Xi Ping’s mind was a blank. As if dreaming, he called out “san-ge,” not knowing whether he had made a sound.

Illusions flashed before his eyes. He dimly heard running water on the bank of the Lingyang River twenty years ago. He forgot where he was.

Zhou Ying flicked his sleeve. Something seemed to knock the top of Xi Ping’s skull open and pour in a ladle of cold water. It chilled him from the top of his head to his tailbone.

The illusions lingering around him dispersed, and he got a clear look at the person in front of him, as well as the surroundings—on the mirrored plane closest to him, a bald acquaintance was just tangled up yet again in the endless cycle of his fate, single-minded, not taking a single glance outward.

Xi Ping gave a start. He had no time to think of anything else. He hauled back his scattered intellect. “Is it the one that the late emperor fished up from the Impassable Sea? Can it stop a shed skin?”

“Of course it can’t. Didn’t you personally kill the heart demon itself?” Zhou Ying raised his eyebrows. “Why haven’t you woken up yet?”

Xi Ping said, “Wha…”

There was a whistling like a hurricane. The shed skin consciousness performing the soul-searching knocked aside the shattered Way of the Heart of clarity, rooted out Zhou Ying’s wavering spirit, and pressed directly forward.

Xi Ping abruptly turned his head. He saw that this so-called “heart demon seed,” which sounded quite mystical, was in fact just a layer of glass as thin as a cicada’s wing!

That heart demon at the bottom of the Impassable Sea had been blown up by a half-immortal’s spirit collapsing when he established his foundation. How much better could a heart demon seed do? A shed skin could destroy it utterly with a single deep breath.

They were like two small insects hiding in a paper lantern amid strong winds and heavy rain. The heart demon seed was a barrier scarcely better than nothing; it couldn’t shield them. Xi Ping nearly felt the sword energy pressing against the center of his brow. He couldn’t open his eyes.

He didn’t know whether the heart demon seed had already broken. He instinctively leapt forward to shield Zhou Ying, transparent qin strings flashing at his fingertips, like a mantis prepared to hold back a chariot, desperate and awkward.

But the anticipated pain of being hacked to pieces didn’t fall on him. The countless mirrors of the heart demon seed reflected the sword light, and all its dim and clouded “mirrored planes” cleared, countless scenes flashing over them: Zhou Ying sending the Heavenly Question back to Xuanyin, Zhou Ying starting to collude with the Blind Wolf King over a decade ago, the Luwu lying low in Northern Li…

Xi Ping’s back was as rigid as a coffin. He unconsciously held his breath.

The images reflected on the facets of the heart demon seed must have been a projection Zhou Ying’s consciousness had left behind before entering. Right now, the shed skin master performing the soul-searching was like someone who had just walked into a dark place with limited light sources. He had seen the images in the mirrors and, at a distance, had been deceived on first glance.

But the images in the mirrors were certainly different from his true consciousness. Once this person noticed that something was wrong, he would immediately be able to catch the two of them.

Xi Ping quickly asked, “San-ge, did you use the way of clarity to collect this thing? What kind of powers do you get from a heart demon seed?”

Zhou Ying said, “For this heart demon seed, I am like the heart demon itself.”

After hearing this “crazy talk,” Xi Ping’s head began to ache—the heart demon itself had been a good-for-nothing that got by on its mouth; it was only good for being fodder at the bottom of the Impassable Sea.

What was the good of being like that thing?!

He struggled, still holding on to a thread of faith in the fact that “san-ge is reliable.” “Then can you control what the mirrors on the heart demon seed reflect? Can you think of a way to concoct some false ‘memories’ to fool this person with?”

“I can concoct something, but it would be impossible to fool him,” Zhou Ying said, his voice still even. “My guess is that the shed skin performing the soul-searching is likely to be Kunlun’s Sect Leader. It will take him only a breath to finish flipping through my whole life. At your cultivation level, you can only just barely keep up with the images. A mere established foundation like me can’t concoct fast enough to keep up with his flipping. It’s all right as long as he’s flipping through for himself, but if I step in to meddle, he’ll notice at once that something isn’t right. Do you think death isn’t coming fast enough? Stop trying to be clever.”

Xi Ping fell apart. “Has your brain been addled by not being able to think up sarcastic things to say while you were inside the way of clarity? Do you have an escape plan or not?!”

“Don’t get excited.” Zhou Ying frowned as he spoke. “Why are you so impertinent now?”

Xi Ping: “…”

His consciousness was special. Even if it broke, he wouldn’t necessarily die. But that scoundrel Zhou Ying hadn’t slipped away, and his Way of the Heart had already shattered. He didn’t know how many more breaths his body could hold out for. All he had left was this bit of consciousness!

“I kneel before you, brother dear. You subduing the heart demon seed after establishing a foundation was a recent event, he’ll turn that segment up right away, and then what will be left for us to…”

But just then, on the heart demon seed’s mirrors, the scene of Zhi Xiu and Zhou Ying discussing the diplomatic mission to Northern Li suddenly flashed.

Xi Ping’s spiritual sense was currently tensed to the utmost. As soon as he glanced over, he saw what was wrong with that picture: when they had been discussing the journey to Northern Li, there had been only three people present in the little cottage on Flying Jade Peak; even Xi Yue had been resting next door. But now, in the heart demon seed’s mirrors, while there were only the three of them inside the small room, on the ground there were human shadows belonging to far more than three people.

Even more bizarre, while the other images had flashed by and vanished, when the person performing the soul-searching flipped to this scene that was like something out of a ghost story, the speed suddenly slowed down.

Xi Ping’s heart was in his throat. He didn’t know what was happening. He shot a questioning glance at Zhou Ying.

“Don’t look at me, I’m not doing it. I told you, I can’t keep up with the speed of a soul-searching shed skin and don’t dare to play tricks at random under his nose.”

“So what’s…”

“Legend has it that the heart demon seed has nine thousand facets, in which anything with a mind can see itself reflected,” Zhou Ying said softly. “Naturally they can also reflect this soul-searching master.”

No sooner had he spoken than Xi Ping heard a soft crack. He thought that something had broken, and his heart nearly stopped. But when he raised his head, he found that a mist had appeared over the heart demon seed, which had originally been thinner than a sheet of paper. That mist seemed to be quietly absorbing the soul-searching shed skin’s spiritual energy, letting out minute crackling sounds like freezing ice. The heart demon seed’s shell was actually thickening bit by bit. The oppressive might of the shed skin sword cultivator, which sent prickles up your spine, instantly lightened a good deal.

At the same time, as the soul-searcher “examined,” the images projected on the heart demon seed’s outward facets became more and more lively.

Xi Ping was dazed. He almost thought that all the people in the mirror were real people. He could even sense each person’s cultivation level and aura.

And that image was a projection of the soul-searcher’s consciousness. The more detailed it was, the further he had been taken in, and the more spiritual energy the heart demon seed had absorbed from him, making its outer wall sturdier as well. In hardly any time, the oppressive might that had nearly broken Xi Ping’s spine had almost entirely been cut off by the heart demon seed, their “paper lantern” turning into an impregnable fastness… It was like a metaphor: the further you probed, the further you were from the truth.

Xi Ping was dumbfounded: that worked?

With all the real memories belonging to Zhou Ying that had just shown up on the heart demon seed, the soul-searcher had only flipped through them without taking a close look. He had only picked out this one, which had been tampered with.

“No matter how true the truth is, what a person believes will always be what they wish to believe.” Zhou Ying audaciously reached out to tap on the outer shell of the heart demon seed. The soul-searching master outside had absolutely no idea. “I can’t trick him, but he can trick himself.”

On the heart demon seed’s facets, the surplus shadows beside Zhi Xiu and Zhou Ying caught the soul-searcher’s notice and became even clearer; among them was one Xi Ping’s couldn’t fail to recognize—you couldn’t find a second cultivator who was that bald and legless. That was Zhuoming.

The soul-searcher thought that Zhuoming was working with them.

Xi Ping was briefly stunned. When he tried to appraise the battle to defend Jinping from the point of view of an outsider, he found that this matter really didn’t bear close examination: Zhuoming had traveled vast distances to entice the Sanyue Mountains and Xiang Ning to throw themselves against Xuanyin’s Territory Map; Xiang Ning had been written off as soon as he was used, Sanyue had sunk into chaos, but Zhi Xiu had taken the opportunity to throw off the spiritual mountains’ fetters and break through the shed skin barrier; also, two of Xuanyin’s three High Elders had died in the battle, leaving only the Dignitary of Fate, who was least adept at fighting…as well as Zhi Xiu’s shifu. The millennia-old spiritual mountains, unassailable as a fortified city, had changed hands overnight.

Zhuoming, who had played a major role in this, really did seem to have been working with them. It made perfect sense!

Continuing along this train of thought, a large part of the reason that the Xuanyin Mountains had tolerated the birth of the Luwu was that Qiu Sha had suddenly towered into view. And Sanyue losing its new full moon sage and waning from its full splendor also seemed inextricably linked to Hui Xiangjun’s tampered-with Unbound Furnace…

In a case of “great minds thinking alike,” the soul-searcher had obviously had the same thought as Xi Ping. The other shadows in the image took on Qiu Sha and Hui Xiangjun’s appearances.

Reincarnation Wood, Heartless Lotus, Eternal Spring Brocade, Late-Autumn Red, Snow Shuffler… Inside that tiny cottage, ancient demonic gods from antiquity to the present were assembled. The mysterious powers that had once been throttled and put down by the spiritual mountains had once again ganged up to conspire to topple the spiritual mountains.

And in the subconscious of this soul-searching master, these ancient demonic gods’ manner of existing was very particular—they were all in shadows. In that image, even the living Zhi Xiu and Xi Ping were sitting with their backs to the light, their faces indistinct.

Great Wan’s Territory Map…and even the South Sea Hidden Realm—both just happened to be the shadows of spiritual mountains.

Xi Ping thought: He doesn’t think that the Territory Map and the South Sea Hidden Realm are what’s behind us “evil garden cultivators”?

As soon as this thought flashed by, he saw the outlines of a dragon and the next life spiritual fish added to the complex shadows in the little cottage. Evidently, the soul-searcher did think so.

Next, this huge fabricated conspiracy, like a Way of the Heart, became a framework to perfectly explain all the things Xi Ping had more or less understood in recent years.

In the images flashing on the heart demon seed, Zhou Ying’s real memories became vaguer and vaguer, while that heart demon seed, once again like a Way of the Heart constantly being refined, developed a shell that grew ever sturdier and thicker.

Suddenly, the soul-searcher seemed to notice something. The images on the heart demon seed’s shell, which had been unusually limpid, blurred. Without warning, the focus of the images on its facets fell on Zhou Ying, whose role had been minimized.

Next, the heart demon seed quaked, and Zhou Ying’s real memories were turned up once again. The heart demon seed’s outer shell cracked open layer by layer. The shed skin sword cultivator’s oppressive might once again pierced through the heart demon seed’s shell.

All the hairs on the back of Xi Ping’s neck stood up. “What now?”

“A shed skin’s spiritual sense is connected to the spiritual mountains,” Zhou Ying said. “It seems that the Kunlun Mountains can’t stand by and watch anymore.”

The soul-searcher had evidently noticed something was off about Zhou Ying. His speed in flipping through his memories slowed considerably. He “saw” Zhou Ying fly towards the Principal Peak after receiving Princess Duanrui’s Way of the Heart…

It was on the Principal Peak that Zhou Ying had taken the heart demon seed. And once the heart demon seed was seen, all the hallucinations would fade. It would be like a glass sphere.

Oh no!

Xi Ping backed up, guarding Zhou Ying. “Coming to someone else’s den to swindle them, what were you thinking… What are you doing?”

Zhou Ying had reached past his shoulder to press his hand against the heart demon seed. An image was suddenly inserted into a corner of the heart demon seed’s shell: the Beijue Mountains’ Blind Wolf King receiving a letter from the south and tearing it open in front of Zhou Ying.

With Zhou Ying’s cultivation level, if he did too much, he would certainly be overreaching himself. Therefore, he only pushed this segment of memory into a very out-of-the-way place and let it flash by, so quickly that even Xi Ping didn’t see it clearly.

But an unbelievable thing once again took place. The soul-searcher who was just about to turn up the heart demon seed caught that image that flickered by like lightning and seemed all of a sudden to lose interest in Zhou Ying. The image that had been out at the edges was pushed into the center of all the facets on the heart demon seed.

Xi Ping’s gaze immediately fell on the letter in the Blind Wolf King’s hand. There was oppressive sword energy on that letter, its might even more fulsome than that of the soul-searching shed skin.

“That’s…”

“A letter sent to the Blind Wolf King by the Sword Slave,” Zhou Ying said. “That’s real. I didn’t see the contents of the letter, but I figure it’s most likely scolding him for blindly messing around in affairs between our two nations…but Kunlun’s Sect Leader might not think that. The word is that the Blind Wolf King and the Sword Slave were once shixiong and shimei, studying under the same teacher—and the matter of the Sword Slave being poisoned in the southern mines is so suspicious.”

Before he had finished speaking, the soul-searcher stopped paying attention to a mere established foundation like Zhou Ying. The “shadow conspiracy” in the little cottage on Flying Jade Peak was once again turned up.

This time, apart from the baldy, the tower, and the beauty, there was another shadow among them—in the corner, merging with the cottage’s ceiling beams because her physique was too large, only a slight edge of the shadow showing… It was the hilt of a big sword.

It looked like Wanshuang!

Violent light instantly exploded inside the heart demon seed. A tiny seal…in the shape of a sword flew out through that soul-searching consciousness.

Before Xi Ping could ask what this meant, he and Zhou Ying simultaneously heard voices from outside.

An unfamiliar man—this must have been the soul-searching shed skin master—said to the High Priest, “Wu Lingxiao. It’s her, just as I thought.”

The High Priest sighed. “The Sword Slave… Alas, the Sword Slave. As expected, she and Xie Chu still harbor resentment over what happened in the past.”

Xi Ping turned his head to look at Zhou Ying in astonishment, unable at first to keep up with this shed skin master’s thoughts: did this gentleman suspect that the Kunlun Mountains had a mole, that that mole was the Sword Slave herself, and that she had faked her own poisoning?

Not even the brush that had written in the toilet bulletins of unseemly relations between Zhuoming and Xuanwu belonged to a mind this broad!

Zhou Ying laughed and stuck up a finger towards him: Shh—

Then the unfamiliar man who had performed the soul-searching continued, “The spiritual mountains were created to punish evil and suppress demons. Our nation has an ancient saying—there is a shadow beneath the light; bliss gives rise to danger. Xuanyin has that overweeningly ambitious Territory Map, Southern Shu has an abyss at the bottom of the sea, Western Chu’s danger lies among its many mountains, and it seems that Kunlun’s ‘shadow’ is among the spiritual mountains themselves… No wonder that though we inherited our shizun’s Way of the Heart and reached the shed skin boundary, we were all refused and turned out by Wanshuang.”

The Sect Leader and the elders had quested bitterly along the way of the sword, yet they had never been able to draw Wanshuang from its sheath. They had stood by and watched as the foremost sword under heaven fell into the hands of a nobody, a puny junior. This was no different than their shizun the Sword Ancestor reaching out from a thousand years ago to slap them in the face.

Such that a mighty thousand-year-old shed skin was now kept in check by a brassy, ugly woman.

Could it be that they were no match for that Sword Slave?

That was impossible.

So there could only be one explanation: Wanshuang had betrayed its master.

“This is a shed skin’s heart demon. The heart demon seed has already been planted,” Zhou Ying said. “This is what the Dignitary of Rule Elder Lin taught me. Fun, isn’t it?”

“Lin… What did he teach you?”

“While it is true that shed skins are puppets of the spiritual mountains, these puppets’ humanity will sometimes struggle free of the ‘heavenly ordinances’ of the spiritual mountains, for good or ill,” Zhou Ying said, “as long as the thought is strong enough—look. I’ve won my bet.”

All of Xi Ping’s thirty-two teeth began to itch at once. For a moment, he knew why Xi Yue liked biting people. “Are you crazy?!”

Before Zhou Ying could scold him, Xi Ping quickly said, “The Luwu losing contact, was that your doing? Undo it, let me come over there, hurry!”

When the Way of the Heart shattered, the body would die. Fortunately there was the heart demon seed to temporarily protect Zhou Ying’s consciousness. Xi Ping didn’t especially understand the heart demon seed, but he sensed that Zhou Ying’s condition now was the same as Liang Chen’s when he had taken the spirit-protecting pill.

If that was the case, there ought to still be time to take him back to the Xuanyin Mountains and ask shifu to think of something. If there was really nothing else for it, they would have to find a freshly dead body for his consciousness to snatch.

Though that would mean severing the immortal path, and his lifespan would also…

Zhou Ying was watching him in amusement. “What, becoming an ascended spirit right under a full moon sage’s nose wasn’t enough for you? You want to steal a corpse out from under the swords of three great shed skins, too? That’s some skill you’ve…”

Hearing the words “steal a corpse,” Xi Ping suddenly exploded. “You’re talking nonsense again!”

Zhou Ying suddenly reached out and patted him on the head, as if he were still eight years old. Then from outside came the Kunlun Sect Leader’s voice: “High Priest, the demons are running rampant, and the Sword Slave holds Wanshuang. Wanshuang is connected to Kunlun’s great array. It would be easy to slip up and shake the foundations of the spiritual mountains. We cannot alert her too soon. This Wan envoy is already dead. I froze his consciousness just now, to guard against it dissipating and being noticed by Xuanyin. You said that you had a way. What must we do now?”

The High Priest beckoned. Zhou Ying’s body floated up.

“It’s no matter,” he said. “All we need to do is break the connection between him and the disciple name token in the Xuanyin Mountains. We will only announce that the Wan envoy is staying as a guest of Kunlun—since we are to have peace talks, Xuanyin can leave a hostage here. There is nothing Zhi Xiu can say about it.”

Xi Ping’s first reaction was that this ought to be impossible. If Kunlun could sever the connection of a Xuanyin disciple’s name token, they could have seized the Xuanyin Mountains long ago.

“With your cultivation level, coming to Kunlun would be offering yourself to the slaughter. What, are you going to ask your shifu to come be my backup?” Zhou Ying said, smiling. “I couldn’t stand the shame. The heart demon seed has been planted in the Kunlun Mountains, and you know the whole story. Go on, my destination has arrived.”

“Your…”

Before Xi Ping could finish speaking, his consciousness was irresistibly pulled away—his consciousness was relying on the reincarnation wood sapling that Zhou Ying had planted inside himself. That sapling had been enabled by spiritual energy, and Zhou Ying had removed the spiritual energy!

He heard Kunlun’s Sect Leader say, “You mean…there?”

What?

Once again, he said that specialized term that Xi Ping didn’t understand.

Xi Ping had never before regretted not having made an intensive study of the Northern Li language.

“He’s talking about the Ceaseless Mirror, the Kunlun Mountains’ divine tool.” Zhou Ying’s figure was already gone. Only his consciousness spoke into Xi Ping’s ear. “The foundation of the first spiritual mountains in the world, the place each possessor of a paramount spiritual sense spends his life wanting to have a look at. I won’t die. Look after Bai Ling for me…”

“San-ge!” said Xi Ping.

“Xiaobao, we will meet beyond the bounds.”