Miss Fairy, Please Hear Me Out

Staring at the ledgers strewn all over the floor, Su Jinxuan went still, a little dazed. When she asked that question just now, she had not truly wanted an answer. What she had wanted was a reason to deny the suspicion she had been harboring toward Mister Qin.

She had already prepared herself. No matter what evidence Xu Changtian produced, she would simply throw back a line at him. Words are cheap. Maybe you fabricated the evidence yourself. But now, those words would not come out. There was just too much of it.

The Konghua Merchant Guild was a regional guild of middling size, one that would still count for something even across the whole of the Great Flame Empire. The account books it had accumulated over more than a decade had already piled up into a mountain.

Ledgers were not the sort of thing one could invent out of thin air. Every incoming entry had to match an outgoing one. The numbers had to balance. Income and expenditure could be checked against each other. Even if Xu Changtian had somehow seen this coming and ordered people to start forging them the instant she was captured, there was no way he could have produced this many account books in a mere ten days.

Looking at Su Jinxuan’s expression, Xu Yuan more or less understood what was going through her mind. Heh. If cooking the books were really that easy, there would not have been so many accountants in my previous life taking the fall and ending up behind bars.

Xu Yuan casually picked up one of the ledgers from the floor and flipped it open. As he leafed through it, he said offhandedly, “If you need the false ledgers the Konghua Merchant Guild used for comparison, I can also have the Blackscale Guards in the capital send those over.”

False ledgers? Real ledgers? Looking at the mountain of books before her, Su Jinxuan felt her mind tremble slightly. If these had all been forged, then Xu Changtian would also have needed to fabricate another complete set of fake books in equal volume.

That was a project running into millions of words. Ten days would never have been enough.

“These are... real?” Her voice came out very soft, thick with confusion.

Xu Yuan let out a direct, mocking laugh. When her gaze turned toward him, he said with a faintly teasing look, “Of course they’re real. But that’s all it took for you to believe me? I thought you’d keep stubbornly insisting these ledgers belong to my estate, and that we merely polished them up a little over the past few days.”

A fresh burst of anger flared up inside Su Jinxuan at once. Biting her lip, she said, “Xu Changtian, you... what exactly do you want?”

“What do I want?” Xu Yuan lightly tapped the wooden table with his fingertip. “What else? I want to clear away every doubt in your heart. Or did you not want that just now?”

Su Jinxuan fell silent.

Shaking his head, Xu Yuan continued in an orderly, unhurried tone, the steady tap tap of his fingers against the tabletop accompanying his words. “I already told you. You can examine the trade partners, the places of transaction, and the dates in these ledgers yourself before making your judgment.”

Su Jinxuan’s eyes flickered for a moment. Without saying a word, she slowly rose, pulled one ledger from the mountain of account books, returned to her seat, and began reading in silence.

Xu Yuan did not urge her on. He sat quietly for a while, then got up and left. All he needed to do now was wait. Something a person had believed in for more than ten years was like a slab of bedrock, hard and unyielding, not easily shaken by ordinary means. But once the seed called doubt took root on its surface, all that remained was to wait for it to grow, to force its way inward, and split that rock apart from the inside until it cracked and crumbled.

ᯓ➤

Time flew by.

Su Jinxuan’s matter was only a brief interlude in Xu Yuan’s current life. Once he had dealt with it, he set it aside for the time being.

After a message arrived from the imperial capital, Steward Li delivered all the pills Xu Yuan had previously requested that very same day. The only problem was that the quantity left much to be desired.

Compared with how Xu Changge used to hand over whole bottles at a time, the pills Steward Li brought this time were scattered odds and ends. Some, like the Meridian Guard Pill and Great Mountain Pill, did not even fill a single bottle.

If Xu Yuan trained without restraint, this supply probably would not even last a week. Left with no other choice, he had to adjust his cultivation schedule all over again.

Without the restorative support of medicinal pills, forcing his cultivation method to run under constant overload caused a sharp stinging pain to come from his meridians. Because of that, those days of burying himself in cultivation day and night without pause were gone for good.

Still, less time spent cultivating did not mean Xu Yuan had nothing to do. Although he possessed the Third Young Master’s memories, the man had understood absolutely nothing about cultivation itself. Xu Yuan had to make up for that gap by reading large quantities of manuals and classics, so that he would not be left helpless if some special situation arose in the future.

Gradually, his daily routine settled into a fixed pattern, and there were only about four things in it. Sleeping, eating, cultivating, and reading.

But two days later, a fifth task was added to the list, which was actual combat.

Every time he finished cultivating and left the inner courtyard with Zhou Chen, they would pass by the training grounds.

Watching those hulking muscleheads fight it out there, fists slamming into flesh, Xu Yuan was suddenly seized by the urge to step into the ring himself. Even now, he had never truly fought someone at his own level. Once the itch hit, he went straight in.

The moment the Third Young Master stepped onto the field, the training grounds, which had been roaring with noise just a moment ago, instantly fell silent. His reputation was far too vicious. No one dared go up against him.

Only after Xu Yuan repeatedly emphasized that he would not hold a grudge, and even offered medicinal pills as a reward, did an eighth rank martial apprentice in the Meridian Tempering Realm finally drag himself onto the field.

Xu Yuan had been quite satisfied with his opponent’s strength. At this point in the story, the protagonist was also only eighth rank, yet he could already take on a whole group of the Xu Manor eighth rank Meridian Tempering guards by himself.

Xu Yuan figured that even if he could not compare to the protagonist, with the overwhelming boost of the Blood Origin Heartfall Art, beating the burly eighth rank fighter in front of him should not have been a problem.

And then.. he lost. It was a complete defeat. Even with the powerful amplification of the Blood Origin Heartfall Art, he was still no match for that eighth rank martial apprentice. He had strength, but no way to use it. The other man’s fists and kicks came in relentless waves, one after another, flowing like a rising tide. The fight had not even lasted a minute before Xu Yuan was forced off the platform.

Standing below the arena, Xu Yuan could clearly feel it. If that martial apprentice had not been holding back out of fear of his status, fighting with obvious restraint, then a few moves would probably have been enough to leave him flat on the ground, unable to get back up.

No one in the courtyard was mediocre. These guards who had taken the path of the martial apprentice were not street brawlers. Every last one of them was an elite carefully selected from the countless commoner students at the Calm Sky Martial Halls. Saying they had clawed their way out of piles of corpses would not have been much of an exaggeration.

At that moment, Xu Yuan suddenly understood just how absurdly impressive it was that Qin Mo, while only at eighth rank, had been able to kill one of the Xu residence’s seventh rank guards. If Xu Yuan were to face Qin Mo alone right now, he might very well die the instant they crossed blows.

Without saying much, Xu Yuan tossed down the promised reward and left. That reaction directly stunned the Meridian Tempering brute who had won it.

He had thought he was finished. A genius like Xue Yong, who stood at the peak of the sixth rank Iron Body Realm, had been killed by this Third Young Master without a second thought. So what was a mere eighth rank Meridian Tempering fighter like him worth?

He spent the night in nervous dread, but when the next day came, he saw the Third Young Master again at the training grounds.

This time, the Third Young Master had brought an entire bottle of Bone Tempering Pills. Beat him once, get one pill. Eighth rank Meridian Tempering martial apprentices like them only received three Bone Tempering Pills a month.

A heavy reward made brave men. Before long, a second man lured by the prize stepped onto the stage.

One minute later, he came back down holding a Bone Tempering Pill.

The Third Young Master, who had just been sent flying off the platform, said nothing. He simply sat at the edge of the arena and quietly adjusted his breathing for fifteen minutes before climbing back up again.

The whole place fell silent.

Then, in that silence, the man who had already claimed one Bone Tempering Pill cautiously tried going up a second time.

Very soon, he received a second Bone Tempering Pill from the scruffy middle-aged man standing at ringside.

Once the Third Young Master’s reward and his promise were proven real, the atmosphere in the courtyard gradually began to come alive.