Chapter 44 — Wedding Negotiations

Lin Che took a deep breath of bathroom-air in, finally filling his lungs with something which wasn’t liquid.

He reached for his phone, opened the voice recorder, and pressed record.

He spoke for about twenty minutes in a stream of consciousness attempting to preserve every minute and relevant detail from his previous life. He mostly spent time talking about the refinements he’d provided to Xu Fang and Guo Mingzhe’s cultivation techniques — in this life he would provide them with the refined versions directly rather than a technique for a generalised profile of a beginner cultivator.

Hopefully that would help him ensure having some competent allies.

He then tried to piece together the fragments of information he’d been given about the Lin Clan.

His background in life had always been mortal — he, of course, had no information about cultivation until a couple of deaths in post-marriage, and his parents must have been mortal as well, considering how they aged normally.

He had grown up in an ordinary apartment in an ordinary city and had gone to ordinary school, and had never once had any reason to believe that cultivation was something that belonged to his family’s history.

And yet this entire marriage scheme proved otherwise.

The marriage contract was designed to extract some or all — he was not yet sure which it was — of his innate Qi, presumably to provide the Shen Clan with access to multiple different points of interest.

The only one he knew of right now was the holy land, but there must have been more.

The Lin Clan had remained dormant for a long time, but it was not extinct.

Still, there was nothing productive he could do with all the questions he had right now, as he simply did not have the information required to think any further. Speculating without information was just constructing a story that would feel true but probably wasn’t.

What he could do was use the Shen Clan.

After all, if the Shen Clan had dealings with the Lin Clan, such as the entire marriage pact ordeal, they must have had more information about the Lin Clan’s structure and beyond.

After he finished speaking, Lin Che put the phone down and looked at the ceiling for another moment.

Then, he finished dressing up and made his way towards his own wedding.

***

The ceremony was the same as it always was, and Lin Che went through the motions automatically as he had done so in most of his previous lives: he bowed down when he had to and spoke rehearsed lines until it was time to sign the marriage certificate.

When the contract arrived, he did not sign it.

He put the pen down and looked at Shen Yue, who was sitting across from him.

“I’d like to speak with Shen Bowen before we proceed,” he said.

“Now?” asked Shen Yue.

“Now.”

There was a brief silence in the room as the registrar sat opposite the two of them stared in disbelief. Shen Yue broke the silence by picking up her phone and making the call.

***

The black sedan came around to the side entrance of the venue with Yang Zichen at the wheel. Shen Bowen stepped out and looked at Lin Che and Shen Yue, who had been hurried out of the office by the registrar as they were ‘not the only ones getting married’ that day.

“Get in,” said Bowen, his voice calm as ever.

The partition was down again, with Yang Zichen once again fading into non-presence and only focussing on the road.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Lin Che sat in the middle of the car, with Shen Yue to his left and Shen Bowen to his right.

“I don’t appreciate the swindle,” began Lin Che.

Shen Bowen looked at him, as did Shen Yue.