At the same time, Li Qiuchen also arrived before the altar outside the village.
Sanskrit chanting, as though descending from beyond the heavens, lingered in his mind. The ritual singing, mournful and plaintive, nearly twisted his thoughts, almost transforming him into a devout believer of the Medicine Master.
“No matter what happens in a moment, just follow me and run. Don’t look back!”
After giving Hong Yang that warning, Li Qiuchen raised his hand toward Guan Damu, spread his five fingers, and then clenched them into a fist.
“Ten years.”
A simple, honest smile appeared at the corners of Boss Guan’s mouth as he murmured to himself.
“Though it’s true that when I came back to beg for medicine back then, saying it was to treat my child’s illness was a lie. But you deceived me for a full ten years and never gave up even a hair. That really was too much.”
“People should be a little more generous. Don’t be so selfish.”
He took out a fire striker, lit the fuse at his feet, then turned and ran for his life.
With a thunderous boom, a terrifying fireball exploded beneath the altar, swallowing the old peach tree in front of it whole.
The strange phenomena between heaven and earth froze in an instant.
Li Qiuchen pressed down on Hong Yang’s head to dodge the blast. Without waiting for the smoke to clear, he charged toward the center of the explosion.
Countless petals tumbled up and down amid the billowing smoke. The old peach tree had been blown in half at the waist, revealing its snow-white core.
Boss Guan, who was closest, pulled an axe from who knew where and swung it straight at the tree core. In just a few chops, he hacked off a chunk of core as crisp and tender as a bamboo shoot.
An old peach tree with three thousand years of cultivation had never borne fruit in its life, storing all its essence within its core. The nutritional value of that core could well be imagined.
The mere fragrance of plants and wood that it gave off was enough to refresh the heart and lungs.
The crayfish spirit could not wait another moment. It pounced forward, hugged the broken tree core, and began wolfing it down. It had guarded the spirit spring behind Songlin Village for so many years all for this one bite. The core of a thousand-year peach tree was a genuine heavenly treasure.
Anywhere else, it would never have had the qualifications to share in such a precious material. Being served at the table alongside the tree core would have been more likely.
“Go! Hurry! Take what we can and leave!”
Li Qiuchen snatched up a piece of tree core and stuffed it into his pocket, then grabbed the crayfish spirit by its claw and dragged it backward. “Stop eating. If we don’t leave now, once it comes back to its senses, however much you ate, you’ll have to spit it all back out!”
No matter how crisp and tender the tree core was, it was not truly a bamboo shoot. The crayfish spirit’s eyes rolled back from being stuffed full, but after one reluctant glance, a surge of water rose beneath its feet, wrapping up Boss Guan and the two children as it turned and fled.
The gap in strength was real.
The crayfish spirit knew very well that, in truth, it was the old peach tree’s prey.
And the reason it could complete such an earth-shaking reversal today was entirely due to Li Qiuchen’s planning.
Even if Songlin Village was a pigsty, the one raising the pigs was not human.
As the fattest pig in the pen, Great-Uncle had, over the years, tirelessly seized the rations of the other piglets, fattening himself until he was sleek and plump. But no matter how much he ate, a pig was still a pig.
Though every pig was fated to be slaughtered, before that final blade fell, the owner of the pigsty first had to ensure the pigs stayed alive.
Through years of careful observation, Li Qiuchen had unexpectedly discovered a loophole in the pigsty’s operating mechanism.
There was only one true believer of the Medicine Master in the village, and that was the owner of the pigsty: the old peach tree.
A tree’s mind was different from a human’s. Though its spiritual intelligence had awakened, it was not like a person, affected by all manner of irrelevant emotions.
If a villager was injured, the old peach tree would act under the banner of the Medicine Master and prioritize treating the villager.
If there were many wounded, it would also allocate more power—just like when the crayfish spirit was captured. In order to heal the villagers, the old peach tree had even drawn on part of the power it used to monitor every movement in the village and manipulate its puppets.
Great-Uncle had fallen into slumber at that time. Because the old peach tree no longer had any attention to spare for this high-level puppet, it could only make him enter a standby state.
In short, this was the “Dao” of the Medicine Master.
As the saying went, if you are a monk for a day, you ring the bell for a day. If you are a believer of the Medicine Master, then you must heal the dying and tend the wounded.
Who you saved was not important. Saving yourself was fine too. The key point was saving.
The old peach tree’s cultivation consisted of taking root in the soil and silently guarding its pigsty.
As a tree, it did not need to go out and temper itself through experience.
As long as there were no major issues in the pigsty’s operating mechanism and no alarm was triggered, it did not even need to take the initiative to manage anything. It merely stood guard at the village entrance, waiting for Great-Uncle to deliver the offerings to its mouth.
More than two thousand people in Songlin Village had lived here for several centuries, and none of them knew that the old peach tree at the entrance was the true master.
But there were exceptions.
Guan Damu had left the village in his early years to wander outside. It was said he had even married a wife and had a child out there. But because his child was born frail and short-lived, he had no choice but to return to the village to beg for medicine.
Yet Great-Uncle was an iron rooster, and the old peach tree was even stingier. It merely fooled him with words, saying that the peach tree bore fruit only once every thirty years, and that he had just happened to miss this round.
Guan Damu waited in the village for a full ten years before realizing he had been tricked by that old thing.
Since they would not give it, he prepared to simply snatch it himself.
Also waiting all along for an opportunity was the crayfish spirit in the spirit spring behind the mountain. It had coveted the old peach tree’s essence for a long time. Unfortunately, its own strength was lacking, so it did not dare get too close and turn into fertilizer. It could only stay in the spirit spring and nibble on the peach tree roots that grew over.
Li Qiuchen connected these two fellows and put forward his own plan.
The plan was very simple to say: while the village was holding the grand sacrifice, bury gunpowder, blow the old peach tree sky-high, and then run.
The difficult part of the plan was—how to hide it from the old peach tree’s eyes and ears.
And how to distract it so that it would not notice the existence of the gunpowder.
For instance, have the crayfish spirit make a move, injure as many villagers as possible, then feign defeat and get captured.
Once such a major event as capturing the crayfish spirit occurred, the village would inevitably hold a grand sacrifice. At that time, while the old peach tree was distracted, Guan Damu could use the chance of building the altar to hide explosives right under its nose.
Although this and that accident had occurred, overall, the plan had succeeded up to this point.
It had even succeeded a little too well.
Bai Yuheng’s arrival had drawn almost all of the old peach tree’s attention.
Now, only the final step remained in this plan—how to run?
Taking the mountain road out of the village looked like the only option, but it was a dead end.
The old peach tree had merely been stunned by the blast for a time. It was not dead. For a believer of the Medicine Master, the concept of “death” could practically be ignored.
Its roots underground not only spread throughout the entire village, they even extended into the front and rear mountains. At their farthest, they could reach twenty li away.
As soon as it awakened, Li Qiuchen’s group would not be able to escape at all.
But within this inescapable net, there still existed a path of survival that everyone had overlooked.
That was the spirit spring behind the mountain.
There were no tree roots in the spirit spring. They had all been gnawed clean by the crayfish spirit.
And beneath the spirit spring was an underground river that led to the outside world. As long as they borrowed the crayfish spirit’s water-escape technique, they could escape alive.
But there was another difficulty here.
How could they ensure that the crayfish spirit was an honest demon and would abide by the agreement?
Fortunately, it was a crayfish. If it had been a fox spirit, Li Qiuchen truly would not have dared stake everything on it.
He could only gamble.
After calculating things this far, the rest could only be left to fate.
“Aaahhh aaaooo—!”
The crayfish spirit erupted with astonishing strength, all ten legs beneath it moving so fast they left afterimages.
It was not because its demonic character was especially reliable, but because the old peach tree had awakened.
A terrifying pressure shot into the sky, frightening the crayfish spirit out of its wits.
The old peach tree, which had just been blown into two pieces by the gunpowder, restored itself to its original state in the blink of an eye. An aged human face surfaced on its thick trunk, turning to look at the group fleeing for their lives.
Compared to a human mind, a tree’s mind was half a beat slower. The old peach tree froze for a long while before finally figuring out what had happened.
My precious tree core!!!
The earth began to tremble.
One pitch-black tree root after another burst out of the ground, whipping down toward the crayfish spirit with the force of thunder.
The crayfish spirit still had wood stuffed in its mouth. Using every last ounce of strength, it drove the current and charged forward recklessly.
Just as the roots were about to fall, Boss Guan pulled out the palm-thunder charges in his hand, lit them with the fire striker, and threw them out one after another.
Firelight exploded. Smoke filled the air. Roots as thick as bowl mouths snapped on the spot.
As the saying went, a foot had its strength, and an inch had its weakness. The old peach tree’s defensive power was not strong. Otherwise, it would not have been blasted senseless by a few barrels of gunpowder.
It was like a healing priest wearing plate armor—what was the point? As long as the health bar recovered quickly enough, defense was unnecessary.
Though the palm-thunder charges Guan Damu threw could not cause any effective damage to the old peach tree, they did temporarily block its pursuit.
At the very least, they delayed it a little, buying the crayfish spirit more time.
With the cover of the smoke, the crayfish spirit plunged headfirst into the spirit spring. With the advantage of its home ground, the speed of its water escape increased tenfold in an instant.
“Ahahahahaha, old fuzzy peach, so you have a day like this too, you bastard!”
Once back in the water, the crayfish spirit immediately regained its confidence. No longer as wretched as when it had been fleeing just now, it spat out the wood in its mouth and began mocking wildly.
“Keep saving it up! Keep saving it up! You saved your coffin money your whole life just to move straight into a coffin! In this life, you—”
Before it could finish speaking, a rumbling crash sounded overhead.
The mountain collapsed.
Ordinary people might find it hard to imagine just how severe the psychological damage of losing money could be to an old miserly iron rooster.
The old peach tree had been driven mad with rage.
Its roots pierced straight down through the rock overhead, and countless shattered stones came crashing down.
The crayfish spirit’s joy turned to sorrow. A huge boulder smashed down onto its head, and its water-escape technique dissolved on the spot.
Icy river water poured in from all directions. In an instant, the rushing current tore apart the three people behind it.
“Xiaochen—”
Hong Yang reached out, wanting to grab Li Qiuchen, but at the bottom of this lightless water, in a river where mud and sand were all surging down, they could not see each other at all.
Li Qiuchen held his breath. Following the current of the underground river, he drifted who knew how far before he finally could not hold on any longer. His vision went black, and he lost consciousness.