The lead story of toilet bulletins from every nation and every organization suddenly became this shocking news: “Northern Li sends troops to the southern mines, occupies Southern He Peninsula.” Every toilet bulletin sent a “scribe”—the writers who penned the articles—to risk themself hitching rides with merchant ships going to Southern He to get firsthand information.

There was endless gossip.

“Wanshuang has cut through every nation’s border inscriptions, one strike for each border, and those inscriptions that even masters can’t get through evaporated faster than steam.”

“If Wanshuang can cut through the border inscriptions in the southern mines, then aren’t the ones on the continent also…”

“It’s over, it’s over.” Some elderly people started seizing the opportunity to make alarmist statements to demonstrate the profundity of their experience. “The northerners are going to come south, just look, it’s the same as back in Renzong’s time, there’s going to be a war!”

“The weather is cold and the earth is frozen on the northern continent. The northerners all eat raw flesh like savages. I’ve heard that in their capital city of Yanning, it’s common for people to be beaten to death if there’s a disagreement in the street. Once the sun sets, no one without self-defense skills dares to go out. Bandits break down doors in the middle of the night, and when food is scarce, they’ll eat anything they can catch! They’ll even eat humans!”

“They’re all barbarians, it’s common for fathers and sons or brothers to share wives!”

“Th-that… My word, are they beasts?”

Unless matters rose again to the pitch of the Wan-He War, reasonably speaking, a struggle between immortal sects wouldn’t make it into the mortal world’s “current events” toilet bulletins—for one thing, mortals wouldn’t understand, and for another, they were afraid of casually bringing up the names of the Exalteds and accidentally violating some taboo.

But this time, events in the Southern He Peninsula turned out to be a falling stone that raised a thousand ripples.

It wasn’t that the common people had nothing better to do than worry about a “deserted” place like the Land of Turmoil. It was that the Sword Slave cutting through the border inscriptions then giving the order to destroy all Moon Plated Gold products had frightened them.

There was a toilet bulletin called the Tao World Record whose scribe had taken a picture of the Northern Li people destroying steam engines, just one picture—it was said that afterward the scribe’s camera and flying goose machine had been crushed by the northern barbarians, and it was unknown whether the scribe was dead or alive. That day’s Tao World Record sold out three extra print runs. Everyone in all the nations who could read Western Chu writing was trying to get their hands on a copy.

All kinds of rumors flew around, making a tremendous clamor. There were even people saying that Northern Li, after a serious outflow of money in recent years, was jealous of the southern continent’s prosperity and wanted to ban Moon Plated Gold again—there were rumors that Moon Plated Gold ought originally to have come to the mortal world eight centuries ago, and it had been the Northern Li people who had hindered that plan, as well as forcing Xuanyin to lock up the Golden Hand.

The wealthy were on tenterhooks: looked at this way, if Northern Li really did invade, all their immovable factories and industrial properties would come to grief. For the poor, it went without saying; their farmland was long gone. Many factories, trains, and ships settled their accounts daily. Workers were living hand to mouth. If war came, they would be finished.

The Tao World Record seemed determined to shock the world. Following on the heels of that precious photograph, it came out with an article that once again jabbed people in the spot they were most concerned about: the well-known scribe “Sir Xu” wrote copiously and fluently for over ten thousand words concerning the mysterious northern continent’s centuries-long struggle over Moon Plated Gold.

Moon Plated Gold had come from the immortal sects. It had always spread “from the top down.” Long before old Moon Plated Gold smelters had formally appeared, the immortal sects had already shed a great deal of blood on this account.

The Wan-He War had taken place on the southern continent. Far away on the upper reaches of the Tianze River, the northern continent’s disturbance hadn’t been so large, yet in degree of cruelty, it had perhaps even exceeded it—Northern Li’s struggle between progressive and conservative parties concerning Moon Plated Gold had extended for several years.

Yanning’s progressive party at the time, perhaps for their own ambitions and ideals, perhaps because they had seen enough of barren earth and fellow countrymen who looked like starved corpses, had asked for change. Kunlun, however, had split internally into two groups on this account: the conservative party opposed to Moon Plated Gold naturally opposed it on the basis of spiritual stones, while Kunlun’s inner sect also had inextricable ties to Yanning’s nobles, and another portion of its people decided to stand with their families.

The people of the north were savage and combative in their hearts. With the attitude of Kunlun’s masters ambivalent, the battle between the progressive and conservative parties escalated rapidly. At first it had only been open dispute and veiled strife at court, but starting from the assassination of Prince Jialuo, the second prince at the time, it quickly became tainted with blood. After that, the “flames of war” spread to the immortal mountains.

The two parties created a hopeless situation, which at last was resolved with a final word from Kunlun’s Second Elder—when news came of the outbreak of the Wan-He War, the Second Elder publicly said, “Moon Plated Gold is inauspicious.”

The Second Elder wasn’t the oldest of the elders, but his position among Kunlun’s shed skins was the most unique. There was a rumor that said even the Sect Leader yielded to him somewhat. With his airy sentence, the progressive party, which had had the firm upper hand, was uprooted overnight.

The attitude among the Night Revenants altered greatly. They tacitly acquiesced to Yanning’s conservative party mobilizing the imperial guards to storm the capital and place on the throne a new emperor who killed his own father and brothers. Many of the progressive party’s nobles, caught unawares, simply died in the fighting.

In this battle, the streets of Northern Li’s capital were covered in blood. The stench took months to disperse. History called it the Dark of the New Moon Incident.

Apart from the Second Elder who had wrought such a great change with a single sentence, the article also mentioned another great personage: Wanshuang’s Sword Slave.

The scribe Sir Xu, whether to avoid violating a taboo or as a show of respect, did not mention the Sword Slave’s full name and only used her title—she was the daughter of the old Prince Pingyang; after being selected to enter the inner sect, she had been given the title of Duchess Changji. She was one of the Second Elder’s two disciples.

It was said that this duchess had been outstanding while still in the Disciple Hall. Before reaching her fifteenth birthday, she had opened her spiritual eyes, beating out a whole crowd of fellow disciples who were senior to her and stronger than her.

Other ways might have moments of enlightenment through happenstance, but there were no shortcuts for sword cultivators. Everything came of hard work, day after day. Duchess Changji was a natural genius. She established a foundation at thirty, unprecedented and unrivaled in the way of the sword, such that the Second Elder couldn’t bear to make her give up Kunlun’s Ninefold Sword. It was said that by the time she was in her sixties, this frightening genius of the way of the sword had already reached the late established foundation stage. The Second Elder was holding back her progress only because he was afraid that her emotional state was unsteady and something would go wrong when she faced a heavenly tribulation.

And this genius who was unusually young for the cultivation world was also confronted with a problem for which the Kunlun Mountains had no precedent: her nearest blood relation in the mortal world was still living.

Duchess Changji’s twin brother had inherited their father’s rank, becoming the new Prince Pingyang. Twins of mixed sex were much closer than an ordinary brother and sister would have been. While one of them had been rejected by the Disciple Hall and the other had become its legend, they had always been very close. For the New Year or on important days like Prince Pingyang’s full decade birthdays, the sword-obsessed duchess who was normally unmoved by anything would be certain to make an appearance in the mortal world, even if she happened to be in seclusion.

When he was sixty years old, Prince Pingyang suffered a serious illness. The duchess, who had never liked meeting strangers, had on this account gone south to Shu to request medicine—apart from the Kunlun Mountains and Yanning City, Southern Shu unexpectedly became the third place she had been to in her life.

Prince Pingyang was no good at swordsmanship, but he was a cunning and crafty politician. Throughout his life, he performed countless great feats that were recorded in the annals of history, and he was hated bitterly by his political opponents.

Of this brother and sister, one didn’t understand swordsmanship, and the other didn’t understand subterfuge. Ordinarily, they each moved within their own unconnected spheres, without mutual interference. At any rate, the close ties that came from being born of the same womb couldn’t be broken.

But fortune makes fools of people. This Prince Pingyang just happened to be one of the leaders of Yanning’s progressive party.

On the night of the Dark of the New Moon Incident, the residence of Prince Pingyang, who was already past seventy, was broken into by enraged rebel troops. He was strung up with gashes cut into his neck and thighs and bled to death. Everyone in his residence was punished.

“On the one hand was her blood brother, and on the other was the shizun who had doted on her to no end since she had joined the sect. The tragedy of some geniuses lies in excessive concentration. Apart from what they love, they think that nothing else has anything to do with them. They forget that they are human—you and I are nothing but two-legged beasts, asking for nothing in this life but ‘power.’ Whether they concern scholarly research or swordsmanship, the three thousand paths of the Great Way are three thousand paths for the pursuit of power. Anyone who insists on lying to themself and refusing to acknowledge this point will come to a bad end.” At the bottom of the South Sea, Wangge Luobao sighed as he pointed to the toilet bulletin spread out on the table, saying, “It’s said that Wu Lingxiao nearly went berserk. This probably explains why she hates Moon Plated Gold so much.”

Across from Wangge Luobao, the Queen Mother of the West raised a cup of tea and sipped it. “Now that you mention it, she isn’t very old.”

Disregarding the sovereignty of the four nations, the Sword Slave had smashed the border inscriptions on the Southern He Peninsula. Her consciousness was no longer limited; it could embrace the whole of the Southern He Peninsula at a glance. It was no longer safe for the Queen Mother of the West to remain on land. All she could do was hold her nose and form a temporary alliance with Wangge Luobao and move her hidden realm to the South Sea as well.

There might be hundreds of thousands of mu of land within a hidden realm mustard seed, but the space it took up in reality could be boundlessly small—as long as you had enough spiritual stones to supply the space-collapsing arrays.

Right now, the Queen Mother of the West had moved her hidden realm, which could hold hundreds of people, into the mouth of the next life spiritual fish.

“That’s correct.” As they spoke, Yu Chang’s image appeared above a communication device on the table.

As soon as he appeared, Yu Chang affectionately greeted Wangge Luobao and the Queen Mother of the West, entirely ungrudging, as if the Queen Mother of the West enjoying his protection while scheming against him and Wangge Luobao secretly playing dirty and setting off the poisonous miasma had never happened.

“This ‘Sir Xu’ is no ordinary scribe. She’s a cultivator backed by a powerful individual. Her article ought to be reliable. She doesn’t write about what happened to the Sword Slave afterward. When I was hiding out in the Slumbering Dragon Sea, though, I had dealings with the northerners and heard some things.”

“Goodness, you’ve come just in time, Yu-xiong.” On seeing him, Wangge Luobao was even more affectionate. The two of them seemed to be brothers who had been separated for many years. “Please do go on, we must know ourselves and our enemy.”

“It seemed that this battle between new and old had come to an end, and the punishments of mortals wouldn’t spread to the immortals of the inner sect. Sadly, immortals also have emotions. While Kunlun’s inner sect prohibits fights among disciples, the conservative party’s suppression of the progressive party was evident. Wu Lingxiao’s plight also became extremely awkward. On account of her shifu, the progressive party were bitterly resentful towards her, and the conservative party knew her family’s standpoint and also treated her as an outsider. Wu Lingxiao was leading an extremely stifled life, so she left Kunlun’s inner sect, requesting to go into seclusion in the Disciple Hall… Before the rancor between teacher and disciple could be resolved, the Second Elder got in trouble in the Beijue Mountains.”

Yu Chang paused, then gave the two other evil cultivators a brief explanation of Kunlun’s Beijue Array. “It’s said that this Second Elder might have had a slight disagreement with the Sect Leader at the time and perhaps got distracted while repairing the Beijue Array and carelessly became trapped in it. To this day he hasn’t been found, dead or alive.”

Wangge Luobao said, “Duchess Changji was in an awkward situation to begin with. Once her shizun left, wouldn’t it have become even harder for her to find a place to shelter?”

“Yes.” Saying so, Yu Chang suddenly gave a faint sigh, then said with slight ridicule, smiling, “Kunlun is swamped with sword cultivators. Female cultivators are very rare. Though Wu Lingxiao had no reputation as a beauty, her appearance must have been dainty enough when she was human. She didn’t have an androgynous look. A woman like her had overpowered her peers… even her elders. Naturally there was as much idle gossip as you could ask for. When the Second Elder was there, they didn’t dare to raise their voices to say it, but once the elder left, naturally they couldn’t be held back.”

Women didn’t understand shit about the way of the sword. It was just that her fellow disciples had been too uncomfortable to fight her in earnest and had given way. That was how she had earned her false reputation in the Disciple Hall.

Her rapid progress—how could the direct disciple of the Second Elder not make rapid progress? A single pointer from the Second Elder would be enough for anyone to spend decades cudgeling their brains to comprehend.

As for why she should have been so fortunate as to not only enter the inner sect but even be able to take one step right to heaven, be accepted as the Second Elder’s direct disciple… Well, who knew?

A woman always had a woman’s “advantages,” anyway. It was pointless for others to envy her or be jealous of her. They couldn’t compare.

While Yu Chang was base and shameless, saying this kind of thing, regardless of whether the person he was speaking of was friend or foe, his manner was always somewhat restrained. After all, as a child, he had personally thrown himself at the burning stake planted on all the women in the world.

The Queen Mother of the West’s expression softened slightly. She asked, “Is that why she gave up her human body, preferring to transform herself into a half-puppet?”

“Kunlun’s sword cultivators have had a tradition of holding competitions since ancient times. That year, the prize for the established foundation cultivator competition was a valuable whetstone—said to have been used by Western Chu’s Hui Xiangjun when she repaired the famous sword Xiuluo. Once word got out, everyone’s eyes turned red with desire,” Yu Chang said. “Wu Lingxiao was in fact remarkable. There was absolutely no doubt that she would take first place among her peers. She was conceited and arrogant to begin with, and adding in the ostracism she had faced from her fellow sect members at the time, perhaps she had some premeditated intention of getting revenge. In short, she practically humiliated her opponents when they fought, leaving no margin, provoking general outrage.

“Before the final round of the competition, thirteen of Kunlun’s sword cultivators who had suffered defeat at her hands banded together to waylay her. Wu Lingxiao knew very well that she couldn’t defeat them, but she still refused to dodge their attack and save herself, and she said some nasty things. So the two sides came to blows, in violation of sect rules. Her fellow sect members had taken pointers from each other and attacked in earnest. By the time the sect was alerted, she had killed one of the thirteen sword cultivators laying siege to her and crippled six. Of those remaining, all had been wounded in the fighting. She herself was seriously injured. Her meridians were destroyed. She could go no further in the way of the sword.

“The casualties on both sides were quite disastrous. Kunlun at first wanted to smooth things over, but the dead cultivator’s teacher wouldn’t let it go and used his family connections to compel them. This was when the Second Elder’s other disciple—Wu Lingxiao’s shixiong Xie Chu—happened to return from his travels. The two of them cultivated different sword paths and had an age difference of several centuries. Adding in that men and women must not associate closely, I figure that they normally didn’t have much to say to each other. Shortly after Wu Lingxiao entered the sect, her shixiong became an ascended spirit and left the Second Elder’s tutelage. I haven’t heard that they had an especially close relationship afterward… Otherwise, there wouldn’t have been people bullying her like that. After all, she had plenty of fellow sect members. Weren’t the ones who wanted to kill her also fellow sect members?

“In fact, the inner sect had hinted that everyone should patch it up to avoid trouble. But when Xie Chu heard what had happened, he didn’t say a word. That very night, he ripped out and severed the meridians of the other twelve sword cultivators involved one by one, then went to find the dead cultivator’s shifu and have a public debate match with him, in which his opponent’s Way of the Heart was damaged. Had Kunlun’s Third Elder not come and put a stop to it in time, there might well have been a death. Xie Chu defected from Kunlun then. I’m afraid you aren’t familiar with the name ‘Xie Chu,’ but you must have heard of his nickname—the Beijue Mountains’ Blind Wolf King.

“Think of Kunlun’s Second Elder at the time. He was so high and mighty, and then in the space of a few brief years, he disappeared, one of his disciples departed, and the other fell to the brink of death. But Wu Lingxiao truly was a lunatic. She came up with a wild notion. She turned up a forbidden art somewhere and found an alternative path, turning herself into a sword-bearing half-puppet, not quite human and not quite monster—the most shocking thing was that Wanshuang, which no one had been able to take up for over a thousand years, actually accepted her. That was how she became the Sword Slave she is now.”

At this point, Yu Chang sighed slightly. “That is how ruthless this person is, arrogant to the point that none of her fellow sect members can stand her. It’s said that with Wanshuang in her hand, she doesn’t even pay attention to the Sect Leader’s edicts. Appeasement and schemes will both fail against her.”

Wangge Luobao shook his head, his passionate and sinister eyes turning toward the Queen Mother of the West. “The Sanyue Mountains are still sealed. Chu is powerless. The Xiuyi of my nation have always bullied the weak while fearing the strong. They only dare to bark a little from a distance. They don’t even dare to dispatch a presentable ascended spirit. As for Southern Wan—as can be seen from Wanshuang’s differing policies toward the various nations, Kunlun must have reached some private understanding with Zhaoting. Your Highness, the road ahead of us might be said to be full of obstacles. Apart from you, there is no one on the southern continent who can control the Sword Slave.”

The Queen Mother of the West’s expression grew slightly grave.