TDSDE 24

24. A Laughable Deception

Since the calamity he suffered in his youth, Du Gujue had never encountered any real obstacles.

The leader of the Sanxing Sect had spared his life, but to Du Gujue, that mercy was a humiliation—an unmistakable act of contempt. He saw it as a complete disgrace and vowed to take his revenge.

In the desert, water was scarce. The entire Sanxing Sect relied on a single underground well for survival. But one day, the disciples began suffering from sharp abdominal pains, chest tightness, and pounding headaches—more than half of them vomited blood and died.

When they investigated, they discovered that someone from the Martial Alliance had poisoned the well.

The moment this was revealed, it shattered the bottom line of many martial artists. Outrage erupted, and voices condemning Du Gujue, the Alliance Leader, came from all directions.

By then, however, Du Gujue had likely already lost his mind. Anyone in the martial world who dared oppose him was simply killed.

This act lit the fuse of fury among the people. The Martial Alliance was far from united—many among them had long been dissatisfied with Du Gujue.

So, civil war broke out within the Alliance, spreading to involve the Sanxing Sect, the western royal clans, and the Dajing imperial court.

In the end, Du Gujue was defeated and killed. The Dajing court, taking advantage of the martial world’s conflict, handed over a lush western territory to the Sanxing Sect as a form of compromise.

Everyone got what they wanted, so they agreed.

The disciples from the western sect, free-spirited and with customs drastically different from Dajing’s, often did strange, eccentric things that left locals dumbfounded. Eventually, people began calling them the “Demonic Sect.”

The former Sect Leader, who had defeated Du Gujue even while poisoned, suffered severe injuries from that battle. Just a year after the sect relocated to Dajing, he passed away.

The customs of the Western Regions didn’t emphasize bloodline inheritance—instead, strength alone determined leadership.

Thus, the strongest member of the sect succeeded him and became the current Demonic Sect Leader.

This new leader was careless and unrestrained, and most martial artists who’d once been involved in the war with the Alliance still bore emotional scars. No one had the desire to reform any kind of martial alliance.

Perhaps due to the heavy casualties back then—or perhaps out of fear of the Demonic Sect—most martial artists came to value their lives and peace above all, creating a rare moment of harmony.

But then, around twenty years ago, the Demonic Sect was suddenly attacked by powerful enemies overnight. Blood ran like rivers.

Under normal circumstances, even if the Demonic Sect had grown lax following its leader’s habits, its strength was undeniable. They shouldn’t have been caught completely unprepared. But the truth was: nearly every sect member was slaughtered without a fight.

Just as the attackers reveled in their triumph, a gust of black wind swept through them. With a single move—heads rolled across the ground.

From that moment, anyone who had once schemed against the Demonic Sect backed away in fear, publicly condemning the attackers instead.

The Sect Leader had flown into a bloodthirsty rage that night. Not a single invader escaped. But many years later, that very leader would uncover the truth about what had really happened.

Xiao Qing paused for a long moment as he reached this part of the story. Then he turned his head, asking Bai Yuanxiu in a tone like their usual teasing, “Do you know how the truth came out?”

Bai Yuanxiu had a bad feeling. If Xiao Qing was asking like that, then no matter what the truth was, or how it had come to light—it couldn’t be good. Still, he could only shake his head in silence.

Xiao Qing looked at him for a while longer, then finally said softly, “It was me who sent it to them.”

Bai Yuanxiu felt like someone had struck him in the head. He still remembered Xiao Qing once saying that when he was twelve, his first visit to the Demonic Sect had been an assassination attempt on the Sect Leader.

“You were one of the night raiders!?” Bai Yuanxiu exclaimed, stunned. “But you—”

He stopped abruptly. Because when Xiao Qing heard him say that, a strange expression crept across his face—almost like a smile.

But Bai Yuanxiu couldn’t even call it a smile. It looked too sorrowful. It would’ve been less painful if Xiao Qing had just broken down and cried.

“I once told Zhou Xiaoxiao that he’d been living in a lie his whole life,” Xiao Qing said quietly. “But I never told him… that the lie I lived in was even more laughable than his.”

His fingers clenched tight. There was a sharp crack, and the white porcelain teacup crumbled to powder in his seemingly delicate hand.

Xiao Qing raised his hand and let the powder sift through his fingers. “It wasn’t Zhou Xiaoxiao who mistook the enemy for family. It was me.”

Back then, after the battle between Du Gujue and the Sanxing Sect Leader, everyone thought Du Gujue had died. But in truth, he hadn’t.

Du Gujue never told anyone what really happened. He’d been caught in an avalanche in the snowy Tianshan Mountains and buried under the snow for days. Just when he thought he’d die there, the snow beneath him gave way—and he fell straight down into a hidden cave.

Inside, he found an elderly man on the brink of death. The man made Du Gujue swear to avenge him, then passed down nearly a century’s worth of cultivation.

At that time, Du Gujue was still uncorrupted by power. Once he escaped, he honored the vow.

The old man’s enemy was none other than the Poison King—a legendary figure whose medical skills could bring the dead back to life or kill with terrifying ease.

This Poison King, whose hands were stained equally by healing and killing, was no ordinary person.

For some reason, he decided to teach Du Gujue all his medical and toxic arts—so that Du Gujue would be as skilled with remedies as he was with poisons.

After wandering the martial world for so long, Du Gujue became adept at reading human hearts. In fact, long before he, as Martial Alliance Chief, launched his campaign against the Sanxing Sect, he already knew exactly what kind of person their leader was.

The Sanxing Sect Leader’s Fatal Kindness

The leader of the Sanxing Sect was a kind and compassionate man. Most of his disciples were just ordinary people he had saved. And it was this very virtue—his most admirable quality—that Du Gujue seized upon and twisted into a fatal weakness.

No one witnessed the final battle between Du Gujue and the Sect Leader back then, so no one knew that Du Gujue hadn’t died at all. Instead, he had taken a death-simulating poison that stopped his breath and heartbeat, faking the appearance of a fatal wound.

In the martial world, it was customary after a final showdown with an enemy—even if they seemed to be dead—to drive a blade through the heart to ensure they weren’t feigning death.

But the Sect Leader was not someone who would go around verifying corpses. While he was praying for the wounded and fallen from both his sect and the Martial Alliance, the poison Du Gujue had applied to his own “corpse” had already begun to contaminate him.

The poison was strange. It could lie dormant in the human body for decades, showing no symptoms. Only when triggered by a specific catalyst would it erupt with fatal force.

Years later, the night raiders who ambushed the Demonic Sect used exactly that method to carry out their attack.

Xiao Qing opened his hand, showing a flawless palm with not a blemish on it.

“Du Gujue was already insane. He was a swordmaster, yet he never taught me how to use a sword. Instead, he had me train in palm techniques.”

He twisted his wrist, the porcelain-like hand catching the sunlight with an uncanny luster—it didn’t look like the hand of a living person. “And it wasn’t just any palm technique. What I learned was the Jade Bone Scripture, a method that had supposedly been burned and lost over a century ago.”

The so-called “Jade Bone” made one immune to evil and repellent to venomous beasts.

Bai Yuanxiu had heard of the technique before. It was said that those who practiced it had to soak daily in poisonous brews and endure the biting of toxic creatures. If the practitioner failed to endure at any moment, their body would become food for the very insects they cultivated—further strengthening the poison they harbored.

And it was also rumored that those poisonous insects weren’t ordinary—they had to be fed with human blood from the time they were still eggs, making them profoundly wicked and unnatural.

Legend claimed that the Jade Bone Scripture was created by a woman, and because both the method of raising the insects and cultivating the scripture were so cruel and inhumane, the scripture had been burned upon her death. In theory, there should have been no way to learn it again.

So how did Xiao Qing, as Du Gujue’s disciple, come to learn it?

Unless…

It was like Xiao Qing could read Bai Yuanxiu’s thoughts. He nodded and confirmed softly, “The old man Du Gujue met in the snow-cave back then… was that woman.”

Everything made sense now. The Jade Bone Scripture was twisted and brutal, but its power matched the torment required to master it. No wonder Du Gujue had seemed to appear out of nowhere, rising from obscurity to be hailed as a martial genius.

Bai Yuanxiu had first heard of the Jade Bone Scripture as a child. He never remembered much from that age, but something about it lingered vaguely in his memory, as if there was more to the legend—but for now, he couldn’t recall.

As he strained to remember, Xiao Qing had already continued talking about Du Gujue.

After faking his death and escaping, Du Gujue saw that the Martial Alliance had lost its momentum. He gave up any thought of returning to reclaim his position as Alliance Leader.

But having once stood at the pinnacle of the world, he couldn’t bear the idea of falling into obscurity.

Though Du Gujue’s reputation had become foul after the battle with the Sanxing Sect, for those who had always lived like rats in the shadows, his ruthless, ends-justify-the-means methods actually held great appeal.

Du Gujue did have a strange charisma. When he stood on the righteous path, he had been praised as a chivalrous hero. And when he sank into darkness, he still drew others to him.

At first, he only gathered a few misfits around him. But over time, more and more joined, and eventually, they formed what became known as the “Thirteen Dens of Xiao Lian,” a den of monsters and demons.

If Du Gujue had once acted without concern for good or evil, simply indulging himself after defeat—then by the time the Thirteen Dens was fully established, he had become someone who found joy in doing evil.

One could tell something was off just by looking at how many children lived in the Thirteen Dens. Every time they went out to burn, kill, and plunder, unless specifically ordered otherwise, they would always leave the children alive.

Some were sold, some used as servants—and a small number were trained to become the next generation of the Thirteen Dens’ demons.

Xiao Qing was one of the last kind.