On a snowy slope in the tea mountains, the cook cradled the female infant and looked back breathlessly as Old Man Jiang proved incomparably tenacious, still pursuing them step by step.
He picked up a stone and hurled it down!
Even as he threw, he shouted, "Old man, your mind's been addled by a delusion! The one in your arms is a monster!"
Old Man Jiang roared in anger, "Nonsense, they're all my children! I picked them all up together!"
The cook shouted with the tone of an I-told-you-so, "You admit he isn't your grandson then? He's nothing like this baby girl. Look at him, does he look human at all? Clearly, you just picked up a little abomination!"
Hearing this, Old Man Jiang looked down at the male infant. The child's eyes were open, and he was sucking on his finger while looking back at him with curiosity.
Call him normal, and he simply looked like a baby—hardly bigger than two palm leaves—with no grotesque features like blue faces and fangs.
Call him abnormal, and truly nothing about him was normal!
He wasn't afraid of the cold. In the bitter freeze, he could actually sleep soundly out in the heavy snow, his entire body growing so warm that he made the old man feel cozy, too.
Nor was he afraid of heat. He could even climb out of a boiling pot of water; aside from when he was first tossed in, struggling desperately as if his skin had scorched red, he suffered zero damage afterward without leaving a single mark, remaining smooth and moist all the same.
He didn't even like to cry! A child this small should normally not even be able to open his eyes, yet those pitch-black, enormous eyes could gaze openly at the sun and face the wind without flinching.
All these strange phenomena could only be explained by treating him as a demon.
By comparison, the female infant in the cook's arms was completely, utterly normal.
Her eyes were tightly shut, trembling as she cried in a way that broke one's heart.
Old Man Jiang shouted, "Hurry up and give me the child! That baby girl is going to freeze to death. Only the heat radiating from my grandson can save her!"
The cook felt the old man was completely unreasonable. "Foolish old man! I cannot give A Xue to you! Don't you know?! Demons eat people! They take on the shapes of humans to trick you, and then they'll eat you until not even your bones are left!"
Old Man Jiang blurted out, "Didn't you eat, too?"
As soon as those words left his mouth, the cook froze entirely, struck as if by lightning, left speechless.
He seemed unable to believe his ears, and seemed equally unable to believe his memory.
His gaze was blank at first, then transformed into agony, until it finally turned into resignation.
Old Man Jiang wore the expression of someone who had seen through it all. "So what if he's a demon? If he wants to eat me, this old man will let him eat me! Let him eat!"
If it were before winter, he truly would have feared demons—after all, he had heard many terrifying stories passed down in the countryside.
Yet having endured such a succession of despairing blows, at this moment he felt demons were nothing to be afraid of, either.
Was there anything more despairing than watching your family starve to death right in your arms? Harsh governance was fiercer than demons and monsters!
Now Old Man Jiang's home was gone, and his family was gone, leaving his heart as cold as dead ashes. It was these two children who had given him the hope to go on living once more.
Never mind such cute children; even if they were truly blue-faced, fanged demons who ate raw meat and drank blood, the old man was too lazy to even run away. He would simply let the monsters eat him, which would also make it easier to enter the Yellow Springs early and keep his children and grandchildren company.
Hearing the old man's resolute words of defiance against death, the cook lowered his head to examine the female infant.
Seeing that she was completely frozen and her cries had grown weak, he hurriedly wrapped her tighter still.
Alas, with the weather freezing bitterly, relying solely on the two layers of clothing on his body, it was truly impossible to warm this child.
The cook muttered, "That's right... what is there to fear about a demon?"
"Can he really save A Xue?"
Old Man Jiang finally crawled to the base of the pine tree, and seeing that the cook was not blocking him, he took the female infant and tucked the two children together.
As for himself, he leaned his back against the thick tree trunk and curled up.
"He can! Earlier, this old man lay on the ice lake, and when we all huddled together, we slept warmly!"
"You come in, too!"
When the cook saw the female infant pressing close against the male infant as if burrowing into a warm embrace, he couldn't help but feel a weight lift from his heart.
He took one deep look, retreated to the other side of the tree, and curled up around himself as he said, "I don't need to."
Old Man Jiang said no more, and so the two of them leaned against opposite sides of the tree like that, huddled into themselves, stubbornly enduring the hunger and cold.
After a long while, Old Man Jiang spoke. "Why don't you start a fire? This old man is warm enough, but you'll freeze to death like this."
The cook muttered, "Letting it freeze me to death is fine. So many people have frozen to death, one more won't matter."
Seeing his utterly lifeless words, Old Man Jiang smiled. "Once you make a fire, we can..."
"..." The cook was stunned, dumbfounded. "You want to eat, too?"
"We have to survive somehow. I still want to raise them." Old Man Jiang spoke as if uttering nonsense.
The cook gave a bitter smile, then said in a tone of despair bordering on tears, "You can't raise them... they haven't even been weaned yet..."
Old Man Jiang's tone was resolute. "We can survive. We'll gather our strength, then head into town and throw ourselves upon a good family... we can survive."
The cook laughed and cried at once. "Head into town? Hehehe, as if the nobles in the city would care about us. The refugees in Donglai have raised an army in revolt, so Langya Commandery has also ordered all counties to bar their city gates to prevent the common folk from causing chaos... Don't you know the corpses outside the city are piled up like mountains?"
Only then did Old Man Jiang learn the simple reason why they were barred from entering the city.
He stood blankly for a moment, then stubbornly said, "There's always a way."
The cook sighed. "But I don't want to eat anymore... swallowing it down... That is why they so desperately wanted to boil these two children."
"Why are you protecting this baby girl? Do you know her? You call her A Xue?" Old Man Jiang asked, voicing the doubt in his heart.
The cook shook his head. "A Xue is my daughter... she was born just as the heavy snow began, so I named her Snow. After the houses in the village collapsed, I took my wife and daughter toward the county town, but we were separated on the road. For the past two days, I've been searching. When I truly couldn't find them and was too starved to walk, that's when I ate."
Old Man Jiang understood. No wonder the cook showed such tenderness toward the female infant; it turned out he truly had a daughter, and when he was about to put the baby in the pot, he remembered his own daughter whose whereabouts were still unknown, causing his heart to soften, of course.
"Then you have all the more reason to stay alive. You haven't found them yet."
The cook's tone was bitter. "When we were separated, they were already sick and starving for three days, and now..."
Old Man Jiang suddenly recalled the corpse by the roadside he had inadvertently seen earlier—it was also a mother and daughter, and he had buried them on a whim.
Surely it couldn't be such a coincidence? Old Man Jiang asked casually, "Was she wearing an iron thumb ring?"
Yet as soon as those words were spoken, the cook sprang straight up, scrambling in a rush from the other side of the tree, wild with joy. "You've seen them?!"
At that sight, Old Man Jiang's heart gave a jolt, and he couldn't help swallowing hard.
"My wife wears an iron thumb ring on her little finger, doesn't she? Does she?!" As the cook asked, he watched Old Man Jiang's expression, and gradually the joy on his own face vanished.
The two of them looked at each other in silence. The cook let out a miserable laugh, his hands and feet going limp, and failing to support himself, he tumbled right down the snowy slope.
They had climbed upwards of two hundred feet up this slope, and with this tumble, the cook rolled into a snowball on the spot, coming to a halt at the bottom of the slope without moving a hair.
Old Man Jiang hurried down in pursuit, wanting to dig the man out, but within a few tries, his hands had frozen stiff.
He thought of the miraculous strange infant in his arms and tried to make that warm current melt the snow.
Yet to his utter astonishment... the baby's hand grabbed at the snow, and the ice and snow remained completely dry!
"Ah?" Old Man Jiang was dumbfounded.
Only then did he suddenly recall that when he first met the infant, he had been lying on an ice lake without melting it in the slightest.
Even though his entire body was hot and cozy, there was no sign of rising heat.
It was as if this wave of warmth could only be used to warm one's own body?
Old Man Jiang felt this bizarre phenomenon assault his understanding, but he was easy-going; monsters, after all, were perhaps just like this, and he didn't understand them anyway.
He immediately cast this astonishment to the back of his mind and dug frantically into the snow, needing to pull the cook out.
Yet little did he know that a hundred feet away, someone was crouching in the treetop, gazing out at this place from afar.
"Embrace Yin, Carry Yang Technique?"
This person was none other than Chen Hu, who wore a look of utter disbelief as he recognized the wondrous property of leaving snow unmelted when encountered.
He had been observing for a long time and knew that the demon infant was constantly radiating heat; otherwise, that old man and the baby girl would have frozen to death long ago.
Yet this wave of warmth had not the slightest impact on the outside world, and the exquisite and subtle execution behind it could only be called brilliant.
It was his first time witnessing such a phenomenon, but he had heard his master mention that some cultivators could emit a ball of fire that burned only a targeted object, perfectly and accurately controlling all the Yang heat energy so that it left snow unmelted, ice unfrozen, water unable to extinguish it, and earth unable to smother it.
Even within a sea of fire containing a thousand or a hundred people, it would burn precisely one person alone. Being burned by such flames meant that unless one possessed a method to break it, leaping into the Yellow River was useless; it could even burn a person to death at the bottom of the sea.
This was the textbook definition of an Embrace Yin, Carry Yang style spell, where the caster decided exactly where the Yang heat energy was conducted.
Most of those who mastered such spells were alchemists; in order to control the heat of their pill cauldrons, they created various methods of utilizing the Yin and Yang Energies.
In the same cauldron, having boiling water on one half and snow on the other was just the basics. Dissolving cinnabar amidst cold ice and freezing mercury within magma—those were considered profound techniques.
As for simultaneously refining dozens of materials in a single cauldron, where the distribution of cold and heat followed one's every desire, temperature reached the ultimate limit of subtlety, and the proportion of Yin to Yang in every single inch or even every fraction of a hair was completely under control—that was truly supreme mastery.
Of course, whether it was the basics or the supreme mastery, this was a power completely beyond the reach of a mere Body Tempering Stage cultivator like him.
Never mind him, even the founding patriarch of the Heaven Swallowing Sect had never witnessed this technique, having only heard of it while discussing the Dao with others...
Never did he expect to see it today in an infant—no, in a monster?
"Just what realm is he in? Spiritual Sense Stage? Calamity Tribulation Stage? Or a great demon of the Dao Attainment Realm?"
Chen Hu was deeply troubled. His master had only said that those who mastered this kind of spell were 'profound cultivators', but the word 'profound' was far too subtle. To what level of profundity did it reach? Chen Hu had no inkling whatsoever.
To him, cultivators in the Spiritual Sense Stage were already profound figures, so was this demon infant truly in the Spiritual Sense Stage?
At this thought, Chen Hu produced a jade talisman. This was an 'Amulet of Evil Warding', capable of neutralizing a spell attack from a mystical stage cultivator once.
He possessed four of them, all bestowed by his sect to serve as life-saving measures for him. After all, the Heaven Swallowing Sect appeared to be a Martial Sect on the surface, but secretly they forged unconventional paths using rare treasures and strange artifacts to help people enter the Dao, and thus they could also be considered half-immortals, belonging to the heterodox and unorthodox factions among cultivators.
When traveling the jianghu ordinarily, this item was completely unnecessary; it hadn't even been used last year during the campaign against the dog demons, because those dog demons were not good at sorcery, preferring instead to use magical power to reinforce their sharp teeth and claws, fighting with physical bodies.
"Now, this demon infant is likely one skilled in sorcery. I thought to myself that this old man's jade talisman would finally come in handy..."
"But if he is in the Spiritual Sense Stage... then..."
Suddenly, Chen Hu looked toward the refugee he had pinned and restrained, a subtle movement stirring in his heart. Ah? I've got it!
He dragged the refugee further away, then unleashed a burst of True Energy, channeling it into the refugee's body to savagely smash through his extraordinary meridians. Finally, it converged, shattering the three mysterious barriers of the tail-closure (weilu), spine-ridge (jiaji), and jade-pillow (yuzhen) gates, completely opening up his Ren and Du Meridians.
"Roar-ah-ah!" Instantly, that refugee shrieked in agony, feeling pain so intense it was beyond comparison.
Next, a mouthful of stagnant blood spurted out. His eyes turned crimson, his muscles swelled up, and bulging veins thrummed all over his body as his vital qi and blood surged like dancing little snakes beneath his skin.
Yet following the excruciating pain came surges of power; he felt as though he possessed boundless strength and could kill an ox with a single punch.
"Thud!" The refugee kicked a stubborn rock away, and the stone actually shattered into pieces.
"Ah-ah-ah-ah! I am the West Chu Hegemon King!"
At that moment, he felt himself to be the Hegemon King reborn! Unable to help himself, he threw a ferocious punch straight at Chen Hu.
"Hmm? Hmph!" Chen Hu let out a cold snort, letting the punch slam directly into his chest.
In a flash, the refugee suffered a massive rebound force, flying backward and rolling two or three zhang away across the snow.
"Cat-and-dog martial arts, and you dare compare yourself to the Hegemon King? Where did you get the nerve!" Chen Hu spat out a glob of phlegm, his face filled with annoyance.
If he had simply been punched by the other party, he wouldn't have cared; after all, most people would lose their minds when suddenly possessing such formidable True Energy and having so many physical potentials forcibly awakened.
Yet the fellow actually dared compare himself to the Hegemon King—simply laughable! Xiang Yu's divine valor was unique through the ages! This was universally recognized from the imperial court all the way to the martial arts world and the immortal sects!
The current number-one person in the mortal realm, Wang Siwen, proclaimed, 'Immortals live forever; I am invincible,' yet in reality he fell far short of the Hegemon King!
An immortal had once stated that from ancient times to the present, no one was known to have surpassed the martial arts mastery of Xiang Yu at age thirty!
What a terrifying fact was that? And this was even taking into account that he had slit his own throat at thirty-one; back then, the only person in the mortal realm capable of killing him was himself.
It could be said that the Hegemon King was the Dao beacon in the heart of every martial artist, and Chen Hu held boundless reverence for him. How could he allow anyone to desecrate that?
"Hmph, listen here, you dog, go slaughter that demon infant. I want you to extract a piece of jade bone from inside his body."
"Don't harbor any useless thoughts. The True Energy in your body is mine, and this old man can take your dog's life at any moment."
Chen Hu's tone was indifferent, clearly intending to use this refugee as an advance scout to test the waters while he himself hid in the shadows to act according to his judgment.
Martial artists with profound internal energy possessed the art of qi-deployment, which meant projecting external qi to treat illnesses and heal people for others.
Since it could heal injuries, it could naturally kill people, and even develop other marvelous uses.
At this moment, the refugee, having had his meridians forcefully opened by Chen Hu's qi-deployment to break through the barriers, now stored five years' worth of Chen Hu's True Energy and had his potential stimulated, granting him nearly a thousand catties of strength.
This was already quite formidable—second-rate jianghu martial artists might not even possess this much strength—yet Chen Hu didn't care at all, because this was life traded for life.
As for taking his dog's life at any moment, that was actually just him spouting nonsense; this refugee would live for at most a quarter of an hour.
Still, just to use him to probe the demon infant's strength, a quarter of an hour was plenty.