CHAPTER

10

Differences in Treatment

I

The residential area of the Outer Court was much bigger than Hao Zhen had originally assumed. Since joining the sect, although he would sometimes engage in small talk with other outer disciples, he had never been to anyone else’s house before, so he was only familiar with the area around his house. Duo Lan’s place, on the other hand, was much deeper in the mountain than his.

As they walked, Hao Zhen noticed how the residences got bigger and bigger. Hao Zhen’s place was a small two-room house. It wasn’t anything grand or luxurious, but he was happy with it. Honestly, he was happy to just have his own place, even if he had to take a few hours every week to keep it clean and tidy.

Since all the neighboring houses looked about the same, and he had never ventured further inside the residential area, he had assumed that all outer disciples were issued similar dwellings.

As he looked around now, he realized just how mistaken he had been. He should have known better—and he would have, probably, if it weren’t for the fact that, at the time, he wasn’t really an actual person, but rather a painfully one-dimensional minor character.

Long gone were the small, simple cottages. All around him now were large, sprawling courtyard houses. All of them were walled, and most had two floors. Large walls enclosed each residence, with stone pathways leading to each of them, branching out of the main walkway. Between the houses were neatly groomed shrubs and trees, and he could see a couple of brown-robed individuals walking around, tending to the vegetation and keeping the area clean.

Hao Zhen remained silent, simply looking around in a daze. He felt like a country bumpkin visiting a city for the first time.

Eventually, they came to a stop in front of one of the bigger houses. It was a two-story courtyard house more than thrice the size of his residence. Limestone walls enclosed Duo Lan’s house, standing high enough he was only able to see the part of the house peeking out above it. Encircling the walls were lines of bushes. A servant was currently in the process of grooming them, and he bowed to Duo Lan upon noticing her. Duo Lan merely gave him a nod, and he promptly resumed his work.

They came to a stop in front of the entrance, which was in the form of a circular gateway. Peering past it, Hao Zhen realized that he had still been underestimating the level of extravagance. In front of them was a courtyard, with the house built around it. In the center of the courtyard was a pond, with lotus flowers floating on top of it. A stone pathway led straight from the gate into the pond, then branched off toward the two sides of the building.

Duo Lan’s residence was better in every way than his own had been back when he was still a mundane, and his father had been a fairly wealthy merchant. At that moment, Hao Zhen was forced to reconsider his original impression of how the sect treated the members of the Outer Court.

Following Duo Lan, they stepped inside the house, into what Hao Zhen assumed was the living room. Looking around, he came to the conclusion that the interior of the house was as extravagant as the exterior. Whereas his place only had a small wooden cot, a flimsy table, and a flimsier chair, the furniture in Duo Lan’s house was made of thick, heavy, and expensive materials, with carving decorations on the frames and posts. Hanging on the walls were white jade lanterns like the ones back in the Mission Hall. He reckoned that even if he were to put his entire residence inside her living room, there’d still be some leftover space.

“You can sit down on one of the couches or chairs,” Duo Lan said. “I’ll be back in a while.” Then, without waiting for a reply, she turned around and marched away, disappearing into another room.

Hao Zhen glanced at Tian Jin, who was already making his way over to one of the couches— a large wooden piece of furniture that looked more expensive than everything he owned put together. Hao Zhen followed suit, taking a seat on a couch opposite Tian Jin’s.

“I’m assuming you also live in a place like this?” Hao Zhen asked.

“Yeah,” Tian Jin said. He didn’t appear perfectly comfortable—he was in someone else’s house after all, and as far as Hao Zhen could tell, it was Tian Jin’s first time in Duo Lan’s place—but he seemed to think of nothing of the expensive furniture, taking it for granted. “I actually live just a few doors down, actually. Mine is a bit smaller, though.”

“Smaller?” That didn’t make much sense. While Duo Lan was certainly famous in the Outer Court and regarded as a very promising disciple, as far as he could tell, Tian Jin was on another level. “Why is that?”

Tian Jin shrugged. “I’m not sure how it went for you, but after the entrance examinations, Duo Lan and I got to pick our dwellings. If I remember correctly, this is a privilege usually only given to the first-ranked disciples in the examinations, but because Duo Lan did so well in the entrance examinations they also extended the privilege to her. We were then brought over to this location to pick a house. I don’t particularly care for where I live, so I just picked the first one I saw. I think I remember Duo Lan taking a bit longer to pick hers.”

“Oh. Yeah, that makes sense.” Tian Jin didn’t strike him as someone particularly concerned with luxury or extravagance. That Duo Lan was one, on the other hand, came as no surprise to him. “After the entrance examinations, I was assigned a small house, just like one of those cottages we walked past near the entrance of the residential area.”

“I think that’s the case for most outer disciples. Everyone who lives around here, from what I’ve seen so far, are either outer disciples who ranked first in the entrance examination when they entered the sect or related to the elders. Both Duo Lan’s house and mine were probably occupied by someone like that before,” Tian Jin said, nodding his head. “Also,” he added, as he reached into his pocket and produced a red ring from it. He tossed it to Hao Zhen, who caught it instinctively. “Here.”

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Hao Zhen recognized it—it was the same ring he had held onto for the past few days. He stared down at the ring in the palm of his hand. “Ke Li’s ring?”

“You can have it,” Tian Jin said, and Hao Zhen looked up sharply at him. “I already have my own, and I don’t need anything that’s inside it. It’s also my fault you got involved in this mess, so this is the least I can do.”

“I…” After retrieving the ring from Ke Li’s corpse, Hao Zhen had spent some time trying to think of ways to convince Tian Jin to let him keep it, but he had forgotten about those plans when he learned that they’d have to turn the ring in after arriving at the sect. Even after the Mission Hall elder had handed the ring to Tian Jin, Hao Zhen hadn’t been particularly concerned about it, as he had already given up on it. Now that it had fallen into his hands so simply, however, he didn’t know how to react.

“You deserve it,” Tian Jin said, sensing his hesitation. The taller boy smiled. “I mean, you really helped me out with Duo Lan back there, and then you helped us properly plan our return to the sect. Had you not been there…” Tian Jin grew sheepish, shifting slightly in his seat. “I would have probably gone to confront Du Qing the moment I was back in the sect, and that probably wouldn’t have worked out too well.”

“Thank you,” Hao Zhen finally managed to say. After Tian Jin had said so much, it wasn’t as if he could refuse, and it wasn’t as if he even wanted to do so, in the first place. It wasn’t just the ring that he wanted. Besides it, there were also plenty of magical artifacts, talismans, and pills inside the ring, not to mention cultivation methods. Just the spatial ring alone would have been a massive windfall. The only pity was that Ke Li seemed to have already used up all of his spiritual stones, but Hao Zhen wasn’t about to complain. Although he hadn’t checked them yet, the pills were probably cultivation pills, and they might be even better than spiritual stones for cultivation.

What he was most interested in were the cultivation methods inside it. Hao Zhen clearly understood just how important cultivation was if he wanted to keep himself alive, particularly if he followed through on his plan of sticking around Tian Jin, who seemed unable to keep himself out of trouble. On the way to the sect, he had given up on studying the cultivation methods in Ke Li’s spatial ring, but that was only because he had assumed he wouldn’t have had the time to comprehend them. Now that they were his, the story was different.

“Again, you deserve it,” Tian Jin assured him.

In light of what had just happened, as well as the past few days, Hao Zhen couldn’t help but revise his opinion of the other boy. He had initially assumed that Tian Jin was the generic righteous cultivation novel protagonist, but that really wasn’t shaping out to be the case. Tian Jin was a righteous cultivation novel protagonist, but there was more to him than that. Besides Tian Jin’s tendency to find trouble wherever he went—which wasn’t even his fault, if Hao Zhen’s theory about the world was correct—and his impulsiveness, he had shown himself to be a perfectly reasonable, down-to-earth, and well-adjusted person so far. All of those were words that he wouldn’t usually associate with protagonists of cultivation novels.

“Anyway, I think we should…” Tian Jin suddenly trailed off, frowning. Puzzled, Hao Zhen watched as he stood up and made his way over to one of the walls, looking at it with a frown. Tian Jin then walked around the room some more, his expression pensive.

“Is something wrong?” Hao Zhen asked. Was there something wrong with the house? He couldn’t help but tense up. Could it be that they had been wrong about Duo Lan and—

“Not really,” Tian Jin said. “It’s just that this place has some pretty powerful warding schemas. I wasn’t expecting this. The ones on my residence aren’t nearly as good.”

So this wasn’t some kind of trap. Hao Zhen let out a sigh of relief, relaxing. “Schemas?” he then asked. He knew the word, but he didn't think it fit in this context. He was surprised it had even come out of Tian Jin’s mouth.

Tian Jin looked back. “Oh, right. You probably don’t know. You were a mundane before joining the sect, right? I don’t think you’d have come across them before if you’ve only been in a sect for two months.”

“Yeah,” Hao Zhen said, noting Tian Jin’s word choice. It seemed like Tian Jin came from a magical background. That’d explain a lot of things about him.

Tian Jin walked back over to his couch and sat down. “There are these magical symbols called inscriptions. Each inscription has different magical effects, and they can be arranged together in small-scale arrays called matrixes or large-scale arrays called schemas. The schemas here are pretty good. The walls can probably easily withstand the attack of a fifth-level redsoul, and the house as a whole is pretty much impervious to mundane fire. There are some schemas in my house, but they aren’t as good. You can see them if you use Spiritual Sight. As for matrixes, they’re what give magical talismans their power.”

Inscriptions he was familiar with—they were pretty commonplace in cultivation novels—and so were inscription arrays, but the words “schema” and “matrix” referring to types of inscription arrays was most definitely unusual. They weren’t terms usually found in cultivation novels. Yet another oddity of this world, it seemed.

Channeling spiritual power into his eyes, the world around Hao Zhen was immediately tinged red. And sure enough, as he looked at the walls and ceiling, he saw all sorts of magical symbols connected to each other, all throughout the room, and probably the entire house.

Deactivating Spiritual Sight, Hao Zhen returned his attention to Tian Jin. “I’m assuming you aren’t from a mundane background? Are you from a magical clan or just…” Tian Jin tensed slightly, his eyes narrowing, and Hao Zhen trailed off, getting his answer.

Tian Jin looked straight into Hao Zhen’s eyes. Hao Zhen held his gaze, but couldn’t help but look away after a few moments. Then, all of a sudden, Tian Jin sighed, the tension draining out of his face.

“I’m sorry about that,” Tian Jin said. “This… This is kind of a long story.” For the first time since the start of this conversation, Hao Zhen detected some hesitation and uncertainty in the other boy’s voice.

Hao Zhen briefly considered whether to let the matter go or push it. He ended up settling on the latter. It seemed like something serious had happened in Tian Jin’s past, and by knowing what exactly had transpired, Hao Zhen would be able to get an idea of Tian Jin’s motivations and goals—as well as whether Tian Jin had any enemies besides Du Qing. Considering he was planning on following Tian Jin in the future, that was the kind of thing he absolutely needed to know, even if Tian Jin didn’t seem all too eager to talk about it.

“I mean, if you don’t want to tell me, it’s fine,” Hao Zhen said. “But if time is what you’re worried about, I don’t think Duo Lan will be done anytime soon.” That was just a guess, but it was an educated one, considering what he already knew of Duo Lan. For good measure, he added, “I also must admit I’d like to know just what kind of life you’ve led so far.”

Tian Jin didn’t answer immediately. For a long while, the other boy remained silent, his expression contemplative, shifting slightly every once in a while, often turning conflicted or confused.

Hao Zhen simply waited, giving the other boy time to think. That Tian Jin was taking so long to come to a decision—that he was considering this so thoroughly—was already a good sign.

Eventually, Tian Jin took in a deep breath, setting his jaw, determination clear on his face. Hao Zhen perked up, watching him intently.

“All right,” Tian Jin said, his voice firm. “I’ll tell you.”