“Next time… don’t push yourself so hard.” Xu Ziyan gently rubbed Zirong’s head as he spoke.
Xu Zirong was about to smile reassuringly when a realization struck him. His expression instantly sharpened.
Xu Ziyan’s hand stiffened. Xu Zirong immediately reined in his aura, and his features softened again.
“Brother knows?”
“Mm.” Xu Ziyan felt inexplicably guilty.
“And Brother doesn’t mind?”
“Ahem… A cultivation method is only a cultivation method. Whether it’s evil depends entirely on the person using it.”
“Mm, I understand.” Xu Zirong lowered his eyes, his thick lashes hiding the wild delight within them.
Believing Xu Zirong must be feeling vulnerable, Xu Ziyan could not resist drawing him into an embrace. He consoled him gently, “It’s all right. I won’t pry into your secrets, Zirong, but you have to promise me one thing: never indiscriminately kill the innocent.”
Xu Zirong slowly raised his head. His bright eyes glittered like stars, and a gentle smile spread across his face. “I swear to Brother that I will never indiscriminately kill the ‘innocent.’” He emphasized the word innocent, as though making a solemn promise.
Xu Ziyan breathed a sigh of relief. His younger brother’s character was trustworthy after all. Apart from the rather outrageous matter of developing feelings for his own elder brother, Zirong was a good child.
Xu Ziyan was in an excellent mood, and Xu Zirong was no less pleased.
Never indiscriminately killing the innocent was a remarkably flexible rule. Xu Zirong was not inherently bloodthirsty, so keeping such a promise was easy enough.
As for those he had already placed on his list of people to kill, they were certainly not ‘innocent.’ Take Bai Hua of Tianyu Sect: merely having coveted his brother was proof enough that Bai Hua did not deserve that designation.
Jiang Ying turned his face away silently. His master’s elder brother was so foolish it was painful to witness. Then again, perhaps that was for the best. With his master’s vindictive nature, if his brother were too perceptive and calculating, their relationship might never end well.
Consider Jiang Ying and Fang Tianrui. If Fang Tianrui had not been so honest and inflexible, he might never have attracted the attention of both the refined and wicked Jiang Ying.
Holding the person in his arms tightly, Jiang Ying smiled bitterly. His wicked counterpart had acted without considering the consequences, leaving the refined Jiang Ying to clean up the mess. Fang Tianrui was still unconscious, but once he awakened, how was Jiang Ying supposed to explain what had happened, much less the fact that he had used his superior cultivation to overcome Fang Tianrui’s resistance and force a paired-cultivation blood pact upon him?
At least, in this dangerous environment, Fang Tianrui had nowhere to go even if he wanted to avoid him. Jiang Ying could use the time to try to repair their relationship.
Thinking of it that way, Jiang Ying suddenly felt that being dragged into this almost sealed-off Demonic Realm might not be such a bad thing after all.
Perhaps because they were trapped somewhere death might come at any moment, Xu Ziyan was exceptionally forgiving toward Xu Zirong. He displayed a remarkable degree of acceptance both of Zirong’s practice of the Blood Sea Heart Scripture and of his feelings toward him.
The circumstances undoubtedly played a part, but Xu Zirong was pleased nonetheless.
He even shared Jiang Ying’s view that being brought here by Patriarch Bu had been a stroke of luck. In the outside world, once his brother learned of his feelings, he might have fled far away.
Here, however, any one of the four who ventured off alone would almost certainly die. His brother had nowhere to go and could only remain by his side.
Xu Zirong was in a good mood, which made him even gentler toward his brother. Around the rocky cave where they lived, he constructed layer after layer of defensive formations. In just a few days, he turned their shelter into a sturdy defensive position.
Xu Ziyan knew nothing of Demonic Realms, but Xu Zirong understood them well. Because a stranger’s guidance talisman had pulled them in by force, and that talisman was now gone, their only route out was through a junction connecting the Demonic Realm to another domain.
Every Demonic Realm possessed several such junctions, but their locations followed no discernible pattern. Finding one would depend on luck.
Even the weakest beasts in this Demonic Realm had Meridian Condensation cultivation. If the Xu brothers wanted to search it extensively for an exit, they would need much greater strength.
Both brothers had already reached late Foundation Establishment. With enough effort, they might break through to Meridian Condensation. Only at that level, combined with their combat ability far above cultivators of equivalent rank, would they stand a reasonable chance of protecting themselves here.
After discussing the matter, the three cultivators quickly settled on a plan. Increasing their strength became the top priority, and they began hunting the Demonic Realm’s beasts relentlessly.
Since waking, Fang Tianrui had remained unusually silent. He had not even asked why he had ended up in such a dangerous place.
Xu Ziyan felt it was not his place to interfere between those two, and Xu Zirong did not care at all. Once Fang Tianrui’s health had recovered, Xu Zirong sent him and Jiang Ying out without hesitation.
Of course, Xu Zirong could not simply send his retainer out to die. So when Jiang Ying sensibly dug a separate cave for himself, Xu Zirong supplied the pair with plenty of defensive formations.
Being alone with Xu Zirong left Xu Ziyan under tremendous pressure. He had tried to downplay the awkward matter between them, but Xu Zirong clearly had no intention of letting him bury his head in the sand.
The two came and went together, but when Xu Zirong attempted to share his sleeping arrangements again, Xu Ziyan firmly refused.
Ridiculous! It had been one thing when he was oblivious. Now that he knew Zirong had feelings for him, sharing a bed would be an absurd test of both their self-control.
Especially Xu Ziyan, who was feeling thoroughly guilty. He still hadn’t sorted out the awkward incident a couple of days ago where his younger brother had accidentally gotten him off. If Xu Zirong did that to him one more time, he figured his remaining sense of propriety would completely shatter.
Faced with Xu Ziyan’s firm refusal, Xu Zirong didn’t get angry. He also didn’t want to put too much pressure on his older brother. Besides… now that things had already been brought out into the open, he wasn’t sure he could still control himself and keep from pinning his brother down.
He still remembered that his brother had said some things must wait until adulthood. With only two months left, he believed he could be patient, provided his brother did not deliberately test his resolve.
Perhaps because his brother had discovered the Blood Sea Heart Scripture, Xu Zirong no longer bothered using blood vines to disguise his blood-based cultivation methods when they hunted.
No matter how thoroughly the blood vines were integrated with the Blood Sea Heart Scripture, they still required seeds as a medium. In this fire-aspected world with so little water, wood-based cultivation methods were severely suppressed, weakening Xu Zirong considerably.
Once he abandoned blood vines as a conduit, however, the Blood Sea Heart Scripture displayed astonishing offensive power.
Take the Fire-Rock Lizard that had originally chased them. Xu Ziyan and Xu Zirong together had failed to kill one quickly, but when Xu Zirong attacked freely, he drained a Fire-Rock Lizard into a desiccated corpse in a matter of breaths.
Looking at the mummified lizard, Xu Ziyan’s eye twitched. He had once considered the body he had transmigrated into exceptionally talented, the sort of genius found only rarely. But now? What kind of genius was that? At the same cultivation level, Zirong was more than a little stronger. Xu Ziyan suddenly felt a deep sense of crisis.
More troublingly, with time the tenderness in Zirong’s eyes had gradually become a fierce possessiveness. Xu Ziyan might once have attributed it to a child’s desire to monopolize his elder brother, but now that he understood Zirong’s feelings, he was losing confidence in his plan to introduce him to the charms of female cultivators.
Even with his dreadful emotional intelligence, Xu Ziyan knew that if one wished to halt a growing attachment, the best time was at its earliest stage. His own obliviousness had made him miss that chance. By the time he could introduce Zirong to a pretty female cultivator, Zirong’s feelings might have grown into an enormous tree beyond his power to uproot.
_(：з」∠)_ I’m too exhausted for love. What do I do…?
“Brother.” A gentle voice sounded behind him. Xu Ziyan felt his scalp tighten and turned around stiffly.
Zirong no longer concealed his feelings for his elder brother. As the saying went, shamelessness was an unbeatable weapon, and Xu Ziyan was utterly helpless against this approach.
If Xu Ziyan responded coldly, Zirong looked hurt, which invariably triggered years of habit and made Xu Ziyan rush over to comfort him. Afterward he often wanted to slap himself, but the habit was ingrained and difficult to change.
If he was especially warm instead, Xu Ziyan felt even worse. Knowing his own younger brother had feelings for him, how could he keep treating Zirong so affectionately? Was he trying to make the other man fall even deeper?
Helpless whichever way he turned, Xu Ziyan was trapped in a dilemma.
On one hand, he believed he should not accept Zirong’s feelings. On the other, he could not bring himself to reject him cruelly.
Forget it… I’ll just put it off. In a place like this, there’s no guarantee we’ll even survive long enough to leave the Demonic Realm. What else can I do?
Having dug yet another convenient hole for himself to hide in, Xu Ziyan resumed his ostrich act. Perhaps he realized deep down that Zirong was not the sort to change his mind after a few words, and so he stopped wasting his breath.
A full month passed while they hunted all sorts of ‘low-tier’ beasts with near-frenzied intensity. Low-tier was relative, of course. They could only hunt beasts at early Meridian Condensation.
By absorbing demonic beast cores and cultivating amid the abundant spiritual energy of the Demonic Realm, the brothers accumulated enough spiritual power over the month to reach the peak of Foundation Establishment. Both were on the verge of breaking through.
Jiang Ying’s progress had been somewhat slowed by caring for Fang Tianrui, but he too was approaching late Foundation Establishment.
Fang Tianrui, however, had made the greatest progress. The core of a Meridian Condensation beast was far beyond a potent tonic for someone at his level. Yet he gritted his teeth and absorbed one, sacrificing part of his meridians in the process to achieve Foundation Establishment.
He concealed his attempted breakthrough from Jiang Ying. When Jiang Ying returned and found him collapsed on the ground, coughing blood, he was frightened nearly out of his wits.