Chapter 512: Cracks in the Mask!
Chapter 512: Cracks in the Mask!
A heavy silence settled between the two men. Jiang Chen said nothing further, merely reaching out to clap a firm hand upon Chen Bo's shoulder. Some wounds, he understood, were not meant to be prodded with clumsy words of comfort. They festered best when simply acknowledged, then left to breathe.
After a long moment, Chen Bo exhaled, the tension bleeding slowly from his weathered face. "Enough. I did not summon you here to drown you in my old grievances." He forced a faint, crooked smile through his unkempt beard. "Tell me instead—what mundane sect affairs have dragged you away from your Dao Companion's bed so early in the morning?"
Jiang Chen chuckled, grateful for the shift in mood. "Nothing so dramatic. I merely intend to make my rounds of the outer Spirit Farms before the Thousand Sects Dharma Assembly draws every idle eye toward Crimson Fire Peak. Best the younger disciples' plots are in order before then."
"Ever the diligent one," Chen Bo remarked, though there was no mockery in it—only a flicker of genuine respect. "Go on, then. The Azure Goose grows restless if I linger too long away from her nest."
With that, the two brothers parted ways, Chen Bo retreating back into his hermit's shell of a stone hut.
Jiang Chen summoned the Shattered Moon Flowing Frost once more, letting its chilling brilliance carry him toward the sprawling outer fields where the sect's lower disciples toiled. Row upon row of Spirit Farms stretched beneath the morning mist, tended by young cultivators still years away from Foundation Establishment.
It was tedious work, this business of inspection—checking soil vitality, correcting improper irrigation talismans, chastising the occasional lazy disciple caught napping beneath a Spirit Fruit tree. Yet Jiang Chen bore it without complaint. He had once tilled these very same plots himself, bare-handed and unremarkable, before fate had seen fit to elevate him.
It was during this quiet, unremarkable circuit that his gaze fell upon an unfamiliar figure kneeling in a forgotten corner plot.
The boy—if he could even be called that, given the vacant madness that supposedly plagued him—was hunched low over a row of freshly turned soil, his fingers moving with a precision that bordered on reverence. Each seedling was pressed into the earth at a measured depth, spaced with an evenness no untrained hand could hope to replicate.
Jiang Chen's brow furrowed. He had heard whispers of this one—the addled young master delivered to Chen Tian's care some seasons past, a "prince" of some minor mortal bloodline, snatched away by a great demon in his youth and returned an empty husk of a man, his soul shattered beyond mending. The sect had taken him in more out of pity and old debts owed to his bloodline than any true expectation of use, tucking him away within Chen Tian's underwater cave abode where his fits of madness might trouble no one.
Yet the figure before him now moved with nothing resembling madness at all.
Curious, Jiang Chen drifted closer, his footsteps silent as falling snow.
It was the faintest disturbance—perhaps a stirred leaf, perhaps some instinct honed through years of mortal peril—but the boy's spine went rigid all at once. His head snapped up, dull eyes locking onto Jiang Chen's for the briefest sliver of a heartbeat.
In that instant, Jiang Chen saw something flicker deep within those vacant eyes. Not confusion. Not the fog of a broken mind.
Calculation.
Then, as swiftly as it had appeared, the flicker vanished. The boy's face crumpled into slack-jawed vacancy, his hands flying to the very seedlings he had just so carefully planted, tearing them from the soil with wild, uncoordinated abandon. He toppled sideways into the mud, thrashing and giggling in a manner utterly divorced from the composed figure of moments before, smearing filth across his robes with gleeful abandon.
Jiang Chen stood in silence, watching the performance unfold.
A lesser man might have dismissed it as coincidence, a fleeting lucid moment amid an ocean of madness. But Jiang Chen had walked too long a road, seen too many masks slip in his years of cultivation, to mistake such a transformation for anything but deliberate.
He said nothing. He offered no accusation, no probing question. Instead, he merely turned and walked on, continuing his inspection as though he had witnessed nothing at all, his expression carefully schooled into practiced indifference.
But his mind churned all the while.
It's just like the novels, he mused inwardly, a private smile tugging at his lips. Anyone with a grand background acting so far out of character has undoubtedly stumbled into some manner of Fated Chance.
A demon abduction. A shattered soul. A miraculous, hidden competence beneath the veneer of idiocy.
The pieces fit together with suspicious neatness.
By the time his rounds concluded, the sun had climbed well past its zenith. Rather than return directly to the Water Spirit Palace, Jiang Chen redirected the Shattered Moon Flowing Frost back toward the solitary stone hut at the edge of Chen Bo's Spirit Farm.
The Azure Goose greeted him first, as before, though this time with a note of impatience in its shrill cry.
Chen Bo emerged a moment later, wiping soil from his hands. "Back again so soon? Did the younger disciples give you such trouble?"
"Not the disciples," Jiang Chen said, his voice dropping low with quiet intrigue. "Senior Brother, tell me—how much do you know of the foolish prince residing within Senior Brother Chen Tian's cave abode?"
Chen Bo's expression shifted, wariness creeping into his weathered features. "Only what everyone knows. A tragic case, taken in as a favor to some mortal lord Chen Tian once owed a debt to. Why do you ask?"
Jiang Chen recounted what he had witnessed, sparing no detail—the precise planting, the flicker of calculation, the sudden and convenient collapse into madness the very moment he had been noticed.
By the time he finished, Chen Bo's brow had knitted itself into a deep, contemplative furrow. "You believe he is feigning it?"
"I believe," Jiang Chen said slowly, "that it would be foolish of us not to look a little closer."
Chen Bo fell silent for a long moment, weighing the implications. Then, with a faint, humorless smile, he reached for the cloak hanging beside his door. "Then let us not keep foolishness waiting."