Phoenix's Requiem

Chapter 286: Contents of the Archives

After Yun Ruoyan saved the genuine Farsighted King, they then locked the fake Farsighted King in the prison cell before leaving the chamber.

“I heard you mention Li Mo just now. What’s the relationship between you and him?” Li Sheng asked Yun Ruoyan. He was seated by a table, still wearing the ragged, soiled garb from before, but somehow still emanating a kingly aura.

“He’s my…” Yun Ruoyan hesitated for a moment, not knowing how to best continue the sentence. According to their agreement, he would be headed to the Yun manor today to ask for her hand in marriage. Had he done so? If he had, he would likely be very upset to see her missing…

Li Sheng smiled upon seeing Yun Ruoyan’s expression. “There’s nothing to be embarrassed about, is there? Rather, I must applaud you for catching my brother’s interest.”

Yun Ruoyan lowered her head in tacit admission at Li Sheng’s guess.

“My third brother’s quite lucky to be able to have a beauty like yourself,” he commented. “When I next see him, I must thank him for the help.”

“Your Highness, he is he, and I am I. Since I was the one who saved you, shouldn’t you thank me instead?”

Li Sheng hesitated for a moment, then began to laugh at Yun Ruoyan’s boldness. “In that case, how would you like me to repay the debt, Miss Yun?”

“Your Highness, to tell you the truth, I came to your manor hoping to be able to access your secret archives. I was trying to find the key to the archives when I accidentally noticed your plight.”

Yun Ruoyan hesitated for a moment before continuing, “I also have another request, Your Highness. I’d like to have Physician Ceng travel back with me to the capital for a few days.”

“I can certainly satisfy these requests, Miss Yun.” Li Sheng acquiesced without any hesitation.

“Your Highness, I’m also curious about another thing, if I may ask?”

“I think I know what you’re interested in,” Li Sheng sighed. “After all, you’ve already seen me at my worst—why not tell you about this too?”

The Farsighted King told Yun Ruoyan that, about three years ago, a demon had emerged on one of the nearby mountains. It preyed on the unsuspecting villagers and townsfolk close by, terrorizing them and reveling in their fear.

Li Sheng brought a troop of soldiers from the Farsighted King’s manor to hunt it down, only to find a woman, beautiful beyond compare, hidden in the depths of the demon’s cave. Li Sheng was about to send her back home when she cried and told him that her parents had been eaten by demons, that she was destitute and homeless.

The woman begged Li Sheng to take her in, and Li Sheng relented. She stayed at the Farsighted King’s manor for the better part of a year. One night, however, when the moon was full, she invited Li Sheng over to enjoy the night scenery together. After having a few cups of wine, she grew tipsy and ultimately revealed her true appearance.

“I had never before seen such a humongous snake. Her jade-green scales reflected the moonlight, suddenly so cold and stark to my eyes. Her pupils were blood-red, her forked tongue almost five feet long. When she opened her maw, I could smell the heavy stench of blood.”

Li Sheng almost shuddered as he recalled those memories. “I was still conscious after seeing the woman transform into a snake. Though I tried to kill her, I ultimately couldn’t bring myself to do so. In my indecision, it caught me and imprisoned me in that chamber ever since, until I was finally saved by you today.”

Only after his imprisonment did Li Sheng find out that the woman he had “saved” was actually the leader of all those demons who had been terrorizing the townsfolk.

“Your Highness, there’s something that’s still confusing to me,” Yun Ruoyan began. “Given that that snake demon could freely switch between its human and demon forms, it must have a very advanced cultivation. However, when I fought her, I couldn’t detect anything particularly unusual or profound about her.”

That Yun Ruoyan’s intoxicating fog didn’t work on her was definitive proof that the demon’s cultivation was above hers.

“The vagaries of fate!” Li Sheng sighed deeply. What had unsettled him the most was that that woman had been a male snake demon, one that had somehow become besotted with him. In order to hide the fact that he had imprisoned Li Sheng, he transformed his appearance into Li Sheng’s.

Months later, he had even found records of a certain demonic technique that would allow him to consume fresh maidens’ hearts to become a regular mortal woman. Apparently, the snake demon had already consumed more than seventy such hearts, and was nearing completion with the technique. As a result, his body had already begun showing some characteristics distinctive to human females.

At the same time, his demonic aura and spiritual energy were both dramatically weakened. Because he was in the process of turning into a human, his cultivation might not have been lowered, but his spiritual energy had been mostly consumed by his demonic arts.

“Is that so…” Yun Ruoyan mused. “In that case, Your Highness, how do you plan on dealing with him?”

“I’ll naturally kill that bastard!”

“Your Highness, there’s another matter that I’m curious about.” After mulling it over for a moment, Yun Ruoyan decided to ask what was on her mind.

“What is it, Miss Yun?”

“Are you aware that that snake demon has been fomenting rebellion under your name?”

When Yun Ruoyan asked that question, she deliberately paid careful attention to Li Sheng’s face, which seemed to stiffen slightly. After a moment of silence, he replied quite naturally, “I’ve heard him mention it a few times, but it hasn’t ever been anything major. I suspect it’s simply in his nature.”

“Oh, I see!” Yun Ruoyan inclined her head slightly, not pressing him any further. In her heart, however, she felt as though she had gained a slightly better understanding of the true Farsighted King.

He definitely wasn’t as innocent as he seemed. After all, based on what Zhuo Yifeng had told her, he had been planning this rebellion for at least a decade, not merely three years. She was therefore quite confident that the rebellion hadn’t been initiated by the snake demon, but rather by the Farsighted King himself quite some time in the past.

However, the snake demon had taken over the planning for the rebellion after assuming his identity. Perhaps in order to please Li Sheng, he had even sped up the plans for so doing by gathering a veritable horde of demonkin to assist in this endeavor.

However, Yun Ruoyan didn’t intend on dealing with this matter. After all, she was now a member of Kongming Academy, and she would be heading into an alternate dimension with Li Mo a year later. Compared to that, matters on the Chenyuan continent really didn’t seem all that important to her.

“Your Highness, thank you for revealing this secret to me and clearing my doubts.” Although Yun Ruoyan had doubts about his true intentions, she still displayed a superficial politeness.

“It’s nothing compared to the favor of saving my life, Miss Yun,” the Farsighted King replied earnestly. In his mind, however, he was simply treating Yun Ruoyan as a means of communicating with Li Mo; since she was his disciple, whatever he told her would ultimately be passed on to Li Mo.

Yun Ruoyan didn’t want to embroil herself in the matter, and refrained from asking any further questions. Instead, she directly asked for the key to the Farsighted King’s secret archives, which Li Sheng handed her immediately.

As she set off for the secret vaults once more, she suddenly thought of something and handed Li Sheng a pouch of powder. “Your Highness, there’s another favor I have to trouble you with. I drugged Physician Ceng with an intoxicating fog, and he’s waiting for me now by the rock garden by the northern wall. Please send someone over to sprinkle this antidote on his face.”

Then, Yun Ruoyan quickly walked back down into Li Sheng’s vaults, an ornate key in her hand. Although the lock opened easily, it took her some effort to push open the tremendously heavy door, a feat that was impossible without some achievement in cultivation.

In front of her eyes was a room of modest size, not particularly wide but with a high ceiling. The room was filled to the brim with bookshelves, each packed with reams upon reams of paper and stacked folders. As Yun Ruoyan glanced around the room, she began to feel a little claustrophobic.

The bookshelves all around her were inlaid with moonstones, and between every few shelves was a lamp made of a pearl-of-night, a light source that would never be extinguished. As a result, she could see her surroundings very clearly.

Yun Ruoyan began searching for her own secret folder. The archives were catalogued very neatly based on the noble houses of the capital. Surprisingly, there were even a few shelves dedicated to the royal family.

When Yun Ruoyan took the key from Li Sheng, she had promised not to casually flip through other families’ folders, and it wasn’t as if she were so curious that she couldn’t restrain herself. She focused solely on finding the Yun family folders, but because of how much information there was, it took her almost an hour to do so.

“I’ve finally found it!” Yun Ruoyan took a rather slim folder out of a jam-packed bookshelf, her heart heavy. She flipped to the records pertaining to her generation, then found her name. Her pounding heartbeats reached a crescendo, then went silent. I have no agency in choosing my birth. No matter what I find, all I can do is adapt to the circumstances and face reality, she reminded herself.

Amidst the crowded bookshelves, Yun Ruoyan sat down and began to read.

“The 534th generation heir, Yun Ruoyan, has a bloodline not of the Yuns; she was born to Lin Yuemei and a mysterious man by the name of Master Long. The sudden appearance of this Master Long in the capital drew Ye Mei’s attention, but almost no information about him could be found. Once, while tracking Master Long, Ye Mei observed him fighting with another man and performing a full-body transformation into a shocking black dragon. Based on Ye Mei’s description, this Master Long is likely an extant member of the demonic dragon clan, which had mysteriously vanished from the annals of the Chenyuan continent over a millennium prior.”

Yun Ruoyan stilled. Despite her conjectures and guesswork, when what she had suspected was laid out in front of her in writing, Yun Ruoyan still found herself needing some time to digest the revelation.

“Ye Mei trailed Master Long until he eloped with Lin Yuemei. A few months later, when Lin Yuemei returned to the Yun manor, she was pregnant with Yun Ruoyan…”

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