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By now, Xu Yuan was thoroughly used to the sight of elders beating up juniors. It was just how things had always gone for him. He had been playful by nature since birth, the kind of person who simply could not sit still, and in his previous life he had practically been beaten all the way from childhood to adulthood by his old man.
In elementary and middle school, he was always getting into trouble and fighting. In high school, he got into an early romance and the girl’s family came knocking at the door. By college, he had fallen in love with wilderness travel. Every time he went out on a trip, he would vanish for over a month and no one at school could find him. And every single time his old man caught him over one of those incidents, it ended in a brutal beating.
After enough of that, Xu Yuan got used to it. If he could not fight back, could he not at least hide? The world was so big. If he could not resist, could he not run?
Besides, whatever else happened, they were still father and son. Once his old man’s anger cooled off, Xu Yuan would say a few soft words, admit fault with a suitably sincere attitude, wait for his living expenses to come in, and then go right back to having fun.
But in this world, Xu Yuan had discovered that even running away was impossible. This nominal elder brother of his could literally hang him up and beat him. Quite literally… hang him up by the feet and beat him. So thoroughly that he could not even get a word out.
While Xu Yuan was lost in those thoughts, a sharp and resonant eagle cry suddenly rang beside his ear. Snapping back to himself, he looked around the still-unfamiliar room before him and gave a faint shake of the head.
After being beaten unconscious, this was the room he had woken up in. A faint incense drifted through the ancient, elegant chamber, and every furnishing inside was old-fashioned to the extreme.
Looking out through the wooden window beside the bed, Xu Yuan saw an endless stretch of blue sky, and also one enormous eagle wing, spanning a full hundred feet and then some.
Two days had passed since the beating. He was now aboard the airplane back to Stillwater. Unlike the steel behemoths of his previous life, this airplane was a living creature, a giant black eagle with a wingspan of over 200 feet.
On its broad back stood a lavish pavilion, carved beams and painted rafters and all. It was Xu Changge’s flying palace, though because Xu Yuan was far too weak, it had been temporarily lent to this youngest brother of his.
As for Xu Changge himself… that elder brother of his had a mountain of responsibilities. After hanging Xu Yuan up and whipping him senseless, he waited for him to wake, then left at once, carrying off those two massive python heads.
Xu Yuan guessed the man had likely rushed back to the Imperial Capital to report to their father. To save him, Xu Changge had already wasted far too much time here in the Myriad Ascents Mountain Range. At this particular moment, timing was critical. He had to return to the capital and support their father.
As the thought passed through his mind, the image of those two gigantic python heads flashed again before Xu Yuan’s eyes, and his expression gradually turned strange.
His thoughts drifted to Ji Fenghua, the female heroine Xu Changge had beheaded. She was a green-haired beauty with absolutely gorgeous character art, very stacked and very fair-skinned. But compared to mourning the death of yet another 2D waifu, what puzzled Xu Yuan more was his elder brother’s strength.
Ji Fenghua, as a fully mature Seven Life Python who had bloomed seven blood lotuses decades ago, was terrifyingly powerful. She was more than a few levels above Ji Qingyue, the serpent race’s Second Princess. And yet a figure like that had died just like this at Xu Changge’s hands.
It was not that Xu Yuan doubted Xu Changge’s strength. The problem was that among the many story branches in Azure Point, Ji Fenghua had fought Xu Changge once before. In the late stages of that particular storyline, the western demon kingdom crossed the hundred thousand mountains of the Myriad Ascents Mountain Range and invaded the Great Flame Empire.
Outside Stillwater, Xu Changge and Ji Fenghua fought a fierce battle. And that time, with no one interfering, Xu Changge lost by the narrowest of margins. A battered and bloodied Ji Fenghua transformed into a sky-reaching giant python and swallowed him whole, ending his life and snuffing out his Dao.
Anyone with eyes could tell that, at the time, there had barely been any gap in strength between the two of them. You could even say victory or defeat had been decided by a single thought.
But now, in reality, the result was this. Xu Changge had gone straight to Ji Fenghua’s lair and chopped her head off.
Taking the environment into account, taking into account how Xu Changge had returned earlier with barely any injuries, and taking into account that there had been other demons in the Ancient Abyss watching from the sidelines, his current strength should have been overwhelmingly above Ji Fenghua’s.
That completely story-breaking gap in power, so obviously at odds with the original plot, made Xu Yuan faintly uneasy.
Less than ten years had passed. Ji Fenghua did not have the player’s cheat-like leveling system, so even if she had gotten stronger, there was no way she could have improved that quickly.
More importantly, Xu Changge was also a genius through and through. If Ji Fenghua could become stronger, then Xu Changge naturally could as well. A special opportunity or stroke of fortune might narrow the gap between them, but there was no way it should ever have closed to the point where they stood as equals.
In that case… Xu Yuan’s thoughts paused slightly, and an almost absurd idea surfaced in his mind.
During the stretch of the story leading up to the Ancient Abyss invasion of the Great Flame Empire, his eldest brother’s strength had not increased. It had actually declined. Why? Xu Yuan could not understand it.
Even in Azure Point, there were many things the players, watching from their godlike vantage point, never learned.
Take Ran Qingmo, who had just separated from him. Xu Yuan had absolutely no idea how she had learned that the Chancellor intended to wipe out the Celeste Sword Sect.
At this point in the story, after all, only Xu Yuan’s father and a handful of his trusted subordinates were supposed to know.
When Xu Yuan had first played Azure Point, he assumed there must have been a mole among the Chancellor’s subordinates. After all, at that point only a handful of people knew about the matter. But as he cleared every ending in the game one by one, none of the Chancellor’s close confidants had ever been vindicated. Every last one of them had remained loyal to the final boss to the very end.
The developers had dug a hole and never bothered filling it in, dressing it up with a lofty excuse about leaving room for the players’ imagination.
Xu Yuan let out a faint sigh. Without enough information, any amount of speculation was pointless. He could only wait until later and look into it when the chance came. He did not let his thoughts keep wandering down that path. Instead, he slowly turned his gaze toward the bedside.
Before leaving, that eldest brother of his had casually tossed him more than a dozen bottles of pills. He had said they were for this useless little brother of his to recover from his injuries. He was to heal up quickly, so their father would not later blame him for hitting too hard.
Unlike the three supreme grade pills Xu Yuan had found in the cave dwelling, the kind where each jade bottle held only a single pill, these bottles each contained more than ten.
One bottle contained Green Forest Pills, which sped up the recovery of the soul and, for a period of time, enhanced the soul’s sensitivity to source qi.
Another contained Great Mountain Pills, a miraculous medicine for strengthening the meridians and reinforcing one’s foundation.
One more was the Meridian Guard Pills. Take one, and a thin membrane would form along the inner walls of the meridians, allowing the user to circulate their cultivation method nonstop for all 24 hours of the day without worrying about damaging them.
Also notably were the Soul Cleansing Pills. Just as the name implied, they tempered the soul.
Xu Changge had said these were for treating Xu Yuan’s injuries... And yes, technically, they could be used for recovery. However, calling them divine medicine for newcomers to cultivation would not be an exaggeration in the slightest. They practically covered every problem one might run into while cultivating. More importantly, none of these pills had any side effects.
In Azure Point’s alchemy system, most pills that helped a character cultivate would leave behind some kind of permanent debuff after consumption.
Soul Weakness, for example, lowered the player’s mana bar. Meridian Damage increased the experience needed to level up. Some barrier-breaking pills even caused irreversible harm to the internal organs, reducing the player’s maximum health outright.
A pill with no side effects only pointed to one possibility. The materials used to refine it were worth far more than the pill itself. In other words, it meant using rare mid-to-late-game materials to make items needed in the early stages of a character’s growth.
Xu Yuan stared silently at the dozen or so jade bottles for a long while. Then, for no reason at all, he suddenly felt the urge to go over and get himself brutally beaten again.
A moment later he fell silent, then shook his head with a laugh. When this eldest brother hit someone, he really did hit hard. But when it came to giving out good things, he was genuinely generous too.
