Zhou Ying responded: Understood. I will set out shortly. 

When he had just sent this Heavenly Question, he heard a shriek from outside the window. The black cat had missed its footing on the courtyard wall and tumbled down. 

Zhou Ying waved his sleeve. The wind from his sleeve flew out through the crack in the window and firmly kept the stupid cat upright. 

The blue luan that had been teasing the cat flew off flapping its wings, leaving a rainbow behind its butt. The black cat ran inside, its fur bristling, furiously coming to lodge a complaint. 

It had gotten old. For a cat, it was already very elderly. The fur around its eyes and next to its mouth had faded slightly, making its expression look considerably more solemn. Living in the Latent Cultivation Temple with its owner for five years, it had steeped in the abundant spiritual energy of the mountains and was still quite robust; it could perhaps live to nearly two decades. But even if it lived another thirty years, it still wouldn’t make any progress. It was still dimwitted and full of fight. All the auspicious animals in the mountains liked to run over to annoy it when they were idle—especially that blue luan, which came every day, rain or shine, to tease the cat and yank its tail. 

Zhou Ying was about to pick it up. He had reached out halfway when his gaze floated outside. He raised his hand and put a finger to his lips. “A guest is coming. Quiet down.” 

Having said this, he stood upright and went out to welcome the guest. Just as he opened the door, Princess Duanrui landed at the gate of the Qiu courtyard. 

Zhou Ying saluted her politely. “Your Highness Duanrui.” 

In terms of blood relationship, Princess Duanrui was his aunt…some unknown number of generations back, but Zhou Ying never called her “ancestor” the way other members of the Zhou family did; neither did he call her “shishu.” He spoke like an outsider who belonged to the same generation as her—he hadn’t properly joined the Xuanyin Sect. 

Five years ago, the plot in the Impassable Sea had fallen through. Dozens of generations of the Zhou family had conspired for eight centuries, and all of it had failed just on the point of success. The great demon with its incomplete demonic soul had been scattered and suppressed once more by Xuanyin’s three elders working in concert, and the last set of sacrificial spiritual bones in the Impassable Sea had been recovered and returned into the hands of their owner. 

But Great Wan hadn’t had a change of dynasty on account of these events; at present, the Zhou family still ruled. 

For one thing, it was because Green Pool Peak was firmly standing watch in the Xuanyin Mountains; Princess Duanrui, half a step from a shed skin, could still hold up the Zhou clan. For another thing, when the matter of the Impassable Sea had taken place, the resentment of Great Wan’s people had accumulated to a certain degree and exploded, bringing all kinds of filth behind all the great families to the surface. Of the thirty-six peak masters, apart from a small number who, like Zhi Xiu, stood alone, the rest were all covered in dirt. Everyone had made fools of themselves; how could a crow have the face to call a pig black? They didn’t have the capacity to investigate the Zhou clan. 

Anyway, after the demon seal had broken, the spirits of all those with a criminal brand on their spiritual image had shattered along with their brands; not one survivor had been left for Xuanyin Mountain. 

Zhou Kun had died in the backlash from the demon seal and taken along a whole card table of people with him. The old fellow certainly wouldn’t be lonely on the road to the underworld—the number of those who had died in the revolt alone was uncountable, and the immortal mountains had been unable to suppress upheaval on every level of society. After the fact, to calm the people’s anger, they had been forced to hold their noses and put the necks of their own worthless juniors under the knife, knocking down another big batch. 

In the last five years, there had been changes in personnel at all the chambers of commerce. Authority over the Water Transport Office, which had nearly become the personal property of a few individuals, had reverted to the court. The Southern Factory Laws, the Land Laws, and other sets of laws and tax reforms had been put into effect immediately and resolutely—these had all been ready-made; they were all government decrees that Emperor Taiming had wanted to put into effect before his death but which in the end had come to nothing. The drafts had been reworked several times and were already quite perfect. They could simply be copied out with minor revisions. 

The villagers who had lost their land might not be able to take it back, but at any rate their ancestral tombs had been safeguarded; the factory workers might not all be appropriately housed, but for the moment no one would dare to offer up human lives because they were too stingy to offer up spiritual stones; minor merchants naturally still didn’t have any say, but at least they could manage to get a seat. 

Emperor Taiming had exposed the wealthy families’s coverup by force, so no one could hold the Cloud Soaring Flood Dragon back from running all over. 

In fact, looking back on it, when Emperor Taiming had used the fire in the southern outskirts as an excuse to send his troublemaking third son out of Jinping to set fires everywhere, it seemed that he had predicted everything and had been acting with intent. 

Why else, on that night that lightning had flashed and thunder had rumbled in Jinping, would Zhou Kun, when everything was going just fine, have laid out all of the Zhou family’s secrets to the Marquis of Yongning? 

He had been the last of the Zhou family’s demon subduers to go mad, and he had been the one bound to reveal it all. 

Had he already dimly predicted that the Zhou family’s fate was to fail? 

Back then, had he no longer cared about whether the great demon in the East Sea could get justice for the Zhou family? Had he only wanted to deal with Great Wan’s chronic illness?

Of the different expressions on his face in death, which had been true? 

In the fifth year of Taiming, Zhou Kun had placed his own son’s spiritual bones on the altar and stolen a heart demon seed; even now, it was unknown where he had used it. Not long after, there had been internal strife in Xuanyin Mountain. One of the four elders had gone into seclusion, and the spiritual bones of one ascended spirit peak master had been removed. Emperor Taiming, still young at the time, had taken the opportunity to unleash a bloody wind upon the court. 

Twenty-four years later, he had seen off his full blood sister, pierced the heavens, carried off everyone who had been involved, and forced Xuanyin to come out and clean up the aftermath. His whole life seemed to have been nothing but failed attempts, but after his death, everything succeeded. 

This tyrant had held the throne for twenty-nine years, and he seemed to have spent the whole time struggling, searching for an opportunity to stab through the canopy above his head. 

But a person’s death is like a fire being extinguished. What the truth was, no one would know now. His accomplices were departed or dead, he hadn’t been close to his wife, and he’d had no trusted aides. There was only the Marquis of Yongning, who drank a cup of bitter wine with him every year—the two old men didn’t talk; the words were all held in the wine: the Marquis of Yongning wanted him to hurry up and die. 

No one on earth had heard Zhou Kun’s inner thoughts, so whether he had been a repentant sage or a sinful lunatic, it would be up to the ghosts in the underworld to judge. 

In these five years, while Great Wan had experienced internal strife, its vigor had increased considerably. The better part of the six ministries and nine officials had been replaced with civilian officials who had done well in the imperial examination. The new emperor was a generous and benevolent sovereign who carried on the successes of his predecessors. He listened to counsel and was himself industrious, nothing like his old lunatic of a father—the throne had gone to the Crown Prince Zhou Huan. 

When the three high elders had brought back Zhou Ying’s spiritual bones, the Dignitary of Rites Zhao Yin had personally met Zhou Ying in Xuanyin Mountain’s main hall and given him two choices: if he wanted to succeed to the throne, he would need to seal his meridians after opening his spiritual eyes and taking back his spiritual bones, not use spiritual energy for the rest of his life; the body of a half-immortal would only let him survive. He would from then on live out the lifespan of a mortal. Or he could cast off the mortal world and enter the immortal sect, have no more association with the court; only there was no precedent for spiritual bones being restored over twenty years after being removed. No one knew how far he could be able to go along the immortal path in the future. 

Having heard this, Zhou Ying didn’t choose either option. He only very calmly said: “I was trapped at the bottom of the Impassable Sea for twenty years. My temperament is paranoid and narrow-minded. I certainly couldn’t be a generous and benevolent wise sovereign. Moreover, the human heart is contrary. If I agree now to seal my meridians for the sake of stabilizing the nation, in a hundred years my ambition might swell. I can’t guarantee that I wouldn’t go looking for an unorthodox method to extend my lifespan. If the same thing that took place eight hundred years ago should happen again, what will you do? Does the immortal sect have so much confidence in me?” 

Of course the immortal sect didn’t have confidence in him, but the high elder’s Way of the Heart was watching over him, forcing him to practice what he preached; he had promised Xi Ping to let Prince Zhuang choose, so he had to hold his nose and undertake this risk, then think of a way to strictly oversee the outcome. 

“As for the inner sect,” Zhou Ying said with a smile, “Her Highness Duanrui has natural spiritual bones, and she entered the way of clarity and unfeeling. Apart from spiritual bones, I also have an unusual spiritual sense. What plans does the sect have for me? High elder, no one who had been held at the bottom of the Impassable Sea since birth would want to be restrained again.” 

Zhao Yin asked, “You want to join an outer sect? Which one?” 

“None of them would have me,” Zhou Ying said. “I’ve heard that in the present chaos, many of the common people have been led astray by evil cultivators and eaten spiritual stones to become amateur evil cultivators. What is the immortal sect planning to do about these people?” 

This instigator actually had the face to ask! 

His question in fact shut Zhao Yin up. 

According to Great Wan’s previous laws, those people must all be brought down as evil cultivators. 

But the law does not punish the majority. There had truly been too many people involved this time. And these people who had entered the evil way by eating spiritual stones and had led the rebellion were seen as heroes by the common people. If they were all treated as evil cultivators, then the real evil cultivators waiting to take advantage of the situation would happily take them, and the people’s resentment, just barely suppressed, would once again erupt. 

It was even more impossible to accept them. Where would they go? 

Xuanyin’s inner sect was so strict that even imperial kinsmen had to rack their brains to get invited. Heaven’s Design Pavilion had extremely high requirements for the endowments of its recruits; it wasn’t unusual for the blue-clothed half-immortals to go above their grade and kill established foundation cultivators. In the past, Liang Chen and the others had become mine supervisors precisely because their abilities had been inadequate. Before, all these cultivators no one knew what to do with had been placed in the southern mines, and the upshot was that an event of such scope had taken place there, so Xuanyin Mountain no longer dared to let outer sect cultivators muddle around blindly. They had simply dissolved the mining office, and in the future the thirty-six peak masters would take turns sending specially chosen people to oversee the mines. 

Zhou Ying said, calm and composed, “I was indirectly responsible for these people taking the wrong path, and like me, they have nowhere to go. Isn’t that predestination? If the sect has faith in me, you can entrust making arrangements for them to me.” 

In this way, today’s Kaiming Cultivators had come to be. 

Xuanyin promulgated a new law. Cultivators from among the common people needed to register and place Xuanyin’s spiritual seal on themselves, becoming Kaiming Cultivators. They would then no longer be considered evil cultivators. After affixing the spiritual seal, the immortal mountain would be able to strictly monitor and control every spell the Kaiming Cultivators used. If they committed a crime, even if they ran to the ends of the earth, Xuanyin Mountain’s Discipline Hall would be able to break apart their spirit with a single talisman. 

These legally operating Kaiming Cultivators were dispatched to various regions according to their registered permanent residence to perform tasks that mortals would be incapable of on assignment from the court—repairing inscriptions, maintaining the arrays on Moon Plated Gold gold smelters, looking after medicinal herb fields, rescuing people if they came upon natural disasters, and so on. According to their labor, they could obtain between one and two jade stamp stones every month. 

Apart from this, Kaiming Cultivators were also cultivators. In a real emergency, they had the means to “bring their complaints to higher authorities.” If there were once again crafty sycophants who defied natural and moral law using the immortal sect’s authority, they would have to have some qualms on account of the Kaiming Cultivators; they amounted to protection talismans for their hometowns. 

In this way, any “evil cultivators” within Great Wan who weren’t willing to register had become true evil cultivators. They increasingly had nowhere to shelter, because as soon as the Kaiming Cultivators got involved with evil cultivators, they would be noticed by the spiritual seal and punished as “evil cultivators”—after thousands of years, the immortal sect had at last condescended to give common cultivators a narrow and barren patch of open ground on which to gain a foothold. It was too precious. No Kaiming Cultivator could stand to put their own and their family's safety at risk. Finally they became the most energetic in opposing evil cultivators, lest they be taken for one of them. 

Blind suppression would only arouse rebellion. Categorization was the correct principle. 

It was no wonder that Prince Zhuang Zhou Ying was the person Green Pool Peak had settled on to inherit the throne at the outset. He stayed in the Latent Cultivation Temple looking after his spiritual bones and showed no signs of being busy. Relying solely on remote control via the Heavenly Question, he arranged the common cultivators within Great Wan into a perfect order. Countless evil cultivators who had wildly expanded their influence in the conflict lost any place to shelter overnight. Within a year or two, they were practically torn up by the roots by Heaven’s Design Pavilion. Any who could run had run. 

Therefore, apart from the “Kaiming Cultivators,” Zhou Ying had also singlehandedly established the Luwu¹—they mixed in among evil cultivators who had fled abroad and quietly seeped into the surroundings. They could conceal themselves much more easily than Heaven’s Design Pavilion’s blue-clothesers, who basically couldn’t leave the country unless they were in disguise. 

Zhou Ying never did anything in a hurry. Only after living in the Latent Cultivation Temple for nearly two years, when his body without its spiritual bones had nearly failed, did he at last unhurriedly open his spiritual eyes. Princess Duanrui had come down in person to oversee his fusion with his spiritual bones. It was so steady that not even the newly grown buds outside the window trembled. All of the Latent Cultivation Temple’s stewards had been overwhelmed with gratitude—they had been on tenterhooks for two years, all of them ready to repair the Qiu courtyard once more. 

Zhou Ying had been in poor health since birth. He needed to adjust to merging with his spiritual bones. Duanrui had placed three hundred bone nails in his body and removed a few periodically. 

After five years, Princess Duanrui inspected his spiritual bones and at last removed all the bone nails. “Your spiritual bones have been restored. You can leave the mountain.” 

“Thank you, Your Highness,” said Zhou Ying. “I’m grateful to you for personally overseeing this all these years.” 

“No need. I was involved in this to begin with,” Duanrui said. “The Zhou family’s business has nothing to do with the younger generations. Go and look after yourself. The immortal sect will handle affairs justly.” 

“Yes, Your Highness.” Zhou Ying humbly accepted her instruction. Seeing that Duanrui was about to go, he called her back. “Before I leave the mountain, would it be possible to see Shiyong on my grandmother’s behalf? He hasn’t written home in five years. The old lady is very concerned.” 

Princess Duanrui shook her head. “I passed by Flying Jade Peak on my way here. The mountain is still sealed.” 

Hearing this, Zhou Ying lowered his eyes, then quickly stood up as though nothing were the matter and politely saw her out. Smiling, he said, “Indeed? That is unfortunate.” 

Just then, out of the corner of her eye, Princess Duanrui suddenly glimpsed a wooden carving of a karma beast standing on the windowsill. 

Zhou Ying followed her gaze and said, “When Shiyong was at the Latent Cultivation Temple before, he thoughtlessly asked for that to play with. I believe Your Highness made it?” 

“Did Steward Su tell you that?” said Princess Duanrui. 

Zhou Ying shook his head. “No, I can sense that its aura is similar to Your Highness’s.” 

Princess Duanrui’s steps paused. She turned her head and looked at Zhou Ying. In a rare occurrence, she voluntarily asked, “How does all that you see appear to your eyes?” 

“Well, this paramount spiritual sense,” Zhou Ying said, raising his eyebrows and shaking his head, “I was born with it. I have nothing to compare it with. There’s nothing unusual about it. I suppose my eyes and ears are a little keener than an ordinary half-immortal’s. If there is a very strong karmic bond—for example, if this little figurine created by Your Highness is placed beside you—I can sense it a bit.” 

In his eyes, the adorable karma beast figurine and the unapproachable Princess Duanrui both had a layer of clear haze over them. 

Without so much as blinking, Zhou Ying said, smiling, “You both share the same just and stainless air.” 

Duanrui never listened to this sort of flattery, which was like a New Year’s greeting. She only waved a hand and instructed him, “An ordinary cultivator’s spiritual sense corresponds to their cultivation level. Only you are different. The senses cause turmoil in the human heart. Too strong a spiritual sense is not necessarily a good thing. Though you have taken back your spiritual bones and so will not die young, you are still frailer than others of the same cultivation level. You must continue to take preservative elixirs.” 

Zhou Ying nodded in agreement and watched her retreating figure as she left, his smile steady and unremarkable. He thought, “Half a step from a shed skin, yet her Way of the Heart is exposed.” 

The princess was always in seclusion. The heart demon seed that Zhou Kun had stolen twenty-nine years ago couldn’t have been planted on her. But it was clear that even she had been impacted. Evidently the demonic seed had grown in the immortal mountains. 

He gently tapped the joints of his fingers, calculating his plans like the Dignitary of Fate’s lineage observing celestial phenomena. There was no rush. The life of a half-immortal was long. 

The black cat came over, wanting to rub against his legs. When it looked up and saw his smile, for some reason, it backed up a step. 

Prince Zhuang looked down and met the cat’s eyes. The smile that seemed to be carved onto his face disappeared. 

Fourteen years ago, when he had struggled free of the Impassable Sea, narrowly escaping with his life, his physical body had been gravely ill in the mortal world. There had been a little scoundrel who, judging others against himself, had thought that he was heartbroken over the death of an old dog and had picked this little thing up from somewhere and snuck it into his study. 

The kitten had been scared to death and had peed on a set of the Four Books annotated by a great scholar of a previous reign…completely ruining them. 

“I commit you to Elder Su’s care.” Zhou Ying leaned down and picked up the cat. “You can live some years longer in the immortal mountains. I no longer need your company.” 

A fourteen-year-old cat could more or less understand a bit of human speech. It opened its eyes wide and looked at him. 

Zhou Ying flicked out a talisman, and a few straw children came inside in answer to the summons and pack for him. 

“Don’t touch that.” When a straw child picked up a brocade box on the table, it was knocked open by a talisman. Zhou Ying coldly said, “Don’t touch anything with a brocade carp on it. Pack up the other things.” 

Inside the brocade box whose lid had been opened was a stack of contamination avoiding talismans. 

The technique was clumsy. It was evident at a glance that these talismans weren’t very expert. They had been meticulously preserved. None of the spiritual energy had drained away. They were identical to what they had been five years ago…in the eyes of an ordinary person. 

But in the eyes of someone with a paramount spiritual sense, that person’s aura had vanished long ago from the contamination avoiding talismans.