The Villain Is Soft and Clingy [Transmigration into a Book] - Chapter 7

Did I hear that wrong? Zhang Kuang? After all that long-winded rambling, he was talking about Zhang Kuang?

Xia Zhitao choked badly on the tea. She patted her chest and coughed violently.

No wonder when she tried to recall the novel, she could not remember any deranged villain like this at all. She had even been a little curious. She had not expected that after babbling for so long, the storyteller had actually been talking about Zhang Kuang.

The entire thing was full of fabrication, reversing black and white, and twisting right and wrong. It was practically lying through his teeth. Did he think the audience around him was deaf?

Most importantly—

Zhang Kuang was a woman!! And not just any ordinary woman either. She was a great beauty personally stamped by Banana Peel-jun as someone whose magnificent looks could kill men, women, young, and old alike!

A dignified great beauty, not to mention the arrogant and unrestrained Demon Sect Leader—why on earth would she capture elderly men and women to warm her bed? Was this a collapse of morality, or the corruption of human nature—

Just thinking about it made it obviously impossible, all right!

Xia Zhitao sighed. If she had not heard it, she would not have known; now that she had heard it, she was truly startled. From the bottom of her heart, she “admired” the rich imagination of the common people.

After coughing for a long while, she finally recovered. Xia Zhitao held her forehead and heard the group of men surrounding the storyteller clicking their tongues and sighing.

“As expected, she’s utterly deranged. Cruel to the extreme!”

There was even a young man who slapped the table and roared, “If I could enter the immortal path, I would kill that demon and uphold justice!”

The people around him clapped and cheered one after another, praising the young man for his great ambitions and saying he would surely accomplish something in the future.

Not to be outdone, the burly man beside him said, “If that female demon ever runs into me, that day will be her death anniversary! I’ll make sure she tastes the power of my Hengshui Great Axe!”

The crowd erupted into cheers again, boasting each other up.

One person said one thing, another added another. Before Zhang Kuang herself had even appeared, she had already been hacked, chopped, strangled, and diced, dying countless times.

Xia Zhitao had only wanted to listen to a story. Seeing everyone flattering one another, while the story itself was fabricated out of thin air, disgust rose in her heart. She stood up and prepared to leave.

Unexpectedly, a burly man sitting by the door noticed her and said, “Little girl, come, come! If you ran into that demon, how would you kill her?”

Xia Zhitao was annoyed and did not want to bother with him. Calmly, she said, “I have nothing to do with her, nor do I have any deep hatred or great grudge against her. Why would I kill her? If I really met her, I would just pass by.”

As soon as these words came out, everyone sucked in a breath.

The young man from earlier had already begun slapping the table in indignation. “That Zhang Kuang abducts, burns, kills, and commits every evil imaginable. You want to let her go? Absolutely unreasonable! Absolutely unreasonable!”

Xia Zhitao sneered inwardly and asked in return, “And what if Zhang Kuang is not as everyone claims?”

“Zhang Kuang slaughtered the entire Shura Path, so she must have some real skill. Setting aside whether everyone here could truly beat her or not, judging and criticizing someone else’s affairs, even maliciously slandering them, is already an ugly act in itself. You listen to rumors, do not distinguish truth from falsehood, do not understand right from wrong, and recklessly slander a woman. So who exactly is the evil one?”

Her words were extremely cold, yet every sentence was reasonable. They left everyone choking, speechless, looking at one another with no idea how to reply.

Xia Zhitao looked around, then suddenly smiled.

That laugh was extremely light and faint, drifting down like a feather. In the silent room, it sounded especially piercing.

She slowly sat back down, as if she had not said enough yet, and added another piece of firewood to the flames. “Besides, the Shura Path was the one that slaughtered innocents indiscriminately and committed the gravest crimes. Zhang Kuang killed them. That can be called eliminating harm for the people and carrying out justice on behalf of heaven. May I ask, what crime is there in that?”

After hearing her say this, the axe-wielding burly man was already furious. He abruptly swung up his great axe and took the momentum to cleave the wooden table apart with a thunderous crash.

Carrying the great axe on his shoulder and stepping on the wreckage of the wooden table, he roared, “You little woman, you’re truly unreasonable! You dare speak for that demon? State your name. Today, I’ll do exactly as you said—carry out justice on behalf of heaven!”

Everyone put on an act and tried to stop him a little, saying things like “Why bother arguing with such a delicate little girl?” and “Long hair, short knowledge. Don’t mind her.” When they saw they could not stop him, they simply stopped trying and hid to the side to watch the show.

The black curtain of the private seats on the second floor moved slightly. Someone lifted a tiny gap with their fingertip, revealing the sharp outline of a side profile.

For a moment, the atmosphere in the shop was tense and ready to snap. Seeing that the situation had gone bad, the waiter had long since hidden trembling beneath the tables and chairs, praying that someone would be willing to compensate for the things that got smashed.

Xia Zhitao did not panic. Calmly and unhurriedly, she set down the teacup in her hand, lifted her eyes to glance at the righteous, indignant burly man, and leisurely sighed.

She said calmly, “Yashan.”

The noisy room instantly quieted by several degrees. The burly man and the others looked at her, their expressions slightly puzzled.

“You asked me to state my name just now. This is my answer.”

Xia Zhitao’s expression was calm. She placed her travel wooden token on the table and gently pushed it forward. “Yashan, Shuijing Peak.”

The burly man’s face turned snow-white with a swish.

“Inner disciple.”

Everyone fell silent.

For a time, the inn was utterly quiet. Only the clamor outside filtered in through the walls, faint and indistinct, as if an old man had split his mouth open and was using his leaking teeth to laugh mockingly at the crowd.

Yashan, the number one immortal sect under heaven. Even an inconspicuous outer-sect servant could look down arrogantly on everyone present, let alone an exceedingly rare inner disciple.

Like a basin of cold water poured over their heads, the teahouse abruptly lost all sound. The previously arrogant crowd wilted completely and returned resentfully to their respective seats.

After Xia Zhitao finished speaking, the atmosphere could no longer become lively. Seeing everyone so lifeless, the storyteller simply stopped talking as well and began drinking tea by himself. The waiter crawled out from under the table, moved to tears, and began serving tea and water normally again.

Although the Qiling Mountain Demon Sect, especially its leader Zhang Kuang, could be called Yashan’s irreconcilable mortal enemy, Xia Zhitao did not feel any regret.

Seeking truth from facts. In the modern world, fabricating rumors would count as false accusation.

In any case, they were not on Yashan. Even if Grandmaster found out that she had said a few words on Zhang Kuang’s behalf, he would not go so far as to blame her.

Xia Zhitao finished her pot of green tea, paid the bill with graceful composure, waved her long sleeves, and left with carefree elegance, leaving everyone with an unfathomable view of her back.

.

What she did not know was that not long after she left the teahouse, the black curtain of the private seat on the second floor suddenly moved slightly, then fell back into place with a rustle.

The private seats were special rooms in the teahouse prepared specifically for honored guests and wealthy merchants. They were separate from the guest tables on the first floor. The people above could see everyone below, but the people below had no way of knowing what was happening on the second floor.

A faint incense burned in the room. The firelight flickered, tugging out wisps of white smoke that filled the room with a cool, woody fragrance.

Two people sat facing one another. One was a woman in white, smiling brightly as her fingertip stroked the rim of her teacup. Her skin was extremely pale, without a trace of blood on her face, white as a dying person.

“How rare. Someone actually spoke for you.”

She propped up her chin and said with great interest, “And it was even a bright-eyed, pretty little girl… I thought everyone in Yashan hated you to the bone and wished they could grind your bones to dust and scatter your ashes into the sea to feed the fish.”

Before she could finish speaking, her shoulders suddenly sank. A surging pressure descended like a boulder, choking her neck and forcibly cutting off her words in her throat.

The person opposite her wore a long ink-black robe. Her neck and wrists were bound tightly, and the tips of her black boots curved upward, glinting with a few traces of silver light.

She lifted her eyes and glanced at the woman in white. Her expression was cold, and her voice did not carry much fluctuation either.

“—Shut your mouth.”

Spiritual power surged over, and the sense of suppression spread layer by layer. Even the white smoke slowly rising seemed to have been startled. Like a thin rope, it twisted crookedly and was pressed into midair.

The difference between their strength was as vast as heaven and earth. The woman in white had no power to resist and was completely suppressed. Unable to say a word, she resentfully closed her mouth and shrugged.

The woman in black folded her arms. A thin silver chain of linked rings hung from her neck, carrying a pale beast fang. A layer of mist gathered over it. Its curved tip was stained with a few traces of blood, as if it were grinning and mocking something.

She withdrew the pressure, sat back, and tapped the tabletop with a bent finger. “The goods?”

The woman in white straightened and sounded rather helpless. “Sect Leader, do you still not trust me to handle things?”

The person called Sect Leader did not even lift her eyes and said coldly, “You talk too much nonsense.”

The woman in white was not angry either. She made a light grabbing motion in the air, and a black box appeared in her five fingers.

“Not one more, not one less. Exactly ten.” She carefully opened the box and handed it to the other person, saying gently, “Please take a look.”

Inside the black box lay ten round, smooth pills, their color pure and clear. With one glance, anyone could tell they were top-grade.

The woman in black casually glanced at them twice and perfunctorily gave an “mm.” The black box instantly vanished, stored away into her storage ring.

She snapped her fingers, and a completely transparent golden stone, like amber, landed on the table, making a crisp “ding-clang” sound.

She spoke concisely. “Payment.”

The woman in white’s breathing quickened uncontrollably. She stared fixedly at that glittering golden stone and worked hard to suppress the urge to reach out and touch it, then praised softly, “…As expected of you.”

The woman in black did not speak. She slowly stood up, casually draped the piece of black robe over her shoulder, and walked out of the room.

As soon as the waiters moving around saw her, they hurriedly bowed and bent their knees. Lowering their heads in terror, they trembled and did not dare move.

The woman in black walked through the corridor. The instant her figure appeared at the top of the stairs, the entire main hall suddenly fell into deathly silence.

—Why would the legendary Demon Sect Leader, who killed like mowing grass and was notorious for her crimes, appear here?!

Even though that person said nothing, not a single person in the entire hall dared move, nor did anyone dare speak. Even their breathing was suppressed to the lowest possible level.

The woman in black had no expression. The tips of her boots stepped on the wooden stairs as she slowly descended, the black robe behind her swaying lightly with her body and drawing a silver arc through the air.

Everyone’s hearts were hanging by a thread as they watched the woman in black walk straight through the hall and toward the bright, open doorway.

Just as everyone breathed a sigh of relief, thinking that this person was finally about to leave, she suddenly turned her head.

Zhang Kuang slightly lifted her brows and eyes. Looking at the few people in the hall, she smiled with unclear meaning.

Her throat was light and delicate, her voice warm and soft.

“Just now, who was it that wanted to take her life and carry out justice on behalf of heaven?”

“…Come out and let me have a look.”

Author’s Note: Zhang Kuang: Didn’t expect it, did you? This Venerable One has two accounts.