Life as a Rogue Cultivator

Chapter 312: Feilongzi

Seeing how vicious those two arrows were, packed with true qi, Liu Xiaolou shouted out, “Don’t kill him!”He knew all too well what it meant to become mortal enemies with a righteous sect. If a grudge like that could be avoided, it was far better to avoid it. No need to invite that kind of trouble.

The armored cultivator's arrow flickered, its explosive force vanishing in an instant. All that was left was a whisper of light, barely there, that grazed Feng Yuanfa's back.

Feng Yuanfa’s eyes rolled back, and he collapsed to the ground, unconscious.

The armored cultivator pulled back his two arrows. With a flick of his wrist, he snatched at Feng Yuanfa’s satchel from a distance. He gave it a quick shake, then muttered under his breath, “Broke son of bitch.”

Feng Yuanfa was a Foundation Establishment cultivator, yet he didn’t have any storage artifact on him. Whether he didn’t own one or had simply left it behind, it was honestly hard to know what to say.

Liu Xiaolou also gathered up everything the four remaining members of the Qingyuan Sect had on them and stuffed it all into his Qiankun Pouch. The two of them exchanged a look, then continued fleeing east together.

They kept running for dozens of li before finally slowing to a stop.

When they looked back the way they had come, there was no sign of Qingyuan Mountain left at all.

By then, it was already daylight. They sized each other up. Liu Xiaolou still had his bamboo hat pulled low and a face covering wrapped tight. The armored cultivator was still wearing that strange armor whose material was hard to make out, constantly shifting in color. He wasn’t wearing a hat, but the armor extended upward, covering most of his face from the nose down.

The life-and-death struggle they had just gone through had created real hostility between them, but fighting side by side against the Qingyuan Sect’s pursuit had dulled that edge somewhat. Even so, the two remained on guard, unsure of what to say or do next.

After a short while, the other man finally spoke. “That was Bi Daoming of the Qingyuan Sect. He is not very well known within the sect. Supposedly he has only been at the Golden Core stage for less than two years. But a Golden Core is still a Golden Core. He is dangerous.”

“You mean the one halfway up the mountain last night?”

“That’s right. The guy who was patrolling with his spiritual sense. I hear he has been cultivating for even less time than I have, yet he already formed his core. That spiritual sense of his is truly impressive.”

Liu Xiaolou nodded silently. It really was impressive. After reaching Foundation Establishment, his own spiritual sense covered only about thirty feet. Last night, Bi Daoming had been at least five hundred feet away, yet his spiritual sense still swept over this area, pinning Liu Xiaolou in place so completely that he did not dare move at all. If he had not had the Concealment Pendant Jade on him, he might have been discovered. Even now, thinking back on it made a chill of cold sweat break out.

“You must be a lot younger than me, young brother,” the armored cultivator remarked. “Truly, you’ve outdone your master. And you’re just as impressive.”

It was obvious he was trying to ease the tension between them.

Liu Xiaolou had no desire to keep fighting either. This man was at mid–Foundation Establishment, or very close to it. And on top of that he had that absurdly powerful soft armor. He was extremely hard to deal with, and there was no reason to deepen their grudge.

Still, there were things that needed to be said. You can't just let people decide when to fight and when to make peace.

“Why did you attack me yesterday?” Liu Xiaolou asked.

“Because something I had been watching for a long time was on you,” the other man replied.

“Who were you actually eyeing?” Liu Xiaolou pressed.

“They say you can’t know someone until you’ve fought them. I am from western Sichuan. My Daoist name is Feilongzi. And you, brother, how should I address you?”

Liu Xiaolou lied, “Li Mu. I used to be with the Pai sect, then struck out on my own to make a living.”

“Brother Li Mu,” Feilongzi said, “can you tell me this? When you made your move and robbed people at Zhenyang Gorge, who exactly were you targeting?”

Liu Xiaolou said, “Just tell me, whose stuff do you want back, and what exactly are you after?”

“Since you put it that way, I’ll assume our goals aren’t the same. How about this. The two Qingyuan Sect outer disciples who had reached the peak of Qi Refining. Could you give me what they were carrying? I’ll trade you the items from that inner disciple at the Foundation Establishment stage we dealt with earlier. His name was Feng Yuanfa. In his satchel were twelve spirit stones, plus a Lingxi inkstone. It’s a high-grade magical item, worth at least two hundred spirit stones.”

“So you ambushed me just because you wanted what those two Qi Refinement cultivators had on them?”

Feilongzi let out a sigh. “I took a job. Those two guys got into trouble, made enemies, and took something that belonged to those enemies. The people they wronged came to me and asked me to get it back. I watched them at the foot of Qingyuan Mountain for half a month before I finally caught my chance. Who would’ve thought… right when I was about to act, I saw the goods end up in your hands, Brother Li Mu. I didn’t know your background, so I acted on impulse. In the end, this was my fault. I owe you an apology, Brother Li Mu, and I hope you’ll be generous and not hold it against me. Haha....”

Something about what Feilongzi said didn’t quite ring true to Liu Xiaolou. While Feilongzi was busy explaining himself, Liu quietly checked the Qiankun Pouch, looking through the items he’d taken from those two Qingyuan Mountain outer disciples to see if anything seemed off.

The most valuable things were two mid-grade magical items. The Qingyuan Sect was famous for its calligraphy, so it wasn’t surprising that the disciples’ gear was along the same lines. One was a gold-inlaid amber paperweight ruler, the other an inkstone. By Liu Xiaolou’s estimate, the two together would fetch less than seventy spirit stones at the market.

There was also a pile of spiritual pills. He’d robbed quite a few people, and while magical items were easy to tell apart, pills weren’t. So he opened the bottles one by one and checked them carefully.

They were all run-of-the-mill pills for treating internal and external injuries or repairing meridians. The quality of the alchemy was clearly worse than what came out of Tianmu Mountain. Just by the smell, he could tell these were far less effective than similar pills from there.

After all, Tianmu Mountain was a dedicated alchemy sect. Down here in Lingnan, you rarely heard of any truly famous pill-making sects.

After opening the bottles and checking them more closely, Liu Xiaolou finally noticed that in three of them, each contained a small jade slip about the size of a fingernail. When he sent his spiritual sense into them, he found they held pill formulas, three different ones.

The pill for internal injuries was called Fragrant Ganoderma Pill. The one for external wounds was Leopard Fetus Pellet. And the one for repairing meridians was called Meridian-Guarding Pill.

Recording pill formulas or cultivation methods on jade slips like this was mostly an old-fashioned practice. That suggested these three formulas were likely the original versions. That fact alone made Liu Xiaolou suspect they were quite valuable.

So he tested the waters aloud. “It’s just the magical items they were using, plus some pills, gold, silver, that sort of thing. None of it looks particularly valuable. You really want to trade for it?”

Feilongzi said, “Those are the items my client wants back. Whether they’re worth much or not is their concern, not ours. Don’t you think that’s reasonable, Brother Li Mu?”

Liu Xiaolou nodded. He took out the gold-inlaid amber paperweight ruler and the inkstone, then added four bottles of spirit pills, not even sure whose they’d originally been. He set them all out and said, “They didn’t have any storage items. This is everything. Want to count it?”

Feilongzi turned the two magical items over in his hands again and again, then uncorked the four pill bottles and sniffed them one by one. It seemed like something occurred to him, and he asked, “No spirit stones? No gold or silver?”

Liu Xiaolou simply checked the two men’s satchels. Between them, there were eight spirit stones and a bit over twenty taels of broken gold and silver. Finding nothing unusual, he took them all out and tossed them over. “If I remember right, these satchels were theirs. The spirit stones and gold and silver inside haven’t been touched.”