novelraw Chapter 124: Back to Old Haunts, with No Old Familiar Faces
Chapter 124: Back to Old Haunts, with No Old Familiar Faces
That evening's pot of wild pheasant and mountain mushroom left Hu Caiyi in a state of considerable inner conflict.
Every few bites she would lift her head and steal a look at Li Qiuchen, as though he had done something unforgivable. The aggrieved weight of that gaze left Li Qiuchen thoroughly uncomfortable.
He had already told her the pot had been scrubbed clean. What more did she want?
He couldn't begin to imagine what was going on inside that head of hers.
When the meal was finally over, Li Qiuchen laid out the bedding for the two girls and sat down outside the treehouse.
Hu Caiyi leaned over the fence and watched him for a moment, then said quietly, "You can come inside, you know."
Li Qiuchen waved her off. "Get some sleep. I need to cultivate."
"Didn't you say we came here to play? Why are you still being so diligent?"
It was precisely because they'd come out to play that cultivating here was so convenient.
Li Qiuchen didn't respond further. He took out a Spirit-Gathering Pill and swallowed it.This was the fourth one he had taken.
The pill dissolved, and in an instant the wind howled around him. An immense tide of spiritual energy surged from the surrounding heaven and earth, forming a great vortex above his head.
If he had been taking pills like this inside Yun County, the disturbance would have drawn all manner of attention.
Out here, with only two small girls who had their own secrets, Li Qiuchen felt no such concern.
He opened his mouth and drew in a deep breath. The vortex of spiritual energy in the sky descended straight into his body.
Each successive Spirit-Gathering Pill produced somewhat weaker effects. On one hand this was a matter of building tolerance, and on the other it was because Li Qiuchen's own cultivation had risen, giving him increasingly refined control over the spiritual energy of the world around him.
After more than a year of cultivation, he had reached the middle to late stages of the Qi Refining realm, and he could now regulate the pill's effects within his body. Nothing like the first time would happen again, when things had gone entirely out of control and the sky had changed color.
"Wow! Oh wow wow!"
Hu Caiyi hung over the fence, staring wide-eyed at the phenomenon Li Qiuchen had triggered. "What kind of pill is that? It's incredible!"
Li Qiuchen gave her a brief glance and said nothing.
After a moment, Tang Xiaoxue's head appeared over the fence as well.
"Will you explode if you eat it like that?"
Li Qiuchen: "..."
"Never mind me. Go to sleep!"
Hu Caiyi swallowed, watching Li Qiuchen with longing eyes.
Tang Xiaoxue turned to look at her. "Do you want some?"
"I don't!"
Hu Caiyi denied it immediately.
"I'm just a little curious."
"That means you want some."
"I. Do. Not. Want. Some."
Hu Caiyi, caught out, flared up with embarrassed indignation. "My family has plenty of money. I could have my father buy me a whole pile of pills to eat like sweets!"
"You haven't started cultivating yet. No pill would do you any good."
Tang Xiaoxue cut straight to the point, puncturing Hu Caiyi's front entirely.
"And neither have you!"
"I'm not craving someone else's pills."
"I'm not craving them either!"
"You're drooling."
"I am not! No I'm not!"
"Then why are you wiping your mouth?"
"Aaagh, waaah!"
One thoroughly exposed young miss collided with the other in a rolling tangle.
Li Qiuchen paid the commotion no attention and focused on his cultivation.
This time the pill's effects lasted fewer than four hours.
When the eastern sky had just begun to lighten, Li Qiuchen opened his eyes and gave his shoulders a small shake, letting the dust and soil that had accumulated on him fall away.
Late Qi Refining realm. The great completion was still a noticeable distance away.
Tang Xiaoxue had a way of seeing straight to the heart of things.
She hadn't been wrong. The violent energy of the Spirit-Gathering Pill really would cause an ordinary person to explode. Not just ordinary people, even most cultivators at the Qi Refining realm couldn't withstand it.
This was not a pill that Qi Refining cultivators should have been taking.
It was because Jiang Tingyue had seen that Li Qiuchen carried the Medicine Master's Blessing that she had given him pills of this kind in the first place.
Honestly speaking, the remedy didn't quite match the condition.
Li Qiuchen had never found a particularly good orthodox cultivation technique suited to himself.
The Senluojing was a technique meant for Medicine Master followers. The Casting Dragon Court required life energy rather than the spiritual energy of heaven and earth, and the conversion efficiency between the two was poor.
But overwhelming force could achieve remarkable things.
It was rather like a doctor telling you that you were iron-deficient, and Elder Jiang presenting you with an iron pot to take home and gnaw on.
For anyone else, being scoured by such an intense torrent of spiritual energy would have shredded their meridians entirely.
But for Li Qiuchen, minor internal damage of this kind could be repaired with a single thought.
After a night of taking the pill, the fourth blood exchange in his Dragon Court was approaching its final stage.
One last push was needed.
He just needed a catalyst.
The equivalent of having all the money ready and simply waiting for the shop to open.
Where to find this catalyst?
Li Qiuchen stood up and looked over the fence into the treehouse.
The two young misses were curled up in their blankets, sleeping soundly.
One half-demon, and one Rakshasa ghost.
Soft and warm, they did look rather appetizing.
Li Qiuchen unconsciously licked his lips.
No. That line of thinking needed to stop immediately. How could he eat a person? What would make him any different from a fiend?
Though wait, they weren't people.
Well, that was fine then.
Tang Xiaoxue seemed to sense Li Qiuchen's gaze and blinked open her eyes, squirmed a couple of times in her blanket, and sat up.
"Finished cultivating?"
"Almost."
Li Qiuchen hesitated briefly, then said directly, "I need to take a little blood from you."
"Right now?"
"Right now."
Tang Xiaoxue scratched her head, still bleary with sleep, stood up and came to stand beside Li Qiuchen. "How do you take it?"
"Hold out your hand."
Li Qiuchen took the right hand she extended, pricked the tip of her index finger with a wooden spike, and drew a firm suck.
Hmm.
How to put this.
While the urge in his mind persistently urged him to consume the flesh and blood of the white-haired girl in front of him, his rational mind told him clearly that this was wrong.
The craving for blood was a false one.
Like a sweet fizzy drink, it brought a momentary pleasure but offered the body nothing of real value.
Tang Xiaoxue watched Li Qiuchen's conflicted expression, then pulled her finger back and stuck it in her own mouth, sucking on it hard and smacking her lips.
"Something wrong with it?"
"Nothing wrong."
"Hiss..."
Li Qiuchen turned to find Hu Caiyi staring at him in shock.
What exactly had she just witnessed?
"It's nothing. Get up and wash your faces. We have some distance to cover today."
Children were always so easily startled.
The stretch of trail from the lake to the mountain stream where he had lived the previous year was genuinely difficult to navigate.
One section in particular had a fast-moving current on one side and dense scrub on the other, with no footing to be found anywhere. Without Li Qiuchen's ability to direct plant growth, an ordinary person would struggle to find the path at all.
But the untamed, deep old forest seemed to awaken something in Hu Caiyi's blood.
When they set out in the morning she had still been looking at Li Qiuchen with a strange expression, keeping a deliberate distance from him without any apparent reason.
After an hour in the mountains, the girl had sunk entirely into the old forest and lost herself completely in the experience.
Li Qiuchen was fond of the atmosphere of an old mountain forest himself, with no trace of human habitation and the air full of the living breath of the natural world.
To an outsider this was simply the smell of earth, dew, and rotting leaves mixed together.
But to someone who had lived in old mountain forests for years, closing your eyes and breathing in was enough to perceive a complete and layered natural world.
The wild animals living in the forest marked their territories with scent.
The medicinal herbs and spirit plants growing in the same forest gave off their own distinctive aromas, and someone with enough experience could sense a mature spirit plant's presence from two li away.
The canine sense of smell was considerably more acute than a human's.
Hu Caiyi quickly found a fresh ginseng growing in the forest.
It wasn't very old, probably around ten years, the kind of specimen that would be considered too young even to bother braising with chicken back at her family's house, only good enough to feed a horse. But Hu Caiyi called Tang Xiaoxue over anyway, and the two of them carefully dug it out together, holding it up and grinning foolishly.
If a couple of days out with him had produced this change, Li Qiuchen couldn't begin to imagine what she would turn into if she went home and ran wild through the mountains with a pack of foxes.
Boss Hu's worries were entirely well-founded.
One could only feel for parents everywhere.
They came to the edge of the ravine, and Li Qiuchen pointed out the small dwelling to them. "That's where I used to live. The herb beds I cultivated are all alongside it."
Hu Caiyi's face was full of sympathy.
"You've had it rough, growing up in a kennel like this."
"Not growing up. I said used to live."
Li Qiuchen didn't dispute the kennel part.
A year on, back at an old haunt, and everything was just as he remembered. The door had been sealed tightly enough that the interior was mostly intact, not yet claimed by any animal as a nest.
He stirred up a quick gust of wind to clear the dust from the room.
Li Qiuchen glanced at the string of black jade pearls sitting on the table.
Gaga hadn't come back. Most likely wouldn't be coming back.
The fate of the Bai family was unknown, and that pig was their only surviving member. He wondered how that dim creature would manage to hold the family name together.
"Oh! Pearl bracelet... wait, are these black jade pearls?"
Hu Caiyi's sharp eyes had gone straight to the string of beads on the table.
"Steward Li, why would you leave a black jade pearl bracelet in a place like this?"
"It belongs to a friend."
"Ah..."
Hu Caiyi's eyes moved, and whatever conclusion she reached caused her expression to soften with misplaced concern. "Oh... I'm sorry for your loss..."
"No one died. What are you condoling me for?"
"Huh?"
Hu Caiyi looked at the beads on the table, then at Li Qiuchen's somewhat overcast expression, and an entirely different range of dramatic scenarios began playing through her mind.
"What are you imagining?"
Li Qiuchen gave her a sharp look. "You like gathering herbs, don't you? There's a hoe and a spade over there. Go dig up everything in the herb beds for me."
When he had left last time, a portion of the herbs in the beds had already been harvested, but quite a few had still been immature. Coming back now, there was another crop ready to collect.
They wouldn't match the quality of herbs tended for a full growing season, but they would serve well enough. On the way back he would find somewhere suitable to transplant them.
Most of the medicinal herbs Li Qiuchen had brought with him previously had been used up or disposed of during his time in Yun County, and he had purchased a fresh stock of varieties he hadn't been able to find in the mountains. Unfortunately, all of those were processed and preserved, lacking any vitality.
He had accumulated a good number of pill formulas by now, and the purpose of this trip was to collect as many fresh herbs as possible to take back with him and begin refining pills.
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