Cultivating Immortality by Raising a Cat (GL) Chapter 60

From the time A-Bai carried the two cats away in the ice bowl to the time Yuan Zhaoyang turned back into human form, stuck an invisibility talisman on herself, and returned, some time had passed. So Yuan Zhaoyang had not expected that after making her way back, Lin Mianmian would still be in the courtyard, head half-raised, staring for a long time at the place in the sky her eyes could no longer reach.
The silent courtyard had only been left for a short while. Yet when Yuan returned, it carried a familiar strangeness. Even the air seemed to have become heavy and stifling.
Looking at the little girl in the courtyard, most of her body turned away so Yuan could not see her face, Yuan Zhaoyang slowly let out a breath. But it could not send away the heavy sourness in her heart.
What kind of fool was this?
Before this, Yuan Zhaoyang had not quite understood why she had wanted to come back the moment the ice bowl lifted into the sky. Even on the way back, she had not understood why she was returning under an invisibility talisman. But now, though her heart felt sour, it was as if emptiness had finally landed somewhere solid and the road back had found its end.
Why had she come back? What was unclear about that?
She simply had not expected that even now, when the scam had reached its ending, it did not feel like an ending to her at all.
Yuan Zhaoyang slowly walked toward Lin Mianmian. A few steps away, she curved around slightly until she stood facing Lin.
The little girl whose eyes had only been slightly red when she sent the cat away now had tears falling like broken beads. They rolled from her eyes, down her cheeks, and became small rivers of tears.
Yuan Zhaoyang looked only once before quickly turning her face away.
What was there to look at? She had expected this long ago, hadn’t she?
But even though it was only one glance, that little face red from crying, the collar darkened by fallen tears, stayed in Yuan Zhaoyang’s mind for a long time.
An enormous sense of guilt swept toward Yuan Zhaoyang from every direction like invisible threads, binding her into a cocoon. Even as a perfect Foundation Establishment cultivator, she had no way to solve this suffocating trap.
Do not cry. There was never any Rice Ball. The one you liked, remembered, and held in your hands like a treasure… was only a bad thing that came to rub against your fragrance.
Countless voices argued inside Yuan Zhaoyang. Some shouted, Tell her the truth, you bad thing! Some calmly weighed the benefits and harms of staying silent against revealing everything. Some were as heavy as a magnet striking iron, grinding out only one sentence: Would the truth really make her happy?
That sentence made the other voices quiet for a while.
Only after a long time did Yuan Zhaoyang press down the thoughts that had not been this chaotic in many years. She gathered her courage and looked again at Lin Mianmian a few steps away.
I am sorry. In the days to come, I will repay you properly.
The little girl’s crying was quiet sorrow.
But tears flowing so silently made one’s heart ache even more. She had been forced to send away her favorite little animal. She did not wail or collapse, shouting that she could not bear it and did not want to. She only endured this ending that belonged to her alone, as if accepting fate.
Although you do not know it, I am still here.
No… it should be Rice Ball is still here.
Yuan Zhaoyang, conflicted inside, looked at Lin Mianmian’s falling tears. As if tempted by something strange, she unconsciously took two steps toward her.
How could such a small body hold so many tears?
Yuan Zhaoyang’s hand stopped in midair, only two palm-widths from Lin Mianmian’s eyes. Yuan looked at her own hand, clearly poised to wipe someone’s tears. She froze. Then, slowly, she drew it back and curled it into a fist.
She was no longer Rice Ball, who could casually touch Lin Mianmian’s face and comfort her.
Just as Yuan Zhaoyang withdrew her hand in what almost seemed like self-mockery, Lin Mianmian suddenly stopped staring at the far sky. She lifted her hands and hastily wiped her eyes twice.
Her face had already been cried messy. Lin Mianmian, who had wiped at it carelessly, had no idea how pitiful she looked right now. For some reason, she had suddenly felt as if she smelled the little calico’s scent, that faint bamboo fragrance from the Hundred-Clear Solution A-Bai had given the night before.
At first, when Lin Mianmian suddenly wiped her eyes, Yuan Zhaoyang was still a little confused. But when Lin immediately began sniffing and looking around, Yuan reacted at once. She quickly activated a talisman to hide her scent and stuck it beside the invisibility talisman.
Because Lin Mianmian had already drawn spiritual energy into her body and all five senses had grown sharper, Yuan Zhaoyang had specially used a higher-grade invisibility talisman than the one from her first time sneaking into Lin’s room. It could hide form, scent, and even sounds unrelated to spiritual energy movement.
But who knew what A-Bai’s Hundred-Clear Solution was made of? The invisibility talisman had not fully hidden it. The previous night, because Lin feared the calico’s remaining stink would affect the first impression at the new home, she had added several extra drops of Hundred-Clear Solution to the calico’s bath. Yuan Zhaoyang had not noticed for a moment. Just now, her hand had also been so close to Lin Mianmian that Lin had sniffed it out.
Fortunately, Yuan Zhaoyang reacted quickly. The scent-hiding talisman finally covered that faint bamboo fragrance.
So it really was a hallucination.
Lin Mianmian no longer smelled that trace of Rice Ball.
Of course. Rice Ball had already been sent away. How could A-Bai suddenly bring her back?
Lin Mianmian slowly brought her palm to her nose and sniffed lightly. The bamboo fragrance was very, very faint, so faint it could almost no longer be smelled. So the clear fragrance from just now had truly been her own wishful thinking.
Had she only just sent Rice Ball away and already missed her so much she was hallucinating?
After rubbing her eyes and nose, Lin Mianmian looked one last time at the empty distant sky. Then she lowered her head and slowly walked back into the room.
How could one person’s mood change so quickly?
Yuan Zhaoyang stood quietly in the courtyard. Lin Mianmian’s grief, surprise, delight, confusion, hope, and disappointment had all landed in her eyes.
Yuan knew why it had all happened, yet still did not know how to solve it.
Just as Yuan Zhaoyang was about to follow Lin Mianmian inside, she suddenly sensed A-Bai’s voice transmission.
“Where are you?”
The farther the distance, the higher the cost and difficulty of voice transmission. In general, once the distance was a little farther, cultivators gave up direct voice transmission and used voice-transmission paper sparrows, jade slips, divine sense messages, or other methods.
Judging by their route, A-Bai should already have flown beyond the Five Elements Sect’s barrier. Why was she still using direct voice transmission?
Yuan Zhaoyang was suspicious, but she did not ignore the little rabbit’s message. She did not answer directly either, only transmitting back, “And you?”
Almost the next moment after Yuan sent her reply, A-Bai answered, “If I have not guessed wrong, I am probably beside you, no more than ten human steps away.”
Yuan Zhaoyang swept her gaze around the empty courtyard. Then, copying Lin Mianmian, she sniffed the air. After a long while, she replied, “Oh.”
A-Bai, who was also crouching by the room door with an invisibility talisman stuck on, felt dissatisfied. “Why are you not asking where I am?”
She had specially returned, but this cat did not show even a hint of surprise. How boring.
Yuan Zhaoyang was clearly in no mood to play a guessing game with the little rabbit. She did not need to guess to know that A-Bai had most likely come back, and that she was most likely in this courtyard.
While Yuan Zhaoyang and A-Bai were transmitting, clinking and knocking sounds suddenly came from inside the room.
Yuan Zhaoyang quickly walked to the door. Inside, Lin Mianmian was crouched by a corner of the wall, taking down the cat steps from the wall.
Those sturdy, smooth wooden planks had accompanied Yuan through many nights. Looking at one plank already knocked down onto the floor, Yuan Zhaoyang felt her heart tighten badly. She had to remember to collect these planks later too.
Thinking wildly, Yuan Zhaoyang moved to enter the room.
Suddenly, her foot slipped.
What?
Yuan Zhaoyang looked down and saw that between her shoe and the ground beneath it, there was a small empty gap. The thing under her foot felt like a round, transparent cylinder.
“So now you know where I am…” A-Bai’s resentful voice transmission sounded in Yuan Zhaoyang’s heart.
Yuan Zhaoyang was speechless.
Unfortunately, A-Bai’s voice transmission was too slow. Almost at the same moment Yuan received it, Yuan’s shoe happened to grind against that transparent thing.
Yuan Zhaoyang silently moved her foot away. “Sorry. I did not see you.”
A-Bai was speechless too.
That reason left no point to argue against.
And so, not long after the ice bowl had flown away, one cat and one rabbit who had both returned under invisibility talismans stood at Lin Mianmian’s room door, facing an opponent neither could see.
According to A-Bai’s explanation, she was afraid Yuan Zhaoyang would come back, see Lin Mianmian’s pitiful little state, fail to hold back for a moment, and tell the truth. So she first entrusted the yellow cat to a family near the Five Elements Sect to raise for a couple of days. After Lin Mianmian was led inside by Zihui and Yuan obediently went to form her core, A-Bai would find time to send the yellow cat to Yingxian City.
A-Bai’s explanation sounded pretty good and pretty right. It seemed logical and considerate of every side. After listening, Yuan Zhaoyang was silent for a moment. With only one sentence, she deflated the little rabbit, who had come back full of confidence as if saving the world.
Yuan Zhaoyang said, “So if Lin Mianmian asks about Tian Xiaoyu’s recent situation later, are you going to keep making things up?”
A lie was like a snowball. One snowball had already rolled halfway up the mountain. A-Bai truly could not bring herself to say that one was rolling and a pile was rolling too.
A-Bai, who had only just returned, left dejectedly. Before going, she left behind a large pile of warnings not to act on impulse.
Yuan Zhaoyang admitted that she had thought about telling the truth. But she had indeed already made up her mind not to say it.
A-Bai had hurried over and hurried away, as if she had specially come back just to be stepped on by Yuan Zhaoyang. Still, it had to be said that her return once again strengthened Yuan Zhaoyang’s decision to end the matter of Rice Ball here.
The cat and rabbit had thought things through very well. But heaven’s will had always been willful. That, however, was a matter for later.
With A-Bai no longer blocking the door, Yuan Zhaoyang finally entered the room.
It had to be said that a cat’s point of view and a person’s point of view were different after all. The furnishings that usually looked tall from cat height now seemed ordinary.
Everything was familiar and strange at the same time.
By the wall, Lin Mianmian worked hard to remove the wooden planks. From time to time, she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.
This kind of crying, with reddened eyes and tears slowly filling them again and again… looked even more pitiful than before.
Was it reluctance?
I… am reluctant too.
Yuan Zhaoyang walked to another wall and touched the delicate little wooden planks there.
Even if these things became part of her collection later, they would still only be a collection.
Just like those days when she had been held in the palm of this fool’s hand as Rice Ball. In the end, they would only be memories.
Yuan Zhaoyang watched Lin Mianmian carefully remove the planks one by one. She watched Lin sort them by size. She watched those eyes that had never dried. She watched Lin cry while gently stroking every board Yuan had stepped on.
At some point, Yuan Zhaoyang’s right palm had pressed tightly over her heart and never moved away.
Every bit of grief and pain was a mistake she had caused. Her bitten lower lip seemed to gradually lose feeling.
Her face felt a little wet.
Yuan Zhaoyang touched her cheek. Her damp palm paused. Just then, something fell onto her fingertip.
What was this?
Yuan Zhaoyang slowly moved her finger before her eyes. A round little drop of water sat quietly on it.
When she had lost all her memories, she had not cried.
When she ate grass roots and bark day after day, seeing no hope and almost dying on Great Snow Mountain, she had not cried.
On Cangming Mountain, when she went from a gifted talent everyone envied to someone secretly discussed as a lifetime Foundation Establishment cultivator, she had not cried.
When she used every method and walked from the Northern Territory to the Southern Union, unable to step into Core Formation for nearly eighty years, she had not cried.
Yuan Zhaoyang had almost thought that nothing could make her shed tears.
And now…
Yuan Zhaoyang looked deeply at Lin Mianmian, who was still inside the room, wiping tears while cleaning the wooden planks.
Then she fled in panic.