Lanke Chess Edge
Chapter 194: Silver Essence Fish Soup

Without even needing to read the content of the letter, Ji Yuan could already guess what was written in it based on his friend’s personality.

He opened the letter addressed to him and took a quick glance at it. Indeed, he was asking Ji Yuan to help urge Yin Qing to go study at Huiyuan Academy in the provincial capital.

Ji Yuan read Yin Zhaoxian’s letters and found, as he read between the lines, that the meaning truly reflected the man’s character. Master Yin was indeed a man worthy of his several years-long tenure in officialdom. His handwriting was majestic and had greatly improved since the last time he had previously copied Ji Yuan’s handwriting. He had already developed his own style.

While Ji Yuan was reading the letter carefully, a paper crane pushing a brocade bag squeezed out of Yin Qing’s arms, pulled open the mouth of the bag, and crawled out of it. It spread its wings and flew to Ji Yuan’s shoulder.

“Oh, you’ve made progress!”

Outsiders couldn’t see the true reality of the paper crane unless they broke its workings. As long as it didn’t fly, many cultivators would just think of it as an ordinary paper bird. However, Ji Yuan could see through it at a glance.

Ji Yuan discovered that the spiritual energy of the paper crane had not decreased; it had increased instead. In addition to the spiritual energy, the aura he had left on the paper crane had not decreased either. He didn’t know whether it was because it had been staying under the jujube tree.

The paper crane itself did not have any spiritual intelligence. It could only be considered to have a spiritual instinct. There was nothing special about the paper. The key to containing the spiritual energy and animating the paper crane lay in the invisible words.

In the past two years, although this paper crane was very good at instinctively gathering spiritual energy, it had never surpassed its previous levels.

When Ji Yuan reached out and touched the paper crane, he could sense the connection between its hundreds of characters. As he had originally envisioned, the continuous flow of the characters formed a special pathway.

It was simply that this paper crane had been active for a long time, and he had been continuously infusing it with the spiritual energy transmitted by his divine consciousness, which grew the continuous connection of this pathway like canyons carved by water.

Ji Yuan withdrew his hand, and the paper crane flew off of his shoulder and moved naturally into his sleeve.

It was as if Hu Yun’s keen sense of hearing detected Ji Yuan’s voice; he twitched his years, woke up, and opened his eyes to look around. Sure enough, he saw Ji Yuan standing by the stone table reading a letter in his hand.

“Mr. Ji, you’re back!”

Ji Yuan gave a simple “Mhm!” in acknowledgement and continued to read the letter.

Hu Yun hurriedly stretched out a paw and poked Yin Qing a few times to wake him up from his nap.

“Uh… what’s wrong?”

Yin Qing woke up in a daze, wiped his eyes, and turned to look in the direction the red fox’s paw was pointing.

“Mr. Ji!”

Then, seeing the letter in Ji Yuan’s hand, Yin Qing’s face collapsed. He knew without even thinking what his father wrote in the letter.

“Are you awake? Did you know that you father asked you to go to Chunhui Prefecture?”

“I knew…”

Ji Yuan nodded.

“That being the case, pack up tonight, say goodbye to the Teacher and your friends tomorrow, and then you will set off for Chunhui Prefecture.”

Yin Qing responded with a small “oh,” and looked at the red fox, then at Ji Yuan, appearing a little listless.

Ji Yuan shook his head and smiled. He turned around and walked out of the courtyard. A sentence lightly drifted back from him.

“Hu Yun and I will take you to Chunhui Prefecture.”

After Ji Yuan left, the man and the fox suddenly reacted in unison, cheering to each other softly.

. . .

The next day, Yin Qing bid farewell to friends in the county, his close neighbors, relatives, and the teachers of the county school. Then, he picked up his book pack, his clothes, silver, essential stationery, and a fox that hung off of his shoulders, and set off for Chunhui Prefecture with Ji Yuan.

Ji Yuan felt that he should also be considered one of Yin Qing’s elders. Rather than asking the other relatives of the Yin family to send Yin Qing off, or for Yin Qing to make the journey alone, it would be better for Ji Yuan to personally accompany him.

In the past, Ji Yuan always walked when he traveled; this time, the travel was considered a pilgrimage for studying, so naturally a carriage was hired.

The curtains of the carriage were currently completely open. Yin Qing sat next to the coachman and looked at the surrounding scenery. Ji Yuan felt as though he were sitting on a bus looking out through the window from back when he was a student in his previous life.

The coachman was a talkative man. He seemed to be in his sixties, but was actually no more than in his forties. Even among the villagers, he was considered to be one of the more worry-lined individuals.

Not long after the carriage drove out of the county, the driver kept chatting non-stop.

“Mr. Ji, we will reach Shunbao County in the evening, and then in the morning we can go to Qianzhou County. If we are lucky, we can reach Jiudaokou County in five days!”

“Alright!”

Ji Yuan responded, and continued to look at the white jade slip in his hand. Of course, because of a concealment technique, to the driver’s eyes this looked like nothing more than a scroll of bamboo slips.

When they learned that Ji Yuan was chartering a carriage for Yin Qing, many drivers were vying to be selected. Ji Yuan was already highly regarded, but even more so was Yin Qing, the son of Yin Zhuangyuan. It would be good for them to cultivate some good relations with him, and it would also give them some respect and be a point of pride to talk to others about it.

“Young Master Yin, look at this yellow horse in front of me. It might look like an old horse, but it has great endurance. Plus it knows the way to Joidaokou County’s Laohua Mountain. I have to make the trip there over a dozen times each year. Even if I take a nap in the carriage, this horse can pull us there on its own!”

“Oh, that’s really cool!”

Yin Qing praised him. He stretched out his hand and slapped it to the side, knocking Hu Yun back and preventing him from stretching out his claws to scratch the horse’s butt.

“Uh, Young Master Yin, what were you swatting just now? Why do I feel like…”

The driver just saw Yin Qing swipe his hand forwards, and only vaguely seemed to see a shadow under his palm.

“Oh, uh, I hit a mosquito! I saw a mosquito trying to bite the horse!”

“Oh, the mosquitoes are poisonous in autumn, but I am not worried about my yellow horse. Young Master Yin, you have delicate skin and soft arms, so don’t let yourself be bitten.”

Yin Qing glared at at the red fox out of the corner of his eye, then subconsciously looked at his hands.

He was not a coddled child from a wealthy family, and he had been working all year round. However, he had become delicate and fair over the years, which made it seem as though he had never suffered any hardship since he was a child.

Ji Yuan noticed Hu Yun’s behavior. This red fox had an unstable mind and an innocent spirit, which was a good thing, but it was not so good for him to inflate his ego just because he had some minor supernatural abilities. It seemed he would have to suffer.

“Woof woof woof woof… woof woof woof woof…”

At this moment, several large dogs suddenly rushed over. They were probably domestic dogs living in a village near the city. They ran back and forth and barked at the carriage.

Almost as soon as the first dog barked, Hu Yun had quickly fled into the carriage and hidden behind Ji Yuan.

Outside, the driver was waving his whip to drive away the dogs by the side of the carriage.

“Go, go, go… Go away, go away, or I’ll come at you with my whip!”

As he spoke, the coachman waved his whip around. The dogs were frightened and backed away a few steps, but they soon gathered around him and started barking again. The entourage of barking dogs lasted for over a mile before they finally quieted down.

“These damn dogs are really acting strange today, following me for so long!”

The entire time, Hu Yun hid beside Ji Yuan, not daring to move. Ji Yuan laughed. He had been bitten by a dog only once, and was still afraid even after becoming a fox monster.

Yin Qing also held his stomach and tried hard to hold back his laughter.

This journey was different from the last time, as there was no risk of getting lost. They turned directly from the official road of Shunbao County into Qianzhou County, and then passed through Qianzhou County to get to Jiudaokou County. They were able to find a suitable inn before nightfall. In the early morning of the sixth day, they arrived at the foot of Laohua Mountain, just outside Jiudaokou County.

The carriage had been hired to bring them there, and they would traverse the rest of the way on their own. Originally, they could have asked the carriage to take them all the way to the ferry, but Ji Yuan had something else to do in Laohua Mountain, so they decided to have the horse-drawn carriage drop them off at the foot of the mountain.

After paying the cost in copper coins and saying goodbye to their carriage driver, Ji Yuan took Yin Qing and Hu Yun into Laohua Mountain.

However, after following the merchant path through the mountains for a while, Yin Qing discovered that Mr. Ji had taken them on a detour, and was walking deeper and deeper into the mountains. He was not afraid, but was a little curious.

“Mr. Ji, aren’t we going to the ferry? Why are we going into the mountains?”

Ji Yuan turned to look at Yin Qing and Hu Yun, the latter of which was lying on the book pack behind Yin Qing, equally curious, and smiled mysteriously.

“There is a pool in this mountain, I want to go see if there are any fish!”

The group walked together for half an hour. They passed through underbrush and groves of trees, and finally arrived at the clear water pool in the center of Laohua Mountain. The deep green water of the pool made Yin Qing feel uneasy.

“Mr. Ji, how can there be fish here? I feel like there might be a big snake or something…”

“Yeah, that’s right…”

Hu Yun also nodded fearfully from behind Yin Qing.

Ji Yuan ignored the two of them and walked directly to the edge of the pool, reaching out to grab the Green Vine Sword behind him.

At this moment, Yin Qing and Hu Yun’s eyes widened. They suddenly saw a sword appear out of thin air in Ji Yuan’s hand.

Hu Yun was not too surprised. Although Yin Qing had seen the supernatural abilities of the jujube tree, and had been in the presence of Hu Yun, a fox who was obviously a fox monster, this was the first time he had seen Mr. Ji himself display such extraordinary abilities.

Then they saw Ji Yuan suspend the green sword two inches above the water surface. He did not make any other movements. After a few breaths, a small silver fish floated to the water with its belly turned upside down, apparently immobilized by the sword energy.

“Hey, there really is one!”

Before Ji Yuan could finish speaking, another, slightly larger, thread of energy appeared.

“Hmm! There’s more? Another one?”

Ji Yuan simply waited for a while, but couldn’t see a third one float up. It seemed that no one had come to catch the Silver Essence in the past two years.

Yin Qing and the fox looked at each other in bewilderment. Could this really be a technique of catching fish?

Ji Yuan took a branch nearby, pulled the two silver fish in front of him over, and reached out to grab them. They felt cool and smooth to the touch. Their gills, mouth, scales, and tail were all intact. If an ordinary person were to see it, they would definitely think that these were merely just two rare fish.

Without looking at it any more, the he used a technique to make a thin sphere of water and wrap it around the fish’s body. Then he took out from his sleeves a dry lotus leaf that he had prepared long ago, and wrapped the two Silver Essences.

“Let’s go, off we go to the ferry! We’ll be eating delicious fish soup today!”

Ji Yuan couldn’t hide the smile on his face. He held the dry lotus leaf packages in his pocket and urged Yin Qing and Hu Yun leave quickly. Although the Green Jade Pool was ownerless, he always had a guilty feeling that he was taking away fish from someone else’s fish soup.

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T/n: looks like JY finally got to eat his mystical fish soup that he reluctantly forewent in chapter 72

Heads up that chapter posts are going to be irregular both this week and the week after next. I’m a little stressed at the moment and flooded with reports I need to write T_T wish me luck!