Martial Cultivator

The middle-aged woman he encountered tonight during the Kuchai Festival happened to be the final person.

He only needed to bring the silver back and throw it into the incense burner, and he could begin carrying out this matter.

At the time, he himself was filled with the excitement of finally fulfilling a long-held wish. That was why he drank alone by the river, and then happened to encounter Chen Chao.

Perhaps there really was heaven’s will at work?

Actually, at the beginning, he was not worried that Chen Chao would come looking for trouble. Although he was the Lord Warden Commander of Great Liang, Danxiao City seemed to be unusually special. Although it nominally belonged to Great Liang at present, the entire population of the city could, in reality, be regarded as the private property of Daoism.

At this critical juncture, he did not believe that this young martial artist would cause new problems.

After the two of them probed each other by the river, he did not detect that the other man had any such intentions.

Besides, what he himself was about to do was not exactly some wicked deed that harmed Heaven and reason, was it?

Of course, it seemed that the young martial artist had not noticed this either.

Taking a deep breath, the letter-writing gentleman smiled. “I said I would gamble once. I’ve lost to him, so I have to honor the bet.”

The little incense burner smacked its lips. “That doesn’t mean you have to give up everything.”

The letter-writing gentleman shook his head. “It’s not that I’m giving up everything. He pointed out a path for me and allowed me to glimpse a corner of it. That counts as my compensation.”

“Don’t you still have to walk it yourself!”

The little incense burner gritted its teeth. It still wanted to persuade the fellow before it. He had spent so many years doing one thing, and he was about to succeed. Was he really going to give it up just like that?

The letter-writing gentleman smiled. “I think this new path is the right one. I should be able to reach the other shore if I don’t die.”

“I think you should think it over properly. There’s no need to make a choice in such a hurry.”

The little incense burner looked at the letter-writing gentleman with a face full of hope. It was still afraid that he would make the wrong choice.

The letter-writing gentleman looked at it and smiled. “Even if I change paths, you’ll still be here.”

The little incense burner frowned and said irritably, “Who was thinking about that!”

The letter-writing gentleman said, “Then let’s leave it at that?”

The little incense burner said no more.

The letter-writing gentleman reached out, picked up the little incense burner, and was about to turn it upside down.

The little incense burner looked utterly miserable. ”This feeling is like spending your whole life diligently working and saving money, finally being just about to marry a wife, and then you fucking say you don’t want to anymore. Fine, don’t want her, whatever. But you even have to return the money to those people. Then what the hell have you been doing with your whole life?!”

The letter-writing gentleman smiled. “It’s like going out the door to look around at various places. You spend the money, walk the roads, and in the end, you return. It seems as though you never went out at all, but that’s not really how it is. Those sights are in your mind, and those experiences are in your memories. It’s not that just because you have nothing in your hands, there’s no way to prove that you ever experienced anything.”

As he spoke, he had already turned the incense burner upside down. The countless amounts of incense ash accumulated inside began to continuously fall. Yet when the incense ash drifted out, it began transforming into points of golden radiance, sweeping toward all directions. In an instant, the surroundings were filled with golden points of light.

It was as though an entire daoist temple had been enveloped.

The little incense burner looked utterly miserable. If it had been able to shed tears like a person, it would absolutely have been streaming with tears and mucus by now.

Those points of light were all the money it had saved over the years!

The letter-writing gentleman watched as those points of light continued sweeping into the distance, falling throughout Danxiao City, falling into thousands upon thousands of households. For a moment, he felt somewhat relieved.

It was as though his heart had suddenly become empty, and his entire person seemed to possess a particularly clear and lucid feeling.

Very strange.

The incense ash inside the little incense burner continued to fall. This process lasted for a very long time. After all, what had accumulated here was not something gathered over one or two years, but over several hundred years in its entirety.

Although the little incense burner was upside down, in its eyes, there was actually no difference.

By now, it had also calmed down considerably and said softly, “With this, the people of this city will more or less all have some good fortune happen to them within the short term.”

The letter-writing gentleman said, “Consider it as though we’ve run a bank for all these years, except they didn’t even know there was such a bank. Now we’re simply giving them a windfall. They can just take it as Heaven looking after them.”

The little incense burner sighed. “You really are taking it rather well.”

Without waiting for the letter-writing gentleman to speak, the little incense burner still asked the question it had always wanted to ask. “Actually, you didn’t only figure this out today, did you?”

“You’ve been thinking about the words ‘I don’t want to do this anymore’ for at least a hundred years.”

The letter-writing gentleman did not deny it. “Actually, how could there be so many people in this world who can be persuaded? When you’re sad, if someone tells you not to be sad, can you really just stop being sad? Later, when you’re no longer sad, it was most likely because you figured things out yourself.”

The little incense burner sighed and lamented. According to that fellow’s original promise, in another two or three hundred years, it would no longer have to remain as it was now. By then, it could transform into human form and be no different from an ordinary person.

But with things turning out this way, would everything have to start over again?

Melancholy. Truly too melancholy.

The letter-writing gentleman seemed to understand what the little incense burner was thinking. He reached out and tossed the skygold coin into the incense burner. “Although I’m not taking this brat’s payment, you should keep this thing. It’s beneficial to the golden body. Better than nothing, I suppose.”

The little incense burner said bitterly, “Now I’m the one guarding a mountain of gold that I can only look at but can’t use.”

The letter-writing gentleman teased, “Fortunately, you’re unable to use it. Otherwise, if I had you guard this mountain of gold, you’d be embezzling from it by the second day.”

The little incense burner gave a scoff, too lazy to argue.

The letter-writing gentleman did not say anything more. He merely patted its head and smiled. “Go find my daoist robe in the chest.”

It was originally a very ordinary sentence, but the little incense burner suddenly froze. It looked at the letter-writing gentleman before it, complex emotions in its eyes.

But excitement was certainly among them.

The letter-writing gentleman casually smiled. “I was a daoist cultivator in the first place, after all.”