Chapter 3 The So-Called Spring and Autumn

Naturally, no one was going to bow down and worship Xue Mu over a single boast. The young woman only smiled faintly. "Developing the sect is no concern of yours, sir. But you'd suit the post of accountant very well. Chan'er, arrange a carriage for the gentleman and give him something for his injuries."

Xue Mu was speechless. So no one had treated his wounds at all—no wonder his whole body still ached. Come to think of it, they'd put him in her carriage purely so he could be questioned the moment he woke; if nothing useful came out of him, they'd probably have just killed him. Who's going to waste effort healing you?

At least this time they were willing to treat him, and to give him a carriage to stay in. Whether they wanted him as an accountant or for something else, he was at least settled for now.

Moved into another, far more ordinary carriage, Xue Mu leaned back against the wall and let out a long breath. The pressure of facing that young woman whose very gaze could kill had been genuinely heavy; this flat-chested girl of thirteen or fourteen looked like she'd be much easier to be around.

Chan'er tossed two bottles over, grinning. "The white one's for your injuries—just one pill, then sleep it off and you'll be fine. The red one's to suppress your poison so it doesn't leak out for a while. Don't make us circulate Qi and hold our breath every second we're near you. Each pill works for twelve double-hours, so remember to take one a day."

"Thanks."

Without another word, Xue Mu opened both bottles and tapped out one pill from each. These people could kill him far too easily for there to be any point in doctoring the medicine.

Both pills dissolved the moment they touched his tongue, and a coolness spread through his limbs and bones; the agony wracking his body seemed to ease by seven or eight parts in an instant. Xue Mu looked down at the bottles in his hand, startled, and once again had the feeling that something was wrong with this world...

No medicine works that fast. This whole thing is just profoundly unscientific.

Well... transmigration had already happened; griping about science just meant he couldn't adjust. Xue Mu flashed the girl what he considered a very suave smile. "I still have to thank you and your worthy master for saving my life. My name is Xue Mu—might I ask the young lady's name?"

The girl smiled too. "That smug smile of yours is pretty annoying, you know. Oh, and I still want to gouge out your eyeballs—I wonder if a blind man can still keep accounts?"

Xue Mu's smile turned bitter at once. "...Of course not."

The girl propped her cheek on one hand and looked him up and down, as if studying some kind of miracle. "You've got a lot of nerve. You saw me, and you even saw my master... it's really a wonder you're still hopping around alive."

So that was why she wanted his eyes. Xue Mu said helplessly, "I didn't see anything. It was pitch black and I was falling too fast—I'm not an immortal, how could I have seen any sights at a moment like that?"

"You saw bare white flesh, didn't you? To me, that counts as being looked at."

"Could you try being reasonable?"

"No." The girl's smile was bright. "If you tell me your story, though, maybe I'll let you off."

Seeing her sweet, dimpled, adorable look, and how her words were vicious without any real malice behind them, Xue Mu smiled and said, "I was raised soaking in jars of poison since I was small. Why I didn't die, I have no idea."

"A thousand sects and a hundred schools of cultivation in this world—clearly more than I could ever know of." The girl sighed with the air of a seasoned elder, then pointed at his short hair, and then at his clothes. "But monks and poison are hard to connect. What sect does this peculiar kasaya of yours represent?"

Xue Mu looked down at what he was wearing, and his mouth twitched... Kasaya? This is a bathrobe, okay? He'd transmigrated at home, so all he had on was a white bathrobe tied at the waist. It really was a tragedy: other transmigrators at least arrived with a wallet or a phone and could work some angle out of it, while he had arrived with nothing at all.

Wait, no, there was something... I was holding that bronze shard when I transmigrated. Did they confiscate it?

When he didn't answer, the girl's expression turned half-smiling. "You're quite good-looking... and under that kasaya you're completely bare. I'd say you're a flower monk—are you cultivating Joyous Chan?"

A girl that age talking about this without even blushing—you're no innocent yourself... Xue Mu grumbled inwardly, then answered, "It's exactly because my devotion to the Buddha was never firm that I returned to lay life... Actually, I grew up in the mountains studying Chan. You two are the first outsiders I've ever met, and I don't even know which dynasty it is now..."

"Then that bizarre business of you appearing in midair—did the Buddha smite you with lightning?"

"Right you are, Xiaoqiang."

"I'm not called Xiaoqiang, I'm called Xiaochan. Yue Xiaochan." The girl was still grinning. "No need to pump me for information—my name's no secret, unlike some people, who don't have a single honest word in their mouths. The Great Zhou has stood for a thousand years, and here you are asking which dynasty it is. And the cloth of that kasaya is unbelievably rich. If you're going to play the mountain yokel, don't make it so obvious."

Xue Mu knew perfectly well that his story couldn't convince anyone, but they didn't seem to be taking it very seriously either. Perhaps in this unscientific world, unscientific things happened so often that they were used to it, and a man suddenly appearing in midair wasn't worth getting worked up over. They were a strange pair, too—they plainly didn't believe him, yet they weren't angry, as if they found it quite normal for him to be full of lies...

It was only that this girl was young and still had a natural curiosity about the world, so she chattered with him like an eager child. It was less an interrogation than someone looking for company to pass the time. Her master took the straw-dog view of people: it didn't matter where anyone came from—if they could be used, use them; if not, kill them on the spot. Who has the patience to listen to you ramble?

And this Great Zhou... a thousand years, wasn't that a bit of an exaggeration? At eight hundred years there'd at least be something that matched up. Though in that Zhou of eight hundred years, there probably weren't any monks yet... Xue Mu probed carefully, "Spring and Autumn?"

Yue Xiaochan blinked. "What's Spring and Autumn? A season?"

Xue Mu was speechless. He found he honestly couldn't tell whether this world was completely different, or whether this girl was simply too illiterate. He thought it over for a long while before saying, "It's the kind of... civilization where a lot of different schools of thought collide."

Yue Xiaochan stared at him fixedly, and only after quite a while said, "If that's what you call Spring and Autumn... then right now is Spring and Autumn."

"..." Xue Mu had no reply. Are you telling me this Great Zhou has lasted a thousand years and it's still the Spring and Autumn period?

Yue Xiaochan said casually, "The martial Dao's hundred schools have contended and called out to one another for a thousand years. Isn't that exactly the Spring and Autumn you're talking about?"

All right, so the so-called hundred schools were martial arts... Xue Mu was now thoroughly certain that this was a completely different world, and that this Great Zhou was nothing like the one he knew. All that history ought to be thrown out entirely, or it would get him killed.

Yue Xiaochan went on, "From the look of you, you belong to some Poison Sect, only you never cultivated it properly—not only did you get nothing out of it, you've stored up a whole body of exotic poisons. There's one upside, though: most people can't be bothered to kill you, since they'd have to burn the body for plague control."

"..." Fine. Even illiterates understand quarantine these days...

Yue Xiaochan looked him up and down for a while, and finally her curiosity ran dry and she grew bored. "Off I go, off I go. No fun at all."

The words had barely left her mouth when she vanished with a whoosh, without the slightest warning, just like a ghost.

Xue Mu stared at the empty carriage, then flopped onto the bed with a thump. Only now did he loosen the nerves he'd kept strung tight all this time, and let himself think about the situation he was in.

The girl's attitude had been decent enough—always smiling, lively and talkative—but in the end she'd still shown the contempt for the weak that was in her bones. Clearly, in the eyes of these women at least, martial strength was the measure of everything and all the rest was trivia. Hoping to charm women with talent or the like was probably out of the question.

If that was the general attitude of this world, no wonder so many transmigrating predecessors cultivated themselves half to death. The taste of being looked down on really was unpleasant. But as for practicing martial arts... I'm twenty-seven already, and from a completely different culture. Starting now, how am I supposed to out-train natives who grew up breathing cultivation? And I don't even have a cheat...

Xue Mu held out his palm for a look. This whole transmigration had started with a bronze shard cutting his hand; the shard must be deeply connected to this world. He had to find a way to get it back from these women. It might just turn out to be his cheat.

One look, and Xue Mu sat bolt upright.

There was no trace of a cut on his palm. In its place was a strange pattern.

Xue Mu hurried to his feet, sat down by the carriage window, and studied it carefully in the sunlight for a while. It was a pattern, all right—a blue wave-shaped marking, identical to the one on the bronze shard he'd found before. It was only the size of a fingernail, and it looked as if it had been tattooed on.