“One was the Delighted Mourning Ghost. The reason why he hadn’t the time to take the Armor was because he sensed the presence of someone else, someone he couldn’t provoke at the time — the Ghost of Impermanence that represented the Ghost Valley’s Master, Meng Hui. Unluckily… he’s also another client of mine. Your son, believing himself to be clever, stupidly took the Armor off of Mu Yunge, and then, right as he excitedly thought to leave, Lao Meng had someone kill him. That someone had once been subordinated to Xue Fang, a general that later changed sides in Ghost Valley’s internal strife — the Long-Tongued Ghost.”

The Scorpion paused. Tears evenly flowed down Yu Qiufeng’s windworn face, as did various unknown fluids, making him look both revolting and pitiful.

“What’s even more unlucky is that the remarkable Ghost Master was meeting with his little paramour when the moon was above the branches of willows, so Lao Meng was too afraid to show his face. The traitorous Long-Tongued Ghost used his old Master’s stunt to kill Yu Tianjie, then shift the blame for it, wanting to deliberately mislead the Ghost Master. Who’d have thought that the gentleman’s pace would be too fast; so fast, the Long-Tongued Ghost couldn’t dodge in time, and thus… he boldly made use of his murderous aura, resulting in…”

The Scorpion gently laughed coldly, shoved Yu Qiufeng away, leaned askew against the back of a rattan chair that a Poisonous Scorpion had gotten from wherever, and sighed with quite a bit of lament. “What type of person is the most tragic? Those who don’t know their own weights, rashly entertaining high aspirations… Sect Leader Yu, do you know what’s different between the heart grown in your chest, and the heart grown in mine?”

He lightly patted his own chest, looking at the man with a set-up-on-high pity, and shook his head. “The one I grew is a heart of ambition. The one you grew… is a heart of wish-ful thin-king.”

Yu Qiufeng’s expression cleared up a bit, and he suddenly spoke up with a mosquito-like voice. “I… Daoist Huang, Feng Xiaofeng… every one of us, the vague information we received before… had actually been all you… all you…”