Chapter 140: And This... Is the Fox Clan (Four Thousand Words, Two-in-One)

Jiang Lin left the room in his wheelchair, stepping out into a bustling Qian Estate.

Servants and maids rushed back and forth, busy reconstructing destroyed buildings and clearing away the ruins scattered across the estate. Jiang Lin even spotted the robot ZZ250, created by Little Black, lumbering back and forth while carrying heavy timbers.

Miraculously, everyone from the Qian Estate who had perished that fateful night had now come back to life, as if waking from a spell.

Kong Baba pushed Jiang Lin toward a pond in the backyard of the Qian Estate. The pond, previously obliterated, had already been hastily restored. However, the fish fry had just been freshly stocked, and a few turtles were actually practicing the backstroke, their postures carrying a slightly bewitching charm.

"If not for all these people from the Qian Estate bustling around with the rebuilding, I’d honestly feel like I were dreaming."

Reclining in his lounge chair, Jiang Lin stared at the backstroking turtles in the pond, a myriad of questions swirling in his mind.

"Hehehe, a dream within a dream—isn’t that precisely what this is?"

Kong Baba was sitting in a lounge chair right beside Jiang Lin, smoothing down his cyan robe, crossing his legs, and soaking up the morning sun. From who knows where, he produced another picture album.

Absorbing the artwork drawn by Jiang Lin, which had been thoroughly blessed with divine holy light by the priest, Kong Baba looked immensely entertained.

"That eight-tailed black fox is dead?"

After a long silence, Jiang Lin slowly spoke up.

"Mhm... dead." Kong Baba set the album down and cradled the back of his head with his hands. "Though she’s quite lucky. She still has an afterlife awaiting her."

Jiang Lin asked, "What was the price?"

Everything in this world comes with a price.

Mo Xiaoye had employed the Blood Name Formation, suffering its backlash while also enduring the heavenly tribulation of the Haoran Continent. By all logic, she should have vanished from this world entirely one hundred percent of the time, leaving her with no chance of reincarnation.

Yet, on that night, that fierce tribulation had been blocked by the cyan-robed scholar sitting beside him.

He had shouldered the karmic retribution.

"The price? Well, it dropped my cultivation from the Immortal Realm all the way down to the Golden Core Realm of the Middle Five Realms," Kong Baba said nonchalantly, hearing Jiang Lin's question as if it were of no consequence at all.

"You of all people managed to reach the Immortal Realm?"

Wrapped up like a mummy, Jiang Lin shot Kong Baba a sidelong glance. There was no astonishment in his tone, nor the nervous tension one might feel upon meeting a supreme grandmaster; instead, there was a hint of skepticism, and more than anything, the lighthearted banter shared between friends.

"Brother Jiang, you’re being quite unfair now. I, Kong Baba, merely choose not to show my true power to the world. But speaking of which, it wasn’t actually that heavenly tribulation that caused my realm to drop."

Kong Baba turned his body slightly and smiled at Jiang Lin:

"It was because I reversed the Blood Name Formation, using my identity as a Confucian scholar to overturn life, death, Yin, and Yang. In doing so, I carelessly incurred the backlash of the Great Dao itself, and that is why my cultivation plummeted."

Every realm, every world, possesses its own Dao, yet far above every individual and every realm lies the ethereal and illusory Great Dao.

This Great Dao is something that cannot be clearly articulated or easily comprehended.

If one insists on drawing an analogy, it is roughly akin to the origin of the universe.

The Great Dao has no rigid, explicit rules; rather, it is a natural, spontaneous formation, functioning much like the self-preservation mechanism of nature itself.

Among the laws that mortals and cultivators have managed to discover and explore is the "Dao of Life and Death."

Whether it is the life and death of cultivators or mortals, this forms one of the most vital cycles of existence.

Without this cycle, the world would fracture and collapse; thus, this serves as a safeguard for the cosmos.

If anyone forcibly meddles with the cycle of life and death, they will inevitably face the severe punishment of the Great Dao.

This punishment is neither a heavenly tribulation nor celestial fire; it is an intangible, ungraspable karmic retribution.

Such karma is something that even the supreme grandmasters of the Upper Five Realms from the Yin-Yang School dare not touch. In fact, the higher their realm of cultivation, the more desperately they avoid it, for the higher one's realm, the greater the karmic entanglement involved.

The more lives of East Forest City's citizens Kong Baba forcibly saved, the greater the karmic weight he incurred. Dropping in cultivation was probably the least of his worries; it was entirely possible that his path on the Great Dao had been severed completely, barring him from ever entering the Upper Five Realms again.

What was even more terrifying was the silent, unpredictable web of karma waiting in the shadows—something utterly impossible to guard against or fathom.

"How many people did you save?"

"All of them."

Kong Baba said slowly.

"Aside from the cultivators who perished, I saved every single ordinary person. After all, as for cultivators—well, the path of a cultivator means bearing the consequences of one's own life and death. Besides, I couldn't have saved them even if I wanted to, since I'm merely a scholar, not an Yin-Yang School master like True Monarch Tai'er.

"Moreover, I had no face to demand that True Monarch Tai'er step in and save them either. It was already generous enough of him to let me come to East Forest City, seeing as Yin-Yang School cultivators fear karmic retribution above all else.

"I begged him for ages, clutching his trouser legs until the fabric was practically worn through, before he finally relented, slaughtered a chicken, and set up a miniature Blood Name Formation. He linked two formations together just to teleport me here.

"According to that fellow True Monarch Tai'er, he vomited three mouthfuls of old blood over the span of those two days, and when thunder struck, he was practically frightened to the point of urinary incontinence, terrified of getting hit by lightning."

As he rambled on, Kong Baba rubbed his chin.

"I just never expected I’d end up being teleported into the body of a dog. Truly bizarre."

Kong Baba pondered the hidden connection, while Jiang Lin remained silent, allowing the two of them to lapse into a brief quiet.

Before long, however, Kong Baba stood up and delivered a deep, respectful bow to Jiang Lin:

"Brother Jiang, I am truly sorry. Because of my affairs, the two of you almost lost your lives. It was my fault for arriving late."

Seeing Kong Baba's sincere apology, Jiang Lin shook his head. "Think nothing of it. We are all cultivators; there’s no need to apologize over something like this."

Jiang Lin genuinely held no grievance against Kong Baba. True to his words, they were cultivators, and such matters did not warrant apologies.

Cultivators inherently contend with humanity and contend with the heavens for their path.

In the course of cultivation, a sudden and untimely death is always a possibility.

Some grandmasters avoid needlessly slaughtering mortals out of fear of entangling themselves in bad karma, and because they simply deem it beneath them—just as an elephant will not lift its foot merely because an ant has bitten it.

Among cultivators, however, it is a different story. Cultivators bear sole responsibility for their own lives and deaths; as long as you do not fear the ancestor of the other party's sect coming after you, you are free to do whatever you please to them.

Therefore, even if Kong Baba had failed to show up from start to finish, Jiang Lin would not have blamed him, nor would he have had any reason to do so. Such is the nature of the cultivation world: everyone is solely responsible for themselves, and above all, responsible for their own choices.

He had chosen to come to East Forest City to pick a fight; no matter what transpired afterward, he had to bear the resulting karma himself. No one else has any obligation to be responsible for another person's Great Dao.

It is not without reason that people say the Great Dao is merciless.

Besides, Kong Baba had actually rushed to their rescue.

It was just that Jiang Lin felt this sort of Great Dao logic was a bit twisted. Understanding the logic was one thing, but Jiang Lin had no desire to delve into it too deeply.

"Hehehe, as expected of Brother Jiang, truly magnanimous. Unlike that fellow True Monarch Tai'er, whom I had to beg for a whole day just to let me come over."

Hearing that Jiang Lin had forgiven him, Kong Baba comfortably reclined back into his lounge chair.

"How did Mr. Kong come to know about what happened in East Forest City in the first place?"

"It's not so much that I knew, but rather that on that particular day, a sudden sense of foreboding welled up inside me, as if I had heard some distant summons echoing from the void. When Little Black mentioned that some fool in East Forest City was setting up a Blood Name Formation, I was vaguely able to piece together a few clues.

"To be honest, at first I thought I might just be overthinking things. But a cultivator fears nothing more than that 'what if,' so I went to beg True Monarch Tai'er. I spent an entire night showering him with flattery! I nearly dropped to my knees and called him daddy before that guy finally agreed to teleport me over.

"Still, I can't entirely blame him. After all, matters involving karma of this magnitude are simply too heavy. For him to assist me was already the utmost limit of his loyalty. I had even prepared myself to fly all the way here..."

"Did Mr. Kong know her from a past life?"

"No... it must have been two lives ago, I suppose..."

"..."

With his hands resting behind his head, Kong Baba gazed up at the drifting white clouds in the sky and spoke slowly:

"A thousand years ago, if memory serves me correctly, there was a handsome, dashing young scholar who set off for the capital to take the imperial examinations."

"And let me guess—did he forget to bring his admission ticket, only to be run over by a three-hundred-pound tank?"

"What on earth are you talking about! Though, I suppose the plot is indeed rather cliché."

Kong Baba embarked on a nostalgic trip down memory lane:

"Not all Confucian scholars practice cultivation, and that scholar naturally did not know any martial arts or spells either. Yet, to a scholar of his caliber, such things mattered little, for his ultimate dream and ambition were to bring peace to his family, order the state, and pacify the realm.

"On the day he traveled to the capital, he encountered a black fox inside a mountain temple.

"The black fox had not yet attained human form; she was merely crouching on the other side of the hall, looking as though she had been injured.

"Both the scholar and the black fox eyed each other with mutual suspicion. The scholar was wary because he had heard tales of foxes acquiring a taste for scholars, while the black fox was likely terrified, mistaking the human for a malicious entity.

"Yet, the two of them spent half the night in peace, their wariness gradually fading away. The scholar shared his meager rations with her, and she ate.

"Noticing her wounded front paw, that handsome and debonair scholar gently helped bandage it up for her.

"At first, she tried to resist, her fur standing completely on end, but sensing no malice whatsoever from the scholar, she eventually accepted his help.

"Following that, he continued his journey to the capital, where he passed the imperial examinations with flying colors. He was granted an official post—neither overwhelmingly grand nor insignificant—and quite a few veteran officials in the court even sought to introduce their daughters to him.

"At that time, the scholar was truly riding the crest of his youthful vigor, yet he declined all those offers. That was until one day, while on an outing in the countryside, the scholar stumbled upon a young maiden.

"The maiden was exceptionally pretty, though her clothes were somewhat tattered. She claimed to be a peasant's daughter and an orphan.

"Now, who on earth would believe such a thing? Have you ever seen a peasant girl with skin as white and delicate as jade, and palms entirely devoid of any calluses from labor?

"Anyone with half a brain could tell this must be some spirit craving the handsome, charming skin of the scholar.

"However, as it happened, the scholar also happened to fancy her looks...

"After escorting the young woman back to her dwelling, the scholar made it a habit to drop by her place for a chat whenever he went on leisure outings in the countryside.

"In this fashion, perhaps half a year passed. The two of them grew deeply affectionate toward one another, though neither of them ever explicitly voiced their feelings.

"To be frank, the country was in turmoil at the time, and dark currents surged beneath the surface of the imperial court. Although the scholar held profound affection for her, he intended to wait until the nation stabilized before taking her home as his bride.

"Alas, things escalated quickly. The scholar was dispatched as cannon fodder to help repel foreign invaders. When he informed her that he had to leave for a while, the maiden embraced him from behind, begging him not to go.

"Yet, in the scholar's mind, duty to the country always came before family, so he departed nonetheless."

"And then?" Jiang Lin asked when Kong Baba suddenly paused.

Kong Baba glanced at Jiang Lin. "Isn't that obvious? The scholar died, of course."

"Didn't she come looking for you on the battlefield?"

"Ah, she did—how could she not? But as Brother Jiang knows, the rules of the Haoran Continent are strict. Neither cultivators nor members of the demon clan are permitted to participate in the wars of mortal nations, or they will face the stern reprimand of the Academies.

"That young woman came to the battlefield searching for the scholar, incessantly urging him to flee with her. But stubborn mule that he was, the scholar refused to budge.

"Just as the maiden finally resolved to knock the scholar unconscious and carry him away by force, she was inevitably discovered by the Confucian cultivators overseeing the battlefield. They banished her from the war zone, leaving her to watch helplessly from afar as the enemy forces shattered the military camp and the scholar, refusing to surrender, was beheaded..."

"And what about the second life?"

"The second life... ah, forgive me, Brother Jiang, but that story is rather long, and to be honest, I haven't quite sorted through my own feelings about it yet. Could we perhaps save that for another time?"

"Then I won't press."

Jiang Lin did not pursue the matter further.

Though Kong Lin spoke in a tone that seemed lighthearted, Jiang Lin sensed that this fellow was likely still tormenting himself with the thought of what might have happened if he had abandoned his official post and fled from that battlefield back then.

Yet, had things truly played out that way, would that scholar still have been the same scholar? Would Mo Xiaoye have loved such a man?

Everything was karma, endlessly intertwining in the dark—a knot impossible to untangle yet endlessly complex.

As for the second life, Jiang Lin suspected that was truly the crux of the matter. But never mind; he could let the guy talk about it whenever he felt like it. Besides, he couldn't even eat melon seeds right now; how could one properly listen to a tangled tale of romance without a bag of melon seeds to accompany it?

"Mr. Kong."

"Mhm?"

Jiang Lin posed a profound question: "Have you ever felt that the way the fox clan falls in love is simply far too rash? I mean, just because you bandaged her leg, she went ahead and fell in love with you?"

"Ah, yes, it is rather rash indeed. But Brother Jiang, what do you suppose the Great Dao is?"

Before Jiang Lin could offer a reply, Kong Baba answered his own question.

"Everyone has their own Great Dao. Flowers and grasses possess their Dao; animals possess their Dao; even every individual realm possesses its Dao. And beyond all these realms lies the overarching universe itself, which holds the supreme Dao.

"Walking along the path of one's own Dao heart, an arrogant person grows more arrogant, a willful person becomes more willful, and a gentle person may become even gentler. One might even encounter all manner of obsessive neat freaks or chronic procrastinators—there's no telling what you'll find.

"Everything is the Dao.

"The Dao of the fox clan is precisely that most unfathomable word in this world: 'Affection' or 'Love.'

"For the fox clan, no matter how they cultivate throughout their lives, they can never escape the shackles of 'Love.'

"Some foxes are naturally frivolous and fickle, while others remain fiercely devoted across millennia, all of them ultimately striving merely to see through the illusion of 'Love.'

"Yet 'Love' is an age-old riddle; who can truly claim to see through it? At best, it is merely a matter of whose comprehension of 'Love' aligns most closely with their true nature.

"Romantic love is inherently intangible and ungraspable. It might blossom slowly over long companionship, or it might ignite in a single glance amidst a crowded street. The fox clan, however, happens to be naturally hyper-sensitive to the concept of 'Love.'

"Some say foxes are inherently bewitching and capable of toppling kingdoms and rivers, but in Baba's eyes, the fox clan's approach to 'Love' is the most pure and unadulterated of all.

[ 'If I like you, I like you! Perhaps all you gave me was a single piece of pastry, but I just happen to like you! Because I harbor a favorable impression of you, I simply want to bear little foxes with you.' ]

[ 'If I don't like you, I don't like you. I care not if you possess the looks of Pan An, nor do I care if your literary talent astonishes the world. In any case, I simply don't fancy you. Get lost, you brute; this lady has no desire whatsoever to have little foxes with you.' ]

"And that...

"That is the fox clan."