These old monsters who have lived for too many years always have a common problem: their houses are a mishmash of styles. Either they look ancient on the outside but are very modern on the inside, or they have steel and concrete exteriors with antiques inside. Now, Tai Xuan Dao belonged to the former category.

Everything familiar to Xie Bai has disappeared, replaced by a modern style of black, white, and gray, simple yet with a cold feeling, but also exceptionally clean... This was probably what Yin Wushu, with his extremely picky cleanliness, prefered.

Xie Bai scanned the surroundings and thought to himself in this way.

The small river behind the house had long been filled in, and Yin Wushu had built a sunroom with floor-to-ceiling windows on that flat ground for the backyard. Inside, there were some evergreen plants, lush and green, making the room bright and clean. The only habit he retained was probably placing tables and chairs in the courtyard.

It was just that they used to be made of stone, and now they were made of wood.

Yin Wushu directly led Xie Bai and Lou Xianyue into the glass room and the three of them sat around the wooden table.

The sunlight shone through the transparent glass, and combined with the warmth inside, it felt warm and cozy, just right.

Lou Xianyue sat down and comfortably nestled in the round chair, exclaiming, "Wow, this is much more comfortable than mine, so warm!"

Actually, demons and spirits are rarely bothered by ordinary heat or cold; they have ways to regulate it themselves, so external temperatures are basically irrelevant to them. But unlike Lou Xianyue, Xie Bai didn't show any relaxed expression. He had a indifferent expression, his eyes slightly lowered, and his skin as pale as ever, giving off a frosty texture.

"Are you cold?" Yin Wushu stared at Xie Bai for a few seconds and then spoke. Although it was a question in theory, his tone was not at all questioning, sounding rather certain.

Lou Xianyue looked at him and then at Xie Bai, her face full of confusion, as if she couldn't figure out how he could tell if someone was cold just by looking at their face, especially since Xie Bai had looked like this since he was a child. But considering that Yin Wushu had raised Xie Bai for nearly a hundred years, she wisely didn't interrupt, thinking that perhaps Yin Wushu had developed some special ability.

Without looking at him, Xie Bai replied, "I'm not cold," and then turned to Lou Xianyue and apologized.

"Huh? Apologize for what?" Lou Xianyue was puzzled, completely unaware of what was going on.

Xie Bai conjured up black mist and turned it into bandages, carefully wrapping his hands while explaining to her, "I forgot that my hands weren't covered when I grabbed your wrist in a hurry earlier, so..."

Lou Xianyue looked down at her flesh, which was streaked with blood and blisters, and said, "Oh," shaking her head. "What am I thinking... It's okay! I almost guessed it just now. I suddenly remembered when you were a child, you always had something wrapped around your hands when I took you to the tavern. I used to think it was because it was cold and I didn't want you to freeze, but now I understand. But what's the reason?"

"It's a physiological issue." Xie Bai didn't elaborate, just gave a simple answer.

"Who would have this condition when encountering someone?" Lou Xianyue was very curious.

"Almost everyone in the Three Realms," Yin Wushu answered for him, "Some are mild, some are severe, some only react after prolonged contact, and some rot at the touch, like you."

Lou Xianyue: "..."

Xie Bai: "..."

"So that's why I used to tell you to take it easy and not take advantage of him just because he's easy to deceive," Yin Wushu couldn't help adding, seeming to still hold a grudge against Xie Bai always being taken advantage of in the past.

Lou Xianyue: "Wait, that's not right. He never had anything wrapped around his hands from when he was little until now when you grabbed his hand. Why didn't you rot?"

Yin Wushu glanced at her with a look of "are you really that naive or just pretending to be" and said, "I don't belong to the Three Realms."

"Oh, right, right, you're an outsider," Lou Xianyue suddenly realized, this person is neither human nor god nor immortal nor ghost, rejected by every corner of the Three Realms, he was the number one outsider.

Looking at them discussing his childhood affairs in front of him seemingly inadvertently, Xie Bai furrowed his brows slightly, feeling a bit annoyed.

Fortunately, at this moment, Feng Li and Li Dong greeted them, entering the backyard one after another, temporarily interrupting their conversation. Li Dong held a small green porcelain bowl, stirring it clockwise with a round wooden pestle inside, and walked over to Lou Xianyue to apply medicine to her wrist, bending down to her.

The medicine to treat her injury was hard to find elsewhere, but there was plenty in Tai Xuan Dao. Back then, Yin Wushu was afraid that Xie Bai would accidentally hurt someone, so he gathered the original herbs and spent three full days and nights making them into two large porcelain bottles for future use. However, Xie Bai was already very careful at that time, and these two large bottles of medicine had hardly been used in the past hundred or so years, remaining untouched until now, locked in the second-floor medicine cabinet of Tai Xuan Dao.

Feng Li hastily picked up some fallen leaves from the four corners of the yard and tapped them with prepared paper talismans. The leaves instantly turned into five sturdy-looking men and women, lined up behind Feng Li to handle the aftermath of the Xianyue Tavern. Perhaps because he was genuinely scared by Xie Bai before, Feng Li avoided him quietly every time he came and went, taking a big detour.

As Lou Xianyue helped Li Dong wrap bandages around her wrist, she said, "I just don't understand. Tai Xuan Dao is so prestigious, but instead of recruiting people, it's always playing these tricks like scattering beans to form soldiers. What's the point?"

Yin Wushu glanced at Feng Li and the others and said indifferently, "Too many people would be too noisy. Even three people are too many."

As one of the ones being rejected, Li Dong coughed lightly to indicate his presence.

Lou Xianyue realized that she hadn't heard of anything that Tai Xuan Dao couldn't handle so far, feeling that she was indeed worrying too much, so she didn't care about it anymore. "The tools I use for divination are all in the ruins of the tavern. Do you have anything here that can be used? Speaking of which, Xie Bai's situation is quite strange..."

"Not much is used for divination, after all, I don't need it. Just pick one," Yin Wushu said, shaking his wrist and causing two things to appear on the table out of thin air. One was six bronze coins strung together with red thread. The other was a divination cylinder filled with a handful of wooden sticks.

Lou Xianyue: "..."

She looked at these two things and couldn't help but say, "Are you trying to deceive children?"

As soon as she said this, Xie Bai's face also became a bit awkward, after all, Yin Wushu used to tease him with these two things a lot.

"And the divination cylinder..." Lou Xianyue muttered disdainfully, bending down to feel around on the ground with her uninjured hand, picking up a wooden stick, and shaking it, "Look, do you have to shake it like this? Just pick one out properly. You even shook a stick out. Let me see what this stick says... 'Alone and lonely, forming shadows, gazing at each other.' She hissed, and the smile on her face slowly disappeared, as if she had discovered something very confusing.

Yin Wushu raised an eyebrow at her, reached out and took the wooden stick, saying, "Calculate yours properly. You said Xie Bai's situation was strange, what's so strange about it?" As he spoke, he threw the wooden stick back into the divination cylinder and shook it.

Xie Bai's gaze lingered on those wooden sticks and he paused for a while.

Seeing that he was not willing to mention the wooden sticks, Lou Xianyue also changed the subject and repeated what she had said to Xie Bai in the attic to Yin Wushu. Finally, she rubbed the goosebumps on her arm and said, "How could that situation happen to Xie Bai? And he even smiled at me and said it was right, what nonsense!"

Yin Wushu sighed, "Oh," with no hint of surprise on his face, and nodded, "Then it's indeed correct."

 

Translator : DarNan