Chapter 1: The Sword Immortal Kneels—my dad is Wu Erbai!

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Chapter 1
A One-Sword Immortal Kneels; My Father Is Wu Erbai!

“Are you certain?” A middle-aged man looked at the young man before him, his face stern. “I hid you for over twenty years. Are you really going to take this road anyway?”

“Father…” Wu Yu opened his mouth, then lowered his head in silence.

In the age after the Nine Gates, only the Wu Clan and the Xie Clan could truly stand out, and Wu Erbai could be called the only one who held their weight.

Yet Wu Yu had never even imagined he was his son—and that Wu Erbai had concealed him in silence for twenty years.

It was widely known that Wu Erbai had no wife and no children, and that is precisely why his methods had always been ruthless and pitiless. If it ever came out he had a son, what retaliation might follow needed no saying.

“Perhaps this is the fate of the Wu bloodline,” Wu Yu said after a long pause, lifting his head with a crooked smile. “I understand now what Grandfather once meant.”

Among all the Wu clan, only Wu Erbai and his late grandfather, Old Dog, knew the truth. Not even Elder Third, who had orchestrated the whole incident, knew of it.

As Grandfather had said before he died, the root of the Wu family could not be severed. He was the Wu Clan itself. They had intended to clear Elder First’s name, but they never expected innocent Tianzhen to be pulled in.

So, the Wu family needed to make fresh arrangements!

And yet now Wu Yu was about to step into that very firepit himself, which Wu Erbai could not understand.

“Do you know something?” Suddenly Wu Erbai’s expression tightened, and an invisible pressure pressed down on Wu Yu.

“No.”

Wu Yu slowly raised his eyes. They were eerily hollow, and at that instant his aura seemed to thin and fade, as if he might vanish at any moment. If you did not look directly, you would hardly feel a person stood before you.

“Bang!”

In that moment Wu Erbai smashed the Qianlong green jade signet he had cherished into fragments. “I should never have sent you to the Eleventh Vault in the first place!”

“Scram! Get out—out!”
He tossed over an address, swung his huge hand away, and turned his back as if he could not bear to look at Wu Yu again.

“I’ll settle everything as quickly as I can, and I’ll protect Tianzhen.”
After saying so, Wu Yu turned and left. At the threshold, he slung the violin-like case on his back and departed without hesitation.

“Kirrr...” Not long after, the door opened once more. This time a woman wheeled in slowly in a wheelchair.

“Still angry, eh?” Looking at Wu Erbai, she could not help but smile. “You and your son hardly see each other more than once a year, and whenever you do, it always ends like this.”

“Little Ling...” Wu Erbai took a few steps toward her. “That brat of yours is getting more and more unmanageable!”

“It’s for me. I know it,” the woman said with a sigh. “If I had died up on Bottle Mountain, none of this would have happened.”

“Don’t talk nonsense!” Wu Erbai’s expression changed instantly. “Back then I could have cured you; now I can still—”

She did not finish. Her face turned bloodless, and then she coughed up blood tinged with gold.

“Ugh! Already this fast?” Wu Erbai’s face darkened at once. “Where’s the Deer-Ho grass? Bring it right now!”

“No use. Don’t try it.” She shook her head as she gripped his wrist. “I have taken Deer-Ho too many times. My resistance has grown stronger and stronger. Better keep it for little Yu.”

“No! No! No! There has to be a way! There has to be another way!” Wu Erbai spoke in near-delirium. “Little Yu… could little Yu have it too…?”

Had anyone seen him like this, they would have dropped their jaws in shock.

Who could have imagined that Wu Erbai, feared throughout both dark and bright roads of the Nine Gates, had such a face.

“Mm. Even though that child hasn’t said it, I can feel it.” The woman nodded. “Curses can sense other curses. That is the only way to tell who truly carries our bloodline.”

“No, I will find a way! Ling, wait—wait just a little longer for me!” Wu Erbai breathed in deeply, then hurried out of the room.

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By then Wu Yu was already weaving through the jungle at speed. The mountain behind it all, never developed and never advertised, belonged to the Wu clan but was unknown to everyone. So of course no one really knew about the estate deep in the hills that seemed like a paradise beyond the world.

Most of his days, except for time in the Eleventh Vault, were spent there with his mother, so he could not really call that life depressing.

“Ding!”

“Congratulations, host, mission complete. Reward granted: One-Sword Immortal Kneels.”

In an instant, his mind flooded with a torrent of memories, and he felt a touch lightheaded. He could not help thinking, not undeservedly, that this was Immortal Li’s famed move. Though it was only a single sword form, what it contained could match three-fifths of all the legacy passed down from Old Huang.

Yes, Wu Yu was a transmigrator. When he came into this world, he was stunned as well. From childhood, he had shown superhuman talent and had been carefully nurtured by Wu Erbai, who had once planned that he would become a copyist and celebrity-hack writer, drifting through the entertainment circles and eating by the skin of his teeth.

But when he first met Old Dog at five years old, he was floored. If there had been only one Wu Erbai, maybe it might still be considered a coincidence. But with Old Dog too—everything suddenly clicked.

A world of tomb raiding!

If memory served, in the original tale Wu Erbai had no wife and no child at all.

Yet the fact was the fact. He truly was Wu Erbai’s biological son. What shocked him even more was this: his mother… Ling, the last inheritor of the Stone-Carrying lineage.

And he too had, without question, inherited the curse that had run through that lineage for generations.

Before boarding the plane, after thinking long and hard, Wu Yu posted a private announcement on his Weibo, then set off on a path no ordinary person could have imagined.

Meanwhile, on the other side, after seeing his son’s post, Wu Erbai sat down with a sigh, thought for a while, and eventually picked up the phone.

“Second brother?” came a voice, sounding a little surprised. “Why did you think of calling me now?”

“Can I not call you?” Wu Erbai snapped. His anger flared at once.

Silence.

After the fire had burned out, Wu Sanshu said, “So what’s this about?”

“...My son is going to look for Tianzhen. Keep watch! If that little bastard gets into trouble, I’ll kill you!” Wu Erbai said, with an odd helplessness in his tone.

“What—what on earth?” Wu Sanshu was stunned.
“Your—your son?”

“Yours?”

“I may not be clever, but I’m not that dumb either!”

Still, thinking of his Second Brother’s temper, he knew this had to be true, though hard to believe. “Are you… sure? Did you run a paternity test? Is our Wu family finally no longer a single surviving branch?”

“duu-duu-duu…”

Wu Sanshu hadn’t finished speaking when the line broke into a busy tone.

“Ha-ha-ha...” Instead of getting angry, Wu Sanshu laughed out loud. For once he told Panzi to set a full table and ended up drinking more than half a jin of wine.

He had scarcely touched alcohol since he returned from the undersea tomb years ago. He had feared getting drunk and making trouble.

But this time, his joy was genuine.

With the descendants of the Nine Gates all fading from one generation to the next, and the Wu family itself reduced to a single-line inheritance for three generations, who could have imagined that his Second Brother had quietly produced a son from nowhere?

“Damn this head of mine—how could I have forgotten my nephew’s name?”

He had just started to call Wu Erbai again when the tone in his own ear reminded him of the earlier shock. He shook his head. “Forget it, forget it. Let’s wait.”

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“Heh—Third Lord!” Panzi by his side could not help but chuckle. “To think Senior Second Brother had a hidden son—by this look, our Wu clan has become really careless, hasn’t it?”

Wu Sanshu, still full of laughter, gave Panzi a sharp smack, then took another swallow. “Now I finally know why Grandfather’s look at me was never the same, and why Mother always had that odd, half-joking tone. So they must have known this child existed all along!”

In truth, Wu Sanshu was partly to blame old Grandma as well, because although Wu Yu was already twenty-one, he had never visited the old Wu manor once and had never seen the old grandmother.

And Grandma had only heard from Old Dog’s sleep-talking that a grandson still lived. But once he woke, Old Dog held his tongue completely and never admitted it. So Wu Yu’s existence could truly be called an absolute family secret.

At the same time, after Wu Yu’s public “I am closing my writing” announcement went out, the online literature world erupted. Everyone was baffled: why had the greatest trailblazer of web fiction suddenly gone silent? Strangely strange rumors rushed in one after another.

But all of that had nothing to do with Wu Yu anymore.

Looking over the courtyard in front of him, he gave a small nod. “Mountain-and-Water Residence—the plaque, though, is a bit awkward.”

From the fresh look of the board, it was clear it had only been hung there not long ago.

“Heh, sorry. I didn’t copy it very well.” A young man inside the gate heard Wu Yu and gave an awkward smile. “We’re still renovating and not yet open. If you want to look around, feel free.”

He started to turn away.

“Do you really trust me enough to let me in like this?” Wu Yu recognized that this young man must be his cousin, Wu Tianzhen.

To be fair, in this moment Wu Tianzhen did look like a true innocent.

Who could have believed that ten years later he would become the Demon Emperor of the Nine Gates, terrifying people just by reputation?

“Nothing in this courtyard is cheap—those bottles and jars, every single one of them. If I’m careless and break a few, you won’t even have time to cry.”

“Heh-heh. Things are arranged without care and those who can tell what’s worth anything are few. Even those who can tell usually won’t think they’re worth more than a few scraps.”

He was innocent in appearance, but never stupid. He had only just returned from abroad, after all, and was still adjusting to many things.

And besides, from the fragrant wooden case on his back—one that exuded a faint scent—you could immediately tell it was a rare Dragon-Ridged back-stand. A person carrying such a thing does not run short on money.

So Wu Tianzhen was quite at ease, even thinking it would be great if Wu Yu smashed a few things; then he could start doing business.

Seeing through Tianzhen’s thoughts, Wu Yu smiled to himself as he looked at the vases and antiques scattered on the ground. “You just came back from overseas not long ago, and yet you’ve picked up a bit of Uncle Third’s cunning and smoothness. I wonder if that will do you good, or bad.”

“What?” Tianzhen was taken aback. “You... do you know my Third Uncle?”

Wu Yu stood up and smiled. “Let me introduce myself. My name is Wu Yu.”

“My father is Wu Erbai.”

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(End of Chapter)