Chapter 3 – Testing the Taiyi Sword at Night
In the purification room, a bed with a lacquered, gold-painted screen instantly transformed the ascetic room into something sensuous. The gauze windows were shut tight, casting a hazy silhouette on the white paper. A beauty in semi-disheveled red robes leaned against the bed’s folding screen, her fair hand holding up her half-undone black hair. Her head was bowed, and the shadows of the bed curtain tassels danced on the exposed, slender nape of her neck.
It was a scene reminiscent of all the elegant and fragrant legends of ancient beauties.
“…What is this piece of junk!”
The beauty cursed in exasperation.
Elegant my ass, ancient beauty my foot.
His hair was half-done because Chou Bodeng had gotten his coronet stuck halfway off. His head was bowed because if he looked up, it would pull his hair. This was Chou Bodeng’s third attempt to remove the golden ring that secured his forehead ornament. God knows how he had managed to elevate the simple task of removing a coronet to a hellish level of difficulty.
Not only had he successfully pulled his own scalp again, but he had also managed to get the golden coronet completely tangled in his long hair!
The Taiyi Sword “laughed” so hard it tumbled over, rolling back and forth on the table where Miss Liu had been squatting earlier in the day.
It was hard to imagine that a broken sword could so vividly express an emotion like gloating.
Chou Bodeng’s face darkened. He channeled the meager spiritual power of his original body and, with the decisiveness of cutting through a tangled mess, snapped the golden ring, hairpin, forehead ornament, and everything else. Only then did he successfully free himself.
With a clatter, a pile of shattered gold, now unrecognizable, was unceremoniously dumped onto the table.
The Taiyi Sword rolled around in the pile of gold fragments.
“…”
Chou Bodeng gathered his long, tormented hair behind him while discreetly grinding his teeth.
He turned to the Taiyi Sword with the most cordial expression he could muster. “Seeing you so energetic, I feel relieved.”
The Taiyi Sword straightened up, leaning back warily.
“We have a clear division of labor. I’ll handle the eating, drinking, and sleeping. You’ll handle the exorcising of ghosts and slaying of demons. The rest of this Liu family business is all yours tonight.”
The Taiyi Sword shook back and forth like a rattle drum.
It conveyed “in your dreams” with perfect clarity.
“Don’t give me that,” Chou Bodeng said. He had remembered why the name “Fu City” was familiar the moment he saw the notice. The original book had mentioned, through the protagonist’s mouth, an old incident of ‘the Oracle Maiden of Fu City being harmed by a puppet.’ “The Records of the East Continent says you are the ‘Heaven-Bestowed Sword,’ a spirit formed from the essence of the northernmost star. If you had just honestly acted like a broken sword from the beginning, I wouldn’t be able to force you into this, would I?”
He reached out and poked the Taiyi Sword.
“So lively, and you’re telling me you can’t even handle a little ghost? Who are you kidding?”
Plop.
The Taiyi Sword followed Chou Bodeng’s finger and fell limply, once again becoming a battered and broken sword, completely motionless.
“Fine,” Chou Bodeng said magnanimously. “Then we’ll both be finished tonight. But now everyone in Fu City knows that the Little Martial Ancestor of Taiyi is here with the mountain-suppressing sword to exorcise a demon. If things don’t work out…”
The Taiyi Sword twitched.
“The storybooks of the future will write: The Taiyi Sect has rocks in their heads, worshipping a good-for-nothing braggart as an ancestor. Their ultimate mountain-suppressing treasure, the Taiyi Sword, turns out to be just a fire poker. The ‘number one immortal sect’ is nothing but a self-aggrandizing boast. As for me, I’m already cursed by countless people, so one more story won’t make a difference. And as for Taiyi’s ten-thousand-year reputation—”
He lifted his gaze, his tone crisp and clean.
“What the hell does it have to do with me?”
The Taiyi Sword leaped up and slammed itself on the table twice.
“Alright, now you know what kind of person I am, right?”
Chou Bodeng, smiling, finally vented the frustration of being inexplicably brought to Fu City. He fell back, pulled the covers over himself, and didn’t forget to say, “Good night.”
The Taiyi Sword knocked on the table, slammed on the floor, and made a racket for a long time, but Chou Bodeng remained as immovable as a mountain.
The sword was about to die of anger!
In the end, the Taiyi Sword hung itself on his bedpost, its tip swaying back and forth, one moment pointing at Chou Bodeng as if it wanted to stab him, the next pointing at the ground.
Night fell.
A cold wind suddenly rose.
The candlelight in the purification room flickered, shrinking to the size of a bean, its color a ghostly blue.
The shadow of the desk on the floor stretched and shrank, expanding and contracting like flowing water until it formed a long, thin “human” figure. It rose, section by section, from the ground in front of the screened bed. The spectral shade looked as if it were draped in a spider’s web, with countless fine, transparent threads drooping down, drifting automatically toward the flesh and blood of the living person on the bed.
The Taiyi Sword hung motionless. Chou Bodeng was fast asleep.
Confirming there was no danger, the myriad silver threads instantly spread out, about to pierce into the living person’s flesh.
Zing—
In the dimness, a flash of snowy light appeared and vanished. When it reappeared, the spectral shade had been run through by the Taiyi Sword. The sword’s body, battered and broken during the day, was now covered in a layer of moonlight. Though rust remained, the chipped parts of the blade erupted with a fine, piercing light, slicing left and right. In an instant, all the silver threads were severed.
The chillingly cold tip of the sword came to a stop, a hair’s breadth from Chou Bodeng’s undefended back, exposed after he had turned over.
Pop.
The spectral shade, like a suddenly punctured balloon, spewed black smoke and rapidly deflated.
As if someone had quickly pulled a string from afar, the spectral shade, now purified to nothing but a skin, split in two down the middle and flew backward like a paper kite. The Taiyi Sword immediately turned to give chase, but the shade was as nimble as a fish, dodging the sword’s light with a series of perilous swerves.
The purification room was small, and the Taiyi Sword’s blade was long and not at its full power, allowing the creature to repeatedly evade it.
Seizing an opening, the spectral shade squeezed through a crack in the window and fled outside at full speed.
Pfft.
The lamp inside the purification room suddenly went out.
In the instant of transition from light to dark, the sound of wind was heard.
It was so sharp, it was as if countless tiny blades had simultaneously torn the air to shreds.
A faint glimmer of dark gold streaked through the air like a meteor.
The next moment, the sound of a fine blade piercing wood mixed with the hum of vibrating metal erupted simultaneously. The spectral shade, which had been on the verge of escape, was suddenly frozen in the window crack, unable to move.
The Taiyi Sword abruptly veered and slashed down from the air.
The force of the blade cutting through the air was even more ferocious than when it had been chasing the shade!
“Calm down!”
Chou Bodeng, who had sat up at some unknown point, symbolically raised his hands in surrender.
The sleeve of his inner robe had fallen, revealing his left wrist was bare. The bracelet that had been on his wrist bone during the day was gone. The candlelight in the room had just been extinguished. The Taiyi Sword slashed down, stopping a hair’s breadth from Chou Bodeng’s face. Its body cast a narrow, long sliver of light on his face, sweeping from the corner of his eye to his crimson lips.
An ultimate interplay of light and shadow.
In that moment, Chou Bodeng looked more like an evil spirit than the spectral shade pinned to the window.
The Taiyi Sword hummed furiously, its sound low and hoarse, as if threatening something in anger and unease.
“I told you to calm down.”
Chou Bodeng interrupted it, holding out his left hand and explaining with great sincerity.
“I’m just good at throwing darts, so I feel like throwing whatever I see.”
The spectral shade was pinned to the window by an ancient golden bracelet.
The ancient bracelet was composed of a series of intertwined Kui Dragons. During the day, when it was on Chou Bodeng’s wrist, its scales were fine and smooth, looking like a mere exquisite ornament. But once it left Chou Bodeng’s hand, the Kui Dragons seemed to come alive. Their scales instantly stood on end, each one as thin as a blade with a sharp tip. When they rotated, they curved to one side, resembling a series of saw teeth.
The moment it was pinned, the spectral shade turned directly to ash.
After burning the spectral shade, the two golden Kui Dragons flew back on their own and coiled around Chou Bodeng’s outstretched wrist. The fangs in their mouths protruded, interlocking with the tail spikes of the dragon in front. After a series of small, dense clicking sounds, they were completely locked. No one could say when those dragon scales might suddenly erupt on his wrist and slice open his flesh.
It was less an ornament and more a dangerous, ambiguously aligned handcuff.
Chou Bodeng toyed with the now-dormant weapon with great interest and asked casually, “This thing, was ‘I’ wearing it originally? Or did ‘I,’ the ‘evil spirit,’ put it on after taking over the body?”
As the ancient bracelet returned to Chou Bodeng’s wrist, the Taiyi Sword gradually calmed down.
But it still pointed at him.
“It’s quite nice, I don’t mind wearing it.” Chou Bodeng turned the bracelet, no longer fiddling with it. “It’s fine, I don’t care about this.”
In elementary school, his language teacher assigned a composition titled “What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up.” Among the essays filled with positive aspirations like teaching, healing, and inventing, Chou Bodeng’s was a standout. He wrote thousands of words, elaborating in great detail on his life plan for the next hundred years: a tour twenty thousand leagues under the sea, tribal hunting on the great plains of South Africa, photographing the aurora at the North Pole, tasting ancient wines aged for a thousand years… He even included an extremely detailed itinerary.
In short: a life of the most exquisite food, drink, and entertainment.
His language teacher was an old man of high moral character. Having never encountered such an unambitious person, he was so angry that he publicly berated him for not knowing the phrase “to squander a fortune.”
Chou Bodeng responded by banging on his desk and singing loudly, “Let’s get drunk today while we have wine; a thousand gold coins scattered will come back again.”
The tune was sonorous, the spirit impassioned.
He had taken the spirit of living for today to its absolute extreme.
“If you think I’m some kind of demon or ghost and want to watch over me, feel free,” Chou Bodeng said, lazily leaning against the gold-painted screen. “Just one thing…”
“Once, my butler, Uncle Li, took me to an amusement park. A car followed us, with some strange men inside. Uncle Li said he wanted to play a game of hide-and-seek with me, and someone would pick me up later. I said okay and asked him to carry me because I was too lazy to walk.”
The sword’s light flickered, reflected in his eyes.
“Uncle Li was very good to me. He took care of me from age three to seven. I leaned close to his ear and told him a secret: I had always liked him… Later, someone asked me what I liked. I told him, ‘Do you know that when a person’s carotid artery is bitten open, the blood pumping from the heart blooms in the air like a flower that blossoms to its fullest in an instant? Do you want to let me see it again?'”
Chou Bodeng let out a low laugh and suddenly leaned in, pressing his face close to the Taiyi Sword.
“If you think I’m an evil spirit and want to kill me, then do it openly and directly. Don’t try any backstabbing.”
“Otherwise, I will grind you down, bit by bit, and chew you up.”
The Taiyi Sword’s soft hum came to an abrupt halt.
In the cold light, a trace of suppressed madness and ferocity flickered in Chou Bodeng’s eyes.
“Do you… believe me?”
His voice was soft and sweet as he revealed two rows of white teeth.
The Taiyi Sword shot backward with a swoosh and slammed into the wall.
After a moment of silence, a burst of loud laughter filled the room.
“No way.”
Chou Bodeng slapped the bed, overcome with amusement.
“You were actually scared?”
He doubled over, the earlier madness and ferocity completely gone. He laughed so hard his shoulders shook, and the unlit room suddenly seemed to glow with brilliance. A flower bloomed wantonly in the darkness, a splash of cinnabar recklessly thrown into thick ink, a vision of pure abandon.
“It was just a joke—”
As he dodged the furiously lunging Taiyi Sword, he accidentally pulled his own hair again and let out a yelp.
“What a rotten place! As soon as it’s light, I’m getting money from Lord Liu and going back to Taiyi!”
***
The next day, the sun was high in the sky.
A group of people waited in the courtyard, but the door to the purification room remained stubbornly shut.
“Oh dear!” Lord Liu stomped his foot in anxiety. He wasn’t afraid that Chou Bodeng had been bluffing yesterday, but that this ancestor from Taiyi had met with some misfortune in his home. “Immortal Elder Chou is…”
Daoist Priest Xuanqing said worriedly, “I hope nothing has happened.”
Lou Jiang frowned, knocked on the door several times, and called out, but there was no answer.
The saber user stood with his arms crossed. In his view, the fact that Daoist Priest Xuanqing and Lou Jiang had stood by yesterday and let Chou Bodeng clear everyone out to “exorcise the demon” alone was a shameful act of brown-nosing the Taiyi Sect. Seeing the door remain closed, he said sarcastically, “Isn’t it obvious?”
“He was afraid of losing face, so he climbed over the wall and ran off in the middle of the night.”
“Let’s go in and see,” Lou Jiang said, about to push the door open directly.
Just then, the door was yanked open with a bang from the inside.
“It’s the crack of dawn! What’s all the racket!”