Chapter Ninety-Five: Trouble Brews

Heavy snow fell in swirling sheets, like goose feathers drifting down to whiten the land for endless miles.

In his ears came the thunder of surging waves striking the shore; before his eyes lay a rugged mountain path leading into a dense forest.

The dragon tortoise had shrunk itself small and was crouched on Xu Zhong's shoulder. It was heavy, tilting his body slightly off balance as he stepped through the snow, one foot sinking deep while the other found only shallow ground. He exhaled long streams of white breath, puffing and wheezing. Xiyue walked beside him, and the two of them followed closely behind Master True Essence and Master Emptiness as they headed outward.

An inexplicable cold wave had blown in from the sea, joining the secret realm and Heavenly Abyss City into a single expanse. The city’s territory had clearly expanded again, but the weather here was far too harsh.

The mournful wind made one shiver without meaning to.

The temperature was too low; ordinary mortals could not survive here at all.

Xiyue glanced at Xu Zhong and saw that he was cultivating with the help of the copied River Map pattern on the dragon tortoise’s back.

The constellations of heaven manifested above his head; the Four Symbols and Twenty-Eight Lodges revolved in ceaseless transformation, and pure astral qi descended to the back of Xu Zhong's head.

Beneath his feet, too, there flowed an obscure halo, a faint and indistinct radiance. It was the tremor of wisps of black smoke: the circulation of the earth's vital qi.

Stars were yang; the earth's vital qi was yin.

He was refining a spell from the River Map copy.

"Is this spell meant to temper the indestructible spiritual light?" Xiyue muttered to herself.

With Xu Zhong's breathing, astral qi and the earth's vital qi, one waxing and the other waning, stretched and contracted from both ends in perfect balance. They did not draw near one another, yet in the void they merged across distance, becoming the purest spiritual energy to nourish his indestructible spiritual light.

A person's indestructible spiritual light could be strengthened through cultivation, or increased by taking pills. The former depended on oneself, while the latter required extracting indestructible spiritual light as medicine.

Indestructible spiritual light existed only within the souls and spirits of living beings. To swallow such pills was, in truth, to consume people.

The dragon tortoise swayed left and right in step with Xu Zhong's movements. Xu Zhong used its shell for cultivation, and it in turn used the starlight and earth qi drawn in by Xu Zhong to nourish itself and speed the recovery of its strength.

"You're still cultivating? I really give up on you!" Empty Wisdom looked back and sighed as he spoke. "If you keep grinding like this, I'm afraid Master will forcibly ordain you as a monk."

Xu Zhong smiled faintly at the remark. "I have things I must do. Those things require great strength, and my cultivation is too slow. I can't afford not to work hard."

He was often able to divide his mind between two tasks, and at the limits of his ability, even three. Even while cultivating, he could still converse normally with others.

He was like one refining a golden core, yet his own indestructible spiritual light was insufficient. And since he could not eat people, he had no choice but to rely on himself.

Fortunately, with the River Map copy at hand, he could resonate with heaven and earth at all times and borrow their creative force to nourish his own indestructible spiritual light.

The spell he had refined from the River Map copy, one that could nourish indestructible spiritual light, he named Radiant Spirit Peaceful Treasury.

Radiant refers to the twin luminaries of yin and yang; spirit refers to astral qi and earth qi; peaceful means stabilizing the indestructible spiritual light; and treasury means storage.

The meaning of Radiant Spirit Peaceful Treasury was to use the twin luminaries of yin and yang to define and stabilize the indestructible spiritual light, then use that spiritual light to store yin and yang qi, thereby increasing the quantity of indestructible spiritual light.

"When in doubt, seek the Buddha," said Empty Wisdom, chanting a solemn "Boundless Buddha." "The Buddha will surely enlighten you."

Xu Zhong shook his head. "What I cultivate is within myself. I am not disturbed by externals, nor moved by externals. Where the heart points, there the Dao resides."

"Benefactor, are you certain you will not enter my Buddhist order?" Master True Essence said without turning his head. "That line about where the heart points, there the Dao resides, aligns perfectly with our doctrine that the mind itself is Buddha."

"Benefactor already has Buddha-nature; why not take the tonsure?" Master True Essence's voice even rose with enthusiasm. "If benefactor were to renounce the world, within a hundred years or so he would surely become a Buddha."

Xu Zhong opened his mouth, unable to say a word.

"Master, it's obvious that Benefactor Xu is not cut out to be a monk," Empty Wisdom muttered under his breath. "He's too good at causing trouble. Wherever he goes, something happens. He's not suited to cultivating the Buddha's path."

"You wretched disciple..."

Xu Zhong paid no mind to the exchange between Master True Essence and Empty Wisdom.

When the lower beam is crooked, the upper beam is crooked as well.

Rather than waste breath arguing with them, he might as well take a few more gulps of earth qi and astral qi.

Xu Zhong turned his gaze inward.

His indestructible spiritual light had grown thicker and longer.

At first it had been only as thick as a finger and three feet in length. Now it had become as large as a baby's arm and six feet long.

But that six-foot length was measured relative to the world within his cerebral aperture. When applied to the human body, it could not even penetrate a single hidden chamber.

"At this rate of cultivation, it will take at least twenty years to fully open everything and condense a golden core," Xu Zhong thought privately. "Twenty years... I should be able to wait that long."

After entering the State of Guarded Unity, his lifespan had likely reached six hundred years.

Twenty years compared to six hundred was like a single season in a year.

"Only, I wonder whether my demonic form will give me twenty years."

The demonic aspect of the Heavenly Way sealed in his cerebral aperture was continuously pouring out demonic qi.

Those wisps of demonic qi lingered outside his human soul. There would be no problem in the short term, but over a long enough span they might well cause some sort of influence.

Xu Zhong's time was pressing. It seemed that ever since he had begun cultivating, time had always been like this for him, as though an invisible hand were constantly pushing him forward.

The group moved on and off until at last they emerged from the secret realm onto the frozen plains.

In the distance, Heavenly Abyss City had become a long, narrow black line: the city wall.

As they drew closer to Heavenly Abyss City, the extreme cold gradually faded, replaced by a wave of warmth.

Heat rose from the city into the sky, melting and vaporizing the falling snow into pure clouds that gathered into a sea of clouds, then were whipped by strong winds into rolling cloud waves.

"How magnificent!" A blazing red sun hung suspended in the vault of heaven, dyeing those cloud waves scarlet so that the entire sky seemed to be burning at that moment.

What Xiyue found magnificent was not that burning sky, but the scene of a thousand sails competing beyond Heavenly Abyss City.

A giant ship with white sails billowed and surged over the waves. The countless vessels coming and going gathered into white clouds like fluttering ribbons; indeed, it was a breathtaking spectacle.

The giant ships drew nearer and nearer, until even the spray bursting from their hulls could be seen clearly, shimmering with rainbow light.

They came and went in great haste, roving unimpeded across the sea, and docked at the pier before Heavenly Abyss City.

"When did the Nine Heavens and Ten Lands become able to dispatch so many cultivators?" Master True Essence observed everything with complete clarity, and so he asked this question.

Not long after the Kingdom of Yu entered the Nine Heavens and Ten Lands, he had once served as the representative of the Dao Alliance's Bodhi Temple in negotiations with the Holy Monarch of the Azure Waves and Prince Yang.

In the early period of exchange between the Nine Heavens and Ten Lands and the Kingdom of Yu, the number of people permitted to enter the kingdom each year had been strictly limited.

Such a large-scale appearance of giant ships clearly did not conform to the rules.

While Master True Essence was puzzled, a sudden intuition stirred within him. He turned back to look.

He only saw countless streaks of light flying out from the direction of the Kingdom of Yu.

Those rays moved astonishingly fast, streaking across the sky like meteors before finally reaching Heavenly Abyss City.

"With so many people, it doesn't seem like an enforcement force," Master True Essence thought it over and could only reach one conclusion. "The Nine Heavens and Ten Lands have deployed giant ships on such a scale... I'm afraid something has happened in the Kingdom of Yu."

He hurriedly led Xu Zhong and the others toward Heavenly Abyss City.

At first he still had the presence of mind to mind Xu Zhong and the others, but later he simply treated them as burdens and left them behind on the frozen plain.

"This..." Xiyue rubbed her rear and got to her feet from the ice. She had truly not expected Master True Essence to abandon them halfway. In her understanding, a cultivator of the inner landscape realm should not have lacked even this much courtesy.

"Well, that's good enough, that's good enough!" Xu Zhong stood beside her; he was not as miserable as Xiyue. "At least he left us on the frozen plain."

"He seemed to say just now that something happened in the Kingdom of Yu?" Xiyue asked softly.

"What sort of trouble could the Kingdom of Yu possibly have?" Empty Wisdom said unconcerned.

The group continued onward.

But without Master True Essence, their pace was pitifully slow.

It took about an hour before they finally reached Heavenly Abyss City.

The pier was packed with people, their jostling heads like a dark, dense cloud. Each of them wore armor and held axes, halberds, or long spears in their hands. There were also great yellow banners snapping fiercely in the wind, like crisp dragon roars.

Every one of these soldiers was above the State of Guarded Unity. Looking across the field, they were densely packed and stretched as far as the eye could see.

There were at least a hundred thousand of them.

Over a hundred thousand cultivators above the State of Guarded Unity had gathered here, and their battle-ready posture made Xu Zhong feel as though they had come to attack the Kingdom of Yu.

Even Empty Wisdom, who had initially dismissed the matter, grew tense.

"These aren't here to fight us, are they?" he asked in a low voice beside Xu Zhong's ear.

"They shouldn't be," Xu Zhong replied.

"Perhaps the Kingdom of Yu really has suffered some change, forcing them to mobilize on such a scale."

Xu Zhong thought of Yuan Yi.

Could it be that he had ultimately accepted Wei Yan's heart?

Could he have done something earthshaking, drawing all these people here?

If not for the crowds here, Xu Zhong would have wanted to slip into the small grotto heaven within the Needle-Head Seven-Arrows Book and spy on Yuan Yi's situation at this very moment.

He forcibly restrained that impulse.

Then they headed toward the inner city.

The inner city was under guard, and the soldiers under Feng Xun's command were keeping watch. They carefully examined everyone entering and leaving.

"Brother Xu?"

Just as he entered the city gate, Xu Zhong heard someone calling his name, sounding especially excited.

"I thought you hadn't made it out."

Turning around, he saw Yun Yong.

"I didn't think I'd be able to get out either."

Yun Yong sounded slightly embarrassed as he said, "When my sister rescued me, I originally wanted her to look for you as well, but the situation at the time was too urgent..."

"It's fine." Xu Zhong interrupted him. "At that moment, no one could guarantee they would leave alive. That you even had the thought was already quite enough. I appreciate it."

After all, Xu Zhong had personally seen Yun Yong's sister appear and take them away.

"By the way, Li Feiyu and the others are still alive too..." He glanced behind Xu Zhong. "We're still at the old place. If you're done, you can come find us."

Xu Zhong nodded. Just as he was about to speak, he heard Empty Wisdom say from the side, "My master is at the city lord's manor. I have nowhere else to go for the moment. I wonder whether Brother Xu would be willing to take me in?"

Before Xu Zhong could answer, he turned to Xiyue and asked, "Miss Xiyue, what about you? Do you have anywhere to go? If not, you can come with us."