6.11

Dangling in the air, Chen Yu lazily savored the experience of playing a white baby rabbit caught by a hawk for a bit until they reached the edge of the gaping chasm. The instant they were within range of the precipice, however, he burst into motion, flipping his legs up and kicking off Wenren ShiShi's stomach in order to disrupt her balance, then gripping her wrist to pull the girl down with him, flashing a grin at that terrified face. It was a bit troublesome to take her along, but this Shadow Abyss was supposed to be quite deep, he might need a cushion for when he arrived at the bottom.

Yes, while the formation of this new fissure was an alarming phenomenon for other cultivators, Chen Yu had long expected this development, since it was this same ravine that had provided the protagonist with rare treasures in the plot. Of course, it'd been the original owner of this body who had given Zhuo Biming the opportunity by shoving him down.

Thus, as soon as Chen Yu had heard where the stampede had originated, he'd guessed what had been driving the demonic animals crazy and had intended to visit this Shadow Abyss. The sole stumbling block had been that the original owner would've avoided such risks like the plague, so it could be said that Wenren ShiShi had served her primary purpose quite well by providing a decent cover story.

As for whether she could survive her second task, well...based on the fact that there was only the whoosh of air speeding by in his ears without a single sound from the animals that must have dropped into the gap earlier, it seemed that the drop was usually fatal, but he certainly wished her good luck as he casually turned in midair to position her body to receive the impact when they landed. The descent was surprisingly long and fending off Wenren ShiShi's weak struggles scarcely merited any of his attention, so that various idle thoughts swept past Chen Yu's mind during the boring minutes, such as how this little girl had imagined that she would be able to justify pushing a fellow disciple to his death.

Somewhat curious when he discovered that he himself couldn't devise a good explanation, he asked her, much to his regret. Apparently, his question had triggered her blubbering switch, she began to emit horrified wails about how sly Ning He was to trick her into this, how he had tainted her immortal shifu, how her shifu must hate her now, so on and so forth, until Chen Yu shut her up with a slap.

Despite having long grasped how delusional the girl was, Chen Yu still raised his brow amusedly at her rant. What 'tainted her shifu,' if anything, this young master was the one being corrupted by him, all right? Besides, what did she mean Moqi Baihui would hate her 'now,' when he'd never particularly liked her to begin with? Tsk, this 'fairy' was another demonstration of how dangerous brain holes were huh. At that deduction, he briefly wondered, hm, which would be bigger, hers or his lover's?

Finally, however, he could no longer put off the memory of the twins' panicked expressions as he'd tumbled down and the way they'd simultaneously shouted "Baby!" as they'd jumped after him without hesitation.

Testing their reaction to a situation in which he appeared to be in critical danger had been his last resort, his ultimate struggle against the answer that every other piece of evidence was pointing toward. Unfortunately, the result had shattered his hopes: with that identical hypersensitivity to him being in danger and that damn nickname that they'd spouted out of the blue, he had to acknowledge that his lover had apparently been split into two in this world.

To have to handle one vinegar tank was difficult enough, how much effort would it take to juggle two of them? Exhausted at the mere idea, he gazed up at the two figures desperately diving toward him and sighed. Was that really what his life would become?

In a more theoretical vein, what had caused such a disaster to take place, what could have possibly severed a soul that was strong enough to follow him through each world? An inkling of what might have happened tickled the edges of his mind, but even when the feeling of Wenren ShiShi's bones crunching under his feet notified him of his landing, the impression remained vague.

In any case, since he had admitted in his heart that, no matter how much he wished it was otherwise, both of the Moqi brothers were the man he'd been searching for, he resolved to hurry through his self-appointed task of looting the realm an ancient cultivator had created underground to hide his precious artifacts. Of course, he could have had the twins accompany him, but he wanted to put off their next encounter for a bit. After all, he knew best how tiresomely insane his favorite man could become after a scare.

Having decided not to dawdle, Chen Yu swiftly stepped off the girl's broken body and squeezed blood from the still-fresh cut she'd sliced on his hand some hours ago onto the nondescript boulder that had been specifically detailed in the story as the keystone of the gate and, once the slab shifted with a grinding noise to reveal a marble passageway, Chen Yu erased his tracks and dashed inside without a backward glance.

He was certain that, lacking a supernatural cheat like the protagonist halo or Chen Yu's knowledge of the plot, even the almighty peak masters wouldn't be able to unearth the entry method. Moreover, the tracking features they'd embedded in his necklace wouldn't work in this distinct dimension which operated by the creator cultivator's rules, so they wouldn't suspect his familiarity with this setting.

The important point was that if the Moqi brothers arrived while he was gone, they'd have to wait around or bother Wenren ShiShi for some time, maybe they'd cool off in the interim.

As it happened, it was merely a short while after he left that the two men plummeted onto the ground of the abyss and frantically hunted around for him, their expressions etched with guilt and fear. This was all their fault, if only they hadn't been wasting time arguing with each other, they would've been able to protect their shizhi. Instead, he'd been harmed under their watch twice now. When they found him, they'd make sure to listen to whatever he said, whoever he picked would stay with him and the other would guard him secretly. Naturally, they glanced at each other, since neither of them could really give up so easily, even if it provoked their jealousy, the best compromise would be if he could accept both of them...

Contrary to their wishful thinking, however, they couldn't detect a single trace of him despite their thorough investigation, so that they eventually narrowed their eyes again at the crumpled body which Moqi Lirong had temporarily staked to the floor by shoving his sword through the stomach. From the odd angles at which her limbs were arranged, there hadn't seemed to be a need to worry about the girl escaping, but the brothers couldn't afford to allow this witness to escape before they'd extracted every drop of information from her, then punished her for bringing Ning He here.

For this purpose, Moqi Baihui twisted the blade in the girl's abdomen to force her to focus and spat out questions at her, his tone laced with fury so that, shocked at the utter indifference on those noble features, Wenren ShiShi shed wordless tears.

She was his disciple, she'd done this for him, why couldn't he see how much better his life would be without that wretch? How could he hurt her for such trash? No, even if her shifu killed her, she would save him from that filthy boy, she wouldn't tell him where he'd gone.

And she remained stubborn to the end, even Moqi Lirong's techniques simply made her attempt to bite off her tongue. Fed up with the girl's nonsense, the twins eventually concluded that it was a waste of time to torture her, they abandoned her to whatever fate awaited a crippled, now-mundane cultivator and examined their surroundings again instead.

Meanwhile, outside the chasm, the crowd of teenagers that had arrived at last had been stunned into silence. Even with just the glow from the moon that had risen during their flight here, they could distinctly discern the awe-inspiring, huge mounds of demonic beast corpses, which they initially believed to be proof of how powerful the Moqi leaders were.

This momentary misconception was possible because, due to the peak masters' reckless speed, none of them except for the Ten Stems Hall's fairy had been able to keep up, their fastest member had barely made it onto the scene when Ning He and the fairy had been slipping over the edge of the precipice.

Nonetheless, this youth could testify that the Moqi leaders had hardly had time to slay a few piles of these remains, in reality, it was the average talent they'd always disdained who had destroyed so many animals. Although at first the other disciples merely snorted incredulously at that claim, a closer inspection of the carcasses indicated that almost all of them had been killed with a single, concentrated blaze of fire each. And since Master Moqi Baihui's elemental affinity was ice and Master Moqi Lirong's lightning, that left...Ning He as the fire user...

Yet even as they were filled with admiration once they'd wrapped their minds around the boy's shocking, hidden abilities, they flushed as they recalled how they'd scoffed at his outlandish boasts in the inn. Clearly, he really was more than capable of destroying a tiny Liu An City if he could single-handedly crush the stampede that had ravaged a whole slew of towns, and they'd mocked him for being deranged and pretentious. Comprehending which side had been the truly deranged party, their faces burned as if they'd been hit with some flames themselves.

Unaware of these brats' shame, Chen Yu spent a few days efficiently passing through the traps set up in the secret passages and gathering the treasures without rest, then he emerged a fair distance away from the place where he'd first landed. He hadn't rested well in this time due to his concern over the twins, so rather than troubling himself with evaluating his spoils, he curled up to sleep in an alcove of the cliff wall, confident that with his collar working again, the Moqi brothers would find him promptly. As he nodded off, his last peaceful deliberation was whether he should refer to his lover in the plural now.

Chen Yu's prediction was exactly right, the unprecedentedly haggard peak masters had been compulsively checking the feedback from his necklace and, as soon as they finally glimpsed a hint, they sprinted over and carried their dozing shizhi out of the hard nook to the softest ground they could find.

At last, lying on either side of him, the two men clasped his body silently with trembling arms for a long time, their eyes reddening in relief. The strangely vivid visions of this boy leaving them behind with only a cold shell to hold onto had been haunting both of them every minute since his disappearance, even now they couldn't calm down unless they constantly reaffirmed that he was alive.

Suddenly, however, Moqi Baihui and Moqi Lirong realized how selfish they'd been. The former had been indulging himself in pressing his lips against the youth's beating pulse in his neck and the latter wasn't much better, he'd been nibbling on the fluttering veins in his thin wrist, when all this time they should have been looking after their shizhi.

Thus, certain that Ning He's priority when he woke up would be cleanliness, they removed his slightly rumpled robes and carefully wiped him down, only to find themselves in a dilemma. While the stiffened points on the boy's chest indicated that he'd gotten cold from his skin being exposed to the night air and they naturally couldn't let their tender shizhi suffer such hardship, there really wasn't anything they could use to warm him in this wilderness.

With their pure hearts overflowing with altruism, they therefore stripped down to share their body heat instead. Nor did they stingily stop there; on one side, Moqi Baihui leaned over to share his melting breath through Ning He's mouth, and on the other, Moqi Lirong wound his long legs around the boy's slender limbs and stroked his calloused, heated fingers across every inch of the youth's torso.

Every step was reasonably defensible, every expression exactly proper, but on the side, their true intentions were revealed by the way they had each furtively wrapped one of Ning He's hands around their lengths, guiding it slowly over themselves.

Actually, Chen Yu had woken up the moment he'd been lifted out of his niche, he simply hadn't warded off their touches because he'd sensed their remaining tension from witnessing his 'crisis.' In contrast, he currently couldn't bring himself to snatch his hands back due to the despair that was dragging him down. He'd hoped that since his lover had been split, his size would've also been proportionally divided, but evidently, that was yet another wish that would go unrealized—from the weight he could feel, the twins were identically extraordinary in this aspect as well.

And misfortunes never come singly, he'd twitched minutely in his desire to escape the instant he'd registered the future that awaited him, thereby alerting both of the men that he was conscious. As usual, it was Moqi Baihui who spoke, he coaxed in his deep voice, "Shizhi, if you're awake, come greet us."

Having been caught, Chen Yu no longer pretended, he flipped his gaze from one of his hands to the other then opened his eyes wide to display all the confusion he could dig up as inwardly, he cursed, you perverts seem to be saluting me just fine, how much more intimately can I greet you? But on the surface, he blushed and stuttered, "Sh-shishu, what's going on?"

With a slightly apologetic face, Moqi Baihui stroked the boy's hair and gently kissed the pouting lips which looked as succulent as if sweet juice would burst out if they were poked, explaining, "Shizhi, when we almost lost you, we realized how silly we were to be holding back so we'll tell you honestly now. And you have to believe that your shishu are very sincere towards you, neither of us are trying to take advantage. It's only that...the relationship we want to have with you is one that's closer than a regular relationship between shishu and shizhi, we want to be the people closest to you, to take care of you and give you the best of everything, to provide all the pleasures in life. Do you understand?"

Chen Yu nearly gave into the man's emotional voice, until he was brought back to his senses by the steadfast progress of Moqi Lirong's hand along his abdomen. Not only had the black twin been distracted during that supposedly heartfelt speech, but also, upon review, the white twin had continued to use this body's hand to stroke himself as he'd been spouting those flowery words. Hng, these perverts, can't even pause for a moment to seduce me properly ah?

Irritated, he tilted his chin up, then tried to wriggle away, shouting, "I don't want to! That girl who pushed me accused me of tainting you, this young master refuses to act so shamefully!"