"Those years were the most painful of my life. Chen Shigu was the finest master under heaven. His martial arts were unfathomable, and he never held anything back when teaching. Whatever you wanted to learn, he would pour out everything he knew. Yet he was also the worst master under heaven. His face always bore a cruel, contemptuous smile, so terrifyingly composed that it made you constantly suspect you were a hopeless idiot. My martial arts advanced by leaps and bounds, a thousand miles in a day, yet compared with the other disciples of the Setting Sun Courtyard, I seemed to be standing still, muddling along without distinction.
"Especially before Eldest Senior Brother, all the talent and intuition I had once taken pride in became a joke. However desperately I worked to catch up, his level remained far beyond my reach. I hated him. I envied him. Every day, I wanted to abandon martial arts, return home, and coast through life as a wealthy country squire. But I had devoted myself to martial arts since childhood and made them my creed. I simply couldn't swallow that humiliation...
"Eldest Senior Brother held no one in any regard. He either beat us mercilessly during sparring or went out, weighed down by worries, to locate burial sites and rob tombs. I had never worried about money and utterly despised tomb robbing. I thought a peerless genius like him shouldn't soil his character with such a low, disreputable trade. Only later did I hear that he had already fallen ill by then and had been searching ancient tombs for a particular elixir."
Baozhu gave a startled gasp and murmured, "Wei Xun robbed tombs to find an elixir to treat his illness?"
"To save his life, more precisely. Grandmaster Barefoot Daoist once foretold that Eldest