Chapter 614: - I’m Really Looking Forward to It

Back at the old residence, whenever Mr. Feng had the time, she personally handled the Marquis of Pingxi’s three daily meals. Later, after He Chunlai rose through the ranks, that once-hot-blooded young man who had dreamed of restoring Jin became the household’s new “imperial chef.”

Whenever circumstances allowed, the Marquis naturally enjoyed the highest standard of dining service.

But truthfully, the kitchen staff in the residence were excellent in their own right. Under such high standards, any of the several cooks could have gone outside and taken charge of the kitchen in a major restaurant.

So the fish soup was exceptionally fresh and savory.

In the dead of winter, admiring the scenery while drinking hot fish soup with flaky pastries really did possess a certain pleasure and elegance.

At first, Xiong Liqing fed Tian Tian two spoonfuls.

Tian Tian graciously drank both.

Then he stopped.

Understanding at once, the Princess ordered someone to fetch a small stool and a little square table from the carriage.

Tian Tian sat on the stool. There was a hidden compartment beneath the tabletop, and with practiced familiarity, he reached inside, took out a napkin, and tied it around his own neck.

Then he took a small silver spoon and a pair of silver chopsticks from compartments on either side.

The fish soup and pastries were placed before him.

Tian Tian examined them carefully, then put the chopsticks back. He held a pastry in his left hand and bit into it while using the spoon in his right to drink the soup.

At home, he always ate by himself, properly and neatly.

The black cat and fox lay crouched nearby, behaving with remarkable obedience.

Xiong Liqing slowly drank her own soup, glancing from time to time at Tian Tian sitting beside her with the solemn air of a tiny adult.

This child truly was lovable.

Well-behaved.

Sensible.

Quiet.

Obedient.

Everyone made calculations in their hearts. She was no exception. But she tried her best not to think in that direction, because she understood perfectly well how her husband felt toward the Prince of Jingnan and toward this child.

So she had to follow his rhythm and desperately suppress her own instinct to calculate.

“Good boy. Just drink the soup. Don’t eat the fish meat. There might be bones.”

“Mm.”

...

The Blind Man did not drink soup.

He held a cup of tea and sipped it slowly.

He had visited the families of several households, making sure none of the dependents had fallen ill from the journey. Only then did he stroll leisurely back.

Then he saw an extraordinarily sturdy, voluptuous figure sitting beside the iron pot in which the fish had been stewed.

She held an enormous sea-bowl and was eating and drinking from it.

This woman counted as a family dependent too.

And a fairly high-ranking one at that.

She was Xue San’s family.

Xue San had brought her back from the State of Liang.

If she had merely been Xue San’s preferred dish, that would have been one thing.

But this woman named Hu Bamei had once, while muddled and half-conscious, spoken a prophecy concerning “Demons Advent.”

The Blind Man disliked prophecy plots immensely.

He always felt they were unbearably cliché, without the slightest originality.

But once the matter potentially involved himself and the others, there was no way not to take it seriously.

Originally, some of the Demon Kings had considered simply killing Hu Bamei.

That would have been the best way to ensure the quality and pace of their present lives remained unchanged.

Unfortunately, that choice violated the Demon Kings’ own code.

Xue San liked her.

Whether physically or emotionally did not matter.

A thousand pieces of gold could not buy a man being happy.

So in the end, Zheng Fan, as Master, made the decision and temporarily set the matter aside.

After that, Hu Bamei had lived at Snow Sea Pass quite peacefully.

Every day, aside from eating and sleeping, she dug around in the little vegetable patch in her courtyard.

She rarely went outside.

Mm.

Her appetite was somewhat enormous.

But then again, so was her body.

The Blind Man stood behind Hu Bamei and watched her back for a while.

Then he slowly shifted his attention farther away, toward the frozen surface of the pond.

At that moment, Hu Bamei took out a handkerchief and wiped her mouth.

She had drunk enough fish soup to leave herself sloshing full.

Rubbing her belly, she planted both hands behind herself like a village girl and sprawled back on the ground.

“Burp...”

Several loud belches followed.

The Blind Man walked slowly over and sat down beside her.

“Full?”

“I drank too much soup. Soup doesn’t stick to the ribs. Good thing I still have dry rations saved up. Hehe.”

The Blind Man nodded.

“Everything your household cooks tastes so good.”

Clearly, during her time at the Count’s Residence, Bamei had been extremely satisfied with the food.

“You’ll still be able to eat it in the future.”

Bamei grinned and nodded.

“Yup.”

Then the Blind Man stopped talking.

And Bamei stopped talking too.

The Blind Man was silent because he felt the scene suited a little blank staring and idle contemplation.

What people liked calling being moved by the scenery.

Contemplate the vastness of Heaven and Earth.

Lament that one was merely a grain of sand within the boundless sea.

When life finally hands you a chance to indulge in pretentious sentimentality, put everything else aside.

Enjoy that hard-won flavor properly.

Hu Bamei, however, had not fallen silent because she did not want to disturb the Blind Man’s refined mood.

Nor had she eaten her fill, calmed down, and begun admiring the scenery in preparation for composing a poem.

Instead, her gaze had become somewhat clouded.

She stared at the surface of the pond ahead.

Her lips were trembling faintly.

If the Blind Man’s field of vision had been like an ordinary person’s, he might not have noticed the change while standing beside her.

The problem was, he was blind.

In his mind, his perspective came from the scanning field created by his mental power.

In many ways it was more delicate than ordinary sight, and covered more angles.

The Blind Man stepped forward and crouched in front of Hu Bamei.

Once again, Bamei had taken on that expression.

Which meant she seemed to have encountered some sort of trigger again, or perhaps recovered some fragment of lost memory.

It was not difficult to understand.

Before some village medium pretended to let a ghost possess her, she first had to shake and shudder in front of you.

A dedicated one might even foam at the mouth.

Put simply, it was all to grab your attention and tell you:

Something is about to happen.

The Blind Man waited quietly.

And waited.

But Hu Bamei said nothing.

Did nothing.

The cloudiness in her eyes slowly began fading.

Her lips stopped trembling.

Obviously, she was returning to normal.

The Blind Man frowned.

I waited all this time just to watch you recover?

Ever since Hu Bamei first spoke that prophecy concerning the “Demon King,” the Blind Man had deliberately collected a great many myths and legends.

Generally speaking, the people most likely to come into contact with “prophecies” in this world were still members of religious or occult traditions.

There were far fewer of those in Yan, because Yan people as a whole did not believe much in such things. And when Master Zang entered Yanjing and severed the dragon vein, the current Emperor of Yan had displayed the bearing of a ruler who simply did not believe in the Mandate of Heaven.

The only person in Yan truly worth mentioning in this regard was the old Grand Elder once kept in the imperial palace.

And even he did not quite fit the category of “clergy.”

The people of Jin did not believe much either.

Under the old division among the Three Great Clans, the Helian Clan had Savage blood in its ancestry, the Wenren Clan admired Confucian learning, and the Situ Clan refused to believe in ghosts or evil.

Power was divided.

Preferences were divided.

The result had directly shattered the theological system that had once existed in the Jin lands.

Before Jin was destroyed by Yan, the region had never managed to produce a new worldview capable of fully explaining itself.

Most surviving beliefs were little more than things grafted onto remnants from the old Great Xia era.

The others, however, all had their own systems.

Chu had its court shamans.

The Savages had the Guides of Stars.

Qian had the Qi Refiners of the Back Mountain.

The Barbarians had their priests.

A unified political foundation was the true soil from which theology grew.

It was the same principle behind Marquis Zheng gathering a great crowd of charlatans at Snow Sea Pass and sending them onto the snowfield to preach.

The reason ethereal gods were created was ultimately to serve the “gods” who lived among men.

As for places like Western Europe in another timeline, where divine authority had once risen above secular power, in the Blind Man’s opinion, that was simply a case of the game getting out of hand.

He had gone through prophecies from all those traditions.

To choose a few representative examples:

Among the Barbarian priests, there was a prophecy that in the near future, a new Wolf King would rise and restore the Barbarians to a golden age of glory.

Among the snowfield Savages, the prophecy he had encountered most directly should have been the one contained in the Jade Figurine Token: a new king of the Sacred Race would be born and lead the Sacred Race into revival.

Among Chu’s court shamans, there was a prophecy that the Fire Phoenix would descend upon the earth once more and that the bloodline of the Chu ancestors would burn again.

As for Qian, there were no prophecies of that kind.

The reason was simple.

They had shame.

Qian’s Son of Heaven could wear Daoist robes.

He could act a little unconventional.

That was fine.

It counted as personal taste and temperament.

But if he went too far, the scholar-official class would immediately bring out the big stick.

So Qian’s Back Mountain had always kept a very low profile.

It maintained close connections with the Imperial Astronomical Bureau, but mostly limited itself to divinations involving celestial phenomena.

It would not suddenly jump out and proclaim that some future figure would appear and overturn this or destroy that.

Everyone preserved a certain dignity.

But there was one problem.

The Barbarian priests’ prophecy had never said the Wolf King would appear with seven Tibetan mastiffs at his side.

The prophecy of the Jade Figurine Token had never said the new King of the Sacred Race would be accompanied by seven loyal warriors.

And the Chu court shamans’ prophecy had never said that when the Fire Phoenix awakened, the new sovereign would have seven civil and military ministers beside him.

The image of a “savior” was actually equivalent to that of a “Demon King.”

It was a very broad concept.

“Demon Lord,” “Devil,” “Lord of Hell,” or anything similar could be substituted for “hero” or “true champion” with ease.

After all, one man’s hero was another man’s bandit.

The “Demon King” element was not actually the most important part.

The word that came after it, “seven,” was what truly set nerves jangling.

So far, only the prophecy Hu Bamei had once muttered in her half-conscious state contained the concept of “seven” with such extraordinary clarity.

Granny.

The stone stele.

Then:

The Demon King descends upon the world.

Beneath him are seven loyal subordinates.

Together, they bring endless darkness upon this world.

Granny and the stone stele should be the introduction.

The Demon King corresponded to Master.

The seven corresponded to the seven of them.

Loyal?

Traditional loyalty did not exist among them.

But all the Demon Kings now shared one understanding: if Master advanced, they advanced with him.

So if Master died, then in all likelihood, they would follow him...

With a bond like that, it was enough to guarantee the purest possible loyalty.

And as for bringing endless darkness upon the world?

Was that not exactly what they were doing?

Especially given the Blind Man’s own lifelong creed: since a person only lived once, he ought to at least try sitting on the Dragon Throne and see how warm it was.

But the most important word of all was still: descends.

There were many ways to “descend upon the world.”

Leap out from a crack in a stone.

Fall from Heaven inside a meteor.

Be born beneath miraculous omens from the belly of a woman who had been pregnant for three years.

All of those could count.

But none of them were truly, strictly accurate.

Because the seven of them and Master had genuinely descended into this world.

Master had merely remained unconscious for another half year.

But the rest of them had all appeared together while unconscious at the edge of the desert.

They had not borrowed any medium belonging to this world.

They had simply appeared abruptly, out of nowhere, and descended.

By now, Bamei looked ready to return fully to normal.

The Blind Man raised his left hand and placed it atop her head.

“You were moved by the scenery just now, weren’t you? That feeling should still be there. It’s fine. I’ll deepen it for you. Make it heavier. Let you sink into it again.”

Xue San was not here.

So the Blind Man could act recklessly.

But put another way, even if Xue San had been here, if only the Blind Man stood present, Xue San truly would have objected.

If Master and the other Demon Kings were all here, even Xue San would have been unable to stop them.

Because this prophecy concerned all of them too deeply.

Put plainly, at this very same moment, while Xue San was drinking “wedding wine,” his unspoken contempt for the Princess had been:

She thinks she deserves to be called the mistress of this household?

That had displayed the Demon Kings’ pride and their worldview of treating human lives as weeds with exceptional clarity.

What the Blind Man was doing now was merely another application of the exact same principle.

Ordinarily, they might be courteous, lazy, taciturn, seductive, frivolous...

But at heart, they remained the same beings Fan Li had once summarized with a single sentence:

How about we chop Master down?

Did anyone truly think that had been nothing more than a joke?

“Ice and snow. I’ll make the area larger for you. A wider frozen pond. More snow. Colder weather...”

“Fish soup. A pot. Heat. Hot springs. Boiling water. White steam. I’ll add those too...”

“People gathered together. Believers. Submission. Prostration and worship. I’ll add that as well...”

Most likely, Hu Bamei had merely experienced a brief moment of emotional association from the scene before her.

The Blind Man, however, used his ability to take the elements present around them and rebuild them according to his own understanding.

Reset them.

Refine them.

Deepen them.

He hoped to recreate whatever true model lay buried inside Hu Bamei’s lost memories.

In truth, this was also a form of psychological treatment.

For example, bringing an amnesiac back to the house where he had once lived, to the room where he had once slept.

At its root, the principle was the same.

Bamei’s body began trembling.

Her gaze became cloudier than before.

Her lips were turning purple.

The feeling that had just been fading away was now returning little by little.

Stronger.

Clearer.

Beads of sweat began appearing on the Blind Man’s forehead too.

Constructing an entire scene inside another person’s mind and using mental power to attack and destroy someone were two completely different things.

The former consumed several times more effort.

“Wuu... wuu... wuu...”

Hu Bamei began sobbing.

The sound was miserable and piercing.

The commotion inevitably attracted attention from the people farther away.

Tian Tian put down his spoon and looked in that direction.

The Princess immediately came over, hugged him, and covered his ears.

Then she ordered:

“Seal that area off.”

“Yes!”

No one knew what Mr. Bei was doing.

But not interfering with him was mandatory.

Beside the frozen pond, the Blind Man hesitated.

He was wondering whether he should send his consciousness directly into Hu Bamei’s mind and personally look at the scene within her memories.

At the prophecy’s true appearance.

Perhaps he might find clues there concerning “Granny” and the “stone stele.”

But the Blind Man did not quite dare.

His power was mental in nature.

That was precisely why he understood the dangers better than anyone.

Some people looked completely “harmless.”

But who knew what might truly exist inside them?

Take Master.

If someone tried using illusion arts against Master, the Demon Pill inside him would be delighted to teach that person who the true ancestor of illusion arts was.

The Blind Man did not want to walk out of Snow Sea Pass on his own feet and then enter Fengxin City lying flat on his back.

So for safety, he ultimately chose not to probe deeper.

Instead, he asked:

“What do you see now?”

“Snow... so much snow... so much, so much snow...”

“Look more carefully. Look in front of you. Is there anything else there?”

“White... white... crystalline white...”

“Crystalline white? Is it ice?”

“Ice. Ice. So much ice. Ah... it’s all ice...”

“What is on top of the ice?”

“Ice... on top... snow is falling...”

The Blind Man calmed himself and continued guiding her.

“Now look behind you. Can you see people?”

“People... so many people...”

“Can you see what they’re doing?”

“They... they’re... kneeling in worship...”

“Turn around again. Look at the ice. Do you see anything?”

“Ice... snow is falling... on the ice...”

“Walk onto the frozen surface.”

“I... I’m on the ice...”

“Lower your head. Look down. Keep walking forward.”

“I... I’m walking forward... looking... underneath...”

The next instant, before the Blind Man could ask another question, Hu Bamei suddenly screamed.

“Aaaaaaaaahhhhhhh!”

She was terrified.

As though she had seen something horrifying.

“What did you see?”

“A person! Aaaaaah! I saw a person! He’s waking up! He’s waking up! He’s waking up!”

Hu Bamei began convulsing.

Her whole body spasmed violently.

The Blind Man hesitated, then withdrew the hand resting on her head.

Thump!

Hu Bamei collapsed onto the ground.

“Granny said... the stone stele... it said... the Demon King descends... seven... seven fiends... darkness... darkness...”

The Blind Man pointed at his own face.

“Is it me?”

Hu Bamei’s entire body abruptly stopped convulsing.

Her expression became incomparably calm.

Then, strangely, a smile appeared on her face.

“You? You think you’re worthy?”

With that, Hu Bamei lost consciousness.

A moment later, she began snoring.

The Blind Man closed his eyes.

Both hands rose before him.

His fingertips moved lightly through the air.

He often played the erhu.

But what he truly loved was the piano.

For him to make this gesture meant his mood was extraordinarily good.

So good he could not help himself.

“Heh... hehehe...”

The Blind Man laughed.

Then said:

“I’m really looking forward to it.”

[End of Chapter 614]