Jade Seal

"Exactly, they never intended to really drive you away." Zhou You changed his approach and explained to Nuomi from another angle. "They took money from the school higher-ups; if they drove you away, how could they keep collecting money in your name?" Nuomi understood the reasoning, but she was still indignant: "Whenever I saw them burning money for me and thought they weren’t having an easy time either, I’d stay quiet for a month, not scare anyone, and pretend I’d been driven away." "These fake Daoists are truly despicable, showing no sincerity toward us dead people at all—worse than that damn rice-thrower!" "So despicable, even deceiving ghosts—utterly lacking in quality!" Nuomi was very angry, muttering nonstop about how she had saved that money for a long time. At the same time, Nuomi looked very dejected. She had thought she held assets in the trillions, and even at the worst exchange rate of 100,000 hell banknotes to one yuan, that would still convert to tens of thousands of yuan. Who could have imagined that hell banknotes were like paper, completely worthless. "All right, all right, everyone’s situation is pretty much the same now." Zhou You comforted Nuomi by taking himself as an example. Zhou You and Chu Xiaoyao’s finances mainly came from meal allowances from their families, with little extra money. Nuomi had no money and didn’t need to eat, so on that level, all three were on the same financial footing: none of them had money. Seeing Nuomi’s mood improve a little, Zhou You breathed a sigh of relief. Being sect master was no easy task—he even had to handle his subordinate’s psychological well-being. "What on earth did I fish up?" Zhou You held the jade seal, tossing it up like a ball. It had real heft, with one corner chipped and patched with brass. "Can you read the characters on it?" Chu Xiaoyao asked. Zhou You shook his head. That was too much to ask—he wasn’t a historian. "Anyway, they’re not simplified or traditional characters." Chu Xiaoyao rolled her eyes. Obviously—did he need to say that? She knew they weren’t English either. "Right, we can use Taobao’s photo search." Chu Xiaoyao suddenly remembered that Taobao had this feature, though she rarely used it. She opened Taobao, took a photo, and searched. A pile of products quickly appeared, but the results weren’t very accurate—all different styles of jade seals, unlike the one in hand. "This one looks pretty similar to ours." Zhou You pointed to one of the items and clicked it open. "Indeed." The style was actually somewhat different, with variations in the design, but the characters on it were the same. Chu Xiaoyao read the product description: "This item is… the Hereditary Jade Seal, and the characters on it read ‘Mandated by Heaven, both longevity and eternal prosperity’?" "So someone bought a Hereditary Jade Seal on Taobao and then threw it into the lake?" Zhou You felt the past two days had been a complete waste. To find Nuomi’s little treasury, he’d been bitten by mosquitoes while body refining, gone to forums to look for help posts, fought members of the Demon Alliance, and snuck out at night to jump into the lake—only to fish up a fake Hereditary Jade Seal. A no-name, no-brand product like this—no one would buy it even if he tried to sell it, right? As for whether this was the real thing, just the thought struck him as laughable—who didn’t know the Hereditary Jade Seal had been missing for a thousand years? As if it were just buried at the bottom of the school lake. If this were real, then by that logic, the mineral water bottle he’d picked up as trash from the lake bottom was a Jade Purifying Vase. "It just so happens our Carefree Sect lacks a great seal; we might as well keep this thing." Chu Xiaoyao thought the jade seal was quite striking. It would be a pity to fish it up after all that effort only to throw it away; better to keep it—it suited the Carefree Sect’s vibe perfectly. As a sect, how could it not have a seal? "Nuomi, put it on the desk." Chu Xiaoyao casually handed the jade seal to Nuomi. It was heavy; stuffing it into a schoolbag to carry home and back tomorrow would be too much trouble. Better to let Nuomi put it back in the classroom directly to save effort. "Mission accomplished!" "Wait, you can see Nuomi?" Zhou You suddenly realized that his attention had been entirely on the jade seal just now, and he hadn’t noticed that these two were conversing fluently—without him acting as a go-between, they could talk directly? Chu Xiaoyao hummed smugly and pushed her glasses. Zhou You did notice the glasses, but he didn’t think much of it. Chu Xiaoyao often pulled out little trinkets to decorate herself. She had once gone to school wearing an eyepatch, solemnly telling Zhou You that the eyepatch was used to seal the black dragon’s power, otherwise she worried the black dragon would come out of her eyes. The head teacher soon made her take it off on the grounds that her appearance didn’t comply with regulations. "Look, these are glasses I found. They let me see Nuomi." "That amazing?" Zhou You was surprised. He’d asked Su Tingxue, and even she had no way to make ordinary people see a vengeful ghost. How could Chu Xiaoyao just happen to find some glasses that could? "My luck isn’t something common folk like you can understand." Chu Xiaoyao grew increasingly smug, seeming ready to float off to the heavens. "Yes, yes, you’re the luckiest." The Zhenyue Ghost King, observing from the shadows, witnessed the whole process. His pupils shrank, and his mind and spirit were shaken. Never mind how eye-searing it had been to watch Zhou You and the Red King, two naked men, taking turns plunging into the water over two consecutive nights. The biggest problem was: how had the seal on the box been opened?! That was the seal of a Human Dao supreme treasure—only a being who stood supreme in the Human Dao domain could undo it! "Damn it, the Human Dao supreme treasure really fell into Nuomi’s hands. What do we do?" The seal on the wooden box existed mainly to prevent Nuomi from approaching. It should have been a foolproof plan, but the Zhenyue Ghost King never expected an unknown person to appear who could open the wooden box directly. Where had this female student come from?! "Is this thing a Human Dao supreme treasure?" The Professor closed the box, then opened it again. The hell banknotes still lay quietly in the box, proving it wasn’t a problem with the box. After thinking for a moment, he put on medical gloves and solemnly took out the bundle of hell banknotes, frowning deeply, unable to make sense of it, feeling that something was off. "Wasn’t the Human Dao supreme treasure supposed to be the Hereditary Jade Seal?" the Red King couldn’t help asking. This pile of hell banknotes had nothing to do with a jade seal no matter how he looked at it. Although the headquarters was in the United States, most organization members were Huaxia people, and all three people in the room were Huaxia people. Who didn’t know hell banknotes? The Red King burned several bundles every year when he returned to his hometown to honor his ancestors. At this point, the Professor displayed the composure of a professional scholar, calmly shaking his head. "We can’t jump to that conclusion. That’s the legendary Hereditary Jade Seal—not just an ordinary object of representative significance as everyone thinks, but a divine object that, once obtained, can make one a supreme expert under heaven. Such a divine thing can’t be gauged by common sense; it’s not surprising that it has the ability to change." The Professor drew out one and speculated: "For instance, this 50-million-denomination hell banknote might be life-buying money, able to buy fifty million lives and decide life and death. This bundle of hell banknotes would be enough to buy the lives of everyone in the world." "Of course, I’m just giving an example. My main point is that we don’t yet know how to use the Human Dao supreme treasure, so we can study it slowly." The Red King bowed his head in self-reflection. The Professor was indeed the one—composed in the face of trouble, able to analyze problems calmly. If it were him, he’d already be flustered and think he’d picked up the wrong box, assuming these were just ordinary hell banknotes. "Besides, you also saw the seal on the box. Opening it is extremely difficult; without top-tier strengthening agent assistance, Xianzhen would have been exhausted at the outset. With such a seal backing it, whatever is in the box certainly isn’t an ordinary object!" "What the Professor says makes sense. This thing is definitely not simple; it must be the Human Dao supreme treasure." Xianzhen, still slumped on the floor and not yet recovered, expressed agreement with the Professor’s view. Two top experts in their respective fields had said as much, so the Red King, a mere layman, had nothing more to add.