When a shed skin appeared, there was practically no need for him to do anything. Where his consciousness swept, the established foundation cultivators were instantly rendered immobile. Inside and outside the Yongning Marquis Manor, all the established foundations who had been incited and then plunged into confusion by the destruction of the undead Ways of the Heart were held where they were by Zhi Xiu.

In a flash, he landed in Dangui Lane.

The established foundation blue-clotheser who had just put down Xi Yue went weak at the knees and knelt with a thump.

Zhi Xiu didn’t attend to him. He flew forward to sever the random bursts of spiritual energy coming from Xi Yue. Seeing that the half-puppet could no longer speak, he reached out a hand to summon a snow-white tree branch and smeared Xi Yue’s blood on it. “Your core array has been destroyed. I don’t understand earworm half-puppet techniques. Tell me what to do.”

Just then, a piece of paper carried by a wild wind hurried towards them—the great battle of the masters had ended, but the Kaiming Department’s “great battle” had just begun. The Kaiming Cultivators everywhere had to set about repairing the fields, factories, and houses that had been damaged by the Territory Map’s troublemaking, and they had to restore the river embankment and provide disaster relief. Bai Ling had originally thought that with Xi Ping to oversee Jinping, he could leave it to him and go coordinate elsewhere. But before the night was out, when he had just reached Suling, he’d heard that there had been yet another incident.

When Bai Ling landed, he took only one glance at Xi Yue, then sucked in a breath and turned to go. “I’ll go get in contact with the Luwu and have them grab the worm master Bu Zhichou in Tao County.”

Seeing them, Xi Yue seemed to know that the Marquis Manor was safe and sound. He smiled. The blood on the tree bark quickly twisted into a word: “Ge…”

Zhi Xiu froze. All of a sudden, he thought that encountering Xi Ping may not have been good for Xi Yue. Xi Ping had spent the first half of his life in perfect contentment, whereas the half-puppet practically hadn’t had a chance to be human. It could sometimes be very hard for the two of them to understand each other…unlike the half-demon and half-human who had escaped the Impassable Sea together and could rely on each other absolutely.

A drop of warmth was enough for Xi Yue to spend half a lifetime digesting, making him overexert himself to repay it.

For this child, the Yongning Marquis Manor was a bowl of potent elixir fed to a person too sickly to handle it…he might end up giving his life in exchange.

“I’ll take you to see him,” Zhi Xiu said gently. His consciousness had already swept towards the Xuanyin Mountains. The thirty-five peaks that had been sealed by Zhang Jue sensed something; they were trembling.

He sent out three beams of sword energy that connected to the snow shuffler growing in the rear garden, securing the four corners of the Yongning Marquis Manor. He nodded to the dumbfounded Pang Jian, who had rushed over. “I’ll leave this to you and Bai Ling.”

Having said this, he picked up Xi Yue and vanished into thin air.

Right now, at the bottom of the Xuanyin Mountains’ Sea of Stars, the blaze of the Unbound Furnace had reached its pinnacle. At last, it swallowed that final star stone, which was as big as a mountain.

Xi Ping controlled the Unbound Furnace alone, no longer speaking to Zhou Ying, all his focus given over to that tumor-like star stone.

When the Eternal Flame burned away a bit of that stone, he learned some information from it.

During Xuanyin’s internal strife, the Dignitary of Code Li Fengshan had shown signs of decline. His consciousness had been sealed by the Xuanyin Mountains’ three other elders, and he had made it through another decade or so before dying.

To make a mean comparison, these high elders were like the wheels of a steam carriage. Emperor Taiming and his son had punctured Zhao Yin with a big awl; the explosion had been heard all over. For Li Fengshan, however, it was more like the air had slowly been let out of him by numerous slender needles; he had deflated soundlessly.

After death, his body had “ascended,” turning into spiritual energy; probably only sages of the elders’ level could have felt it. Then his shed skin Way of the Heart had slowly sunk into the Sea of Stars.

The Li clan was the most well-established of Southern Wan’s big families; Li Fengshan had been senior even to Zhao Yin. Before they had frittered it all away, their clan’s prosperity had been in no way inferior to that of the Zhao clan. The shed skin’s Way of the Heart had dropped like a whale falling into the depths. The Ways of the Heart of common origin had immediately gathered to cling to it. Thus had the first Way of the Heart that could disrupt the will of the spiritual mountains been produced amid the Xuanyin Mountain Range.

Xi Ping carefully delved into that star stone and saw that this “malignant tumor” had even disturbed the distribution of spiritual energy throughout the country—on the inner sect peaks under the Li clan’s jurisdiction and in places where clan members congregated in the mortal world, the spiritual energy concentrations were nearly ten percent higher than elsewhere.

Their power in court had collapsed utterly, but they had used the exceptional advantages of their ancestral inheritance to build factories wildly and rake in money. While admittedly the civil unrest during the twenty-ninth year of Taiming had been caused by Zhou Ying’s meddling, traces of activity by Li family members also appeared.

And Li Fengshan dying and ascending had happened precisely in the year that Zhou Ying had escaped and Liang Chen had fallen to the demons.

No wonder. While the Sea of Stars couldn’t light the Impassable Abyss, when the half-skeleton of hidden bones had emerged and hidden in Jinping, the Sea of Stars still ought to have given warning. Reasonably speaking, it shouldn’t have waited until eight years had passed and Liang Chen was plotting to seize Jinping’s Dragon Vein to react.

At this point, the power that could hoodwink a spiritual image brand, give Liang Chen the spirit-protecting pill, and lure him down into the Impassable Sea seemed on the point of being revealed—

Just then, the surge of spiritual energy Zhou Ying had drawn came to an end.

The fire in the Unbound Furnace had burned the Xuanyin Mountains clean. Half of the interference in Zhang Jue’s mind instantly disappeared. In surprise and bewilderment, he realized what Xi Ping and the others had been burning.

But the ascended spirit peak masters were unlike the established foundations, who had first been driven crazy and out of control by the “heavenly edict,” then been at a loss when the “heavenly edict” had suddenly been removed. When one’s cultivation reached the ascended spirit level, the Way of the Heart became impregnably firm. Rather than saying their minds had been influenced by the “heavenly edict,” it would be more accurate to say that the “heavenly edict” had only revealed the truth. They had already “joined ways” with the stones underground.

Now the dead stones underground had been burned, but the “living stones” remained.

The three ascended spirit “stone blocks” who had lost their senses suddenly heard Zhou Ying speak through the reincarnation wood: “Gentlemen, who still has protective immortal tools?”

“What’s a protective immortal tool?” said Wen Fei.

“I was in a rush and didn’t bring enough. I packed some for Shiyong.”

“I can’t right now, they’re in the mustard seed, feel around and use whatever you like!” Xi Ping needed to concentrate. “What’s wrong?”

“The spiritual wind has disappeared, and the ascended spirit peak masters are coming towards you,” Zhou Ying said indifferently. “I can’t reach you. My cultivation is too low, and that wind just now blew me too far away.”

Xi Ping: “…”

What a great brother! How had Bai Ling managed not to murder his superior after all these years? That half-demon da-ge must be the one really cultivating the way of clarity.

Meanwhile, Zhi Xiu had already passed through the snow shufflers on Flying Jade Peak.

The Xuanyin Mountains’ seal was like paper. As soon as he arrived, it immediately fragmented along with the flying snow filling the air.

Zhi Xiu first flew up to the sealed immortal palace at the summit of Flying Jade Peak. A spirit ice pearl flew out at his summons and turned into a big sphere larger than a person when it landed. Zhi Xiu placed Xi Yue inside it to keep his spirit from being extinguished. Then there was no time to say anything. He turned and flew towards the Sea of Stars.

The Sea of Stars was one chaotic battle. Apart from the Lin family members, who still had some recollection that they should protect Lin Chi, the other peak masters, without hesitation, were hurling all kinds of talismans towards the three ascended spirits who had lost their senses.

Wen Fei wasn’t a tidy person. He normally stuffed elixirs into his mustard seed at random. Anyway, with his cultivation level and sense of smell, there was no way he could get the wrong one. Now that he couldn’t see or smell and was pretty much grabbing blind, this unreliable medicine cultivator absolutely couldn’t remember what was what.

With Xi Ping, it was even more of the same. He had no idea what was in the mustard seed Lin Chi had given him, and there was no time to discuss it now. He had no alternative; he pulled back his focus from where it was sunk into the Eternal Flame and rummaged through the mustard seed.

The two of them didn’t talk it over; they struck simultaneously, one scattering medicine at random, the other tossing things at random.

Zhou Ying opened his mouth but didn’t have time to say anything. So he swallowed his words, appraised the situation, and felt that no matter what, his mouth couldn’t be faster than these two’s hands. Therefore, he simply stopped giving pointers and quickly withdrew from the Sea of Stars.

A large portion of the things Lin Chi had given Xi Ping were experiments with spirit-conducting gold, all deadly weapons—ascended spirit grade. Immortal tools made of spirit-conducting gold automatically absorbed spiritual energy. They only had to be switched on; there was no need for a cultivator to activate them with spiritual energy. Xi Ping could neither see nor feel. How could he know what kind of metal any of these things were made of? So he recklessly activated all of them with spiritual energy. “Go fuck yourselves, you stupid leashed dogs!”

An ascended spirit’s force striking ascended spirit grade spirit-conducting gold weapons was simply overkill. Before they could confront the enemy, he himself had blown up nearly half the immortal tools. Adding in the other peak masters either actively attacking or passively defending…the spiritual energy boiling in the valley of the Sea of Stars was comparable to the essences of a thousand ascended spirit masters being ignited all at once!

Even Zhang Jue’s blindfold fell. “Stop!”

Amid the fierce quaking of the valley of the Sea of Stars, there was a sudden whizz. Among the pile of immortal tools Xi Ping had tossed out, there turned out to have been a bundle of fireworks reinforced with spirit-conducting gold. Lin Chi had been inspired to make this when he remembered the great fireworks on Flying Jade Peak that had once brought down the north slope with two spiritual stones.

He had only been making it for fun and had accidentally put it in the mustard seed… Cultivators’ lifespans were too long; the shortest span of time they ever contemplated was a decade. Lin Chi had casually made enough for ten years.

There was a bang. Perhaps even the Bell of Tribulation went deaf. All of Great Wan could see the enormous fireworks rising into the sky, carrying Wen Fei’s medicinal powders that may have been for anything at all.

It was like the folk tale about the imperial court of the thirty-three heavens descending to the mortal world. The newly risen sun in the east faded amid the bright colors as if its fires had been put out. After the colors passed, there came a big cluster of silver flowers, as if all the eternal spring brocade that had been in the world many years ago had burst into bloom at once.

Wen Fei’s medicinal powders floated throughout the mountains. The flowers and grasses that had been revolving systematically through the seasons forgot the date and grew wildly. Vegetation crept everywhere, like monsters. A gigantic colorful mushroom broke through the roof of the lofty main hall of the Principal Peak. The white mourning streamers tangled with its mycelia.

This brightly-colored mushroom grew all the way up to the mouth of the divine image of the Southern Sage before half of it was charred by a bolt of lightning that could take this no longer; it let off an unusual fragrance of cooking. Each of the disciples who accidentally breathed it into their lungs took on a dazed expression, plunged into some unknown illusion.

The auspicious animals didn’t know to hold their breaths and breathed in a different kind of medicinal powder. Whether blue luan or white deer, immortal crane or spirit fox, all of them opened their mouths and barked like dogs.

In over a thousand years, there had never been such an uproar on the Xuanyin Mountains’ solemn and silent Principal Peak.

Amid these huge explosions like illusions, there were also now and then mixed in some ascended spirits who had been thrown up into the sky by the spiritual wind. The flustered ascended spirit peak masters tried using talismans and immortal tools to stabilize themselves, but all the powers they used required spiritual energy and stimulated the spirit-conducting gold in the fireworks a degree further. The fireworks climbed step by step up the sky, so dazzling they startled the whole of the southern continent, like celebrations for a hundred new years all squeezed together!

In the midst of this auspicious and jubilant atmosphere, the Sea of Stars was lifted in its entirety into the sky.

Innumerable stars representing “fate” were set loose at once, like an immense prank.

Luo Qingshi lay face up on the ground. The fireworks lit up his bloody, pitiful form. A smile of pleasure appeared on his cynical doll’s face.

Cracks came from the cliffs on both sides of the Sea of Stars. The ancient spiritual mountains couldn’t sustain this kind of stimulation. The cliffs were about to collapse. At the moment of peril, ice-cold sword energy appeared out of nowhere, freezing the mist permeating the valley. Then upright birch trees quickly put down roots and sprouted from the cracked stone of the mountains, forcibly mending the cracks. In the blink of an eye, they had woven a big net, holding up the tottering cliffs.

The layer of protective spiritual energy around Zhi Xiu was too strong. The glittering medicinal powder couldn’t get near him. When he saw these dregs of nameless poisons, the corners of his eyes twitched. He clenched his teeth and shouted towards the valley: “Xi Shiyong!”

A mist flew his way. Zhou Ying practically “rolled” out of the mist. He stumbled a long way in midair before finding his footing, but because he wasn’t at all embarrassed, this didn’t seem awkward.

Once he had his sword firmly under his feet, he saluted Zhi Xiu. “General Zhi, please descend to speak. He’s gone deaf.”

Zhi Xiu: “…”

The sword cultivator’s consciousness instantly enveloped the mess of the Sea of Stars. He pushed all the ascended spirits who had been sent flying back to the ground. The wildly leaping spirit-conducting gold was swept aside by a single blow. Next, he borrowed a blizzard from Flying Jade Peak and washed away Wen Fei’s bizarre medicinal powders.

The ice and snow met heat and melted. All the vapor rose and formed clouds. A moment later, a strong rain fell, scouring the mess of the Sea of Stars.

The inscriptions and arrays inside and outside the Sea of Stars were so tattered there was nothing left of them. The “stars” were washed into gullies by the rain. The star stones that had accumulated over thousands of years had been committed to the fires of the Eternal Flame. Only that faded little prayer mat in the depths of the valley had unexpectedly survived amid this storm.

Zhang Jue at last opened his eyes. He didn’t come to his senses until Zhi Xiu landed beside him.

The corners of Zhang Jue’s mouth twitched. Before Zhi Xiu could speak, he floated down into the valley, picked up the little prayer mat, patted the dust off it, then turned and headed off without a word to the Hall of Reflection on Errors beneath the Principal Peak—this was the place where Li Fengshan had once been locked up.

The Sea of Stars was empty, the paths of the stars in the sky had gone astray; the general trend of events was like a flood that had burst the banks.

But for some reason, the Dignitary of Fate’s step was somewhat lighter that before.

Only embers remained in the Unbound Furnace. The ascended spirit peak masters lay higgledy-piggledy throughout the valley, making a certain established foundation escaping entirely unscathed seem even stranger. Zhi Xiu raised his hand to remove the authority of the mutinous peak masters and placed immortal-binding talismans on them, imprisoning them in Yuntian Palace.

Finally, he turned up Xi Ping at the bottom of the valley.

No matter what, Zhi Xiu couldn’t work out what the hell Wen Fei had fed him. All he could do was send a beam of sword energy directly into his essence, like he had rinsed the Sea of Stars, forcing the remaining return to unity powder clean out of his body.

The senses that had been suppressed by the return to unity powder repaid him twice over. Xi Ping’s arms and legs began to cramp. He curled into a ball.

Zhi Xiu grabbed his wrist to check his pulse and was just searching all over himself for pain relieving and healing pills that would work on an ascended spirit when he heard that Xi Ping was actually laughing intermittently. His laughter seemed a little off. Zhi Xiu frowned, then saw the veins in Xi Ping’s neck and forehead stand out.

Xi Ping forced his convulsing meridians apart and rolled over onto his back to let the downpour fall onto his face.

“Shifu…” he said faintly, “I’ve risen from the dead.”

Zhi Xiu was silent for a moment, then let go of his wrist. “Come with me.”

A moment later, Xi Ping, as though exhausted, was leaning against the spirit ice pearl holding Xi Yue. His body heat couldn’t warm the pearl; instead, the pearl froze the rainwater soaking him.

Tao County’s Luwu had received the order and had already carried the worm master Bu Zhichou back in a sack, pressing the worm master’s blood onto reincarnation wood by force. Xi Ping had no time to thank them.  He caught Bu Zhichou’s consciousness.

“This…this is Xuan-xuanyin?!”

Xi Ping could sense this dishonest worm master’s consciousnesses revolving wildly, eagerly trying to have a look around, so he aggressively shoved him back. “No nonsense. Take a look at him and I’ll let you live.”

“Hey, hey.” Bu Zhichou clicked his tongue feelingly. “I’ve been saying the arrangements in Tao County are far-reaching, and wouldn’t you know it, Tai Sui isn’t some unknown evil…hss! Spare me, senior… Th-there-there-there’s nothing to look at here, he stabbed through his own core array, who’s going to be all right after gouging out his own heart? If he didn’t have a half-immortal’s cultivation, he’d already… Ow, senior, I wasn’t finished, there’s a way, there’s a way. Just keep his spirit from dispersing and have him establish a foundation. It’ll just take some spiritual stones…but you’re orthodox immortals of the spiritual mountains, you must have plenty of spiritual stones…”

As Bu Zhichou spoke, he snuck a look through the reincarnation wood to examine the true countenance of the Tai Sui in front of him, but he saw that when he was finished speaking, this mysterious ascended spirit with his dazzling features suddenly looked distraught.

“No way,” Bu Zhichou thought. “He can’t bear to spend the trifling sum of spiritual stones for establishing a foundation? Seems this half-puppet is useless.”

The next moment, the worm master’s vision dimmed. He knew nothing more.

Xi Ping pressed a hand against the spirit ice pearl and closed his eyes. The cold of the spirit ice pearl turned his fingertips bright red.

Xi Yue laboriously raised his hand, as though trying to reach him, but also as if trying to get him to take his hand off the ice.

“Shifu.” Xi Ping couldn’t bear to look at him. He abruptly turned away. “Your disciple has a presumptuous request. Please take Xi Yue as your disciple, whether direct or of record…pass on your way so he can establish a foundation.”

Xi Yue’s hand fell.