The waking dragon was one of Shu’s Three Islands’ sacred beasts, a king in the water, with a special internal spiritual energy pump that let it move freely back and forth between the deep sea and the shallows without being crushed by water pressure. When its body turned into a rainbow, it could move instantaneously.

In the blink of an eye, it was a hundred li away, diving right into an array formation deep in the sea.

This was an array formation full of the characteristic style of the Miah, large and concealed, like a huge beast-catching net. Apart from spiritual beasts reared by the Miah, nothing else could find this place.

The arrays were like transparent passageways in the water, which only manifested when spiritual beasts and cultivators passed through them. Countless arrays were floating there, overlapping, so it was impossible to see what was what—especially since that waking dragon didn’t go right through the arrays but jumped from point to point, moving instantaneously… By the time a cultivator’s spiritual sense was touched, it was already too late.

Before Xi Ping, who was in the waking dragon’s shadow, could finish identifying the first array, his spine suddenly went cold. From the shadow, he shouted resolutely to the big animal, “Stop! Stop it!”

There was no “seeming” about it—this array formation really was a beast-catching net!

The waking dragon’s frantic long body was like an insect that had crashed headfirst into a spiderweb, then rolled around in it several times!

Next, the waking dragon turned into foam, and its shadow disappeared. Xi Ping, hidden in the spiritual beast’s shadow, was firmly trapped among the array formation pressing toward him from all sides. It was as if there were stones tied to his whole body; he was rapidly pulled to the bottom of the sea—

Not good. This was a trap!

In a moment of desperation, qin strings flew from Xi Ping’s hand, and a beam of sword energy shot out. But the instant his fingers touched the Tai Sui Qin, he knew he had made another mistake. The arrays enveloping him turned in a half-circle, like the constellations revolving, rebounding all the sword energy back at him.

Xi Ping narrowly managed to dodge, almost getting a lock of hair chopped off. An invisible array seized this moment to brand itself onto his fingers and instantly climbed all over his body. A white sheen like a pearl’s appeared on Xi Ping’s body. He went rigid, like a puppet fixed in amber, unable to move a muscle.

The spiritual threads of the array twined around every strand of his hair. The milky white radiance covering him lit up the dark sea depths, where even the fish and shrimp had vanished.

Just then, a large air bubble appeared in the seawater next to him. It refracted the white light that passed through it into all colors. The body of the waking dragon with its rich play of color took shape once again. From its giant python-like big head shot a rather cheerful gaze…a human gaze.

The waking dragon opened its mouth. Its long tongue nearly poked Xi Ping’s face. It spoke in a human language: “Fellow Cultivator Tai Sui.”

Xi Ping wanted to answer, but the arrays holding him flickered; even his tongue was immobilized.

“If I were you,” said the waking dragon, unhurriedly circling him, “I would think carefully before using a borrowed power. After all, Yu Chang-xiong was also once my ally. We’re all familiar with his methods.”

Xi Ping: “…”

That Centipede Yu had a foot on eight different boats.

“Let’s both put our cards on the table. Even if you sincerely wanted to destroy the Lancang Mountains’ great array, you still wouldn’t have been unable to work out that I would be waiting on the sidelines. You wouldn’t have acted on such a grand scale, and you certainly wouldn’t have chosen to announce yourself in Western Chu. So it must have been…how do you say it in Wan? Oh, ‘giving someone a taste of his own medicine,’” Wangge Luobao said through the waking dragon. “All the clansmen I brought with me have at least established foundation level cultivation, and they’re indignant now. It wouldn’t be so easy to make them turn around. After all, the ‘grit projection’ is of reduced value in your hands. So I guessed that you wouldn’t use people. I’ve finally managed to invite you over.”

Xi Ping’s shortcomings were very obvious. He had no firm foundation in talismans, arrays, and inscriptions. His cultivation level had spurted up too quickly. Unlike others, he hadn’t experienced hundreds of years of accumulation and trial by fire. Though he was very skilled in petty pilfering techniques learned from black markets everywhere, how many ascended spirits could you meet on the black market in a few years? Encountering a cultivator of the same level or higher, he had only a few moves at his disposal. If his opponent set their mind on researching him, they would even be able to figure out what move he would use.

“You really are much harder to handle than Yuan Hui.” Having said this, Wangge Luobao saw Xi Ping’s expression change slightly. As if he could read minds, he laughed. “Don’t look at me like that. I was born less than three hundred years ago. I didn’t have the privilege of knowing that ancient demonic god even older than the spiritual mountains. It’s only that I inherited my sect founder’s Way of the Heart and understand a little more than others.”

As I thought, Xi Ping said to himself. It could have been said that he and Wangge Luobao had neither past resentments nor recent grievances between them. Though he had indeed disturbed his plans in the South Sea, looking at Wangge Luobao’s actions in the aftermath, he felt that this Miah-Xiuyi mixed blood man hadn’t actually been focused on the South Sea Hidden Realm at the time; instead, he had been focused on usurping authority over the Miah clan, provoking internal strife, and freeing himself of Zhuoming while he was at it.

The odd-eyed man had even set aside past grudges to team up with Yu the Great Hole-maker, who had changed sides right before the battle.

Wangge Luobao’s incessant scheming and determination to make trouble for him wasn’t aimed at Xi Ping himself but at the hidden bones he carried.

And to hear him talk, this targeting must have started in the time of Ancestor Tianbo.

Xi Ping quickly recalled the information the Luwu had obtained.

It was said that Wangge Luobao had inherited Ancestor Tianbo’s Way of the Heart. This was very special—while the disciples of the founders of the other spiritual mountains, hindered by the prevailing ideological trends of their generation, hadn’t directly accepted their shizuns’ Ways of the Heart at face value, they had still practically all used them as reference. The Ways of the Heart of the full moon sages had all been inherited and preserved in greater or lesser part, whether directly or indirectly. Only Lingyun’s Ancestor Tianbo had merely given instruction without passing on his way, keeping his Way of the Heart a closely guarded secret even from his direct disciples. On departing the mortal world, he had left behind a beast-taming flute bearing his Way of the Heart; no one who wasn’t of mixed Xiuyi and Miah blood could approach it.

In the early years, Lingyun had selected quite a few people of mixed Xiuyi and Miah blood from noble families. No matter how strong their spiritual sense or how good their constitution, not one of them had been able to inherit Ancestor Tianbo’s Way of the Heart. It was considered getting off easy if those mixed-blood disciples were disoriented and amnesiac upon waking up, spending the next year or so in a fog; in the most severe cases, they might explode on the spot. Bit by bit, people had stopped daring to touch it.

In modern times, there had been fewer and fewer mixed blood people among the noble families. If there happened to be one from time to time, they would most likely be an illegitimate child born to a mistress, not qualified to enter Lingyun’s Grand Selection. Ancestor Tianbo’s Way of the Heart had quietly guarded the Lingyun Mountains from beginning to end. In over a thousand years, Wangge Luobao was the first to get a glimpse of its reality.

Why was Ancestor Tianbo’s Way of the Heart so picky? It couldn’t be that it required its inheritor to have mismatched eyes, could it?

And why would they target the ungovernable way? Even if there had been a grudge back then, he had never heard of anyone’s Way of the Heart passing along even a personal grudge from eighteen hundred years back.

Unless Tianbo’s Way of the Heart was in conflict with the ungovernable way, in conflict to the point of being unable to live under the same sky.

But the ungovernable way had no Way of the Heart. It was the most solitary way in the world; with it, you couldn’t even have a debate of Ways of the Heart. Its only special feature lay in the fact that no matter what truth a person beheld, there was still no Way of the Heart to shatter.

The waking dragon’s big head drew close to him. As if afraid that his voice would get out, Wangge Luobao spoke into his ear as quietly as a mosquito. “For example, you and I both know that the three thousand paths of the Great Way are only a fantasy. We struggle bitterly seeking a Way of the Heart, then we rear it, refine it, and in the end serve up our body to it. When we are dead, our essence returns to the universe, but the Way of the Heart persists forever.”

The corner of Xi Ping’s eye twitched, his pupils suddenly growing large in the depths of the sea.

Wangge Luobao let out a sigh that was almost a moan. “I’ve finally…spoken it aloud.”

These matters that heavenly commandments kept from being spoken couldn’t be revealed to those who didn’t know them. The words could only be spoken when both the speaker and the listener were well aware, and there were no third-party ears around.

As if he had seen a ghost, Xi Ping stared at the waking dragon in front of him.

When even the Southern Sage had birthed a heart demon, when the Dignitary of Rule High Elder’s Way of the Heart had shattered as soon as he had taken a glance into the Territory Map, why had Wangge Luobao and Tianbo before him been all right?

Why was there someone who knew perfectly well what a Way of the Heart was but had still accepted one and established a foundation, had still jumped further in, could still make sense?

“Because even a monstrous lie has a creator, little Shiyong,” Wangge Luobao said, calling his courtesy name. “You freaks with your plants that reach beyond the bounds really are each annoying in your own way, but the rest of them are all at least influenced by their Ways of the Heart. All apart from you—the two of you.”

At this point, the seawater around them suddenly began to quiver. The mournful roars of dragons came toward them.

The Cauldron of Nine Dragons!

Wangge Luobao sighed. “If not for that, the two of us really would have been kindred spirits. What a pity, our next meeting…”

But just then, Xi Ping, frozen into a puppet by the array, suddenly spoke without opening his mouth: “So the reason you’ve been racking your brain scheming against me is because you want to shut me up? Tsk, that obnoxious southern barbarian showed up too quickly. You weren’t finished explaining yourself yet.”

The waking dragon abruptly drew back. A cloud of bloody mist suddenly exploded from the “Xi Ping” caught fast by the array, and he turned from pearl white to dead white—it had been a paperman wrapped in a layer of human skin!

The paperman had been “borrowed” by Xi Ping from Bai Ling. It was an established foundation power to begin with, only suitable for camouflage and fooling low level cultivators. At close range, an ascended spirit could even sniff out the difference between a flesh and blood body and one made of paper. So Xi Ping had had a fantastic idea. He had used the bone-sharing talisman from Zhou Ying to make a “slight improvement” to the paperman, peeling off a layer of his own flesh, blood, and skin to stick it onto the paperman.

Zhou Ying, who had only been willing to pluck out one of his hairs, had probably never imagined that his power could have such an “ingenious” use.

His investment in blood hadn’t been for nothing. Adding in that he had been repeatedly smashed apart by shed skin sword attacks, which had sent Xi Ping’s cultivation level leaping right up to the middle ascended spirit stage, the camouflage technique had been even easier to use. And Wangge Luobao was accustomed to acting from the shadows. He had laid out a big net in order to catch him. Detonating the array formation consumed a large quantity of spiritual energy, which had perfectly covered up the last of the paperman’s slight flaws.

And aside from the paperman, the heartless lotus seal that Xi Ping had stolen from Zhuoming had also risen in power along with his cultivation.

The reason Wangge Luobao was always jabbering on, not letting Xi Ping talk, wasn’t that he was afraid of being scolded; he wanted to prevent him from “speaking a lotus flower”—the heartless lotus’s lotus seal could reach the consciousness through the senses. After establishing long-distance contact with Xi Ping, he could protect his other senses, but he couldn’t stop his voice from coming to his ears.

The instant that Xi Ping’s voice came from the paperman, the lotus seal struck Wangge Luobao’s hearing at the same time as the voice!

Wangge Luobao wanted to withdraw his consciousness from the waking dragon at once.

This hit had been too direct. Adding in the rapid progress of Xi Ping’s cultivation level within a short time, while he couldn’t simply pull up a person’s consciousness like Zhuoming himself, he could still keep Wangge Luobao from escaping at once.

Xi Ping said, “Hehe, big worm, our next meeting is indefinitely postponed.”

He tore apart the skin and flesh on the spot and withdrew his consciousness, leaving behind only a wad of paper dissolved by seawater.

The might of the Cauldron of Nine Dragons instantly fixed on Wangge Luobao.

When the roar of the dragons came, Zhi Xiu’s heart tightened—Lingyun’s people had come!

However powerful a sword cultivator might be, he could hardly withstand two divine tools single-handed.

Instantly, Zhaoting was forced to produce all and more than all of its fighting force. Zhi Xiu, using himself as a shield, protected the thousands of people behind him, hacking at the Silver Moon and forcing it toward the deserted side of the Lancang Mountains.

The Silver Moon, which had had the rug pulled out from under it by the evil cultivators, seemed to be entirely inhibited by the sword light. The Lancang Mountains tottered on the point of collapse from the collision with the falling moon. The spiritual energy of the Lovebird Sword Array wavered. The Sword Slave brazenly reached out and grasped the main sword of the Lovebird Sword Array.

But the nine dragons with their gnashing teeth and flailing claws only appeared for a flash, and then, like dumplings thrown into the pot, went into the water along with Lingyun’s Sect Leader—even the splash was quite restrained.

Xuanwu, who had thought rescue had come: “…”

Zhi Xiu, who had made ready to face an enemy from both sides: “…”

What was this senior from Southern Shu in such a hurry to go do?

The next moment, a blood-covered “human stick” emerged from the next life spiritual fish’s mist. On his way, he scooped up the cultivators who had fallen into the sea, including Chang Jun, dealing each one a talisman to keep them from waking up and being scared to death by seeing a “living ghost.”

Before his skin and flesh could grow back, this “blood person” dove right into Yao Qi’s shadow.

Now that Xi Ping had arranged an “assignment” for the Cauldron of Nine Dragons, Lingyun’s people temporarily wouldn’t come out to make trouble. Xuanwu was under control, the Lovebird Sword Array was being held down by the Sword Slave. The opportunity was too good to miss.

“Ziming!”

The instant the main sword was seized by the Sword Slave, the noise and din about to burst Yao Qi’s consciousness suddenly calmed. Yao Ziming, with no idea what time or day it was, opened his eyes in bewilderment and saw the Lancang Sect Leader in front of him.

This was an image floating above the clouded Way of the Heart. The old Sect Leader’s hair and beard were white, lines of age carved all over his face. Half the skin of his face seemed to have been charred black by a fire. His features were twisted, an ominous bloody light emanating from his eyeballs…but that tall figure was still as upright as a mountain range, the tears in his eyes dispersing the grimness and horror of the bloody light.

“S-senior?” said Yao Qi.

The Sect Leader didn’t answer. He had been dead for two centuries.

The eyes of that image looked through Yao Qi and fell on the vast and desolate Southern He Peninsula. Like a recording, he began to recite some words that Yao Qi didn’t understand.

Under the influence of the grit projection, Yao Qi involuntarily spoke aloud the words in his consciousness.

Xi Ping froze. That wasn’t the Southern He language.

An ascended spirit could connect to heaven and earth—though Xi Ping didn’t understand it, his spiritual sense told him what this was.

Inscriptions.

He had never known that the inscriptions said to bear “heaven’s designs” could be recited aloud.

Xi Ping was perfectly well aware of his own worth in this situation. He came to a prompt decision and quickly clapped out a common half-immortal grade talisman. Yao Qi’s voice soared, suddenly reverberating through the air over the whole Southern He Peninsula—all the people flying in the sky were shed skins, anyway; someone would have to understand.

But Zhi Xiu, the Sword Slave, Xuanwu, and even Lingyun’s Sect Leader at the bottom of the sea froze simultaneously; all of these masters looked to some extent confused and taken aback.

But the constantly roiling Lovebird Sword Array and the Lancang Mountain Range stilled simultaneously.

Out of nowhere, that instant of dead silence reminded Xi Ping of when the Law Breaker’s axiom had descended upon Tao County.

Wait—hadn’t Qiu Sha said that the spiritual mountains…were a big Law Breaker?