For his spiritual sense to be touched, only a person with an intimate karmic connection to him could be involved. There were truly few people like that. 

Prince Zhuang raised his head, and Bai Ling landed beside him like his shadow. 

Without preamble, Prince Zhuang asked, “When you sent him the spiritual stones last time, where was he?” 

Bai Ling said quietly into his ear, “He had already reached the southern mines.” 

Prince Zhuang massaged his thumb: counting the days, the spiritual stone shipment convoy would indeed have reached the East Sea, but wasn’t the Resurrection Vortex in a calm period? 

And also…why would it only be his thumb? 

He waited patiently for a moment, but there were no other indications. 

It was as if that moment just now had been his mistake. 

“A little later, go ask where our Viscount is now,” Prince Zhuang instructed Bai Ling. Then he pressed down on the center of his forehead and stood up. “Let’s go.” 

The two of them were currently in a forest that had just been cut down. On the ground were leftover ruts and wooden stakes of all sizes. There were dry twigs and withered leaves everywhere. It looked like a land of stumps. 

When night fell, many people gathered here. There were workers who ought to have gone to work the night shift, and refugees and beggars who had lost their jobs and their homes. There was a ring of coffins laid out all around. 

Some had clearly been recently buried and then dug back up. The dead inside them probably hadn’t fully rotted; they gave off a putrid netherworld smell. Some coffins were old, already decayed, the dregs of the rotten wood mixing with fragmented skeletons. They looked truly shabby laid out and had to be covered with rags. 

With an old moon-white cloak draped over his shoulders, Prince Zhuang walked among the dead ghosts and the living ghosts, like a specter looking on from the sidelines. 

A man in mourning clothes was standing on a new coffin, shouting out an accusation: “…First they occupy the farmland. When they’ve occupied the farmland, they occupy the graveyards, leaving the living with nowhere to shelter and the ancestors to become wandering spirits! To calm the people’s resentment, they come up with another sinister plan. They dress it up by calling it a designated patch of wilderness for folks to move their graves to, but in secret they’re pushing us to occupy land whose fengshui is at odds with tombs! Everyone, everyone! Open your eyes and see who are your brothers and who are the jackals!” 

Sobs rose among the crowd. Some people stepped over the coffins to shake hands and make peace, and some burned paper. A wind blew, and paper money filled the sky along with the ashes of burnt paper. Sparks lit the eye sockets of the skeletons, like in some grotesque ritual. 

People carrying coffins kept gathering. Prince Zhuang, with his hands behind his back and his face turned towards the fluttering paper money, walked out against the flow of the crowd. 

He and Bai Ling both had talismans on them. Ordinary people couldn’t see them. There were only a few cultivators mixed into the crowd who calmly glanced at them, nodded, and made way, indicating “we walk the same path and have no ill intent.” 

Prince Zhuang wasn’t on the “same path” as anyone. He kept his eyes focused straight ahead. Only when he had left the crowd did he say to Bai Ling, “I hadn’t thought that these ‘roaming common cultivator friends’ would be so rampant in Guzhou. If Guzhou is rotten, then everything is rotten down to the roots.” 

The traditions of Guzhou were conservative. The common people were very superstitious and had always especially shunned evil. 

In the eighth year of Xiaozong, a few errant monks had come here, just as an epidemic was spreading. Because their certificates of ordination were incomplete, they had been taken for evil cultivators by the terrified villagers and beaten to death. 

Similar events came one after another. The history books recorded that in Renzong’s reign alone, over a hundred people had been captured and handed over to the yamen on suspicion of practicing “nightmare spells,” bringing about countless disputes and tragic cases of sentencing on false charges. Out of concern that some people would use the common people’s fear of evil to frame others, Heaven’s Design Pavilion had specially established two branches in Guzhou, one in the north and one in the south, in order to make it easier to operate. 

In the local parlance, the worst curse you could call someone was a “child of filth,” meaning “a monster’s progeny.” 

Prince Zhuang pinched a piece of paper money that had flown onto his shoulder. Wishing only to see the world in chaos, he said, smiling, “Only five generations, and the people of Guzhou who would have loved to bathe in incense ash are standing on the coffins themselves, waiting for the children of filth save them in their time of need. How exciting.” 

Bai Ling said, “According to your instructions, I have already disseminated the instructions for dismantling some common standard inscriptions… But Your Highness, the greater the commotion gets now, the less Heaven’s Design Pavilion will be able to deal with it. If Xuanyin Mountain gets word of this, the part we have played in it cannot be hidden.” 

“That is no problem. Xuanyin Mountain won’t dare to interfere,” Prince Zhuang said calmly. “The people’s resentment has risen. Now they can only pretend to be ‘immortals unconcerned with mortal affairs,’ turn a blind eye, and afterwards hold their noses and come out to bury all their families’s unfilial descendants.” 

Bai Ling said in surprise, “How come? Only for the sake of reputation?” 

Never mind Xuanyin’s inner sect, even its half-immortals could crush a pile of ordinary people with one hand. Would they care about a bit of resentment from the people? As for their reputation, it would all depend on how conscientiously they whitewashed it. If the immortal sect cared, couldn’t they just bring out some high-sounding justifications?

Prince Zhuang laughed. “You can only blame the Southern Sage.” 

On each of the rare occasions he was willing to discuss the history of the immortal sects, Bai Ling always felt that he was the better for listening. He unconsciously began to focus. 

“Thousands of years ago, the structure of the immortal sects had yet to be established. Masters floated everywhere like clouds. Of the shed skin cultivators who could control the elements, some became sages who cut through mountains and established lineages, enjoying the sacrifices of hundreds of generations; and some became ‘demonic gods,’ their bodies and souls destroyed, sunk forever in the Impassable Sea.” As Prince Zhuang spoke, he looked at the distant crowd. Flames leapt angrily in the distance. He asked dully, “Do you know why that was?” 

Bai Ling hesitantly said, “Perhaps because their skills were inadequate, and history is written by the victors?” 

“At their level, it’s no longer a war of arts and skills,” Prince Zhuang said evenly. “An ‘ascended spirit’ breaks free of mortality, a ‘shed skin’ ascends to heaven, and beyond the ‘shed skin’ is the ‘full moon.’ At the full moon level, you become a god, become a sage, dominate the spiritual mountains.

“When the shed skin masters were fighting over the divine full moon positions, it was a war of Ways of the Heart. In the end, only five people rose above the crowd, and they created the five sects of Xuanyin, Kunlun, Lingyun, Sanyue, and Lancang, and with this split the territory into five nations—among those five sages, there was a specialist in taming beasts, a scholar of arrays, a master of the sword… In summary, the techniques they were skilled in were different, but their Way of the Heart was the same.” 

Bai Ling asked, “What was it?” 

Prince Zhuang smiled with a trace of ridicule. “To bless and protect the common people.” 

For a moment, Bai Ling suspected he was reciting from the history books of the orthodox sects. 

“It’s true, not whitewashing by immortal historians.” It was as if Prince Zhuang had eyes on the back of his head. He had no need to look to know what Bai Ling’s expression was. “The Way of Heaven is universal. It has its own equilibrium. Before the shed skin stage, cultivation depends on the individual. Past the shed skin stage, it’s no longer a matter of cultivation. If you want to attain the full moon stage, your Way of the Heart must merge with the universe, be accepted by the Way of Heaven. I suspect that among the three thousand ways, only the one that ‘looks to all living creatures’ is qualified to reach the full moon stage.” 

Bai Ling trembled. “So nonentities are born and die in an instant while all the immortals consider them beneath their notice, but the immortals must still rely on their holy sages’s sects, and those holy sages were determined by the strength of those multitudes of nonentities!” 

“Correct. The Way of the Heart cannot be violated. If the Way of the Heart is broken, cultivation is destroyed. I sometimes think it’s hard to say whether the five sages back then ‘dominated’ the spiritual mountains, or whether they were detained in the spiritual mountains as collateral, to reach the final unsullied level of cultivation and be released only when there was peace in the mortal world,” Prince Zhuang said. “Xuanyin’s foundation is the Southern Sage’s Way of the Heart. The four high elders, the thirty-six peak masters—while on the surface they all have their own Ways of the Heart, Xuanyin makes up their roots, from start to finish—in other words, a part of all their Ways of the Heart is inherited from the sage. Normally those shed skin and ascended spirit cultivators fight over power and influence for the sake of resources. When the people’s resentment boils over, do you think that they would dare to disobey the sage’s Way of the Heart for the sake of protecting some nobodies from their own families?

“All they can do is watch the flames burn higher, hoping that the wind will be weak and the fire will go out soon.” Prince Zhuang looked into the distance and murmured, “I think now that Zhou Kun was scheming against me. The old fool knew from the start what I was going to do and deliberately let me out to start the fire.” 

Zhi Xiu glided down from Flying Jade Peak wrapped in ice and snow. When Zhaoting flew past Green Pool Peak, he saw mists hanging over the always lush peak, firmly covering all the green waves on the mountain. 

Green Pool Peak was sealed… Her Highness Duanrui was in seclusion? 

Now? 

There was no time to think about it. Zhaoting swayed, and Zhi Xiu landed on Xuanyin Mountain’s principal peak, in front of Shouxin¹ Hall. 

The inner sect disciples coming and going in Shouxin Hall were startled to see General Zhi. One after another, they stood in place and called out “shishu.” Despite the colossal urgent business he was on, Zhi Xiu didn’t forget to be polite. He nodded in response to each of them. “Is the Dignitary of Rites High Elder here? I want to request a token to leave the mountain…” 

Before he had finished speaking, he saw someone flying a sword land hurriedly. He was flying too quickly and stumbled when he landed. Zhi Xiu held him up from a distance, and the newcomer quickly said, “Thank you, little shishu.” 

Zhi Xiu saw the mark of Dim Mist Peak embroidered on this disciple’s clothes—Dim Mist Peak was one of the peaks that belonged to a direct descendant of the Lin family. He said, “What has you in such a hurry?” 

The disciple said, “An outer sect disciple who had just joined my peak, originally a mine supervisor in the southern mines, is currently escorting a shipment north, on his way to leave office and enter the inner sect. He just sent a Heavenly Question to the mountain. He says that the spiritual stone shipment convoy was attacked in the Resurrection Vortex. A gold-winged great roc of Southern Shu appeared and disappeared. Convoy Commander Zhao Zhenwei and Head of the Guard Lü Chengyi were colluding with a foreign nation. Lü has vanished.” 

Zhi Xiu was startled. “Convoy Commander Zhao Zhenwei?” 

When Xi Ping had asked, he had casually performed a divination on this Zhao Zhenwei. He had seen that he was from a collateral branch of the Ning’an Zhao family. His family’s traditions weren’t particularly upright. They had used some dishonorable methods the year he had taken part in the Grand Selection. Apart from that, there had been nothing else. How could he have failed to divine as major a matter as colluding with a foreign nation? 

Just then, another Heavenly Question flew over. The Dim Mist Peak disciple grabbed it and saw what it said: The convoy has escaped and withdrawn outside the Resurrection Vortex. Zhao Zhenwei has been soul-searched, without result. There is a criminal brand stamped on Zhao’s spiritual image. His spirit has collapsed.

Lin Zhaoli was soaked in salty seawater, his robes cut to rags by the remnants of the ascended spirit sword energy, his hair nearly soaked enough to extract salt from it. In this sorry state, he glared at Zhao Zhenwei, who was like a pile of mud—he was still breathing, but his spirit had collapsed and couldn’t be repaired. All that remained of him was an empty sack of skin. 

Lin Zhaoli pounded his fist against the wall of the ship’s hold. 

The convoy commander and the head of the guard had been involved in a conspiracy; who could be behind them? The Mine Governor? In all the southern mines, who was clean? 

The cultivators beside him saw Lin-shixiong’s expression change several times. At last, to their surprise, he began to laugh quietly, savage and distraught, frightening them so they didn’t dare to make a sound. 

Very few sword cultivators came out of the Lin clan, and Lin Zhaoli hadn’t obtained his Way of the Heart from his family. 

In the inner sect, his family had always valued quality over quantity. They were very harsh when it came to picking among juniors and descendants; they wouldn’t take anyone with slightly insufficient endowments. Lin Zhaoli’s disposition was unsociable and indolent. He didn’t like social graces, was too lazy to heed others, and he had no ambition. At any rate, everyone in the southern mines respected him somewhat. There had been nothing wrong with muddling through life…until he met Anyang. 

Anyang…

Being “captive to love” sounded like an even more humiliating spectacle than raping and pillaging. Lin Zhaoli had always taken the position that all women captive to love were fools, and all men captive to love were worthless…and his arrogance had brought his punishment upon him. 

Anyang was his punishment. 

When a member of the Zhou family had dived in and snatched away the Mine Governor position that he ought to have had sewn up, he hadn’t grumbled at all. Instead, Anyang’s seemingly joking words had given him a strong prod: “Forgive me, Lin-shixiong. I’ve robbed you of your office. Don’t worry, I’ll probably only be here a few decades before returning to the Latent Cultivation Temple.” 

True—for the most part, the girls of the Zhou family would ultimately enter the inner sect and become lady cultivators he was unworthy to associate with. 

So he had begun to madly cultivate his spiritual bones, searching everywhere for an ancient master’s Way of the Heart. Perhaps because he had so few wishes, when he occasionally raised a request to heaven, his luck had always been good. Over twenty years had passed, and just before he came to the end of his lifespan, he had completed his spiritual bones and filled up a great vacancy with the vital weapon of a master sword cultivator—and obtained the Way of the Heart within it. 

Lin Zhaoli hadn’t even waited for the inner sect to issue a reception order. Because the end of his lifespan was nearing, his face was slack, his hair was turning white, and the faint reek of age was already upon him… He had felt a sense of inferiority about this and hidden from Anyang for five full years. The day before Princess Anyang’s birthday feast, he had impatiently violated the rules and established his foundation. Even if the inner sect were to punish him, he had wished too much to go in person to wish her a happy birthday in person, see her dressed in splendid regalia. 

The instant he had succeeded in establishing his foundation, his consciousness had blanketed the whole of the southern mines—and just that night, those thieves stealing from the mines had activated their transport array. The secret array had crashed against the unauthorized established foundation cultivator, and both secrets had been exposed without warning. 

The thieves in the house had worked through the night to move the array. By the time he went to investigate, there wasn’t a trace. The lovestruck sword cultivator learned only then how deep were the waters of the southern mines. He hadn’t known that he was a blind fool with his eyes open. 

He had immediately notified Anyang and seen her beautiful face turn pale. His heart had instantly filled with heroism. He would rather help her clean up the southern mines than join the inner sect, even if it meant dying here as her watchdog. 

It turned out that he had been flattering himself. 

How ridiculous. She must only have thought that this unsuccessful love affair was standing in her way, right? 

In the princess’s manor, the sea of flowers in the garden was in full bloom. Purple mist nearly spilled from the wisteria pergola. Princess Anyang Zhou Qing sat on a swing, the hem of her dress trailing a zhang on the ground, her jewelry and ornaments so ceremonious it was as if she was about to attend a palace feast. 

She looked down at her own palm. Dozens of criminal brands flashed in her white hand. Three of them—Liang Chen's, Lü Chengyi’s, and Zhao Zhenwei’s—had been crushed. The assassination of Lin Zhaoli had failed—she had known even before Lü Chengyi that Heaven’s Design Pavilion had come with ill intent. From the day Liang Chen had died, she had known that this day would come sooner or later. 

It seemed that every arrangement she had made only constituted a dying struggle; she couldn’t overcome fate. 

“You’ve also prepared yourself, haven’t you?” Zhou Qing sighed gently and took out a gold butterfly hairpin. 

Pang Jian kicked down the gate of the princess’s manor, pushed aside the irritating sea of flowers, and saw the swing swaying lightly in the wind. There was a smile at the corners of Princess Anyang’s lips and a gold butterfly in the center of her brow, looking like it was fluttering its wings preparing to take flight—she had stabbed the butterfly pin through her spirit, taking all her secrets with her, not leaving a single word. 

Pang Jian stared blankly for a long moment, then suddenly remembered: the year that Zhou Qing had ridden the flying horse carriage to the Latent Cultivation Temple, he had also been the one escorting the disciples. 

He was a little face-blind to start with, and a grown man had no business looking closely at a female disciple. He had seen her for a brief moment forty years ago and hadn’t remembered what Zhou Qing looked like. But bizarrely, he remembered that butterfly hairpin. 

Just before the selected disciples had gotten into their carriages, a teenage boy had rushed over and put that butterfly hairpin into the hands of one of the female disciples. Someone else had told Pang Jian that that teenage boy was the fifth prince…the present Emperor Taiming. 

Others were jubilant on the way to the Latent Cultivation Temple, full of curiosity and excitement. When they reached the sky, they never listened to an old man’s advice; they insisted on sticking their heads out the windows and only dropped it when they got dizzy from looking. Pang Jian didn’t know how many classes of disciples he had escorted, but only that girl, clutching the butterfly hairpin, had cried the whole way. It was a far cry from her carelessness in death. 

It was as if at eighteen she had already foreseen the wrong path that would take her here.  

“I don’t believe it can all be over and done with just because she died.” Pang Jian casually sealed the manor with a talisman and released karma beasts onto the carved walls. He turned abruptly and said to a group of dumbfounded mine supervisors, “Starting now, I am confiscating the Mine Governor’s seal. Martial law will be imposed on all the ports in the southern mines. No one may go in or out. I want records of all mine collapses beginning from the opening of the southern mines.” 

In front of Shouxin Hall on Xuanyin Mountain’s principal peak, practically on the heels of Lin Zhaoli’s message, Zhi Xiu received a Heavenly Question from Heaven’s Design Pavilion. 

Pang Jian’s writing was about to take flight: Shiyong went north with the shipment convoy, his fate is unknown, and Princess Anyang has committed suicide! 

Xi Ping, whose fate was unknown, heard whispers filling his ears. 

There were male and female voices, old and young. He was dazed for a long time, gradually regained a bit of consciousness, and felt that the “bed” under him was unpleasantly hard. 

Wait…what bed? 

Hadn’t he fallen into the sea? 

Xi Ping abruptly opened his eyes and found to his astonishment that all the water on him had dried. 

He was in a forest of reincarnation wood. The coiled and knotted branches were interlaced, woven into a hammock wrapped around him. There were also unknown vines carefully stabilizing his injured leg and hand. Seeing him move, they somewhat reluctantly let go. 

HIs injured hand and injured leg were actually mostly healed. This place was as full of spiritual energy as Flying Jade Peak. 

Even his meridians, nearly blown apart by the ascended spirit sword energy, were much better. Xi Ping tried moving—he could shift himself. 

Xi Ping took a backup sword from his mustard seed, pushed aside the branches that wanted to block his way, and jumped down.

“Hss…” 

If the vines hadn’t sped over to catch him, he would nearly have broken his still not very nimble leg again. 

“What’s going on?” Xi Ping, recovering from his shock, hugged the vines and thought, “I can’t fly a sword?” 

Next, he also found that he couldn’t activate a talisman, couldn’t control an array… He could still play his bone qin, but it was no different than playing an ordinary qin that cost three liang of silver on the market—in this place with its unusually plentiful spiritual energy, he couldn’t use a single sliver. 

Where is this? Xi Ping thought blankly, throwing back his head to look at the ancient trees that reached to the sky. 

Xi Yue, Xi Yue? 

No response. He couldn’t sense the dragon-taming chain that was tied to his mind.

Xi Ping then focused on the center of his brow and called to Wei Chengxiang…still no response. But this time, he felt his voice bouncing around the reincarnation wood trees around him. 

Just then, something fell out of his hair and slipped down his collar into the front of his robes. Xi Ping reached in to take it out and have a look, then nearly threw it away. “W-w-what the hell!” 

It was a small segment of finger bone! 

But when he squeezed that segment of bone and considered it for a moment, his spiritual sense was faintly touched… He thought that the owner of this bone had some connection to him. Xi Ping hesitated, then carefully put the bone away. He picked up a piece of straw and carelessly tied up his hair, then began to go in circles in the reincarnation wood thicket. 

The reincarnation wood forest must have been hundreds upon thousands of years old. It was dense enough to shut out the light. Xi Ping couldn’t resist muttering, “What a hindrance…” 

Before he could finish speaking, something miraculous happened. All the reincarnation wood trees collectively wriggled their heavy, clumsy trunks, leaning and swaying, making an empty space about a zhang in circumference as if afraid of annoying him. 

Xi Ping was shocked. These things were more obedient than Xi Yue. 

He hesitated a moment, then tentatively said, “Where is this place? Can you point the way for me?” 

The reincarnation wood trees continued to push and shove at each other. If not for the fact that the trees couldn’t leave their roots, they would have walked a few steps aside on their long beards. After a moment, a clear path appeared in the thicket. 

Xi Ping walked a few li along this path and left the reincarnation wood forest. His field of vision suddenly widened—

He was in an enormous valley. The bottom of the valley was full of ruins, like an ancient battlefield. The cliffs all around were full of caves. He couldn’t see clearly what was inside, but he heard the wind passing in and out of them, carrying terrifying sobs. 

The cliffs and the ground were covered in inscriptions, not one of which he recognized. 

In the cracks between the inscriptions, Xi Ping saw a line of footprints and boldly attempted to walk up. Nothing happened. So, walking on tiptoe, he followed the footprints upwards. 

At the end of the footprints was a tall and upright sacrificial altar. 

Xi Ping threw back his head and looked up at the altar, thinking, Oh, mother…

The sacrificial altar was full of human skeletons, seated or standing. The skeletons were all different, their postures almost elegant, the spiritual energy upon them oppressive, so it was impossible to tell at first whether these were real human bones or bizarre statues carved out of white spirits. 

In a moment of resourcefulness, Xi Ping suddenly pulled out the unseen glasses Pang Jian had given back to him before he’d left and looked up through the lenses. 

He saw that the skeleton closest to him, standing, had a name: Zhou Ye. 

He looked to the next ones: Zhou Suxin, Zhou Li, Zhou Qi…

Zhou Qi? 

That name was familiar. Who was it, now? 

Also, why were all these skeletons surnamed Zhou? 

Xi Ping walked in a circle around the altar. Suddenly, he saw a skeleton sitting upright, its head in its hand. For some reason, this skeleton’s posture gave him a sense of utter familiarity. Xi Ping’s heart jumped for no reason. 

Then he saw the name of these bones: Zhou Ying.