Chapter 84

  The Eternal Veil (VI)

  Long Tao lazily followed after the two kids, feeling rather... bored.

  He'd already taken care of everyone at mid-Foundation Establishment and above, doing so whilst hiding it from the prying eyes of Elder Qin. It wasn't easy, and if he had been at the Qi Condensation Realm, he wouldn't have been able to do it. But with the Sword Palace, he had quite a few tools to hide his actions.

  "Master is too kind!" The young girl had never stopped complaining since they left. "Why did he speak up for her after she insulted him?! Hah! Like that wench knows anything about him!"

  "Yes. Just because she's scared, she faults us for not being scared?" Xi Zhao was a bit reluctant to join her at the start but had been worn down since. "You should have seen her freeze up when she was attacked! If I wasn't there, she would have died!"

  "And instead of thanking you, she goes to accuse the greatest man alive of incompetence! I hope she's still with the sect once I break through to the Foundation Establishment Realm, as I will make a lesson out of her!"

  "You've been quiet, Senior Brother Tao." Xi Zhao spun and faced him. "Do you disagree?"

  "... no, no, I fully agree," he shrugged it away. "If it were me, I'd have personally cut her head off and lobbed it over to the town."

  "Precisely!" Dai Xiu growled as Xi Zhao winced. "This is a lesson, Junior Brother Zhao! Our Master's kindness... others will try to exploit it, but we must be there to protect him!"

  For a twelve-year-old, Long Tao mused, she was rather... feisty. Then again, she wasn't this way ordinarily--just when it came to that strange master of theirs.

  Long Tao vaguely understood why his master elected to 'save' the young woman. The man's reputation was already in the gutter, and if it came out that a disciple was, in effect, executed because of what she said--which, to most of the sect at least, would be words of truth--there'd be seldom a chance of ever recovering that reputation.

  Besides, having spent months with the man by now, Long Tao understood that his Master was strangely... unbothered by the whispers. And even after the woman's direct accusation, he seemed the least harried.

  There was always this duality toward the man where, on one hand, he appeared a complete novice, as though he'd walked into the world of cultivation just yesterday, yet, on occasion, there were these flashes of an enlightened mind who'd grown past all these things.

  The way he treated practically everyone equally, the way he (suddenly) didn't lord his status, the indifference to the way he was seen by mere disciples...

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  Those were all the hallmarks of a mind made, and yet, without a shred of doubt, Lu Qi was a man unmade in more aspects than one.

  "Maybe Master had a reason?" Xi Zhao protested slightly.

  "Of course Master had a reason!" Dai Xiu said. "But such a kind heart... we must become its protectors! Do you understand, Junior Brother Zhao?"

  "Y-yes, Senior Sister!" "It was quite odd, Long Tao mused, how the two settled into a relationship.

  It wasn't the younger calling the older a junior--that was par for the course, as not only had she taken under their Master first, but she was also decidedly stronger. The two had sparred frequently in the recent weeks, and Xi Zhao hadn't managed to win even once.

  Despite it making logical sense, Long Tao was actually a bit surprised--Xi Zhao, at least for this corner of the world, wasn't weak for his realm. Rather, he was likely even stronger than that woman who was in the mid-Foundation Establishment. On top of that, he was a sword cultivator capable of procuring Sword Qi, with an innate capacity of imbuing faint traces of temporal law into his attacks.

  He should have won, at least once or twice.

  But the girl... well, it made sense, he reconciled. She was probably bred to be a Dao Seed host. While her innate talents may not be otherworldly, Vast-Body physiques were incomparable when it came to resilience.

  "I'll stay in the back," Long Tao said as the three came upon the entryway. "I won't interfere unless it looks like you're about to die."

  "... how about a bet, Junior Brother?" Dai Xiu proposed.

  "Twenty mid-grade Stones? The usual?" It wasn't the first bet between the two--hell, Long Tao had lost count of how many times the two of them gambled.

  "How about a hundred? It's special circumstances, after all."

  "He he, fine. Whoever kills the most wins."

  "Don't get yourself killed, Junior Brother."

  "No way. I'll be too busy winning the bet."

  If that woman could hear the two of them right now, how would she react?

  Long Tao was actually tempted to tell her and see the reaction firsthand, but now wasn't the time for it.

  He followed the kids inside and inspected the town yet again. The streets were still littered with people, but only with corpses--he'd taken the sick and dying inside. Of the original two thousand or so that inhabited the town, a quarter or so had already died.

  The two paused at the grisly sight, yet forced themselves to endure.

  They were good seeds.

  To Long Tao, a person's talent was always secondary--there were about a million things under the heavens that could reforge one's fate. Take Xi Zhao--he was a practical nobody all his life until, one day, he chanced upon enlightenment and was now destined for a future he couldn't have even dreamed of before.

  Long Tao himself had reforged dozens of fates in his previous life, taking ordinary farmer boys and girls and making of them world-spanning Emperors.

  The two in front of him fit the bill perfectly; they had some innate qualities that would make the transformation of their talents a bit easier, but far more importantly, they had the demented heart of a martial artist. No mortal child could walk into a town of corpses, merely wince at the sight, and then walk past it all toward a fight that, by all accounts, they should not be able to win.

  Two kids, one at the seventh and one at the sixth stage of the Qi Condensation Realm... well, it didn't matter. The legends weren't born from doing conventional things--those who were to become Emperors would never meander in expected mediocrity.

  They were the ones shattering the walls and expectations of everything. He was once like them, and now he was to watch the two unburden themselves from the ordinary fate.

  And at the center of it all, the star around which they all orbited--their strange, oddly loose Master.