Jiang Yun stared at those two words for a full three breaths, then he stuffed the sensing artifact back into his sleeve and drew a deep breath.
Heavenly! Emperor!
His mind raced through every scrap of information he could dredge up that had anything to do with the title "Heavenly Emperor"... At the very least, an ordinary Sixth Realm cultivator would never dare call himself a Heavenly Emperor.
After all, one's Dharma-Station was itself bestowed by the Heavenly Dao. To put it bluntly, even those who truly cultivated to the Sixth Realm were merely doing the Heavenly Dao's bidding.
And you dare call yourself a Heavenly Emperor?
Either it was some arrogant fool who understood nothing of these matters, or it was someone standing at a height he could never hope to look up to in this lifetime.
So why had Xu Huayi emptied out her entire fortune? Was it because she had glimpsed Gu Chengming's desire and been frightened out of her wits?
No—that wasn't it.
Jiang Yun suddenly grasped it, and cold sweat all but instantly seeped out of him.
That hadn't been begging for mercy. That had been ransom money for her own life!
Whatever Xu Huayi had seen must have terrified her, right then and there, to a state bordering on losing her senses. That was why she had instinctively made such an utterly illogical move—piling every valuable thing she owned before the other party, all to buy herself a way out.
Jiang Yun's back was now completely drenched.
Some near-instinctive terror crept slowly up from the base of his spine. He forced himself to maintain that worried expression on his face, but his fingers had already begun to tremble faintly, beyond his control.
Was there still time to flee now?
Jiang Yun swiftly ran the calculations in his head, and the conclusion was disheartening.
At this moment he was still in full view of everyone, and he had no idea whether Gu Chengming had noticed anything off about his identity. If he bolted now, he wouldn't just expose himself—he'd be seized on the spot.
Fortunately, the worry on his face didn't require much faking. His current expression, compared to everyone else's, didn't look all that out of place.
After all, everyone was worried about Gu Chengming and Xu Huayi—it was only their reasons that differed.
They feared something might happen to Gu Chengming. Jiang Yun feared that nothing would.
"Fellow Daoist Jiang, why do you look so pale?"
Tao Yong leaned over and asked in a lowered voice.
"Perhaps I got buffeted by the turbulent currents when entering the Secret Realm—I'm feeling a bit unwell." Jiang Yun maintained his usual amiable smile and waved a hand. "It's nothing. Thank you for your concern, Fellow Daoist Tao."
Tao Yong let out an "Oh," asked nothing further, and turned back to bury himself in sorting through the survey instruments.
Jiang Yun looked once more toward that stretch of utterly empty void. Some things, once known, made a man even less able to swallow his food than not knowing had.
This friendship of ours between Daoists still has a long way to go.
He had said that very line to himself earlier.
Right now, Jiang Yun felt deeply that the line had been stupid to an outrageous degree.
Meanwhile, on the other side.
Inside the stone chamber, Gu Chengming was still staring blankly at the dialogue box before him, where Hundred Bones Resonance was living through the pinnacle of his life.
[Hundred Bones Resonance stands alone against the myriad gods of all the heavens, gazing up at countless deities falling like meteors, and roars: Hand over Gu Chengming's remnant soul!]
Gu Chengming: "..."
The illusory realm the Hundred Emperor had sunk into—why was it once again about waging war across all the heavens?
He lowered his head to glance at that little mountain of treasures heaped before him, then raised it again to look at Xu Huayi's face—turned instinctively away, flushed all the way to the roots of her ears—and let out a helpless sigh inwardly.
The good news was that with the Hundred Emperor holding things up, escape seemed within reach.
The bad news was—what on earth did Xu Huayi mean by this? Hadn't he already said there was a way out? So why hadn't she taken her spirit stones back yet?
[Hundred Bones Resonance faces all the heavens alone, his body bearing a hundred wounds, drenched in blood, yet still standing towering and unbowed.]
[Hundred Bones Resonance walks slowly out from a mountain of corpses and a sea of blood, clutching in his hand a broken fragment of a divine soul.]
[Come back to life, my beloved!]
Gu Chengming saw this line and fell silent for a moment.
—Hundred Emperor, that line of yours... isn't it a little off?
Setting aside his thoughts, Gu Chengming turned toward Xu Huayi and said, "Put your things away first."
Xu Huayi froze on the spot.
Gu Chengming looked at the spirit patterns on the wall. "I already have a lead. This place's predicament is nothing much—I'll break through it soon."
At his words, the tension drained abruptly from Xu Huayi's shoulders. She let out a long breath of stale air and raised her sleeve to wipe the fine sweat from her brow. But as she looked at Gu Chengming's calm, unruffled back, something faintly strange flickered through her heart.
She couldn't say whether it was regret, or disappointment.
She lowered her head and picked up the items on the ground one by one, stuffing them back into her storage pouch—her movements far slower than when she'd pulled them out.
"As expected of Fellow Daoist Gu." Xu Huayi cinched the drawstring of her storage pouch and rose to her feet. "Then let us go with your method, Fellow Daoist Gu."
Gu Chengming didn't reply; he simply turned to face the center of the stone chamber.
The lead he spoke of was, of course, no formation-breaking technique. The semi-transparent frame right at the center of his vision was flickering wildly.
At that very moment, a low, deep rumble suddenly sounded all around the stone chamber.
The ancient, intricate spirit patterns on the walls began to fade at a visible speed, those grayish-white glows dimming point by point, as if something were drawing them out from the roots.
Gu Chengming's gaze stirred.
[Hundred Bones Resonance's favorability has risen to three hundred.]
[All attributes +3!]
Well now—waging war across all the heavens can even raise favorability?
Could it be that the Hundred Emperor was having such a grand time he decided to let me have a bit of fun too?
The rise in favorability came with an exceedingly wondrous sensation, as if every meridian and bone in his body had been repolished by a pair of invisible hands.
Looking at it now, his current attributes should be enough to cultivate that Immortal-Concealing Wine-Sword Formula.
Come to think of it, he felt a bit apologetic toward that Elder Hua—here he was already at the Third Realm, and only now beginning to cultivate the technique the elder had given him... Oh, wait, no—it didn't seem like all that much time had actually passed since he'd received the manual.
The spirit patterns on the walls faded faster and faster, until the last trace of light suddenly winked out.
The entire stone chamber trembled with a roar.
Gu Chengming raised a hand to shield Xu Huayi, pulling her behind him, channeling a bit of force beneath his feet to stand firm and steady.
Then, everything around them began to shatter.
It wasn't the real stone walls collapsing—it was this entire space itself, like a painting soaked through with water, dissolving from the edges inward. The grayish-white stone walls, the mirror-bright floor, the Dharma-Station spirit patterns spiraling across the domed ceiling—all of it, every last bit, dissolved in an instant into a sky full of scattering points of light, vanishing into a vast expanse of white radiance.
After the dazzling light passed, what rushed to meet them was a gust of biting, frigid wind.
The two of them had escaped.
Beneath their feet was a stretch of soft, freshly fallen snow.
Gu Chengming blinked, his vision gradually clearing from the afterimages of the white light.
All around was an empty snowfield, the sky a leaden gray, thick banks of cloud pressing the horizon extremely low—as if he could touch them by reaching out a hand. Far off along the horizon, several strange spirit-glows drifted between the clouds and the earth, flickering in and out of sight, as though Tianque itself were breathing.
The snow was newly fallen; a step into it gave a crisp "crunch," leaving two clear, deep hollows.
Gu Chengming looked around, swiftly confirmed there were no obvious signs of danger nearby, and only then withdrew his gaze.
Xu Huayi stood at his side, already gesturing with her Judge's Brush at something—clearly sensing their bearings.
"The directional sensing is a bit off. The spatial structure inside Tianque is completely different from the outside world."
She pressed the Judge's Brush against her lips and thought for a moment. "But broadly speaking, I can confirm we've been transported to a deeper part of the Secret Realm."
Then Xu Huayi cleared her throat and resumed her usual capable air. "Fellow Daoist Gu, let's first pin down our position and make contact with the rest of the team as soon as possible."
"Alright."
Gu Chengming agreed, and treading through the snow, walked shoulder to shoulder with her.
Their footsteps sank into the snow, one deep, one shallow, and apart from that, there was only the sound of the wind all around.
After walking for about half an incense-stick's time, the terrain began to change. The flat snowfield gradually sloped upward, the snow growing thinner and thinner, until it revealed the black dark stone ground beneath—of a piece with the wilderness outside the boundary markers, but harder in texture, its surface polished smooth as a mirror, faintly reflecting the figures upon it.
Gu Chengming walked up a few more steps, and his view suddenly opened wide.
A mountain had appeared, directly ahead in the two of them's field of vision.
Not a mountain in the ordinary sense, but a mountain mass of exceedingly strange outline. It towered into the clouds, its walls nearly vertical, as if carved out by some force by main strength, without the curves that natural erosion should bring. The color of the mountain itself was a deep iron-gray, appearing especially grave beneath this grayish-white sky.
The outline of the summit was irregular, as if countless slender spikes had broken up out of the rock—some upright, some slanted, chaotic and dense—and from between those spikes seeped an aura so sharp it was nearly substantial.
Gu Chengming sensed it a little, and his brows twitched faintly.
That was sword qi.
Not the sword qi of one or two swords, but the sword qi of countless—countless—swords, deposited by the years, congealed into something solid, suffusing the whole of the mountain. It was like an invisible mist that would slice any who drew near to pieces at any moment.
Even standing several hundred zhang away at this moment, his skin could feel that fine, prickling pain, like a thorn against the back.
Xu Huayi also came to a stop. From her sleeve she took out a thin, rolled-up map, spread it open, and compared it against the mountain before them.
After a moment, she abruptly lifted her head.
"Fellow Daoist Gu."
There was a trace of astonishment in Xu Huayi's voice that he had never heard before. Her finger pointed at a certain spot on the map, and then she raised her head, her gaze falling upon that peak, and finally spoke in a rather uncertain tone: "That, um... that looks like the Sword Burial Tomb."
"The Sword Burial Tomb?"
Gu Chengming instinctively glanced at the mountain again.
The iron-gray mountain mass, cliffs sheer as if planed flat, that dense thicket of conical spikes at the summit flickering in and out of the low-hanging clouds, sword qi suffusing everything.
"Are you certain?"
"Mm." Xu Huayi lowered her head and cross-checked the map once more. The edges of the paper had already begun to curl faintly in the cold wind; she pressed them down with her hand, her brows knitting unconsciously. "The bearing, the terrain, the aura—they all match. And look at that sword qi—there's no second place in the Secret Realm that could present this kind of density."
She folded the map and tucked it back into her sleeve, turning her face aside, her gaze lingering on that mountain for a moment. "By rights we've strayed off course. This place wasn't in our original first-step plan; the transportation formation just happened to fling us here by sheer coincidence."
Gu Chengming: "Stumbled onto our destination by coincidence?"
"You could say that." Xu Huayi thought about it. "The Sword Burial Tomb is one of the few Dharma-Station wonders within Tianque that Great Qian's side deliberately intends to explore—it's listed among the objectives of this trip. We'd have had to make a trip here sooner or later; I just didn't expect it to be this soon."
She paused when she said "we," probably recalling that the whole team was now scattered across every corner of the Secret Realm, and that this "we" at present in fact meant only her and Gu Chengming. So she gave a light cough and didn't elaborate further.
"So this Sword Burial Tomb..." Gu Chengming drew his gaze back from the mountain. "What's its origin?"
Xu Huayi thought for a moment and said, "I don't know much myself—it's all from documents I read before setting out, more or less a compilation of hearsay. Take it with a grain of salt."
Treading through the snow, she walked slowly a couple of steps toward the mountain. "According to the documents, Tianque was originally the ruins of some ancient great being. Exactly whose, there's no settled conclusion—every school tells it differently. Some say it belonged to a certain grandmaster of the Sword Dao, others say a master artificer who fell into cultivation deviation. In any case, let's set that question aside for now."
"As for the Dharma-Station behind the formation of the Sword Burial Tomb—according to the conclusions observed by successive generations of the Imperial Astronomical Bureau's Star-Gazing Terrace, it only appeared several thousand years after Tianque had been sealed. Which is to say, it was not part of Tianque from the beginning, but formed on its own at some point in time——"
"But there is one thing that's certain."
She raised her hand, pointed at that mountain, and said quite happily: "Inside the Sword Burial Tomb, everyone who enters can refine and forge a Dharma Sword of their own."
"And not the ordinary Third Realm sort of Dharma Sword. The documents record that cultivators have refined Dharma Swords of the Fourth Realm, even the Fifth Realm, within the Sword Burial Tomb—and these Dharma Swords, so long as they receive 'acknowledgment,' may all be taken away."
When she said the word "acknowledgment," her tone paused in a subtle way, as if considering how to phrase things.
Gu Chengming noticed the pause. "What acknowledgment?"
"That's precisely the troublesome part."
Xu Huayi let out a light sigh. "In theory, a Dharma Sword—even one forged to the level of the Fourth or even Fifth Realm—is just an artifact. It has no will, and cannot perform the active action of 'acknowledging.'"
"Yet it's precisely in the records of the Sword Burial Tomb that this 'acknowledgment' genuinely exists. Among the cultivators who go in, some come out bearing Fourth Realm Dharma Swords, while others fail even to refine a Third Realm Dharma Sword and return empty-handed—and some, after going in, get no reaction whatsoever."
She made a little gesture, her expression rather subtle.
"What exactly is doing the acknowledging in that acknowledgment—no one knows. The documents debated it for several hundred years, and the final conclusion came down to four words."
"Cause unknown."
Gu Chengming: "..."
You people of the Imperial Astronomical Bureau really understand the fine art of nonsense scholarship—write a whole string in your paper, then end it with a 'further research required' to swindle your research grants, is that it?
"The elders of the Imperial Astronomical Bureau were very honest." Xu Huayi looked a little embarrassed. "In any case, this is one of the destinations of this trip. Since we've stumbled here by chance, let's go in and take a look."
The closer they drew, the more distinct that sword qi became.
At the foot of the mountain the snow had vanished entirely, replaced by a stretch of level, hard dark stone ground. There were many fine cracks in the stone surface, and from within the cracks seeped a faint, ghostly blue light, winding and extending along the veins.
"Go on in, Fellow Daoist Gu. I'll keep watch out here for you."
Gu Chengming felt a little puzzled at this.
"I'm not a sword cultivator."
Xu Huayi explained rather bluntly: "What's refined inside the Sword Burial Tomb are Dharma Swords, and this thing is of little use to a non-sword-cultivator to begin with. If I went in, I'd only be wasting my energy—better to wait outside for you, and study the formation patterns here while I'm at it."
With that, she found a relatively level piece of dark stone and sat down, took out her Judge's Brush, and had already begun sketching something on the silk she carried with her.
That familiar, practiced posture looked exactly like someone at the gate of a scenic area declaring, "I'm not going in—you all go, I'll wait for you here."
Gu Chengming voiced his thanks, turned, and walked toward the entrance at the foot of the mountain.
At the mountain's base was an extremely narrow fissure, no wider than a single person, as if torn open from the mountain's belly by main force by some power. The stone walls on either side of the fissure were hung with countless fine sword scars, deep and shallow, crisscrossing in every direction.
The interior, however, was far more spacious than he'd imagined. That narrow crack was merely the entrance; once inside, it opened into a considerably vast space. The ceiling was extremely high, extending almost to some dark apex within the mountain's interior, its end nowhere to be seen. Only a scattered few points of light hung high above, casting the whole space in shifting patches of light and dark. The ground was level black dark stone, but smoother in texture than the ground outside the mountain's foot—almost able to mirror one's reflection.
Then, the swords.
The first thought that sprang into Gu Chengming's mind, the moment he laid eyes on how this space was furnished, was that the name "Sword Burial Tomb" had not been misgiven at all.
All the Dharma Swords were scattered throughout the whole space in a manner utterly without pattern. Some swords were stuck into the ground with only half the hilt exposed, some lay flat across the floor, some leaned aslant against protrusions in the stone walls, and still others simply hung suspended in midair.
The number of swords was so great it could nearly be called a "heap." Gu Chengming swept a rough glance over them and couldn't even count their approximate number.
Every kind, every era, every material.
Some swords were black through and through, as if the furnace fire had burned the entire blade thoroughly during forging, black to the point of gleaming. Others were exactly the opposite—the blade white to near transparency, so that one could faintly see the things behind it through the sword. And still others were severely corroded, their surfaces covered in a thick layer of rust, their original color long unrecognizable.
The sword qi here was made concrete as a thin, flowing mist, seeping slowly out from the surface of every sword's blade, suffusing the air, twining together with one another, so that the whole space drifted with that unique scent of iron mingled with cold.
Gu Chengming stood at the entrance for a moment, and only after confirming there was no obvious danger did he step inside.
His first step landed on the dark stone ground, and fine echoes returned from all directions—but apart from that, there was no other movement.
Gu Chengming tried approaching a sword that looked to be in fairly good condition.
It was a slender longsword, its blade marked with fine water-ripple patterns, its guard engraved with two ancient seal characters in a script he couldn't identify. It hung about one zhang above the ground, its point downward, emitting a steady, restrained Fourth Realm aura.
He stretched out his hand, tried to stir his spiritual power, and following the method described in the documents, gently probed his spiritual sense toward that sword.
No reaction. The sword was still just a sword, hanging in place.
Gu Chengming withdrew his spiritual sense and switched to another sword.
Still no reaction.
Another one.
Still nothing.
He walked through this sword forest for about half an incense-stick's time, trying every Dharma Sword within reach around him—from the finest Fourth Realm sword to the ordinary, near-cheap Second Realm ones. Without exception, all of them stayed utterly motionless, turning a deaf ear to the probing of his spiritual sense, as if he were a transparent man who didn't exist at all.
Gu Chengming came to a stop before a mid-stage Second Realm Dharma Sword and fell silent for a moment.
Even the Second Realm ones ignored him.
He lowered his head to look at his own hand, then raised it to look at the swords around him that took no interest in him whatsoever, and a dialogue box popped up before his eyes.
[Huiyuan Sword Formula, somewhat indignant, comforts him: It's fine, it's fine—these are just Dharma Swords here with no eye for quality.]
[That they can't recognize a gem is common enough. Chengming needn't take it to heart.]
Then it paused and added another line.
[My Chengming is, of course, the very best.]
My Little Huiyuan is the very best too, Gu Chengming thought, feeling rather comforted at heart.
He surveyed the surroundings once more. Since he'd tried the conventional methods all over and none had worked, he'd change his approach.
He lifted his foot and casually walked over to a stone platform jutting up from the ground nearby, intending to sit down first and think it over.
And then, in the dim depths of things, he sensed something.
Not that clear, directional kind of sensing, but something exceedingly vague—like a dull thud carried up from underwater. Somewhere, something, seemed to have formed a connection with him, thin as a floating gossamer thread.
Gu Chengming stopped.
He spread the feelers of his spiritual sense out in every direction, carefully sensing that faint, barely-there pull, and following its direction he walked a few steps, then a few more, passing through two dense rows of swords and rounding a black stone wall about half a man's height.
Before him appeared an ancient sword hanging in the air, with almost no other sword around it at all, forming a suspended clearing.
But this sword was far too old—not that "antique simplicity" of something polished round and rich with patina by the years, but a broken-down state in the literal sense.
There were several clear cracks along the blade, winding from the guard all the way to near the tip. The blade itself had been struck by who knew what; a small portion had already chipped away, exposing the darker-colored core within. The scabbard had long since vanished, and the wrapping on the hilt had mostly rotted away, with only a few remaining coils still wound around it, looking ready to fall off completely at any moment.
Stranger still, this sword gave off no aura of any grade whatsoever.
[Hundred Bones Resonance reminds him: Heavenly Emperor Gu, in my experience, this kind of sword is usually the most formidable.]
Much as he didn't want to admit it, the Hundred Emperor's experience had reached the same conclusion as his own understanding.
Gu Chengming thought this over, crouched down to be level with the sword, and examined it carefully.
Then he tried probing his spiritual sense toward it.
This time, at last, there was a reaction.
Xu Huayi sat outside at the foot of the mountain for about an hour and a half.
That was already enough time for her to trace out the formation-pattern structure of the area around the Sword Burial Tomb's entrance three times over, to more or less grasp seven or eight parts in ten of the spiritual power distribution across the dark stone ground, and finally, with nothing left to do, to pull out an old archive of Tianque's outer regions that Chu Heng had given her earlier and compare it against the surroundings.
The archive's author had rather sloppy handwriting. Xu Huayi frowned and made out the words for a long while, and finally, on the seventh page, found a brief record related to the Sword Burial Tomb.
It was only a single line: "Within are Dharma Swords beyond number, all masterless. Hard to refine, hard to be acknowledged, harder still to obtain. The cause is unknown."
Xu Huayi looked at this line, was silent for a while, and then turned the archive to the next page.
This was probably the most sincere record the elders of the Imperial Astronomical Bureau had left behind. In a sense, admitting you'd researched nothing at all took a fair bit of courage too.
Another half an incense-stick's time or so passed, and from deep within the mountain's belly came an extremely low, deep tremoring rumble.
Xu Huayi's head snapped up.
That tremoring rumble did not come suddenly, but through a process of weak-to-strong, far-to-near. At first it was only the dark stone ground beneath her feet trembling faintly, then it spread to the mountain walls, and after that the whole mountain mass began to quake.
Xu Huayi stood up, her hand already gripping the Judge's Brush at her waist.
That sword qi suddenly grew several times denser.
The faint, mist-like sword intent that had originally drifted about the mountain was, in this instant, as if abruptly gathered in by some force, rushing swiftly toward the mountain's center from all directions, giving off a fine, tinkling ring—like countless swords being drawn from their sheaths all at once.
Cheng, cheng, cheng.
One note after another, from dense to sparse, from high to low, like a melody drawing to its close.
Then, from that narrow crack at the mountain's foot, a figure walked out.
Gu Chengming.
His expression caught Xu Huayi somewhat off guard. It carried a trace of some hard-to-describe, faintly complicated feeling, without the slightest of the high spirits one would expect from someone who'd spent nearly two hours in the Sword Burial Tomb and refined a peerless Dharma Sword.
Xu Huayi's gaze swept quickly over him and saw no newly acquired Dharma Sword.
The volume of his storage pouch hadn't changed, nothing extra had appeared at his waist, and even his aura showed no obvious change from before he'd gone in.
Could he have come back empty-handed? But then what was that tremoring rumble about?
"Fellow Daoist Gu?" Xu Huayi stepped a couple of paces closer and asked curiously, "Did you gain anything?"
Gu Chengming hesitated—a rather rare moment of indecision for someone of his usual composure—then raised a hand and pointed behind himself.
Xu Huayi looked in the direction he pointed.
Her gaze first fell on Gu Chengming's back, then passed through him to look farther off, where there was the dark stone ground at the foot of the mountain, a few stalks of fine, withered grass poking stubbornly out from the stone cracks, that stretch of grayish-white snowfield in the distance, and the low-hanging clouds.
And then.
RUMBLE——
The entire Sword Burial Tomb moved.
Not a shudder, not a slight tremor, but movement in the literal, total, whole-body sense. That iron-gray, sheer mountain with its summit grown thick with spikes began to slowly detach from below the ground, as if something were pulling its roots up out of the earth. Throughout this process the dark stone ground gave off a dense series of cracking sounds, great chunks of rubble scattering and flying out from the mountain's foot, and the fine dark stone dust around the mountain mass rose into the air, forming a thick ring of dust-fog in the air.
And then the entire mountain floated up.
Just like that, it slowly hovered in place behind Gu Chengming, about three zhang above the ground. The foundation at the mountain's base, once buried deep underground, was now exposed to the air—an irregular, coarse cross-section of rock, still hung with scattered clumps of soil and fine chunks of dark stone. A few stones dropped off from the cross-section and struck the ground with a crisp sound.
That sword qi had all been gathered in.
Not a single wisp scattered—all of it drawn back into the mountain's interior. The entire Sword Burial Tomb floated quietly behind Gu Chengming, like an especially absurd "artifact" that could flatten a person at any moment.
Gu Chengming and Xu Huayi were now completely enveloped in the shadow of this great mountain.
For about five breaths, Xu Huayi's mind was in a state of complete shutdown.
—What did you say you refined?!
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