Chapter 217. In an Old Prison, We

“Sect Leader, shall I teach you Tiyunzong?”

“Do I look like a beggar?”

It was human nature not to want to learn when someone offered to teach. Walking side by side with the White-Clad Scholar, I said,

“No need.”

What I had actually wanted to say was, “Do I look like your disciple?” Instinctively, it had come out as a question about whether I was a beggar. When I refused, the White-Clad Scholar looked puzzled.

“Why?”

“Scholar, why are you so willing to teach your exclusive martial art so carelessly? Do you not feel it’s a waste because you’ve learned too many martial arts? I truly cannot understand what goes on in that head of yours.”

The White-Clad Scholar let out a low laugh.

“Huhu.”

I glanced sideways at the White-Clad Scholar and said,

“Why? Because after teaching me, you can simply kill me later? I’m busy enough training the martial arts I already know.”

“It is true that I have dealt harshly with disciples like butchers, but I do not see you as a man on their level.”

“Even so, I don’t need it.”

The White-Clad Scholar tilted his head and replied,

“Then why? Explain your reason.”

“How absurd. Does something like this need a reason? Tiyunzong doesn’t suit my temperament. Leaving aside the fact that it isn’t easy, I’m more suited to moving busily, as if I’m going to smash the ground apart with my own two feet.”

“Is that so?”

“Even if my speed is a little slower, I don’t care. But if my qinggong improves, I suppose it can’t be helped that it will be because I witnessed your Tiyunzong.”

“Are you saying you were influenced by it to some degree?”

“I realized that qinggong must even alter the weight of the body.”

The White-Clad Scholar nodded.

“Good. Shall we run for a bit longer this time? Your food should be digested by now.”

This madman seemed to have waited until I had digested the noodles. I still couldn’t grasp his intentions. After all, I had already lost the qinggong contest. In truth, whether I won or lost at something like qinggong didn’t matter much to me. I wasn’t competing in qinggong right now. I was competing against this scholar bastard.

“Let’s go.”

The White-Clad Scholar set off again, and as if he truly intended to make it a long battle, he crossed mountains and rivers. Before I knew it, dawn had broken, and we raced through valleys, mountains, cliffs, then swamps and wastelands. On flat ground, I was slower than the White-Clad Scholar, but on rough terrain, the gap did not widen by much. Yet unless there was a special reason, the White-Clad Scholar never released the posture of Tiyunzong.

This bastard was a man who could run insanely well.

An ordinary master would have died while chasing him, his qi and blood overturned, but I kept watch over my internal energy and continued to maintain my breathing calmly as I followed.

I was slower than the scholar, but I had no intention of dropping out because I lacked internal energy. No matter how outstanding the scholar was, I was not at such a level now. Since I was running at full speed in such a frenzy, I felt pathetic wondering why I was even doing this, and for a moment I could not remember the reason I was running.

But I thought of it as running in place of the subordinates and villains who had gathered in front of the Thousand-Li Inn.

This bastard’s identity was indeed the White-Clad Scholar, and also the Demonic Gentleman.

But the fact that he had not yet become the Evil Emperor cheered on my run.

I could not predict how this kind of running would change the future, but for now, running was the best choice.

So I kept running.

This bastard ran on for a long time without rest, but I had my pride too, so I did not tell him to stop.

By the time I had forgotten the passage of time…….

The White-Clad Scholar stopped and stared ahead. An impossibly high cliff rose before us, and the moment I saw it up close, I felt as though I understood how Tiyunzong had been born. In other words, if one wanted to climb this place quickly, one had no choice but to become accustomed to Tiyunzong.

From the looks of it, this seemed to be the destination to which the White-Clad Scholar had dragged me.

The White-Clad Scholar looked at me.

“Can you follow?”

I nodded with a calm expression. It was so high that I could not gauge it by eye at once, and the upper portion was hidden by clouds. The White-Clad Scholar shot into the air and climbed the cliff while unfolding Tiyunzong. After cursing inwardly, I widened the distance, then leaped upward at full speed. Fortunately, steps that I had not noticed from below were carved into the cliff. In other words, they were traces of footprints. Or perhaps they had been hollowed out by the inner force of the men who had climbed this place before.

In any case, a single slip meant a drop of a thousand fathoms.

In the end, I too assumed the posture of Tiyunzong and climbed the steep cliff after the White-Clad Scholar. At some point, the White-Clad Scholar’s figure was hidden by the clouds, but his voice came from nearby.

“Come in.”

Feeling as if my thighs were about to burst, I shot upward and entered a place that looked like the cave of a hideout.

Who on earth could ever discover a hideout like this? Even if the jianghu called the White-Clad Scholar the Evil Emperor and put him on a kill list, there would have been no chance of finding this man at all. For one thing, most masters could not even climb up here.

The White-Clad Scholar was already nowhere to be seen.

The farther I walked into the cave, the wider the space became. Suddenly, I felt a strange sensation and let out a sigh before I knew it. For some reason, the peculiar atmosphere emanating from the cave felt familiar, as if I had been here before.

As I was entering, I stopped and looked at the cave wall.

Murals were painted there. Naturally, they were murals that bore the weight of time, but I could not tell what they meant, so I examined them while walking slowly. Similar yet different paintings filled the walls of the cave. A moment later, the passage ended and a large space appeared. From here on, instead of murals, paintings were arranged in all directions like decorations.

Only then did I realize that the murals and the decorated paintings depicted the same thing. The paintings mostly portrayed scenes of massacre, with scholars in white being buried in pits. Some were falling into the pits with their heads severed, and in one painting, soldiers were stabbing scholars who were crawling out of a pit with spears.

With my hands clasped behind my back, I continued glaring at the paintings.

Now that I looked, something was burning here and there throughout the paintings, and when I combined it with what I had seen in other places…….

What was burning were books.

Only then did I understand what incident the murals and paintings were consistently expressing.

“Fenshu Kengru (焚書坑儒).”

Fenshu Kengru literally referred to the incident of burning books and burying scholars in the ground. Various rumors and idle tales were mixed into it, but the depictions of the scholars were generally consistent. The common account was that soldiers dug up the earth and buried the scholars alive. That was why the murals and paintings showed spears and blades raining down on scholars trying to escape the pits.

At some point, the White-Clad Scholar, who had changed clothes and appeared, looked around at the paintings with his hands clasped behind his back and said,

“Do you know of Fenshu Kengru?”

“Roughly.”

The White-Clad Scholar pointed at one painting.

“Look at that. At the time, those called Confucian students, scholars, and men of letters would often hide books in their homes or in places like safe houses. They hid them by hollowing out walls, buried them in the ground…… and when they were discovered, burning down the scholars’ entire houses in order to find the books was a common occurrence. When such things happened too often, perhaps even those who recorded history grew weary, for they did not write it down in detail.”

After listening to the White-Clad Scholar, I looked at the paintings again and saw that there were many depictions of people hiding books. In other words, some paintings depicted storing books using something like mechanisms and formations.

One painting looked as though it showed a martial arts secret manual being hidden away.

“Mm.”

Without realizing it, I looked at the White-Clad Scholar again. Just what sort of man was this bastard? He did not seem like someone who had suddenly dropped from the sky, but rather an inheritor who had received an ancient hatred.

The White-Clad Scholar stared at me and asked.

“People merely think that the books of the Confucian scholars were burned.”

“Was that not the case?”

“To be precise, it was the books of the Hundred Schools of Thought (諸子百家) that were burned. The Hundred Schools (百家) means that many different schools of learning existed. What does it mean, when only Daoism (道家), Mohism (墨家), Confucianism (儒家), and Legalism (法家) are known to the world, yet there were more than a hundred such schools?”

I felt as though I knew what the White-Clad Scholar was trying to say.

“So there must have been jianghu forces among the Hundred Schools of Thought as well. It would have been an era when the distinction between martial arts and scholarship was not so clear.”

The White-Clad Scholar smiled.

“Indeed. Do you remember Iryong Nogun, whom you killed?”

Just how much had this bastard investigated about me? I let out a sigh, then answered.

“I remember.”

“Did you know which lineage he was a descendant of when you killed him?”

“My guess was that he was a descendant of Guiguzi (鬼谷子).”

The White-Clad Scholar nodded.

“So you knew. Guiguzi, too, was a member of the School of Diplomacy (縱橫家), which belonged to the Hundred Schools of Thought.”

The White-Clad Scholar suddenly laughed aloud, then walked somewhere and pulled on a cord hanging from the wall. With a rumbling sound, the painting that had occupied the wall of the large cavern rose upward all at once.

I looked around with an impassive expression.

In every direction, bookshelves packed full of books densely filled the cavern. In other words, it was all books. In an instant, the peculiar smell one could sense from old books stabbed at my nose. When the White-Clad Scholar fiddled with something again, a mechanism moved, and one wall flipped over, revealing a desk. It had been attached to the opposite wall, then appeared as it rotated along with the wall.

I looked over the countless books, too many to estimate.

Was he storing all the books of the Hundred Schools of Thought said to have been burned back then? Or, given the White-Clad Scholar’s nature, had he gathered only the books of the Hundred Schools of Thought that were related to martial arts?

The White-Clad Scholar extended his hand, as if telling me to look around to my heart’s content.

“Sect Leader, take your time and look.”

If all of this was some sort of mental attack the White-Clad Scholar had intended, then I was being struck without managing even a single proper counterattack. The moment I confirmed the sheer number of books and this bizarre scene, I found myself dazed.

As I looked over the books, I asked the White-Clad Scholar.

“……So this place is the Samnak Book Prison (三樂書獄)?”

“Samnak Book Prison? That was something I roughly made up when informing the Murim Alliance, so pay it no mind.”

If it was something he had roughly made up, that meant there was nothing the Murim Alliance could find out even if they tried. While looking over the books, I suddenly turned my head and saw that the White-Clad Scholar was sitting at the desk, writing something.

‘That crazy bastard.’

He had invited me all the way here, yet he himself appeared to be briefly absorbed in work. Since I could not see the titles of the books, I stepped closer to the wall and examined them in detail. As if they had indeed followed the classifications of the Hundred Schools of Thought, the name of a person I did not know was written at the top, and beneath it the books were organized.

As I walked, reading the titles and the classifications at the top, I had no choice but to stop. At the top, Guiguzi’s name was written, and beneath it I saw titles that seemed to explain mechanisms and formations. The problem was that all of them were books made of paper. As far as I knew, in the days of the Burning of Books and Burying of Scholars, records were written on bamboo slips (竹簡) or wooden slips (木簡).

When I looked at the White-Clad Scholar, who was writing something at the desk, the bastard spoke as if he had seen through my thoughts.

“……They were copied over.”

I looked at the White-Clad Scholar as he worked. The term Book Prison had not appeared for nothing. If he had been confined in a place like this and had endlessly copied the writing on bamboo slips into books, then this place was no different from a Book Prison (書獄, a prison of writing). Having reached this point, I found it only natural that the White-Clad Scholar had gone mad. The question was just how mad this bastard was.

As I resumed looking through the books, I stood blankly for a moment and stared hard at one name occupying a classification.

Ji Shengzi (紀渻子).

What should I call this feeling? I had no way to express it. I lowered my gaze, then scanned the titles of the books belonging to Ji Shengzi’s classification.

There, I once again found a name familiar to me.

Jingui Xiaoyao Gong (金龜逍遙功).

I tore my gaze away, then stared at the White-Clad Scholar, who was writing something.

“…….”

The White-Clad Scholar also stopped moving his brush and was glaring at me from the corner of his eye. Somehow, I had the feeling he was stealing glances at my expression.