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Translator: Ryuma
Chapter: 7
Chapter Title: Clear Wind Temple
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Li Huowang, dressed in a hospital restraint suit, lay on the bed, silently staring at the IV hook above his head, as if waiting for something.
"Creak." The door to the ward opened.
"Hey, Little Li, weren't you recovering pretty well before? What happened this time?"
Li Huowang's attending physician walked in, looking at him with disappointment on his face.
Hearing this, Li Huowang, whose head was wrapped in white gauze, grew anxious at once and explained, "Doctor, they made the first move on Yang Na! I only fought back to protect her!"
The doctor curved his index finger to push up his glasses.
"You call that fighting back? That was overkill! Liu Jianye is still in the ICU and hasn't come out. That kick of yours nearly sent him straight on his way. You've been here long enough to know everyone's conditions—didn't you think about Master Liu's illness before you struck? I thought you were a sensible kid."
Thinking of Yang Na, who had been scared to tears, Li Huowang felt indignant.
"So what if he's got mental issues? Does that mean he can do whatever he wants? If it came down to letting Yang Na get hurt or going to jail, I'd pick the latter."
"You—" The attending physician was left speechless by Li Huowang's retort.
In the end, he sighed and shook his head.
"Forget it. The dean has already called both families' relatives. You don't need to worry about these things."
Hearing this, Li Huowang curled up slightly and rolled onto his side facing the empty side of the room, starting to calculate in his mind whether that jade pendant worth 400,000 would be enough for compensation.
But at this moment, he wasn't panicking at all. After seeing that the pills really worked, Li Huowang suddenly realized his life had many more new options.
Sensing his young patient's low mood, the doctor spoke up to comfort him.
"Little Li, don't worry. You won't go to jail. The hospital can issue a certificate for you. Don't think about this stuff—focus on recovering. We'll handle everything else."
Li Huowang picked up on the concern in the doctor's words.
"Thanks, Doctor."
"What's there to thank? I'm your attending physician. And you're so young—I naturally have to take extra care of you." Li Huowang felt a pat on his shoulder.
"But Little Li, tell me the truth—what happened back then? How did you hurt him so badly? That's not something an ordinary person could do. Were you in a normal state at the time, or did you fall into some new stress-induced hallucination?"
Hearing this, Li Huowang's heart tightened, and his attention snapped to the pocket in his top.
"That... I..."
"I'm a psychologist, and I've got quite some expertise in this area. Don't try to hide your condition. You'd better think it over before you answer—I hate it when my patients lie to me."
Though the doctor's tone was mild and pleasant, Li Huowang felt an intangible pressure filling the room.
"What do I do? He can't know about the pills."
Just as Li Huowang anxiously searched for a way out, everything around him started to become unstable, and the doctor's voice grew more and more indistinct.
In just a few seconds, he found himself plunged back into a hallucination, lying on the stone bed in Xuanyang's private cave chamber.
Clutching his head as he sat up, Li Huowang looked at the sparse furnishings around him and grinned.
"Heh heh, no matter what, this is still a way to solve it."
This time, he didn't plan to go back so quickly, lest the doctor was still hovering nearby.
He walked out of the room and looked at his fellow disciples coming and going through the cave tunnels, beginning to plan his next moves in his mind.
Since those pills were real, he couldn't be as reckless as before. He needed to manage this place properly to squeeze out more benefits from it.
Fortunately, his status had changed from a drug primer in the Material Room to a nominal disciple of the head disciple, giving him much more freedom of movement.
When he saw a mustached Daoist in a Daoist robe pass by, Li Huowang's eyes lit up, and he hurried after him.
"Senior Brother! Senior Brother!"
The mustached Daoist turned and saw it was Li Huowang speaking, his attitude neither warm nor cold.
"Junior Brother Xuanyang, what is it?"
Mimicking their manner of speech, Li Huowang replied, "Junior Brother has just become Master's disciple. Please enlighten me, Senior Brother—what should I do next?"
"Don't take offense at my blunt words, Junior Brother. Though Master personally took you in, you're the most junior. For now, you can only run errands around Clear Wind Temple."
"To have Master teach you the path to immortality—that's a privilege only for his final disciple. You're not qualified yet. Come with me to wait outside the Pill Refinery Room for now."
"The path... to immortality?" Li Huowang murmured to himself. He had never heard of any immortal becoming one by refining pills from human ingredients.
"Master can really achieve immortality?"
A hint of pride showed on the mustached Daoist's face.
"Of course. Master possesses great supernatural powers. Just serve him well."
From this Senior Brother Xuanyin, Li Huowang learned the full makeup of the temple in the cave complex: five nominal disciples, one personal disciple, and the temple master—Danyangzi—one.
Besides them, the rest were peripheral personnel, like the cooks, the drug primers in the Material Room, the Daoist boys doing odd jobs, and so on—totaling around a hundred or eighty people.
This was the first time Li Huowang had a complete picture of the temple. The numbers were small, even sparse—verging on rundown, especially after so many had died not long ago.
As they talked, that oppressive pill furnace appeared before Li Huowang again, wisps of white smoke drifting from it, as if something was being refined inside.
This time, besides Danyangzi at the pill furnace, there was also his final disciple—a gloomy young man.
After waiting outside with Xuanyin for a bit, Li Huowang received his task: take the ingredient list to the Material Room to check the materials—just like what Xuanyang used to do.
When Li Huowang, holding a white whisk, arrived at the Material Room, everyone working there looked over, their tense gazes tinged with fear.
The albino girl pursed her lips and took two eager steps forward, but in the end said nothing and slowly retreated in fear.
Her counterpart's status had shifted from the oppressed to the oppressor.
As Li Huowang gazed at them, his mind started racing. With their roles reversed, maybe he could get some benefits from this.
"Uh, do any of you have money?" Everyone froze at the question. "Money—you know, silver, gold, jade pendants, that sort of thing."
Truth be told, Li Huowang really needed money right now. He had no idea how much the compensation for Old Liu would be, and his family was just ordinary—if it was a big sum, his mom might have to sell the house. This was something he urgently needed.
"Anyway, money's useless here. Might as well give it all to me—that'll be your protection fee. From now on, I've got your backs."
His words were so direct that everyone understood. The people in the Material Room began patting themselves down. They didn't expect his protection—they just hoped handing over their stuff meant he wouldn't bully them.
A thumb-sized piece of blackened broken silver, a copper hairpin, and forty-odd round-outer-square-inner copper coins—that was his entire haul.
Looking at these things, Li Huowang sighed in dismay. He seemed to have miscalculated—these guys had no money left. What he got probably wouldn't even match the balance on his health insurance card.
(End of Chapter)