The middle-aged scholar stared at Yue Yang.
A stare like a sword.
Straight into the heart.
Yue Yang, for his part, was perfectly unbothered. He drank without a care in the world, gnawing at a chicken wing, treating the middle-aged scholar as though he were not there. If Sea Fatty and the rest had been around, Yue Yang — comfortable as anything with food and drink in front of him — might well have made up some little ditty on the spot about how much he loved chicken wings and sung it for everybody.
“I am a traitor to the Sky Tower. And whose doing was that?” The middle-aged scholar’s eyes stayed fixed on him, and the question came out with an edge on it.
“Whoever it was, it wasn’t me!” Who knows what happened ten thousand years ago. Not my business, not my problem, and Yue Yang could not have cared less.
“So. Having been wronged, I come back here today to collect what is fair, and to collect the things that were mine to begin with.” The middle-aged scholar’s anger vanished all at once and his eyes went cool and reasonable again — though the hatred buried deep underneath, and the wish for revenge, inevitably showed through. He was not hiding it anymore. Standing there, he felt like an avenger with every right on his side.
“The Sky Tower is mine now. Whoever you are, whatever you once did, you have no standing to take one thing out of it. Not one grain of sand.” Yue Yang laid his cards face up. Whatever happened before is your own affair. Right now it is this young master’s word that counts, and things go by my rules — or else we are enemies until one of us is dead.
“The Sky Tower is not yours. Even if it is in the future, it is not now, and since it is not now, the future is not certain either.” The middle-aged scholar smiled coldly. “I have strength enough to take back what is mine, and until I have taken back all of it, none of this is any business of yours, junior!”
“Now you’re talking!” Yue Yang clapped his hands and praised him loudly. “You’re the villain — how can you be sitting here sniveling! You have to show your real face!”
As far as Yue Yang was concerned, everything the middle-aged scholar had just said and done was off.
You’re the bad guy. Where’s your self-awareness?
The thing has to be vicious. Savage.
Weeping about your bitter grievances is what dirt-poor farmers do with three mountains sitting on their backs. Is it what a big boss does, a man who wipes out a stretch of heaven and earth when the mood takes him and drops a thousand heads with a wave of one hand? If a big boss like you carries on this way, how the heck is anybody else supposed to live? Where are the grassroots nobodies supposed to go and cry after this? You’ve taken every argument there is, and now there’s nowhere left to cry from either. Where the heck is the justice in that?
The middle-aged scholar looked coldly at Yue Yang, wearing the expression of a man looking at a corpse.
Yue Yang gave a small, frightened little shrug.
Please.
Set aside the worry in Fourth Mother’s eyes, and Her Majesty’s temper, and Shuang’er’s wheedling, and big sister Yu’s tears; set aside Princess Qianqian’s soft fists and Wuxia’s scolding; set aside the million-step ultra-difficulty challenges the Supreme sets and the training assignments the Sword Spirit big sister makes ultra-ultra-ultra-difficult by pointing one finger anywhere she likes — set all that aside, and what exactly does the third young master have to be scared of?
Your old man here grew up on being scared, all right!
Don’t go thinking that because this young master is afraid of a lot of things he’s easy to push around!
This young master has never in his life been afraid of a man, let alone a traitor to the Sky Tower who went old years ago and still runs around dressing young! So the transmigrator was perfectly relaxed about the middle-aged scholar’s cold stare.
“If you’d kept it down even a little, I wouldn’t have called you out on it — first because it wastes my breath, and second because peeling a man’s face off does real damage to his self-respect, and a model student like me, who loves peace and respects his elders, lets a few things slide.” Yue Yang tossed the chicken bone aside and wiped his greasy hands casually on his clothes. “But a man shouldn’t be too pleased with himself… Doing what you just did, playing the pitiful one to con sympathy out of people — bad intentions I could let go, but you actually expect me to buy it. Sister of mine, is my intelligence really that low? Do I look like a man who is that easy to fool?”
Yue Yang came very close to writing CLEVER on his own forehead, to prove he was a good child with top marks in every category there was.
As for the middle-aged scholar’s little performance of time running backward.
He had exactly one word for it: advertising.
What is advertising?
Put bluntly and not very politely, advertising is peddling fake medicine.
Advertising is having one thing and claiming a hundred — having one thing and claiming a thousand, ten thousand. You watch it and that’s fine. But if you actually believe it, you’re an idiot with a hole in your head.
Yue Yang had understood what advertising was by the age of eight, before he ever transmigrated. And now a few scenes of time running backward were supposed to make him believe that ‘Dongfang’ — a Grand Hall Master who could not hack it in the Sky Tower and went over to the Central Divine Hall and turned traitor without a backward glance — was a poor wretch deserving of sympathy. What the heck were the odds of that?
The odds were exactly zero.
Zero, and nothing else.
Yue Yang’s own view of it was this: never mind that this young master is a complete outsider with nothing at stake. Even if this young master were your father, ‘Dongfang,’ and you were my son, I would not swallow that so easily. And as it happens I am not your father. I am the mortal enemy of a Sky Tower traitor.
Never mind actually believing it. Half a second of entertaining the thought would probably earn him a slap from the Supreme, the kind you give a piece of iron that refuses to become steel.
Her Majesty might well come charging out of her palace and boot him past the ninth heaven on top of that.
“I wouldn’t claim to be so cunning I’m near-demonic, but I really am not the moron you take me for.” Yue Yang’s expression was all modesty and his words were all sincerity, and he turned that honest face on the middle-aged scholar. “Before I peel your face off, let me give you my conclusion first. Ten thousand years ago, was everybody in the Sky Tower blind? They weren’t, were they? Some of them may have had eyes and seen nothing, but surely not all of them. And even if every single person in the Sky Tower had gone blind — what about the Sky Tower’s own will? That can’t have gone blind too, can it? So why did the people of the Sky Tower, and the will of the Sky Tower, choose me, who gave a thousand times less than you, instead of choosing you — the poor wretch who supposedly gave a thousand times more, who bled and wept? I think the reason is very simple. Heaven’s eyes were not blind! Ten thousand years ago the people of the Sky Tower and the will of the Sky Tower both made the most correct choice available to them, which was not to choose you, Best Actor!”
“Best Actor?” The middle-aged scholar did not quite follow this entirely new expression. He could dimly make out what it meant, but he could not pin it down.
“That’s right. Best Actor — that’s you.” Yue Yang was certain about it.
“You are saying I lied?” The middle-aged scholar laughed out loud, and the laugh stopped short, and he looked into Yue Yang’s eyes with contempt. “A moment ago you admitted with your own mouth that everything I replayed was real. And now, in the space of a breath, you say I lied?”
“Real scenes can lie too!” Yue Yang called it out without the least courtesy. “There are a great many things where what the eye sees is not the most real thing there is. The eye is the easiest thing in the world to deceive. Only the clearest heart is hard to blind! Watching the scenes you replayed, I was not moved in the slightest, and that proves one thing: however real your scenes were, they were false, because while it was running you used those scenes to cover up that hypocrite’s heart of yours!”
“What did you say?” The middle-aged scholar’s face went cold as winter.
“Ah — let me put it another way. That might fit better.” Yue Yang looked straight at the middle-aged scholar, and his gaze seemed to go directly into the other man’s heart. “On the surface you don’t care about fame or gain. Underneath, you have an enormous appetite for performing and a desperate craving to be praised. Every single thing you ever did, my guess is you were thinking something like this: ‘Come and look, come and look at my performance, see how brave I am, see how wise I am. Where would you find a genius as handsome and as humble as me? Everything in this world is in the palm of my hand. Commander of the three armies, the legions of the Demon Abyss — I play with all of them between my fingers. Come on, everybody, praise me! The moment I take the field, victory arrives. The moment I make my move, the whole Heavenly Realm shakes because of me!’ The reason you resent everyone is that you never collected enough flattery. The reason you want revenge on the Sky Tower is that nobody in the Sky Tower knew how to appreciate your peculiar tastes! Whereas the Central Divine Hall is not short of flatterers — so you do very well over there, you live a very happy life, and people even call you the Central Divine Hall’s foremost sage. Listen to that. What a comfortable bit of flattery that is! I’m guessing you were pleased to death. That flattery just about floated you off the ground. And if somebody tactless called you the Heavenly Realm’s foremost sage instead, you’d be furious — not low-key enough, and low-key posturing is what those peculiar tastes of yours require! Have I got any of it wrong, Senior Dongfang, the Sky Tower’s foremost traitor, the Central Divine Hall’s foremost sage, and the Heavenly Realm’s foremost lover of flattery?”
The middle-aged scholar’s face went iron gray.
He had never in his life been that angry.
The vicious words out of this barely weaned junior standing in front of him cut worse than arrows and drove worse than spears, and they ripped him open inside with a swagger that knew no limit at all.
Yue Yang, for his part, had no idea at all that he was about to make a man die of rage, and went straight on to congratulate himself. “You ought to be grateful to me. In ten thousand years not one person has understood you. Only I know you love flattery! So at a stretch, that makes me the one friend who understands you, doesn’t it!”
“I understand you. Why do you want revenge on the Sky Tower, this home you supposedly bled and wept for? Because it galled you! You were that outstanding. You schemed your heart out for all those years, and not one person understood you, not one person flattered you. Everybody assumed you didn’t care about fame or gain. Everybody assumed flattery and honors were the things you liked least in all the world. Who would have guessed they were all wrong? They took the surface — the man who wants no fame and no profit, pure and elevated in character — and thought that was ‘Dongfang.’ How could they know you waited a good few hundred years and not one person came to your door to flatter you, not one person insulted your lofty moral character by offering you anything as vulgar as the post of commander of the three armies? They had it entirely wrong… And the result! Obvious enough. You could not stand a life without flattery any longer. You could not keep the act up any longer. So you turned around and went over to the Central Divine Hall — that kingdom of flattery — and became its foremost sage.” Yue Yang said it with total certainty. “A man like you, who threw away several hundred years — a thousand — and never collected one scrap of flattery. How could you not turn bitter? How could you not want revenge?”
“Have you said enough?” The middle-aged scholar was so angry his eyes had gone red.
“Just about. One last thing.” Yue Yang made the most of the time he had and tacked on one more. “You said a moment ago that you wanted to take back what was originally yours. I agree to it now. Go up to the Sky Tower’s sixth floor and I’ll send a hundred flatterers a day to flatter you — satisfaction guaranteed! And if you think a hundred is too few, if it isn’t being laid on thick enough for you, I can send more. A thousand, ten thousand, no problem. If the Sky Tower doesn’t have that many we’ll do our best to scrape them together and find some in the Heavenly Realm — flattery is a Central Divine Hall specialty, isn’t it? We’ll go and grab a few Central Divine Hall people. Don’t hold back on my account, Senior Dongfang. You’ve earned every bit of it!”
(End of Chapter 1245)