Qiu Sha looked him over from top to bottom. Her manner was fairly polite. “You’re a good-looking young fellow. You look like you’re from Wan. Which of Xuanyin’s mountains are you from? Have you seen me before?”

Xi Ping: “…”

In Tao County, he had arranged for her scheme to fail at the last moment. He had been prepared to take a beating, but it turned out that he had worried for nothing. She didn’t recognize him.

That was fair. Thinking back, Qiu Sha hadn’t seen his true appearance. The reason she had easily been able to discover his existence back in Tao County was that they were both inheritors of accompanying plants, and at the time, her cultivation level had been higher than his.

Now they were both in this half-dead condition, and they had both been ascended spirits “while living.” If she hadn’t happened to see the reincarnation wood earlier, it in fact wouldn’t be so easy for her to recognize him.

“I have heard a great deal about you. There is no one among the four great spiritual mountains who hasn’t heard your name.” Xi Ping gave an embarrassed laugh, then added, “I am a disciple of Xuanyin’s Flying Jade Peak. You may not have heard of it, fellow cultivator.”

If he had gone right to mentioning his shifu, due to Southern He’s Lancang, Qiu Sha probably would have known of him. But as far as she was concerned, Flying Jade Peak was too “young.” It had only obtained a master after Zhi Xiu had become an ascended spirit, and furthermore, because of its master’s laziness, the mountain had never been formally opened.

“Just as long as it’s not Moon Plated Peak. It’s all this mountain and that mountain over there at Xuanyin, I can’t tell them apart.” As expected, Qiu Sha had absolutely no understanding of Southern Wan, where late-autumn red didn’t grow. Among all the Xuanyin Mountains, the only person she knew of was Lin Chi. She waved a hand. “Why has someone from Xuanyin come all this way, and how did you end up in that bald donkey’s hands?”

Xi Ping said, “Well, Sanyue’s sect leader became a full moon sage and fought with the East Peak’s High Elder Xuanwu…”

“What?” Qiu Sha suddenly straightened from her indolent slouch. “You’re saying Xiang Rong is a full moon sage?”

Xi Ping had a thought: Qiu Sha didn’t know, which mean that her not recognizing him wasn’t because she’d just happened not to see the reincarnation wood; it was because she had no connection to the outside world at all.

In other words, all those mouths everywhere didn’t belong to the consciousnesses of Qiu Sha and the others the Heartless Lotus had swallowed…they were the result of that baldy babbling on his own.

Truly insane…

But that was just as well. This way, he would have room to maneuver.

Not turning a hair, Xi Ping picked up: “Right. The sky lit up in the middle of the night, and Western Chu’s borders began to shake. Each nation’s shed skins are already holding the line along the borders, and my colleagues and I were the first group to infiltrate the Sanyue Mountains on orders from the sect.”

Then, keeping an eye on Qiu Sha’s reaction, using nine parts truth and one part falsehood, he described the whole series of events concerning Xiang Rong’s battle with Xuanwu and Xiang Rong merging with the spiritual mountains, omitting all of his own improbable actions in the Unbound Furnace. He only said that he had been hoodwinked by Zhuoming, that he had collaborated with that bald lunatic in order to infiltrate the Sanyue Mountains and taken the Heartless Lotus into the Unbound Furnace, the upshot being that after managing to escape with his life, the bald donkey had attacked him from behind, and so on and so on—using Lin Zhaoli as a model, he turned himself into a naive idiot from the remote depths of the inner sect.

Qiu Sha didn’t speak for a long moment after hearing this. Finally, she gave a quiet laugh and said, “That deranged little whelp really knows what he’s doing. To think that the furnace heart can be used like that.”

Seeing Xi Ping glare at her, Qiu Sha slowly coiled up her hair, of which there was too much to get your hand around. “Do you suppose that just anyone who snuck into the Unbound Furnace would be able to trick Xiang Rong? Those old bastards have longer lives than tortoises. They spend all their free time facing the wall and examining themselves. If a thought that flashes across their spirit has a trace of wrongness about it, they’ll notice it at once. That kind of work is painstaking, full of risk at every step. The Heartless Lotus truly is a monster with a thousand hearts and a thousand faces… It seems that I was right to give him the furnace fire.”

“Well, regardless,” Xi Ping said, “I think we ought to think of a way to get out. We can’t stay…”

He suddenly shut his mouth, because Qiu Sha was giving him a strange look of wonder and ridicule.

“Listen, young fellow, what way are you cultivating? The way of the decorative vase? Have all your brains gone into looking pretty?” Qiu Sha said. “You’re already dead, haven’t you realized it yet? ‘Think of a way to get out’—and go where? To your ancestral tombs?”

“What do you mean?” said Xi Ping. “Hey, where are you going, wait!”

After listening to his miserable experiences and foolishness, Qiu Sha had determined that this little pretty boy wasn’t very bright. She had suddenly felt extremely bored and lost interest in talking to him.

She crouched down and squeezed into the opening in the lotus root.

Xi Ping quickly followed.

Inside the lotus root’s long opening, there were even more “stone tapes,” some of them with half their bodies already merged with the lotus root, leaving only a segment dangling out, like freakish sculptures.

Aside from Xi Ping, with his hidden bones attached to his consciousness, when an ordinary cultivator’s body was destroyed, their consciousness would also be destroyed. Only when the consciousness had been concentrated to the ascended spirit level could it live outside of the body—that was precisely why this level was called “ascended spirit.”

But even an ascended spirit consciousness couldn’t survive long unless it could snatch a body. Any random nobody who came along to do battle could send them off by drawing a bit of spiritual energy and making waves. And even if they snatched a body, they could still only “cling to life.” After getting a new body, with their original body’s spirit destroyed, they would never again be able to cultivate, and their lifespan would be a little shorter than even an ordinary mortal’s.

While this “rash and thoughtless” young ascended spirit seemed quite dim-witted, there was still a difference between a good-looking fool and an ordinary idiot; after all, one could act as a decorative vase, while the other could only serve as a spittoon.

Though Qiu Sha held him in some contempt, watching him shamelessly tail after her, she actually didn’t get angry.

Perhaps because she was already “dead,” she was a little milder than she had been “in life.” She actually said more: “The consciousnesses that the Heartless Lotus collects are completely severed from their original bodies. Even if you return to your body, your cultivation will still be lost. It would amount to possessing yourself—and anyway, you can’t get back. This portion of your consciousness has already been subsumed by the Heartless Lotus. Rather than saying that you are yourself, it would be more accurate to say that the current ‘you’ is only a split off portion of consciousness in that baldy’s mind… If he wants, he can know what you’re saying or doing at any time. I advise you to be a little more careful about what you say.”

Xi Ping: “…”

Making an inference by analogy, he quickly realized that while the “Qiu Sha” in front of him could be called the remaining consciousness of the already dead Qiu Sha, she could also be called a consciousness split off by Zhuoming!

On the surface, it currently appeared that he was talking to Qiu Sha. But in reality, it could be seen as a conversation between two Zhuomings.

“Don’t be scared,” Qiu Sha soothed him, insultingly. “That baldy would rather watch you organize a bunch of stone tapes to stage a rebellion against him than control your consciousness. A consciousness is an extremely fragile thing. If he so much as touches it, your consciousness will be completely destroyed. What would be interesting about that? Here, look around, all of these are consciousness he’s keeping around.”

Just in time, Xi Ping bumped into a hand dangling down from overhead. When he looked up, there was a consciousness like a hanged ghost staring fixedly at him, half its face merged with the lotus root wall.

“Of the consciousnesses that come into the Heartless Lotus, mortals can live ten or twenty years, half-immortals thirty or forty. I’ve heard that an established foundation with an especially firm consciousness once lived for a hundred years. As for ascended spirits…there’s only you and me here, so I don’t know. While ‘living,’ some of them raised cries of lamentation or swore all day, and others had delusions of trying to escape like you. Still others gave up and abandoned themselves to despair. No matter what they did, that baldy hasn’t interfered. Only when these consciousnesses die altogether will they be slowly digested by the lotus root.”

Xi Ping felt the part of his scalp that the hand had touched go numb. “So what’s so interesting about this?”

“I don’t know what’s so interesting about it. My guess is that he can’t stop.” Qiu Sha spread her arms. Her arms and legs were truly too long; each and every one of her movements had an unusual kind of grace. “You must have heard of the ancient demonic god called the Heartless Lotus. He was crazy, his head as cracked as a pomegranate, and he had a paramount spiritual sense who would get lines mixed up while reading. Supposedly this baldy was stuffed into the Heartless Lotus by his deadbeat shizun so he could either inherit it or die. Though he managed to make do and survive, it was still rather forced—he doesn’t actually have such great natural gifts. He was born with only one consciousness. After inheriting the Heartless Lotus, he was cut apart into many pieces. So my guess is that maybe he’s desperately collecting consciousnesses to try to fill in these lotus hearts.”

As she spoke, Qiu Sha had already familiarly walked into the depths of the lotus root. She muttered, “Only when there are other people in the lotus hearts to act as contrast can he find himself, even if the people he grabs spend all day saying they’ll fuck his ancestors… Forget it, if you don’t understand lunatics, then you don’t understand. You seem harmless and naive. You don’t even seem to understand ordinary people very well—ah, you were right, he really has got the Unbound Furnace!”

Xi Ping followed the direction of her gaze and saw that in the depths of the lotus root was a very big empty space. The heartbeat he had heard before seemed to be coming from here. The blood red “wall” throbbed rapidly, and there was even a mural on it. The mural was of a flame the height of a person, with the vague figure of a person inside it.

The figure belonged to a Chu woman of average height. She was only tall enough to reach Qiu Sha’s chest, so Qiu Sha bent down and drew close to the mural, unblinking, as if she wanted to dig that figure out of the wall.

“She has a form now, doesn’t she?” It was unclear whether Qiu Sha was talking to Xi Ping or to herself. “She didn’t before… Look at her, you can even vaguely see her features!”

Xi Ping said, “Who? What is this?”

“It’s the projection of her Way of the Heart.” As if afraid of startling the person in the mural, Qiu Sha kept her voice very low. “After the Heartless Lotus swallows a consciousness, he’ll digest the Way of the Heart very slowly. This way, the projection of the Way of the Heart will remain on the lotus root. That useless baldy can’t even eat shit while it’s warm. He’s too slow. It’s been over two years since he got the furnace heart from me, and he still hasn’t fully grasped the furnace fire. Now that he has the Unbound Furnace itself, I see that he’s finally understood a bit.”

Xi Ping’s eyes flashed slightly in the darkness. Putting on Lin Zhaoli’s constantly clueless expression, he asked a string of questions: “What? This is Senior Hui Xiangjun’s Way of the Heart? Shouldn’t her Way of the Heart be in her vital weapon, the Unbound Furnace? And what do you mean by ‘hasn’t fully grasped the furnace fire’? He even sent a full moon sage to his death, how can he not have fully grasped it? So in order to fully grasp it, would you…”

“You’re so noisy. Shut up.” Annoyed by his clamor, Qiu Sha shushed him.

She sat down cross-legged in front of the mural to watch that image on the mural with its indistinct features, waiting for the image to become reality, like a farmer waiting for the right weather conditions.

Xi Ping, as if he couldn’t pick up social cues, once again opened his mouth to make himself annoying: “If her Way of the Heart has always been in your hands, why didn’t you find her a suitable successor in the toolmaking way?”

Without so much as looking around, Qiu Sha softly said, “Scram.”

There was a sinister glamor about her, oppressive, like a monstrous knife that had just been dug up from a fierce ghost’s coffin. A figure that was too tall could easily give the impression of being “clumsy” or “big”; when others mentioned her, they always remembered how she “cut people down like melons” or acted “deranged and arrogant” but forgot how she had nearly killed off half the ascended spirit masters in the cultivation world.

A-Xiang accidentally getting the Law Breaker had already been enough to make Qiu Sha want to kill her. Since she knew how important the furnace fire was, how could she have handed it over so easily to Zhuoming for the sake of killing Xiang Zhao?

Unless…

Xi Ping’s gaze fell on her back: she had expected that it would come to this.

She had known that if she kicked up such a big fuss, whether she succeeded or failed, Sanyue’s great divine tool would be certain to descend to the mortal world. She had known that she was certain to die, yet she had still staked everything on one throw. The lotus root heart of the Heartless Lotus was the grave she had prepared for herself.

This was no hothead who only knew how to fight and kill. This was an eight-century-old fiend.

“Senior,” Xi Ping said after a moment’s silence, imitating her soft voice, “since ancient times, no evil cultivator has become an ascended spirit. With you standing out like that among all the rest, you were sure to meet with resistance. Why didn’t you take it slow and steady from the start?”

Qiu Sha was silent for a while. She asked, “Did you just become an ascended spirit?”

Xi Ping agreed vaguely.

“Mortals hold opening your spiritual eyes to be the threshold for cultivation and believe that establishing a foundation completely separates mortal from immortal. So do you know what an ‘ascended spirit’ is?”

Xi Ping really didn’t know. No sooner had he endured the ascended spirit heavenly tribulation than he had been hunted by a full moon sage. He hadn’t been crushed to death by the mountain, but instead he had been eaten by the lotus root. He hadn’t even had a chance to say a few words to his shifu. Where would he have found the time to stop and appreciate his cultivation level?

As soon as he thought this, he immediately felt very dejected. So he lowered his head and abandoned himself to self-pity.

But Qiu Sha thought that lowering his head meant he was at last feeling ashamed. She sneered. “How did you even end up as an ascended spirit?”

Xi Ping told the truth: “A shed skin elder pushed me through.”

Qiu Sha clicked her tongue on hearing this, only taking this to mean that he was of high birth.

But with her age and experiences, she wasn’t especially inclined to feel righteous indignation about injustices—these were the facts, resentment was only worthless self-pity.

While she sat upright facing the wall, the monstrous air about her faded considerably. Her figure wrapped in its plain robe was like a high mountain of jade. “Though an established foundation also has a Way of the Heart and an essence, only when you have passed the ascended spirit boundary can you be qualified to listen to heaven and earth, touch the Way of Heaven—rather than allowing your elders to feed them to you or reading the contradictory truisms in those useless ancient texts that have been copied this way and that.”

So that was what “putting inquiries to heaven and earth” meant!

When Xi Ping had just been starting out cultivation, he had boldly said to shifu “Everyone is always putting inquiries to heaven and earth, heaven and earth must be sick of it”…but it turned out that there were only a few people on earth who were qualified to ask.

“Let me ask you, who was it that said evil cultivators have been unable to become ascended spirits since ancient times?”

Xi Ping recalled what Beacon Luo at the Latent Cultivation Temple had taught. “It’s because common cultivators often lack resources…”

“Don’t talk nonsense,” Qiu Sha impatiently interrupted him. “Do you know how many cultivators there have been in the world these past thousands of years? If you had thrown a needle into the East Sea when the spiritual mountains formed and had each of those people scoop up a basin of water at random, they would have scooped up that needle by now. Is it so hard to become an ascended spirit? You haven’t seen any for yourself, so you’re that certain that there aren’t any? Do you think that those people are all as dim-witted as you?”

Xi Ping: “…”

Fair enough. He was a mighty ascended spirit, yet he was still parroting the established foundation Luo from the Latent Cultivation Temple. He had utterly humiliated Flying Jade Peak. He instantly didn’t dare to speak again.

“That cats and dogs live for a few decades, that mortals live for a hundred years, that spring flowers have an end, that evil cultivators are not acknowledged by the spiritual mountains and can only reach an established foundation,” Qiu Sha said, lifting her chin slightly, “these are all the sayings of heaven, the sayings of the spiritual mountains—like the ‘axioms’ of the Law Breaker.”

Xi Ping’s eyes opened wide. In an instant, he was filled with enlightenment: the axioms of the Law Breaker were absolute, unless an axiom was broken!

If the spiritual mountains were an enormous Law Breaker, if these heavenly rules were like the Law Breaker’s axioms…then that meant that if someone could only evade that rule and succeed in becoming an ascended spirit, the “heavenly rule” would be broken and lose effect!

“I was sure to die when I became an ascended spirit, but just you wait. After my death, ascended spirit evil cultivators will spring up like bamboo shoots after a spring rain. The blood moon will hang in the sky all the time. The Way of Heaven will collapse, and it will have started with me… That was her original intention in making the Law Breaker and the Riverward,” Qiu Sha said softly but sonorously. “Late-autumn red is the guardian of eternal spring brocade. My Way of the Heart would follow wherever she desired—like fuck I’m going to take it slow and steady! Do you think I’m like you assholes in the spiritual mountains, only in it for personal gain, doing nothing but climbing towards the carrot the Way of Heaven has put in front of you?”

Xi Ping’s scalp instantly prickled.

He had suddenly realized that Zhuoming was wrong. Late-autumn red was eternal spring brocade’s accompanying plant; how could Qiu Sha fail to understand Hui Xiangjun’s relic?

She understood only too well.

From the day she had come out into the world from the hidden realm, she had known what road she was going to walk, known how she would die… It was just like a cicada growing for years underground then crying out as soon as it broke through the earth, singing its loudest no matter how destitute its circumstances.

Zhuoming had said that “heaven” and “earth” were locked in constant struggle. “Heaven” was the disciples of the full moon sages, and “earth” was the demonic gods that had lost by a narrow margin. Hui Xiangjun had inherited the eternal spring brocade’s Way of the Heart, so it seemed that she ought to belong to the “earth,” but…was that the truth?

Why was it that while the Unbound Furnace clearly had a furnace flame, Lin Chi had never seen it?

Why wasn’t Hui Xiangjun’s Way of the Heart in her vital weapon?

Xi Ping asked, “What kind of person was she?”

Hearing this, Qiu Sha raised her head, facing the vague figure in the mural across a distance of eight centuries.

They had asked why she had died and where her relics were, asked what way she had cultivated, asked what wonders her Unbound Furnace possessed, asked why her furnace flame could burn within ice and water…and at last someone had asked what kind of person she was.

“She was…a very patient person.” Unconsciously, Qiu Sha’s voice became a little indistinct. She narrowed her eyes, as if her gaze were piercing through the lengthy ages.

Qiu Sha didn’t know her own background, but she probably hadn’t come from a wealthy family. A wealthy family wouldn’t have abandoned a newborn child on a deserted mountain.

A few eternal spring brocade trees were growing on that mountain, so the late-autumn red was everywhere. There hadn’t been a “late-autumn red” among the ancient demonic gods to begin with; this was a half-puppet that the frail toolmaking cultivator had made themselves.

This parasitic vine grew alongside the eternal spring brocade, and it grew in too great profusion. The finicky main tree couldn’t supply the nutrients that such a large expanse of late-autumn red required, so it would eat decaying flesh, hunt down defenseless insects, birds, and animal cubs…and abandoned infants.

Late-autumn red was the accompanying plant of a half-puppet. When it came into contact with living things that had spiritual eyes, it would extend into the spiritual eyes and turn the human or spiritual beast into a puppet growing from its vines.

As far back as Qiu Sha remembered, she had been fighting over living space with other people just as uncivilized as her, and even spiritual beasts, struggling to maintain her own awareness.

Until one time, the eternal spring brocade on the mountain suddenly blossomed. The accompanying plant had a new master.

All the vines cheered. Only Qiu Sha was afraid. Her mind was connected to the late-autumn red vines. She instinctively knew that late-autumn red, this parasitic vine, belonged to the eternal spring brocade, and the new owner was certain to clean up this tangled skein of late-autumn red like pulling up weeds, get rid of all the disorderly minds in it, and either take over it herself…or have a half-puppet in her keeping take over it.

Xi Ping softly asked, “Did she choose you?”

“Late-autumn red was everywhere in Western Chu then, not just on that mountain. I don’t know how many consciousnesses there were inside it. The vast majority of them were incomplete. How could she choose?” Qiu Sha shook her head. “It was a trash heap hiding all kinds of evil, even more of a mess than this lotus root heart. The most reasonable method would have been to wipe out all those vines that had been stuffing themselves for hundreds or thousands of years at once.”

Did the remnants of consciousnesses inside the vines feel and reason? Did those fragments count as people? Or were they only an annoying blight on the trees?

Xi Ping imagined it and thought it was very hard to say. If it had been him, he probably wouldn’t have wiped them all out, but it would have been so much trouble that he probably would have just left it alone.

“So she…”

Qiu Sha said, “She spent a hundred twenty years lecturing to the late-autumn red vines.”

Xi Ping said, “What?”

“She irrigated the vines with spiritual energy and lectured. Who could have understood? We didn’t even know human speech then,” Qiu Sha said. “For the first eight years, she was just talking to herself. Every time she opened her mouth, there would only be frightened and angry noises in the late-autumn red, no reaction, but she didn’t care, only kept lecturing… Have you ever met a person like that?”

Doing precisely what she wanted, day after day, caring nothing for feedback, caring nothing for the outcome.

“I hadn’t. I’d never met a person like that,” Qiu Sha said almost inaudibly. “Educating a bunch of wild vines, as if she only wanted to try and see whether if she had enough patience, a miracle would be sure to happen.”

For the consciousness struggling within the parasitic vine, this was a vague thread of hope. She spent eight years struggling to get a grasp on the Chu language, connected to spiritual energy following Hui Xiangjun’s lead, constantly trained her consciousness. When it came to the twentieth year, she gave the eternal spring brocade her first stammering response.

Qiu Sha remembered that Hui Xiangjun had paused slightly then, cocked her ear to listen for a moment, then smiled.

A clear thought had suddenly emerged. She had thought: I want to look like that, too.

She was the first flower to open on the late-autumn red. When she drew spiritual energy into herself, she cleared away all the noise in the vines and became the master of the late-autumn red. She fell to the ground and cultivated a human body, making her face look like Hui Xiangjun’s.

And then she had walked a riotous road that could dye the moon at the center of the heavens blood red.

“Zhuoming got the furnace flame, but he could never get hold of Senior Hui Xiangjun’s Way of the Heart,” Xi Ping said after sitting with her for a long moment. “I understand now.”

Qiu Sha froze. Her long, thin eyebrows lifted. “What do you understand?”

“What do you understand?” came Zhuoming’s demonic voice from the depths of the lotus root.

Just then, Xi Ping finally realized that the violent heartbeat had at some point leveled out.

On the lotus root wall, a human face emerged beside the mural of Hui Xiangjun and stared fixedly at Xi Ping.

Zhuoming gave him a very strange look. “You woke up so quickly. You didn’t have to sleep for several months. And you found your way here… I’ve never seen a newborn ascended spirit with such a resilient consciousness.”

Xi Ping calmly smiled at Zhuoming. “I did want to have a lie-in, but there was nothing for it. After all, I’m in a rush.”

The corners of Zhuoming’s eyes twitched.

Qiu Sha suddenly realized something. “Who the hell are you?”

Xi Ping didn’t answer. He cupped his hands towards her. “I came specifically to see you. When we parted in Tao County, there were many things we hadn’t had time to discuss. Thank you for your guidance today, senior.”

No sooner had he spoken than he—or rather, his consciousness—shattered without warning, leaving behind only a cluster of person-shaped heartless lotus stalks. As his consciousness collapsed, these also turned to mist and seeped into the lotus root.