Somehow, Chu Danfeng instinctively disliked this one-armed young man. After hearing this, he felt even more uncomfortable and couldn't help but retort to him: "Didn't you let the dog bite him first? Why are you calling him a monster?"
The one-armed young man recalled with lingering fear: "You don't know, that child was a monster back then. The way he bit people... he was really like a wild beast."
"He is a demon half-blood! But speaking of which, his mother was a demon beauty. She lived in the village for a while, but her husband didn't want her. Tsk tsk tsk, and she died later..."
Chu Danfeng: “!!!”
A beauty from the demon clan, abandoned by her husband, in a small village not far from the demon world... How could it be such a coincidence, isn't it Ji Hongling and Li Jing!
So, the "little monster" is indeed Hua Tingxuan!
Chu Danfeng had read the original novel, so he naturally knew Hua Tingxuan's life experience. Originally, it was just a passage that said "he was helpless and alone as a child, and was often bullied by bad kids in the village." Now, hearing the one-armed young man recounting his evil deeds so lightly and with no intention of repenting, the thin text seemed to materialize into a sharp embroidery needle, piercing Chu Danfeng's heart with pain.
The one-armed young man paused for a moment, winked at Chu Danfeng with a look that said "you understand, right?", and then said, "Among the half-bloods of the demon race, nine out of ten are physically disabled, and the remaining one is mentally ill. He is the one with the mental illness, a little lunatic, no, a mad dog! If you piss him off, he will pay you back a thousandfold, and when he gets mad, he will not care about the consequences."
Hua Tingxuan secretly clenched his fists, veins on the back of his hands had already popped out. It was not because he was angry that this person insulted him as a mad dog, but... he was afraid that Chu Danfeng would guess that the vindictive "little mad dog" was himself.
He had pretended to be obedient and endured for many years in his life, and finally got what he wanted, coaxing the little brother to nod his head. He knew that Dan Feng liked well-behaved and sensible junior brothers. If he knew his true self...
"I'm afraid it will scare him away," Hua Tingxuan thought to himself with self-mockery.
But Chu Danfeng said coldly: "Did you bully him like that back then?"
One-armed young man: “Ah?”
Chu Danfeng: "Besides letting the dogs bite him, what else did you do?"
The one-armed young man snorted, "There are so many tricks. We are a group of people. We threw stones at him, stole his food, and peed in his rice bowl... But we are not bullying children. What do you monks say? 'The little bastards of the demon clan, everyone has the right to kill them', right—"
Before he uttered the word "right", the one-armed young man fell flat on his face.
Then, Chu Danfeng stomped hard on his back and rolled over it again before he cried out "Ouch!" and apologized insincerely, "Why did you fall down suddenly? I didn't see it. I'm so sorry!"
Chu Danfeng used some internal force when stepping on the man. The one-armed young man was almost vomiting blood. After getting up, he covered his heart with his hands, his face turned pale, and hid far away from Chu Danfeng, then ran tremblingly to the front to lead the way.
"..." Chu Danfeng touched his nose and muttered softly, "Why are you running so fast? I can't eat him."
Hua Tingxuan really couldn't hold back his laughter this time.
His junior brother was indeed not suitable for acting. Only a fool could not understand what was going on with such a stiff performance. The one-armed young man was obviously frightened. Although he had offended the two "ghost cultivators" somehow, he was a mortal and did not dare to fight with the cultivators. He did not say another word along the way and behaved obediently.
Chu Danfeng couldn't pretend to be a "white lotus", so he simply stopped pretending, cleared his throat, and whispered: "Xuan'er, I have something to tell you."
Hua Tingxuan immediately showed an attitude of listening attentively.
Chu Danfeng: "Do you know why I taught him a lesson?"
Hua Tingxuan habitually pretended to be good, and gave a very standard answer: "He bullies the weak." His junior brother had taught him since he was young to be friendly and respectful. Dan Feng had always been upright and decent, unlike him, who was dark and perverse in his bones.
After a brief silence, Chu Danfeng said something shocking: "Because I know that the child is you."
Hua Tingxuan: “!!!”
Chu Danfeng didn't even raise his head: "I already knew your mother was a demon, because..."
These days, Chu Danfeng has been slowly building up his mental strength, trying to forget that Hua Tingxuan was the boy he raised, and trying to see him as a man and a Taoist partner.
As Taoist couples are going to spend their whole lives together, there can be no deception.
However, he kept saying "because" for half a day but could not come up with any further words, as if some force was stopping him.
Chu Danfeng tried for a while and finally gave up.
He had reason to suspect that it was the power of the system. Although he had been untied from the system now, he still could not say anything about "traveling through a book" or "plot". This was probably some kind of sophisticated and mysterious "confidentiality principle".
Seeing that he looked embarrassed, Hua Tingxuan reminded him sympathetically: "Did your master tell you?" It was Meng Cangyu who rescued him from that village that year, so of course your master knew the inside story.
Chu Danfeng shook his head: "No."
Even if he couldn't say it, he didn't want to deceive Hua Tingxuan. Isn't the most important thing between Taoist partners to be honest with each other
"I can't tell you how I found out," Chu Danfeng said, "But I want to tell you that the term mixed-blood bastard is all bullshit. It is absurd to distinguish good from evil based on bloodline. Whether you are a human or a demon, as long as you have a clear conscience, you don't need to care about other people's opinions."
"… Um."
Hua Tingxuan agreed verbally, but was thinking in his heart: Junior Brother keeps saying "don't worry about it", but he just lowered himself to teach a mortal a lesson, all for him.
Just as he was thinking, he felt Chu Danfeng holding his hand: "It's all over. I will take care of you in the future... If anyone dares to bully you again, I will take care of you."
The junior brother's hands were soft and slender, smaller than his own, but warm and reliable. The heat was transmitted from his palms, and Hua Tingxuan's chest felt hot.
In fact, there was no need for Chu Danfeng to make the decision for him. Hua Tingxuan had already avenged himself in his previous life. He did not let go of any of the evil children in the deserted village who had bullied him in the past, and he paid them back tenfold and a hundredfold. At that time, he had been accompanied by Chu Danfeng's corpse all day long. He had already developed a demon in his heart and behaved perversely. He enjoyed killing people and tortured everyone in the village to death. Not only did he not leave a single person alive, he also put their souls into a flying cigarette bottle and slowly "played with" them until their souls flew away.
Now that he had a junior brother, he was not so angry when he saw these "old friends" again - he didn't have time to care whether they loved each other or not, since he already had Dan Feng anyway.
Hua Tingxuan held Chu Danfeng's hand contentedly and followed him all the way to the one-armed young man's house.
Although the one-armed man was not very old, only about 25 or 26 years old, he already had a son of 7 or 8 years old. The child was not shy, sniffing his nose and staring at the two guests curiously. However, the "one-armed man" was very reluctant to let his son follow him, and slapped the child on the back of his head, "Go out and play!"
He was still cursing at the child's mother, asking her to take the child away. The one-armed wife was also pregnant. Chu Danfeng noticed that there was a willow branch tied to the threshold of his house. He couldn't help frowning, but he suppressed it and said nothing.
The one-armed man noticed Chu Danfeng's gaze and said, "Master, my daughter is five months pregnant and has been straddling willow branches every day. Will you accept the baby?"
Chu Danfeng: “!”
Hua Tingxuan calmly asked, "What's the price?"
"Not expensive," the one-armed man gestured, "If you want high-quality spirit stones, you can convert them into silver!"
Hua Tingxuan: "It's not expensive. Is this the price of the willow branches, or does it include the baby's body?"
Many ghost cultivators use infant corpses to refine corpse oil, which is convenient for driving infant spirits and is also a good raw material for refining evil magic tools. The one-armed man heard that he asked such an expert question and became more convinced that this was a ghost cultivator who was "sincerely accepting the goods". He could not help but be more attentive: "Count it in together, we do business with no cheating!"
"Take us to see the 'leather' first."
"No problem, no problem."
The one-armed man lit an oil lamp and led the two men into the semi-underground warehouse. With the light of the oil lamp, Chu Danfeng could see clearly what was in the room.
That's a room full of wind! dry! people! skin!
These are complete enough that you can barely make out the facial features.
Chu Danfeng: “!!!!!!”
Chu Danfeng's legs went weak and he almost fell to the ground, but luckily Hua Tingxuan held him firmly.
He held up the oil lamp with one arm to illuminate the way. He didn't notice their little movements and continued to introduce them: "Look, this one is fifty years old, this one is forty-six, and this one is the best, but also the most expensive. It's my grandfather, seventy-three years old! It's rare for a person to live to seventy. There is no skin older than this one in the whole village!"
Chu Danfeng used his utmost willpower to finally control his voice from trembling, "Are these your relatives?"
The one-armed man said as a matter of course: "Yes, we kill our own, and we have our own rules. Don't worry, they are all skinned alive, and they all meet the requirements. We can inspect the goods."
Chu Danfeng didn't dare to inspect the goods. He even wanted to use the "Earth Escape Technique" to drop the burden and run away. Fortunately, Hua Tingxuan squeezed his palm, took over the conversation with understanding, pretended to check it, and decided to choose the seventy-year-old human skin. With the help of this human skin, he got a lot of information out of him.
It turned out that these villagers were not trying to make any "price difference" at all. They heard a method from somewhere and sold the first seriously ill old man. After tasting the sweetness, they even forced the healthy old men to be sold. Later, they even went further and actually skinned the animals themselves, dried them in the way of the ghost cultivators, and stored them for sale at a higher price.
Over time, the villagers had stopped producing and all the arable land was abandoned. The human skins would eventually run out, and they were unwilling to just sit there and do nothing, so every household started to think about selling the baby spirits.
No wonder there are neither old people nor children in this village. The youngest child is probably the one-armed man’s son, who is seven or eight years old.
"Those ghost cultivators buy old man skins and newly formed babies at high prices," One-armed Man counted the spirit stones happily, thinking that Chu Danfeng and the other two were ghost cultivators from other places who were doing business for the first time, and introduced enthusiastically, "Then they sell a kind of purple small bottle to those demons. You can also do the same, you should be able to make a lot of money."
Chu Danfeng and Hua Tingxuan looked at each other: It turns out that the ghost cultivators are the so-called middlemen.
But this makes sense. The villagers are just fragile mortals. How can they be so good at dancing among vicious monsters
The villagers are not "middlemen" but meat on the chopping board, yet they are still foolishly scrambling for these small profits, even selling their relatives...
Duibi carefully wrapped the old man's skin for them, but Hua Tingxuan noticed that Chu Danfeng's face became uglier and uglier. He couldn't bear it any longer, so he used the excuse of checking on the fetus and pulled him up to get some fresh air.
The one-armed man didn't care, but just reminded them: "You two Taoist priests, it's okay, but please keep it secret from my son. I'm counting on that boy to take care of me in my old age. Don't let him know about these dirty things."
Chu Danfeng was surprised: "The whole village is doing this, how can we hide it from the children?"
The one-armed man took his grandfather down without even raising his head: "Every family keeps it a secret, they don't know!"
"… "
Chu Danfeng came out of the underground warehouse, took a break for half a day, and sorted out his thoughts: "So the ghost cultivators collected human skins, made soul-calling instruments, collected souls, put them into the Feiyan bottle, and then handed them over to the demons."
"That's right," Hua Tingxuan also whispered, "At this point, our mission has been completed, and we can immediately set off to return to the sect - who?!"
Hua Tingxuan suddenly shouted sternly and sent a stream of spiritual power towards the weeds in the backyard. The weeds parted and a snotty-nosed little boy stood out tremblingly. It was his one-armed son.
"I, I didn't mean to do that. I just wanted to take another look at my grandpa... Did you buy my grandpa away?"
Both of them were focusing on the boy and didn't notice a small "firefly"-like thing behind him fall into the grass, flap its wings, turn into a puff of black smoke, and disappear.
"..." Chu Danfeng, "Do you know what's inside?"
"Of course I know. Dad didn't let me see it, but no matter how sneaky you are, you can't hide it from me!" The child asked, "My grandfather, grandmother, and great grandfather are in it. Who did you buy it for?"
… This kind of conversation is really weird! Chu Danfeng got goose bumps all over his body, but Hua Tingxuan replied with interest: "It should be your great grandfather."
The child heaved a sigh of relief and said happily, "Great, grandpa is still here! Grandpa was the best to me. Humph, my dad skinned grandpa alive and looked at me for not knowing... When I grow up, I will skin him and sell it for money to avenge my grandpa! Hehe."