Heaven Official's Blessing: Tian Guan Ci Fu (Novel) Vol. 2(50)

Just then, he sensed something and whipped his head around. The young crown prince stood outside the door amidst the corpses of guards strewn across the entrance floor. The boy’s eyes were blank, as if doubting what he saw was real. He took a step forward and almost tripped on the threshold, dazed and disoriented.

He withdrew the sword, and blood splattered his black robes.

The crown prince hadn’t tripped on the threshold but on the dead bodies sprawled on the ground. He threw himself on the king’s body, his voice finally returning.

“Father?! Mother?!”

But the king would never speak again. The crown prince couldn’t shake his father awake. He whipped his head around toward him, his eyes wide.

“Shifu! What are you doing? What did you do?! State Preceptor!!”

It was a long while before he heard his own voice, devoid of emotion—

“You all deserved it.”

***

Xie Lian slept fitfully and rolled awake with a start.

He blearily rubbed his eyes and discovered he hadn’t actually slept for that long, and moreover, he didn’t even dream of anything nice. To the latter point, it was a good thing that something had jabbed him in the chest and woken him. He sat in silence for a while, then felt around in his clothes and found something. He opened his palm and revealed two dice, the same ones from Paradise Manor.

A sea of red floated in his mind’s eye. The scene was blurry, but that crimson figure was supremely distinct, gazing intently at him, unmoving. Xie Lian sighed.

I wonder how much is left of San Lang’s Paradise Manor. If I get banished again, who knows how much junk I’ll have to sell or how long it’ll take to pay him back…decades, centuries; if anything, I’ll pay him the rest of my life.

Xie Lian stared at the dice for a bit before clapping his hands closed in a prayer; he shook the dice in his palms and rolled them to the ground. The dice rattled and rolled before coming to a stop.

As expected, all the luck he had borrowed from Hua Cheng was used up. He was hoping for another roll of two sixes, but it came up snake eyes.

Xie Lian couldn’t help but puff out a rueful breath and shake his head.

Suddenly, he heard footsteps coming from behind. He stiffened and packed away both his smile and the dice.

The footsteps didn’t sound like those of Jun Wu. Jun Wu’s footfalls were steady and composed, quite unhurried. Similarly, although Hua Cheng walked with nonchalance and lacked decorum, often lazy and languid, his air of confidence and surety was identical to Jun Wu’s. These footsteps, in contrast, could be called a little floaty.

Xie Lian turned his head and was taken aback. “It’s you.”

The person who had arrived was clad in black, his face fair and his lips thin. His expression was indifferent, appearing incomparably aloof. Although a martial god, he looked more like a civil god. Who else could it be but Mu Qing?

He saw Xie Lian’s startled expression and raised his brows. “Who did you think I was? Feng Xin?”

Without waiting for a response, he lifted his black robes and crossed the threshold of the door. “Well, Feng Xin probably won’t come.”

“What are you doing here?” Xie Lian asked.

“The Emperor detained you and barred His Highness Tai Hua from coming here. But he didn’t say I couldn’t come,” Mu Qing said.

He didn’t bother answering Xie Lian’s question. Fine. Xie Lian wasn’t actually curious anyway, so he didn’t question him further. Mu Qing looked around the brand-new Palace of Xianle until his eyes finally ended up on Xie Lian. After looking him up and down, he suddenly tossed something at him. A blue blur glinted in the air; Xie Lian caught it with his left hand, and when he opened his palm, he found a small blue porcelain bottle.

It was a bottle of medicine. Mu Qing said apathetically, “It’s pretty unsightly, dragging around that bloodied arm.”

Xie Lian held the bottle but didn’t move. He watched Mu Qing instead, a calculating expression on his face.

Since his third ascension, there could only be one phrase to describe the way Mu Qing treated him: passive-aggressive. It always felt like he was waiting for Xie Lian to get booted for the third time so he could make snide remarks. Yet now that Xie Lian might actually get booted that third time, he suddenly became pleasant—he even came specially to deliver medication. This complete reversal in attitude made Xie Lian feel quite disconcerted.

Seeing that Xie Lian wasn’t moving, Mu Qing gave a faint smile. “Use it if you want. Either way, no one else is coming to deliver you anything.”

It wasn’t an insincere smile; it was obvious that he was genuinely in an excellent mood at the moment. Although Xie Lian didn’t feel any pain in his right arm, there was also no reason to just leave the injuries be. That pat from Jun Wu was a quick, emergency fix, but it would be better to heal it with medication. Thus, he opened the small blue bottle and poured the contents onto his arm without any particular care. What came out of the bottle was neither powder nor pill but instead a faint blue smoke. The smoke circulated languidly, wrapping around his arm, its scent cool and refreshing. It was certainly a high-grade healing item.

Mu Qing suddenly asked, “Was everything Lang Qianqiu said true? Did you really kill those Yong’an royals?”

Xie Lian looked up and met his gaze. Even if Mu Qing had been forcibly hiding it, Xie Lian still detected a trace of uncontrollable excitement in his eyes. He seemed highly interested in the details of Xie Lian’s massacre at the Gilded Banquet—he followed with another question.