Was the Old Celestial Master Illiterate?

In the flickering candlelight, the patch of green scales behind Lin Youwei's ear gleamed with an eerie, cold light. Zhang Xuan pondered intently—was it truly a human hiding inside that warm, soft, jade-like body?

The wife of the Celestial Master's Mansion's Dao Head was not human?

The thought seemed absurd, but in the Celestial Master's Mansion, a place riddled with mysteries, it was hardly strange.

Zhang Xuan did not dwell on the question. Whatever Lin Youwei's origins were, he would set them aside for now. What he needed to investigate was her purpose!

On the surface, Lin Youwei had come to pay her respects and pledge her support...

But if she truly meant to tend a cold hearth, cultivating ties with him before he became Celestial Master, why had her very first glance upon entering fallen on Jiang Jiu?

Her abrupt embrace, in particular, had set alarm bells ringing in Zhang Xuan's mind.

She was a pretty young widow newly bereaved, and he was a young man in his prime. However close they were, she should never have crossed the line like that—unless she wanted to use the embrace to conceal something!

So Zhang Xuan had gone with the current, pretending to be bewitched by her beauty and letting her do as she pleased. In truth, he had quietly watched their every move through the bronze mirror on the wall.

Under cover of the embrace, Lin Youwei's gaze had roamed around the room before finally settling on the clothes chest beside the wall.

Pop—

The candlewick burst, scattering sparks into the lamp. The sound pulled Zhang Xuan out of his recollections.

He turned his gaze toward the clothes chest beside the wall...

The chest was small, roughly half a person's height, with an upper and a lower compartment. It was made entirely of ordinary camphor wood, its exterior somewhat mottled.

There were no elaborate decorations on its body, only a few simple lines outlining its shape. The edges of its lid were slightly worn from years of opening and closing.

It was merely an ordinary piece of furniture for storing Zhang Xuan's everyday clothes.

Could Lin Youwei and Jiang Jiu be looking for something in his room?

Once the thought arose, Zhang Xuan could no longer sit still. First, he searched the clothes chest Lin Youwei had secretly watched. After rummaging through it, he found only two Daoist robes lying quietly inside, and nothing else.

Aside from the clothes chest, this room of twenty-odd square meters contained only a bed and a low table beside it. There was nowhere else to hide anything.

Zhang Xuan searched every nook and cranny but found nothing.

Outside, night had fallen. Cool moonlight spilled into the room through gaps in the window. The bronze bell beneath the eaves swayed ceaselessly in the wind, ringing clear and crisp.

Zhang Xuan let out a long breath, lifted the cumbersome hem of his Daoist robe, and slumped against the bed.

It made sense, really. If any clues had been left in the room, someone would have found and destroyed them while he was unconscious.

"Hm?" Zhang Xuan suddenly knitted his brows.

His gaze fell on the clothes chest he had just searched, its doors still standing open.

He suddenly noticed a problem.

"The upper and lower compartments only take up two-thirds of the chest. Where did the rest of the space go?"

Zhang Xuan jumped off the bed and hurried over.

He felt through the chest inch by inch. Sure enough, an ingenious mechanism was hidden between the lid and the body. A light press on a seemingly innocuous little protrusion at one corner of the lid was all it took to activate it.

A faint but orderly series of clicks sounded, revealing a small compartment cleverly concealed in the middle.

His heartbeat abruptly quickened. He swallowed, unease surging in his chest.

He reached in and took out the contents of the hidden compartment. There were only two items: a small porcelain vial traced with blue patterns, and a folded slip of paper.

Strange blue patterns rippled over the celadon surface, roaming across the vial as though alive.

He pulled out the stopper. A pungent odor hit him in the face, making him nauseous and fiercely dizzy.

Zhang Xuan hurriedly replaced the stopper, horror rising within him—this was a deadly poison!

Zhang Xuan took a deep breath and unfolded the slip of paper. Four characters had been written across it in bold, sweeping strokes, like dragons flying and phoenixes dancing: "Cut the grass, uproot the roots."

The hidden compartment, the porcelain vial, the note... As everything connected, Zhang Xuan's pupils abruptly contracted, and towering waves crashed through his heart.

Could it be... that I was the true culprit behind the Old Celestial Master's poisoning???

For a moment, even his breathing quickened involuntarily as possibility after possibility flashed through his mind.

He had a motive—to ascend to the position of Celestial Master as soon as possible.

He had the opportunity—as the Old Celestial Master's most beloved direct disciple, he attended him personally. Poisoning him would have been as easy as turning over his hand.

And he was the ultimate beneficiary—he had already received the Celestial Master's Mansion's supreme secret, the "Celestial Master's Ordination," legitimately becoming the fourteenth Celestial Master.

At that thought, Zhang Xuan's composure shattered. The murderer was me all along?

The moonlight lay like frost, turning the bronze bell beneath the eaves outside the window into a ghastly white fang. As the night wind swept past, the clapper's strikes sounded like a ghost grinding its teeth.

"Calm down. Calm down and think this through!" Zhang Xuan muttered to himself, wiping the cold sweat from his forehead.

He kicked off his Daoist shoes and stepped barefoot onto the cold stone tiles. Their icy touch steadied his clamoring thoughts a little. He paced back and forth through the room, brows tightly furrowed, continually recalling the string of strange events that had occurred in such a short time.

His master's bizarre death, his fellow disciples' eagerness to push him onto the Celestial Master's seat, and the poison and note reading "Cut the grass, uproot the roots" hidden in the clothes chest—all of it surrounded him like layer upon layer of dense fog, trapping him and obscuring the truth.

The gruesome sight of his master bleeding from all seven orifices remained vivid in his mind. Yet after discovering his death, not one of his fellow disciples had thought to investigate its cause. Jian San, his second senior brother and currently the most senior disciple in the Celestial Master's Mansion, had even flatly insisted that their master had taken his own life...

Jian San's indifference made their master's death seem like some trivial matter. He had cared only about appointing a successor quickly. And though Jiang Jiu appeared endlessly attentive toward Zhang Xuan, respectful to the utmost, Zhang Xuan kept feeling that the man was not nearly as simple as he seemed.

What exactly lay hidden behind the position of Celestial Master?

He had lost his memories and knew nothing of his past, yet these so-called fellow disciples unanimously insisted that he was the next Celestial Master. They had to be hiding something!

And then there was his master...

He had clearly had the chance to tell Zhang Xuan the truth, yet in the end he had chosen to say nothing, taking everything to his grave.

Then there was that supposed "Celestial Master's Ordination." The Old Celestial Master had insisted that the blazing sun bearing the word "System" was the "Celestial Master's Ordination"...

Wait, the Celestial Master's Ordination?

Thinking of the "Celestial Master's Ordination," Zhang Xuan suddenly recalled something worth examining closely.

There had been something strange about the way his master communicated with the Celestial Master's Ordination in the Inner Landscape!

Every question he asked had been phrased as a yes-or-no question. It was far too strange...

What benefit was there in doing that?

"Every question was like a lock, confining the answer between 'yes' and 'no.'"

But why would he do that?

Unless...

—He couldn't read?!!

Zhang Xuan's expression froze!

Could the esteemed Celestial Master of the Celestial Master's Mansion really be illiterate?

At first, it seemed absurd. But after careful thought, it really was possible.

The writing on that blazing sun consisted of square, neatly formed Chinese characters.

Yet the characters on the Celestial Master's Mansion's plaque, on the spirit tablets in the Celestial Master Hall, and on the hilt of the Dragon-Swallowing Sword hanging at his third senior brother's waist were all Wei script, twisted like tadpoles.

Zhang Xuan suspected that Wei script was the writing commonly used in this world, while Chinese characters were not.

Clearly, the Old Celestial Master did not recognize Chinese characters either, which was why he had always used that sort of phrasing to communicate with the "Celestial Master's Ordination."

Zhang Xuan's gaze sharpened as a thought flashed through his mind. Chinese characters that even the Old Celestial Master could not recognize...

—Then why could I read them?