“Why are we here?” Chen Hao asked, standing before a stone house painted orange and red. This close to the lake, buildings finally had some variety to them.

The three-storey house had a small garden to its side, which was completely overgrown with weeds. While Chen Hao hesitantly knocked, Jun inspected the exterior of the place. He couldn’t see any formations, which either suggested a lack of defences or an extremely well-hidden formation. He bet it was the latter.

The door swung open, but instead of Li Xia, they saw an older girl with wild, unkempt hair that was so tangled that it resembled a bunch of snakes. She was tall and stood confidently, but Jun could see that her muscles were tense. Her eyes were ferocious, narrowing as she observed the two that stood before her. Small scars marked her face, though they looked too symmetrical to not be self-inflicted.

“What?” she asked, adjusting her beast-skin clothes.

Chen Hao desperately looked at Jun, who turned away and pretended to sniff the stone by his feet.

“I... Uhh... My dog led me here.”

That was all that the boy could come up with. He glanced past her and into the house, looking for something he might recognize. She stared at him incredulously.

“Okay.”

Seconds passed. There the two stood, not saying a word to each other. This was the most awkward Jun had seen the boy. He wasn’t caught off guard—no—he was ambushed.

“It must have been a mistake. Good day to you,” he said, turning away, but before the door could shut, Jun loudly barked a few times.

Now their attention was on Jun, and even he was starting to feel flustered.

“Well, this is awkward.”

Suddenly, the woman spoke up. “You look weak,” she said, pointing at Chen Hao. Then, she turned to Jun.

“And you as well. The dog isn’t too different from the master.”

“Phui! Your mother is weak! Your entire family is weak! Come here, I’ll show you Grandpa Jun’s Stone Ram,” he said, howling at the girl who looked more unimpressed by the second. That only provoked him more.

Finally, the whole farce came to an end when Li Xia approached the door, wearing a yellow and red dress adorned with qilins and dragons. She had dyed her ends pink and painted her nails blue, each showing a different cute animal. New pearl earrings hung from her ears, sparkling in the sun.

“Well, look who finally decided to show up,” Li Xia said, crossing her arms. Chen Hao met her eyes and blushed.

Jun cackled like mad.

The wild woman looked between the two before shrugging and heading back inside.

“Doesn’t know how to properly fight. I wouldn’t spare him a second glance,” she said as she left.

“Psh. Who cares about that? Jun’s the real cutie here anyway,” Li Xia said, kneeling and opening her arms. The dog gulped, remembering the repressed memories. However, with Chen Hao awkwardly standing there and Li Xia waiting, he had no other choice. Slowly, he approached the blonde terror before getting lifted high in the air.

“Seeing that you didn’t show up alone, I guess I can forgive you. Come in.”

Chen Hao trailed behind her, his eyes curiously taking in the large house he was in. The wild woman’s room had become even messier, and Jun shivered when he saw her breaking off the claws of a tiger with her bare hands.

The last time Jun had been here, he hadn’t awakened his qi yet, and he still had to deal with colour blindness. Now, when they entered Li Xia’s room, he could properly be overwhelmed by the barrage of pink and red. There wasn’t a single spot he could look at that wasn’t covered in overly cutesy things that made his retinas burn.

Several more jade figurines had joined Mr Bunny and Mrs Kitty, and Jun could already tell he would learn their names by the end of the day. He was tossed onto the bed, and before long, he was being brushed by an exquisite gold comb that magically unknotted his fur.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

As for Chen Hao, he was curiously looking around the room for a place to sit. Eventually, he decided that standing up was perfectly fine for him. It was either that or to sit right next to the girl.

“So. What made you want to visit after four months?” she said, curiously looking up from her bed.

“Well... You didn’t tell me where you live. Only now did Jun lead me to you.”

Jun put his paws one on another, deliberately not looking at anyone or anything.

“Oh really? That’s interesting. You didn’t know about this place months ago? Jun coming here multiple times was probably just my imagination.”

Now, Chen Hao’s gaze was burning a hole in Jun’s fur. The boy looked positively betrayed.

“Well, I was busy. I couldn’t come and visit anyways.”

“Why’s that?” she asked, hiding a smirk behind her hand. He recited the same story he had to the other disciples, but all the girl did was laugh.

“Really? And where do you say you stayed?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it was the inner sect, or perhaps it was outside of the sect altogether. Who knows where the crazy elder brought me.”

“Are you sure you weren’t staying at an inn of some sort? No?” she giggled.

Chen Hao nervously chuckled along, but she fixed him in place with a stern look.

“You’ve reached the third stage. Congratulations.”

Now, the boy was properly shook.

“How did you know?”

“Have you forgotten who recommended the technique to you? My senior brother had similar changes when he cultivated it,” Li Xia said, pulling out a set of scissors. She began to trim Jun’s fur like a professional dog groomer.

“I only found out where you were staying two months ago. People said you went missing, so I hired some people to look for you. You weren’t too hard to find,” she casually said, unaware of how threatening her words sounded.

“You don’t have to say what you’ve been up to if you don’t want to. I just thought you’d like to share.”

Jun barked a few times in agreement. He normally frowned on spilling secrets, but this was Li Xia—the elder’s daughter. The boy would only benefit from becoming closer to her. Silence reigned for a minute before he couldn’t take her intense gaze anymore.

“Well... I had to go to the lower sect because of some specific circumstances after I lost my robes and my badge.”

Chen Hao began telling a very heavily edited tale of what he was up to, focusing more on his cultivation and techniques than the whole “I was beaten,” and “I’m helping a thief rob houses.” The boy didn’t mention either the butcher or the Lu family. Instead, he excitedly showed off his water dance, elegantly transitioning from one form to another, dancing amidst the reflecting drops of water.

He excitedly reached out his hand for her to join him , but she only smiled at him and lowered her eyes. The boy did blush at that, ending the dance early and quickly moving on to his other techniques.

“So it was you who was spying on me that one time. Have you no shame? Spying on a lady in her private quarters,” she threw a pillow at him when he told her about the Water Mirror Technique despite seeing him pick the technique months ago.

“I was just testing it on someone I know. You can’t blame me for that.”

“Hmph. If I find out that you’ve been shamelessly looking at...” She didn’t finish her sentence, instead opting to crack her knuckles.

The boy continued by telling exaggerated stories of what he had done in the three months, mixing it up with tales he had heard from the inn. Unknowingly, an hour had already passed and his voice had grown raspy.

“That’s pretty much it. I don’t know what I’ll do now,” he finished his stories, leaning against the wall.

“Are you going to stay in the inn?”

“I don’t know. It’s a good place, but the spiritual force there isn’t enough. But, at the same time, the quarters are too unsafe. I don’t want to go missing for real.”

‘New home, new home, new home,’ Jun projected his thoughts outwards, trying to mentally communicate with the girl. If he believed in something hard enough, it would manifest.

The girl tilted her head and thought for a few seconds. Then, she hopped out of the bed and clapped her hands once.

“Both of them are bad. Alright, let’s go,” she said, beckoning to Jun and Chen Hao as she stepped out of the room.

“Go where?”

“To get you registered as an official disciple. Then, we’ll go to the Hall of Formations and get you a house. I know someone there who will help us,” she turned back, giggling at how confused the boy looked by the sudden turn of events.

“But... What if I don’t have the spirit stones?”

“I’ll give you a loan. Also, stop thinking I’m blind. That’s a storage ring on your fingers.”

“I can’t hide anything from you, can I?”

“You suck at lying. Anyone who deals with cultivators often will be able to tell. Get the Turtle Breathing Art for concealing your cultivation base, and get a formation inscribed on the ring to hide it better,” she winked and stuck out her tongue, running out of the house and into the streets.

She didn’t have her grey robe on, but the other disciples, instead of sneering and looking on with disdain, nodded their heads and slightly bowed to her. Why the difference in treatment? Well, Li Xia looked like a princess, and the boy looked like a beggar, quickly running to stay by her side. Meanwhile, Jun looked like a dog, mainly because he was one. But he was well groomed and proper, not at all a vicious thug that didn’t know manners. No one in their right mind would think he belonged to the beggar.

And so, the strange trio made their way to the Hall of Formations.