Cen Qianshan held Qianji on his knees, applied new oil to its joints, and used his spiritual power to clean the fine sand in the crevices of its body, making it make grunting sounds in comfort.
"Are you maintaining the puppet?" Mu Xue squatted down beside them.
The man paused for a moment, his fingers stained with engine oil. "Well, he's already quite old, and needs careful maintenance."
Qianji waved his hands in dissatisfaction, protesting that his master had said that he was old in front of Mr. Mu. Unfortunately, because his chest was opened at the moment, he dared not move around.
Mu Xue reached out and touched the puppet's smooth head to comfort it. Qianji rolled his small iron eyes and hummed with joy.
Qianji is still as cute as he was back then. Mu Xue thought happily that this was the little puppet that had been with her the longest and that she loved the most. She thought he had died while accompanying her, and she was very sad. It seemed that Xiaoshan had picked him up later and repaired him so well.
Mu Xue's eyes fell on the bamboo flute, and she was a little curious. "You play the flute really well. I didn't expect you could do this."
"I didn't know how to play it at first." Cen Qianshan was busy with his work and answered casually, "One time, when Master came back, he said he liked the music played by Liu Ruyan. So I quietly started to learn it."
Mu Xue murmured in confusion: "Who is Liu Ruyan?"
Cen Qianshan looked up at her, then lowered his head again.
Mu Xue did not notice that the busy man's lips curved up, because of her unintentional words, he could not help but show a curve of joy.
"It's normal that you don't know. He is just an insignificant person." Cen Qianshan lowered his head and worked hard, his hands moving non-stop.
"Before, I didn't know how to play the flute, but after practicing for many years, I finally learned it. I thought that one day I could play it for my master. In the past, I was not very sensible, and I bothered my master to cook for me every day. Now that I have learned how to cook, I thought I could also cook for my master to taste."
He replaced Qianji's spirit stone with a new one, closed his chest, patted him, and told him to get up.
Then he raised his head and turned to look at Mu Xue. There was a gleam in his eyes, revealing a little cautious expectation.
At this moment, they were so close to each other that Mu Xue could clearly smell a familiar scent of soapberry coming from him.
It was in a snowy yard, with a small bathing room and the unique fragrance of soapberries.
Mu Xue suddenly remembered what the senior sisters had just said.
Who can resist a handsome and gentle man like him who puts so much effort into me
"You shouldn't be like this," Mu Xue said carefully, "Have you ever thought about what would happen if your master... never came back? Or even if she came back, she couldn't respond to your feelings. What would you do then?"
As if in response to her words, the ray of sunlight in the sky also hid behind the clouds.
The sky darkened and even cold snowflakes began to fall.
The man opposite stared at her, and after a while he laughed as if to mock himself.
"what do I do?"
He raised his hand. His fingers were long and smooth, with a little bit of motor oil on the fingertips. He used this hand to catch a small cluster of crystal clear icicles falling from the sky.
"Look, this is snow. It's beautiful, isn't it?" He showed the sparkling thing to Mu Xue. "In the world I used to live in, there was no such clean thing. It was dark and dirty, full of decay and stench."
"I fell in love with her when I first saw her, and as time went by, I became so deeply attracted to her that I could no longer pull myself out." His beautiful eyes moved as he watched the snowflake melt into his palm.
"But I didn't dare to say it at that time. I felt that something like me who came out of a ditch, rotten and smelly, was not worthy of her."
"No, no, no, how could you be a rotten thing?" Mu Xue blurted out in anxiety.
"Yes. I regret it now. For more than a hundred years, I have been tormented by regret every day." Cen Qianshan raised his eyes and stared at her.
"I should have worked harder. If I'm not good enough for her, I should work hard to make myself better. If she doesn't see me, I should work hard until she sees me. I shouldn't have let go so foolishly and cowardly that I missed her. What else will I have left after losing her?"
Mu Xue blinked, and was speechless because of the declaration that came from the heart.
"Do you think I am qualified to like her now?"
Cen Qianshan looked down at Mu Xue, his voice low and hoarse, as if he had been badly bullied by someone, with a bit of suppressed grievance, "Can I have the qualifications to give it a try?"
Mu Xue opened her mouth, but couldn't bear to say no.
I could only stammer, "Of course."
The man smiled. He seemed to have put down a huge stone in his heart. In the snowy season, he smiled with relief because of a short answer.
"Even if she still doesn't like me and doesn't want to talk to me, it doesn't matter. I will try to make her see me and try to make her come back to me." His fingers pressed on the collar of his clothes, where there was a red pendant.
"I can wait for a hundred years, two hundred years, until the day I burn out, go out, and turn into ashes."
In this world, the things that can move people the most are never the elaborately crafted rich and colorful words in the vernacular novels, nor the sad and sorrowful tone in the poems and songs.
And these are often the words that go deep into the heart, taken out from the chest when the chest is cut open.
In front of Mu Xue, Cen Qianshan had his collar slightly open, revealing the red jade necklace hanging around his neck. The red dragon pendant was as red as a ball of fire, burning in the middle of his white collarbone.
At this moment, in Mu Xue's Huangting, there was also an identical Cen Qianshan standing by the lake of her heart. The man came out of the water, with water droplets on the ends of his hair, clear springs in his eyes, and he looked at her silently.
For a moment, the mood inside and outside, two pairs of brows, overlapped, stirring the lake in the heart into wrinkles.
"You say... Will Master blame me? Will she accuse me of being a traitor?" Cen Qianshan approached slowly and asked softly in his throat.
The throat sound was deep, with an "um" at the end. It had a natural alluring flavor.
The fire dragon in the Huangting descended from the clouds, circled around Mu Xue's soul, looked at the wet water tiger by the lake, and whispered in her ear.
"Promise him. I like him very much."
It was so hot between water and fire, and Mu Xue's heart was in chaos. She didn't even know whether it was the voice of the fire dragon or the words in her heart.
Not far away, under the dilapidated ancient city wall,
The white bird from the Night Shine tribe picked up a flower from somewhere, flapped its broken wings, struggled to jump onto Xiao Changge's shoulder, tilted its little head and handed the flower in its mouth to the human boy she liked.
She spoke in human language, "I like you, you are more beautiful than flowers."
Several nearby disciples who were familiar with Xiao Changge whistled and made fun of him.
Xiao Changge blushed, but did not forget to reach out to stop them, "Don't laugh at her."
With a red face, he took the bird with broken wings off his shoulder, held it in his hands, looked into her eyes and said, "Thank you for liking me. This is the first time I have received flowers from a girl. I am really happy."
"But please forgive me. I cannot accept your feelings. We are of different races and have different living habits. Besides, I can only stay here for seven days. After seven days, I will go back to my world. There, my family, friends, and beloved teachers are waiting for me."
The little bird scratched his palm sadly with its claws and began to cry.
Xiao Changge used vines to create a small bird's nest, placed the tearful little bird on it, and touched the back of her neck which was still bandaged.
"You can follow me for a few days. I will change your medicine every day. Wait until your wings grow back, and then you can fly away by yourself."
He raised his arms and wanted to temporarily place the bird's nest on a protruding stone statue beside the doorway.
At this time, the sound of crutches tapping could be heard from the deep doorway in the city wall.
Xiao Changge looked up and happened to see a skinny and short old woman, leaning on a cane in one hand and carrying a basket in the other, walking out of the dimly lit city gate with a hunched back.
She saw Xiao Changge looking at her, and she tilted her head with a smile and nodded to Xiao Changge.
Is it a monster? A thought flashed through Xiao Changge's mind, but how come he didn't detect any spiritual power fluctuations? Could it be an ordinary human
How could an ordinary person appear in such a ruin where demons were reborn
Before this thought disappeared, a familiar red rope suddenly appeared and tightly bound the short old man. Almost at the same time, a bright knife flashed and fiercely chopped the man into two.
A pool of blood and two broken bodies soaked the ground. The rest of the people finally reacted and stood up.
"What's going on? Is it a demon? Why can't I feel any demonic power at all?"
"It looks so weak, what kind of monster is this?"
"Isn't that a bit hasty?"
"He actually took action?"
During this journey, Mu Xue rarely relied on her extremely powerful Immortal Binding Rope and never used it unless it was a critical moment.
Cen Qianshan almost never took action, and most of the time he just stood at the end of the team and watched them fight silently.
What surprised everyone was that this old lady in front of them, who had low spiritual power fluctuations and looked very weak, for some reason caused Mu Xue and Cen Qianshan to attack them at the first moment.
"Do you know what it is?" Mu Xue asked in a low voice while leaning against Cen Qianshan.
"I don't know, but I feel it's very dangerous." The intuition gained from countless life-and-death battles told Cen Qianshan that the person in front of him was an enemy that he must not take lightly.
Along the way, he remained vigilant and released his spiritual sense. No creature with spiritual power within a radius of several miles could escape his perception.
But this plain-looking "old woman" actually walked in quietly and was not discovered until she was within his sight.
Even the weakest ordinary people have a trace of spiritual power belonging to living things. But the old man in front of him, under the cover of his spiritual consciousness, did not even have the slightest spiritual power fluctuation. It was as if he did not exist at all.
In less than a moment, the two halves of the body soaked in blood made gurgling bubbling sounds, and two old women of the same size and shape as before crawled out of the pool of blood.
They seemed to have forgotten that they had just died. They continued to walk forward with baskets and crutches, chattering non-stop.
"It's snowing. Drinking a cup of warm yellow soup is a good way to feel comfortable in this weather."
"I heard that there's a new young master at Qinhuai Pavilion. We should go and listen to a piece of music."
"The offerings in the temple have not yet been changed. Do not forget it."
When Cheng Yan blocked the way for the trembling old woman, she suddenly opened her toothless mouth and let out an extremely shrill and unpleasant scream.
The sound waves were like a foul and smelly tide that flooded across everyone's sea of consciousness, polluting their divine senses, stirring up the listeners' sea of consciousness into chaos and their spiritual energy into disorder.
Cheng Yan, who was protected by golden light, could not resist the pollution to his spiritual consciousness. He covered his head and cried out in pain, with blood flowing from his ears.
Ding Lanlan's puppet fell from the sky and stomped the screaming monster to death with one foot.
But not long after, several identical old men carrying baskets emerged from the monster's corpse.
More people joined the battle. The scary thing was that every time a monster was killed, more monsters would soon appear.
Soon, the people walking back and forth on the street in front of the city wall were all white-haired, hunchbacked old women.
"Let's go talk to Granny Wang."
"The divine whip is in the hands of a little girl like this. Is it Bai Wuchang's thing?"
"I heard that the wife of Er Gouzi from West Street ran away with her husband."
"It's snowing again. Have you put away the incense threads drying in the yard?"
"The sacrifices offered this time are really good."
Many old women were walking back and forth, muttering to themselves, looking harmless.
However, once they stop at a certain place, they will suddenly open their mouths and let out a shrill scream, causing unbearable pain to those nearby and suddenly making them lose the ability to fight.
This is not a solution, Mu Xue thought from a high place.
They were stuck in a stalemate. The more they killed, the more enemies there were. But if they stopped killing, the numerous monsters would shout in unison and no one could bear it.
These are definitely not the real bodies of the demons. We must find their real bodies and completely destroy them.
Mu Xue sat in the sky-reflecting clouds, calming her mind and breathing, her consciousness spreading in all directions, penetrating deep into the earth. Although her body was still in the foundation-building stage, if she only considered her consciousness, she would not lose to a cultivator in the golden elixir stage.
The divine consciousness turned into several silver threads and explored deep into the earth.
Beneath the earth there was first a solid city foundation, and later a dark, lightless layer of mud.
Going down further, huh? It seems that there is a huge temple buried under thousands of acres of earth and rocks. The temple is vast and boundless, and there is a faint light in the depths.
Mu Xue tried hard to stretch her spiritual sense further, wanting to see clearly what that hazy light and shadow was.
It seemed as if there was a piece of amber that had solidified for many years, and inside it was a soul with its eyes closed.
As Mu Xue's consciousness slowly approached, a chilling cold consciousness spread out from the amber and grabbed Mu Xue.
It was a woman who was curled up with her legs hugged. She suddenly opened her eyes and looked at Mu Xue through the amber.
She has a pair of graceful eyes, full of spring love and autumn thoughts, charming and attractive.
Mu Xue heard a faint sigh.
"Hey, what an interesting kid. You have a powerful spiritual awareness, but you have just started practicing. Your foundation is solid and stable, but you have just started to collect liquid to make elixir."
That voice laughed in the empty world, "The best part is that it's a path of love. It seems that I've finally waited for it."
On the ground, the city wall that had stood for hundreds of years began to tremble, large chunks of soil kept falling off, and the city wall was falling apart.
The old ladies running around on the ground all rushed in one direction. They pushed each other and climbed up, gradually forming a huge young woman.
The woman was slender and graceful, with a free and unrestrained posture. She was only covered with a layer of misty gauze, and a golden ring was on her bare feet and arms. When she moved, the golden ring collided, and a clear sound was heard.
Such an affectionate posture, charming yet not vulgar, not to mention the men present, even the women couldn't help but feel their heartbeats speeding up when seeing it.
"What kind of monster is this? Why have I never seen it in books?"
Facing such a graceful woman, Cheng Yan was too embarrassed to use his magic to engage in close combat with her. He could only retreat from a distance and ask.
Lin Yin raised his arm and pointed forward, his fingertips trembling slightly, "Look, does she... does she look like those people?"
Most of the buildings on both sides of the road here are dilapidated, but you can still see many statues of happy gods mixed in the stone buildings.
At this moment, following Lin Yin's finger, everyone was surprised to realize that the female Buddha in the statue of the Laughing Buddha was almost exactly the same as the woman in front of them, both in terms of clothing and appearance.
The demon god raised his bare feet, slowly stood up, and walked towards Mu Xue with light lotus steps.
"Master," Wangchuan Sword's childish voice sounded in Mu Xue's mind, mixed with some fear, "I seem to have seen this person. But I can't remember where."
"Don't be afraid. No matter who she is, as long as I have you in my hands, I can kill even gods and demons."
In Wangchuan's hazy consciousness, he suddenly remembered a voice. Someone had said the same thing to him.
"Wangchuan, as long as I have you in my hands, I can kill all the gods and demons in the world."
That era was so long ago that it no longer remembers who it was.
Perhaps it was his previous owner.
Mu Xue stroked the sword blade, and used blood to rush out the murderous spirit. With a frosty sword, she slashed at the demon god that was approaching her.
"Oh, the Forgotten Sword?" The charming voice that I had heard underground rang out again, "The Forgotten Sword, the Immortal Binding Rope, how come Dongyue's things are in your hands?"
Dongyue Ancient God is an ancient great god. No matter whether it is immortals or demons in this world, when they mention him, they all respectfully call him Ancient God, Almighty. But in this woman's indifferent tone, it seems as if he is just a friend she is drinking and chatting with.
When she said the first sentence, she was still very far away from Mu Xue in mid-air. With the sound of jingling of the golden rings between her feet, her charming eyes suddenly came close to Mu Xue's eyes.
Mu Xue was shocked and ordered Ying Tianyun to retreat with a thought, then she flipped her hand and summoned a small puppet.
The palm-sized puppet had pink skin like a real person, holding a green lotus leaf. Her hand was moving, and the sky was filled with lotus leaves. Suddenly, the sky was filled with green lotus leaves, and the small cloud reflecting the sky where Mu Xue was could no longer be found.
This is a puppet made by Mu Xue using the piece of meteorite iron that he selected from the sect's treasury. Due to the short time, he only refined a few simple functions, so he never took it out. This is the first time Mu Xue used it in battle.
I just felt that this little puppet was in tune with my mind, and he could control it as easily as with my own arm, and they cooperated very well.
When the little puppet saw his master escape successfully, he showed a very anthropomorphic expression of happiness.
A huge, white, soft hand emerged from between the green lotus leaves. The hand grabbed her and lifted her up high.
Red rune lines appeared on the little puppet's face, and its body turned into liquid and slipped through the fingers of the God of Joy.
The demon god standing high in the air looked down at his empty hands, and his red lips curved up, "It's amazing, Dong Yue has been gone for tens of thousands of years. Where did you learn a little bit of Dong Yue's magical skills of transformation?"
Mu Xue's Yingtianyun appeared in the distance. She reached out and took back the little puppet that had turned into liquid from the ground and was rolling towards her in a hurry.
She put away the puppet and looked at the graceful and affectionate Joyful Demon in the distance with a wary look on her face.
The god of joy raised his arms with golden rings, put his palms together, and smiled, "I have waited for so many years, and I thought I had given up hope. But I never thought I would actually find you."
"Then follow me into the Great Joy Hall."
Her beautiful face shattered like a shattered gem, and her entire body scattered on the ground like sand.
The world shook as she disappeared, and a huge crack appeared on the ground, revealing a dark, bottomless abyss. Looking down from above, the inner wall of the abyss could be vaguely seen with towers and pavilions, as if there was a huge temple extending downward layer by layer at the bottom.
An irresistible huge suction force was generated in the abyss there, and the city walls, buildings, and vegetation were all uprooted and sucked into the bottomless cave.
Mu Xue suddenly felt the world spinning around her and she could no longer control Ying Tianyun. She was dragged into the bottomless black hole along with the flying sand and rocks.
The sky above was obscured by sand and rocks, and behind him was an irresistible divine power. Mu Xue lost control of her body, and fell rapidly, being hit by the falling boulders and flying sand, making her dizzy.
In the chaos, an arm suddenly stretched out from somewhere, and as soon as the strong arm grabbed her, it pulled her into a solid embrace and protected her tightly.