When Pang Jian poked him in the spine and called him out, Xi Ping at last came back to his senses. He turned his head to glance at deserted Jinping, then suddenly looked down and laughed.

Supposing that all the spiritual mountains blended into the veins of the earth, then would spiritual stones still exist? Would the human world become what it had been before the Great War of Gods and Demons?

That would be the dream of evil cultivators and demons come true. Shizun couldn’t accept that.

So…probably the only way it could go was that all the “old ones” bound each by their own “way” would by some means slowly withdraw from the scene, either die or, like the full moon sages, ascend to heaven after laying down a new order, turn into gods that existed only in legend, not in the human world.

Xi Ping was not afraid. More than that, out of nowhere, he was glad.

Why should he care what happened to him decades from now? Weren’t people not meant to live more than a hundred years, anyway? After all the twists and turns, his teachers and friends would all be there… There was only san-ge who had undertaken a distant journey, but that was all right. Supposing that all paths led to the same end, they would still be reunited one day.

On the blank road ahead, an endpoint had suddenly appeared. He seemed to have been pressed back into the mundane dust by the imminence of time; unconsciously, he stamped on the groun with both feet.

Zhi Xiu beheld his wretched disciple’s august mien and also thought it offensive to the eyes. Therefore, he sighed, extended a hand, and withdrew his sword energy from Xi Ping’s ragged clothes. The cuts closed up automatically. Then, a pair of shoes and a wooden hairpin fell beside Xi Ping.

“At least put on some shoes.” Having a rebellious disciple aged a person. Zhi Xiu hesitated, then pronounced an assessment that seemed to belong to an old man: “Outrageous.”

The young master taken in by Flying Jade Peak had left the mountain, and that parting had nearly become final. Over a decade of springs and autumns had raced by, and the whole time, the shard of Zhaoting had shone upon Xi Ping on his lonely wrong road.

And this mutual dependency that spanned mountains and seas might at any moment have become one that spanned the worlds of the living and the dead.

Xi Ping had always been broad-minded, impervious to apprehension. Since before all his teeth had grown in, he hadn’t been worried when he got lost in a busy street. The thoughts “my family has abandoned me” or “I hope nothing’s happened to my family” hadn’t even entered his mind…until he’d had a shifu who really could disappear at any moment.

He was flighty and frivolous, with too many distracting thoughts, so all his efforts in studying the sword had come to little avail. In fact, the blame was all on shifu, or how else could he have learned that move as soon as the broken Dragon Vein had forced him to it? More than half of his distracting thoughts were “Is shifu still there?” Shifu instructed him to sink into the sword, forget self and the world, but he was always afraid that some piece of instruction would be the last thing shifu ever said. Worried that he wouldn’t hear it clearly, his consciousness was always clinging to the words, going nowhere, not daring to abandon the person in favor of the sword.

Since Zhi Xiu had picked him up in the Blissful Village, it seemed that half a lifetime had passed. At last he was seeing him in person again.

Xi Ping thought that had he still been a teenager, he would have thrown himself at shifu and wailed while clutching his leg.

But he wasn’t a teenager anymore, so he only looked down at that pair of shoes, hiding his expression, and said disdainfully, “Shizun, do these shoes come from the time of Renzong or something? Are they wearable?”

“Give them back if you won’t wear them.” Zhi Xiu saw a pair of boots appear on his feet as soon as he moved them. “Why didn’t you put those on earlier if you had them?”

“Riling people up on purpose,” Xi Ping said very candidly while putting Zhi Xiu’s pair of “antiques” away in his mustard seed. “This is Ning’an embroidery, right? There are textile mills all over Ning’an, the embroiderers have all changed profession. Ning’an embroidery is a dying art. Old things from the Renzong and Xiaozong eras are favorites with Southern Shu’s upstarts. If we try them out in the Zhaoye antiques markets, they’ll sell for thirty liang of gold at least. Hey, shifu, why don’t you gather up all the junk you couldn’t stand to throw away back then, I’ll move it for you next time, family discount thirty percent off…hey…ow!”

He also seemed to have taken “thirty percent off” Zhi Xiu’s overwhelming sorrow about their long seperation; he instantly recalled this little bastard’s unsavory track record. “Do you have anything decent to say for yourself? Moon Plated Peak’s Lin-shixiong is such a quiet person. He rarely goes out of his way to interact with others. But because of you, these past few years, he’s sent over three hundred Heavenly Questions to Flying Jade Peak.”

Xi Ping froze several paces away from him. “Oh… Three…three hundred letters? Complaining about me?”

The corner of Zhi Xiu’s eye twitched. “What, do you think it was because he wanted to have some light intellectual chitchat with me?”

Xi Ping only knew that that punching bag Lin Chi would only lodge a complaint when he was at the end of his tether. He was surprise to find that in addition to his toolmaking, Master Lin was also such an indefatigable writer—even Zhao Qindan, who was always wielding her pen and hurling abuse, would feel ashamed of her own inferiority if she heard about this!

So his first reaction was, “Do you still have the manuscripts? Can you pick through them and see if there’s any we can publish? I’ll have someone assemble them and bind them to be sold.”

As he spoke he was already prepared to dodge the small branch that came whizzing toward him. In a flash, he had covered nearly half of Jinping City. “I’ll go help repair Jinping… Shifu, repairing the city will take spiritual stones, too, and the Kaiming Department is so poor it rattles. Without all the money I’ve been sneaking around to extort all over the place, where would we be getting the spiritual stones now? Just ask Bai Ling!”

Bai Ling was not thrilled to hear this.

He was a half-demon. In the presence of an upright shed skin cultivator, he was having some difficulty catching his breath. Therefore, he had been pretending to be a piece of paper when their cousin young master sold him out without warning.

Perhaps in a past life he had been the Viscount’s shield. Every time a certain person was getting beaten—regardless of who was doing the beating—he would always get dragged in.

Bai Ling was helpless. All he could do was brace himself and salute. “General Zhi.”

Zhi Xiu had just become a shed skin. His sword aura was still overflowing somewhat. He deliberately toned it down a little, put Zhaoting away in his mustard seed, and politely said, “Thank you for your efforts. Does the Kaiming Department have enough spiritual stones?”

“It’s all right. Many people in the Kaiming Department come from poverty. Everyone is very frugal,” Bai Ling said. “It’s only that there are many people and a great deal of things to attend to, and the immortal mountains allocate limited funds to outer sects. Sometimes we have trouble making ends meet when we encounter something like a natural disaster. Fortunately the Luwu have business abroad. With an ascended spirit like the Viscount to safeguard the shipments in secret, it goes fairly smoothly. They can transfer spiritual stones when the Kaiming Department falls short.”

So Zhi Xiu said, “I suppose that the Kaiming Department has no established foundations as yet?”

“That is correct. Apart from myself and my lord, the Kaiming Cultivators have all been cultivating for a very short time, and none of them have yet had time to rinse their spiritual bones…and anyway they don’t have the resources to establish foundations.”

Zhi Xiu nodded. His consciousness watched Xi Ping call up a crowd of Kaiming Cultivators. Xi Ping always made himself at home, not taking himself for a stranger with anyone. He assigned work to the Kaiming Cultivators the same way he usually ordered the Luwu around.

The Kaiming Cultivators’ skill level with talismans was generally not high—they had all taken crash courses and had no systematic knowledge. Anyway, practicing talismans wasted spiritual stones. They wouldn’t usually learn “useless” talismans and arrays.

But when these people got down to repairing the ruins, they were very skillful, as if they had practiced it hundreds of times. They were more adept at coordinating amongst themselves than even Heaven’s Design Pavilion. It was clear who had been safeguarding Great Wan in recent years during droughts, floods, and earthquakes.

Of the spiritual stone reserves Bai Ling had urgently transferred over, a small amount still remained. Not a wisp of spiritual energy was wasted. All of it dissolved into Jinping City.

The fractured riverbed and roads were joined with countless talismans. Damaged brick and tile returned to their original locations, the cracks in them “glued” shut by spiritual energy until they looked even stronger than before. The ruptured sewers underground and the broken tracks aboveground were all restored to their former condition bit by bit. Even the somewhat muddy and smelly waters of the Lingyang River became considerably clearer. The glazed tiles of Guangyun Palace shone as if consecrated…

Except that the things that had burned to ashes couldn’t be restored. Except that the dead couldn’t be brought back to life.

Zhi Xiu said, “Many silk dragon hearts were spent inside the Territory Map. I’m afraid that established foundation pills will be in short supply in the near future. Xuanyin Mountain won’t be expanding the established foundation quota for now. But the funds allocated to the Kaiming Department can be doubled in the future, so all the branches can recruit new open-eyed cultivators. If it isn’t enough, we can discuss it again.”

He was a new shed skin who had suppressed the Xuanyin Mountains with an accompanying plant. When he spoke these easy words, an echo instantly came from underground. The mountains and rivers agreed. The spiritual mountains were forced to obey.

Bai Ling knew perfectly well that he meant no harm, but he still couldn’t keep his spine from tensing amid this echo.

Zhi Xiu was also slightly shaken. He had an unprecedented sense that a single thought from him could affect all of Great Wan—the Dignitary of Rule's sealed mouth and the Dignitary of Fate's blindfolded eyes were in fact both shackles they had given them selves to ensure that they would be cautious in word and deed… No matter how you looked at it, while after a thousand years Xuanyin was also in decline, the fact that it hadn’t ended up like Sanyue and Lingyun was entirely down to the seals these two seniors had willingly taken on.

And the way of the sword was to begin with the most imperious and isolated way in the world. He needed a seal…

“In legend, the Kaiming and the Luwu are two divine guardian beasts. They protect the world of the gods, are mighty yet benevolent, have sharp claws and fangs but do not injure the meek. These are good names.” Zhi Xiu was talking to Bai Ling, but it also seemed that he was talking to himself. “Please convey to His Highness Prince Zhuang that I hope the Kaiming and the Luwu will stay true to their original intentions. If one is motivated by resources, one becomes the claws and fangs of spiritual stones. It unavoidably chills the heart.”

Having said this, he nodded to Bai Ling and instantly landed beside Xi Ping.

“Take this thing,” Zhi Xiu said in an apparently casual manner. “Put it away for me and keep it safe. Don’t auction it off.”

Xi Ping was just quickly familiarizing himself with Jinping’s layout. Hearing this, he turned his head. “Wow, shifu, have you finally brought yourself to open the mountain…”

Before he could finish, a beam of light shining like a white rainbow fell on him. This thing seemed to weigh over a thousand jin. With Xi Ping’s ascended spirit cultivation level, he was still pulled down from midair and stumbled when he landed.

Xi Ping was astonished.

He got a clear look at what Zhi Xiu had given him: Zhaoting!

Zhi Xiu—the same stingy shizun who had just wanted a pair of old shoes back—as nonchalant as if he had just tossed his disciple a piece of candy, pulled the map of Jinping out of his hands. “How much more is there? Let me see… Apart from the canal and Guangyun Palace, I don’t recognize any of it… Tell the Kaiming Department brothers to go repair people’s homes, I’ll take care of these two places. The sooner we can get things fixed, the sooner we can the city's people return to their homes after that shock—you should also go look in at home.”

Xi Ping, clasping Zhaoting two-handed, hadn’t come to his senses yet. He blurted out, “Will you come visit my house, shifu?”

Zhi Xiu gave him a strange look, as if he had said something completely superfluous. “Naturally I must go pay my respects to your honored parents.”

Xi Ping: “…”

He had a bad feeling.

Zhi Xiu said, “Or else how will I deal with those three hundred plus letters of complaint?”

A female cultivator from the Kaiming Department who had come to draw upon the spiritual stone stores overheard this remark and couldn’t resist turning her head away to smile. Zhi Xiu had old-fashioned manners. Seeing a strange woman, he swallowed the rest of what he had been about to say and temporarily let Xi Ping off the hook. He gave him a “behave” expression and went toward the canal.

Unlike the members of Heaven’s Design Pavilion, who had nearly all come in through Xuanyin’s Grand Selection, the Kaiming Cultivators had started out in the common revolt during the final year of Taiming. Among those who had been driven by anger at oppression to enter evil ways, there had been no small number of women. Later, they had also been pulled into the Kaiming Department. So the Kaiming Department had always accepted many female cultivators; they were no longer only limited to princesses.

Fair enough. The brave entered the Kaiming.

At any rate, there would be no more Jinghua Village.

 

After a wait of centuries, Jinghua Village at last saw the return of the one who had carved its tablet.

The mustard seeds and arrays holding the small village open were still there. Wen Fei gently tapped on the stone tablet at the entrance to the village with his folding fan, and the prohibition on the entrance silently dispersed. Though the blue-clothesers all knew what had happened in Jinghua Village, when they saw the devastation with their own eyes, they still turned their heads away automatically.

There was only one blue-clotheser with a newly established foundation who, as though he had lost his soul, staggered inside.

“Wang-shixiong…” A colleague wanted to go after him, but Pang Jian held him back.

“Let him be alone,” said Pang Jian.

No sooner had he spoken than they heard suppressed wailing nearby.

“He’d just returned from the Latent Cultivation Temple,” Pang Jian said softly. “He dithered for days, but in the end he didn’t dare to come… Earlier, he asked me to deliver his ‘last effects’ to his wife.”

The cowardly man had been enticed by the prospect of a road to heaven and had in the end abandoned the mundane dust. He hadn’t even dared to come in person to break it off with his wife and children. There had still been fantasies in his heart… He had imagined that in the future he might sneak a look at them, take care of them in secret—after all, a mortal lifespan wasn’t long.

But instead…instead…

The long night had ended, and amid the first rays of dawn in Jinping, they had heard the sage say that the spiritual mountains’ days were numbered; they wouldn’t even outlast a mortal lifespan.

Then what had all of this been for?

Wen Fei narrowed his eyes, looked at all the strange yet familiar sights of Jinghua Village, then stepped in. Where he passed, the corpses of women and children were appropriately laid out. He didn’t look closely at these people. He only took out a piece of “white paper” from his mustard seed, scattering it as he walked. Scraps of paper, like snowflakes, landed on the bodies and automatically turned into light blankets like silk that wrapped up the bodies.

In each place he went to attend to the bodies, he reached out to remove the mustard seed folded there.

Bit by bit, he dismantled Jinghua Village. The original appearance of these few mu of wetland at the heart of the lake was revealed, as bleak and desolate as a shattered immortal dream.

A walker in the mortal world quietly said, “General Commander, does this mean that…there won’t be a Jinghua Village from now on?”

Pang Jian raised his head to look at Wen Fei’s back and remembered what was said in Heaven’s Design Pavilion concerning this person.

In its entire history, the most special of Heaven Design Pavilion’s general commanders had been Wen Fenghan—other people got into the immortal sect based on either birth or luck; he had gotten in based on his looks.

Among the men Pang Jian had had dealings with over the years, on the score of appearance, it seemed that the only one who could compete against him was the Yongning Marquis Manor’s Xi Shiyong…but that brat Xi Ping had been spoiled rotten all his life and knew only too well that he was good-looking, so he wanted to show off to everyone he met. If no one paid attention to him and he was left to his own devices, he would gaze infatuated into a mirror, so there wasn’t much sense of looking at something forbidden—looking closely at him could easily inspire the desire to beat him up.

Peak Master Wen had much better deportment than that guy.

In his time, Great Wan’s Dragon Vein had been in perfect condition, and Xuanyin had yet to institute the “Grand Selection Year.” How long passed between selecting disciples depended on heaven—when one of the four great families produced a scion with excellent endowments, members of that clan within the inner sect would lead the way in starting a Grand Selection.

That year, the unexpected Grand Selection had happened to coincide with the imperial examinations. Wen Fei had had nothing to do with the cultivation world to start with. He had come to the capital to take the exams—he wrote good verse and had a name for being a romantic. He was a literary man. The emperor himself had conferred on him the title of Tanhua, the third-place graduate of the palace exam. While he had been out parading before the crowd, he had run into the immortal envoy coming to the capital.

The immortal envoy that year had been a medicine cultivator disciple from Li Yuelan’s peak. Her nature was shy. Because she hadn’t wanted to disturb the mortals, she had hung a stealth talisman on herself and gone against the flow of the crowd toward Heaven’s Design Pavilion.

Wen Fei had a first-class spiritual sense. A first-class spiritual sense was already extremely rare, and his spiritual sense was naturally concentrated in his olfactory sense.

The overwhelming majority of people had their spiritual sense concentrated in their eyes, and roughly another thirty percent had their spiritual sense concentrated in their ears—it was whatever their most acute sense was before opening their spiritual eyes.

Even Southern Shu’s beast-taming cultivators, who were celebrated for their sense of smell, mostly cultivated it deliberately after entering the Way. People whose spiritual sense was naturally concentrated in their nose were rare—clearly this person had been born less than honorable.

When they brushed shoulders, this uncommon nose caught the scent of medicine on the lady immortal of the way of medicine making through the stealth talisman. The stealth talisman instantly dissipated. Wen Fei’s eyes met those of the young immortal lady; gazing on her, he smiled.

Immediately upon entering the mortal world, the immortal lady slipped and fell to sexual charms. So that year, the name of the Tanhua first appeared on the Grand Selection roster, the reason given being his “uncommon spiritual sense.”

By an odd coincidence, the Tanhua didn’t enter the Hanlin Academy; instead, he joined Heaven’s Design Pavilion.