Daily life of a cultivation judge-Chapter 1250: Terms of the deal (1)

Xie Han’s steps paused halfway at Yang Qing’s words. Slowly lowering his foot, he turned to face him.

"Another trade?" he asked with an incredulous expression as his heart began to race. Is it really going to happen? He thought as his excitement stirred.

He’d already written off the chance of coming under Yang Qing’s employ as a spy, given how quickly he’d turned on the mysterious expert who had helped him break through to the palace realm. But now, it seemed all hope wasn’t lost.

Still, he found it hard to believe that the deal was alive and kicking. If the roles were reversed and he were in Yang Qing’s position, judging whether or not to use someone like himself as a spy, there was no way he’d consider it. For one, he wouldn’t trust the information given, and more importantly, he wouldn’t trust the person’s ability to effectively fulfill the role.

Actually, now that he thought about it, why would someone like Yang Qing want him as a spy in the first place? He clearly lacked both the spine and finesse for such work, given how easily he got caught earlier and how quickly he spilled everything he knew.

And then there was his title—’ Guest Elder.’ While it sounded important and was significant in certain circles, in his case, it wasn’t.

That title existed in name only. It lacked the authority and prestige it was supposed to carry, at least in his case. Other Guest Elders received far better treatment than he did. But then again, they hadn’t ended up in the Huang clan’s employ because of a botched robbery that left them at the mercy of some clan elder, who, in exchange for sparing the robber’s life, forced them into service.

His actions, unsavory as they were, had saved him once again. But while this time he didn’t have poisonous gu or strange concoctions embedded in his body, he was still under a different kind of restriction. Most in the Huang clan knew exactly how he’d gotten in—and treated him accordingly, in line with the stain of his activities.

He might now be a palace realm expert and a Guest Elder, but that didn’t mean he’d escaped the taint of his past. The Huang clan would never trust him with anything important. And if they didn’t trust him, what value could he possibly provide as a spy?

Does he even want me as a spy? Xie Han wondered anxiously, realizing he might have gotten ahead of himself... again.

Fortunately, that realization helped settle his thoughts just enough to catch Yang Qing’s next words.

"Yes, a trade," Yang Qing confirmed, his eyes taking on a mysterious glint.

Xie Han’s face twitched slightly beneath that expression. For some reason, he felt completely exposed under that gaze, like everything inside him had just been laid bare.

"I’m not sure what kind of life you led," Yang Qing said softly, "but it seems you’ve accumulated a lot of injuries in that time—most of which were poisonous in nature."

Xie Han flinched at the remark. His earlier feeling of being seen through was instantly vindicated, but he wasn’t exactly pleased about being proven right. For someone like him, with the life he’d led and the things he’d done, his past was something he preferred buried in the deepest, darkest abyss imaginable. freewёbnoνel-com

Yang Qing, clearly sensing his discomfort, continued,"Hundred Venom Gu, Soul Shackling Gu, and the Withering Blight Nightshade...You—or whoever did it—did a good job removing them. But even so, they still left behind a lot of hidden damage."

Xie Han’s eyes widened more and more with each name Yang Qing mentioned. Memories he thought he’d escaped came flooding back.

The Hundred Venom Gu, the Soul Shackling Gu, and the Withering Blight Nightshade were the ’chains’ his former gang had used to bind him. Any one of them alone could subject someone to a torment worse than death—he’d had all three. The pain had been so unbearable that for nearly thirty years, he’d lived in a delirious haze, consuming anything that could numb the agony, even for just a few seconds.

That was how the gang controlled him. The three toxins were their stick, and the potion they gave him to ease the pain was the carrot.

He got lucky during one of his missions when he stumbled upon clues on how to deal with the Hundred Venom Gu, which was by far the nastiest of the bunch and the greatest contributor to the pain and delirium he’d lived under. After nearly 170 years, he finally uncovered a way to remove it.

Of course, knowing something and actually doing it were two very different things. His attempt, though ultimately successful, hadn’t been clean. It left behind a great deal of trauma.

The same went for the remaining two, especially the Withering Blight Nightshade, which had embedded itself deep into his meridians and dantian, then spread throughout the rest of his body, infecting it with rot. The damage to his vigor and vitality had been so severe that he was no different from those who relied on life-burning escape techniques.

The Soul Shackling Gu was the trickiest to handle, since it was tethered directly to the person who had planted it. Any attempt to interfere with it would alert them immediately, allowing them to poison his soul and subject him to unbearable torment.

But ironically, while it was the most dangerous to handle, it ended up being the easiest to remove—and the only one of the three that left the least damage after its removal.

To remove it, all he had to do was uncover the controller and force them to undo it. Identifying them wasn’t difficult, considering the man loved to taunt him, often bragging about how he could end Xie Han with a snap of his fingers. And whenever he was in a foul mood, he’d trigger the Soul Shackle Gu just to watch him suffer.

It always felt like jagged fire hooks had been driven into his soul, melting and tearing it apart.

He made sure to return that torment in kind when the time came.

Xie Han placed a dozen or so cursed spells on the controller, which shattered his mind, before he then took control of it. Like controlling a puppet, he made the man remove the Soul Shackle Gu.

Xie Han had always been aware of the hidden damage left behind by those three things. After all, it was his body. He could feel it, especially during certain seasons, in particular environments, or when facing specific types of attacks. Those hidden injuries would flare up. They weren’t as painful or life-threatening as before, but they still impaired him.

In addition to those situational weaknesses triggered under certain conditions, it was also evident to him that even under normal circumstances, he was slower—his movements and reactions were laggy. To a normal, they seemed normal, but to him, he definitely knew his movements and reactions were slightly impaired. It was like fighting with blurry vision and trembling hands while wielding a sword.

He’d hoped that breaking through to the palace realm would fix things—that maybe the tribulation or the accompanying boon would cleanse the lingering damage. And to an extent, it had helped—especially in repairing the vitality damage caused by the Withering Blight Nightshade.

That being said, some of its remnant effects still stubbornly hung onto his body, and so did that of the hundred venom gu and the soul shackling gu(which he honestly thought had been completely dealt with, but given Yang Qing’s statement, it seemed it wasn’t dealt with completely).

"If you don’t deal with those hidden traumas properly, you know as well as I do that they have the potential to halt your path forward permanently," Yang Qing said.

Xie Han nodded solemnly in agreement, fully understanding the weight of that assessment.

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