The deep blue water dragon gallbladder could treat insanity. That was what the Dignitary of Rule Elder Lin Zongyi had said.

Lin Zongyi’s research was quite rigorous. Xi Ping judged that his notes wouldn’t be too unreliable. But at the time, the array of the Beijue Mountains had yet to form, and the spiritual mountains were still who knew where. The forces of evil were running wild everywhere, and even Yuan Hui, one of the four great demonic gods, looked like a righteous man willing to help others. With the world so deranged, who would need to be treated for insanity?

Xi Ping pondered it backward and forward until he had worked up an interest in getting to the bottom of things, so he went to the karma beast.

When the hidden bones had invaded the Territory Map, they had gravely damaged the karma beast’s beast spirit. The beast spirit had disappeared from the ground, and everyone had thought that the sacred beast was dead. Pang Jian had been inconsolable. From then on, he avoided cats and dogs. He couldn’t bear the sight of four-legged animals.

This continued until Xi Ping, on his shifu’s order, had been inspecting the veins of the earth through the reincarnation wood in the Territory Map as usual and had happened to find traces of the karma beast spirit’s dwelling place—the hidden bones had been very quickly expelled by the Law Breaker back then and hadn’t had time to destroy it completely. So a whole crowd of Xuanyin masters had gone through all the inner sect’s texts, looking for the Southern Sage’s way of reining beast spirits. They spent several years on it, and finally, with Lin Chi responsible for giving instructions and Xi Ping controlling the Unbound Furnace, they at last brought the sacred beast that had nearly followed the sage in casting off the mundane dust back to the human world.

Based on this contribution, Xi Ping thought that the sacred beast ought to recognize him as its second father.

But this rebellious child was very unfilial, without any sense of gratitude to its second parent. When others summoned the karma beast, it would always be an avatar that came, a little palm-sized lump, which would sometimes even roll over and expose its belly, demanding pets without any shame. What Xi Ping summoned was always the ferocious original form of the giant beast, which would shake its whiskers and glare at him as soon as it came, provide a complimentary series of furious roars…though that was also a matter of a very long time ago.

Summoning beast spirits was an ancient art. No one knew it now. The karma beast was always in hibernation underground, with Xi Ping as its only remaining old friend, who occasionally called it back to the human world. However much they didn’t get along, over these many years, they had still developed affection for each other. The karma beast wanted to be a little nicer to him every day. During the New Year, it even delicately changed its fur to red…then was angered by the nuisance surnamed Xi into changing it back to its original color.

To summon the sacred beast, Xi Ping drew a portrait of the karma beast on the wall. He was convinced that it was absolutely lifelike.

When the sacred beast came and saw it, it not only didn’t appreciate the sentiment, it bared its fangs and waved its claws, biting that drawing to pulp, and in one breath paid its respects to eighteen generations of the artist’s ancestors.

Xi Ping wasn’t having it. “Do you know how much money my authentic works are worth now?”

The enormous, hill-like beast, on hearing this, dug irascibly with its paws, expressing its view: Ptui, stinking dog shit!

A certain individual surnamed Xi, having forgotten his own surname amid the plaudits of the auction houses, angrily said, “Ignorant brute!”

Man and beast, trading words and howls in equal portion, cursed at each other for a while. Ultimately, a human throat couldn’t outshout a beast. Xi Ping shouted until his lungs hurt and had to bow out of the battle.

He poured himself a cup of homemade wine, tried a mouthful, then sucked on his gums—his winemaking technique could be called an authentic tradition handed down from his teacher; it was extremely inconsistent. Each time he opened a jar, it was like playing A-Xiang’s Silver Tray Lottery. There was no way of knowing whether he was opening good wine or dregs. “This batch is no good. Karmie, let me ask you about something.”

The karma beast waved its big tail indifferently.

Xi Ping said, “Yuan Hui once cut out a heap of dragon gallbladders. What was he doing with them? Selling them wholesale to the Heartless Lotus to fix his head?”

The karma beast snorted and became thumb-sized. It jumped onto the bamboo slips and left a paw print on the ancient Wan writing.

Xi Ping looked where the paw print indicated and saw a record there about water dragon pearls. “Don’t mess around, I know what water dragon pearls are for, I used to have one. I asked you…”

The karma beast rolled its eyes at him—it had learned this expression specifically to use on Xi Ping—then raised its front paw again and tapped heavily against a line of small writing at the edge.

“Lacking the aura of the water dragons, only a master with cultivation that can overpower a water dragon can activate…” Xi Ping froze. “Huh?”

Water dragon pearls were extremely precious. After so many years of dawdling in the human world, Xi Ping hadn’t seen another one. The one in Zhou Ying’s hands must have been unique. Presumably apart from the infinitely resourceful demon of the Impassable Sea, no one would have been willing to take it out and use it casually. Therefore, he had nothing to compare it with.

But putting himself aside—he had at any rate been a near-ascended spirit then—san-ge had plainly just opened his spiritual eyes; he couldn’t even draw a talisman properly. But hadn’t he just waved a hand and flicked the water dragon pearl into him?

Had Lin Zongyi gotten it wrong?

Xi Ping stared at the karma beast in bewilderment. “You don’t mean that…”

The karma beast drew near, sniffed his fingers where they were holding down the bamboo slips, then once again acted like it was burying shit.

Xi Ping stood up, turned, and passed through reincarnation wood, returning to the Yongning Marquis Manor, which he had not seen for a long time.

Jinping no longer had nobles. When his friends and relatives in the mortal world were gone, Xi Ping had handed the Marquis Manor over to Jinping’s authorities to have them take care of it.

This was a gift that burned the hand. Who would dare to overstep their authority to live in his former residence? Finally, the Kaiming Department made a decision. They put protections on the buildings and changed the Yongning Marquis Manor into the “Tai Sui Manor”—also popularly called the “Tai Sui Temple”—and it became a famous former residence for people to come visit.

Now the Yongning Marquis Manor was full of dense ancient trees. It was one of the eight sights of Jinping. It received an endless stream of tourists every day. There were many rumors circulating among the people about “burning incense in the Tai Sui Temple working a miracle” and “seeing a reincarnation wood tree cast a human shadow in the temple.”

It was all pure nonsense. Xi Ping might not go back for centuries, and when he did go, he didn’t go during the day. He didn’t like to see people.

It was midnight now. The Tai Sui Manor’s guards had locked the three gates. The incense smoke had dissipated. When Xi Ping came out of a reincarnation wood tree, he first attended to the sounds in the vicinity, then laughed in spite of himself, feeling like a thief.

He bowed to that somewhat divine ancient moonlight frost tree in the garden and passed through the garden to the rear courtyard.

The rear courtyard wasn’t open to tourists. The Yongning Marquis Manor’s old possessions were all stored there. The order of the books hadn’t even been disarranged. Only a layer of protective film to guard against water and insects had been put over them. They seemed to still be waiting for their master to return. On the innermost bookcase, Xi Ping found the Xi family’s genealogical record.

The genealogical record was quite long. Many generations had lived calmly in Great Wan.

Thinking about it, this was actually strange. The paramount spiritual sense appeared among people at random. It wasn’t passed on between generations, because those lunatics not only didn’t leave behind descendants, beneath the spiritual mountains, they were certain to lead lives plagued with disasters. Whole families dying out was the standard.

But the Xi family seemed to be an exception. Though it was also very hard for them to have children, and they often had children who died young due to their unusual spiritual sense, the bloodline had survived in fits and starts. The possessors of paramount spiritual senses born into this family, while they couldn’t necessarily preserve their reason with dignity to the last, they had all had company in life and death; they were already greatly fortunate as compared to their fellows… Why was that?

It couldn’t be because each generation had a reckless person like the Marquis who colluded with foreign evil cultivators, could it?

Xi Ping had found a new riddle, and he pursued it in high spirits. Following his family’s genealogical record, he first found the origin of recent generations—they had migrated from the west after a plague of locusts—then used the reincarnation wood, which could get in by every crack, to wander all over, sneak into storehouses of records everywhere. He consulted ancient texts, compared historical events, researched local guides.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t so easy. Xi Ping went all out for thirty years, but the leads still broke off. But he wasn’t worried about doing useless work, anyway. He treated it as travel for pleasure.

During this time, he became a true scholar. He read too many documents and texts containing difficult and unpronounceable words. No matter how out-of-the-way a thing was, if it mentioned a few key terms, he could work out its entire history clearly. He more or less knew all the writing systems that traces could be found of. He also made himself a fake identity and went to the nation of New He to take part in the civil examinations, easily passed based on the fact that he had been reading longer than everyone else’s grandfathers had been alive, and got himself a position in an archeological office. From time to time, he went to lecture to the college students.

If Dandan were still writing histories and wanted to consult him again, he wouldn’t have to run muttering from the New Year’s Eve dinner to flip through books now.

“You missed the good times.”

Inside the Law Breaker, Xi Ping spoke regretfully to the Zhao Qindan duplicated by the Tai Sui Qin’s melody.

Zhao Qindan pushed up her reading glasses impatiently and gave him a stern glare, and asked him a number of questions she believed to be cunning. Wei Chengxiang, sauntering over to invite her out on a stroll, just happened to overhear. She plastered herself to the wall and slunk away, ashen-faced.

Xi Ping sighed. From past experience, he easily pretended to be stumped and begged her for mercy.

Because spiritual energy was prohibited, the “people” inside the Law Breaker couldn’t leave it using papermen. And inside the Law Breaker, by nature each was only a segment. Though they could talk and move, they were eternally static, stopped at a certain moment. They couldn’t change.

So Zhao Qindan always used the same questions to put him in a difficult spot, and Wei Chengxiang didn’t know that she had already overheard this conversation countless times and could never remember the answers.

The Wei Chengxiang in the Law Breaker was A-Xiang when she was young, duplicated by Xi Ping according to the melody he remembered. She had gone out to sea adventuring and disappeared, dying on the way to the unknown. There had been no time for her to say anything to her friends and loved ones.

She had lived her life beset by perils, left Jinping alone at sixteen, always rushing ahead to where the road was wider, not stopping until death.

Zhao Qindan, however, had the appearance of an old lady, after she had begun to show signs of decline—in fact, he could have duplicated any segment he wanted; her residence had been fixed in Tao County most of the time, and she was the most frequent visitor to the Law Breaker. From the twenty-something ignorant young mistress escaping a marriage to the renowned scholar Sir Xu who could summon hundreds with a single cry, Xi Ping had the “score” for every age. It was Zhao Qindan who had insisted shortly before her death that it be the very last portion of her lifespan that remained in the Law Breaker.

“The young me won't do,” she said softly on her deathbed. “I was just a pretty face then, without all my wits. I didn’t understand anything. I’d have nothing to say to you. I couldn’t keep you company.”

There was no concern about keeping a distance between men and women then. Xi Ping sat alone at her bedside to see her off.

Each day the Law Breaker enveloped the human world, each day the axiom had yet to be broken or realized, as the “steward,” he couldn’t fail or age. When they had met, they had been classmates of about the same age, but on parting, he looked like her grandson.

He coiled up her white hair and mixed up rouge. Before he could apply the rouge, he looked around and saw that the young mistress, who had kept to Wan manners all her life, was clinging to his sleeve, weeping.

“Hey, old woman, can’t you hold out a little?” Xi Ping spoke rudely, but his hand as he wiped away her tears was very gentle. “You’ll make the makeup run. How am I supposed to apply the rouge?”

“Get…get out.” Zhao Qindan couldn’t catch her breath. “Don’t think…that I don’t know, back then…you dressed up as me, and made yourself up like a ghost…nearly scared off the great evil cultivator Yu Chang…”

“You’re nearly a ghost yourself, what do you care if I make you up like one?” Xi Ping laughed. Then, as if humoring a child, he said, “The banquet’s festivities are all over, and the drunks have all gone home. Someone ought to clean up, right? Fine, fine… Anyway, you’re all still here. When I’ve had enough of idling outside, I’ll come back to the Law Breaker.”

In the Law Breaker was A-Xiang, not yet set out on her journey, the young mistress who had returned, Lao Pang who couldn’t eat enough osmanthus duck, the eternally calm and quiet Bai Ling.

There were also the seniors—as the masters’ essences flowed away and their cultivation levels gradually dropped until they reverted to half-immortals, to mortals, ceasing to be divinities and once again becoming human, Xi Ping was finally able to hear the melodies of their consciousnesses in the Law Breaker. So inside the Law Breaker, Master Lin stayed inside every day tinkering with odd bits of machinery and gears; shifu had a fish pond, where he took out a small boat to catch shrimp and fish when he wasn’t practicing swordsmanship; Divine Physician Wen had planted a field of flowers beside the pond, and the flower dew and petals became ingredients for shifu to make wine…

Though no matter what was planted, only a few types of flowers would grow, and no matter what was brewed, the results would always be the same jar of wine, it was still lively.

But there was a person missing amid the excitement. Xi Ping could never duplicate san-ge’s “score.”

Zhou Ying’s consciousness was nowhere to be found in the known realms.

At last, when Xi Ping had grown tired of archeology and was ready to “retire in order to return home” in New He, people discovered a tomb at the bottom of the sea—it ought to have been an islet, but it had been submerged by seawater as the terrain had altered. At the depths of the tomb, people discovered an altar and some leftover “deep blue gemstones.”

Historical circles boiled over; everyone had different opinions, proposed all kinds of conjectures. Only Xi Ping recognized at a glance that the “deep blue gemstones” were fragments of the legendary water dragon gallbladders.

Exploiting the perks of his position, Xi Ping pilfered a piece of water dragon gallbladder, used a reincarnation wood seed to slip into the altar, and used the Unbound Furnace to decode it.

In the furnace flame, he once again saw Yuan Hui.

“The water dragon gallbladders you wanted.” Yuan Hui placed a mustard seed in front of a woman.

The woman had a blind person’s cane in her hand. Her eyes stared directly ahead. She was not only blind, she also seemed to have trouble moving, unable to stand up on her weak, slender legs.

Xi Ping was slightly surprised—the woman’s features were very similar to Yuan Hui’s. It was clear at a glance that they were close kin.

“Then we’re even.” The woman felt around for the mustard seed and laughed softly. “Da-ge.”

Yuan Hui shook his head and dully said, “It’s not about being even or not. I owe you my life—when I had just established a foundation and was trapped among the Shamans’ living corpses, I would not have escaped without your help. If you want anything in the future, just notify me. You know how to contact me.”

The woman smiled brightly and said, “I am a humiliation left behind by our mother. My father the king saw me as a stain and never treated me as his own child. If I hadn’t helped you, I would also have died trapped there.”

Xi Ping understood at once and said to himself: After the holy woman was abducted by the shamans, she had a daughter.

Yuan Hui didn’t stand on any further ceremony with her. He only asked, “What do you want the water dragon gallbladders for?”

The woman gently pressed down on her underbelly. Yuan Hui’s gaze followed where she indicated. “You…”

“I can feel it, this child is the same as me…and our mother.” The woman sighed softly. “It will be hard for the child to survive.”

Yuan Hui, frowning, said, “It is indeed difficult for children that are born frail to inherit your gift. Why don’t you look after your health and not deliberate so much, don’t use things at random. The water dragon gallbladders are…”

“For treating insanity,” the woman interrupted him quietly. She raised her head. Silver light flashed over her unfocused pupils as she looked out into emptiness. Those eyes possessed of a paramount spiritual sense couldn’t see the human world, but they seemed to see the future. Suddenly, out of nowhere, she said, “Have you heard of the spiritual mountains that have arisen in the northern continent?”

Yuan Hui seemed a little bewildered, not knowing why she had suddenly mentioned the northern continent.

“Our mother opened the way to chaos, da-ge. The world is going to change.” The woman spoke as if chanting. “The canopy of heaven will descend, and those who can see the stars will always be insane. In fact, there’s nothing wrong with being insane. It’s easy. I just hope that I can leave a sliver of another choice for later generations… If our bloodline isn’t extinguished, perhaps one day, someone will be able to escape the prison.”

Yuan Hui was all at sea. “What are you even talking about?”

The woman smiled without answering. Her strange eyes looked through him and met Xi Ping’s eyes as he spied through the Unbound Furnace. Her eyes suddenly moved, as if they had pierced thousands of years of time to meet Xi Ping’s gaze. She smiled at him.

She said, “Perhaps because of the water dragon gallbladders mixed into their bloodline, later generations will be able to activate dragon pearls, just like the dragons, command the clouds and rain.”

“What do you mean, like water dragons?” Yuan Hui shook his head. He seemed to be accustomed to his sister saying mysterious things that he couldn’t understand. He stepped forward to push her wheelchair. “I’ll take you back… Why are you turning your head? Is something wrong with your neck?”

The woman sat in the wheelchair, turning her fine long neck, her blind eyes “watching” Xi Ping from start to finish. “It’s nothing. I’m looking at the future.”

Yuan Hui shut his mouth. He was a little anxious, feeling that it seemed that she ought to eat some dragon gallbladder. Their two figures slowly vanished from the furnace fire.

Xi Ping abruptly left the Unbound Furnace, suddenly remembering the power of the first established foundation paramount spiritual sense in the world to turn into mist. This power had been unheard of for thousands of years, yet when the spiritual mountains had been nearly at their end, it had appeared in Zhou Ying.

A beginning and an end.

Before the spiritual mountains had formed, had the eyes of an unsuppressed paramount spiritual sense really been able to see the future?

Had the Xi family’s bloodline really originated there?

That he and san-ge could easily activate the water dragon pearl, was that really because the bloodline passed down to them from antiquity contained the aura of the water dragon gallbladders?

The water dragon tribe had died out, and there were no more dragon pearls. The people from thousands of years ago had also long ago become unfindable vestiges. There was no way to investigate any of this.

But there was one thing he could be certain of. San-ge, having passed through the Ceaseless Mirror, must have escaped the prison and glimpsed the sky beyond the bounds.

When he thought this, Xi Ping suddenly felt that he didn’t regret not being able to see him in the Law Breaker as much.

He turned to leave. From familiar habit, he arranged to fake the death of his identity in the mortal world and escape.

Xi Ping thought that he was a little tired. He would return to the Law Breaker to dream.