Chapter 6: Chapter 5: Short-Term Planning

CHAPTER

5

Short-Term Planning

I

“Before anything else,” Hao Zhen said, “I want to know where you were last night, Duo Lan.” After seeing Duo Lan suddenly appear in the clearing, his heart had almost jumped out of his chest. Thankfully, he had been prepared for it and had managed to stop her from freaking out on them.

Duo Lan gave him a blank look, as if she didn’t understand what he was talking about. Then her eyes widened. “Are you … Are you trying to say I had something to do with this?” She bristled, glaring at him.

Her glare was something else all right. Hao Zhen had no idea how Tian Jin could stand being on the receiving end of it so often. Still, he stood his ground. He couldn’t back down now.

Hao Zhen glanced at Tian Jin. Thankfully, Tian Jin seemed to get the message, and took a step forward, slightly raising the sword in his hand, as if preparing himself for a fight.

Duo Lan looked between the two of them, as if she couldn’t believe what was happening, an incredulous look on her face. Then she ground her teeth. “All right, I get it. You want to know where I was last night, right?”

“Yes. We agreed to meet up at the clearing by nightfall. I arrived there at the agreed time, but even after waiting for a while, nobody appeared. I then found Tian Jin and Ke Li fighting each other, so their absence is explained. Yours isn’t.”

Hao Zhen didn’t really think Duo Lan was involved. Du Qing hadn’t mentioned of in the jade slip, nor had Ke Li so much as spoken her name or insinuated some sort of connection between them last night. Hao Zhen also thought she was too openly antagonistic toward Tian Jin to be involved in the assassination attempt, as paradoxical as that seemed.

However, that didn’t change the fact that her absence last night was suspicious, so he wasn’t about to take any chances.

“I was…” Duo Lan hesitated. She glanced at Tian Jin, and her cheeks reddened slightly. She looked down. “I was … I was searching for more magical plants. I spent the entire night looking for them.”

Hao Zhen frowned. That wasn’t the explanation he had been expecting. Then again, he didn’t know what he had been expecting, but this was just too weak of a reason, nor did it make that much sense. Her reaction was also rather odd. Glancing at Tian Jin, he saw that the other boy was also frowning.

“And why were you doing that? Did you fail to find any before nightfall?” Hao Zhen asked.

“No, I found plenty,” Duo Lan said, shaking her head. Then she started hesitating again, before murmuring something he couldn’t hear.

“What was that?”

Duo Lan glared at him, then grounding her teeth, said, “I wanted to make sure I had gotten more than Tian Jin.”

Hao Zhen blinked, confused, then exchanged glances with Tian Jin, who looked similarly bemused.

“Why?” This time, it was Tian Jin who asked the question.

“Because … because I wanted to win,” Duo Lan said, looking away. Her cheeks were clearly red now. “I wanted to find more magical plants than Tian Jin.”

Tian Jin stared at her blankly for a few moments, then shook his head, his expression turning wry. Turning to Hao Zhen, he said, “I think she’s telling the truth.”

Looking at the embarrassed Duo Lan, Hao Zhen found himself agreeing. This was in line with her behavior so far. Duo Lan was terribly competitive, and she seemed obsessed with being better than Tian Jin.

Still, that wasn’t enough to believe her.

“Can you prove it?” Hao Zhen asked. If she was telling the truth, there’d be an easy way to prove it: she’d only need to take out the magical plants she had collected.

Without a word, Duo Lan closed her eyes for a moment. Then, the spatial ring on her hand flashed, and in front of her, a large pile of magical plants appeared. Hao Zhen’s eyes went wide. There had to be over a hundred magical plants in there. He had been expecting at most two dozen or so of them.

“You caught all of this?” Hao Zhen asked, not doing anything to mask his disbelief.

Still not looking at them, Duo Lan nodded her head.

Hao Zhen looked more closely at the pile and confirmed that most of the magical plants in it were sunpraising grasses and deathpetal orchids, proving that this wasn’t a pile of magical herbs she just happened to have in her spatial ring.

“I…” Hao Zhen turned to Tian Jin, who also appeared incredulous. “All right. We believe you.”

“I told you,” Duo Lan muttered. Her spatial ring flashed again, and the pile of magical plants in front of her disappeared. “Anyway, what exactly happened yesterday?”

“I’ll explain,” Tian Jin said. Hao Zhen said nothing, waiting as Tian Ji gave a summary of last night’s events similar to the one he had given to Hao Zhen not too long ago.

By the time Tian Jin was done, Duo Lan didn’t look taken aback. Instead, she was incensed. “Du Qing won’t get away with this. We need to return to the sect immediately to settle this.”

If Hao Zhen didn’t know any better, he’d have thought the target of the assassination last night had been her, not Tian Jin. He suppressed the urge to groan. Although he had been hoping that this wouldn’t be the case, Duo Lan had reacted almost the same way Tian Jin had after being shown the incriminating evidence he had found in Ke Li’s spatial ring. He hadn’t thought she’d be this righteous.

Sighing, Hao Zhen gave her the same explanation he had given Tian Jin, trying to convince her that they couldn’t simply trust the elders of the sect and that the jade slip wouldn’t be enough to get Du Qing in trouble. As it turned out, Duo Lan wasn’t nearly as easy to convince as Tian Jin had been, but he ultimately managed to get her to accept that simply charging into the sect demanding justice wasn’t a particularly good plan.

“So what’s your idea?” she snapped, a challenge implied in her eyes. She clearly didn’t think he had managed to come up with anything good.

Unfortunately, she was right.

“I’m not sure,” Hao Zhen admitted, “which is why I think we should spend some time considering our options and coming up with plans. In any case, we’re not in a hurry to return, and I don’t think we should do so before we have a plan.”

“I agree,” Tian Jin said. “We’ll make Du Qing pay, but Hao Zhen’s right. We need a proper plan first. We can’t just head in and expect everything to work out.”

Good, Hao Zhen thought to himself. Tian Jin was learning—and, more importantly, Tian Jin had just shown that he could learn. As far as he could tell, after regaining his memories, he stopped being affected by whatever it was that was making everyone act like characters of a cultivation novel, but he could influence others into doing the same thing. Thankfully, Tian Jin had just proved that such a thing was possible; if it wasn't, Tian Jin would have insisted on returning to the sect and directly confronting Du Qing, as he had originally intended.

Truthfully, if the events of the world really replicated that of the plot of a cultivation novel—if Tian Jin’s fate was indeed analogous to that of the storyline of a cultivation novel protagonist—then even if he did confront Du Qing without making any plans, he’d probably end up triumphing in the end somehow.

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Hao Zhen wasn’t about to take any chances, however. He didn’t know whether any of his theories were correct, and he wasn’t just going to put his life on the like just like that.

If they returned to the sect with Tian Jin alive and Ke Li dead, there was no doubt that Du Qing would suspect that his plans had been revealed and so would try to silence everyone involved. To remain alive, Hao Zhen needed to ensure that Du Qing would be dealt with.

“All right,” Duo Lan said. “I guess it can’t hurt to think of something.”

Over the next hour, they discussed the possibilities and ultimately came to the conclusion that for the time being, the best plan of action would be to keep Ke Li’s attempt to assassinate Tian Jin under Du Qing’s orders a secret, claiming instead that they had gotten ambushed by a monster, which had ended up eating Du Qing. Tian Jin, who knew Du Qing best, was certain that if they did this, Du Qing would first try to find out what had actually happened and sound them out before making any movies, which would give them time—more specifically, Tian Jin and Duo Lan—to grow stronger. Hao Zhen and Duo Lan were both confident that they’d be able to take on Du Qing soon enough.

It wasn’t as good a plan as Hao Zhen had hoped, but it was the only one they had managed to come up with, and it also solved another problem: what to do with Ke Li’s corpse. If Ke Li had died, they’d be expected to return with his corpse—something they couldn’t do, considering doing so would reveal that Ke Li had died after being stabbed through the chest by a sword. If they said that a monster had swallowed Ke Li, however, then they’d have an explanation for why they didn’t have the corpse.

Now, they only needed to come up with a reason why, after eating Ke Li, the monster had left them alone. Saying that they had killed the monster wasn’t an option. If they went with that explanation, then the elders would question why they hadn’t brought the corpse of the monster back—a corpse they didn’t have, as there wasn’t any monster, to begin with. Not to mention they'd have to place Ke Li’s corpse inside the monster's stomach for their story to make sense, which defeated the purpose of having a monster eat it in the first place.

“Maybe we can just say that it got satisfied after eating Ke Li, then left us alone because it wasn’t hungry anymore?” Tian Jin said, though judging by his expression he didn’t seem to put much stock in his suggestion.

“I don’t think they’d buy that. Too convenient.” Hao Zhen furrowed his brow. “I can’t think of anything better, though.”

“Hmmm.” Duo Lan, who had been quiet for a while, suddenly looked up. “What if we say that Ke Li killed the monster after being swallowed? We can say that after the monster ate him, it suddenly exploded, and we assumed that Ke Li had used an explosion talisman to take it out with him, destroying both of their bodies in the process”

“That … that could work,” Hao Zhen said, looking at her with surprise. “I think there might be a problem, though. The elders could ask for proof. I’ve never used an explosion talisman before, but I don’t think one would be able to completely obliterate a monster to the point of leaving nothing behind.”

“I know,” Duo Lan said, nodding her head. “I have something I think we can use. What we need is a third-level red-grade monster big enough to swallow a man whole, right?” Her spatial ring flashed, and a horn appeared in her hand. “Here. The horn of a piercing sun tiger.”

The horn was bright red, roughly the length of a forearm, and appeared to be glowing softly under the sun.

Hao Zhen stared at it blankly, then looked back at her. “How … how exactly did you get your hands on that?”

A third-level red-grade monster was strong enough to fight a group of third-level redsouls. This wasn’t the kind of material an outer disciple could get her hands on—even if it was someone like Duo Lan, who was only second to Tian Jin.

“It’s an ingredient of one of the pills I’ve been trying to concoct,” Duo Lan said, shrugging. She would have been more convincing if she wasn’t trying to avoid eye contact. “So I managed to get my hands on some through my connections in the Alchemy Division.”

She was clearly lying—or, at the very least, she wasn’t being entirely honest. For a moment, Hao Zhen considered calling her out on it, but ultimately decided against it. He didn’t like secrets, but knowing Duo Lan, trying to get the truth out of her could very well turn ugly very quickly, and now wasn’t the time for infighting.

“It looks like we have a plan, then,” Hao Zhen finally said. “While we were searching for sunpraising grass, we were ambushed by a piercing sun tiger. It swallowed Ke Li whole before any of us could react, and then, moments later, it exploded, only leaving behind that horn. How does that sound?”

“I think it works,” Tian Jin said. Duo Lan also agreed with the plan, though that was expected, as was the one who had suggested it in the first place.

“One last thing,” Hao Zhen said. “What about Ke Li’s spatial ring?” As he said that, he took it out of his pocket and showed it to them. “Would a spatial ring normally survive an explosion talisman?”

Tian Jin looked unsure, but Duo Lan nodded her head. “Definitely. We would be expected to bring it back to the sect with us and hand it to the elders.”

Hao Zhen stared at the ring in his hand. He had been dreading that answer. He had hoped they’d have been able to keep it, claiming to the elders that it had also been destroyed in the explosion, and since Tian Jin and Duo Lan already had spatial rings of their own, he had been hoping they’d have let him have it.

“Then I guess there’s no other choice,” he said, looking at the ring with regret before returning it to his pocket.

With that, there was nothing else left to plan for the time being, so they made their way over to Ke Li’s corpse to get his magical cloud so that they could. Kneeling down next to the corpse, Tian Jin pulled back Ke Li’s sleeves, revealing a red bracelet on the corpse’s forearm. Apparently, magical clouds could be condensed into bracelets. This was why the magical cloud seemed to spill out of Ke Li’s sleeve when he summoned it.

“What happened to his skill seed, anyway? Did you already get it?” Duo Lan asked offhandedly as she looked down at the corpse with visible distaste.

“Oh. Right. I almost forgot,” Tian Jin said.

“Skill seed?” Hao Zhen asked.

Besides practicing spiritual cultivation, cultivators also sought to deepen their comprehension of heavenly laws—the laws that, essentially, governed reality. If a cultivator’s comprehension of a heavenly law reached a high enough level, they would be able to derive a spiritual skill from it, or at least that was what Hao Zhen had heard. He didn’t have a spiritual skill, nor had he ever tried to comprehend a heavenly law with the purpose of acquiring one. That wasn’t exactly the kind of thing outer disciples usually bothered with, as most of their time was already taken up by trying to grasp their cultivation method.

He knew even less about skill seeds, the extent of his knowledge being that were supposedly the materialization of spiritual skills. All Hao Zhen knew about spiritual skills and skill seeds had been told to him by other outer disciples, and those that he had talked with hadn’t known much, to begin with.

“You don’t know?” Duo Lan raised an eyebrow.

Tian Jin looked up, glancing at her, then turning to Hao Zhen. “When a cultivator with a spiritual skill dies, their skill seed leaves their soul, manifesting outside their body as a skill seed,” he said as he pushed Ke Li’s corpse to the side slightly, displacing it. Something red rolled down from underneath the corpse, and Tian Jin swiftly grabbed it.

Tian Jin stood up and held out the red object for Hao Zhen to see. It was a small red orb. “This is a skill seed. If you assimilate it into your crux, you’ll get Ke Li’s spiritual skill, Ethereal String Puppetry. And unlike spatial rings, skill seeds are pretty fragile, so we can claim they were destroyed in the explosion.”

Hao Zhen narrowed his eyes at the small orb. A spiritual skill … that could definitely come in handy. However, the one who had killed Ke Li was Tian Jin, so it technically belonged to him.

As if Tian Jin had read his thoughts, he tossed him the skill seed. “You can have it,” Tian Jin said, shrugging. “I already have one, after all.” At that, Duo Lan blinked, then turned to glare at Tian Jin, who ignored her.

“I…” Hao Zhen looked at the skill seed, then at Tian Jin. “Is it safe, though? Couldn’t the elders notice that I suddenly gained a spiritual skill—the same one as Ke Li at that?”

“Only if you use it,” Tian Jin assured him. “It doesn’t matter how powerful you are—you can’t see inside another cultivator’s crux with Spiritual Sight.”

“Ke Li’s spiritual skill was Ethereal String Puppetry, right?” Duo Lan suddenly interjected, to which Tian Jin nodded. Turning to Hao Zhen, she said, “That’s one of the three signature skills of the Blazing Light Sect, the other two being Blazing Sun Aura and Radiant Light Field. Ethereal String Puppetry doesn’t have the defensive properties of Radiant Light Field, nor the offensive power of Blazing Sun Aura, but I think it’s a very useful skill seed, and it’s particularly suitable for those who aren’t all that good at fighting.”

“She’s right,” Tian Jin said. “I think you should take it. Skill seeds aren’t easy to come by, and considering we don’t know what Du Qing will do, the more powerful you are, the better you can protect yourself. Just bear in mind that as a redsoul, you can only have one spiritual skill, and after you assimilate a skill seed, there’s no going back. The only way to get rid of it would be to destroy your crux and start cultivating all over again. You’ll also have to keep the fact that you have a spiritual skill a secret until you can come up with an excuse for it.”

Hao Zhen silently listened to their advice, all the while staring at the small red orb in his hand in contemplation. He found himself thinking of yesterday—how Ke Li had almost managed to kill Tian Jin using his spiritual skill, the same spiritual skill he now held in his hands. He didn’t know when another opportunity like this would come in the future, and considering that they’d still have to deal with Du Qing later on, he’d need all the power he could get, just like Tian Jin had said. The more he thought about it, the more certain he became. Finally, he made his decision.

“I’ll assimilate it.”

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