[2HA Recap] Chapter 3: This Venerable One's Shige

[wistmanswords]

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When we last left off, Mo Ran had died, been reborn as his 16-year-old self, and behaved appallingly towards a sex worker his teenage self was fond of, who hasn't done anything yet, but who betrayed adult!Mo Ran in the future, maybe. Transmigration: it's complicated!

Content warnings: Gore, violence against children.

Lightning-fast vocabulary lesson: transmigration is the movement of a soul into another body after death. Mo Ran dying before his soul was yeeted back into his teenaged body makes this a transmigration story as opposed to a time travel story, although there's some overlap in the tropes in Mo Ran's case. The other (wildly popular) transmigration story I've been reading lately is Ren Zha Fanpai Zijiu Xitong/The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System by Moxiang Tongxiu, where the traveller in question migrates into a totally different person's body, and as a result doesn't have time travel tropes. Because I have the memory of a tranquilised goldfish, I am probably going to end up referring to Mo Ran's transmigration as time travel now and then, because he did in fact travel in time...

Okay! Moving on.

What happens:

There were so many unfair things in the world. What do you care? It was enough to tire a person to death.

Having left the brothel and the sex worker he robbed for no dang reason behind (I think I stan Rong Jiu now), Mo Ran starts travelling back to his home at Sisheng Peak. It's getting late, so he stops for dinner at Wuchang Town and listens to a storyteller reciting the history of Sisheng Peak. He, and everyone else in the restaurant, are promptly distracted by some strangers dressed as cultivators rolling up outside and claiming to have pixiu cubs for people to see. If you don't remember what a pixiu is, they're these:

Mo Ran checks it out, and describes the cubs as "human-faced, bear-bodied monsters in the cage." He is pretty sure they're bear cubs, but whatever they are, they're definitely not pixiu, and only a donkey-brain would think that--

Well, turns out everyone in the tavern is a donkey brain, because they all come rushing over to see the pixiu.

The fun is interrupted by a horse carrying two riders bursting into the scene. One of the riders is a heavily-cloaked cultivator from Sisheng Peak. The other is a woman in her 30s or 40s who immediately leaps off the horse and scoops up one of the pixiu cubs, crying and referring to it as her son. While the crowd initially things she might be a pixiu in human form, Mo Ran realises what's actually going on: the pixiu cubs are human children who have been kidnapped by the cultivators. Specifically, Mo Ran suspects the cultivators cut out their tongues, boiled their skin off, and then covered them with animal hides so that the hide would stick to them when their skin healed.

Yeah, I wasn't kidding about the harm to children tag.

The Sisheng Peak cultivator tries to have a word with the cultivators who are displaying the children, but they aren't having a bar of it, and immediately start beating the cultivator up. Mo Ran does absolutely nothing about this.

He had zero intention of helping out. He'd always loathed the righteous and meddlesome ways of his sect, even in the previous life. The lot of them rushed in to throw themselves at any trouble that cropped up, like so many idiots. Even some minor inconvenience like Mrs Wang's cat getting stuck in the tree was something to bother them with. The entire sect, from the leader all the way down to the servants, every last one of the was a dimwit.

Frankly, it's a miracle Mo Ran survived long enough to become a tyrannical emperor worthy of assassination; he's so goddamn annoying I want to kill him. A+ for accurately depicting the most obnoxious breed of teenage boy, Meatbun.

It's many-against-one, but the Sisheng Peak cultivator ought to be able to win handily; instead they're getting kicked around. Mo Ran isn't sure why they're holding back. The Sisheng Peak cultivator tells their assailants that he's trying to reason with them, which baffles his attackers so completely they briefly pause. This gives Mo Ran enough time to recognise the Sisheng Peak cultivator as Shi Mei, a realisation which rattles him so much he immediately joins the fray, knocking five of the rogue cultivators away from Shi Mei. Because it's okay to act like a dimwit if it's Mo Ran doing it, I guess.

New characters:

• On screen:
• Shi Mei. Presumably the shige (older martial brother) Mo Ran was so excited to find at the end of last chapter. His name is a homophone for shimei (younger martial sister), which is... an interesting choice.
• Rogue cultivators and a storyteller. Not named, probably not important.
• Mentioned:
• Sisheng Peak Sect Leader, who Mo Ran thinks is a dimwit - presumably the same person as his uncle mentioned last chapter?

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