Chapter 37: Wonderful World of Fish and Dragon

His alchemy furnace had exploded several times. She looked down from the high platform and saw him come out covered in dust and dirt, exhausted, and fall asleep on the ground, not caring where he was. Jiaoran felt that he seemed like a medical geek, but definitely not a martial arts geek.

But this kind of person who doesn't care about martial arts is the one who possesses unparalleled magical skills.

At that time, he walked out of the dark room and fell asleep on the floor. When he woke up, Jiaoran saw a string of blood behind him, but he seemed to have not noticed it at all.

Such a strange person.

Jiaoran was staring at the blood on the ground and saw him gasping for breath against the side of the stone wall. There was a loud bang and she ran over thinking that he must have been blown to pieces. Fortunately, he was still alive.

His face was pale, and looking down, his chest was covered in blood, and his white hair was also stained with blood. It was truly an extremely strange feeling. Perhaps it wasn't exhaustion, but he was in extreme pain.

He said nothing, not a word of pain, but just endured it. When the pain was too much, he would fall asleep, with his head resting on stones and his head water. Jiaoran had never seen such a person before. Thinking of the day when she woke up on the jade ice bed, it was already considered that he cared about her.

What a weirdo.

Jiaoran retracted the branch and continued to walk closer to the Clivia to admire it. It wouldn't be long before it would be back to normal and she wouldn't need to worry about it.

He was also surprised to see a flower blooming in the cave.

"How come there are flower seeds here?"

Jiaoran shook his head and thought, "This isn't my home, how would I know?"

He stared at her from behind for a long time, and when he saw that she didn't say anything, he suddenly gave her a needle in the back.

When Jiaoran felt the pain, he had already pulled out the silver needle.

"What are you doing! It hurts." Jiaoran said.

As soon as the words came out of her mouth, she was stunned.

Can I... speak now?

He gently put the silver needle back into his sleeve and wiped it calmly.

Jiao Ran understood, "I've been well for a long time. Did you do something to stop me from speaking?"

He clapped his hands and said, "You're smart."

"you!"

"It's noisy, that's why I do it."

Jiaoran was almost suffocated to death by holding her breath. If it weren't for his superb martial arts skills, she would definitely have beaten him up.

I turned around and took a few steps to cool down, but the more I thought about it, the angrier I got.

At this moment, there were several rustling sounds, and branches of flowers were constantly waving from Jiaoran's hands, but they could not hit him, and could not even touch his clothes.

He flipped over like a carp and flew ten feet into the air.

Jiaoran didn't want to ask him why he did this. She turned around, lifted the bluestone slab, and jumped down without hesitation.

He was faster than her and grabbed her arm, "You want to go out?"

Jiao Ran gritted his teeth and said, "Of course, you've locked me up for so long, I've wanted to go home for a long time."

"If you leave, I won't be able to refine the elixir. I need your blood."

Jiao Ran said word by word, "What does it have to do with me! Your pills have nothing to do with me."

"Do you know how many people are affected by this pill?"

Jiao Ran scratched his forehead. "It's up to you to refine as many pills as you want, but I don't like to practice alchemy. Is it fair that you've trapped me here?"

The python became furious and surrounded the bluestone slab. This man and the python were relying on her.

Jiao Ran didn't know what he meant. "If your elixir can't be refined in one day, will I stay here with you for one day?"

He kept emphasizing, "I saved you."

Jiaoran was most afraid of owing favors to others. He somehow saw this and used it to blackmail her.

"I know, I will repay you in the future. Although you didn't teach me anything, but just kept feeding me moves, I learned all my martial arts skills from the murals here. You can be considered half my master." Jiaoran had not spoken for a long time, and when he spoke now, he still stuttered a little.

He said, "Well, I don't want any reward from you. When you can kill me, you can leave here."

As soon as she said this, she knew she could never leave. First, she couldn't kill him, and second, she didn't want to kill him. In terms of skills, she would never be his opponent until her death. However, Jiaoran had never thought of using killing him as a way to leave this place. He had saved her life and taken care of her body. She was not the kind of person who would repay kindness with enmity.

"You know it's impossible."

The candles in the cave burned out and the two people could no longer see each other.

Just when Jiaoran was about to jump down in the dim light, his ears were more sensitive and he had already restrained her. He then shot a spark from his sleeve into the air, like a firefly in the summer night, and a new candle in the dark was lit.

The candlelight reflected Jiaoran's slightly angry face, and she couldn't stay there for a day longer.

He had raised her well, and she would leave. He had always understood this.

He looked at Jiaoran silently, "Don't you believe in yourself?"

Jiao Ran laughed. "People should have self-awareness. If I were one-tenth as capable as you, I could practice for five, ten, twenty, or thirty years and defeat you. But you're more powerful than anyone I've ever met. How could I possibly defeat you?"

He thought it was right, "How about this, if you can withstand twenty of my moves, I'll come out of seclusion?"

"Twenty moves?" This is much more hopeful than defeating him.

"How about ten moves?" She continued to bargain.

He interrupted Jiaoran, "Don't you know how dangerous the world is? If you go out again and your life hangs by a thread, you will know that I am thinking about you."

"I'm going back to my own home. What's so dangerous about it?"

"What if you meet your enemy on the way back?"

"I have no enemies." Jiaoran said stubbornly, thinking to herself that maybe Fenghuang Chu and Mu Jin were really waiting to kill her.

Seeing that Jiaoran refused to give in, he thought about it and agreed confidently, "Ten moves is fine."

From the day the snow on the mountain had not melted, Jiaoran could no longer distinguish the four seasons of spring, summer, autumn and winter, and he had no idea how many days and months he had spent in the cave.

She no longer counted the days on the wall, but only counted how many of his moves she could withstand.

At first, he couldn't take any of his moves, but later on, he could actually take two of his moves.

When Jiaoran was able to block any move he made, she knew that she was not agile enough.

She practiced in the cave for a long time, jumping and running between the uneven stone walls like a monkey.

Later, Jiaoran felt that he was becoming stronger and stronger, and his hands and feet were becoming more flexible day by day.

She could jump up and down the seventy-eight-zhang cliff at will.

Even in the dark, he can walk as fast as flying, with the agility of a sparrow.

One day, Jiaoran noticed that there was an animal background behind the little figures in the mural. When she looked closely, she found that there was a painting of a dragon and a phoenix fighting.

He stood beside her and asked, "What did you see?"

"The dragon and the phoenix fight."

He said no, "The phoenix has not yet reached nirvana, and the dragon has not yet transformed into a dragon. The phoenix is ​​only a bird, and the dragon is only a snake."

"What do you mean?" Jiaoran looked at him.

"It's just a normal snake-bird fight," he said.

The phoenix was trapped by the dragon. Although its beak was sharp, it never attacked.

It was not until the second painting that the phoenix pecked off the dragon's scales and escaped.

"Just now, in the first painting, why did the phoenix stand still and allow the dragon to bully it?"

He said, "I've already said it's a snake, not a dragon. What would happen if the bird's first move was to peck at the snake's head?"

Jiaoran thought for a moment, "The bird's legs will be entangled by the snake's tail."

"Yes, what if it pecks at the snake's tail?"

"You will be injured by the snake's head." Jiaoran said.

She understood, so she stood still, waiting for the snake to change.

When the snake attacked first, it exposed its weakness, so in the second painting, the bird was able to quickly peck the snake's weak spot.

"This is the use of stillness to overcome movement," he said.

Jiao Ran lost his patience and asked, "So when we face the enemy, we can only wait for them to strike first?"

"Of course not."

"So what does this painting mean?"

"It's telling you to think twice before facing an enemy of similar strength." His answer was simple and clear.

Jiao Ran nodded, "I understand."

But he saw his figure move and flash, and the Cloud Piercing Palm went straight through his throat.

Unexpectedly, just as Jiaoran made a move, he changed his feet and moved behind her like the wind. She couldn't even see how his footwork changed, so her Cloud Piercing Palm was now aimed at her throat. He held her arm, as if he wanted her to stab herself to death.

"I told you to think twice."

"I know, so I'm going to take them by surprise."

As soon as Jiaoran finished speaking, he turned over and punched him. His sleeves gathered a gust of wind, turning his palm into a fist and heading towards his mouth and nose.

Instantly, her fist was clenched. Jiaoran's heart tightened. She had only ever been this close to the young master. Other men, even her fellow apprentices, were rarely this close. Her mother said there were differences between men and women, and rarely let her play with them.

His big palm wrapped around her small fist, his fingertips pressed on the back of her hand, and his tiger's mouth clamped her knuckles.

She was stunned for a moment, and the person holding her fist was also stunned for a moment.

They remained in a daze for half an incense stick of time.

He slowly loosened his hand, and Jiaoran took a step back as if nothing had happened, coughing dryly a few times.

When the plum blossoms on the island bloom, bursts of plum fragrance seep into the cave through the cracks.

Jiaoran asked, "Are the plum blossoms here always this fragrant?"

He took a deep breath and said, "Maybe it's because of the good weather, the plum blossoms this year are more fragrant than in previous years."

Snowflakes flew over their heads again.

He played the flute, the sound was melodious and distant.

"You haven't told me your name yet?" Jiaoran asked him.

The flute sound suddenly stopped.

Sadness was hidden in his eyes, and that sadness seemed to turn into eternal pain in an instant. He said, "Zhu Su."

He wrote on the ground with his flute.

"But you can't call me by that name. In the Fish-Dragon Wonderland, everyone who can call me by that name is dead. No one can call me by my name except myself."

"Why? Disrespectful?"

"Because my master is also called that."

"Why?"

"Because that's my master's name."

"Why?"

Jiaoran was even more puzzled. In an ordinary family, it would be absurd for a grandson and a son to have the same name as his father. But when going to the Central Plains, he heard that people in those prefectures still had to avoid it. It was disrespectful for a son to have the same name as his father.

He stared at Jiaoran for a while and said, "I have taught you a lot. You must take me as your master."

Jiaoran said no.

She was a member of Huiyingmen in life and a ghost of Huiyingmen in death. How could she still worship other people as her master?

"Have you become someone else's disciple?"

Jiao Ran nodded. "My mother is my master. Although I don't know much, it's not because my mother didn't teach me well. It's because I was too playful and didn't study hard. My mother is the most powerful woman in the world."

"Since you are the disciple of the most powerful woman in the world, how did you end up on the run?"

Jiaoran shut her mouth. Could she tell the secret of Huiyingmen to outsiders at will?

"I saved your life. If you want to repay me, you don't have to help me in the same way. I can never be exiled like you. I want you to tell me your true origins, who is hunting you, and why did you flee here?"

She could lie to him and make up countless lies. At Huiying Gate and in the Governor's Mansion, what she learned the most was lies. Lying to the neighbors was the first thing her father taught her when she grew up. It can be said that other people's enlightenment was based on the Three Character Classic and the Thousand Character Classic, but she just made up lies at random.

But she didn't want to lie to Zhu Su because he asked her sincerely and he didn't seem to be an ordinary person.

"Have you heard of 'Takayama Shou'?" He said without any other expression, "Yes."

The reason she left Huiyingmen was because of this broken secret book.

Except for unnecessary details, she told the whole story.

I thought this plan would surprise Zhu Su, but he just said "oh" softly.

"You don't believe me? Or do you not believe that there is such a secret book in the world?"

Zhu Su sighed, "So that's how it is."

"What's the matter?" Jiaoran didn't understand what he meant.

"Why is this place called the Wonderful Land of Fish and Dragons? Have I never told you?"

Jiaoran didn't ask him. She felt that this place didn't seem like the mortal world, but rather a place for people to practice asceticism. His martial arts were also unlike the moves used by people she had seen before. The first time she saw him meditating in the moonlight with his clothes fluttering in the wind, she felt that he was like an immortal. It wasn't that he had an extraordinary appearance, but that he had an aura that ordinary people didn't have, between life and death, beyond light and darkness.

"Because there are fish and dragons here?" Jiaoran said.

He called the python over and asked, "Do you think Jifeng is just an ordinary little snake?"

Jiaoran certainly didn't think so. "It's not just any little snake, it's a giant python."

"Look at its head."

Ji Feng raised his head proudly.

"It's so high up, I can't see anything."

He asked it to lower its head, and when Jiaoran got closer, he saw two small tumors on its head.

"Did it get bumped in the hole like me?"

Zhu Su was silent.

Ji Feng also fell silent.

Not long after, a gust of wind suddenly sent Jiaoran flying. “Ah!”

"Why did it hit me?"

"Because you're stupid, it's a little dragon, a Jiao."

"Jiao?"

Do dragons really exist in this world? Really?!

"Does that mean it might turn into a dragon?"

"Of course, but the time has not come yet."

"I've never seen a dragon before. How could a dragon be coiled in such a small cave?"

"Under this cave is the Dragon Pond."

He said that thousands of years ago, there were countless real dragons living in the Dragon Pond.

At that time they were just the mounts of gods, and mortals often came to the Dragon Pond to feed them.

Those mortals were the last of a kind to serve the gods. They lived in the Wonderland of Fish and Dragons. Thousands of years ago, the gods suddenly ascended en masse, no longer attached to the mortal world, soaring towards the heavens, and the dragons of the Dragon Pond followed them. Although the gods no longer visit the Wonderland of Fish and Dragons, they left behind countless treasures, the most precious of which are "High Mountain Longevity" and "The Secret of Immortality." It is said that any mortal who can comprehend these two secret manuals will achieve immortality like the gods and dominate the world.

He wasn't shocked by what Jiaoran said, but what he said shocked Jiaoran so much that he couldn't close his mouth. "Are you saying... "Gao Shan Shou" is yours?"

"These two secret books were lost hundreds of years ago. Zhu Su, who was guarding Wonderland at the time, was soon dismissed due to incompetence."

"Someone stole it? How could that be? It's quite hard to find it here, and they're all venomous snakes. How high must one's martial arts skills be to steal it!"

Zhu Su looked at her and said, "The Wonderland is not a dead thing. It's impossible for outsiders to reach the island. The secret book was stolen by a member of the Fish Dragon Clan who coveted the mortal world. After he returned to the human world, he caused a bloody storm."