Inside the little house in Peach Courtyard, Zhou Taozhi, despite his extremely high Grade Realm, now showed hints of fear and apprehension, behaving with extreme caution. With great seriousness, he secretly took several talismans of yellow paper inscribed in red from beneath the offering table holding the little coffin, then walked to the doors and windows and gently pasted them up.
Seated on a meditation cushion, the Storyteller tilted his head slightly to watch him, thinking, This old bastard really is badly deranged. Getting him to talk is going to be tricky.
In fact, before he and Ren Ye came to the Enlightenment Academy, they had already understood that the Treasure-Gathering Chess Game in this little peach-grove courtyard might not be the hardest part. The real difficulty would come after they beat the game: how could they coax the truth about those old events out of the mad Zhou Taozhi...?
The man was insane, his moods unpredictable and his thoughts impossible to fathom. If a single ill-phrased question triggered an episode and sent him rampaging through the Enlightenment Academy, the three perpetrators would inevitably be exposed and find themselves in extreme danger. Moreover, there had been three tomb keepers back then. Two had died, leaving Zhou Taozhi the sole survivor.
From Xiaopang's account and the various details, the two spirit tablets on the offering table had to belong to the two tomb keepers who had died back then. And their true causes of death certainly had not been natural.
In other words, Zhou Taozhi's survival might not really have been good fortune. Some unknown, sordid conspiracy might have been hidden behind it. So if the Storyteller pressed him directly, he might well alert something unexpected. Most importantly, although Zhou Taozhi was mad, that did not necessarily mean he was willing