Chapter 5#
Anning#
Zhu Anning was a bit dazed. When he looked up, he met Yin Yuheng’s concerned and gentle gaze.
…No!
Zhu Anning gritted his teeth secretly. How could you forget that you have a blood feud with the person in front of you? Could it be that because of this trace of gentleness, you gave up that deep-seated hatred?
Didn’t you come to the Imperial Advisor’s Mansion and try your best just to take revenge on him and let him taste the same pain as you?
Zhu Anning forced down the emotions surging in his heart: “Thank you, Senior Brother. Junior Brother will return to the Imperial Advisor’s Mansion first.”
Zhu Anning didn’t dare to look at Yin Yuheng again, and turned to leave in a hurry.
It wasn’t until he returned to the Imperial Advisor’s Mansion and closed his door that he sat blankly in front of the mirror and touched the jade hairpin on his head.
But what flashed through his mind was all Yin Yuheng’s appearance.
*
Yin Yuheng watched Zhu Anning’s back disappear before looking at a strand of hair in his palm with a faint smile.
This was what he had quietly cut off when he was tying Zhu Anning’s hair just now.
“I’ve heard of a kind of heterodoxy that can use hair, blood, and other things to curse a person, and it’s silent and difficult to detect.” Yin Yuheng narrowed his eyes.
Xiao Bai was watching obediently, and was startled by Yin Yuheng: “Heng-ge, calm down, Zhu Anning is a plot character, he really can’t be killed!”
“I was just thinking casually,” Yin Yuheng said with regret.
What are you regretting! Xiao Bai screamed silently.
Yin Yuheng put away the hair and said thoughtfully: “Don’t you think Zhu Anning is hostile to me?”
Xiao Bai said: “It’s normal to be hostile. What is this? He will deliberately pretend to be ill in the future and let Li Guanghan take your blood to refine medicine for him.”
Yin Yuheng touched his chin: “I know these. But don’t you think it’s strange? In the plot, his hostility towards me was inexplicable and without reason.”
Xiao Bai hesitated: “This…”
Yin Yuheng added: “There are so many things happening in the world at every moment, and the plot is not exhaustive. For example, what just happened was not in the plot.”
Xiao Bai thought for a while: “Indeed, many plots in the book are not written in detail, but only mentioned briefly.”
“So, it’s better to have no book than to believe everything in it,” Yin Yuheng laughed, “Although important plots cannot be changed, there is actually room for operation in many details, isn’t there?”
“Then what do you plan to do?”
“Investigate, of course,” Yin Yuheng smiled meaningfully.
Yin Yuheng pondered for a while, and took Zhu Anning’s hair to the Star-Plucking Platform.
The ninety-nine-story Star-Plucking Platform is a heavy place in the imperial city, and no one can enter except those with the Yin lineage.
Yin Yuheng stood in the center of the Star-Plucking Platform. Above the sky, the star trajectories moved endlessly. Under his feet, the jade floor was carved with the mountains, rivers, and great marshes of the nine provinces and four seas, encompassing the entire human world.
Yin Yuheng stretched out his hand, and the hair in his palm turned into light smoke swirling in the air, and finally landed on the jade floor, right at the location of Fengliang in Yuanzhou.
“Zhu Anning is from Fengliang in Yuanzhou?” Yin Yuheng thought thoughtfully.
He had been there—he had saved Li Guanghan in this place back then.
Yin Yuheng squinted slightly and reached out towards Fengliang. The light smoke transformed from the strand of hair rose again, forming the silhouette of a person in the air.
The silhouette was a small child. Although his face still looked immature, some of his good looks after growing up could already be seen. Unfortunately, this child’s clothes were tattered, and he was dirty all over, looking very disheveled and pitiful.
This was what Zhu Anning looked like when he was a child.
He really looked a bit familiar, but unfortunately he couldn’t remember. Yin Yuheng frowned slightly and asked Xiao Bai: “Do you have any impression?”
Xiao Bai was not human, and it would not forget.
Xiao Bai pondered for a moment, and suddenly said in surprise: “The small blood slave raised by the Fengliang Prefect?”
Small blood slave? Now that Xiao Bai said so, Yin Yuheng suddenly remembered.
*
When Yin Yuheng was thirteen, he had been injured once. Because the spiritual spring in Fengliang, Yuanzhou, had a very good effect on this kind of injury, he was sent here for treatment.
He also “saved” Li Guanghan here.
Yin Yuheng, who had saved Li Guanghan, was not in a very good mood. The Fengliang Prefect saw that he had something on his mind, and to please him, he took the initiative to offer Yin Yuheng a blood slave.
Yin Yuheng frowned at that time.
Blood slave is a very cruel heterodoxy.
As the saying goes, “every medicine has three parts poison,” many pills in the cultivation world contain three parts toxicity, which even the most brilliant alchemists cannot avoid. But cultivators always have times when they need to take pills. To avoid this pill poison, someone came up with the method of blood slaves.
The person making the blood slave would first select children with pure breath, and feed them with special medicine every day to change their constitution. In the end, every drop of the blood slave’s blood carried a special medicinal property. Before the master wanted to take a pill, he only needed to feed the medicine to the blood slave, use the blood slave’s body to filter out the toxicity in the pill, and then drink his fresh blood to treat the illness and heal the injury.
In this way, the master naturally had no worry about pill poison, but the pill poison in the blood slave’s body was accumulating every day, and he also had to endure the pain of cutting flesh and letting blood, slowly becoming neither human nor ghost, and dying in endless pain and howling.
No blood slave can live past five years.
Yin Yuheng looked at the child who was brought before him trembling, and felt compassion in his heart.
The Fengliang Prefect saw that he seemed to have some hesitation, and persuaded him that these blood slaves were children of criminals and were originally born into slavery.
But Yin Yuheng thought, what crime can such a small child have? Even if he was implicated by his parents, he shouldn’t suffer such torture.
Yin Yuheng kept this child, but did not touch him. Instead, he regulated his spiritual meridians every day to wash away the medicinal properties in his blood.
On the other hand, Yin Yuheng arranged for people to secretly investigate the Fengliang Prefect thoroughly.
It turned out that this child was not a so-called child of a criminal at all, but a child bought privately by the Fengliang Prefect. There were many such children, all made into blood slaves using cruel methods, as gifts for the powerful.
Yin Yuheng felt cold at such investigation results.
Before he left Fengliang, he used some means to bring out all the things the Fengliang Prefect had committed over the years, from corruption and dereliction of duty to killing innocent people. Several crimes were punished together, and he was sentenced to public execution.
Later, the atmosphere of the entire Li Dynasty officialdom was cleared, and no one dared to make blood slaves again.
And as for that small blood slave who was given to Yin Yuheng, Yin Yuheng also gave him some money and let him live freely.
“I wish you a peaceful, smooth, quiet, and happy life.”
Before leaving, Yin Yuheng rubbed his head and gave him a blessing with a smile.
*
Yin Yuheng recalled this past event and couldn’t help but curl his lips.
“The small child from back then has already grown up.”
Xiao Bai was a bit dazed: “But looking at it this way, you not only have no grudge with Zhu Anning, but also have been kind to him!”
Yin Yuheng laughed lightly.
“So what if I’ve been kind? Are there few people in the world who return kindness with ingratitude? Isn’t Li Guanghan the same?”
Li Guanghan threw him into the snowfield’s ice lake and watched him struggle in despair.
Zhu Anning took his blood and deliberately tortured him.
Maybe he has some special “ungrateful” aura, and people who meet him will automatically become ungrateful.
Xiao Bai hurriedly said: “Heng-ge, don’t be sad, maybe there is some misunderstanding in this.”
Yin Yuheng turned and left the Star-Plucking Platform.
“I’m not sad.”
Yin Yuheng smiled nonchalantly: “I just think it’s very interesting.”
Zhu Anning. Did the young man give himself this name because of that sentence when he left back then?