The black cat held tightly in his arms suddenly stiffened, letting out several hoarse cries.

As a result, with a "whoosh" sound, a tidal wave of ghosts that loomed over Xie Bai was torn in half, reducing their piercing cries by almost half instantly.

Xie Bai, bending over and coughing so hard he could barely stand, suddenly saw a hand reaching out to him.

His eyes were filled with physiological moisture, damp and blurry, almost unable to see the outline of the hand, only catching a fleeting glimpse of white.

Almost instinctively, Xie Bai reached out his hand without hesitation and grabbed the hand in front of him. Supporting most of his weight, his other hand grasped unconsciously onto the tree trunk, the sharp wood thorns on the bark almost unnoticed as they pierced his fingertips.

He coughed until his eardrums were ringing, his heart pounding a hundred times louder, the blood vessels near his eardrums throbbing so intensely that he couldn't hear anything else or pay attention to anything else.

When he finally caught his breath and stood up straight, he realized that all the ghosts that had been howling and wailing had been torn apart and scattered on the ground in a shapeless mess. The sharp cries were blown away by the mountain wind, gradually fading until they were no longer audible. And his hand, with several cuts from the wood thorns, was being held in someone else's palm.

He breathed gently, calming his breath, while keeping his head down, his gaze naturally falling on the hand holding his. The mist in his eyes gradually dispersed, and the outline of the hand became clearer... In fact, even if the outline was unclear, he could still recognize it.

Xie Bai's lips moved slightly, and he called out with a hoarse voice, "Yin Wushu..."

"Mmm," the person standing in front of him responded casually to his words, his voice low and deep.

Xie Bai looked up at him and saw that he had changed into a black coat, unbuttoned at the front, with a smoke-blue pinstripe shirt underneath. The coat was damp with the night's moisture, but there was no sense of dust or dirt, more like he had just happened to pass by and lent a hand.

"Alright," Yin Wushu said as he removed the last few thorns from Xie Bai's fingertips, lifting his head. "Next time, don't touch every tree you see. Bloodstains on your hands make quite a statement, don't they?"

Xie Bai's hand suddenly felt cold as he realized that he had let go of his hand.

A furry mass came rubbing against his ankle, hopping onto Xie Bai's shoulder from the pocket of his coat, rubbing against his cheek, warm.

Xie Bai paused for a moment, turning his head to glance at the small black cat on his shoulder, then looked at Yin Wushu in front of him. For a moment, he didn't know what to say.

Yin Wushu, however, narrowed his eyes slightly, looking at the black cat. "Yours?" His expression seemed entirely natural, so natural that Xie Bai almost overturned all his previous speculations about the black cat.

Xie Bai made a non-committal sound and reached up to pat the kitten's back, grasping the soft skin at the back of its neck. He pulled it back into his arms and said, "Found it a while ago."

There was a moment when he almost didn't know what kind of emotion to feel towards the kitten. He could deceive others, but he couldn't deceive himself. The reason he was a bit special towards this little black cat was largely because he felt it was connected to Yin Wushu.

"Boss, over there— Huh? Boss, why are you here too?" Li Dong suddenly turned from a path on the side of the mountain, apparently intending to say something to Yin Wushu, but then he saw Xie Bai in front of Yin Wushu.

"Did I come at a bad time?" Li Dong stopped a couple of meters away, hesitating as he looked at the two of them.

His gaze lingered for a moment on the small black cat in Xie Bai's arms, then he glanced quickly at Yin Wushu. That glance was almost instinctive, so fast that he might not have noticed it himself, but Xie Bai caught every bit of it.

Yin Wushu, with his back turned to Li Dong, didn't see that glance, maintaining his usual expression.

Xie Bai withdrew his gaze and asked, "What are you two doing here?"

"Looking for something," Yin Wushu replied, glancing up the mountain.

Xie Bai remembered that when he left the Tai Xuan Dao earlier, Yin Wushu had indeed told Lou Xianyue that he was going to look for something... He just didn't expect Yin Wushu's search location to coincide with where he ended up.

Yin Wushu was usually indifferent to most things. Even if he lost something precious, he wouldn't react much, just saying, "If it's lost, it's lost." Then he would simply let it go and not mention it again. Often, Xie Bai would secretly search everywhere for him. If he found it, he would silently put it away for him, without saying a word.

Such an unreliable boss also liked to pretend to remind Xie Bai before he went out: "Take care of your things, don't lose them and then come crying to find them later."

Seeing Yin Wushu turn and walk along a winding path towards the mountain, Xie Bai frowned and asked Li Dong, who was behind him, "What are you looking for?"

"You can tell from my bewildered face," Li Dong raised his hand and pointed to his face. "I have no idea what the boss is looking for. I was supposed to stay with Feng Li and guard the door, but he suddenly took me out. He just called me to set up some roadblocks to prevent ordinary people from going up the mountains for the last month. He hasn't told me anything else."

"But whatever the boss is looking for, it's definitely not something ordinary," he added, glancing at Yin Wushu's back, and then followed after him.

Yin Wushu didn't walk far. He took four or five steps before turning on tiptoe and heading towards the woods on the right. He walked around the first old pine tree, then went straight through the gap between two wild camphor trees, took two steps to the right, and then stopped in his tracks.

He was only seven or eight steps away from Xie Bai, and even if Xie Bai didn't follow, he could still clearly see his movements.

Yin Wushu raised his hand and shook out a thin wooden stick, with a long spider silk attached to it, circling down the stick and inching closer to the ground.

"Boss, is the thing you're looking for buried down there?" Li Dong, with his hands tucked into his sleeves, squatted down next to him, quite disregarding his appearance, as if he wanted to carefully examine if there was anything worth Yin Wushu's rush to find out here in the middle of the night.

Xie Bai watched Yin Wushu's movements and suddenly remembered certain fragments. He was never good at recognizing directions, and many places, even if he had been there before, still left no particular impression on him. Unless there were some special landmarks... His brows furrowed, and he swept his gaze around the entire Lilan Mountain. When he saw the old tree halfway up the mountain, which had been split in half by lightning and had a peculiar shape, he muttered in surprise, "Is this the former Coffin Mountain?"

Yin Wushu heard his voice and raised an eyebrow, saying, "You even remember? Coffin Mountain is the nickname given by the locals, its proper name is Lilan."

Xie Bai naturally didn't care about the mountain's official or unofficial names, but if this place was indeed the former Coffin Mountain... he almost knew what Yin Wushu was looking for.

As soon as this thought came to mind, Yin Wushu had already used the spider silk to hook up the thing he wanted from the ground. The thing was only slightly larger than a fist, and from a distance, it looked somewhat pale. But Xie Bai knew that it was just a layer of membrane wrapped around it, because originally Yin Wushu couldn't stand to put that thing into the ground naked.

Li Dong exclaimed, "Holy shit," jumping up and taking two steps back, calling out, "Why is it another heart? Whose is it?"

Yin Wushu collected the wooden stick, the spider silk, and the heart in his hand together, smiling, "It's mine."

Xie Bai: "..." Just as expected.

Li Dong: "..." A freak.

 

Translator : DarNan