Genshin Impact: The Sage's Disciple Doesn't Want Fame

Yun's father naturally disapproved. He was not a businessman, and although he understood the principle of profit-seeking, he absolutely could not earn money that was against morality. Therefore, when everyone was dividing the money, he was the only one who did not take a single cent.

They immediately wanted to leave the group, but a young boy suddenly appeared by the roadside, saying that his family was starving and he wanted to sell his family heirloom in exchange for Mora, inviting everyone to visit his home.

The Yun family has always been interested in family heirlooms. Yun's father expressed his willingness to follow along, and seeing that the boy looked like he couldn't afford to eat, he thought he might as well raise the price and buy it, which would be a good deed.

Unexpectedly, the boy refused Yun's father's request to follow him on the spot, without explaining why, and simply led the rest of the caravan away.

Before leaving, Yun's father asked the boy his name, and the boy told him the truth. He also warned him that the journey was dangerous and that it would be best to take a detour back to Liyue Harbor.

Later, Yunfu, who had returned to Liyue Harbor, learned of the caravan's fate. Their bodies were found in a deserted village on the outskirts of the city, and the murderer had clearly laid an ambush beforehand.

From then on, Yun's father had a deep impression of the name "Ji Ming," but he never heard the name again over the next few years.

Unexpectedly, when he heard the name again, it was his own daughter who brought it up.

Back then, Ji Ming used a family heirloom to lure and kill a merchant caravan with a terrible reputation. Now, he's targeting the Yun family again because of the heirloom. It's terrifying to think about.

“Ajin, you can give him a sample of the pale moon, but you must not associate with him afterward.”

"Eh, why?"

"Losing money is a way to avoid disaster."

"Eh?!"

Chapter 72 [Extra Chapter] Jianghu Zheng Laosan

Zheng Laosan grew up with coal ash as his childhood.

At the easternmost end of Tiger Rock, the blacksmith's shop was perpetually covered in black ash from its rafters, and the bellows sounded like an old man suffering from tuberculosis as he pumped them. When Zheng Tietou swung his hammer, he would always mutter, "San'er, watch the fire! Purple fire forges farm tools, blue fire forges weapons!"

But eight-year-old Zheng Laosan was only thinking about the sweet potatoes roasting in the ashes—this morning he had dug up the coal ash from the Zhou family's coal caravan, which contained half a basket of coke.

………………

The Zhou family's carriage arrived at noon.

The silk shop's carriage got stuck in a mud pit in front of the blacksmith's shop. The driver whipped the clothesline, which snapped, and Zheng Laosan's mother's coarse cloth shirt, which she had been mending for three years, fell into the coal pile.

Zheng Tietou grabbed the red-hot iron tongs, ready to fight back, but was pinned to the chopping board by four thugs in blue uniforms.

What Xiao Zheng Lao San remembers most clearly is that ebony abacus—Master Zhou sat in the carriage, fiddling with the beads, and the sound leaking from the curtain was like a viper spitting its tongue: "Master Zheng's hands are worth twenty moras."

That night, the blacksmith's furnace was stained with blood. When Zheng Tietou's right index finger was broken, he kicked his son into the water vat in the backyard: "Hold on! If you dare make a sound, I'll beat you to death!"

Little Zheng Lao San curled up in the ice-covered water, and through the cracks he could see his father's severed finger bouncing on the chopping board, like a mudfish with its head chopped off.

Sixteen-year-old Zheng Laosan could lift the bellows with one hand.

Even the mischievous kids in the back alley of Tiger Rock were afraid of him—this towering man always carried an unsharpened iron spade at his waist when he went to Yaoguang Beach to collect coal slag.

That day, the tide receded rapidly, and he stumbled upon a white-haired girl who had fallen on the rocky beach, her knees covered in blood, clutching a tattered basket tightly in her arms.

"Can you eat this junk?" Old Zheng tossed half a pancake at him.

Ningguang wiped her face, and the seashells were arranged in the shape of the Big Dipper on the sand: "The gentry of the Guili Plain in the north like this. They call it 'Seven Treasures of the Sea.'"

The bruises on her wrists were denser than the patterns on a seashell. Zheng Laosan recalled the night his mother's leg was crushed by a coal cart, when she had also been protecting half a bag of brown rice with the same fierce determination.

As the sound of horses' hooves crushed the sound of the tide, Zheng Laosan was squatting down picking seashells.

The young master of the Zhou family swept away the basket with his golden whip, scattering coral-red seashells all over the ground: "You worthless bastard! How dare you steal the tribute from my fishing grounds!"

Ningguang lunged at him and bit his wrist, but was whipped on the collarbone by the horsewhip.

It was at this moment that Zheng Laosan swung out his iron ingot.

The sharp crack of the horse's leg breaking startled the seabirds into flight. Young Master Zhou, soaked to the bone in the saltwater, yelled, "You blacksmith brat! I'll stuff you into the furnace sooner or later!"

Zheng Laosan stepped on his back to pick up seashells, only to find that Ningguang had already disappeared.

………………

Zheng Laosan truly hated the Zhou family more than ten years after his parents passed away.

The Liyue Septate is implementing some kind of "craftsman registration reform," where blacksmith shops in Tiger Rock have to pay a monthly "smelting tax."

When the tax official in his official hat kicked over the bellows, Zheng Laosan's hammer was only half an inch away from the top of his head. In the corner sat his mother's memorial tablet, and three broken incense sticks remained stuck in the incense burner.

"Trying to be arrogant with an official?" The tax official sneered, brandishing his documents. "Lord Tianquan's newly issued 'Order of the Hundred Craftsmen' stipulates that violators will have their ancestral property confiscated!"

Zheng Laosan stared at the shell-patterned official seal in the lower right corner of the document and suddenly remembered the white-haired girl who could slip away faster than a fish.

The Liyue Harbor docks have been contracted out to the major merchant guilds, so fishing boats no longer need blacksmiths to repair anchors.

Old Zheng squatted on the rusty cargo ship, drinking alone, watching the Zhou family's merchant ship sail by with its golden tassel flag fluttering. On the deck were piles of celadon shell-carved Pixiu—it was said to be a "wealth-attracting formation" personally designed by Ningguang.

On a snowy night on the eighth day of the twelfth lunar month, the Zhou family, accompanied by the Thousand Rock Army, came to demolish the shop. Zheng Tietou, clutching his ancestral anvil, coughed up blood: "Third son... Father hid a hammer..."

Before he could finish speaking, he was dragged out the door, the old blacksmith's back slamming against the threshold with the same dull thud as the night his finger was severed twenty years ago.

Zheng Laosan drew his knife on the eighteenth day of the twelfth lunar month.

Steam rose from the kitchen chimney as he crouched on the roof beam, caressing the ancestral hammer—the blade had been quenched with the ashes of his father's severed finger, and the coarse cloth wrapped around the handle had been soaked in his mother's blood-activating medicine.

The bronze anchor buckles of merchant ships were cracked in batches; bloodstained seashells were nailed to the beams and pillars of Master Zhou's bedroom; and the mischievous children at Tiger Rock sang a crooked poem: "The blacksmith's bones are harder than iron, three fires will burn Master Zhou..."

The blood and fumes stained the "Liyue Canal Transport Map" on the wall, and he suddenly remembered the Big Dipper shell on Ningguang's pendulum.

Many days later, the Zhou family's salt warehouse caught fire, and the entire Zhou family was wiped out overnight.

Nowadays, fishermen say that on a full moon night, they can hear the sound of blacksmithing on the rocky beach.

Someone once found a rusty hammer with half a string of seashells wrapped around its handle, engraved with the roughest poem in Liyue Harbor: "The blacksmith doesn't forge gold and silver, he specializes in striking down the black-hearted people of the world!"

Ningguang's white jade abacus was still ringing at Yujingtai, but every time it came to the item "taxes from Huyan", the fingertips of the abacus would pause.

The sea breeze carried the sporadic sounds of hammering, much like the sounds someone used to make as a child roasting sweet potatoes in a cinder pile.

It has nothing to do with anything else, except that we suffered together back then, but now one of us is in the Heavenly Palace and the other is in the mortal world. But all of this is for Li Yue. The suffering we shared back then has ultimately come to an end.

Chapter 73 [Extra Chapter] Chen the Severed Finger in the Martial World

Chen Huaizhang was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. It's no exaggeration to say that his starting point was the endpoint for most people in Liyue Harbor, and even something they could never reach in their entire lives.

There's a saying in Liyue that goes something like this: the first crossroads in life is in the womb.

The Chen family of Liyue is a renowned and prestigious family in the entire Yujingtai region. Although no one in the family has ever produced a Seven Star, many families that have produced Seven Stars often come to them seeking marriage alliances.

The Chen family neither engages in commerce, nor teaches arts, nor does it farm or study. Members of this family are often active in the middle ranks of government, serving as "advisors" or "secretaries."

As the saying goes, Kun's weapons and wealth, Li's Seven Star Cloud hammer, are no match for Chen's silver tongue.

If the aforementioned families are the face of Liyue, then the Chen family of Liyue is the backbone of Liyue, representing the efficiency of the middle and lower levels of administration in Liyue Harbor, and even more so, the spiderweb-like network of human connections in Liyue.

Chen Huaizhang was born into such a large family, and his future was already predetermined before he was even born.

As a son of the main family, Chen Huaizhang was groomed by his elders to be the helmsman of the family, and he was also taught a lot about the role of a clerk.

Before the age of six, while other children his age were still learning to read and count, Chen Huaizhang began his special training to become a clerk in an environment where he was constantly exposed to the world.

For a secretary, handling government affairs is secondary; the most important thing is interpersonal relationships and understanding human nature.

Under the guidance of his family elders, Chen Huaizhang never read enlightenment books like "The Hundred Family Surnames" during his childhood. Instead, he carried a small booklet passed down from the Chen family and read it wherever he went, which could also be considered his enlightenment education.

The booklet didn't contain any business strategies for getting rich. Instead, it was filled with the relationships between the various families in Liyue Harbor. The complex web of interpersonal connections was all in the hands of the Chen family, which taught Chen Huaizhang from a young age how to navigate among these forces.

Chen Huaizhang disliked all of this; the expectations of his family elders were suffocating him, and he could only relieve this pressure in his spare time.

Cricket fighting was Chen Huaizhang's favorite pastime when he was young, which sounds a bit like frivolous.

There was no other way; the pressure was simply too great, and raising larger animals wasn't appropriate. So, Chen Huaizhang could only secretly keep two crickets as a form of entertainment, which he usually entrusted to his personal maid, Chunxing, for safekeeping.

Chunxing was four years older than Chen Huaizhang. When she was a child, her family sent her to the Chen family to work as a maid. After Chen Huaizhang was born, she became his personal maid and study companion.

Chen Huaizhang had always held a strong affection for and absolute trust in his gentle and understanding personal maid, whom he privately called "Sister Xing'er" and regarded as a sister and mother figure.

Yes, Chen Huaizhang's father had many concubines, and in order to ensure that the right heir would not be constrained by the rules of etiquette, he did not establish a principal wife.

Chen Huaizhang's mother can only be called his birth mother; she did not raise him personally. He only saw her once a day when he paid his respects. The relationship between mother and son is naturally beyond question.

Under these circumstances, Chen Huaizhang's trust in Chunxing naturally increased rapidly, and he even developed a fondness for her that was beyond his years.

At the age of sixteen, Sumeru's new ideas spread to Liyue Harbor, and the Palace of Wisdom rose to fame. Following the route arranged by his family elders, Chen Huaizhang left Liyue to study in Sumeru.

That same year, on the night before leaving Liyue, Chen Huaizhang, who was just beginning to experience love, was very curious about it. In addition, he rarely interacted with women, so he left a secret letter in Chunxing's room.

"The celadon inkstone is cold and the ink lingers, I accidentally brush my fingertips and my eyes are half-closed."

"She picked up the flower from her hair, but was too late; she secretly tucked a wisp of fragrance into her sleeve."

"I wanted to write about the moon on Xue's paper, but I was afraid to startle her whispers, so I only drew her eyebrows."

"Suddenly I saw a small crabapple tree by the west window; I wanted to pluck it but hesitated as the wind rose."

This is clearly a love poem expressing affection. The shyness of the young man made Chen Huaizhang write it very subtly, but as the personal maid of the young master of the Chen family, Chunxing should have been able to understand it.

The next morning, as Chen Huaizhang embarked on his studies abroad, he found an extra letter in his bag with the same design. Upon opening the envelope, he found very delicate handwriting and faint water stains on the letter, as if they were tears.

"The ink in the young master's study is not yet dry, while a beautiful woman adds fragrance to the inkstone as she grinds it."

"A flower tucked askew into her disheveled black hair, she steals a glance at her beloved, writing of her longing."

"Whispers are hidden at the bottom of the inkstone, butterflies linger on the lines of poetry."