The golden ripples faded, and the vault of heaven sank back into silence.
That rule—anchored at the cost of an eternal Dharma-Station, fueled by the lifelong grand vow of a True Lord—was now carved into the deepest foundation of this world.
—"Peace Under Heaven."
Gu Chengming slowly opened his eyes.
In his field of vision, the Heavenly Ritual Altar that had once stood so solemn and grand was reduced now to nothing but broken walls and shattered rubble. And on the half-transparent system panel before him, several lines of text were slowly surfacing.
[Zhouli Heavenly Harmony Righteous Heart Method—Bond CG: Peace Under Heaven]
[The Gentleman Is Not a Vessel: Your bond with the Zhouli Heavenly Harmony Righteous Heart Method has reached perfection. From this day on, the Zhouli Heavenly Harmony Righteous Heart Method will no longer be confined to the single use of "rectifying the heart," but may leave its imprint upon every cultivation technique you practice.]
[Legacy Teaching of Peace: When facing laws of the "tampering," "distortion," or "subversion" type, your resistance will be greatly increased.]
Gu Chengming read the two effects over slowly, and understood.
Under the power of this CG, the Zhouli Heavenly Harmony Righteous Heart Method was no longer a single, isolated technique; it could now seep into his entire cultivation system like an underlying base coat.
The Legacy Teaching of Peace was more direct still—the last trace of grace left behind by that True Lord's age-spanning vow before it dispersed. Put plainly, it was a passive shield, tailor-made to counter the Eternal Life Sect's heretical methods of tampering with history and polluting Dharma-Stations.
Ahh. After so long, it felt good to play the gal-game master again.
Gu Chengming nodded, thoroughly satisfied, and settled in to enjoy the CG.
On the screen, a sky full of brilliant golden light swept away the endless night like the first light of dawn.
The girl who had always been so meticulous, who kept rules and propriety forever on her lips, now stood quietly at the center of that radiance. She had cast off entirely the stiff, feigned maturity of her usual dignity and severity; down her lovely face rolled tears she could not stop, like pearls from a snapped string.
With her wide sleeve she wiped clumsily and haphazardly at the corners of her eyes, and yet she could not hold back the curve of her lips, blooming into a smile that was utterly unguarded and radiant beyond measure.
[The Zhouli Heavenly Harmony Righteous Heart Method looks at you with a smile, and says with great sincerity: Chengming, you truly are the finest gentleman under heaven!]
And now the dialogue boxes of the other techniques in his Sea of Consciousness popped up one after another.
[The Huiyuan Sword Formula, gazing at that CG of the Zhouli Heavenly Harmony Righteous Heart Method, cannot help feeling a little sour.]
[It thinks: how does it feel like another one just got added? But then it reconsiders—given Zhouli's former temperament, surely she won't pose the same kind of threat as the Clear-Heart Formula?]
[Perhaps it can even form an alliance with her, and firmly defend its position as the principal wife. Heh heh, aiya heh heh.]
[The Clear-Heart Formula seems to see right through what the Huiyuan Sword Formula is thinking, and laughs softly behind her hand.]
Watching this scene, Gu Chengming found it rather funny.
Then, at last, he noticed something that had slipped past him in the heat of the battle.
—At the very same instant that the Zhouli Heavenly Harmony Righteous Heart Method's affection reached one hundred, the Red Dust Phantom Body Formula's "Dao Conduit" CG panel had also fully lit up.
That progress bar, which had shown only halfway since the moment it was first unlocked, had finally filled in its last segment, turning into a complete gold.
And with the full unlocking of the Dao Conduit CG, the Red Dust Phantom Body Formula's affection climbed too, rising steadily from its earlier figure until it came to rest firmly at eighty.
[Red Dust Phantom Body Formula affection: 80 / Fond]
[Agility +2]
Gu Chengming looked at those two words, "Fond," and his mood turned rather complicated.
The Red Dust Phantom Body Formula had always been so low-key it was practically invisible. It never fought for anything, never grabbed the spotlight—either huddled in a corner quietly reining in its aura and repeatedly checking whether they were being eavesdropped on, or scanning the surroundings for hidden dangers with a caution that bordered on an occupational tic.
Now, even with its CG unlocked, it hadn't so much as come out to make its presence felt. At this rate, he felt, it would end up just like Prison Moon.
As if sensing Gu Chengming's attention, a dialogue box popped up.
[The Red Dust Phantom Body Formula says with a smile: Fellow Daoist Gu, congratulations on dealing with a great enemy.]
Having said that, it seemed to feel that wasn't enough, and added: But the road of cultivation is still full of danger, and the path ahead may grow even more rugged. May Fellow Daoist take this affair as a lesson, so that in future you can handle such perils with greater ease.
[Halfway through, the Red Dust Phantom Body Formula paused, hesitated a moment, then decided to say it anyway: But even if Fellow Daoist grows careless, it doesn't matter—it will always stay by your side and help you avoid the danger.]
[And it hopes that, in the days to come, you may truly seek the Great Dao together.]
—All right, so there had been some changes after all.
Looking at that "weighty" remark the Red Dust Phantom Body Formula had let slip without meaning to, Gu Chengming finally came to understand the Red Dust Phantom Body Formula's "Fond."
How to put it…
He rather felt this sort—the Red Dust Phantom Body Formula's sort—was the kind that hid the deepest.
[Seeing this, the Clear-Heart Formula can't resist egging on the Huiyuan Sword Formula beside her with a smile: Now that is the kind of line Little Huiyuan ought to be writing down in her notebook. Learn from that.]
[The Huiyuan Sword Formula, dazed and muddled: I-is that so?]
Somewhat helpless at the mischievous streak the Clear-Heart Formula kept letting out, Gu Chengming was about to say a word or two when, the next moment, yet another dialogue box popped up.
[The Hundred Bones Resonance reminds him: Heavenly Emperor Gu, remember to search the corpse and collect the spoils…]
Oh, right—there was still that one indispensable post-battle ritual to savor.
Gu Chengming nodded, and the next moment—
[The Hundred Bones Resonance seems only now to notice something; its words stall, then it flies into a rage: What's going on? Where are my spoils?!]
Prompted by the Hundred Bones Resonance, Gu Chengming realized only then that the spot where the Fifth Realm great cultivator he'd just punched to death—[Master of the Eternal Life Dao-Choking Chessboard]—had fallen held no storage pouch at all. Even that Dharma-Station wonder was nowhere to be seen.
Surely he hadn't blasted the storage pouch to dust along with the man?
A strange feeling stirred in Gu Chengming.
[The Hundred Bones Resonance seems to grasp this too; its fury abruptly subsides, and it turns a little guilty.]
[It—it shouldn't have, right? It was being careful not to blast the storage pouch to bits…]
Upon the altar, ruins lay strewn everywhere.
Gu Chengming put away the system panel and turned his attention back to reality.
The first thing to meet his eyes was Zhou Qingmu.
This Chief Commander of the Great Qian Night-Watch Bureau knelt on one knee at the edge of the shattered altar, propping herself up with the horizontal saber "Night-Sever" like a crutch.
The marks of the Filth Tide's corrosion, from when she had received the Dharma-Station inheritance, had not yet fully faded; a few faint black patterns still lingered on her right arm. But her aura had steadied—clearly she had escaped the danger the very instant Gu Chengming severed the Dharma-Station link.
It was just that the look in her eyes as she gazed at Gu Chengming now was genuinely rather complicated.
The situation was roughly this: you had readied a stirring set of dying last words and prepared to go meet your end, and just as you got halfway through the speech, that Third Realm subordinate of yours dropped out of the sky and dragged you back from the gates of hell—and, in passing, flipped the whole hopeless endgame laid out before you clean upside down.
Grateful? Of course she was grateful.
But baffled? She was truly baffled too.
No matter how she thought about it, she couldn't make sense of it. At that moment she had already entered the phase of merging with the Dharma-Station; its inheritance power had been binding to her Dao foundation in an irreversible way. In such a state, even a fellow Fifth Realm great cultivator would have had no way whatsoever to strip the Dharma-Station out of her body.
Yet Gu Chengming had done it.
A Third Realm cultivator, by some means she could not comprehend at all, had forcibly severed the inheritance link between an eternal Dharma-Station and a Fifth Realm great cultivator.
What in the world kind of method was that?
It wasn't that Zhou Qingmu had no guesses.
The most reasonable explanation was that "Red Dust Art"—but where exactly did the Red Dust Art's ceiling lie? A Harmonious Joy Sect technique, by what right could it interfere with an inheritance at the Dharma-Station level?
These doubts churned in her for a while, and in the end she dealt with them in a manner very much her own.
—Never mind. If she couldn't figure it out, she'd stop trying.
The outcome was good anyway: no one had died, the Filth Tide was cleared, and the Eternal Life Sect's scheme lay in pieces.
As for the details along the way—the ones so absurd they made you wonder whether you'd spent a few hundred years cultivating your way into a dog—those could wait.
Zhou Qingmu braced against her saber and rose to her feet, rolled her aching, numb shoulders, and walked over toward Gu Chengming.
Some distance away, Shen Qianqiu also withdrew his sword-stance.
That [Master of the Thousand-Face World-Mirror] he had pinned down so relentlessly, the instant he felt the Dharma-Station collapse and the Filth Tide disperse, made a snap decision to flee. The cloaked figure was clean and decisive, running faster than a rabbit, not even leaving behind a single face-saving word.
Shen Qianqiu did not give chase. In his current state, catching up wouldn't necessarily mean he could keep the man there—and besides, there were more important matters here at the altar.
He rode his sword down beside the ruins of the altar and joined Ren Wencai and Xu Huayi, who had rushed over at the news.
The dust and smoke on every side had not yet fully settled, but the vault of heaven over Tianque had already cleared once more.
That "Peace Under Heaven" rule, forever carved into heaven and earth, was spreading through the entire Secret Realm in an exceedingly gentle way. Wherever it passed, the lingering Filth Tide dissolved into nothing, and the distorted structures of space began to repair themselves.
Ren Wencai watched this, then looked at his disciple—covered in blood, his robes torn to rags, yet standing ramrod straight—and his lips moved. He wanted to say something.
Something like "Not bad, kid," or "Truly a disciple of mine, Ren Wencai."
But the words that actually came out of the old man's mouth were:
"How bad are your injuries? You brat—you really, you'd dare do something this dangerous?!"
Feeling the concern and worry in his master's words, warmth stirred in Gu Chengming. He raised a hand to show he was fine—only to lose his footing and stagger, and it was the quick-eyed, quick-handed Zhou Qingmu who caught him.
Xu Huayi stood off to one side. She hadn't, in truth, fully digested what had just happened even now; she only quietly put away the Judge's Brush and, in her mind, added another thick entry to the "Ledger of Gu Chengming's Absurd Deeds."
By now, this account had grown nearly thicker than the inheritance scriptures of her own sect.
Soon, however, everyone's attention converged on a single focal point.
—The Dharma-Station was gone.
Shattered by Gu Chengming and turned into a rule—an act unheard of in all the history of Tianque, and indeed of the entire cultivation world.
A Dharma-Station was the brand of the heavenly Dao, the crystallization of an ancient power's lifelong orthodoxy, the fortune that countless cultivators spent hundreds of years desperately seeking. Wantonly squandering something like that…
Shen Qianqiu stood beside the ruins, silent for a long while.
As a Fifth Realm great cultivator, he knew all too well the value of a Dharma-Station. Had Gu Chengming chosen to claim it for himself, then even laden as it was with so much pollution, given the methods he'd already shown, he might well have been able to slowly cleanse it in the days to come.
Once that succeeded, it would have been a straight, smooth road to the Fifth Realm and beyond. Yet he had chosen the "worst deal" of all paths—releasing the whole of the Dharma-Station's power together with that True Lord's grand vow, and anchoring it as a rule of heaven and earth.
That decision was one not a single person present could easily claim they'd have made without any selfish thought.
Shen Qianqiu suddenly felt a little glad that it was Gu Chengming who had obtained the Dharma-Station, and a little glad that the Wenjian Sect had produced such a disciple. Looking at Gu Chengming—bedraggled, yes, but brimming with spirit—a single line rose unbidden in his mind.
We sword cultivators, we ought to be just like this.
…
Everyone took a brief rest.
Once Zhou Qingmu had dealt with the last of her lingering injuries, she came before Gu Chengming.
"Sit."
She casually cleared a flat patch on the pile of rubble, sat down cross-legged without any fuss, and patted the spot beside her.
Gu Chengming did as she said and sat.
Zhou Qingmu's expression was calm. With her free-and-easy temperament, saccharine lines like "you saved my life" were something she could never bring herself to say. She only stayed silent for a few breaths, then spoke in a tone almost like idle chat.
"About just now—thank you."
Gu Chengming didn't put on airs either. He nodded. "Part of my duty."
Zhou Qingmu glanced at him, then let out a soft laugh. "Part of your duty? You, a Third Realm Deputy Commander, call it 'part of your duty' to care whether your Fifth Realm superior lives or dies?"
Gu Chengming: "…Chief Commander, your subordinate was only being polite."
"Fine, then." Zhou Qingmu smiled crisply.
After a brief silence, she brought up another matter of her own accord.
"That Zhouli Heavenly Harmony Righteous Heart Method you practice—you must already know where it comes from."
Gu Chengming nodded. In that karmic resonance just now, he had clearly "seen" everything.
"The Zhouli Heavenly Harmony Righteous Heart Method is descended precisely from that True Lord Zhou Gui Tianli's 'Heavenly Harmony Righteous Heart Method.'"
Zhou Qingmu's tone as she said this was very light, as though stating a fact long since settled.
"The technique I've cultivated since childhood takes the True Lord's orthodoxy as its root, then refined and specialized by generations of worthies in my sect. In a sense, there exists a direct lineage of Dharma-transmission between me and that True Lord."
"And the Zhouli Heavenly Harmony Righteous Heart Method in your hands—"
Zhou Qingmu looked at Gu Chengming and weighed her words. "From the standpoint of orthodox transmission, if you really wanted to stretch it, you could just barely count as half an orthodox inheritor?"
Something odd flickered through Gu Chengming, but he didn't press further on the subject; instead he steered the conversation toward a direction that concerned him more.
"Chief Commander, that [Master of the Eternal Life Dao-Choking Chessboard] just now—when he perished, he left nothing behind."
"The Dharma-Station wonder dispersing, that's understandable; he detonated the pollution at the cost of sacrificing the Dharma-Station. But his own remains, his storage pouch, his spirit artifacts—all of it gone, as though he'd evaporated into thin air."
Most crucial of all, after Gu Chengming killed him, even the multiplier of "Hundred Emperor, aid me" hadn't gone up.
By rights, a Fifth Realm cultivator like that should have pushed the multiplier up by around one no matter what—yet there had been no response at all.
Gu Chengming chose his words carefully, glossing over certain details that were hard to explain.
"And given his cultivation as a Fifth Realm great cultivator and the heavy weight of killing karma on him, his fall should at the very least have left some kind of feedback in Tianque's laws. But in fact there was nothing at all—as if this man had never existed in this world from the very start."
When those words fell, Zhou Qingmu was silent for a long while before she spoke. "Perhaps it's because he was not a person who exists in the present world."
That took Gu Chengming somewhat aback. Not a person who exists in the present world?
A living, breathing Fifth Realm great cultivator, wielding a Dharma-Station wonder, who had crossed blades with them in earnest, who had even been willing to self-detonate his Dharma-Station to ignite a scheme a thousand years in the making—how could such a person not exist in the present world?
"Do you know what position the Fifth Realm holds in the Eternal Life Sect?" Zhou Qingmu asked in turn.
Gu Chengming thought for a moment. "Jìntiān?"
Fifth Realm cultivators were exceedingly scarce to begin with; across the whole of Great Qian, the Fifth Realm great cultivators of all the major sects put together numbered only a handful.
The Eternal Life Sect had eight "Jìntiān" elders, and nearly every one of them was of Fifth Realm cultivation—this was the greatest source of confidence that let the Eternal Life Sect stand as an equal against the orthodox factions of Great Qian.
"But that man was not any one of the Eternal Life Sect's eight Jìntiān."
Her words gave Gu Chengming a measure of understanding, and he asked, "Then…"
"He was an Eternal Life Sect elder who should have died thousands of years ago—styled [Eternal Life Chess]."
As she spoke, Zhou Qingmu drew a yellowed volume from her storage pouch and passed it into Gu Chengming's hands.
"This is an ancient record I obtained along with the Dharma-Station in the Zhou Shrine. Part of it concerns the internal structure of the Eternal Life Sect thousands of years ago."
Gu Chengming took the volume and opened it to read closely.
Thousands of years ago, before the catastrophe later generations called the "Great Tribulation" had arrived, the landscape of the cultivation world had been utterly different from now. Sixth Realm cultivators had still been rare, but far from the vanishingly few of the present day—and at that time the Eternal Life Sect was at its zenith, its fame resounding, in no way weaker than any great orthodox sect.
The "Jìntiān" of the Eternal Life Sect back then likewise represented the sect's highest rank—but unlike now, in those days the Jìntiān elders were almost uniformly cultivators who held Dharma-Stations, every one of them a true "half-step Heavenly Being."
On one page of the volume was recorded an old tale concerning a Jìntiān.
It told of an Eternal Life Sect Jìntiān elder named "Red Dust Immortal."
Red Dust Immortal—his true name unknown; it was known only that he had been raised from childhood in an exceedingly wealthy old family. Yet "wealthy," in the context of the cultivation world, was far from a matter of piling up worldly gold and silver—that family was a colossus that possessed several spirit veins, its every scion a cultivator.
Red Dust Immortal was extraordinarily gifted, and the family poured nearly all of its resources into him. Nor did he betray those hopes—he advanced triumphantly all the way, and in the end, before he was even a hundred years old, he stepped into the Fifth Realm, becoming the youngest Jìntiān elder in the Eternal Life Sect's history.
And throughout that near-legendary cultivation career, there was always one person who followed at his side. That person was no heaven-blessed prodigy, no reclusive master—only an utterly ordinary servant of Red Dust Immortal's household.
No one knew his name either; it was known only that he was styled [Eternal Life Chess].
From the time Red Dust Immortal was still swaddled in infancy, Eternal Life Chess had been his personal attendant.
The two were far apart in age and vastly apart in station—one the legitimate scion of a great family, born clutching spirit-jade; the other an aged house-born servant bound by an indenture unto death. When Red Dust Immortal cultivated, the old servant followed at his heels to pour his tea and hand him his water.
When Red Dust Immortal first began to cultivate, the old servant was still struggling at the threshold of the First Realm. When Red Dust Immortal reached the Third Realm, the old servant had only just barely stepped into the First.
After that, Red Dust Immortal's cultivation soared ever upward, and the old servant stayed at his side all the while. By the time Red Dust Immortal became a Jìntiān elder, famed throughout the world, the old servant had become a Fourth Realm cultivator.
Someone once asked the old servant: "You are already a Fourth Realm cultivator—why still style yourself a servant? With your cultivation, where could you not secure an elder's seat?"
The old servant only smiled and said, "This is something others cannot do."
Even when the old servant reached the Fifth Realm, he still called himself "Red Dust Immortal's old servant." The volume's record of this was only a single short line—"Eternal Life Chess, Fifth Realm cultivator, servant of Red Dust Immortal, who to the end of his life never changed his purpose."
After that came the Great Tribulation.
The details of the Great Tribulation the volume left vague, mentioning only a certain being of that era—the "Fate-Reversing Tribulation-Severing Sovereign."
The final record concerning Eternal Life Chess was only a few sparse lines. In the Great Tribulation, the Eternal Life Sect suffered catastrophic losses; Red Dust Immortal went missing, and Eternal Life Chess, while trying to find his master, encountered the Fate-Reversing Tribulation-Severing Sovereign.
The result was a foregone conclusion. The Fate-Reversing Tribulation-Severing Sovereign, famed throughout the world in that age, did not even need to draw a sword—and this old servant's body perished and his Dao was extinguished.
There the volume broke off abruptly.
Gu Chengming closed the volume and was silent a moment. "So—he actually died thousands of years ago?"
"Yes."
There was a measure of gravity in Zhou Qingmu's tone. "A man who died thousands of years ago, yet able to appear in Tianque with the complete strength of a Fifth Realm great cultivator, wielding a Dharma-Station wonder—and even, after sacrificing himself in self-detonation, able to vanish without leaving a single trace… This is exactly why I say the matter is very troublesome."
Because she, too, had no idea how the Eternal Life Sect had managed it.
Some forbidden resurrection art? Or had the Eternal Life Sect mastered some means of "extracting" the dead out of history itself?
Or else… was it connected to their core ability to tamper with history and pollute Dharma-Stations?
If it was the last possibility, then it meant the Eternal Life Sect's methods were far more unfathomable than anyone imagined—they could not only tamper with the "records" of history, but might even have the power to drag the "figures" of history back into the present world.
The two of them fell silent again.
Well—though doubts remained unresolved, there was no question that the Eternal Life Sect's whole chess game here in Tianque had been smashed to pieces by a single punch from Gu Chengming.
The Dharma-Station inheritance of the True Lord Zhou Gui Tianli had dispersed, but the "Peace Under Heaven" rule it left behind would forever be carved into heaven and earth. This rule had not only purified all the lingering Filth Tide within Tianque; at the root, it had sealed off any possibility of the Eternal Life Sect ever again using a Dharma-Station to spread pollution.
In any case, this affair could be counted as brought to a satisfying close.
"From here on, you'd best take extra care."
Zhou Qingmu rose to her feet, brushed the dust from her robes, and her tone suddenly carried a bit more seriousness. "What you did here in Tianque—there's no way the Eternal Life Sect won't know of it. The ones who come for you next will most likely no longer be those earlier flunkies, but true Jìntiān."
Gu Chengming gave a sound of assent, thinking privately that he'd actually already killed off a third of the true Jìntiān himself.
Still, caution was always wise—and besides, the Eternal Life Sect… Why did it feel like the further he advanced, the more troublesome the Eternal Life Sect became? Back when he was Second Realm, he'd always thought of the Eternal Life Sect as pure roadside riffraff.
Thinking this, on the surface Gu Chengming still answered solemnly: "Understood."
Hearing that prim, by-the-book answer of Gu Chengming's, Zhou Qingmu suddenly paused.
She tilted her head slightly, pretending to survey the scenery of Tianque's ruins, one hand seemingly idly stroking the hilt of her saber, her tone turning somewhat offhand as well.
"Of course, an open spear is easy to dodge, but a hidden arrow is hard to guard against. The best way is to find someone with enough ability to protect you."
She turned her head, those clear, bright eyes fixed straight on Gu Chengming, and said as if in passing:
"After we head back to the Capital, why not move into my residence?"
"?"
A question mark popped up above Gu Chengming's head.
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