Who Let Him Cultivate?! (WX)

Man Gu’s letter was lengthy, packed with inappropriate quotations from classic texts and inappropriate sentence-final particles like “zhi,” “hu,” “zhe”, and “ye”[1] added to the end of every sentence.

Filtering the extraneous content, Lu Yang distilled the letter down to its basic meaning: I can’t handle the haunting in the county town. Senior Brother, save me!

Lu Yang found it absurd. Man Gu is an almighty Void Refinement expert. How could he not handle a haunting? Oh, right... Void Refinement Stage. Indeed, he can’t deal with it.

“Old Meng, Junior Brother Man Gu wrote to me saying they’ve got a haunting over there.” Lu Yang immediately sought out the bane of ghosts.

Ten days had passed since Meng Jingzhou was blasted. He had just finished consolidating his realm and emerged from seclusion.

“You’ve gotten one too?” Meng Jingzhou also held a letter from Man Gu.

Comparing the dates, they pieced the sequence of events together. Man Gu had written to Meng Jingzhou first, but the latter was in seclusion, so he sent another letter to Lu Yang.

However, given that Man Gu still had the mood to be punctilious about the minutiae of his wording in the letters, it probably wasn’t something urgent.

“What do you think?” Meng Jingzhou asked.

Lu Yang flashed an enigmatic smile. Since reaching the Transcendent Tribulation Stage, he liked smiling like this. “Extreme stillness engenders movement. It’s time to go out and move about.”

“True.”

“Senior Horse...”

Lu Yang was about to call the old horse, but couldn’t find him after scanning the surroundings.

“Uncle Horse went back to his old home in the East Sea to go into seclusion and break through,” Meng Jingzhou explained. “Looks like he’s about to advance to the Transcendent Tribulation Stage.”

“Congratulations are in order then.” Lu Yang smiled. Although Senior Horse hasn’t played much of a role as Old Meng’s guardian, it has been tough on him.

I’ll send congratulatory gifts to the Dragon Horse Tribe to celebrate his breakthrough another time.

The old horse’s breakthrough delighted Meng Jingzhou. “Uncle Horse is about to break through to the Transcendent Tribulation Stage, but my dad’s still stuck at the Fusion Stage. If he had run away from home with me back then, he would have reached the Transcendent Tribulation Stage long ago!”

“Do you hear yourself...?” Sometimes, Meng Jingzhou’s way of thinking was so agile that Lu Yang felt his own way of thinking was too rigid.

“It’s fine even if Senior Horse isn’t here. You’re already at the Transcendent Tribulation Stage.”

“True. With a Transcendent Tribulation cultivator like you around, what’s there to fear?”

The two praised each other lavishly without reservation.

Laughing heartily, they decided to set out right now.

Considering that both of them had been featured in the newspaper, sometimes with a full page dedicated to their portraits and stories, they needed disguises before stepping out.

Man Gu oversaw Quyi County of Zhongshan Commandery in the Wilderness Province of Great Xia.

They traveled at breakneck speed, arriving directly in Quyi County.

Along the way, they stumbled upon the ruins of an archaic battlefield opening, said to be left from the wars of conquest during the late Great Qian era. Although the souls had long vanished, their unyielding wills remained, and countless fortuitous opportunities were scattered throughout the site. Only those who displayed noble character and excellent talent could gain the approval of those wills and become the master of the archaic battlefield ruins.

The two entered the site and whipped out a recording orb, playing footage from Incarceration Peak. They told the unyielding wills that regardless of whether they were cultivators from Great Qian or Great Yu, they had better behave themselves and stop their endless squabbling. After all, the Fate Arbiter and Guan Shanhai were already locked up at Incarceration Peak.

The unyielding wills soon yielded to them. The two claimed the remnant battlefield site and donated it to the Great Xia imperial court, proposing that Golden Core cultivators under twenty-two could come here for training.

The two also recovered a fragment of an immortal artifact from the ruins. According to the unyielding wills, its origins were unknown, but it encompassed the intent of yin and yang and was immensely beneficial for cultivating the Yin-Yang Dao. Half-immortals once fought fiercely over it.

The Everlasting Immortal Fairy identified it as a recording device the Nine-Layers Immortal had used to observe the mating of golden crows and jade rabbits.

The two wanted to view the records, but in their conflict, they accidentally dropped it into some gully. They had no choice but to abandon the idea.

~~~

The son of a hunter was hunting in the mountains. As a famous local archer, he easily shot a clean arrow through a rabbit. Following the direction of the arrow, he found the rabbit. Beside it was a fragment carved with unfamiliar patterns.

“What’s this?”

He picked up both the rabbit and the fragment. Blood from the rabbit accidentally splashed onto the fragment. It shone brilliantly, projecting a beam of light that sank into the child’s brow.

The child recited the information contained within. “First Level of the Extreme Yin Cultivation Method?

“There’s also an Extreme Yang Cultivation Method. Why do I only see the name but not its contents?

“Could it be that because this is only a fragment, I need to gather all the other pieces to reconstruct the complete cultivation technique?

“And this Golden Crow Jade Rabbit Visualization Painting is covered by a veil of thin mist. Am I unable to view it because I’m not a cultivator?”

Although he didn’t know the origin of the fragment, the name of the cultivation technique and visualization painting made it clear that this was no ordinary object.

~~~

“See? I told you not to snatch it. Now it’s lost.”

“You make it sound like you didn’t snatch it, too.”

Even after reaching Quyi County, the two couldn’t stop quarreling over the events during their journey, though actually, they were simply looking for any excuse to bicker. After all, what they had lost wasn’t that important. The Extreme Yin Cultivation Method was of little use to them, and the Golden Crow Jade Rabbit Visualization Painting was the only slightly interesting thing.

“Man Gu seems to have governed this place well.” The two ambled along the main street toward the yamen. It was daytime, exactly when the county magistrate should be present.

The roads were clean and tidy, with bailiffs patrolling the streets. Children played and frolicked, and they could hear people reading aloud.

The two arrived at the yamen just as Man Gu was holding a court session.

Man Gu’s tall stature made the official robes look somewhat out of place, especially since his sleeves were rolled up, revealing muscular arms.

Sitting upright, he slapped the table and bellowed, “Court is now in session!”

Then he remembered he had forgotten to use the gavel. Never mind, it makes no difference.

Two women were weeping as they clutched a child.

Standing among the crowd at the yamen entrance, Lu Yang roughly figured out the situation.

One woman claimed that her child had gone missing years ago. Yesterday, she spotted a child in another family who looked exactly like hers. She insisted that the child was hers, but the other family refused to accept it, claiming the child was theirs.

They brought their dispute to Man Gu, seeking his judgement.

The registrar whispered in Man Gu’s ears. “Your Excellency, you could order the child to be beaten—the harsher, the better. Whoever shows more concern for the child would be the true mother.”

Man Gu gave the registrar a strange look. “Does that even work? Putting aside the child’s beating, even if they aren’t the biological parents, they have raised the child for years. They would still care for the child.”

“Then what do you suggest, Your Excellency?”

“A blood kinship test, of course.”[2]

“Ah? I heard that’s not very accurate.”

“It should be pretty accurate.”

Man Gu had both women and the child each drop a bit of blood into a bowl. He then channeled his powers to make one blood droplet explode, revealing the information it carried to everyone present.

“The blood contains three billion tiny units. Their sequences differ between individuals. Only blood relatives share identical sequences.”

“Three billion tiny units?” the registrar stammered. “How do you compare them?”

“With the eyes, of course,” Man Gu replied matter-of-factly. He studied the sequences carefully and soon reached a conclusion.

“Strange. Why do all three of you have nearly identical sequences?”

“Oh, I get it. The three of you are family.”

Man Gu pointed at one of the women. “You’re actually over fifty. You look young because you’re a cultivator. Did you lose a daughter years ago?”

That woman nodded repeatedly.

He then pointed at the other woman. “Were you adopted as a child?”

The woman nodded.

Man Gu smacked his fist into his palm and pointed at the first woman. “That’s correct, then. She is your mother. In other words, you’re the child’s mother, and she’s the child’s maternal grandmother.”

1. These four are common archaic expressions and are not used in day-to-day Chinese. A sentence-final particle is a word added to the end of a sentence to reflect the speaker’s emotion or sometimes turn it into a question. ☜

2. This is often featured in Chinese historical dramas. Two people drip their blood into a bowl of water to see if the blood mixes or separates. Naturally, this isn’t accurate. ☜