“Come, little sister, I’ll take you… Brother Tian, lead the way up front!” Su Feifei let go of Ye Tianxie, walked over to Shattered Star-Heart and linked arms with her intimately, at the same time shooting Ye Tianxie a look of coy reproach.

Ye Tianxie smiled faintly and turned to walk ahead. But seeing him about to leave, one man finally stepped in front of him, bringing Ye Tianxie’s steps to a halt.

“Let me see your face.” Cloud-Piercing Sword’s gaze was sharp and his expression indifferent, his body blocking Ye Tianxie’s path, his eyes resting on the Hero’s Headguard. Perhaps out of sheer habit, his voice was not merely cold — it was plainly the register of a command.

Cloud-Piercing Sword’s presence was striking, and it had nothing to do with attributes or power in the game world. It was built on formidable real strength as its foundation and formed through long immersion and hard experience — never something an ordinary person could possess, and never something cultivated in a short time. His tone, too, plainly belonged to a man long accustomed to commanding others, accustomed to the bearing of someone above them. Against anyone else that bearing would have cowed them easily; against Ye Tianxie, he had clearly picked the wrong target.

Ye Tianxie answered coldly, “Beat me and you can find out. The weak have no right to make demands. As you are now, you don’t qualify!”

A cold light flashed abruptly in Cloud-Piercing Sword’s eyes. He looked at Ye Tianxie steadily for a while, then turned and left without a word.

“Lingyun. Long time no see.” Zuo Pojun came over and called out at Cloud-Piercing Sword’s back in that booming voice of his.

Cloud-Piercing Sword’s steps stopped, and he turned around.

“Yo! I never imagined this world was even smaller than that polluted, beautiful one — that in a place I had no business being, I’d run into a man I had no business meeting. Lingyun, three years apart, and my longing for you is exactly like that hateful blazing sun overhead scorching my beautiful skin: it makes a person wish it would never appear again.” Following right after Zuo Pojun, Murong Qiushui spoke up mournfully, and his voice turned Cloud-Piercing Sword’s gaze toward him; his pupils contracted noticeably — he had clearly recognized him at once.

“Zuo Pojun. Murong Qiushui!” After an instant’s pause, he half-narrowed his eyes and spoke their names.

“BINGO! It seems your memory hasn’t declined along with your aging. When you called out my name, your gaze wavered… Ugh! I even felt your heartbeat quicken — that must be your longing for me, surging like ocean waves. You must be recalling all those beautiful moments of our encounter three years ago.” Murong Qiushui was radiant, his peach-blossom eyes brimming with feeling, the light flowing through them carrying an enchantment that could intoxicate.

Cloud-Piercing Sword’s cold face began to twitch. He gave a cold snort, turned the body he had only just turned around back the other way again, and left with hard, cold strides… strides plainly a good deal faster than before.

Zuo Pojun pushed his face up close to Murong Qiushui’s, lowered his voice, and said through gritted teeth, “You’re vicious! You actually managed to gross that fellow clean off the field.”

“Oh!! Gross… what a detestable word. Dear Third Brother, how can you say such a thing about your beautiful, captivating Fourth Brother? He plainly couldn’t resist my passion and had no choice but to leave without saying goodbye.” Murong Qiushui said it with a face full of grievance.

Zuo Pojun: “……”

Shattered Star-Heart’s pink lips parted as she stared in astonishment at this “pretty older sister,” Murong Qiushui… because no matter how you looked at it, the things he said sounded like the words of a lunatic. Su Feifei giggled in her ear, “Sister Chenxin, he’s always like this, don’t mind them… let’s have a talk between sisters… Mm, how did you meet Tian— my boyfriend?”

Su Feifei deliberately hung back with Shattered Star-Heart, talking with her at a volume the others couldn’t hear — clearly meaning to dig up her roots. Ye Tianxie glanced at Cloud-Piercing Sword’s receding back and, walking ahead with Zuo Pojun and Murong Qiushui, asked, “You know him?”

“Could it be that Second Brother is interested in him?” Zuo Pojun asked back.

“Heh. There probably aren’t many people in all of Huaxia who’d dare face you and Qiushui with an expression like that.” Ye Tianxie smiled casually.

“His name is Lingyun, and he really is no simple figure. Three years ago he had a match against Qiushui,” Zuo Pojun said.

“And the result?”

Murong Qiushui lifted a corner of his mouth and said mournfully, “That’s exactly why I say the memory of it is as detestable as that blazing sun up there, and no matter how you drive it off it won’t go. In that beautiful bout three years ago, I failed to turn his body into a beautiful blood-flower blooming on the yellow earth. What an unpleasant memory.”

“You lost?” Ye Tianxie’s brow sank slightly in surprise.

Zuo Pojun shrugged. “Of course he didn’t lose — with Fourth Brother’s temperament he’d have gone mad long ago if he had… It was a draw, neither able to do a thing about the other. Among people his own age Fourth Brother has never lost to anyone, and that year Lingyun was only sixteen, three months younger than him. So Fourth Brother took that bout as an enormous humiliation, and he’s held onto it ever since.”

“How is it I never knew?” Ye Tianxie asked. From what he knew of Murong Qiushui, resenting a draw to that degree wasn’t strange in the least — it was as normal as normal could be. His talent was as astonishing as his appearance, and it had meant he had never lost to anyone younger than himself. Fighting Cloud-Piercing Sword to a draw was no small blow to him.

Murong Qiushui pulled his neck in and said sheepishly, “A thing so shameful it would make the very stars too embarrassed to come out — how could I have the face to tell Second Brother…”

Zuo Pojun’s gooseflesh scattered all over the ground. And back then Murong Qiushui had also said to him, in complete seriousness, “Dear Third Brother, if you dare let Second Brother find out, oh-ho-ho-ho-ho…” Thinking back on it, that coquettish laugh still made him shiver. But the more important reason was… three years ago, Ye Tianxie had still been submerged in the blow that had shattered him and nearly driven him mad, and had not yet climbed out of it.

Because she was the most important string in Ye Tianxie’s heart, and the most fragile. If that string snapped, it was enough to shake all of him.

“Let’s get back to this Lingyun,” Ye Tianxie said thoughtfully.

Zuo Pojun nodded. “In a certain sense, Lingyun’s existence is a secret, because he belongs to one of the three forbidden grounds on Huaxia soil.”

“Three forbidden grounds?” It was the first time he had heard the name from Zuo Pojun’s mouth. If even Zuo Pojun had never raised it in front of him before, then these so-called Three Forbidden Grounds were clearly nothing ordinary.

Zuo Pojun’s eyes flicked around them, then back at Su Feifei and Shattered Star-Heart behind them, and he lowered his voice in a tone at once careful and grave. “The Three Forbidden Grounds are three taboo families that even my old man won’t touch lightly. Every one of them has a long history, and having stood this long without falling, the foundation and depth they’ve accumulated are extremely powerful and frightening — powerful enough that even the highest authority in Huaxia doesn’t dare provoke them, let alone control them. All it can do is permit them to exist. One of them is the Ling family. And Lingyun is the eldest son of this generation of the Ling family, a genius with extraordinarily high talent.”

“Permit them to exist? Now there’s a phrase worth chewing on.” Ye Tianxie said it offhandedly.

Zuo Pojun shrugged and answered with a touch of helplessness, “You can’t blame my old man and my grandfather for that, or my grandfather’s father and grandfather before him. As the highest authority, what they carry isn’t responsibility for one or two people, or for a single family — they carry the stability of the whole of Huaxia, and they can’t permit any force to exist that could threaten Huaxia’s government. And those three taboo families have exactly that kind of strength… At the same time, how could the three of them fail to see it? So they allied a long time ago: to move against one is to move against all three, and if it ever really came to that, the consequences might be past imagining. Nobody dares run a terrible risk like that.”

“With the enormous military authority you hold, plus the strength of the Sanctuary, you still can’t handle a mere three families?” Ye Tianxie said flatly, eyes half-narrowed.

Zuo Pojun’s voice dropped lower still. He said slowly, “Second Brother, their strength absolutely exceeds anything you’re imagining. My old man does have the ability to wipe them out, but the price would be enormous, and the possibility of a rout is absolutely not zero… Everyone inside those three forbidden grounds is a terrifying monster. Second Brother, think about it — back then Lingyun was just a fifteen-year-old kid and he could fight Fourth Brother to a draw. How formidable must those old men be?!”

Ye Tianxie: “……”

“His sword is faster than a bullet,” Murong Qiushui added, unhurried.

“Second Brother, the term ‘ancient martial house’ can’t be unfamiliar to you. In antiquity, before firearms, Huaxia’s ancient martial arts flourished, and there were countless ancient martial houses great and small. A thousand years on, those that remain are as rare as phoenix feathers. But not one that survived that long river of history is simple. The man they call the ‘Heaven-Blade Netherking,’ Sha Wujin, is next in line of the house acknowledged as Huaxia’s strongest ancient martial family, and his talent with the blade is extraordinarily high… But only a limited number of people know that the truly strongest ancient martial house isn’t the Ming family… it’s the Ling family!!” Zuo Pojun said gravely. Very few people in all of Huaxia knew what he had just said.

“Your Zuo family permits these three families to exist, and yet there’s hardly a rumor of them in the world. It seems your elders have signed some interesting agreement with them.” Ye Tianxie thought for a moment, then said it.

Zuo Pojun gave Ye Tianxie a strange look and nodded almost reflexively. “Second Brother, you even guessed that… That’s right. Roughly a hundred years ago my predecessors signed an agreement with them. The gist of it was that the Huaxia government would permit their existence and wouldn’t interfere with it. But they must never extend their claws into the world of ordinary people… Put that way, it’s also a restraint on their growth, confining them to a region belonging to nobody but themselves. My Zuo family may not dare disturb them lightly, but naturally they aren’t arrogant enough to imagine they could stand against the entire Huaxia government. So in a hundred years, neither side has ever broken that agreement.”

(End of Chapter 165)