Faraway Wanderers Novel (English Translation)

Ghost Master

Chapter 33. Devil Lord

(Edited version)

Wen Kexing sat back slowly and gazed at him in silence. With both legs crossed, he tapped a finger against his knee for a moment before he spoke in a quiet voice.

"My surname isn't Rong, In fact I rather regret never meeting Rong Xuan in person. Else, I'd have murdered him as many times as we met."

Zhou Zhi Shu's face remained unchanged at the other man's words. When he replied it was in a slow and deliberate tone.

"Oh? I must have guessed wrong then. I thought... I thought the current Ghost Master may be an heir to Rong Xuan."

Zhang Chengling's light snores rang in the darkness. A breath away from each other, the two men kept as silence and still as the dead. Minutes stretched, unaccounted for, before a smile swept over Wen Kexing's lips.

It was a smile that was different from his usually foolish grin; the toothy one that made his eyes squint a little. No laugh lines framed his jet-black gaze as it glistened coldly.

"Huh?" He uttered with his simper and slight arch of a brow.

Zhou Zi Shu's whispered retort was so low, his lips hardly moved. Yet the flow of his words became brisk.

"The reason the Mourning Groom hired the Scorpions to lure the brat out wasn't to kill him, but to ask him a question. He wanted to know whether the boy had seen a man who's missing a finger on the night is family was massacred. To my knowledge, Xue Fang, The Hanging Ghost, is a finger short. Yet, I knew from the moment we met the men at the run-down Temple, that the Ghost Valley wasn't behind the Zhang Clan wipe out."

"And how did you come to this conclusion?" Wen Kexing asked as if enthralled.

Zhou Zi Shu let out a chuckle.

"I brought the brat with all his limbs intact and not a single hair harmed all the way to Taihu. If I were able that I could fend off the clutches of a hundred thousand Devils all by myself, l'd have proclaimed myself King of Wulin a long time ago, and wouldn't be here talking to you."

"..Please, you don't have to be so modest." Wen Kexing said whilst he eyed him with an incandescent gaze.

"But if so," Zhou Zi Shu went on, "why then was the Mourning Groom so determined to get his hands on the boy? As I mulled it over, I saw only one explanation. Regardless of who was behind the Zhang Clan massacre, someone from the Ghost Valley, is acting at their own discretion, and was involved. The Mourning Groom Suspected... or rather, wanted people to suspect that this person was the Hanged Ghost. Which led me to another tidbit: the black-clad man Gu Xiang killed at the temple said something in his dying breath. He pronounced the word "purple".
But purple what? Could it be... could it be that he had recognised the Purple Fiend?"

Wen Kexing nodded.

"Yes. She and I followed you all the way to Taihu, then all the way to Dongting. Our arrival was too strange for a coincidence, and we made appearances at other suspicious moments as well. Then, I killed that little good-for-nothing back in the cave, because l feared he would expose my identity- am I right?"

"It wasn't so hard to guess, Brother Wen. In the whole of Jianghu, the people I couldn't pin down are simply too few. In fact, Nanjiang and the Northern desert aside, I can count those from the Central Plains on one hand. And then, if I still couldn't figure it out after spending so many days in your company, I'd be quite the fool, don't you think?"