Mistaken Era – Chapter 17
It belatedly dawned on Xiaoxiao – he knew that creature would be venomous, yet he didn’t warn her, which was rather… unbecoming of him.
But in the end, he did step in to save her, so she should still thank him.
At this moment, however, the purple-eyed man said, “Miss, please forgive me…”
Saying this, he picked up the still mostly immobilized Cui Xiaoxiao and submerged her in the clear water to help dissipate the venom more quickly.
Fortunately, she had only inhaled the serpent’s toxic mist. If directly bitten and the venom entered her bloodstream, it would have been much harder to treat.
The burning sting Cui Xiaoxiao felt earlier subsided significantly once immersed in the water.
Once able to move, she swam toward the deeper pooled area where the streams converged, using the water to rinse off residual toxic mist and egg fluids from her body.
However, this thorough rinse left her clothes soaked through, clinging to her skin… She looked up to find the young man was still watching her, so she couldn’t help but say, “Sir, could you please turn around?”
The man raised an eyebrow, slowly turning away as he sat on a large boulder sharpening his sword. He also took an outer garment from his bundle and tossed it behind him to Cui Xiaoxiao.
During this, he continually examined the Soul-Sealing Talisman Xiaoxiao had used, his long fingers slowly tracing back and forth along the intricate lines of the talisman script.
Those long, powerful fingers moved with an almost hypnotic quality that left Cui Xiaoxiao’s mouth feeling inexplicably dry as she watched.
Not wanting to look at him further, Xiaoxiao emerged from the stream, silently chanting an incantation to shake the water from her body. Seeing her tattered outer jacket was no longer wearable after being torn by the bushes, she put on the garment the man had given her.
Seeing him still examining her talisman, she casually asked, “What’s that? Are you also interested in talismans? Oh right, since you also cultivate, which path do you practice?”
The man seemed to gauge that she had finished dressing, only then slightly turning his head, his face in profile as thin lips curved in self-mockery. “I practice an unorthodox path, having never joined any formal sect… Besides, in this vast world, there may be no one willing to accept me as a disciple.”
Xiaoxiao disliked his self-deprecating tone, so she casually asked further, “How so? Is it because you lack virtuous conduct, which is why no one would accept you?”
It was only then that the man finally looked directly at Xiaoxiao – this skinny young lady now wearing his oversized outer garment, constantly rolling up the too-long sleeves looking like a little girl trying on adult clothes…
A slight but sincere smile played on his lips, yet he stated in an even tone, “My origins are inauspicious, and my bloodline is impure. Reputable sects would never accept someone like me…”
Seeing the faint purple luminance in his eyes, Cui Xiaoxiao guessed he likely had some foreignblood lineage. From this perspective, he was also from humble roots, not unlike her own drifter childhood.
Except her luck was a bit better in the end, encountering her master Tang Youshu who guided her onto the righteous path of cultivation.
Recalling her master’s kindness in taking her in, Cui Xiaoxiao felt rather pensive as she half-jokingly, half-consolingly said, “What does a lowly birth matter? Since ancient times, the path to immortality makes no class distinctions. If one attains the Dao, even dogs and chickens can ascend to heaven. Your skills seem quite good, and you don’t lack talent either. How can you be so self-deprecating? If no one else will accept you, then just take me as your master and join my Linshan Talisman Sect!”
Hearing this, a glimmer of surprise seemed to flicker in the man’s eyes. After a slight pause, he self-mockingly said, “If your master saw someone like me, he likely wouldn’t dare accept me either…”
Cui Xiaoxiao rarely had such an opportunity to show off – as the head of her sect, she did have the prerogative to freely accept disciples.
“My master has long since ascended. It is I who now oversees the Linshan Talisman Sect. If you take me as your master, I will accept you and make you a third-generation senior disciple!”
Cui Xiaoxiao’s keen eyes had already spotted the glint of gold within the man’s bundled pouch, filling her with a tinge of envy at his apparent wealth.
Her master’s Gold Dissipation Curse had yet to be resolved, and now she found herself stranded in this forsaken place with no idea when she could reunite with her senior martial brothers.
If she could recruit a disciple untroubled by a Gold Curse and lacking no material wealth, that would truly be an auspicious blessing!
Xiaoxiao had promised her master to reform and stop her thieving ways. But if a disciple made offerings, she could rightly accept and make use of them.
However, Xiaoxiao didn’t truly harbor fantasies of actually taking this man as a disciple. Her intuition told her this man was anything but simple, and his skills likely surpassed her own. How could he possibly randomly take her as his master? After all, the Talisman Sect was quite unrenowned and incapable of nurturing great talents.
Her offer of accepting him as a disciple was merely a flippant remark.
Yet this exceptionally handsome man seemed to take Xiaoxiao’s words seriously. His purple eyes partially obscured by loose strands of black hair, one couldn’t tell what he was thinking before he finally looked up with a smile toward Xiaoxiao.
“Since the Linshan Talisman Sect is willing to take in someone as destitute as myself, how can I fail to recognize such grace? In that case, I accept you as my master. Please allow your disciple to pay respects…”
Saying this, he truly knelt down on one knee and bowed three times toward Cui Xiaoxiao.
Though Xiaoxiao had casually joked about taking him as a disciple, more to console the man over his uncertain future prospects, she never expected he would respond so earnestly by immediately kowtowing in acceptance.
She had intended to take it back, but the man had already risen and was respectfully addressing her as “Master.”
…Well, taking on a new disciple didn’t cost any money, so what was there to lose? If the Talisman Sect wished to expand, it needed to branch out.
This man’s skills were decent. Once her three senior martial brothers reached the rank to take their own disciples, there would be someone to carry on their heroic deeds of hunting rabbits and fowl!
Thinking this, Cui Xiaoxiao let out an awkward laugh before offering some customary words of encouragement, then casually asked, “Oh right, I don’t know this disciple’s name yet!”
The young man also smiled at his new young master as he enunciated each word clearly, “Your disciple’s surname is Wei, given name Jie!”
Cui Xiaoxiao had been about to compliment how resounding and auspicious such a name would be for revitalizing the Talisman Sect. But the smile gradually froze on her face.
“Wei… Jie? What exact ‘Wei’ and ‘Jie’ characters are those?”
Her new Talisman Sect disciple casually picked up a branch and wrote out his full name in the sand by the stream.
It was remarkably good calligraphy! The vigorous and unrestrained strokes flowed like soaring dragons and dancing phoenixes, exhibiting an unconventional forcefulness.
Thus, the large characters “Wei Jie” struck directly into Cui Xiaoxiao’s eyes.
After a long silence, she asked gravely, “Why… did you take that name?”
He clearly had cultivation foundations and was no ordinary mortal! Yet all cultivators would avoid carelessly uttering the names of infamous villains. So how could he just happen to have the same name as Wei Jie the Demon Lord?
Hearing Xiaoxiao’s question, the man calmly said, “One cannot discard the name given by one’s father. ‘Jie’ means ‘the inability to attain what one covets.’ I was forced to come to the mortal realm against my will. To my parents, I was their unfulfilled obsession.”
Cui Xiaoxiao’s mind was buzzing, her thoughts rapidly jumping between this verdant mountain, the sudden appearance of the Sinbream Serpent, and this man who also went by “Wei Jie”, growing increasingly muddled.
Everything about this place seemed to exude an endless sense of bizarreness.
She hesitantly asked again, “May I ask, who is your respected father?”
Wei Jie looked directly into his young master’s large eyes and slowly said, “He was the head of the renowned Demon-Quelling Wei Clan in past times – Wei Jingling!”
Cui Xiaoxiao gasped and stepped back two paces.
The handsome man finally revealed a sinister smile as he continued, “As for my mother… If you’ve seen the stone stele on the mountain, young lady, you should know she was a Demonic Fox. I am a half-demon, born of a human and a fox spirit! Being a demonic descendant unfit to bear the Wei surname, I took the ‘Wei’ character comprised of ‘demon’ and altered my surname accordingly…”
He spoke with an obvious intention to shock this young lady who had so rashly dared to accept him as a disciple, his lips curved in a mocking smile as he waited for her horrified reaction.
After all, his mother was the dreaded Demonic Fox that all righteous cultivators sought to exterminate without mercy. And his father was a criminal condemned by the orthodox sects.
Whoever accepted such a disciple would be inviting the downfall of their entire sect!
When he agreed to take her as master earlier, it was really just to see her flustered response in this moment of revelation. He wondered what excuse she would use to hastily distance herself from him.
Though he didn’t usually find amusement in such trivial matters, for some reason today he felt compelled to tease this strange young lady who had seemingly appeared out of nowhere.
He had originally thought she was from a rival sect sent to lure him into a trap, so he pretended to fall for it to see what schemes she had planned.
But later he realized this young lady was genuinely unaware of what lurked in the valley, looking so pitiful when poisoned.
She was simply an ignorant young lady lacking insight. His rebuke would prevent her from recklessly declaring herself a sect leader and indiscriminately accepting disciples everywhere she went.
But instead of the expected flustered reaction, the young lady stared at him for a long while before asking a completely unrelated question – “May I ask, what is the current year’s regnal era name?”
After Wei Jie answered, Cui Xiaoxiao fell silent, using her fingers to calculate for a while. Then she said in despair, “You said… this is really Elder Mountain? But why are there so many trees here?”
Even if she had mistakenly accepted the wrong disciple, the young lady’s reaction was too bizarre!
Wei Jie didn’t know why she was asking such things. The mocking smile faded from his face as he wondered if she had been so frightened that she had lost her senses and began raving nonsensically.
He had no idea that his new master’s mind was currently a raging storm of turmoil.
She… she felt a sense of temporal dislocation. This man didn’t seem to be lying or joking, but what exactly was going on here?
Just as Cui Xiaoxiao was utterly perplexed, a voice suddenly rang in her ears, “My my, you really are something, actually managing to activate the Zhu Jiuyin divine statue. But… how did you end up sending yourself to this time period? Don’t you know that according to your birth destiny, going back two hundred years means you’ll definitely die by his hands? Ah, how fascinating, hahaha!”
Cui Xiaoxiao knew this was the demonic bead within her body speaking to her. Though her blood lineage suppressed the bead’s malicious nature, preventing it from possessing her to commit evil deeds, after being nourished by the serpent venom earlier, it had apparently regained some vitality to rouse from its slumber and idly converse with her.
After saying this, the demonic bead seemed to exhaust its spiritual energy as it let out a lazy yawn before sinking back into dormancy, no longer speaking.
But Cui Xiaoxiao was left utterly shaken. What did it mean – had she really traveled over two hundred years into the past because of that ominous avatar statue? And she was fated to die by someone’s hands here?
Being extremely intelligent, Cui Xiaoxiao carefully analyzed the demonic bead’s words while recounting all the strange events since encountering this man. She finally realized the truth with dawning horror, her breath catching in her throat!
If this really was Elder Mountain over two centuries ago, then the abundance of lush vegetation was because the trees had not yet been incinerated by the Phoenix’s celestial flames.
Then this whip-wielding man who could shake boulders… was none other than the once-human Wei Jie before he became the Demon Lord!
That’s right! According to legends, the not-yet-demonic Wei Jie had come to Elder Mountain and shattered the Four Great Sect’s merit steles…
The more Cui Xiaoxiao thought about it, the more her head pounded. Feeling drained, she asked the man who had been watching her silently, “Those people pursuing us up the mountain earlier… who were they?”
Wei Jie lazily replied, “Looked like disciples from the Four Great Sects.”
Cui Xiaoxiao gritted her teeth, “So… they weren’t actually chasing after me, but coming for you! Why didn’t you say so earlier?”
Wei Jie arched an eyebrow as he calmly explained, “But Master, you truly are a beauty like a pristine lotus blossom. How was I to know if any of those many men harbored amorous intentions toward you?”
Faced with this flippant scoundrel, Xiaoxiao could only rub her temples in exasperation before asking, “What did you do to make them chase you like that?”
The man smiled lazily, “Nothing much, just stole some of their spirit-strengthening pellets to replenish my energy… Master, would you like a few to vent your vexations?”
Saying this, he untied his cloth bundle. To Xiaoxiao’s surprise, instead of gold she had assumed from the glinting light, it was filled with shimmering golden spirit pellets – he had clearly plundered all of the Four Great Sects’ treasuries!
Alright, with his statement, Cui Xiaoxiao could finally align the sequence of events.
Her master’s secret annals had mentioned that before Wei Jie became infamous, he was surrounded by disciples of the Four Sects on Elder Mountain after stealing their spirit pellets.
With his foundations still unstable at the time, he was forced off a cliff during the ambush and ended up in the Sinbream Serpent’s den. Gravely wounded from battling the giant serpent and poisoned, this marked the start of his path towards demonic depravity!
But now, what situation was this? Why had the course of events deviated so drastically from what originally occurred?
