As the Mid-Autumn Festival drew near, a crisp autumn wind brought refreshing cool air.
From their second day in Luoyang onward, Sun Yixie and Huang Donglai had settled into the Justice Sect with complete peace of mind.
The sheer thickness of their skin would have been enough for them to freeload their room and board there anyway, but after gifting Sect Leader Shen a slip containing an "unrivaled divine art," they became even more utterly uninhibited.
Every day, the pair did nothing but eat, drink, and make merry. When the mood struck, they wandered out on the town; when they felt too lazy to leave, they sauntered about inside the Justice Sect compound, peering here, poking around there, asking questions left and right... leaving Shen Youran under ever-mounting financial and mental strain.
Shen Youran had originally intended to use these two "worthy younger brothers" to draw outside attention and make it easier for him to conduct his own business, never imagining they would turn the tables on him and leave his hands even more tied.
Just like that, after a few days, Shen Youran could take it no longer. With these two bastards around, scheming and plotting was thoroughly inconvenient... So he figured he might as well move out himself.
Thus, the dignified leader of the Justice Sect was reduced to a state where he couldn't stand staying in his own headquarters and had to relocate temporarily to a villa in the south of the city... Of course, during the daytime, he still had to deliberately trek halfway across the city to make an appearance at the Justice Sect, staying for four to six hours to conduct business just to keep up appearances and pull the wool over people's eyes.
And what had Shen Youran gained from paying such a heavy price?
Nothing more than a secret manual he couldn't understand in the slightest, one that only Sun and Huang in the entire world could decipher. It was like flowers in a mirror or the moon reflected in water... seemingly right before his eyes, yet utterly beyond reach.
Leaving aside Sect Leader Shen, who had tragically suffered a "base swap," let us turn back to Sun and Huang.
Their plan had been carried out with remarkable success. Not only had the two usurped their host's position and temporarily eliminated the possibility of Shen Youran secretly doing them harm, but they had also leveraged the Justice Sect's clout so that their issue of being "overly high-profile" was no longer an issue at all.
Nowadays, even if someone felt they showed off too much, nobody dared to do anything to them... After all, they were living right inside the Justice Sect and calling Shen Youran their brother. What could anyone say?
When it comes to dirty backroom dealings, the more you try to cover things up—acting like a saint while behaving like a scoundrel—the easier it is to draw public gossip and censure, because your concealment makes people think you still have scruples.
But if you take the stance of, "That's right, I'm openly pulling strings. If anyone has a problem with it, step forward," people suddenly don't dare make a peep, because in that situation, no one wants to be the nail that sticks out.
Human nature is just like that.
When Sun Yixie and Huang Donglai had first become famous in the city, nearly everyone wanted to pick a quarrel with them to test just what they were made of.
Yet after the two moved into the Justice Sect and struck an attitude of "We have a patron and our strings are out in the open," most people only dared to swallow their jealousy and keep their mouths shut.
Over these past days, not only did no one dare cross them, but plenty of people even tried to curry favor with them.
Faced with such people, Sun Yixie and Huang Donglai naturally handled them with ease. In psychological terms, both were far older than their physical years and mentally very mature. Even though this was their debut in the jianghu and they lacked experience in its ways, they understood worldly wisdom and social dynamics inside out.
Sun Yixie in particular had an exceptionally sharp eye for people.
Who was a fair-weather friend and who was a crafty scoundrel became clear to him after just an encounter or two.
For instance, the kind of fellow who barely knew you, yet after a few cups of wine started spouting lines like "we're brothers for life" and "we're closer than family"—such people could never be trusted. They were the very definition of fair-weather opportunists: when they needed something, they were all over you; when they didn't, they were nowhere to be found. When they needed help, they talked about "loyalty," but when you needed help, they talked about "reason."
Tricks like that were something Sun Yixie wouldn't stoop to use even though he knew them well... because the only people taken in by that routine were naive greenhorns or folks with an intellect like Lei Buji's.
Speaking of Lei Buji... ever since Sun and Huang had negotiated a slot for him to enter the assembly, he had basically become their hanger-on, dropping by whenever he had a free moment. Sun Yixie and Huang Donglai didn't mind hanging out with him, not because the kid was foolish—he just didn't understand worldly ways, rather than being an idiot—but because Lei Buji was genuinely sincere. He didn't deceive anyone and harbored no ill intentions. Making friends with someone like that could never hurt.
The days slipped by one by one. Young heroes and heroines from all across the country traveling to Luoyang for the Youth Heroes Assembly arrived in succession, and the public spotlight gradually shifted away from Sun Yixie and Huang Donglai toward others.
The two could have peacefully waited until the literary exam on the fourteenth of the eighth month, but who could have guessed... on the very eve of the exam, Huang Donglai pulled another bizarre stunt.
Having far too much free time on his hands lately, he had begun using his idle evenings in his room to conduct "chemical experiments." And what did he experiment with? Naturally, it was the xie gallbladder Iron Monk Yihuai had given him a while back.
Huang Donglai was an immensely confident person by nature, and even with a material he had never seen before, he felt confident he could master it.
Thus, after shaving off some powder from the gallbladder and running tests with several reagents he had concocted, he believed he had basically grasped the properties of this precious ingredient.
Then he spent three days refining that xie gallbladder into an elixir...
Many people imagine that refining elixirs must be a major undertaking requiring seven times seven, forty-nine days, or even nine times nine, eighty-one days, using a colossal cauldron with people constantly watching and controlling the flames...
If you actually think about it, you realize all that is useless nonsense.
The temperatures ancient furnace fires could achieve were inherently limited; many metals with high melting points couldn't be processed at all, and temperature control couldn't possibly be precise. If you drag the refining process out over dozens of days, what could you possibly burn out of it?
In reality, in that era, if you couldn't properly process something after heating it for several dozen hours, burning it for dozens of days would yield the exact same result—completely pointless.
The reason myths like "forty-nine days" or "eighty-one days" became so widespread was primarily that swindlers who used elixir-refining as a front needed a long buffer period. With dozens of days of leeway, it was much easier for them to freeload meals, swindle fortunes, and make their getaway in the meantime... If you showed up at someone's door claiming you could refine an elixir in two hours, wouldn't opening the furnace after two hours immediately expose your fraud? How could you scam anyone then?
In short, three days was more than enough for Huang Donglai to refine the pill.
Of course, he hadn't brewed it haphazardly. The Huang Clan of Shu genuinely knew their stuff when it came to chemistry. As the young clan master of the Huang Clan, he naturally possessed considerable skill in this area. His past exploits—poisoning the Water Transport Gang underlings outside Hangzhou, repelling mountain bandits with his concocted poison bombs, deciphering several poisons in the Luzhou serial cases, and employing various poison methods against Scarlet Chopsticks—were all ample proof of his genuine ability.
The Xie Gallbladder Pill he had refined was completed according to Huang Clan techniques: first testing the material to determine its properties, then subjecting it to meticulous, formulaic processing.
Otherwise... he wouldn't have dared take it.
Indeed, once Huang Donglai finished refining it, he actually swallowed the elixir.
After all, there was only one, so he couldn't very well find a test subject first. Besides, he felt he had thoroughly tested the chemical properties of the material prior to processing, so even if the finished product failed to boost his cultivation, it certainly wouldn't kill him.
To his surprise, less than an hour after taking it, he discovered... he couldn't circulate his inner strength at all.
And that was only the lesser problem...
The bigger issue was that a vast reservoir of internal force was slowly building up in his dantian, as if fermenting... expanding more and more, swelling his belly bigger and bigger along with it...
Bizarrely, under these circumstances, he didn't even feel much discomfort; he was just unnerved watching his stomach balloon outward, terrified he might burst and die.
So under cover of night, he sneaked out of his room and knocked on Sun Yixie's door next door.
Sun Yixie had just finished his cultivation practice and laid down when he heard the knocking. He casually called out, "Who is it?"
"It's me..." Huang Donglai answered in a hushed whisper from outside.
Hearing it was Huang Donglai, Sun Yixie thought nothing of it. He rolled out of bed, took a few strides to the entrance, and opened the door.
The moment the door opened, Huang Donglai squeezed into the room, slumped down by the table, and said, "Brother Sun, I think I'm in deep trouble."
Pulling the door shut, Sun Yixie glanced back at him, his face twisting into confusion. "What do you have hidden under your robes?"
With things having come to this, Huang Donglai had nothing to hide. He recounted the entire story of taking his self-refined elixir from beginning to end, lifting his shirt to display a belly that looked just like Zhu Bajie's.
Sun Yixie was already in stitches halfway through the tale. The moment Huang finished, Sun's first reaction was to roast him: "Did you just brew up a 'Huang Clan Conception Pill'? Delivers immediate results, doesn't it?"
"What the hell are you laughing at! I'm scared shitless right now," Huang Donglai shouted. "Do you have any ideas or what?"
"What could I possibly do? I'm not a doctor. And you made the pill yourself—if you don't even know what happens after taking it, why ask me?" Sun Yixie spread his hands, making a very reasonable point.
"Then can you at least go fetch a doctor for me?" Huang Donglai asked.
His request was fair enough. In his current state, moving around was awkward, and running into anyone looking like this would be downright humiliating.
"Fine, fine, fine..." Sun Yixie muttered, getting ready to throw on a robe. "Wait here, I'll just—"
Before he could finish his sentence, however, there came a sudden—
*PFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFT—!*
Huang Donglai suddenly unleashed an extraordinarily rare, deafening, marathon of a fart.
Accompanying that unending flatulence, Huang Donglai's bloated belly actually slowly deflated back to normal...
"Holy shit!" Sun Yixie was too slow to react. By the time he caught the stench, the entire room was already completely suffocated with it.
To borrow a line from Mr. Guo's crosstalk routines—that wasn't a fart, thicken it with starch and you've got shit.
Cursing up a storm, Sun Yixie bolted out of the room. As for Huang Donglai... once his dantian felt relieved, he instinctively took a deep breath. One inhale nearly knocked him unconscious, and he too stumbled and staggered out of the room in panic.
A moment later, when the Justice Sect disciples rushed over upon hearing the commotion, they beheld... Sun Yixie and Huang Donglai actually brawling in the courtyard.
One was spewing curses: "Did you fucking brew a fart pill just to assassinate me out of your own ass?!"
The other yelled back: "I told you it was an accident! I almost died in there too!"
The two usually seemed as thick as thieves. Though their banter was constantly laden with mutual verbal abuse, they had never actually come to blows. The Justice Sect disciples were dumbfounded by the sight, caught in two minds about whether to step in and break them up.
While the disciples hesitated, the foul stench from Sun Yixie's room had begun drifting into the courtyard. Several who stood closer to the door caught faint whiffs of it... Fortunately, the courtyard was spacious and open to the night air, allowing the odor to dissipate quickly; otherwise, everyone present would likely have been taken down.
In the end, without waiting for anyone to intervene, the two scuffled for a short while before stopping on their own.
They hadn't truly been fighting in earnest anyway, neither having used internal force; at most, it was roughhousing. Furthermore, Huang Donglai realized at that moment that even after venting all that gas, he still couldn't circulate his cultivation—he couldn't draw upon his internal force even if he wanted to.
Long story short, after sending the Justice Sect crowd away under the excuse of "we had too much to drink and bickered a bit," they left the door to Brother Sun's room wide open and headed to Huang Donglai's room together.
After some discussion, they decided to keep the matter under wraps for now. Perhaps Huang Donglai's symptoms would vanish on their own by tomorrow... And if he still couldn't circulate his inner strength tomorrow, it wouldn't matter much anyway, since tomorrow was just the literary exam. The martial contests wouldn't start until the day after. If he still hadn't recovered by then, they would cross that bridge when they came to it. At the very least, he no longer displayed any symptoms that looked like they might kill him, so stalling was their best bet.
Nothing else happened that night. At Sun Yixie's insistence, the two swapped rooms and retired to rest.
And so, the next day arrived.
The fourteenth of the eighth month—the opening ceremony and literary exam of the Youth Heroes Assembly were finally at hand...
Chapter 41