Young Master Bai — Chapter 16
Chapter 16 Roasted Deer Meat Really Tastes Good
It is said that a million years ago, the Heavenly Stars fell down again and again, star fragments blanketed Heaven and Earth, and the world was covered by glaciers, with countless yao beasts driven to extinction. The heavenly maiden Ba [a mythological drought deity] descended and used her own spiritual domain to melt the ice, walking for a million years before reviving the world.
The ice and snow have long since passed, seas have turned into mulberry fields, and the corpses of prehistoric yao beasts sank into the endless seas with the melting snow. The lands they once lived on were buried deep underground by shifting mountains and rivers. Only two snow-covered places remain to prove that such a desolate era once existed: one is today’s Great Snow Mountain, the other is the endless snowy plains in the extreme north — the ancient habitat of the Nine-colored Deer.
After the human race appeared, generation after generation was troubled by wars. To escape the chaos, they moved into whatever high mountains and sea islands they could. In ancient times, a tribe even took advantage of the sea still being frozen to walk across the ice to the extreme north, where they multiplied and thrived. Because the sacrificial totem they passed down had a deer’s head and a bear’s body, the world called them the Deer-Bear tribe.
Lu Ren Wang and Lu Ren Yi were descendants of this ancient tribe. But their ancestors were quite unlucky — during ancient times, they were far from the mainland and missed the golden age of human rise. A thousand years ago, the Yao King happened to raise an army in the extreme north, and the first thing he did was slaughter the Deer-Bear tribe to use their blood as a sacrificial banner. Even the Nine-colored Deer that lived alongside them were killed to the last.
The only fortunate thing was that the Demon Venerable, who then dominated the human world, also sharpened his knives and prepared to slaughter this ancient human tribe. When he saw that the yao had killed them first, the arrogant demonic cultivators immediately clashed with the Yao King’s army. A few surviving Deer-Bear clansmen seized the chance to mix in with the demonic cultivators and fled to the Central Plains. When the Heaven's Way Alliance finally quelled the chaos and settled the land, they quietly returned to the extreme north to rebuild their homeland.
Human lifespans were not long. Before the Unknown Truth Sect popularized cultivation, living to a hundred was enough to be called a sage. To Lu Ren Yi’s generation, these old stories were all etched into stone slabs. After he was born, the only thing he knew was that the adults in the tribe deeply hated the yao, while he and his brother, unfortunately, carried yao blood.
Their mother was the Deer-Bear tribe’s shaman. From childhood, she studied the stone slabs to inherit the ancestors’ knowledge and grew up as the dream woman of many warriors. Unexpectedly, such a noble shaman fell in love with a cultivator from the Central Plains.
The cultivator called himself Lu Lang. The two became inseparable and pledged their lives to each other after just one month. On their wedding day, following local customs, Lu Lang entered the snow forest to catch the first prey to offer his bride as a betrothal gift. Who knew he would disappear for an entire day?
The shaman, wearing her wedding dress, waited bitterly outside the forest until dawn and finally saw her husband return. Lu Lang carried a beautiful white deer covered in nine-colored patterns, giving her the highest honor as a bride. She wept with joy, grateful he came back safely, never knowing that the man holding her then was no longer Lu Lang.
The shaman, unaware, continued the wedding, shared all the inherited knowledge, and even bore him two children.
Lu Lang did not follow Central Plains custom by letting the sons take his surname but named them Lu Ren Wang and Lu Ren Yi. [Lu for Deer, Ren for Man, Wang for King and Yi for Second (spare).] This was the ancient yao way of naming: when the time came to find a mate and bear offspring, they used the parents’ races as the surname and casually gave an additional name to distinguish the offspring.
These things were recorded on the Deer-Bear tribe’s stone slabs, but the shaman never suspected her beloved husband. She still waited at home every day for him to return from hunting. But as the children grew, Lu Lang became increasingly cold toward her. Heartbroken, she only blamed him for being unfeeling, until one day when Lu Ren Wang was ten, she accidentally saw Lu Lang conversing with a fox yao and discovered that the man she had spent days and nights with was actually a deer yao.
The deer yao, exposed, was about to leave. The shaman, heartbroken and furious, led her two sons into the snow, crying bitterly: “Lu Lang, do you really want to abandon me and our sons?”
“I am not Lu Lang but the last Nine-colored Deer in this world. In this snowy land, there is no female yao beast to cultivate into human form. I originally intended to use your womb to leave behind my bloodline, but the children you bore are no different from ordinary humans and cannot be considered yao descendants. Since that is so, I need not stay and will follow the Yao King’s heir to restore my clan’s glory.”
Leaving such cold words, he did not even turn his head before transforming into a white deer before her eyes. As he ran, the nine-colored patterns on his back were just like the dazzling ribbons on the Heavenly Maiden’s mural — exactly the same as the prey he had offered on their wedding day.
The shaman could not believe it. When she and her sons stumbled home, the Nine-colored Deer they had kept as a trophy had already turned into a human skeleton — the real Lu Lang, who had died in the snow ten years earlier. It turned out everything was the deer yao’s illusion. All those years she had unknowingly married the monster before her beloved’s remains and even worshipped his corpse as a betrothal gift.
Such a blow completely broke the shaman. She laughed and cried, then, before her two sons, hugged the skeleton and threw herself into the icy river, freezing herself to death in the bone-chilling water.
It was laughable, too: the deer yao waited ten years, but seeing that his sons never awakened their yao blood, he finally abandoned them. Yet just as their mother’s corpse floated up, her unclosed eyes meeting those of her sons through the ice, their yao bloodlines awakened amid grief and fear. They grew white antlers like the deer yao and their feet turned into hooves, turning the children into yao, beings despised by their own tribe.
“Our mother suddenly killed herself without training a successor shaman. No one in the tribe could read the ancient characters on the stone slabs anymore, and the Deer-Bear tribe’s inheritance was completely broken. My brother and I, once the shaman’s hopeful sons, were hated by everyone after that and eventually sold by the chief to a small demonic sect as goods.
“The tendons and bones of deer yao are valuable. That demonic cultivator cut off our antlers, kept us at his side, and taught us cultivation only to harvest our yao bones when we were strong enough. Later he offended the Demon Sect and was executed by the sect master. We took the chance to escape, lived in hiding for many years, and finally joined the Demon Sect and managed to live in peace for a while.”
These things weighed on Lu Ren Yi’s heart for many years, and now, speaking of them again, his voice was full of hatred. He hated the deer yao who ruined his family and also his mother who abandoned them. But all his resentment turned into boundless sorrow when he thought of his brother. The half-yao gripped the paper money he had bought today, his eyes red like a deserted little beast.
“I am a hated person. Since childhood, only my brother protected me. When we were under that demonic cultivator’s hand, my brother tried to escape with me, was caught, and had his tendons cut. Even now he could only walk by relying on his qi. He said he wanted to go to the Great Snow Mountain to find that heartless deer yao. I didn’t want to have anything more to do with yao and quarreled with him… I shouldn’t have argued. If I had gone with him, who could have killed him in the snow?”
Just as the Ghost Tactician said, the memories he left for his most beloved person before dying were full of quarrels — a regret one could never forget in a lifetime. Bai Chen thought of himself storming out on his Fox Immortal Grandfather and could somewhat understand his feelings. He called Chenzui to undo his bindings and softly said, “There is no Nine-colored Deer in the Great Snow Mountain. You went to the wrong place.”
Any talk of the Yao King’s heir implied the Nine-tailed Fox. Lu Ren Yi didn’t believe him and fiercely retorted, “Impossible. I was there at the time and clearly heard him say he would follow the Yao King’s heir!”
At that time, Lu Ren Wang was ten and Lu Ren Yi was eight — old enough to remember.
Hearing this, Bai Chen felt even more suspicious, but Li Wuming advised, “Since you were a hunter, don’t you know the habits of beasts? The three main races of the Great Snow Mountain are foxes, wolves, and bears. The rest are flower yao and grass yao — vegetables. Even the few herbivorous little yao are just livestock, destined to be slaughtered one day. Deer meat is so delicious. I love roasting it in winter. If your father really was a descendant of the Nine-colored Deer, how could he have lived among these carnivorous beasts?”
This man truly had no heart. Even after hearing such a tragic story, he could instantly say something so blunt. Yet what he said did make sense, and Lu Ren Yi froze in place.
Though he spoke logically, Bai Chen found it unpleasant to hear and glanced at him. “So this young master is a carnivorous beast?”
To this, Li Wuming silently rolled up his sleeve and showed the bite mark on his arm. “Look. I accidentally stepped on your tail this morning and got bitten.”
The body of a Sword Immortal was not so easily injured. This man clearly wanted to leave evidence of domestic violence to accuse him. Bai Chen turned his face away and ignored him, only saying to Lu Ren Yi expressionlessly, “What he said may sound inhuman, but it is true. Yao have hunting and self-defense instincts. Even though this weirdo and I are Dao companions, when my tail is stepped on, I can’t help but bite. If a deer kept wandering around, the Heavenly Wolf clan and the Great Bear clan would surely go green-eyed [greedy].”
Lu Ren Yi never imagined the yao were divided this way. Seeing this, he gave a bitter laugh and collapsed to the ground. “Ridiculous. So the deer yao isn’t here, and my brother died in vain…”
To seek a father only to look in the wrong place — this truly was a sad misfortune. Chenzui, feeling sympathy, said no more and only asked Bai Chen, “Could there be other Yao King heirs in the world besides the Ancestor?”
Bai Chen was also puzzled and turned his gaze to the Sword Immortal’s successor. “That is something to ask someone’s master.”
A thousand years ago, it was the Sword Immortal who killed the Yao King and broke the yao army. The Yao King’s heirs were also slaughtered one by one by him. Only Li Wuming knew the answer. Yet the man only touched his nose helplessly and said, “With my master’s clear-cut temperament, he probably did kill them all a thousand years ago. But it’s not impossible that the Yao King might have had one or two illegitimate children. After all, the rumor was that he wouldn’t even spare a mother mosquito.”
This was completely different from the Yao King recorded in the Great Snow Mountain. Chenzui opened his eyes in surprise. “So the Yao King was that formidable?”
This kind of formidable was not something normal people would want. Seeing Bai Chen’s face darken, Li Wuming quickly shook his head. “That’s what my master said. You can take it with a grain of salt.”
“Hmph, I think this cut-sleeve [gay] curse was cast by your master. Only he would hate the Yao King that much.”
The Sword Immortal’s line truly produced nothing but weirdos. Bai Chen couldn’t spare the energy to deal with the matters of a thousand years ago. Seeing Lu Ren Yi’s emotions slightly calm, he asked seriously:
“The Bear Guard would always capture and question intruders first and would never kill before clarifying their origins. If Lu Ren Wang really stumbled into the Great Snow Mountain stronghold and encountered the Great Bear clan, as long as he revealed his identity as a demonic sect disciple, the Bear Guard couldn’t possibly have killed him.
“Think carefully again — was there anything unusual about your brother’s body?”
~ Chapter End ~
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