Southern Shu—

Shu was divided into two parts. The main peninsula bordered on Western Chu; it was the tail-end of the western part of the continent. The national capital Zhaoye and the Lingyun Spiritual Mountain Range were both on the main island. 

Crossing the Goddess Strait to the south, you arrived at the famous Three Islands of Southern Shu. 

These three precious islands were named for Shu’s three auspicious beasts. The two islands to the west neighbored each other, one north and one south. The northern island was named Scarlet Ibis, and the southern island was named Sable Sheep. The eastern island was long and narrow; therefore, it had been given the name Waking Dragon. 

On Sable Sheep Island, there was sweltering heat year-round, but in the north of Scarlet Ibis Island there were projecting mountains with snow often floating on their towering peaks. The wind swept among the three islands. When it hit the depths of the range of hills along Waking Dragon Island’s east side, it let out a lengthy whistle, harmonizing with hundreds upon thousands of spiritual beasts. The weather was very changeable here. It was known as “a different sky every three li.” From Kunlun to Lancang, throughout the whole continent, practically all species of plants could be found on Southern Shu’s Three Islands. 

It was said that long ago, even eternal spring brocade had grown here.

Of the spiritual beast materials used by the ways of medicine and toolmaking, approximately sixty percent came from Southern Shu’s Three Islands. The Miah were divided into nine tribes. Under the protection of beast-taming cultivators and arrays, they constantly lived alongside all types of spiritual beasts. 

Towards evening, on a beach on the west coast of Waking Dragon Island, the sea waves gently struck the reef, letting off light like fragmentary gold. There was a splash. The sea birds flew up in surprise, several flying fish leapt joyfully, and then, a “big python” thick enough for several people to wrap their arms around unexpectedly emerged from the sea and “flew” over a zhang high. 

This big python had skin like satin, with a rich play of light flowing over its whole body. When it leapt into midair, the python’s body suddenly became insubstantial. The sunset glow passed through it. First it became partially transparent, and then, like a beautiful dream, it dispersed into spray and merged into the seawater along with the vapor, leaving only a rainbow behind in midair. 

This kind of miraculous sight could probably have scared a passel of mainlanders out of their wits, but the Miah children playing on the reef banded together in delight, chattering excitedly as they lined up holding hands and piously made wishes in the direction the big python had disappeared—that python-shaped spiritual beast was the waking dragon itself, a very docile type of sea-dwelling spiritual beast. It never spontaneously attacked people. When it left the water, it could turn into a rainbow. When it dispersed into spray, the sparkles could travel over a hundred zhang away. 

The east island had been named for the waking dragon. The locals believed that the waking dragon was the beloved pet of the sea god, and seeing a waking dragon turn into a rainbow could give you ten days of good luck; any wish could come true. 

The waking dragon that had become a rainbow appeared in the distance. Its long, muffled cry reverberated from the seabed. In the sunset glow, a human form hung indistinctly above the sea, affectionately patting the big python’s head. 

On the shore was a small and skinny Miah boy wearing a visor palm-leaf fan on his head. He looked like a bean seedling that had just sprouted. The bean seedling’s eyes widened as he looked towards that person. Excitedly, he struggled free of his companions’ hands. “Look, it’s the sea god!” 

All the children stood up on tiptoe. 

“Where?” 

“Where is he?” 

“Right there, next to the waking dragon!” 

But his little companions seemed to be blind. No matter how he pointed, they couldn’t find the person. The little bean seedling was so worked up he flailed his arms and jumped. 

“There’s no one there,” said a slightly older child. “He’s just a babbling parrot. He’s always making up lies to get attention. Liars have bad luck. It’s no wonder your family’s always unlucky.” 

“He really is there…” 

“Lying parrot! Liars have rotten luck!” 

Children follow an older child’s example. A crowd of kids noisily surrounded the bean seedling. The gaudy bean seedling ran away crying. 

The bean seedling was extremely aggrieved. “I’m not a liar, he’s right there…” 

Just then, he heard a soft laugh in his ear. A slightly low masculine voice said, “Shh—”

The bean seedling looked through his tears and saw the sea god in the distance, like a shadow, lift a finger towards him. 

“Don’t cry, you were telling the truth. If others don’t believe you, it’s because they’re incredibly ignorant. Why should you cry over others being slow-witted?” 

The sea god was speaking! 

The bean seedling’s dark green eyes became round. 

“I only appear to special people.” The sea god’s voice resounding in his ears was like the gentlest breeze of dusk. “I only took one gift with me when I went out today, to give to the best child. What wish did you make to the waking dragon just now?” 

The bean seedling stammered, “Sea god, can you save my dad?” 

The sea god tilted his head. “Oh?” 

“My dad went out to gather herbs, and his foot got bitten by a crawling ghost. His foot turned black, and the apothecary uncle said they’ll have to cut off his leg…” 

The sea god gave a cry. “That must hurt.” 

There was a faint trill in his voice. These words made the child cry. 

The skinny Miah bean seedling stood alone on the reef by the sea. As he sobbed, he brokenly explained his family’s melancholy circumstances. His father had a high fever and was always crying out in pain… He was too little; under the influence of mingled surprise and fear, his words were incoherent, but the sea god wasn’t the least bit impatient. He listened to him vent for the space of a whole incense stick. 

Only when the setting sun had sunk into the surface of the sea did the little boy finally cry himself to exhaustion. With eyes like peaches, he looked with difficulty at the human form that had nearly blended into the setting sun. 

The sea god said, “Turn around. Count five steps backwards with your cute little feet and have a look at what’s under that triangular rock.” 

The boy turned his head in surprise. Indeed, five steps away, he saw a triangular rock. When he walked over and looked, he saw that there was a small bottle hidden under it. The tight seal couldn’t seal off the fragrance within. 

The sea god had bestowed a magical elixir! 

The boy was ecstatic. He cautiously picked the little bottle up with both hands and wanted to thank the sea god, but when he looked back, the waking dragon and the man had both vanished. 

Like the waking dragon’s spray scattering into the air, as if they had been a dream. 

On the calm sea bed of the South Sea, the enormous waking dragon passed through coral and shoals of fish. On its back stood a graceful young man. 

His thick, dark grey hair was spread out in the water like seaweed. He had a typical Miah countenance, but his figure was very tall and sturdy, with broad shoulders and a narrow waist, more like the Xiuyi. 

His eyes were two different colors, one grey and one yellow, but they didn’t seem strange at all. The corners of his eyes and the tips of his brows were both slightly down-turned, as if adding a trace of sorrow to his gentleness, but there was a natural slight smile about the corners of his lips. When he looked at someone, he seemed to be the reflection of the affectionate husband of a young girl’s dreams. 

Suddenly, the waking dragon shivered. Its huge head split open. A dark red lotus stalk slowly reached out of the top of its head, then grew a flower. 

The unusual white lotus took no notice of the water pressure. In the depths of the sea, it burst into full bloom. Where the stamen ought to have been, a face grew, all covered in mouths! 

One mouth said, “Tsk, you sham!” 

Another mouth said, “Disgusting!” 

Yet another mouth said, “It’s obvious you didn’t expect that there’d be a kid with a first-class spiritual sense in this backwater and accidentally got yourself seen. Only appear to special people? Shameless.” 

At last there were no more mouths. A provisional slit opened in the lotus flower and spoke in Southern Shu’s official language, strangely accented: “You would even lie to a child. Lao Wang, you’re very wicked.” 

“My surname isn’t Wang. My family name is ‘Wangge,’” the “sea god,” completely unmoved, responded amiably. 

It turned out that this odd-eyed young man was Southern Shu’s preeminent evil cultivator, Wangge Luobao, who spent every day openly roaming through Southern Shu’s Three Islands!

Wangge Luobao spoke the Shu language with an unusual cadence, as though he were singing. It was pleasing to the ear. “While admittedly a first-class spiritual sense is a rare gift, what connection can a child of villagers and fishermen ever have to the cultivation world? It’s purely imaginary. Isn’t the best thing to make the child happy? He’ll love this patch of sea for the rest of his life…” 

The four mouths on the lotus flower all spoke at the same time: “Ew—”

Wangge Luobao glanced at the lotus flower with his melancholy odd-colored eyes. “If you don’t want to be happy yourself, not even other people’s hearts breaking can make you smile.” 

The lotus flower said with a cold laugh, “Where is your heart broken? Get it out and let me sew it up, why don’t you? I really can’t stand the sappy way you Shu talk.” 

Wangge Luobao seemed to lack the emotion of “anger.” Hearing this, he remained unmoved. Instead, he very understandingly said, “Zhuoming, everyone in the world has mistreated you, but you’ve escaped them now, clearly. Yet you continue to mistreat yourself…as if changing to another mode of living would be betraying the past, forgiving your enemies. Why do you suffer like that?” 

The lotus flower—Zhuoming, who had once escaped from the Sanyue Mountains—coldly said, “Save that crap for dealing with those evil cultivators, all right? See if they’ll bite.” 

Wangge Luobao changed the subject. He said, “I’ve leaked all the information that needed to be leaked. I don’t have any control over whether they come or not.” 

“Xuanwu will definitely come,” Zhuoming said. “He’s been wanted as a criminal by the four great spiritual mountains all these years, dodging and hiding. He urgently needs a stable place to heal and restore his boundary. You’re an evil cultivator. It won’t hurt his Way of the Heart to destroy evil. The Misty Willow will also definitely come. His speed of passing through boundaries is unprecedented, but that means he has no solid foundation. He hasn’t had time to steadily save up resources. The number of spiritual stones an ascended spirit has to burn isn’t something a mere established foundation can imagine. All the Kaiming Departments of Great Wan’s nine provinces put together might not be able to support him. He must be desperately hard-up now, desperately looking for resources… What reason could he have not to come?” 

As Zhuoming spoke, he merged his four mouths into one. His features returned to their original positions. “This person is extremely sly, always hiding something. He’ll have anticipated that many of his enemies will be at this gathering in the South Sea. It’s likely he won’t rashly come with his true body. An ascended spirit of the ungovernable way can swap his true body with his accompanying plant for thousands of li around at will. The vegetation on Southern Shu’s Three Islands is lush, and misty willow is a lowly wood that grows in any corner. It’s everywhere here… He’s certain to order a trusted subordinate to go on ahead and send a sliver of his consciousness to watch in secret from a nearby misty willow.

“This time, as long as he sends a single sliver of consciousness…” Zhuoming’s newly collected features twitched uncontrollably. His eyes nearly went flying. “I won’t give him another chance to escape.” 

Wangge Luobao sighed. “In fact, as I see it, all the preparations that individual made back then were for the purpose of protecting himself. If you hadn’t attacked him first, no matter how many backup plans he had, he wouldn’t have had a chance to use them. There was no need for things to reach this stage. Stubborn biases always have a reason. If you can’t clearly work out what this Tai Sui means to you, even if you capture his consciousness, you’ll still only have a new source of unhappiness…” 

Before he could finish, a lotus stalk struck at his forehead like a flash of lightning. Wangge Luobao’s figure flashed, and he was somewhere else, leaving behind only a strand of long hair broken off by the lotus stalk. 

“You’re only a speculator in spiritual beast offal. Don’t try to teach me my business,” Zhuoming said coldly. “I aided you in becoming an ascended spirit, so you have to pay tribute to me for ten years. We each get what we need. Don’t forget that my lotus seal is on your consciousness. If you speak out of turn again, I’ll restrain you.”

As he spoke, man and python burrowed into the furthest depths of the sea bed. The fine sand of the seabed churned and absorbed them.

“There’s another person you must be careful of.” Zhuoming’s voice reverberated over the empty seabed. “The shadow of the Slumbering Dragon Sea, Yu Chang. The Misty Willow removed his spiritual image brand and has used Yu Chang’s vital power many times. There is a deep connection between the two of them. They must be colluding.” 

In the north—

With Southern Shu’s Three Islands as a boundary, looking out from the towering peaks of the Lingyun Mountains towards the ocean that touched the sky, to the south was the South Sea, while to the north was the Slumbering Dragon. 

Only the “foot” that the Slumbering Dragon Sea extended towards the peninsula of Chu and Shu was temperate. Going north, meanwhile, it was a world of eternally unmelting ice and snow. The glaciers on the sea were linked to the frozen soil of the northern plains. This was the truly a place “with no birds in flight, unmarked by the step of man¹.”  

Currently, in the southern half of the continent, the plums were already yellow, and Southern Shu’s Three Islands had entered the rainy season. Even the wildflowers at the feet of the Kunlun Mountains had blossomed, and familiar wild geese had returned to Yanning. 

The glacier in the North Slumbering Dragon Sea at last melted slightly. There was a crisp crack. A huge ice floe fell from the glacier, revealing only a tip above the water. Underwater, there were still a thousand zhang, plunging into the abyss like a long drill. 

A black shadow spread upwards from the lower part of the ice floe. In an instant, it had stained the ice pure black, as if it had been soaked in ink. When it had floated all the way to the surface of the water, the black shadow dispersed into the seawater all around. 

As the seawater oscillated, the delicate-featured face of a Chu man appeared faintly within it. 

“The South Sea…” the person in the shadow whispered. His voice reverberated through the ice, shaking another ice floe off the glacier. 

Then the shadow on the surface of the water collected together, and a person emerged. The chief offering who had once been imprisoned in the shallows of Yu Family Bend was already an ascended spirit. The aura surrounding him was even more unfathomable. “Tai Sui, it’s about time you returned my Discard the False and Keep the True book.” 

At the Chu-Shu border—

Past the sheltering mountains of Chu, the terrain gradually leveled out. A vast rainforest separated the nations of Chu and Shu. It was called the All-Devouring Marsh. 

This place had few signs of humanity. The rainwater went where it would. Each pool of accumulated rainwater might be hiding fatal marshland beneath it, capable of swallowing an elephant; at the shared border between the two nations, the spiritual energy was disorderly. Spiritual energy vortexes would appear in midair out of nowhere. In the past, Sanyue had sent some inner sect masters along with Qilin Guardsmen to explore it. Over a dozen established foundation and open-eyed elites, and they had vanished without a trace, dead or alive; not one person had returned. 

Therefore, it had become forbidden territory for both the mortal and immortal worlds. 

In the silent dense forest, a patch of level ground caved in without warning. Boiling bubbles floated up. Suddenly, a human hand reached out of the marsh, untouched by mud. It was clear at a glance that this was a cultivator protected by spiritual energy. 

The veins on this hand stood out. It formed a hand seal overhead, and the surrounding spiritual energy immediately formed a talisman in accordance with that hand seal. Visible to the naked eye, a number of ancient trees drooped slightly. When the talisman had just taken shape, the hand suddenly trembled fiercely, like a convulsion, and was pulled downwards fiercely by an unknown force. 

The completed talisman condensed the surrounding spiritual energy into substance. Clutching its master’s hand, it rubbed the fingers raw, but in the end this was futile. 

The hand sank into the marsh. A moment later, weak spiritual energy diffused. A final bubble emerged from the marsh, like a burp while digesting. 

The peaceful marsh faded bit by bit and became pure white. It turned into Xuanwu, wearing his mask. 

Xuanwu gently wiped the mouth drawn on his mask. 

“It is everyone’s duty to punish evil cultivators who pilfer heaven’s order.” 

He cast his gaze southward and whispered, “The South Sea…”