Beneath the Altar - Chapter 2

After we left the city, I took Gu Changsheng west.

A carriage I had arranged in advance was waiting at the relay station.

Lu Zefeng would probably reach Fengyue Hall before long. I had asked the madam to throw him off our trail, but my interference had disrupted the plot. No one knew what would happen next.

If the plot couldn’t be defied, Gu Changsheng would still encounter Lu Zefeng. At the very least, I had to make sure he could fight back.

First, he needed his sight restored.

The bloodspirit herb that grew by the Western Sea could cure eye disorders of any cause.

That was where we were headed.

Gu Changsheng sat in the carriage with a white silk band over his eyes, making the already perfect line of his nose even more striking.

He really was a rare beauty.

“Miss Su, which sect do you belong to?”

His cool voice interrupted my wandering thoughts.

“Why do you ask?”

“You said you would bring me back to the cultivation world, which suggests you know who I am. I have no acquaintances among mortals. That leaves someone from the martial world.”

Gu Changsheng’s reasoning was sound. Unfortunately, there was nothing reasonable about how I had got here.

“If you insist on a sect, I’d say the Stay-at-Home Sect.”

“Stay-at-Home? I haven’t heard of it. What paths do you practice?”

“Um… the Dao of Competitive Gaming, the Dao of Anime and Movies, the Dao of Eating Well and Doing Nothing?”

Gu Changsheng shut his mouth and said no more.

I realized I had taken the joke a little too far. From his perspective, a complete stranger paying a fortune to free him could hardly be acting without an ulterior motive.

I grew serious. “Gu Changsheng, I don’t belong to a sect, and I’m not a bad person. I’m just an ordinary rich person. There are a lot of things I know, and you and the Qingyun Sect happen to be among them.”

At the name Qingyun, his austere face finally changed.

A year had passed since the sect’s destruction.

Perhaps that ending had been inevitable from the moment he brought that child back to Qingyun.

“Then who are you? Why do you want to save me?”

No one could place complete trust in kindness that appeared out of nowhere, especially not someone who had suffered what Gu Changsheng had.

Explaining would have been too complicated, so I said, “You can think of me as a prophet.”

“A prophet?” He raised his brows in puzzlement.

“Exactly. A prophet who knows the past and can foresee the future.”

I smiled at him. “You can believe I saw the future, weighed the benefits against the risks, and decided to help. Or you can believe this is purely my own personal heroism.”

“Personal heroism?”

He had never heard the expression.

“Call it a wandering hero’s spirit. It means I give freely. I don’t need a reason to help you.”

“Why?” The crease between his brows deepened.

“Why does there have to be a why? Did you need a reason when you took that little girl’s place performing in a brothel?”

Gu Changsheng went still. He hadn’t expected me to know even why he had entered Fengyue Hall.

“Which version are you going to believe?” I asked with a smile.

He said nothing. Inside the carriage, only our breathing could be heard.

After a long while, the faintest curve touched his lips. “Both, I suppose. Whichever it is, things can hardly get worse.”

The carriage took half a month to reach the Western Sea.

All that jolting travel was wearing me out.

I had thought a carriage would ride as smoothly as the ones on TV. Instead, it lurched around more wildly than Keyun in one of her frantic fits searching for her child.

Gu Changsheng, on the other hand, was perfectly composed. He sat as still as a Buddha.

We found an inn in a nearby fishing village.

He looked embarrassed when he heard me ask for one room.

An unmarried man and woman sharing a room was certainly improper by ancient standards. But I was afraid that if I looked away for one second, that mad dog would snatch Gu Changsheng.

“What do you mean, you don’t have any?”

I was close to losing it.

I had come all this way to buy one bloodspirit herb, only for the apothecary to tell me it was sold out.

“It’s an exceptionally rare medicinal herb. You might search ten apothecaries and not find a single one. Your timing is unfortunate, customer. We sold ours just yesterday.”

For the first time in my life, I experienced the frustration of having money I couldn’t spend.

I tried every other apothecary in the area. Just as the first shopkeeper had said, bloodspirit herbs were hard to find.

I looked toward the towering cliff on the distant coast.

Once, I had followed the crowd and climbed Mount Tai. It nearly killed me. After coming down, I had ached all over and slept for an entire day and night out of sheer outrage.

Surely Sea-Wail Cliff couldn’t be harder to climb than Mount Tai?