The shadow spread out feebly on the wall. A big shining white furball appeared. Xi Ping couldn’t tell at first glance whether it was a dog or a bear.

He saw the furball shake. A skinny face like a Chu person’s emerged from the pile of fur, with a pair of glasses that wouldn’t fog up no matter what sitting on its nose.

The head looked around the Marquis’s study as if it had just cultivated a human form for itself and had never seen anything before. On this “expedition to the big city,” it examined the desk lamp, the desk clock, and the pot of hot water as though they were novelties, then finally met Xi Ping’s eyes.

As soon as they looked at each other, each guessed the other’s identity—that furball wasn’t a dog, and it wasn’t a bear; it was an old grim-toothed wolf of the north.

“The Blind Wolf King?” said Xi Ping.

“Tai Sui?” said the head.

“You flatter me.” Xi Ping pinched a qin string between his fingertips. “What, didn’t His Highness Prince Zhuang tell you how to safely get in contact with me?”

After beginning to cultivate, he had spent less than half a year on Flying Jade Peak. Before he’d had time to work out the rules and etiquette, he had been kicked straight into the Impassable Sea by the cultivation world. Since then, he had grown lawlessly in lawless places. Adding in his nature and the influence of the ungovernable way, he had an arrogant air of scorn for everything around him. On first sight of him, outsiders’ first thought was always of “Tai Sui,” not some rule-abiding disciple of an immortal sect.

“I do in fact have a piece of reincarnation wood. It’s only that there just happened to be some remnants of the Perplexing Sword’s energy I gifted many years ago that had yet to dissipate. Since I was going to contact Jinping, I wanted to look in on my old friend while I was at it.” In order to demonstrate his good faith, the Blind Wolf King was speaking clumsily in the Wan language. He vaguely probed, “I didn’t expect Tai Sui to come so fast. It seems that Jinping City is indeed Your Excellency’s territory. The Chu fell against a worthy opponent here.”

From the speed of his reaction, it could be perceived that Great Wan’s domestic situation was busy but not chaotic; it probably wasn’t anywhere near as desperate as outsiders imagined.

“Naturally,” Xi Ping said, deflecting. “Since the Blind Wolf King has honored us with his presence, if I had come late, wouldn’t I have been snubbing our distinguished guest?”

Xi Ping had never shown this aspect of himself in front of his family. By the time the Marquis of Yongning came to his senses, these two gentlemen had already exchanged several rounds of incisive remarks.

The Marquis took a deep breath. He felt that this was no time to be reasonable, so he interrupted and pulled the rug right out from under their feet: “Exalted, there is a reincarnation wood tree right under my study window. He can get here from the immortal mountains more easily than from the garden—also, this is my son.”

The Blind Wolf King: “…”

Xi Ping: “…”

Tai Sui’s identity was no longer a secret: the Sword of the South’s sole direct disciple, the son of… some marquis or other of Great Wan’s Jinping—the Blind Wolf King was careless and had only remembered that much. He couldn’t even speak the Wan language easily. Not everyone would necessarily know the era and the emperor of a neighboring country, so who could be expected to remember how many marquises or monkeys or orangutans there were in Jinping?

The old fellow suspected that his Wan language was so bad that he had misunderstood. “Your what?”

Xi Ping spoke almost at the same as him, his voice lowering considerably: “Dad.”

The Marquis unhurriedly saluted. “My son is ill-mannered, an embarrassment in front of the Exalted. In the recent turmoil in Jinping, it was owing to your Perplexing Sword that my whole family’s safety was secured. I have not yet expressed my gratitude.”

Xi Ping only now remembered that such a thing had happened. You had to give way to someone who had done you a favor. All he could do was shut his mouth sullenly.

The Blind Wolf King stared so hard that his eyes nearly burst out from behind his glasses. He was so shocked that he broke into Northern Li language. “Him? Your son? Isn’t that… Well, did that talisman I gave you back then work out? How is the child’s spiritual sense?”

Xi Ping was feeling very bewildered by the strange turn this dialogue had taken. Then he heard the Marquis answer with a trace of a smile, “A little better than third-class. Thank you, Exalted.”

As far as the cultivation world went, only a first-class spiritual sense was a natural talent; everyone who didn’t meet that criterion was ordinary, without much difference between the slightly quicker and the slightly slower, so there was no need to deliberately separate them; they were generally termed second-class. Below ordinary people were the disabled, born with lacking wits, those for whom a soul-searching wouldn’t turn anything up; these were called “third-class.”

Translating the Marquis’s words into plain language, he had just proudly and gratefully told an outsider, “My son is a little better than an idiot.”

If Xi Ping hadn’t been hiding under the “Tai Sui” mask year in and year out, having developed the skills not to let his emotions show on his face, he wouldn’t have been able to keep his expression intact.

“Hahaha.” When this Blind Wolf King who looked like a little pretty boy laughed, he actually did rather show the distinctive characteristics of the people of Northern Li. It was as if there was a trumpet in his chest. “Sadly, with my cultivation level, I could only give you a seal that worked up to a point. I suppose this is your only son and heir… Sit down, let’s talk, sit. Alas, a mortal’s lifespan is brief. Just the blink of an eye, and you’ve aged so much. You would have been much better off if you had stayed to cultivate the Perplexing Sword with me in the Beijue Mountains.”

Then, on his end, he plopped down into his nest of furs and very familiarly crossed one leg over the other. Pointing at Xi Ping with the “I held you when you were a baby” attitude of an uncle, he said, “Nice kid! An ascended spirit under fifty, and the southern continent is about to go to pieces from all your messing around! What an achievement! Be sure to pass along my respects to your shifu… That unreliable Zhou Ying, he didn’t make it clear, either. If I’d known you were part of the family, I wouldn’t have bothered with all of this, I’d have just planted a tree and called you over here to have a drink with me. Wouldn’t that have been nice?”

Xi Ping: “…”

Senior, aren’t you being a little overly familiar?

The Marquis of Yongning, seeing his son’s completely lost foolish look, said, “Our family has always been small. You know that.”

Xi Ping nodded a little woodenly: Jinping was his family’s ancestral home, but apart from Zhou Ying, all the cousins he had played with as a child were from his mother’s side. The only close relative on his father’s side was his aunt, who had gone into the palace when she was young. This was in fact quite strange.

As the capital city of Great Wan, Jinping was in a valuable location that very rarely experienced natural disasters. The locals lived fairly well. While the Xi family wasn’t illustrious, they had never been destitute. Their ancestors had passed down some farmland, and generation after generation would turn out scholars; occasionally, someone might get lucky and even snag a position as a petty bureaucrat. A family like this, while they wouldn’t necessarily spread to the four corners of the nation in a few generations, at least wouldn’t be nearly childless… Xi Ping had always thought that this was down to the family’s unhappy fates as beauties.

“It’s because there is an illness in our bloodline that makes it difficult to have children.” The Marquis raised his head to look at the family tree on top of the bookcase. “In your grandfather’s generation, there were four brothers to begin with. Two of them died while still in their swaddling clothes. Then there was another one who you’d be calling your fourth grand-uncle if he were alive. He was deranged from a young age. You always felt that he could see things others couldn’t. When he spoke, what came out was nonsense that no one understood. He got to thirteen or fourteen, then jumped into a well and died.”

Xi Ping had a vague impression of having heard about this when he was little, but he hadn’t taken it to heart. Now he was startled, feeling that this manner of lunacy sounded like an unusual spiritual sense.

Indeed, the Marquis went on, sighing, “Practically every generation of our family has had such a person. Your grandfather lived to be nearly fifty, and he managed to raise your aunt to adulthood. Seeing that she was lively and healthy when she was young, like a normal person, the family thought that the illness in our bloodline had weakened, not expecting it to manifest again in His Third Highness.”

Sure enough, they were speaking of the paramount spiritual sense, which made it hard to survive!

Then Xi Ping suddenly caught up. The Marquis had only said his aunt was a “normal person”; he hadn’t mentioned himself!

The Blind Wolf King casually interjected: “Your father is very fortunate, being a little beneath those lunatics. He just falls on the stronger end of a first-class spiritual sense.”

“I do well enough during the day. Apart from being a little sensitive to small noises and disturbances, there’s nothing inconvenient. Only when I was young, I often had palpitations from fear in my sleep, which left me with slight heart disease.” The Marquis looked at Xi Ping, for once not so sternly, and softly said, “I wasn’t planning to get married. I hadn’t counted on meeting your mother. She knew perfectly well what my situation was, but she was still willing to throw off her family and fortune to marry me. There is no way to repay that favor… But because of me, we didn’t have children for several years after our marriage. She didn’t say anything, but she regretted it. She often went to pray for children at Southern Sage Temple.”

The Blind Wolf King, laughing, said, “As if he would help!”

“Of course it did no good,” the Marquis said. “I was young and impetuous then. I decided to go to the black market and try my luck, see if there was any way to seal off my bloodline.”

Xi Ping suspected that his ears had stopped working. “You went where?”

Nine out of ten evil cultivators were short on money. Many people would in fact take on work from mortals for a high price—but for one thing, the price was extremely high, and for another, you needed to find connections. If you just went to the black market and tried your luck, if it was good, you might come across a Wei Chengxiang, and if it was bad, you might run into someone like Wild Fox Country’s Snake King.

He felt that his family’s inheritance wasn’t a paramount spiritual sense, it was extreme daring… No wonder they had nearly all died without issue!

“A family like ours, while we couldn’t reach to the immortal sect above, we would always attract some monsters from below. Our forebears had dealings with evil cultivators.” The Marquis sighed, saying, “I exchanged a protective immortal tool handed down from my ancestors for information, and they instructed me to go to the Beijue Mountains to ask His Highness the Wolf King.”

At this point, the Blind Wolf King dinned, “They were telling you to find a disciple of the Beijue Mountains, but you, you misunderstood and just ran off to the feet of the Beijue Mountains.”

Xi Ping could no longer feel surprise. “…How could you find the Beijue Mountains without cultivation?”

“A path I left behind.” The Blind Wolf King blinked at him. “The Beijue Mountains have a secret passage built of talismans that mortals can also pass through. Only a person with a high enough spiritual sense and good enough luck can come upon it… I’ve always wanted to take someone with a high enough spiritual sense as my successor. I placed that hidden realm back when I first took up residence in the Beijue Mountains to use to filter disciples. But it turns out that people with high enough spiritual senses are so rare that no one found that door in centuries. As time went on, I forgot all about it.”

Xi Ping: “…”

If the Crown Prince Snow Wolf found out about this, he would probably be mad as a gourd. The Beijue Mountains, which he had only reached by the skin of his teeth, nearly burning himself to ashes, turned out to have another entryway!

“I suppose I owe you my life,” the Blind Wolf King said, sighing. “For certain reasons, my consciousness was nearly lost at the Beijue Pass then. If not for the fire you started in the pavilion, I’d have frozen there forty-odd years ago.”

The Marquis said, “I only unintentionally lent a hand, while the talisman you personally conferred upon me sealed my bloodline and allowed me and my wife to live normally for many years and have offspring. I cannot thank you enough.”

“Don’t mention it, you’re making me regret it—think of the fate that brought us together. You’d have been much better off as my disciple, you good-for-nothing. All you can think about is a wife and kids.” The Blind Wolf King waved a hand. “Since I’m already here, it’s pretty good to look in on an old friend, and now I can rest easy. I hear my sword attack cut down the Heartless Lotus, so I suppose it must have been just about used up. I’ll make a long story short. I just sent my shimei a letter, and I figure that idiot spy working for me has already copied it and passed it on to the Kunlun Mountains—I suppose you know who my accomplished shimei is?”

The Sword Slave—Wu Lingxiao—was right now standing on the border between Li and Chu’s southern mine areas. She had received the letter that the Snow Wolf had penned in the Blind Wolf King’s stead. No expression could be seen on her ravine-crossed face. Whenever she received Linked Hearts from the inner sect or official documents and letters, she always destroyed them once she was finished reading, but this time, after a slight pause, she put that letter away.

The two Northern Li sword cultivators following her exchanged a veiled look, then heard a bone-chilling clank as Kunlun’s Wanshuang left its scabbard and sliced at Chu’s border inscriptions.

It was as if the ground had been slit open. The hum of the sharp sword bounced around throughout the whole of the Lancang Mountain Range. The spiritual energy on the inscriptions all flowed away like steam. Even the Northern Li cultivators were silent as cicadas in winter.

“It seems that all the friendly nations of the southern continent can no longer spare the attention to control the southern mines, such that evil cultivators are running amok here,” the Sword Slave said slowly, holding up Wanshuang. “That being the case, I will temporarily assume control over the Lancang Mountains in their stead.”

Then she waved a hand. Armed and armored Northern Li cultivators and soldiers poured into the other nations’ mining areas.

“Among the cultivators of the Shu and Chu mines, many are suspected of colluding with evil cultivators. They must not leave the camps at the mining areas. They will all be kept for later interrogation. Southern Wan’s mining area has disobeyed the Xuanyin Mountains. Tie them all up and send them back to Zhi Xiu as a token of our good will to buy their information. I want to dismember that Yang clan survivor.” The Sword Slave gave instructions without so much as turning her head. “Starting now, I am in charge of the Southern He Peninsula… Stop all those steam engines, their noise is annoying me to death!”

The Kunlun Mountains had never acknowledged that the Second Elder was dead. It was only her shixiong Xie Chu who, for reasons unknown, persisted in believing that shifu was gone. But he knew how strained her relationship with shifu had been at the time. He never mentioned shifu to her in private… The Sword Slave had grown up with her shixiong. She knew that this was the Blind Wolf King’s subtle warning to her.

Her interaction with the evil cultivators was hard to explain, and Kunlun had grown suspicious of her; he was telling her to watch her step.

The Sword Slave appreciated his kind intentions, but she didn’t take the warning seriously. With the Wanshuang Sword in her hand, they were welcome to suspect her; anyone who objected to her could come and fight about it.