The white-jade stone doors slowly drew shut behind the two of them, sealing off the outside world completely.
The spiritual energy here was rich and dense, yet held perfectly obedient by extraordinarily strict laws.
Zhou Qingmu trailed a step behind, glancing left and right, playing to the life a low-ranking Chief Banner Officer who had never seen the wider world and had bluffed her way into the core zone on pure luck.
"Deputy Commander Gu, does this count as walking straight into the True Lord's treasure vault?"
Zhou Qingmu leaned in and lowered her voice, an excitement she couldn't quite hide threading through her tone. "Look at the patterns on these walls—that's top-grade spirit-luring sand. Scrape off a little and take it to the Capital's black market and you could trade it for a fair pile of spirit stones. This True Lord Zhou Gui Tianli was a real big spender back in the day."
Gu Chengming stopped and glanced back at her, helpless. "Chief Banner Officer Shen, watch your words. The laws within the Zhou Shrine are severe. Best not to say such things aloud."
Zhou Qingmu nodded at once and struck the pose of a dutiful little sidekick, clearly relishing every moment of it.
The two pressed on. At the end of the passage the way opened wide into an enormous circular domed hall.
At the center of the hall stood no spirit treasures or weapons, no mountains of hoarded spirit stones and elixirs.
There was only a massive white-jade platform, upon which a single jade slip floated quietly, radiating a soft golden light.
Around the platform rose four towering jade walls, carved dense with ancient seal script.
The Zhou Shrine's rules took effect at once. The moment the two set foot in the hall, several lines of brilliant golden characters surfaced in the air.
[Those who enter this hall must observe the True Lord's life.]
[Those who observe without reverence: expelled.]
[Those who observe without reflection: expelled.]
"These rules are pretty overbearing," Zhou Qingmu muttered at his side. "Not even allowed to not understand it."
Gu Chengming said nothing and walked straight up to the white-jade platform.
The wonders within Tianque set great store by karma. Since this True Lord Zhou Gui Tianli had left behind an inheritance of this kind, he surely meant to test the temperament of those who came after.
He raised his hand and lightly touched the floating jade slip with a fingertip.
In that instant, the light and shadow in the hall shifted violently. The jade walls all around seemed to come alive; the golden seal-script peeled loose and recombined, forming scene after vivid, living scene.
It seemed to be the life of True Lord Zhou Gui Tianli.
The story did not open with the auspicious descent of some dazzling prodigy, but with the everyday chaos of an ordinary mortal town.
The True Lord's secular name was Zhouli, born into a fairly wealthy scholarly household.
The Zhou family had passed down a single heir for generations, and naturally they doted on this lone seedling even as they laid great hopes upon him.
The old master Zhou was set on raising his son into a courteous, learned gentleman, and from his earliest years engaged the most erudite tutor in the city to instruct him.
Yet the young Zhouli was nothing short of a little terror.
The scenes on the jade walls were vivid to the extreme. At three, Zhouli smashed the old tutor's inkstone and used the ink to dye the white geese in the courtyard black. At five he stole his father's official seal and ran to the market to stamp the great seal onto every one of the butcher's pigs, declaring he wanted to see whether this "official authority" could spare the pigs the knife. At seven he grew even bolder—he took the ancestral tablets from the shrine hall and rearranged them by height and girth, tall to short, fat to thin, claiming the old arrangement did not accord with the rites in his heart.
The old master Zhou trembled with rage, and family discipline became a daily affair.
Each time he was beaten, Zhouli neither cried nor made a fuss. He only stared, wide-eyed, at his father.
"Father beats me because I do not accord with the rules."
In the scene, the young Zhouli held the ruler high overhead, his palms swollen red. "But Father taught me: in the practice of rites, harmony is to be prized. When Father beats me and I feel pain—where is the harmony in that? If the rules cannot set a person's heart at ease, why must they still be kept?"
The old master Zhou was struck speechless by this crooked logic, and could only bellow at his unfilial son.
Zhouli's mischief sprang not from malice, but from his doubt toward the so-called propriety all around him.
The more his parents bound him with elaborate ceremony, the more keenly he could ferret out the logical holes in those rules.
He did not understand why the poor must kowtow before officials. He did not understand why an elder who erred could go unpunished. He did not understand why the sages' grand Dao written in books, once put into practice, amounted to nothing but compromise and hypocrisy.
By the time he was ten, the old master Zhou finally conceded defeat, convinced the child must be possessed by some evil thing that no mortal academy could teach. So he spent a fortune, pulled every string, and sent him up to an immortal sect far above the clouds—Taiping Guan.
Taiping Guan was, in that age, a renowned orthodox school of great standing in the cultivation world.
Its founding creed was: "Accord with the Heavenly Dao, dwell in stillness and non-action, govern the heart through rites."
Even after entering Taiping Guan, Zhouli's nature did not mellow.
When his elders told him to sit in meditation and refine his qi, he insisted instead on slipping into the Scripture Repository to pore over the sect codes left by his predecessors. When they told him to recite the Dao scriptures, he pointed out in the middle of class that the scripture's glosses on "Heaven and Earth are not benevolent" and "the Dao follows nature" contradicted one another.
The enforcement elder of Taiping Guan blew out his beard and glared, and punished him with sweeping the three thousand white-jade steps of the main peak.
And so he swept—for three years.
For three years, broom in hand, Zhouli swept from the foot of the mountain to its summit.
He watched how the morning dew evaporated beneath the first ray of sunlight, watched how autumn's fallen leaves followed the wind's path down into the soil, watched how the disciples within the sect divided their food, clothing, shelter, and travel strictly by cultivation rank.
One night in his thirteenth year, Zhouli set down his broom and sat upon the white-jade steps.
The scene on the jade wall drew close, fixing upon the eyes of the boy Zhouli.
"I understand now," the young Zhouli said softly. "The rites of the mortal world exist to bind the weak, but the rites between Heaven and Earth are the orbits along which all things move. So long as one remains within Heaven and Earth, there is no escaping this order."
The instant those words fell, Zhouli broke through two realms in a single night, straight to the Third Realm.
His comprehension was extraordinary, and it fit Taiping Guan's rigorous, order-obsessed methods to a flawless, seamless degree.
He no longer defied his elders. He became scrupulously proper, the most impeccable disciple in all of Taiping Guan, and a genius acknowledged throughout the cultivation world.
And yet the scenes on the jade walls, in Zhouli's twentieth year, abruptly turned oppressive in tone.
That great calamity known as the Filth Tide had arrived.
The records of the Filth Tide on the jade walls were vague, evasive, even distorted.
There was no concrete enemy, no rampage of demons and fiends—only a boundless, filthy, viscous substance spreading out from the far east.
It was no physical current, but a disaster on the level of concept.
Wherever the Filth Tide passed, the sky turned the blackish-purple of clotted blood, and the spiritual energy grew violently corrupted, frenzied and virulently toxic.
Mortals touched by the Filth Tide sprouted fleshy tumors within hours, lost their minds, and tore into one another. Cultivators who carelessly absorbed the tainted spiritual energy suffered qi deviation at best, and at worst their meridians snapped inch by inch and their bodies burst apart in death.
The whole mortal world became a purgatory.
Cities collapsed, the starved lay dead across the land, black slime gushed up from cracks in the earth and devoured all life. Countless small sects were reduced to ash under the Filth Tide's onslaught, and even those lofty great cultivators, faced with such power of Heaven and Earth, found themselves helpless.
Taiping Guan, one of the leaders of the orthodox path, came to the hardest decision in its history.
Before the great hall of the main peak, the Abbot of Taiping Guan stood with his hands behind his back, gazing down at the purple, venomous miasma that had already spread to the edge of the mountain-guarding formation.
Every elder and inner disciple of the sect stood solemn about him.
The Abbot's voice rang out across the summit.
"The Heavenly Dao is constant; it does not exist for Yao, nor perish for Jie. The Filth Tide is a great calamity of Heaven and Earth, born of the accumulated karma and cause-and-effect of all things. It cannot be resisted by human strength, cannot be blocked by cultivators." The Abbot closed his eyes. "Taiping Guan's lineage has been passed down for thousands of years; its orthodoxy must not be severed. Take my decree: from this day, Taiping Guan seals its mountain and locks its gates, closing off all formations within and without. Until this calamity passes, we swear not to leave the mountain."
Below the hall, all bowed as one and cried aloud, "We respectfully obey the Abbot's decree."
Zhouli stood among the crowd. At the time he was no more than a peak Third Realm cultivator—in a great sect like Taiping Guan, merely a promising junior.
He bowed along with the rest, his movements still perfectly in keeping with Taiping Guan's "propriety," without a single flaw to be found.
The scene on the jade wall lingered on the final moment of Taiping Guan sealing its mountain.
The heavy Dragon-Severing Stone was slowly descending, and the vast mountain-guarding formation had begun to cut all of Tai'e Mountain off from the outside world. Zhouli stood at the very edge of the sect formation.
Wind blew up from below, thick with the reek of blood and the stench of rotting flesh. The blackish-purple clouds in the sky hung low, as if they might collapse down at any moment.
Zhouli stood ramrod straight. His face was hidden in shadow, his expression unreadable.
But the sounds carried through.
They were the wails of mortals—an old woman clutching her dead grandson, keening in despair; a strong man cursing shrilly as he struggled in the mire; the last pleas of countless families in the instant before the Filth Tide swallowed them.
By all reason, the main peak of Taiping Guan soared into the clouds, walled off by the mountain-guarding formation; a Third Realm cultivator could not possibly hear the cries of the mortals below.
These sounds rang directly upon Zhouli's Dao Heart.
The hands he had tucked into his wide sleeves were trembling beyond his control, his eyes fixed on that blackish-purple tide below, spiritual power surging wildly through his meridians.
"Zhouli, withdraw at once!"
The enforcement elder's voice came from behind him.
"The Dao follows nature—this is nature. If you step beyond this formation, you will not save them; you will only throw away, for nothing, one of Taiping Guan's living embers. Rein in your heart, settle your qi. These are the sect's rules, and they are the rules of Heaven and Earth as well."
Zhouli turned. He looked at the elder who had taught him for ten years, looked at the towering main hall of Taiping Guan behind, looked at the fellow disciples who had likewise chosen to shut their gates and stay within.
What an agonizing moment it was. He had studied the rules since childhood, and at Taiping Guan he had carved them into his very bones. He understood better than anyone: the elder was right. A Third Realm cultivator leaping into the Filth Tide would not raise so much as a splash.
In the end, he loosened his clenched fists, raised his hands, bent low, and made a long bow toward Taiping Guan.
"This disciple obeys."
The Dragon-Severing Stone crashed down. The mountain-guarding formation sealed completely.
Taiping Guan had closed its mountain.
In the years that followed, the records on the jade walls moved swiftly.
Within the sealed Taiping Guan, Zhouli no longer listened to the sounds outside. His talent was truly earth-shaking; with a mortal body he set out to dissect the underlying logic by which the Heavenly Dao bestowed the Dharma-Station.
He pored through ancient texts, took formations apart, day and night without rest, and his cultivation rose with the tide—Fourth Realm, Fifth Realm, breaking through all the way with unstoppable momentum.
At last he succeeded. He created a method that could deduce on its own, and even to some degree intervene in, the coalescence of a Dharma-Station—
the Heavenly Harmony Righteous Heart Method.
And by this very method, within a secret chamber of Taiping Guan, he attested to the "Dharma-Station" that belonged to him.
True Lord Zhou Gui Tianli was thus born.
Here the scenes on the jade walls resolved into the guiding creed of his lifetime of cultivation: benefit others, save the world, spread enlightenment, redeem myself.
And yet, from here, the story began to turn exceedingly strange.
The records on the jade walls tried to show how the True Lord had put these four principles into practice—especially the matter of "saving the world."
But the scene "stuck." It showed the True Lord, his whole body wreathed in golden light, striding out of Taiping Guan—and then? How was the Filth Tide resolved? How did the True Lord save the multitudes amid the venomous miasma? What earth-shattering divine ability did he use?
Nothing. There was nothing.
The scene on the jade walls skipped past with jarring stiffness. One moment the True Lord was still at Taiping Guan's gate making his grand vow; the next, the scene cut straight to a golden age of blue skies, a reviving earth, and a hundred flowers in bloom.
Beside it ran a line of utterly hollow text: [The True Lord illumined Heaven and Earth with rites and law; the Filth Tide scattered at its touch. All the people bathed in his grace, and peace reigned across the realm.]
No causal logic whatsoever, no detail of any battle, not even a clear account of how the Filth Tide had actually receded.
It was as if some third-rate hack writing a storybook had abruptly stopped updating halfway through, then slapped together a slapdash grand happy ending.
The story cut off, right there.
As the last line of brilliant golden script dimmed, the towering jade walls all around ceased their flow as if drained of spirit. Those lifelike scenes shattered back into rigid seal-script, then sank away into the depths of the jade.
The hall returned to that dead, silent emptiness. Standing before the white-jade platform, Gu Chengming had watched this vast life to its end—yet his brow only furrowed tighter and tighter.
"Deputy Commander Gu, finished watching?"
Zhou Qingmu rolled her somewhat stiff neck at his side. "This True Lord's life was quite the grand and stirring saga. But that last stretch—wasn't it a bit too much of a cop-out?"
Zhou Qingmu's offhand jab landed squarely on the wrongness that had been nagging at Gu Chengming.
A man who was rebellious from childhood, who questioned the rules, in the end became a sage who treated the rules as the supreme Dao. A man who, when the Filth Tide came, listened to the wails of mortals and finally chose compromise, bowing to the sect's rules and hiding inside his shell—and the core of the Dharma-Station he attested to turned out to be "benefit others" and "save the world"?
It made no sense at all.
Cultivation prized a clear and penetrating Dao Heart. In that moment years ago, Zhouli had chosen to shrink back, to submit to the sect's interests. His Dao Heart had already set in that very instant.
What he sought was to preserve himself, to carry on the orthodox lineage.
How could a man like that ever deduce a Dharma-Station with "saving the world" at its core?
And if the Zhouli Heavenly Harmony Righteous Heart Method truly had to do with True Lord Zhou Gui Tianli, and if that True Lord really was, as the jade walls recorded, a man who could stand by and watch the whole world die for the sake of his sect's grand strategy—then the Zhouli Heavenly Harmony Righteous Heart Method would never have the character it possessed now.
[The Zhouli Heavenly Harmony Righteous Heart Method gazed at the life of that True Lord Zhou Gui Tianli, unable to recover its composure for a long while.]
[It wanted to refute, but did not know where to begin; an emotion hard to name brewed within it.]
Seeing the words in the dialog box before him, Gu Chengming thought: just as I suspected.
This familiar reaction... back during the Clear-Heart Formula's bond event, it had likewise shown this rare, bewildered look.
So it had finally come? The Zhouli Heavenly Harmony Righteous Heart Method's bond event.
"Shen Jinghong"—the guise Zhou Qingmu wore—crossed her arms and asked, "What does Deputy Commander Gu make of it?"
"Histories are mostly whitewashed by later hands—half true, half false. Little is gained by digging too deep." Gu Chengming's tone was mild, but the next moment he turned the thread. "Still, setting aside these grand judgments of merit and fault, and speaking only of the True Lord's method—it does share a certain kindred cleverness with this Zhouli Heavenly Harmony Righteous Heart Method that I cultivate... If the two truly are connected, then I have a rather different reading of it."
Zhou Qingmu raised her brows slightly, playing the attentive listener. "Oh? This subordinate would gladly hear your reasoning."
Gu Chengming lifted his gaze to the dome of the hall. "Everyone believes that the two words 'Zhouli'—the rites of Zhou—refer to cultivating severe rules, strict order of high and low, rigid dogma. The elaborate ceremony this stele demanded of us just now seems to bear that out."
"But it is not so. If rules existed only to pin people in place, this method would have become so much waste paper long ago. I think the Zhouli Heavenly Harmony Righteous Heart Method lies not in keeping the rites at all, but in 'setting the heart right.'"
He gestured at the white-jade walls around them. "Rites and law were never immutable heavenly edicts. They were laid down, in the beginning, to maintain order in a chaotic age—to give the many a road to walk, food to eat, a life to live. When a code of rites can shelter the living, it is the orthodox path. But when that code becomes the block and cleaver by which those on high butcher the common folk, becomes the shackle that leaves people no way to survive—then it becomes a man-eating beast."
At this, the smile at the corner of Zhou Qingmu's mouth faded a fraction, and something like genuine scrutiny surfaced in the depths of her eyes.
Gu Chengming went on. "So the Zhouli Heavenly Harmony Righteous Heart Method cultivates not rigid dogma, but the power to adapt. Only by knowing what constitutes great righteousness can one tell right from wrong. Meet an evil law, and one should smash it and set down new rules; meet a chaotic situation, and one should use whatever means it takes to set the moral order straight again. To accord with the Heavenly Dao is not to teach people to shut their eyes and ears and endure abuse—it is to let a person, between Heaven and Earth, keep safe the ones who should be kept safe."
"What is called Heavenly Harmony and a Righteous Heart is to measure the Heavenly Dao with the human heart. The rules are dead; people are alive. So long as the original heart stays pure and true, so long as one does not betray great righteousness—then even acting a little wildly, even wielding a little ruthlessness, is still practicing the true rites of Zhou."
[The Zhouli Heavenly Harmony Righteous Heart Method's somewhat bewildered gaze cleared a few degrees at these words. Having learned its painful lesson, it praised: To cast out the old and establish the new—this is the true great Dao. Chengming's words strike deep into its heart!]
Having heard all this, Zhou Qingmu fixed her gaze steadily on this young cultivator of merely early Third Realm. The disguise in the depths of her eyes fell away, and a genuine, unfeigned admiration and agreement surfaced.
This lad understood the true rites of Zhou better than all those old fossils in the Capital who had read dead books their whole lives.
And in that very moment, dead center in Gu Chengming's vision, a half-transparent prompt box quietly popped up.
[Detected the Fellow Daoist's heartfelt, profound agreement. Fellow Daoist Karma established.]
[「Dao Conduit」 CG unlock rate increased by 20%.]
Gu Chengming looked at the line and thought: now this was a pleasant surprise.
His top superior, traveling incognito, had not only refrained from blaming him for spouting off—she'd genuinely come to regard him as a kindred spirit of the same path.
Before he could savor this gain in full, from the dome of the Zhou Shrine's hall there suddenly descended a strand of utterly pure golden spirit-light.
This was no attack, but the Dharma-Station wonder's "response" to the words Gu Chengming had just spoken.
The Zhou Shrine's blessing had descended.
That golden light, like warm water made solid, poured straight down through the crown of Gu Chengming's head and coursed through his four limbs and hundred bones, washing away the last trace of impurity lingering in his meridians. The Righteous Noble Breath of the Zhouli Heavenly Harmony Righteous Heart Method merged flawlessly with this power of the same origin; his qi-mechanisms climbed step by step, and all of it felt entirely natural, a matter come to fruition in its own time.
Third Realm, third layer.
Gu Chengming slowly exhaled a breath of turbid air, his whole body light, his spiritual foundation now many times deeper than before.
In a place as riddled with danger as Tianque, being able to freeload an entire realm's advancement was, of course, an excellent thing.
He gently clenched a fist, feeling the abundant spiritual power flowing through his fingertips, and was about to turn and thank Zhou Qingmu at his side—and to examine, more carefully, whether this white-jade platform held any other mysteries.
But the peace in the hall did not last long.
The smoothly running laws of the Zhou Shrine abruptly showed an exceedingly faint stall.
Gu Chengming noticed nothing amiss at first, until the corner of his eye swept across the far side of the white-jade platform.
There, at some unknown moment, one more person had appeared.
It was a male cultivator of middling build, dressed in an utterly unremarkable gray robe.
He stood there as though fused into one with the surrounding jade walls and platform.
If one did not stare hard, the gaze would slide right off him with perfect naturalness—even a probing spiritual sense would overlook him entirely.
In the very instant Gu Chengming sized the man up, his Sea of Consciousness erupted like a boiling pot.
[The Red Dust Phantom Body Formula's alarm bells are blaring!]
[This person is exceedingly dangerous—Fellow Daoist Gu, take the utmost care!]
Gu Chengming's chest lurched, and he grasped it at once. A living, breathing person had appeared without the slightest warning in this core zone that the Zhou Shrine's laws had sealed off in isolation—and his own first instinct had judged the man utterly harmless, entirely ordinary.
A perception-veil?!
The gap between what his mind expected and the reality before him, together with the Red Dust Phantom Body Formula's frantic warnings, could only mean one thing.
This gray-robed cultivator without a shred of presence was a terrifying being who could warp the perception of ordinary folk.
The gray-robed man had clearly not expected that someone would already have gotten a step ahead of him into the Zhou Shrine's core hall.
His infiltration of Tianque had a crystal-clear goal: to take advantage of the chaos as the great powers warred over the Secret Realm's outer reaches, and, using his own concealment art, to claim this Zhou Shrine without a soul knowing.
So long as he seized control of the Zhou Shrine's core laws, he could hold the absolute initiative in the coming struggle over "True Lord Zhou Gui Tianli's Dharma-Station."
"So I came a step too late."
The gray-robed man's voice carried a hint of amusement. His eyes swept over Gu Chengming and Zhou Qingmu, and with ease he saw through both their Third Realm cultivations.
The rule of Tianque's third stage was "slay to seize fortune."
Since these two cultivators could call down the Zhou Shrine's blessing, they must share a deep karmic origin with the True Lord's Dharma-Station. Wiping them out in passing and taking that karma for his own would only make the plans ahead go the more smoothly.
No idle words, no aura of pressure leaking out.
The gray-robed man merely raised his right hand with the utmost casualness, crooked his index finger, and made to flick it toward the space between Gu Chengming's brows.
Before the thought of circulating his method to resist could even rise in Gu Chengming, a tall, slender figure planted itself before him without any warning.
Zhou Qingmu had dropped the act!
The token at her waist that marked her as a Chief Banner Officer of the Night-Watch Bureau swayed with the motion; her right hand gripped the horizontal saber at her waist that had never once left its sheath.
The shell of cultivation that had been forcibly crushed down to Third Realm shattered with a roar, and the abyssal Fifth Realm aura belonging to the Chief Commander of the Night-Watch Bureau was unleashed in full within this white-jade hall.
Zhou Qingmu drew her blade.
The stroke came out with no dazzling saber-radiance, no earth-shaking momentum.
It was a scene immense beyond measure, yet pared down to the barest extreme.
Gu Chengming saw only Zhou Qingmu's wrist give a light flick—and then, in an instant, the swaying ever-burning lamps in the hall went dark.
Not blown out by wind. Rather, within this stretch of space, the very concepts of "light" and "sound" were severed clean by that single thread of the blade's edge.
Across the canvas of reality, a pure-black blade drew a straight horizontal line out of empty air. Wherever the line passed, the perception-veil before the gray-robed man, his body-guarding laws, and even the very space he stood in, all split open soundlessly like paper.
It was the very stroke Gu Chengming had once seen aboard the flower boat—
Night Severance!
The gray-robed man's face changed drastically, his eyes brimming with terror and disbelief. With all his strength he drove his movement art, trying to slip into the void and flee this killing stroke.
For two Fifth Realm great cultivators to clash within this sealed Dharma-Station wonder—the mere backlash of the laws bleeding out from the exchange was enough to grind everything around them to powder.
Zhou Qingmu knew this well.
In the instant before the blade's edge cut through the void, she turned her head slightly and looked back at Gu Chengming behind her, a helpless smile surfacing. She offered no explanation of her identity as a Fifth Realm great cultivator, and gave no account of where she was bound next.
In that smile was a touch of the awkwardness of being "caught in the act," and a touch of the hope of a superior letting a subordinate go and make his own way.
It all needed no words.
The next moment, Zhou Qingmu crushed in her left hand a jade talisman coursing with the law of space.
The white-jade floor tiles beneath Gu Chengming's feet turned instantly into a swirling vortex of nothingness.
Weightlessness slammed into him; the fragments of space around him whirled backward like a spinning lantern's shadows—the hall, the horizontal saber, the horrified man, and Zhou Qingmu, all cast behind him.
Gu Chengming was forcibly sent out of the Zhou Shrine.
Meanwhile.
The Tianque Secret Realm, outside the Zhou Shrine.
Ren Wencai hid behind a massive fractured stone pillar, holding his breath and steadying his mind.
As a veteran sword cultivator who had knocked about the cultivation world for many years, he understood well the peril of this Secret Realm. Now that the rules had changed, the interior of Tianque had become a vast hunting ground, and any anomalous ripple of spiritual power might draw countless greedy eyes.
At this moment his gaze was fixed on the Zhou Shrine not far ahead.
The commotion that had just come from the Zhou Shrine was by no means the ordinary stir of cultivators dueling. It was more like the backlash of some region's underlying laws being cut clean through and then pieced back together.
"A major upheaval," Ren Wencai reckoned to himself.
The Zhou Shrine had always been strict in its rules. To stir up so great a disturbance, someone must have touched off its most core fortune—might even have already taken the treasure into their own hands.
He had meant to draw closer and feel out the situation, but as he skirted a stretch of ruins, he stopped.
Relying on his seasoned experience and keen spiritual sense, he detected several ragged yet malice-laden auras crouching among the crumbling walls ahead.
Ren Wencai quietly circulated a Concealment Art, blending his form entirely into the gray gloom around him, and edged slowly forward. Through the gaps in the rubble, he made out the figures of those people.
Five in all, dressed as rogue cultivators, their garb varied, the spirit artifacts in their hands mostly of the sinister and vicious sort.
At their head was a middle-aged man with a knife-scar across his face, his aura thick and deep, already across the threshold of mid Fourth Realm. There was one other at early Fourth Realm, and the rest hovered in the Third Realm. Right now they had fanned out in a spread, locking down the one unavoidable path before the Zhou Shrine's main gate. Ren Wencai formed an exceedingly faint Wind-Listening Art, gathering the scattered snatches of distant conversation into his ears.
"The commotion inside this Zhou Shrine is downright terrifying. Do we really have to stake out here?" One of the leaner rogue cultivators' voice carried a trace of nerves.
Scarface gave a cold snort and lowered his voice. "The bigger the commotion, the more astonishing the fortune inside. Tianque's rule now is slay to seize fortune—no matter which deity's inside, when they thrash out a spectacle this big they're bound to be drained of spiritual power. We wait at our ease, five of us in formation for a sneak attack—even a peak Fourth Realm cultivator wouldn't come out ahead."
Hearing this, Ren Wencai sneered coldly to himself.
Bandit cultivators.
The most contemptible trade in all the cultivation world.
This lot refused to put in the bitter effort to comprehend the Dao themselves, and made their living entirely on ambushes and robbery-murder—capital-free ventures of killing folk and seizing treasure.
Faced with someone of higher cultivation, they'd play the grovelling lackey; run across someone alone or gravely wounded, and they'd swarm in all at once.
Ren Wencai had always prided himself on the backbone of a sword cultivator, and he despised such conduct devoid of all martial virtue.
His fingers stirred slightly, and the natal flying sword in his sleeve had already given off a faint humming ring.
He weighed it: if what emerged from the Zhou Shrine was some heretical fiend, then he would let dog bite dog. But if it was a fellow of the orthodox path, he might well have to step in against injustice and draw his sword to teach these rogue cultivators—who had no idea how close death stood—a lesson.
Just then, above the massive rite-questioning stele before the Zhou Shrine's gate, the space suddenly warped violently.
Amid a burst of glaring white light, a figure was spat out from within the Zhou Shrine with the utmost brutality.
The figure flipped in midair and landed steadily on the bluestone slabs.
The rogue cultivators' breathing turned heavy in an instant, and lethal light had begun to glimmer faintly across their various spirit artifacts.
Ren Wencai narrowed his eyes and looked hard.
When he made out the figure's build and face, his mind went blank for a beat.
It was a young man in the standard black robes of the Great Qian Night-Watch Bureau, his features clean and handsome, his expression calm. Just teleported out, he showed no panic at all—instead, with perfect composure, he brushed at nonexistent dust on his sleeve.
—Chengming?!
How could he be here?!
By all reason he should be following the old seniors in the Great Qian Night-Watch Bureau, handling some trifling little demon-hunting cases. How had he come to Tianque?!
Ren Wencai's heart leapt into his throat. In his eyes, however gifted Gu Chengming might be, however extraordinary his comprehension, he was after all a young man with little worldly experience.
Caught in a life-or-death killing snare laid by a pack of desperadoes like this, the lad was sure to suffer badly!
There was no time to think through the whys of it, because the bandit cultivators in the ruins had already made their move.
"Now!" Scarface bellowed.
The five bandit cultivators worked in flawless concert.
A black net steeped in deadly venom swelled against the wind, sealing off every avenue of retreat above and to both sides of Gu Chengming; three Soul-Extinguishing Needles, glinting with eerie blue light, shot soundlessly straight at his back; and the Fourth Realm Scarface flung out a ghost-head saber that came whistling shrilly through the air, cleaving straight at Gu Chengming's face.
Killing moves held nothing back, not a word wasted—this was pure, life-or-death slaughter.
Facing this deadly encirclement closing in from every side, Gu Chengming—just forcibly booted out of a Fifth Realm great cultivator's death-duel—showed not a flicker of fear. Instead his mind was full of what had happened inside the Zhou Shrine, and of the possible Zhouli bond event to come...
Ren Wencai could no longer spare the effort to keep his Concealment Art going. Sword intent erupted around him like a volcano; three natal flying swords shot from his sleeve and became three brilliant sword-dragons, hurtling forward with unswerving resolve.
In that instant Ren Wencai had already braced for the worst.
The combined strike of these five was already nearing the might of a peak Fourth Realm cultivator. He meant to risk damage to his natal flying swords, first forcibly shattering that venom net and the Soul-Extinguishing Needles, then take Scarface's saber-blow head-on himself, and use the recoil to hurtle to Gu Chengming's side, grab him by the collar, and immediately burn his blood essence to cast the Blood Escape Technique and flee.
But just as his flying swords cleared the ruins, an instant before they touched that black net—
The sky went dark.
Without warning—not the gray clouds of Tianque bearing down, but something enormous, forcing its way into this space and blotting out all the light.
Ren Wencai's charging figure jerked to a halt, and he instinctively looked up. The spellcasting bandits froze too, and they saw a sight that shut their minds down completely.
An iron-gray mountain range had simply appeared out of nothing, directly above Gu Chengming's head.
Gu Chengming stood in the mountain's shadow and merely turned his body a fraction to one side.
Then the mountain moved—sweeping outward with Gu Chengming as its center.
That black malevolent net, said to trap Fourth Realm cultivators—before that iron-gray mountain mass, and the three Third Realm bandits with it, could not even leave behind a scream before they had flown clean out of spiritual-sense range, their fates unknown.
Ren Wencai halted in midair. His three flying swords, robbed of their target's guidance, hung blankly in place a good hundred-some feet from Gu Chengming.
"What in the world is that thing?!"
Scarface, being a mid Fourth Realm cultivator after all, reacted swiftly.
In the instant the Sword Burial Tomb swept out, he forcibly checked his forward charge, wrung his body's spiritual power dry, and scrambled backward dozens of feet in a headlong tumble, barely dodging the mountain's physical sweep of the field.
Even so, the savage gale kicked up as the Sword Burial Tomb passed set his blood and qi churning throughout his body, and the ghost-head saber gave a keening wail of unbearable strain.
Scarface crashed to his knees in the heap of rubble. One more look at that floating mountain, and his legs shook too hard to stand.
Only then did Gu Chengming slowly shift his gaze to that surviving bandit leader.
"To kill men and seize treasure—this is to be disloyal, unrighteous, improper, unwise, inhumane, unfilial, and to dislike scallion pancake rolls!"
Gu Chengming rattled off his pre-battle hat-pinning declaration at breakneck speed, then leveled his index and middle fingers together toward Scarface.
A Righteous Noble Breath, pure to the utmost extreme, burst forth from his fingertips.
Within that force there seemed layered upon layered countless utterly unreasonable law-amplifications: a rejection of cultivators who were not of Great Qian, the coercive pressure of a superior scrutinizing an inferior, the judgment of the righteous upon the unjust—and even an inexplicable, incomprehensible fury toward those who disliked scallion pancake rolls.
This impact, magnified without limit, became a visible white wave of qi that crashed forward with the force of sweeping away all before it.
"BOOOM—!!!"
The thunderous roar seemed set to blow the dome off Tianque itself.
The region where Scarface stood, together with the sprawling ruins behind him, the broken stone pillars, even the bluestone slabs of the ground, all met with annihilating force the instant they touched that white wave of qi.
No shards flew, no dust rose.
Only absolute obliteration.
That impact brutishly erased every obstacle along the path ahead.
When the wave dispersed and the gale subsided—
The stretch of ruins that had lain across the front of the Zhou Shrine was utterly gone, replaced by a straight ravine several yards wide and bottomless, stretching all the way to the limit of sight.
And at the ravine's edge, that mid Fourth Realm Scarface bandit lay collapsed on the ground like so much mud.
Every meridian in his body had snapped; his body-guarding qi had shattered to dregs; blood poured ceaselessly from his seven orifices; his chest had caved in—already breathing out more than in, gravely wounded and near death.
Ren Wencai stood a full hundred-some yards off, his hands still holding the sword-seal, staring at that figure standing unharmed at the ravine's end, then at that terrible chasm that looked as if a heavenly god had plowed it up with a harrow.
He swallowed hard, a cold draft running up his spine straight to the back of his skull.
Which shameless old monster has seized my precious disciple's body?!
Is this damned thing even still Chengming?!
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