He turned to look and saw that although Hua Cheng still wore the appearance of a clean-cut young man, his eyes were blazing with rage.
Hua Cheng was always smiling, but Xie Lian knew that his true emotions were always hidden deep within. Xie Lian had never seen such violent, blatant fury in his eyes. He followed the line of Hua Cheng’s sight, and in the next moment, he felt his own breath hitch.
Before that giant, extravagant chair knelt a person.
Or so it seemed, but upon a closer look, it was actually a life-sized stone statue of someone. It was a rather interesting statue: sculpted in a kneeling position, its back facing him, its head downcast. It was the very picture of a “homeless stray dog.” One had to assume that the only purpose of making such a statue was to humiliate its subject.
And Xie Lian didn’t need to turn the statue around to know that its face must be exactly the same as his own.
Generally, people didn’t know what their own backs looked like, but Xie Lian was different. He was more than familiar with how his own back looked.
When the Kingdom of Xianle first fell, to relieve themselves of anger, the people burned down his eight thousand crown prince temples and desecrated all of his statues, stole the gems on their swords and cleaned their attire of gold. Yet after all that, the rage continued to burn, and so they came up with a new idea: building kneeling statues like this one.
The crown prince, once so highly venerated and worshipped, was sculpted into the form of one kneeling down and begging for forgiveness. These statues were placed in crowded areas of town so everyone was free to spit at or kick them when they passed and, in doing so, rid themselves of misfortune. Worse, some even had him sculpted prostrating and used the statue directly as a threshold so that tens of thousands would walk all over it. In the first ten or twenty years after the Kingdom of Xianle fell, those statues were a common sight in many cities and towns. And so how could Xie Lian not recognize his own back?
Just then, the voice of a young man said, “That mangy little cur Pei Xiu had to cling to the leg of that manwhore dog Pei just to ascend in such a pitiful way, so who does he think he is? He’s nothing more than an exiled stray right now. Ruining my plans… Once I’m through with him, even after the winds dry up his corpse, no one will dare go to collect it!”
Before the person himself had even appeared, they could already hear his insults. Xie Lian gazed over and saw a figure clad in green strut into the cave. Due to reasons not worth mentioning, Xie Lian couldn’t help but look at the top of his head first, and he was actually kind of disappointed to see that the figure only had a mask on and no light above his head. A bunch of little ghosts dressed in green crowded around this green-clad man, and he stood there surrounded by a circle of green light. This had to be one of the Ghost Realm’s Four Calamities: the Green Ghost, Qi Rong.
Ever since Nan Feng had first mentioned the name, Xie Lian had kept it in the back of his mind, wondering if this Qi Rong was the same Qi Rong he knew. However, there was an unspoken rule that, demon or ghost, one was to hide their real name and bury their past life. Because of this, he didn’t think they were the same person, only that the fake name had coincided with the real one. But from the looks of things, he was more than certain that this was the Qi Rong he remembered. How could there be a second Qi Rong who was obsessed with the statue of the kneeling crown prince? And why would his voice sound so familiar?
The little green ghosts that surrounded Qi Rong were loudly proclaiming him king and talking all at the same time. Xie Lian figured out some of what had transpired from their chatter. It seemed that when Qi Rong sent a few of his henchmen to Ghost City, they failed to cause any havoc and were decimated by Hua Cheng. He then regrouped and prepared to fight again, but before the second round had even started, the henchmen bumped into the exiled Pei Xiu on the road. Although exiled in the Mortal Realm, Pei Xiu nevertheless was once a heavenly official and also had nothing better to do—thus, when those henchmen bumped into him, he thought he might as well clean them up. And so they were decimated once again.
The moment Qi Rong received the news of how many henchmen he’d lost in such a short time, he was furious and started cursing nonstop.
“Like ancestor, like descendant—that damned manwhore Pei Ming probably has sores all over his crotch. I should chop off both his and Pei Xiu’s rotten dicks and hang them at their temples, then whoever worships them will bleed pus with every step just like them!”
Xie Lian really had to suppress the urge to cover his ears. When Feng Xin got upset, his curses were the same, also too vulgar for the ears; but as much as he swore, it was obvious that his were only words of temporary anger with no real ill intent. Qi Rong’s curses were different—their targets could have no doubt that he truly wanted to condemn them to die as crudely as his curses, and he was wholly unafraid to take cheap shots, thoroughly crass and obscene.