Wei Chengxiang was woken by the sound of lips smacking. 

She had plainly been swept up by spiritual energy and waves and forced down all the way to the bottom of the sea. But when she opened her eyes, she found herself on a grassy field beside a black sheep with horns bigger than its head, which was munching single-mindedly, as if no one were around. 

Wei Chengxiang had been bored on the way to the meeting and had seen this animal while flipping through an illustrated handbook of spiritual beasts. This seemed to be one of the auspicious omens of Southern Shu’s Three Islands, the sable sheep. 

This ethereal auspicious omen didn’t eat grass. It only nibbled on flowers. It nibbled all the way to Wei Chengxiang’s feet, raised its head, and said to her: “Baa—”

Wei Chengxiang: “…” 

Why did the “auspicious omen” sound the way soy sauce stewed mutton did when it was alive? 

A half-immortal couldn’t entirely eschew food, but the Queen Mother of the West and all her subordinates considered themselves to be people of a vanquished nation and viewed the desire for food as a sin. Those who couldn’t eschew food all relied on inedia pills to survive. Wei Chengxiang had had to follow their custom after joining. Now, faced with a big, plump sheep, she involuntarily swallowed a mouthful of saliva—the truth was, she was a little gluttonous. 

The sable sheep had a docile temperament. It didn’t take issue with her. It good-humoredly moved her foot aside with its curved horns, ate a little cluster of jasmine she had accidentally covered, then gave a floral-scented belch. 

Wei Chengxiang heard the flutter of birds’ wings. She narrowed her eyes and saw a red-faced, white-feathered scarlet ibis fly by, chasing a rainbow phoenix. A rosy glow spread over the sky like satin. 

She found herself at the summit of a mountain. 

It was hard to say how big this place was. At any rate, it exceeded the scope that a half-immortal’s consciousness could cover. Wei Chengxiang looked far into the distance and saw that there were eight principal mountain peaks here. The mountains surrounded a valley. There was running water in the valley that passed through and then rushed off to somewhere unknown. The gentle mountain ridges were full of medicinal herbs whose names she couldn’t come up with. At the feet of the mountains, meanwhile, was a cluster of ancient trees reaching up to the sky. It seemed to be a rainforest. 

Looking in the other direction from the mountaintop, you could vaguely see where the sky met the water…which seemed to be a sea. 

Was this sea connected to the South Sea? 

Supposing it was, then if she had washed up here, shouldn’t she have been on the shore? How had she ended up on the mountaintop? 

Wei Chengxiang couldn’t understand it. She only felt that the spiritual energy in the mountains was astonishingly dense, exceeding the southern mines that had once been part of the Lancang Spiritual Mountains. 

“This seems like a set of spiritual mountains.” To guard against her intellect being clouded, she took a mind calming pill from her mustard seed, chewed it, and gave Xi Ping an incoherent account of what had happened. Then she came to what she thought was the only reasonable conclusion: “Could this be the legendary South Sea Hidden Realm?” 

Xi Ping’s first reaction was that this was impossible. 

If the South Sea Hidden Realm had opened, how could the Lingyun Mountains still exist? 

Anyway, there had been so many ascended spirits and shed skins present, all with their eyes fixed on the South Sea Hidden Realm. It was impossible that none of them would have noticed—but presently he found that he could only hear Wei Chengxiang’s voice; he couldn’t sense her location, and he couldn’t send his consciousness there. 

“How many principal peaks did you say there are just now?” 

“Eight.” Wei Chengxiang cautiously floated up on her sword. Afraid that there would be some unknown dangers here, she didn’t dare to fly too high. She roughly described the form of the terrain and used the setting sun to determine orientation. She added, “It’s very close to the sea to the south.” 

Eight big principal peaks, a rainforest at the feet of the mountains, the south end on the sea… Along with the form of the watercourse in the valley, the more Xi Ping heard, the more he thought she was describing the Lingyun Immortal Mountains. 

But when he looked up, he saw only devastation everywhere. There was no “rosy glow” in the sky like she had said—in many places, the fires had yet to be put out. The smoke and flames had formed a choking haze in the air. 

Just then, he heard Wei Chengxiang give a cry of alarm. 

“What now?” 

Wei Chengxiang was always wandering through the Land of Turmoil and various black markets. She was cautious to a fault. Seeing numerous different species, her first reaction wasn’t to become enraptured by the beauty but to think “How many kinds of spiritual beasts must there be here?” For a half-immortal, wild spiritual beasts were very dangerous. As Wei Chengxiang carefully observed the surroundings, she reached a hand into her mustard seed, ready to put on something protective. 

As soon as her hand reached in, she froze: her completely undamaged mustard seed was half empty! 

Wei Chengxiang had been responsible for looking after the arrays on the whale ship. She was the custodian of all the spiritual stones that drove the arrays. This meant that her pauper’s mustard seed had for once contained some white spirits and blue jades. 

“The white sprits and all the blue jades larger than a fist are gone!” 

It wasn’t only the white spirits. Many things were missing from the mustard seed.  

Xi Ping sometimes helped Lin Chi, who couldn’t do accounts, balance his books. He often managed to get hold of some protective immortal tools that low level cultivators could also use. He himself was tough; for him, being broken to bits counted as cultivation. So he casually handed the immortal tools out among his friends and family. Wei Chengxiang had some items that were of established foundation grade and above. 

But now they were all gone, including the willow leaf boat that not even that huge dragon had been able to blow off her. 

“It’s the elixirs, too. The established foundation pill is gone, along with its bottle. There are only a few open-eyed grade ones left…” Wei Chengxiang turned her mustard seed upside down. “Wait, are established foundation pills an established foundation grade item?” 

Concerning what grade established foundation pills belonged to, there was a dispute in the cultivation world. Going by their users, a pill meant for open-eyed half-immortals to take ought to be called “open-eyed grade,” but the materials that needed to be refined for them, as well as the spiritual energy that went into them, were in fact of the established foundation grade—of course, no one apart from medicine cultivators cared about this dispute. 

In other words, all things of established foundation grade and above, including “Xi Ping’s consciousness,” couldn’t enter that hidden realm. 

Xi Ping, as though afraid she would be in danger, said a few words to Wei Chengxiang and hurried over—in fact, when she was fifteen or sixteen, Wei-laoban had set foot all on her own onto the path of no return to Demon Country. In all these years, she had experienced every kind of situation. There was no need for others to exert so much strength fretting about her. Xi Ping just wanted to run away. 

A hundred thousand mountains were weighing down his heart. He urgently needed a seemingly legitimate reason to “rescue” him from the misery of the mortal world, even if it meant running around for the sake of some trifle. 

When he rushed back to the South Sea, the spiritual energy and the smell of blood over the sea had both largely dispersed. Xi Ping made a few circles near the entrance to the South Sea Hidden Realm that Wangge Luobao had summoned, even ran the risk of sending out his consciousness, but came up with nothing—Lingyun’s high elder must have inspected everything after putting away the Cauldron of Nine Dragons. If there had been anything unusual, it wouldn’t have taken Xi Ping to find it. 

He frowned, then suddenly remembered that willow leaf immortal tool of Wei Chengxiang’s. 

It had been an ascended spirit grade item to begin with and had become even sturdier after Lin Chi had improved and reinforced it. No matter what happened, it would closely protect the person inside it. If the place A-Xiang had gone into had stripped her of everything established foundation grade and above, then that willow leaf boat…or its wreckage ought to have been the last thing to have fallen off her. It had likely been left behind at the entrance. 

The willow leaf boat’s grade was too high. While a low level cultivator could use it, it would only acknowledge an ascended spirit or above who spilled blood onto it as its master. This willow leaf boat’s previous master had been Zhi Xiu, who had given it to Xi Ping after the latter had become an ascended spirit. The boat had a drop of his blood on it. 

Xi Ping formed a seeking talisman in his palm and followed the talisman’s lead into the sea. He went about a hundred li south before his spiritual sense was finally touched as he sensed that drop of his own blood. 

There were no more signs of the battle here. Xi Ping hid his aura and withdrew into a ball of spiritual energy. He sank to the bottom of the sea and found that willow leaf boat. 

The boat was stuck in a crack at the bottom of the sea. For several li around were all kinds of familiar immortal tools and elixirs…as well as high grade spiritual stones, which had attracted a large number of deep-sea fish to crowd around them. 

Xi Ping waved a hand to collect all the items. He grabbed hold of the willow leaf boat and sent his consciousness down along the hull, but no matter what he couldn’t keep probing—this was his first time finding that his consciousness was too “fat.” Even if he pared it down to a thread, he still couldn’t get it in. 

After he tried several times without success, Xi Ping could only shout in the direction the boat was pointed: “A-Xiang, can you hear me?!” 

Inside the hidden realm, the sable sheep was startled by the faint voice coming from outside. It raised its head warily. 

Wei Chengxiang quickly straightened up. “Senior, did you shout something just now?” 

“I may have found the entrance. Follow the qin music.” Xi Ping tapped lightly on the boat’s hull with his fingers, his fingers rapping out the soft sound of the Tai Sui Qin. The qin music had spiritual energy. It could condense into a thread and serve as a guide. 

Wei Chengxiang said, “What qin music?” 

Xi Ping’s fingers stopped. 

The two of them went back and forth a few times and quickly found that anything holding Xi Ping’s spiritual energy—for example, the music of the Tai Sui Qin, and words sent or amplified by spiritual energy—would be blocked by the crack. Only when he didn’t touch a sliver of his essence and simply used his throat to shout could his voice get through. 

Xi Ping: “…” 

All he could do was wrap himself up in the spiritual energy bubble, take a deep breath, and start shouting towards that crack. 

The two cultivators used this primitive method to find each other, with eight out of every ten sentences being nonsense like “Can you still hear me?” and “This way!”, like two desperate mortal miners performing a search and rescue on the scene of a mine collapse. 

Xi Ping hadn’t used his throat like this since he’d begun cultivating. He shouted so much his mouth went dry and his head rang. He had scared off all the fish within a few li. 

But strangely, he also seemed to have spat out a considerable amount of the gloom caught in his chest. 

Finally, he managed to lead Wei Chengxiang to the “entrance”—according to her, it was in a little lake on a mountaintop. 

She called it a lake, but in fact it looked to be only one or two mu in area, more like a little pool. 

The water was so clear you could see right to the bottom. The water at the deepest part at the heart of the lake only came up to Wei Chengxiang’s chest. The little fish and aquatic plants in the water undulated vibrantly. 

A corner of the willow leaf boat was stuck at the heart of the lake. There was a long, narrow crack at the bottom of the lake holding it. Spiritual light flashed at the edges of the gap. There seemed to be three thousand miniature worlds in the crack. Neither human eyes nor consciousnesses could see through them. 

Tai Sui’s voice came from the water. He sounded a little distant. “Try and see if you can get out. I’ll meet you at this end.” 

Wei Chengxiang did as he said, first attempting to reach her hand out of the gap. 

When her hand touched the crack, it was as if it had dissolved within it. Wei Chengxiang instinctively curled her fingers to feel the location of her hand, then felt a cold, slender hand with faint calluses on it take hers. 

“I see you,” said Tai Sui. “I’ll pull you out. Tell me right away if anything’s wrong.” 

Having said so, he yanked her out. 

Wei Chengxiang had hardly ever eaten a solid meal in her life. She’d never put on any weight. She had never expected to experience the sensation of being “too fat” and getting stuck. 

She felt as though she had been jammed into an ill-fitting piece of clothing, all her bones and flesh squashed a size smaller. For a moment, she seemed to be pressed flat and stretched out. 

Just when she couldn’t take it any more and was about to cry out, she smelled the salt of the sea. Next, a spiritual energy bubble wrapped around her. Wei Chengxiang took a deep breath and felt her flattened body expand once again. 

“Tai…” 

Then she saw the newcomer clearly—this was a Wan man covered in blood, with an exceptionally ostentatious, one-in-a-million face that could capture the gaze. But there was unspeakable weariness on his brow. It was hard to say whether his mind had ended up behind this face by mistake, or whether the face had covered the wrong mind. 

Panting, Wei Chengxiang said, “S-senior, you must have been in a hurry when you shaped your spiritual image mask. It’s a little unnatural.” 

Only then did Xi Ping remember that he had forgotten to put on a spiritual image mask. “What’s wrong?” 

“It’s a little strange,” Wei Chengxiang said casually. “It feels like it doesn’t especially suit you.” 

A face for idly watching the scenery go by on Tai Sui…tsk. 

A little caustically, she thought, He looks like a little pretty boy who just got through hooking up with all the married women in Dangui Lane, and then, after cuckolding the nobles one after another, got himself hunted all the way from Great Wan to the South Sea… And the little pretty boy looked a little familiar. Where had she seen him? 

This thought only flashed by. Wei Chengxiang didn’t consider it closely: she had seen too many people; everyone with well-proportioned features looked somewhat alike. 

But Tai Sui, on hearing her, froze for a long moment, then gave a bitter laugh. “If you don’t like it, then don’t look—stop observing me, have a look at what’s going on with that crack.” 

The two of them soon found that mortal objects could easily pass through the crack, while open-eyed grade objects got a little stuck but could be shoved in. 

But if you had an established foundation object and above, even just a tiny established foundation pill, you shouldn’t even think of getting it through. 

Xi Ping tried widening the gap, but the gap didn’t move a hair. 

Unlike Wangge Luobao, he didn’t have a Way of the Heart inherited from the founder Tianbo. There was nothing an outsider like him could do about this hidden realm being sealed. 

Xi Ping reckoned: even if he could snatch Wangge Luobao and bleed him, without the support of the Cauldron of Nine Dragons swallowing and spitting out spiritual energy from the ascended spirit and shed skin battlefield, his mere ascended spirit cultivation would be nowhere near sufficient to open a crack here—that whole crowd of evil cultivators had known that in order to open the South Sea Hidden Realm, you had to at least sacrifice a shed skin here. 

“Wait.” Xi Ping considered, then split off a sliver of consciousness and flew back to Law Breaker’s space inside Tao County. In a heap of junk, he found a downgraded immortal tool—this thing used as its basis a “camera” from the mortal world that flashed when pressed; after being modified with spiritual stones and a miniature array, it could take very clear pictures, and they developed immediately with no need to wait—only there was a very limited audience for downgraded immortal tools, and the pictures of people it produced were excessively lifelike; everyone thought that it was like getting your soul sucked out—very frightening. So this item had become unmarketable. 

A downgraded immortal tool could be stuffed into the crack. In no time at all, Wei Chengxiang, having been pressed flat once again, brought out a stack of clear photographs. 

Xi Ping only took one look, and his heart began to beat wildly. 

The hidden realm in this crack was identical to the Lingyun Immortal Mountains, as if it was a reflection in a mirror. 

Except that there were no signs of human activity, no struggle between the Xiuyi and Miah fouling the atmosphere, no bloody and forbidding divine tool of the mountains, no immortal palaces or inscriptions and arrays denying entry… It had its own land, its own sun and moon, clear and calm; perhaps this was the original form of the spiritual mountains. 

In the calamity the Lingyun Mountains had experienced, close to half of the mountains’ spiritual energy had dispersed. Xi Ping now knew where that portion of spiritual energy had gone. 

It hadn’t dispersed into the universe. It had all been collected in a place where no one who possessed an “essence” and walked a fixed immortal way could enter. 

The two of them looked at each other helplessly. 

Perhaps because her neck had been squeezed so many times going back and forth, Wei Chengxiang’s voice was suddenly a little dry. “Tai Sui, what…what does this mean?” 

Before Xi Ping could answer, Zhao Qindan’s voice suddenly came through the reincarnation wood. 

Her voice was a little low, but her tone wasn’t rushed. 

“Senior,” she said, “I asked you many questions just now, but you did not respond to a single one. I suppose you wanted me to make my own choices.” 

Zhao Qindan glanced at Li Manlong, consoling his clansmen one by one nearby, and clenched her teeth slightly. “Thank you for advising me, and for taking me to Shu to temper my Way of the Heart—however…I have decided not to establish a foundation.” 

There was still no answer from the reincarnation wood, but once she said these words, her expression became even more determined. She continued: “When I began to cultivate, I already knew that only with a Way of the Heart could one sustain one’s spirit while establishing a foundation, keep one’s consciousness from dispersing; that only when one had refined one’s Way of the Heart could one survive amid the divine lightning of the high heavens and allow one’s spirit to ascend… Looked at that way, it would seem that a Way of the Heart is a footpath leading to heaven. 

“But while I have a Way of the Heart, my Way of the Heart is incompatible with the immortal sects. I could use my Way of the Heart as a ‘Way of the Heart,’ take an established foundation pill. I could go on to fool others and myself, contort that Way of the Heart into the form of the ‘orthodox way,’ and perhaps by dumb luck I might even become a great master. But…senior, it may be that my cultivation is weak and my knowledge is shallow, but I think that this is not how a Way of the Heart is meant to be used.” 

At last, Tai Sui answered her, very softly. His voice seemed hoarse. “If you don’t establish a foundation, what will you do from now on?” 

“Pursue my Way of the Heart,” Zhao Qindan said. “If my lifespan runs out in two hundred years, then I will die at the age of two hundred. If I encounter a disaster tomorrow, then I will die tomorrow. All my life, I will never enter the immortal sects, and I will not be an evil cultivator. Tai Sui, even if this is a wrong road, I still…”

All of a sudden, Tai Sui laughed aloud. 

Zhao Qindan wasn’t very well acquainted with him. For some reason, every time this Senior Tai Sui spoke to her, he was more brief and to the point than with others and deliberately kept his voice lowered, as if afraid that speaking would waste spiritual stones. 

This was her first time hearing him laugh like this. She couldn’t help but be astonished. 

“You aren’t taking a wrong road. I’m the one on the wrong road,” Tai Sui said, laughing. “A pity there’s no turning back. All I can do is guard the entrance and take the rest of you part of the way. Come—”