As Qin Wuyi wandered around the village, the Taoyuan villagers gave him a warm welcome —— Meanwhile, Huang Xiyin stayed exactly two metres away at all times, anxiously following him everywhere, refusing to spend even a second out of sight.
He didn't know what this dumb bird was seeing, but it certainly wasn’t anything good.
Very soon, he found the good spirit Yiyi.
He entered her home, was passionately received, and also saw her little sister.
Under Huang Xiyin insisting to the death, Qin Wuyi didn’t eat that bizarre bowl of food. Instead, he spent his time politely making small talk, while keeping his eyes on the silent little sister.
He quickly discovered an important clue.
“The little sister dresses flowery and fancily in an attempt to conceal her scars. If you look at her more closely, you’ll find that she had so many stitched scars on her skin that it’s almost as if……she’s been crudely dismembered before.”
“You make her sound like some scary Barbie[modern_footnote]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbie[/modern_footnote] from a ghost story. Isn’t it a bit too bizarrely discordant for her to appear amongst those good things you see?” Huang Xiyin quipped.
Of course, she also understood the importance of this clue, and inwardly she began to puzzle out the facts in earnest.
A dismembered little sister.
A silly, saintly and sweet big sister.
This combination certainly seemed quite unsettling.
Qin Wuyi then left Yiyi’s homestead, looked all around to observe the living conditions of the surrounding villagers, chatting and conversing with them. After he finished asking questions, he would have Huang Xiyin repeat in full what the villagers’ evil forms said.
Gradually, his expression grew more and more grave, yet his eyes became brighter and brighter.
Until one particular occasion.
Qin Wuyi signalled Huang Xiyin to back off a bit first, then closed his eyes and remained silent for a long time. He slowly reopened his eyes, and spoke in a serious manner: “Fellow daoist, you have wronged your family and your old mother.”
The good form of that youngster was stumped for a second, then asked kindly: “Friend, why do you say that?”
“You have been so absorbed in village affairs, working until late night every day before you return home. You prioritise your job over your wife and daughter, and never cared after your elderly mother, neglecting a son’s duties. This is unfilial of you.”
The youth’s face immediately darkened, and he angrily rebuked, “What do you know! Me being this busy is for the whole village! For the sake of everyone, the greater good!”
“But what about your mother and your family? Aren’t they also a part of everyone?” Qin Wuyi retorted.
“This……” The youngster stammered for a moment, reflected a bit, then proudly said, “Loyalty versus family always presents difficult dilemmas, but I simply chose the big family of the village, over my little family.”
“Therefore, to your little family, you are not considered good. Only to that big family do you count as good. If that’s the case, why are you a good spirit?” Qin Wuyi resolutely refused to relent.
The youth finally couldn’t take it anymore. He took out a weapon and threatened to use it, cursing in rage: “Fuck your mother, you professional nitpicking bamboo-knocker!”[modern_footnote]Knocking bamboo: taking advantage of another’s weaknesses, i.e. blackmail. Said to have originated from late Qing Dynasty, where smugglers would hide opium inside bamboo sticks, then inspectors would make a show of knocking the bamboo to check, whereupon the smugglers would bribe the corrupt inspectors into letting them go.[/modern_footnote]
Qin Wuyi took half a step backwards, glancing at the phoenix maiden and signalling her to burn his not-so-good assailant. But when Huang Xiyin saw a skeleton actually tried to attack the ‘Good saw only Good’ Qin Wuyi, she couldn’t help but rub her eyes, and was completely stunned for a second.
Only after that did she finally react, and sent the skeleton flying with a casual fireball.
Following that, Qin Wuyi walked towards another villager, and began using similar rhetoric following his previous pattern, obstinately picking at their flaws until they couldn’t help but resort to violence.
After tormenting five people in a row like this, Qin Wuyi let out a long sigh of relief, “I get it now.”
“Ehhhhh? What did you get?” Huang Xiyin looked absolutely flummoxed.
“From the time I heard you talk about this place, I have been wondering. Good saw only Good, Evil saw only Evil, but how is this Good and Evil determined? Whose ideas of Good and Evil is enforced here? Wave-Treading Fairy’s? If that’s the case, then she isn’t some kind-hearted Supreme, but instead an overambitious zealot using her might to make everyone else accept her moral standards.”
“And now my tests bore fruit.” Qin Wuyi swept past the villagers, “What you consider as good is Good; what you believe as evil is Evil. Therefore, in the face of being challenged, good spirits with different values could still puff out their chests and claim clear consciences. This is Wave-Treading Fairy giving the right to determine Good and Evil to all of our own selves.”
“What does that mean?” Huang Xiyin was confounded.
“You see Evil not because you’re evil, but because you believe yourself evil, carrying a guilty conscience. And same vice versa.”
Qin Wuyi calmly added, “You can try to hypnotise yourself again, but don’t go that far this time, just make yourself believe……Your heart and actions are utterly unclouded, they are all those of heavenly justice, and even if you do something rotten, it’s still something the world and others owe to you. After doing that, take a look around again.”
“Huh? Isn’t this just the phoenix maiden’s original nature? I can do this one! I just need to block out her memories of being refined alive, make up some memories of me being forcibly taken by you, then got conditioned into a little meat toilet, mm……”
“Hey, wait, what the hell? Don’t you slander me!” Qin Wuyi was shocked.
But it was all too late, as Huang Xiyin had already temporarily cut her connection with her other spare body, and opened her eyes in a daze.
“Ah!” When she saw Qin Wuyi, her red eyes froze, followed by much reluctance and unwillingness, both cheeks flushing pink with shame as she gritted her teeth and tremblingly mumbled, “Mas……Master……”
“What do you see now?” Qin Wuyi asked.
“Eh?” Huang Xiyin looked around her, not quite understanding, “What’s the point of asking this phoenix that? There’s obviously a bunch of human creeps.”
“Do they have flesh and blood?” Qin Wuyi pressed for more details.
Huang Xiyin glared at him oddly yet fearfully, “Of course they do, otherwise they’ll be called boney creeps. Um……on the basis of me being so well-behaved, please don’t hit me so hard tonight, and please……please don’t shoot inside again, okay? If I actually get impregnated by a human, Mother’s going to beat me to death.”
“Alright, you can wake up now.” Qin Wuyi gave her buttocks a loud smack, and instantly the phoenix maiden’s eyes cleared up, followed by rolling into her skull, leaving only the whites. She fell to her knees and twitched for a long time before the floodgates finally closed.
After regaining her senses, she climbed back up with teeth clenched, grumbling and mumbling: “You’re terrible……my stockings and underpants got soaked because of you again. I haven’t prepared that many spares, are you actually scheming to have this phoenix to accompany you while going commando? You big perv!”
“I’m not entertaining your nonsense. Just what kind of weird plot have you brainstormed for yourself now? Am I some kind of erotic storybook’s male lead in your eyes?” Qin Wuyi felt another headache coming.
“Nah, it’s just the classic tale of a fox-riding young man using his big whip to subdue his haughty phoenix maiden nemesis, causing her to hate and fear yet unable to stop experiencing heaven and hell.”
The phoenix maiden pulled out three peacock feathers, creating a Rain Mist Maze Formation around them that prevented others from peeking inside. Then, right in front of Qin Wuyi, she slowly took off her soaked silk stockings, as well as those sweet scented and saturated shorts.
Taking out a fresh pair, she hesitated for a few seconds, then glanced at Qin Wuyi and asked: “You sure you don’t want me to keep you company while going commando?”
“Don’t wear any if you don’t want to, but don’t you try to pin the blame on me.” Qin Wuyi’s head was surrounded by a cloud of black lines again, and he suddenly suspected this fellow had deliberately brought less spare underwear despite her condition.
Perhaps this was just an open and overt excuse to go commando and tempt him.
“You won’t touch my tail either~?” The phoenix maiden intentionally teased.
“No!”
“Tch~” Huang Xiyin rolled her eyes at him, then really stuffed those stockings and underwear back into storage, withdrawing instead a special pair of ‘pantyhose’.
It was a classic Carefree Pavilion style, and it wasn’t known what material this was made from, but it was very thin, very translucent, and those parts stretched taut could hazily project the young maiden’s snow-white skin underneath.
This was clearly just a simple change of hosiery, but the eroticism was just too much. Even as she pulled the pantyhose up to her waist, she seemingly unintentionally turned to give Qin Wuyi a full view of her hips, her hands lifting up the hems of her skirt, casually inviting the man to appreciate her bouncy bubble buttocks.
“All done……eh? I’m just changing clothes, what are you staring at me for? It can’t be that you’re horny for your soon-to-be-wed nemesis, surely not? Stinky Old Qin, you’re such a perv~”
These words were obviously berating him, but with the young girl’s slightly raised shaped eyebrows, plus her flirtatious and mischievous smirk, the end result was a concentrated dose of seductive intent.
Qin Wuyi took a deep breath, and forced himself to look away from the girl, “Alright, stop playing around now. Let’s go save your main body.”
“You know what to do already?” Huang Xiyin was dumbstruck.
No way, was the difference between you and me this great? I hadn’t even jumped out like that comic relief character Kogoro Mouri[modern_footnote]Supporting character from Detective Conan, who gets all the credit for the protagonist solving cases.[/modern_footnote] to help you eliminate a wrong answer yet!
Qin Wuyi had already zoned her out, and just gently closed his eyes. After a long time, he reopened them once more, as his aura abruptly became sinister and dark.
Without a word, he walked towards Yiyi’s homestead —— at this moment, in his eyes, it had now become a desolated ruin.
“Good and evil are illusory, underneath is ultimately still human.”
“We’ve all been fooled by these false illusions ever since we arrived here.”
“This so-called paradise is not at all a shelter for good spirits to dwell in eternal serenity, but an ark of last resort to fool everyone into sleeping until the next era!”
“Jiangming and that possible Corpse Immortal Lin Yuanhong would never be able to find the White Coffin, because they’re already inside it a long time ago. There’s no such thing as a day and night cycle, and the dark only meant the coffin lid had just been closed.”
Qin Wuyi stepped into the ruins, picking up that small, cold and creepy Bodhisattva idol, then brushed it clean of floating dust.
“Have I got it right?”
“Wave-Treading Fairy.”
He interrogated the idol.
[author] The Secret Realm Slayer seems to have figured something out! After tormenting the villagers, the pair’s experiments yielded some results that allows Old Qin to come up with some conclusions, but the stupid bird doesn’t get it!
https://www.novelupdates.com/series/succeed-or-fall-into-depravity-as-a-witch/
Thank you for reading! Please share your thoughts about the chapters in the comments, or leave a review on Novelupdates![/author]