The fire in the furnace constantly belching out smoke reminded Xi Ping of the smokestacks of the factories in Jinping’s southern outskirts. The smoke seemed to contain a powerful will that swept across everything in its vicinity. Even the shed skin Elder Xuanwu had been trapped in it. It truly was a powerful magic tool.

But evidently, it wasn’t as powerful as he had imagined.

However good an opinion Xi Ping might have of himself, he still didn’t believe that he was really mightier than a shed skin. If even he could easily…well, it was overstating things to call it “easily”—but at any rate, if he, a person who hadn’t even crossed the boundary to an ascended spirit, could succeed in struggling free of the trap, then how long could the furnace restrain Xuanwu?

He kept feeling that any moment now, Xuanwu would burst out and clear his head. There was so little distance between him and the shed skin that it basically amounted to standing on the man’s eyeballs and doing a jig.

But he’d come all the way here and laid eyes on the thing, so he absolutely couldn’t withdraw. What should he do? Was there anything that could block the sight and hearing of a shed skin…?

Xi Ping suddenly had an odd thought: since the Luwu masks could turn you into a mouse, then couldn’t this Replica, which was of higher grade than the Luwu masks, turn him into something else?

As soon as he had the thought, his body immediately stiffened and gradually disappeared. He really had become an irregularly-shaped big tile, blending among the tumbling ruins of stone and brick.

Master Lin was worthy of being known as this era’s legendary Golden Hand—he could even make something out of this good-for-nothing!

When he was finished, Xi Ping, gasping in admiration, quietly conveyed the appearance of the big cauldron to Lin Chi. “Master Lin, have a look for me, is this the legendary Unbound Furnace?”

At the summit of Moon Plated Peak, since giving Xi Ping the Replica, Lin Chi had been laden with anxiety, worried that the dangerous immortal tool he had made would ruin General Zhi’s disciple. Hearing these words, he had no more care for anything else. He tossed aside the unknown spiritual beast materials he was holding and gripped the reincarnation wood. “Bring my consciousness over, hurry!”

There was no reincarnation wood in Sanyue, but there was some on Xi Ping. A small twig the length of a finger joint emerged from the pile of rubble as Master Lin, who hadn’t left Moon Plated Peak for centuries, traveled to Western Chu for the third time within a single year.

As soon as his consciousness arrived in the reincarnation wood, Lin Chi’s mind buzzed. It was as if he was being choked.

Before he could clearly work out what was happening, he heard a couple of notes from a qin in his ear, promptly dispelling the smoke that had curled around him.

“What was that just now…?” Lin Chi came back to himself and was just about to speak, not expecting that as soon as he looked out, the first thing he would see would be the shed skin at the bottom of the pool.  

Master Lin’s heart stopped for a moment. “Xi Shiyong, you’re going to get yourself killed… Where are you?”

Xi Ping had no mouth with which to speak. He could only communicate with his consciousness. He responded, “Do you see that pile of broken stones next to you? I’m there.  This damn place is as colorless as Xuanwu’s head. All the stones without inscriptions are blank, but I have carvings on me. Just find the tile with the twin lotuses carved on it¹!”

Lin Chi: “…”

Once again, the Master of Moon Plated Peak was struck dumb by his own creation.

Xi Ping said, “It’s all right, Master Lin. After my last experience, I’ll be able to take the spiritual image mask off despite not having hands—stop studying me, look at that smoking furnace. Why do your toolmaking furnaces make so much smoke? Do you all have problems with your lungs?”

Lin Chi felt that there wasn’t much wrong with his lungs, but his heart was very tired.

He finally managed to get down the breath that had been caught in his throat. It was as if his head had crashed into a wall. When he turned towards the blazing cauldron, he spoke only after a long moment: “That…really is the Unbound Furnace, but it isn’t the way I saw it when she had it. You shouldn’t be able to see flames from the outside of the Unbound Furnace… Who lit that fire? What are they making?”

“It must have been their sect leader. It was burning when I got here,” Xi Ping said. “I don’t know what he’s making. It sounds to me like he’s burning firewood.”

“Don’t joke,” Lin Chi said feebly. “All toolmaking furnaces have fireproofing inscriptions in them.”

Xi Ping was astonished: “Fireproofing? Your whole profession uses furnaces you can’t light a fire in?”

When toolmaking cultivators were working on a large project, it could easily take them several months or even some years. They couldn’t even use their toolmaking furnaces to boil some water or cook some rice?

“What the fire in the toolmaking furnace burns is the toolmaker’s essence. When the Way of the Heart of a toolmaker is complete, they obtain an extra sense that other cultivators don’t have, called the ‘seventh sense’—the ‘seven’ is homophonous with ‘tool².’ The seventh sense is connected to the fire in the toolmaking furnace, communicating with the materials inside. Only when the person outside the furnace has a spiritual connection to the item in the furnace can they keep the fire stable. When even a toolmaker with a seventh sense encounters a material they can’t communicate with, the furnace fire will go astray. Sanyue’s Sect Leader Xiang doesn’t cultivate the toolmaking way, how could he have ignited the Unbound Furnace?”

Before, all Xi Ping had known about toolmaking was that if you got the money and the resources, then gave a cry of “Master Lin,” the materials would automatically turn into immortal tools. He’d had no idea there were so many underlying contrivances.

“In other words, if you want to ignite a toolmaking furnace, you need to be able to communicate with the things inside the furnace.” Xi Ping seized the central point, then quickly inferred by analogy. “That doesn’t necessarily take having a special sense. If it were me, I’d toss in a couple of chips of reincarnation wood. Reasonably speaking, wouldn’t I also be able to ignite the furnace then? I know, Sanyue’s sect leader doesn’t have anything as evil and unorthodox as an accompanying plant—but what about if he was cooking himself in the cauldron?”

Lin Chi said, “Don’t joke!”

Just then, Xuanwu, who had been driven to bizarre ravings by the mist, suddenly gave an angry shout. The fire in the Unbound Furnace was suddenly suppressed. The flames instantly shrank, going from golden red to cold purple blue. He also dispersed the smoke with one strike.

“What is my life for?” Xuanwu said, practically squeezing the words out from between his teeth. “Don’t you know?”

The fire in the Unbound Furnace seemed to want to launch a counteroffensive. As if locked in a struggle with something, the color of the flames kept changing from cold to warm.

“The mighty master of Dongheng, striving for the full moon boundary, yet relying on the tool of a junior! Ha! Xiang Rong, have you once in your life walked on your own two legs? As I see it, you were only born with legs so you could sit more elegantly!”

As Xuanwu’s voice fell, it suddenly extinguished the fire in the Unbound Furnace. The spiritual energy in the immortal palace converged, and a long string of inscriptions rushed from his palm to press right against the Unbound Furnace.

Amid the spiritual energy that had nearly converged into an astral wind, Lin Chi opened his eyes with difficulty and sucked in a breath: Xuanwu wanted to wipe out the Way of the Heart in the Unbound Furnace!

Xi Ping had also realized this. While he had never collected predecessors’ Ways of the Heart, he had seen others trading in them in Wild Fox Country’s black market.

From every vital weapon left behind when its owner died, the original owner’s Way of the Heart could be collected, though the Ways of the Heart of cultivators who had only reached an established foundation had no value; the buyers were usually only interested in the vital weapons themselves. Some people didn’t want the remaining Way of the Heart to disturb them, so they would request that the traces remaining on the weapon be wiped away—by first embedding a set of inscriptions into the weapon to act as a medium, then pouring in a large quantity of spiritual energy to disperse the original traces.Then the new owner’s consciousness would be branded onto it.

The inscriptions from Xuanwu’s hand were cast into the Unbound Furnace like silver beads falling into a tray. The smoke he had just dispersed attempted to congeal and was once again knocked apart by Xuanwu. In the blink of an eye, the inscriptions were attached to the walls of the furnace, and a nearly pure gold flame flashed. Through the reincarnation wood, Lin Chi sensed the aura belonging to Hui Xiangjun. His eyes nearly burst from their sockets.

Xi Ping, however, was faintly surprised. He thought, After two hundred years, why hasn’t Xiang Rong wiped away Hui Xiangjun’s Way of the Heart?

But no matter what, all he and Lin Chi could do now was watch.

Essence belonging to a shed skin slid into the Unbound Furnace through the inscriptions. Spiritual energy that could level the whole of Western Chu poured into the Unbound Furnace. Not a thread of it leaked out, but Xi Ping and Lin Chi were both wedged in place by a sense of suffocation.

The capacity of the Unbound Furnace must have been immense. It greedily absorbed Xuanwu’s essence, until the body of the furnace began to shake faintly. Xuanwu’s eyes, identical to the sect leader’s, abruptly opened, their pupils taking on the shape of the Unbound Furnace. He had stabbed his consciousness into it.

Then there was an abrupt reversal. Xuanwu suddenly screamed and fell backwards, as if someone had shot him through the head with a hand cannon.

Thunder like the tolling of an enormous bell came from the Unbound Furnace. Spiritual energy that could nearly have contended with that of all of Sanyue suddenly burst out, surging straight upwards.

In the immortal palace, the ceiling of the main hall, covered in first-class inscriptions and connected to the great mountain array, was pulverized like tofu by that spiritual energy. The sky appeared within the hall. Entirely unobstructed, that spiritual energy surged straight towards the horizon, even breaking apart the flashing and thundering dense clouds in the sky above the Central Peak!

The Silver Moon dimmed and faded. All the roofs seemed to be trembling.

“I…blazes…” Right now, Xu Rucheng, dumbfounded, was lying in an irrigation ditch at the foot of the Central Peak.

After obeying orders to meet up with a group of Luwu colleagues and infiltrate Sanyue’s West Peak, he had run headfirst into cultivators fleeing from the Central Peak. Each one of them was scared witless. No one noticed him. Xu Rucheng, a “country Kaiming” who had been cultivating for less than a decade, suddenly got into his head an impulse to rise above the tumult and look at the sky.

So he gathered up all his courage and went against the tide towards the Central Peak.

The arrays surrounding the Central Peak had been smashed to pulp, letting this little half-immortal easily slip in, just in time to witness this scene.

For a time, Xu Rucheng was speechless. While his body hid in the ditch, his mind was nearly crushed by the vast explosion. Unconsciously, he used his consciousness to convey everything he saw through the communication device he had received from Xuanyin’s inner sect.

Xuanyin Mountain, Luwu everywhere, Zhou Ying, and Bai Ling simultaneously received the intermittent images.

In the Sea of Stars, the Dignitary of Fate High Elder Zhang Jue’s sleeves, beard, and hair were all stirred by the violently unstable stars. He suddenly opened his eyes. “A new full moon divinity has been created!”

At the summit of Sanyue’s Central Peak, the immortal palace had turned entirely to ruins. The reincarnation wood twig Lin Chi was occupying flew up like dust.

In that instant, Xi Ping only had time to push Lin Chi’s consciousness out and send him back to the Xuanyin Mountains. The water dragon pearl on him flashed brilliantly, then turned to ashes.

But precisely because the water dragon pearl had protected him, the slab with the twin lotus carving that was Xi Ping didn’t immediately turn to powder but only broke in half.

Never mind how that felt—the Replica enveloping him hadn’t broken, so reasonably speaking he was still a whole person and could still feel his whole body, but the upper half and lower half had each gone in its own direction, one part remaining on the platform, one part flying over a zhang away and getting caught in a crack in the stone. Xi Ping’s head and feet had never been so far apart.

“Shiyong!”

“Ge!”

“Senior…”

Bzz—

His ears were instantly filled with the worried voices of friends and family all over, but he had no time to attend to them. After the earth-shaking burst from the Unbound Furnace, a might he had never before seen seeped out bit by bit from the furnace, its force overpowering all the shed skins Xi Ping had ever met in his life.

Xi Ping seemed to hear a sigh from the Sanyue Mountain Range. For a moment, he had the impression that the spiritual mountains had a soul—that they had “come to life”!

Xuanwu was bleeding from the seven apertures of his face, having been thrown a hundred zhang away and embedded in the mountain by the spiritual energy suddenly surging out from the Unbound Furnace.

Then the dense clouds above the Unbound Furnace gradually formed the shape of a person, as big as the statue of the Black Emperor on the cliff. Xi Ping took only one glance, and his stone-shaped head cracked. His vision went dark, and he nearly fainted.

But in just that one glance, he had seen clearly that the giant in the furnace smoke also had Xiang Rong’s face.

Xi Ping had a splitting headache. The Sanyue sect leader fighting inseparably with the Silver Moon outside looked like this, Xuanwu looked like this, and the giant that had come out of the furnace now also looked like this—was this face the sect’s public property?

Just then, Xi Ping realized that the mountain-rending noise the Silver Moon and Xiang Rong had been making had stopped.

“Senior.” Xu Rucheng gathered up his wits with difficulty and squeezed the reincarnation wood chip in his palm. It was unclear whether he was making a report or speaking to himself. “I, I’ve ended up at the Central Peak somehow, I think I saw…the Silver Moon ‘go out.’”

“Hff…Tai, Tai Sui-xiong…are you still alive?” Almost at the same time, Zhuoming spoke, nearly on his last gasp—prior to this, the two successors of ancient demonic gods had exchanged items. Zhuoming had given Xi Ping a length of lotus stalk, and Xi Ping had given him a length of tree branch in exchange, so they could convey information when needed.

“Just now, fighting with the Silver Moon, it wasn’t Xiang Rong’s true body.” Laughter gradually mixed in among Zhuoming’s almost fragmentary breaths. “Ha…hahaha…the sect leader knew all along…the sect leader knew all along that Xuanwu was using me to spy on the Central Peak… ‘Getting weaker by the day’ was a joke he was playing on Xuanwu…hahaha…”

Xi Ping said, “…What?”

The giant that had come out of the Unbound Furnace spoke. His voice echoed throughout the Sanyue Mountain Range.

“On the road to a full moon, I needed this tribulation, shidi,” he said to Xuanwu, who had turned into a relief sculpture. “I used an avatar to test you, and as expected you couldn’t hold back.”

The cracks on Xi Ping’s stone body deepened.

If what had overpowered Xuanwu and had been on an even footing with the Silver Moon was only an illusory avatar, then the cultivation level of Xiang Rong’s true body must be…

Xu Rucheng heard “Tai Sui”’s voice from the reincarnation wood—this time, he didn’t even bother disguising his voice. “Leave the Central Peak, hurry!”

“Xi Shiyong!” Lin Chi, having been thrown back to the summit of Moon Plated Peak, scrambled to catch the piece of reincarnation wood that he had let slip. “What just happened? How are you? Answer me!”

“Master Lin,” Xi Ping whispered, bearing up under the fierce pain, “guess what? I got it right just now. Xiang Rong really was cooking himself in the big cauldron… The ‘material’ the Unbound Furnace was burning was his true body.”

The rusty red of the blood moon in the sky faded bit by bit, revealing clean, chilly white light. The white light was constantly strengthening; soon it was impossible to look at directly, brighter than the sun, so dazzling no one could open their eyes—

Throughout the four nations on the continent, all the roosters responsible for crowing in the dawn were struck dumb as wooden chickens. In the middle of the night, the sky was as bright as noon.

“You…didn’t lose your mind,” Xuanwu, embedded in the cliff face, spat out. “A full moon…”

“My natural endowments aren’t high. Only because the Sanyue Mountains are foremost in the world, the environment surpassingly favored by nature, was I by good fortune able to come before all my fellow cultivators present.” Xiang Rong’s voice was mild and dignified. There wasn’t a trace of having lost his mind. “But blessings can bring disaster. Neither my talent nor my virtue were enough to merit the position, my heart and mind unable to keep up with my cultivation, my time limited. So I took a risk and entered seclusion with the Unbound Furnace, using this unbound article to glimpse the boundaries of the spiritual mountains, hoping that I could find a gleam of hope for survival. After two hundred years, the chance began to take shape, but the essence I had cultivated for thousands of years had nearly all been cooked away in the furnace. If I used the flow of spiritual energy in the spiritual mountains, I would have had to consume the vigor of the mountains, bringing disaster upon the nation and the people. Would that not have violated my Way of the Heart? I thought at first this was the will of heaven—that I was unworthy of becoming the first person in thousands of years to reach a full moon position. I had meant to create an avatar to go out and make arrangements for after my death. But the will of heaven is unpredictable. It turned out that my shidi was willing to use his essence to take me part of the way.

“You and I…” The first master of this age to have attained a full moon position sighed softly. “…share a common origin.”

What did he mean by a “common origin”?

Xi Ping had nearly cracked into eight pieces. Under the enormous pressure, he was barely managing to keep his consciousness clear. His thoughts raced: Does he mean that they have the same mother? Blood relations are usually said to be “born from the same roots.” I’ve rarely heard anyone call it a “common origin.”

But Xuanwu, on hearing these words, seemed to suddenly go mad. The mountain where he was “embedded” creaked as it trembled. He gave a low cry and pulled his head up from the cliff face.

“A common origin,” Xuanwu said quietly. “That’s right, sect leader shixiong. You still remember.”

“My mother the empress was lost in the chaos of battle and unluckily fell into the hands of a demonic god…and had you.” Xiang Rong drew back the voice that echoed throughout the mountains and spoke in a soft voice that could only be heard at the summit of the Central Peak. “Then the imperial family wanted to dispose of you, and it was I who did all I could to prevent them. I thought at the time that no matter what your background, you were after all still my brother.”

“That’s right. A life debt, brother,” Xuanwu said almost inaudibly. “Haven’t I repaid it?”

Xi Ping placed all of his remaining spiritual sense in his ears and heard Xuanwu say, “Before shizun chose his direct disciples, you were attacked by a peer. Your meridians were damaged, and you were on the point of becoming a cripple. But you were the eldest son of the Xiang clan of Dongheng, with your rare innate spiritual bones—such gifts and promise. The hopes of the whole clan were vested in you. How could they allow this to happen? Then a genius among the clan thought up the Spirit Splitting Technique. It required a person whose spiritual image matched yours to undertake the spiritual energy that your meridians would be unable to handle when your spiritual eyes opened…”

The more Xi Ping heard, the more familiar it sounded. Then he suddenly realized—wasn’t this precisely like the spiritual image dolls that had been popular in Wild Fox Country’s black market?

“But where could one go to find a substitute whose spiritual image would match you, with your innate spiritual bones?” Xuanwu laughed. “Did the mercy you had shown in your youth not find recompense then?”