Chapter 1617 - 1464: Yin Yang Inn 20
Master Dongxu’s teacher really did have genuine skill; his Mana for catching ghosts and driving out evil was quite impressive, and Master Dongxu, following at his teacher’s side from early on, properly learned a full set of fine abilities.
Master Dongxu’s teacher devoted himself to cultivating Master Dongxu into his successor, yet never expected that Dongxu’s nature was not upright; he had learned all these fine abilities but did not use them to save people.
Although Master Dongxu had, from childhood, followed his teacher in cultivation, learning to live a frugal, austere life and using his skills to uphold righteousness and ward off evil, in his bones Master Dongxu was someone who loved pleasure and wealth, unwilling to settle for poverty.
Nor was he someone who carried justice in his heart and rejoiced in helping others. After his teacher died, Master Dongxu did not follow the path his teacher had envisioned—striding onto the righteous way of slaying demons and exorcising ghosts and gods.
Properly saving people brings money slowly and would never make him fabulously rich, so Master Dongxu directly walked the crooked road. He used his own powerful Spells to help people harm others and collected hefty payments.
Relying on his full arsenal of Spells, Master Dongxu very quickly made himself live the good life he had always dreamed of.
This made Master Dongxu highly pleased with his own cleverness: unlike his teacher, he hadn’t spent a lifetime in hardship. No matter how many people his teacher saved over a lifetime, so what? He himself suffered bitter days from beginning to end.
How could that compare to his own carefree joy—eating delicacies and drinking fine wine, free and unrestrained? This was what human life ought to be. To suffer for the sake of saving others, that’s what an idiot would do.
Thinking this way, Master Dongxu didn’t stay happy for long, because his carefree days had not gone on very long before he discovered that his lifespan was actually already about to run out!
This discovery was no small matter; it scared Master Dongxu so badly that he didn’t even dare take on the big job he had just accepted. Overnight he rushed back to the Daoist Temple he hadn’t set foot in since his teacher’s death.
In the Daoist Temple there were many cultivation classics left behind by Master Dongxu’s teacher. As soon as Master Dongxu returned, he began rifling through the texts his teacher had left, searching for the reason his lifespan was being cut short.
Only after this investigation did Master Dongxu finally understand why his lifespan was being reduced: it was because he had used his full arsenal of Spells to harm people.
Ordinary people who harm others and commit evil will have their lifespan reduced, and when Cultivators, who possess special powers, harm others, their lifespan is cut at ten times the price.
Master Dongxu’s teacher had never imagined that his disciple would use the abilities he taught him to harm people, so naturally he had never told Master Dongxu that harming others would diminish his lifespan.
After realizing why his lifespan was being cut, Master Dongxu not only failed to repent, he instead gnashed his teeth in hatred toward his teacher for not warning him of this. Otherwise he would have made thorough preparations and would never have let himself fall into such a fate.
Now that things had already happened, no matter how much Master Dongxu blamed his teacher for not warning him in advance, it was useless. He could only strain himself to think of a remedy.
In cultivation, Master Dongxu truly possessed rare and exceptional talent. After bitterly pondering, he actually did manage to find a method to extend his own life: using the Demon Essence of pure-hearted demons in Alchemy to refine Elixirs so as to prolong his lifespan.
Only, pure-hearted Monsters cannot be killed indiscriminately. If he rashly struck out and killed them, his lifespan would still be cut; when that time came, the life extended would be less than what was reduced, and then all his efforts would have been for nothing.
In the end, after long, painful thought, Master Dongxu finally came up with a good plan: find someone to help him share the punishment of losing lifespan—and this person had to be an ordinary person.
Because ordinary people lose far less lifespan for doing evil than Cultivators do. At that time he would give the person a bit of the Lifespan Extension Pills he refined, letting the person live a few extra years. That way, even if the person later died, no one would associate it with him.
And pulling an ordinary person in to help bear the penalty of lost lifespan was really far too easy. After he found a Monster, he just had to reveal the existence of this Monster to some ordinary person with ambition.
Then he would tell the person that obtaining the Monster’s Demon Essence could extend their lifespan and keep their youth forever. No one could resist that temptation.
And the actual operation was simple as well: he would first locate a demon whose disposition was pure and who had never harmed anyone, then bring the person along and directly capture or injure the demon he’d found.
As long as the one who personally killed the demon in the end was an ordinary person, the punishment of lost lifespan would fall on that person and have nothing to do with him.
Relying on this method, time and again Master Dongxu extended his own life, dodging the outcome of being dragged to Hell after death to suffer punishment.
Recently, Master Dongxu had the good fortune to obtain another portion of pure Demon Essence; once he refined it into Elixirs, it would be enough to extend his lifespan by ten more years.
So after refining the Elixir, Master Dongxu was almost unable to wait before beginning seclusion. Only this time in seclusion, Master Dongxu kept feeling a certain unease in his heart.
He was a Cultivator, and the unease in his heart was basically a warning sign that calamity was about to happen. Yet no matter how Master Dongxu divined, he could not discover where the disaster would spring from.
As for tracking down his enemies, sorting through them to see who might come looking for trouble with him—that was impossible.
Because Master Dongxu had harmed and killed far too many people; his enemies were as numerous as fish in a river crossing, each one wishing for his death. Trying to single out, from so many enemies, one who might bring calamity upon him was simply as hard as ascending to heaven.
In the end, Master Dongxu could only press down the unease in his heart and go into seclusion to extend his own life. If he did not stretch his lifespan a bit longer, he simply could not feel at ease, afraid that if some accident struck and chopped off a big chunk, he would be directly seized and dragged down into Hell.
This bout of seclusion went extremely smoothly. Feeling his lifespan once again extended, Master Dongxu was very satisfied.
Just as Master Dongxu was preparing to end his seclusion and leave this place, then find another hidden spot to lie low and thus dodge the calamity that had been weighing in his heart, never knowing when it would arrive, Master Dongxu suddenly smelled a rich, eerie fragrance.
This scent seemed almost like a living thing; the moment it appeared, it rushed straight into Master Dongxu’s nose. Then Master Dongxu only felt his head spin, and he knew nothing more.
When Master Dongxu next regained consciousness, he discovered that he had become a tuft of roadside grass, low and short. The memories in his mind were extremely blurred; he no longer remembered that he had once been human, only feeling as if he had been born as grass from the very beginning.
The patch of ground he grew in was fairly fertile, with no lack of rain and sunlight, but every day cattle and sheep would pass by him, chewing down all the grass around him to eat.
Perhaps because he had turned into grass, Master Dongxu could clearly hear the screams of those other blades of grass, which filled him with intense terror. He feared that one day he too would be eaten by those cattle and sheep.
In this kind of nervous, heart-in-mouth panic, Master Dongxu passed day after day. Every day he thought he was going to die, yet each time he scraped through, until all the grass around him had been eaten clean and Master Dongxu finally was eaten by a cow as well.
The feeling of being ground to pieces in a cow’s mouth was far from pleasant, but when he woke again, Master Dongxu discovered that he had turned into a flower.