NOVEL NEXT Unable to restrain the agitation in his heart, Gu Yunjue grabbed Mu Chen’s hand, pulled it to his mouth and bit it unceremoniously. He was reluctant to hurt Mu Chen. Just a slight bite with a few teeth marks had constrained him to calm down. “Master!” Gu Yunjue gnashed, “If something goes wrong with me, you will regret it for the rest of your life!” Leaving those words, Gu Yunjue had flashed to the waterfall behind the mountains and plunged into the cold pond to let the bitter coldness quench the burning heat on his body.
‘What a sin! Your beloved feeds you with philter, but you can’t touch him!’
Mu Chen looked at the back of his white hand, several deep teeth marks on it extremely eye-catching. He could not help frowning, with his face dyed with some sadness. His young disciple should bite him! ‘So he hated me such?’ Thinking of Gu Yunjue’s tone, Mu Chen felt a sting to his heart. The young disciple he cherished so much should talk to him like that. Certainly, he was the one to blame. He always regarded Gu as a child but neglected the little disciple’s personal ideas. He just stuffed the pill into Gu’s mouth without communicating with him or considering his opinions.
Thinking of that, Mu Chen felt tired and rubbed his forehead, “Little disciple has really grown up; I’d better evade sometimes in future.” His heart felt empty. Although he knew Gu Yunjue would grow up one day, he didn’t expect the day should come so fast.
The little disciple, who wanted to be cuddled and held high in the air, had grown up.
When Gu Yunjue came back, he found that Mu Chen had entered the pill concocting room again and set up a boundary outside, which looked like that he would not come out in a short time. Gu Yunjue’s face turned ghastly pale-Master just hid again!
Every time Master started concocting pills, it took at least a dozen of days.
“He promised to give me a cultivation training, but he dares to forget it! … What else he daren’t forget? Really … getting naughty!”
The next day, the frosty-faced Liu Hanzhi carried Zhu Qianshaung in his hand and came over Yanyang Palace. He said to Gu Yunjue, “Follow me” and then left Gu with a straight back. Scared of the domineering sword intent, passers-by fled away and were afraid to approach.
Gu Yunjue narrowed his eyes. His intention for a fight aroused, he took the sword, and followed after Liu.
Chu Qianshuang wailed and waved with a woebegone look: “Come on, let’s get trained together and spend a day of being beaten. We get beaten for losing a fight, for slow progress, for wrong guidance of spiritual power and for misuse of movements! Anyway, no matter what is wrong or what is not wrong, we just get beaten as long as our Master is dissatisfied!”
Liu Hanzhi: “Your Master told me to get you trained.”
Gu Yunjue: “Oh.”
Liu Hanzhi: “Draw your swords, both of you.”
Gu Yunjue: “Eh.”
…
Half a month later, Mu Chen ended his seclusion. He got out of rage instantly when he saw the wounds on his disciple. He lifted his sword and went to query Liu Hanzhi: “I only asked for your help to train him. What have you done? Why beat him?”
Liu Hanzhi responded in a cold voice, “All Masters beat disciples in training. You too, don’t you?”
Mu Chen denied him with righteousness: “I don’t! I never beat my disciple with weapons, kicking at most!”
Liu Hanzhi twitched his mouth and didn’t know what to say. Gu Yunjue’s wounds weren’t caused by intention, but were swept by the air of sword during training, which was inevitable. Who knew that Mu Chen would shield his disciple as such!
Gu Yunjue stood not far away and fixed his slight on Mu Chen as he was at the moment, like being possessed. As counted, master and the disciple hadn’t talked a word for more than ten days since their last accident. These days had been the limit to his patience. How could the person not even render a glance to him while he himself almost went mad? He bowed his head to conceal the fascination in his eyes, and then looked up with his sight being sober and calm.
Mu Chen was about to leave after he had dissed Liu Hanzhi when Gu Yunjue suddenly rushed over to hold his waist from behind so tightly that he was almost out of breath. At last his cold expression cracked. Mu Chen sighed quietly in his heart, “Yun’er, you’ve grown up.”
“So your Master doesn’t accept me when I grow up, do you?” the person behind him chuckled; the warm breath as he spoke led Mu Chen to tilt his head.
Mu Chen frowned, “Never.”
“If not, why won’t you even look at me?” Though the voice of the young disciple was changing over his age, it sounded deeper than ever at that time, as if he was suffering infinite grievance and overflowing pains of being discarded.
Mu Chen looked down and sighed deeply with emotion. He grabbed Gu’s hands and intended to pull them off his waist. But Gu held too tightly to be separated, leaving not the slightest gap between them. Mu Chen’s heart was softened. “We should go home”, he said slowly.
“Master, it was my fault. I’ll take the punishment and kneel as soon as I go back.” The young disciple apologized in a low voice. His body was trembling slightly, which filled the emptiness inside Mu Chen’s heart bit by bit. His disciple was still clingy, not angry with him. So it seemed Mu Chen himself as master had been petty.
“Forget it,” Mu Chen heaved a sigh, “I was wrong too.”
Chu Qianshuang, sitting at rest with a sword in his arms, looked at Liu Hanzhi sorrowfully, his eyes visibly indicating, “That Master apologized to his disciple.”
Liu Hanzhi shot a cold glance at Chu, who, upon getting it, was terrified to bow his head. Chu Qianshuang cried in his heart and missed his second martial uncle so much as he didn’t advocate beating disciples at all. It was a pity that Master and second martial uncle still didn’t talk to each other as if they were competing.
The minute they returned to Yanyang Palace, Mu Chen received a message from Yu Tianyi, asking if he could stay in Hanyang Palace during the Four Great Sect Competition.
Lofty Cloudy Sect would certainly arrange accommodation for guests. But many cultivators preferred to live together with their close friends so as to deepen the friendship. Due to the special status, Yu Tianyi was bound to be honored as a distinguished guest in Lofty Cloudy Sect. So long as Mu Chen agreed, Yue Mingze surely wouldn’t refuse.
Mu Chen was intended to approve. It shouldn’t be a big deal to accommodate Yu Tianyi, since there were more than enough rooms in Yanyang Palace and they had a ten-year promise. Unexpectedly, Gu Yunjue, who was kneeling on the corner of the room, suddenly stood up, marched over and tore up the summoning talisman in Mu Chen’s hand. He hummed with a surly look, “Yanyang Palace is where I and Master live. How can we allow others in?” Then he went back the wall and kneeled again.
Gu Yunjue looked like a small wolf that got angry because someone had invaded its territory. Mu Chen couldn’t bear to stimulate his disciple’s sensitive nerve any more. So he sent people to pass on the message: “Yanyang Palace is too narrow to accommodate any guest.”
Yue Mingze looked at the summoning talisman in his hand, his head aching. Yanyang Palace was so big that hundreds of people could be accommodated. Such a lame and insincere lie.
Seeing the man who was drinking tea and didn’t even divert any attention to care about the whole thing, Yue Mingze said in a polite tone, “Sect Master Yu, you can live next door to me. The scenery of the main peak is also inviting.”
Yu Tianyi nodded and looked at Yue Mingze with some smiling mood. He hadn’t seen Yue for ten years. During that period, this little sect chief had become more confident.
Mu Chen looked at Gu Yunjue’s sulky face and surrendered, “When are you going to stop kneeling?”
“Till Master is not mad at me.” Gu Yunjue looked serious.
Mu Chen was a little depressed. After they came back, Gu had been kneeling all the time when he heard Mu Chen plan to build a wall between their rooms. Mu Chen asked him to get up, but Gu Yunjue just wouldn’t listen and insisted that Mu Chen was angry or he wouldn’t want to separate their rooms. Mu Chen felt tired in the heart. Why he just couldn’t understand?
At the moment when Mu Chen felt helpless with Gu Yunjue, Guan Shan came over with a space bag in his hands and said respectfully, “Palace Master, a man at the foot of the mountain said this is the relic your mother left and told me to hand it over to you.”
Mu Chen became severe abruptly with his face darkened. He took it over.
Inside the space bag was a piece of jade slip. Mu Chen explored it with his spiritual sense but found nothing in it. He then dripped some blood into it. This time, the slip buzzed spontaneously, emitted a striking beam of white light, and then disappeared into the void.
Mu Chen blinked with surprise: disappeared?!
Right at that very moment, in the gap connecting the three realms, an elderly meditator suddenly opened his eyes, releasing compelling aura like that of countless thunderstorms. He was shocked and then bent his finger to divine. His strapping figure shook a bit and tears streamed down his old face after his divination. “My son, you should have offspring!”