Nan Zhi carefully stored away the will and cash left behind by Dao Magu before finally finding the time to inspect the Gu book and the alchemy cauldron.
《Ten Years of Gu Records》 was not some cultivation manual or secret technique. Instead, it resembled a Gu master's personal handbook, filled with records of obscure Gu arts such as "Money Gu," "Love Gu," and "Cat Face Gu."
She casually flipped through a few pages and realized that although it was written in Chinese, it seemed quite old, written in a semi-vernacular style mixed with Traditional Chinese characters.
Fortunately, by piecing things together, Nan Zhi had no trouble reading it.
On the other hand, the Gu Jar—which she had mistaken for a cricket jar—was rather interesting.
Placing the five venomous creatures into the jar yields a Gu among Gu, which can be used to cultivate the Mother of Ten Thousand Gu.
—Huaguzi was as dead as dead could be, but Nan Zhi still had a vivid memory of her mastery over Gu arts.
Not to mention that black spider capable of shifting its size, even the insect mist Huaguzi commanded was incredibly fierce, using its mandibles to completely ruin the red-skinned gourd left by Ma San!
And that was under the premise that Huaguzi was merely at the Qi Refinement stage.
If her Gu arts reached mastery and she had various artifacts to stall her foes, fighting three enemies of the same realm single-handedly would pose no issue at all.
Nan Zhi gave the Gu Jar in her hand a tentative shake and was surprised to hear a soft "sh-sh" rustling inside, very faint, like dry, brittle leaves.
Could the Gu insect inside still be alive?
She reflexively held her breath and opened the lid, sparks of electricity flickering at her fingertips, ready to crush the Gu insect the moment it made a move—
Clatter.
With her movement, a long, dark, plump, thousand-legged corpse of a massive centipede tumbled out of the jar, stretching out to the length of an adult's palm.
The centipede corpse was stiff, curled into a massive ball. Its internal body had already grown brittle, and its shiny, pitch-black shell was nearly translucent—it had clearly been dead for many years.
Only then did Nan Zhi slap her forehead.
Right, these things had been buried when Grandma was still alive. Even if the jar had contained a Mother of Gu, it would have starved to death long ago.
It seemed she couldn't just reap the rewards without effort. If she wanted to raise a Gu insect of her own, she would still have to start by catching bugs.
As for that sudden alchemy cauldron, Nan Zhi couldn't quite figure out its origins for the time being.
Although she had always known she possessed Miao blood and had grown up immersed in Miao folklore, she had never personally seen her Grandma raise or release Gu, so she naturally hadn't known about the existence of this Gu Jar.
Needless to say, these items had been inherited by Dao Magu from Great Grandpa Nan. Although Great Grandpa Nan hadn't wanted his only daughter to learn Gu cultivation during those unusual times, he couldn't bear to see the Gu arts die out either, which was why he passed these things down generation after generation.
However, the Chixia Cauldron was clearly a Taoist artifact at first glance. She had no idea how it had ended up in a Miao village, ultimately falling into her great-grandfather's hands.
Still, since it had landed in her hands, it was naturally hers now.
Nan Zhi put away the Gu Jar and the Chixia Cauldron before burying the centipede corpse beneath the great locust tree.
She made up her mind to ask Grandpa Shi tomorrow when visiting him to see if she could unearth any more stories about her great-grandfather.
As for 《Ten Years of Gu Records》, Nan Zhi treated it as bedtime reading. Besides recording various Gu arts, most of it detailed the author's personal experiences with Gu over many years, making it remarkably vivid and entertaining.
Gu were not strictly sinister, crooked methods meant to harm people or used by Miao women to manipulate lovers as ordinary people assumed. Witches were divided into black and white, so Gu naturally came in good and bad forms as well.
For instance, one passage told of a man from the author's village who went up the mountain and was dazzled by either a fox or a snake spirit. After returning home, he began vomiting sour liquid, and no doctor could cure him.
The author wasn't sure what kind of creature was harming him either, but retrieved a Black Gaba from a jar and told the man to place it under his pillow when sleeping at night.
In the middle of the second night, the man woke with a start from a dream to find a huge hole broken through his window. The Gu insect under his pillow was gone, but a section of a yellow snake tail lay on the ground—only then did he realize he had provoked a snake spirit.
He had seen with his own eyes that the Gu insect, Black Gaba, bit off the snake spirit's tail, smashed through the window, flew outside, and vanished.
Afterward, the man's illness naturally cured completely, but the author left no record regarding the ultimate fate of the snake spirit or the Black Gaba.
Nan Zhi: “...”
Leaving people hanging like that—zero stars, bad review!
...
...
Shi Hongjiang's house and the Nan family's ancestral home faced each other across the lake from a distance, with both old residences occupying somewhat unique locations.
The entire village was shaped like a sharp crescent moon, with the Nan family at the upper tip of the crescent and the Shi family at the lower tip.
Because of this, when Nan Zhi was little and ran off to Grandpa Shi's house to pick tangerines, whenever it got late, she would simply stay over at the Shi home, running back home the next morning only after smelling the aroma of Oil Baba.
When Nan Zhi and Zhang Qiuyu arrived at the Shi house, a crowd of spectators had gathered on the open ground in front of the wooden building. The driver who had driven them yesterday was kneeling in the Shi family's main room, his expression pained as he clutched his stomach and cried out continuously in agony.
The gray-haired Grandpa Shi sat beside the brazier, muttering in the local dialect to the people nearby. Every now and then, he took a puff from his water pipe, exhaling a plume of white smoke.
The old grandpa was over eighty years old and severely hunchbacked, always stooping so low that from behind he looked doubled over, as if carrying a large iron pot on his back. Yet he remained spirited. His thick fingers were stained scorch-yellow from tobacco residue, and his thin, withered face usually wore a stern look when regarding others, but upon seeing Nan Zhi, his smile bloomed like an old chrysanthemum:
“Little Zhizhi, how come you didn't come see your grandpa when you got back? The tangerines behind my house turn yellow every year, but no one comes to pick them, leaving them to be ruined by the dragonflies and birds.”
“Grandpa Shi, haven't I come to see you now? This is my good friend, Zhang. She lives with me. When she heard I was coming to see you, she came along with me.”
Nan Zhi placed the gifts into Shi Hongjiang's hands, crouched down, and leaned closer. She caught the familiar scent of tobacco oil on Grandpa Shi, but instead of feeling repulsed, she felt as if she had returned to the age when she used to sneak around stealing tangerines:
“I only came back yesterday, you see, wanting to burn some paper money for my Grandma and sweep up the old house. That's why I came to see you first thing this morning.
I bought you some cookies, soft cakes, and milk. Every morning, tell Shi Hongjiang to make you some egg tea mixed into the milk. Smoke less tobacco—smoking all the time is bad for your health.”
“Alright, alright! I get to enjoy the dutiful gifts from little Zhizhi. If your grandma were still here, she'd surely be so happy.”
Grandpa Shi was overjoyed. He took Nan Zhi's hands and patted them gently, then grinned wide and called for Shi Hongjiang to take the two girls to the back room to relax:
“Grandpa has to extract the black for someone in a moment. Don't let it scare you girls later. Go find your aunt behind the house and ask her to fry some cakes for you to eat.”
“What pretty, fair-skinned young ladies! Grandpa Shi, you're so blessed—all the youngsters in your family grow up looking so good and capable.”
Hearing this, the bystander assumed Nan Zhi was a girl from the Shi family and hastily offered an attentive smile, praising Nan Zhi before turning back with a bitter face:
“Look at my third son—he was in pain all night yesterday. Even taking him to the city hospital for X-rays didn't do a thing! Please have a look, take a look at him, please—he truly knows his mistake now.”
Rate on N.U.
