Chapter 32 of 90
Tiger Cub Under Spirit Snake
Xiaocui prepared the room.
She did it quickly and correctly, as she did everything—a small bare chamber two doors down from the guest room, a narrow bed, a basin, a stool. And as she worked, she glanced back once, through the half-open door, at the thin white-haired girl standing beside the King of Soft Rice, and gritted her teeth.
That soft-rice king has even found himself a little girl to wait on him, she thought. What—aren't we serving him well enough?
Her lips thinned.
Hmph. We'll see. We'll see if we can't teach that little white-haired thing a lesson.
It was nearly dark when Li Yuguo noticed the box of Snow Spirit Fruits still sitting on his table.
He had meant to give them to Jun Xue. They were for her—for the ice-type bloodline sleeping in her starved, battered body, which the shopkeeper had said they would nourish. She needed them more than anything else he had bought. And in all the commotion, he had forgotten to hand them over.
He took one out of the box. It was cold in his palm even in the evening heat, frosted and faintly glowing, the white mist swirling slowly beneath its translucent skin. He went down the corridor to her room.
The door was not quite closed.
He had his hand up to knock when he saw the steam curling out through the gap, and heard, from inside, the soft splash of water in a wooden tub.
He stopped dead.
She's bathing.
Through the narrow gap, he could see nothing but a corner of the room—the edge of the tub, a curl of steam, a folded towel on the stool—and then a small startled sound came from inside, and the splashing stopped.
Li Yuguo turned around so fast he nearly walked into the wall.
"Sorry!" he said, to the corridor. His face was burning with embarrassment. "Sorry, sorry—the door was open, I didn't—" He crouched, still facing away, set the frosted fruit down on the floor just inside the threshold, and stood up again. "I've brought you one of the Snow Spirit Fruits. Eat it before you sleep tonight. It'll help you heal. I'll give you the rest tomorrow."
"Y-yes, young master…" came the small voice from inside.
He reached back without looking and pulled the door firmly shut.
He stood in the dark corridor for a moment, rubbing his face with both hands.
Idiot, he told himself. Knock first. She's a child, and she's spent half her life in a cage with no door at all. She deserves a door that closes. He made a note to have a latch put on it in the morning.
Then he went back to his room.
Later, he sat cross-legged on the floor of the guest room, the window open to the night, and tried to cultivate.
His mind would not settle. It kept going back to the alley.
To Ye Qiong.
The protagonist had appeared half a year early—and his strength, even now, was impressive. Not overwhelming, not yet. On paper, they were close. Ye Qiong was a Martial Teacher at the edge of Advanced; Li Yuguo was a Martial Teacher. One small step apart.
But that small step was an ocean.
It was a matter of quality. Li Yuguo had felt it in every exchange of blows. Think of a ton of cotton and a ton of iron. They weighed the same. But a ton of cotton was so bulky you could not fit it into a truck, and a ton of iron would sit in the corner of a room and take up no space at all. That was the difference between them. Ye Qiong's Qi was dense. Compressed. Every ounce of it hit like a hammer, while Li Yuguo's, for all the fire the Lieyang Shenjian had put into it, was still loose and soft and new.
At the same realm, Li Yuguo could not beat Ye Qiong. Not in a fair fight. The gap was in quality—and behind quality, in talent, and behind talent, in blood.
Talent could be made up. With enough pills, enough hours, enough Moon Spirit Grass.
Blood could not.
Bloodlines in this world were divided into four grades. He had written them himself: Superior. Excellent. Epic. Legendary.
Ye Qiong's Raging Wave Dragon Ape was legendary. There were not many legendary bloodlines in the whole world—a handful, in each generation, scattered across the continent. That was the protagonist's halo at its most fundamental. A bloodline accelerated cultivation far beyond what ordinary people could manage, and a legendary bloodline most of all. It was why Ye Qiong could stride proudly up the road and never stumble once.
And Li Yuguo?
In the original book, Li Yuguo's bloodline had never been mentioned. Not once. He was a minor villain. Minor villains did not get bloodlines; they got a paragraph of description and a sword through the gut.
Does that mean I don't have one at all?
The thought made him cold. If he truly had no bloodline—if this body was nothing but empty flesh—then no matter how hard he worked, he would never catch Ye Qiong. Never.
But no. He remembered the setting now. Everyone had a bloodline in this world. Everyone. It was simply that for most people, it was worthless—stone, grass, root vegetable. Common, useless bloodlines that barely did anything at all. They were by far the most common.
He got up, lit his lamp, and went to the shelf where the old genealogy of the Li family was kept—a stack of heavy bound volumes, foxed and water-stained, that the original Li Yuguo had never bothered to open. As the son of the house, he had every right to read them.
But first, he took out something he had bought in the market that afternoon: a smooth, palm-sized crystal, clear as water, that the seller had sworn could reveal a man's bloodline. He held it in his hand and pushed his Qi into it.
It glowed faintly. Cloudy. Shapeless. A dim, swirling haze, like fog over a pond.
Unawakened, he thought. It's there. But it's still asleep. The crystal can't read what hasn't woken.
He set it aside and opened the genealogy instead.
His father's page came first.
Li Guangyi. The God of War. And there, written in a clerk's careful hand beneath his name: Bloodline—Fire Beetle. Grade: Epic.
Li Yuguo let out a breath.
Of course.
The Fire Beetle. A great armored beast of flame. It was very nearly a perfect match for the Lieyang Shenjian—both were fire, both were fierce, both were built for war. One plus one made far more than two. The Fire Beetle's flame fed the Lieyang fire, and the Fire Beetle's shell gave it armor. Attack and defense in one body. No wonder his father had been unstoppable.
If I inherited that—
He turned the pages, looking for his mother.
In the original book, she had been mentioned exactly once: the eldest daughter of a certain sect. One line. He had not even given her a name.
But the original book was not everything. He knew that now. Too many things had happened in this world that had nothing to do with what he had written. Li Yutang hiring horse thieves to kill him. The Snow Spirit Fruits. The Circling Finger Softness in a fruit knife. Guan Yunfan's wandering eye. Nalan Meng's debt. None of those had been in the book.
This is a real world now. It had grown past him, like a vine growing past the trellis.
Outside the window, the stars had come out. The night wind was cooler than the day's, stirring the curtains. Li Yuguo closed one volume and opened another, and another, turning the brittle pages under the lamp.
And then he found her.
Murong Wan'er.
The name flashed past on the page, and his heart jumped. In the original, she had been one line, never named. A minor villain's mother did not need any ink.
But here, beneath her name, there was more. Much more. A whole column of careful characters.
Murong Wan'er. Youngest junior sister of the Blood Clothes Sect. Bloodline—Thunder Python. Grade: Excellent.
"Thunder Python," Li Yuguo whispered. "An excellent bloodline…"
And then it hit him.
"Damn it!"
Excellent and Epic. He knew how inheritance worked in his own world; he had written the rule. When two bloodlines met in a child, the weaker one usually took precedence. It was a crueler rule than real genetics, and he had made it that way on purpose, to explain why so many great families declined.
Which meant there was a very high probability that his own sleeping bloodline was not the Fire Beetle.
It was the Thunder Python.
Li Yuguo dropped to his knees on the floor.
"In front of the legendary Raging Wave Dragon Ape," he said through his teeth, "the Thunder Python isn't even worth mentioning…"
Excellent against Legendary. A grass snake against a dragon. If this was true, the gap between him and Ye Qiong would only grow, every single day, wider and wider. And half a year from now, when Ye Qiong came back to Nalan City with the bloody storm at his heels—
What could Li Yuguo possibly do to stop him?
He lay back on the floor and stared up at the cracked plaster ceiling.
"Is the game over already?" he murmured. "Do I only have half a year left?"
He felt hollowed out. Like a gourd scraped empty.
He did not know how long he lay there.
Long enough for the lamp to burn low. Long enough for a moth to find it and batter itself against the glass.
No.
The thought surfaced slowly, like a bubble rising through mud.
No. I can't just lie here. I don't get a third chance.
And then, sharper:
Wait.
A bloodline that had not yet awakened was sleeping. It lay dormant in the body, waiting for its moment. And there was a setting—he had written it himself, buried somewhere in the middle of the book—that while a bloodline was still asleep, it could be replaced. Draw out the sleeping bloodline, the weak one, the useless one, and put a new one in its place. Then when the bloodline finally woke, it would not be the old one waking.
It would be the new one.
He sat bolt upright.
He had used that setting exactly once. In the middle of the book, when Ye Qiong was at the height of his fame with his companions around him, he had stumbled across a younger disciple with a garbage bloodline and helped him replace it. The episode had appeared once and never again. Afterward, that younger brother had become one of Ye Qiong's right-hand men.
An opportunity!
Li Yuguo leapt to his feet. It was like finding a crack of light in a sealed tomb.
The power of bloodlines comes from the essence of demons and beasts. That was the setting. And there was a place—not far outside Nalan City—where the essence of a very great demon might still be waiting.
Spirit Snake Mountain.
The demon tomb. The tomb of an ancient great demon…
His breathing quickened.
And then he remembered what else was on Spirit Snake Mountain.
There were three kinds of thieves around Nalan City: mountain bandits, horse thieves, and water bandits. And of all of them, the bandits of Spirit Snake Mountain were the strongest and the most brutal. Five or six hundred of them, holed up in the cliffs and ravines, and their leader had the strength of a Martial Soul at its peak.
To reach the demon tomb, he would have to go through them.
With Nalan Meng's help, it would be simple. She could level the mountain.
But he could not ask her. Not now.
Think about it. Li Yuguo, the King of Soft Rice, had suddenly changed his temperament, given up gambling, started making money, started talking about the welfare of the common people. She was already suspicious. If he now walked up to her and said, By the way, I happen to know there's a secret ancient demon tomb under Spirit Snake Mountain—even if she were an idiot, she would know. She would know that this man was not her husband.
And if Nalan Meng ever found out what he really was…
He knew her character. He had created her. She was upright to the bone, with no room for a grain of sand in her eyes. A stranger wearing her husband's body like a coat? She would not hesitate. He would not escape death.
So: only the King of Thieves. Only himself and the King of Thieves, against five or six hundred bandits, on their own mountain, in their own territory. Guan Yunfan was strong—as strong as Nalan Meng, perhaps—but there were too many enemies, and Spirit Snake Mountain was their home ground.
It would not be easy. It might not even be possible.
Li Yuguo stood in the middle of the dim guest room, with the moth beating against the lamp and the night wind stirring the curtains, and clenched his fists.
If I don't want to fall behind Ye Qiong, this is the only way.
If you don't go into the tiger's den, you'll never get the tiger's cub.
Every day that passed, the gap between him and Ye Qiong was growing wider.
He would not let it grow any wider than it had to.
Discussion
Comments (0)