Zhao Yin struggled free of the Vitex Branch and recklessly flew towards the East Sea. 

In fact, impulses are like great joys and great sorrows; none of them will last very long. The evil flame, once gone, was gone. Zhao Yin had noticed that there was something wrong with his thoughts: even if Zhang Jue, out of consideration for Zhi Xiu, wanted to protect the descendant of their lineage at every point, Lin Zongyi still ought to have approved of expelling demons. 

The moment the Vitex Branch had caught him, he had been bewildered. How had he provoked both of these people into standing against him? 

However, some impulses are like writing the wrong word—you just need to cross it out; while other impulses are like killing the wrong person—once dead, they can’t come back to life. 

With the thirty-six peaks as witness, Zhao Yin had wished to use the Bell of Tribulation and had been obstructed, then cried out “The two of you are lusting after the principal peak.” What was done was done. 

Upbraiding others on the basis of virtue while lacking virtue, spitting upon others while being contemptible, accusing others of selfishness while himself bewildered by selfishness—as Xuanyin Mountain’s Dignitary of Rites High Elder, Zhao Yin couldn’t fail to understand this obvious reasoning. 

So today he had to prove that the demon seal was under attack and he was right, or else he would lose all standing and reputation after what he had said. 

In an instant, Zhao Yin passed by the thirty-six peaks and arrived at the Latent Cultivation Temple, which formed the barrier between mortal and immortal. 

A storm raised by a shed skin sage was no small matter. Where Zhao Yin passed, a waterspout appeared. The straw children, still performing the routine actions of repairing the residences of the disciples, collectively had their heads separated from their bodies and rose into the air.  

Luo Qingshi heard the noise and thought it was someone fooling around with talismans. He stuck his head out of the Qiankun Tower ready to scold. Unexpectedly, as soon as he looked up, he was alarmed. Showing great adaptability, Immortal Luo leapt out of his chair. Before he hit the ground, he had already squeezed into a protective mustard seed. He went rolling down the Qiankun Tower’s high stone steps. 

The next moment, there was a faint crack as a snow bright whip cleaved the black clouds raised by Zhao Yin, trickling out like daylight. 

When the dreadful “daylight” swept over it, the Latent Cultivation Temple’s Qiankun Tower was cut down the middle by fierce wind, and the third-class inscriptions on the tower didn’t even light up—Princess Duanrui was here! 

“How lucky that I rolled quickly… My goodness, why are they fighting?” Luo Qingshi, who was usually very eager to enrich his experience, didn’t even dare to stay to observe this time. He nimbly fled the Qiankun Tower, rolled up a pile of straw children with missing limbs, and began to run like mad. 

Duanrui showed no mercy. As soon as she joined the battle, she delivered a killing blow. Where her vital weapon, the Remorseless Whip, passed, the Latent Cultivation Temple’s lush green vegetation instantly withered. Half the valley took on a lifeless hue. 

Zhao Yin was caught off guard. The lash of her whip hindered him, giving the two elders behind him the chance to catch up. 

The princess knew that however much she might be the foremost person below the shed skin level, she was still “below the shed skin level”. Therefore, she didn’t try to show off. She rolled up the Remorseless Whip and withdrew. 

Zhao Yin gave a furious shout. The waterspout at his feet swept across the Latent Cultivation Temple. The huge valley that disciples of each year broke their legs running across to get to morning class was covered in an instant. 

In Zhang Jue’s snow white eyes, the even whiter irises changed positions like the movements of the stars. There was a humming in the ears of all the people and auspicious animals in the Latent Cultivation Temple. Even the wind stagnated. 

In that moment, all persons and objects lost their origins and destinations; they were severed from their own cause and effect, cast all over at random—stones that had been rolling down rose into the sky; the straw children thrown up into the sky by the wind ended up half-buried in the dirt; Luo Qingshi and his protective mustard seed “parted ways” out of nowhere, ending up over a zhang apart in the blink of an eye; Princess Duanrui’s figure was snatched up to the pinnacle of the split Qiankun Tower; Zhao Yin froze in midair—the people on the ground craned their necks until they nearly broke to see his enormous sleeves, his figure as grand as the southern mountain. 

The mountain was collapsing. 

Lightning wrapped around inscriptions slammed into Zhao Yin like a natural disaster. He was knocked out of the clouds by the two great shed skin elders. The Vitex Branch came down, pressing directly against the spirit at the center of Zhao Yin’s brow. 

The Dignitary of Rites High Elder’s cheeks were sunken in. There was a frightening elderliness in his face. His eyes were fit to burst out of their sockets, he glared at Duanrui at the top of the Qiankun Tower. 

Under the force of three great shed skins, Princess Duanrui’s breathing was rather unsteady, but she herself was very steady. With the Remorseless Whip curled up, she nodded from afar towards Lin Zongyi and Zhang Jue. 

The Zhou family…

Zhao Yin thought: The Zhou family, suppressed for over a thousand years by the immortal mountains—their methods were truly excellent. On one hand, raising demons in the Impassable Sea, and on the other, cultivating in seclusion on Green Pool Peak, the immortal and demonic sides not hindering each other. Xuanyin Mountain had four great families; for the sake of equilibrium, for the last thousand years, only the Zhou clan hadn’t had a shed skin, but within a single generation, they had managed directly or indirectly to pull two shed skin elders down from the spiritual mountains—what scheming! 

After five years of growth, the heart demon, which had already put down deep roots, covetously enveloped the shed skin elder’s Way of the Heart, neatly tying all the unrelated coincidences in Zhao Yin’s mind into a conspiracy. Darkness appeared on the Vitex Branch holding his spirit. 

At the bottom of the Impassable Sea, Zhou Ying came to the last pair of inscriptions whose sequence he had disrupted. He couldn’t hear Xi Ping’s voice for the moment, so he took the opportunity to brush the spiritual energy extending from the weak inscriptions. As if talking to himself, he said in an almost inaudible low voice, “Power is like the tide. If you try to wash away your bad reputation, when the tide recedes, you’ll be dried out on the shoal of disgrace.”  

Blood churned in Zhao Yin’s eyes—before the Great War of Gods and Demons, there were no spiritual mountains, no immortal sects, and naturally there had also been no such thing as so-called “family protection.” Each cultivator was a lost wanderer, finding their own Ways of the Heart through repeated fumbling, how far they could walk solely dependent on their individual luck and aptitude. 

Only Zhao Yin had taken a shortcut. 

Back then, he had been only a puny open-eyed half-immortal, stuck at the two-century threshold, already showing signs of coming to the end of his lifespan, not making the slightest progress in his cultivation, his hopes growing more and more remote. Once, when he went to sea to seek an opportunity, he happened by chance to be caught up in a struggle between masters. Zhao Yin came close to death, but his luck was good. Amid the violent storm, he survived. 

When he woke up, he found that he had been thrown up onto a nameless little island. With him was half of the corpse of a master, along with that person’s intact vital weapon. Zhao Yin was very surprised, because in that era, very few cultivators died natural deaths; it was vanishingly rare for a person’s weapon to survive after their death. So he curiously stepped forward to investigate. 

At first sight, he found that, like the most perfect inscribed memorial tablet, the vital weapon, loyal to the last, was carved with all the paths its master had walked while living—it was a polished, complete Way of the Heart! 

Zhao Yin had searched bitterly without finding the threshold to an established foundation; his heart began to beat wildly. He thought, Why can’t I use someone else’s Way of the Heart? 

He did want to find his own way, but the lifespan of a half-immortal was too limited. They were hardly better off than ephemeral mortals. He was nearly out of time! 

But while he lived another day, succeeded in establishing a foundation and becoming immortal, he became for a time the laughingstock of the cultivation world. 

All his fellow cultivators knew that his Way of the Heart was “stolen”. 

Now, thousands of years had passed, and it had been a long time since anyone had talked about a “stolen Way of the Heart”. Inheriting a Way of the Heart from an elder or a deceased master was now seen as a matter of course; it was fumbling around for yourself that was rare…even a little unorthodox—if your teacher didn’t have some breadth of mind, they were likely to be somewhat embarrassed. 

For the Zhao family, which had been the first to implement this method, their patience at the outset had been repaid; from the laughingstock of the cultivation world, they had gone on to become one of the great families of Southern Wan, had even dared on the strength of overwhelming numbers to claim themselves as equals to the Lin clan, which had turned out so many geniuses. Everyone fell over themselves to follow their example, racking their brains to come up with a way to join the Zhao clan. 

But the human heart isn’t floating duckweed. Even when the direction of the wind changes, deep-rooted humiliation remains in place. 

If you whitewashed the road you had climbed to turn it into a heavenly pathway to immortality, you still couldn’t fool yourself after having crept up that road step by step—his Way of the Heart was stolen. 

A crack opened in the Way of the Heart of the Dignitary of Rites High Elder, which had been impregnable as a fortress for thousands of years, just like a thousand-li dam bursting because of an ant hole. 

Zhang Jue suddenly sensed something. He cried out, “Dignitary of Rites!” 

Without hesitation, Princess Duanrui shunned the Qiankun Tower. At the same time, she tossed out a huge mustard seed, wrapping up herself and all the half-immortals in the Latent Cultivation Temple. 

The next moment, an enormous impact slammed down from above. Luo Qingshi and the others like him for a time didn’t know what had happened; they only thought that the sky seemed to have fallen. 

The mustard seed maintained by the princess, who was half a step from the shed skin boundary, shattered at this single attack. She went to her knees on the ground, her posture very unnatural—her spiritual bones had snapped! 

But she no longer had attention to spare for that. 

Duanrui hastily stabilized her fractured vertebra and ribs with spiritual energy. She turned her head away, her pupils contracting sharply—what had shattered her mustard seed just now had been an astral wind. 

The other two great shed skin elders had held down Zhao Yin, but they hadn’t held down the fallout of his Way of the Heart being crushed. The wind that had cast heaven and earth into darkness, like a waterspout, was rushing lightning fast towards the edge of the Latent Cultivation Temple, about to fly out carrying the irresolvable obsession…fly out into the mortal world, where even a falling brick could kill! 

Damn it! 

Just then, there was a drone. The Bell of Tribulation suspended over Xuanyin Mountain’s principal peak was struck by a beam of sword energy carrying the aura of frost and snow. It resonated throughout the thirty-six peaks. 

The tolling of the bell instantly smashed the better part of the waterspout with its towering resentment. The astral wind that seemed about to destroy the world was downgraded at once, changing into an ordinary hurricane, pitifully and contemptibly continuing on its way east. 

Meanwhile, the demon seal in the East Sea was restored, and the excited demon seed unwillingly fell back into the abyss. But while the portion of the inscriptions belonging to Zhao Yin remained loyal to their post, the spiritual energy swarming over them, as if suddenly rudderless, became clumsy, only swept along by the inscriptions of the other two, moving mechanically. 

Zhou Ying extended a hand and allowed the thin smoke of the Riverward to envelop him. Finally, he looked towards the reincarnation wood forest—without the cover of great chaos in the world, a twenty-something cultivator half a step from an ascended spirit was too shocking. Even if he took Shiyong away by force now, he would only be another Qiu Sha, wiped away by the Way of Heaven. 

It wasn’t time yet…

Meanwhile, in the Xuanyin Mountains, Xi Ping, hidden in Lin Chi’s sleeve, and Wen Fei simultaneously recognized the beam of sword energy that had struck the Bell of Tribulation. 

Xi Ping was pleasantly surprised. “Shifu!” 

But Wen Fei was so startled that his fan slipped out of his hand. 

Lin Chi deftly caught the fan with the blue luan’s tail and saw a heap of disorderly writing climb over it as if flying: I kneel before you, Zhi Jingzhai! I wanted you to come out of seclusion to have a look. I didn’t want you to clean up the shed skin battlefield! Aiming the Bell of Tribulation directly at a shed skin—General Zhi, pardon me, are you the Southern Sage reincarnated? What do you think your cultivation level is? Do you really think you’re on a par with a full moon grade divine tool from the heart of the mountains…

The first stroke of a final line of scrambling writing had just appeared when the messy writing on the fan suddenly paused. Then it was wiped away. 

Then, a few characters very slowly appeared on Immortal Wen Fei’s special fan. It looked like the dying testament of a person on the brink of death, written on a final breath, each stroke shaking. 

These characters were nearly falling apart, barely holding their shape. The handwriting was scarcely discernible. It said: Shifu is here. 

Lin Chi was slightly startled. In the reincarnation wood, it was as if Xi Ping had been struck by the heavenly calamity in the sky over the Xuanyin Mountains. 

Only Wen Fei was bewildered, thinking to himself, Whose shifu is he calling himself? 

It was all over. He was starting to rave. 

Wen Fei took back his fan, and the three crooked words melted like snowflakes. The master of Rosy Cloud Peak waved the fan somewhat anxiously a few times and aimed it at Lin Chi: Lin-shixiong, is there anything you can do about Zhaoting? 

Lin Chi shook his head. “Zhaoting is one of the three famous swords of the era. It won’t be so easy to repair. Moreover, there was a piece missing when Elder Zhang brought it back. Forgive me, I can’t do it.” 

Xi Ping was trapped in the reincarnation wood and couldn’t put in a word. Hearing this, his mind filled with questions: Zhaoting was missing a piece—what had happened? Had the Dignitary of Fate High Elder who kept his eyes closed all the time groped around blindly and missed a piece? 

No…that was wrong! 

Just now, on Peak Master Wen’s fan, shifu had obviously been talking to him. 

But…shifu had been sent away before the demon seal in the East Sea had descended, and he hadn’t left Flying Jade Peak in five years. He shouldn’t know what had happened after the arrival of the three elders. 

By normal reasoning, supposing that his inheritance from the demonic god hadn’t been exposed, the elders ought to have tossed him back into the Xuanyin Mountains, and now he would only be a puny established foundation. In a situation like this, he would either have been gathered up into some master’s sleeves, or he would be hiding somewhere not daring to raise his head. How could he end up in company with some ascended spirit peak masters watching the fun…having specifically chosen these two, who were least able to fight? 

How could shifu know he was here? 

Xi Ping suddenly remembered the bloodstains on his san-ge’s hand. They didn’t look as though he had picked them up somewhere—they looked as if a sharp weapon had cut him. Was the missing shard of Zhaoting in his corpse?! 

So when shizun had been startled awake by Peak Master Wen just now, if he hadn’t convinced san-ge to stop…

Just then, he saw writing continue to pop up on Wen Fei’s fan: Five years ago, he was seriously injured, lost his vital weapon, and was forced to enter seclusion. In five years, he may just have accumulated the strength for that one blow. He’s courting death! 

Before Xi Ping could finish reading, Wen Fei suddenly turned and left. 

“Wait! My shifu, he…” Xi Ping’s heart trembled. He hurriedly said to Lin Chi, “Peak Master Lin!” 

Lin Chi was very understanding. “I’ll take you over to have a look.” 

Just then, Lin Zongyi’s voice suddenly sounded in the sky above Xuanyin’s thirty-six peaks: “The Dignitary of Rites’s Way of the Heart has been damaged. There is something abnormal about this. The Dignitary of Fate and I will leave the mountains to investigate. Xuanyin’s thirty-six peaks will be sealed.” 

Zhou Ying had just been brought out the Impassable Sea by the Riverward. He had yet to leave the area of the East Sea when he heard Xi Ping’s urgent voice come from the reincarnation wood he was carrying: “San-ge, Xuanyin’s shed skin elders are almost here!” 

Zhou Ying clicked his tongue and drew back his hand, which had been about to put the Riverward away. “It would seem that Zhao Yin has truly gone to see the sages?” 

One of the whirlpools in the Resurrection Vortex swept by, rolling up the Riverward and Zhou Ying inside it. The Riverward covered all his traces and aura; he became one with the East Sea. 

Next, the slowly billowing thin smoke of the Riverward changed into a vague human form and landed beside him. It pointed a finger at him and put it to its lips—be quiet, be careful. 

The consciousnesses of the shed skin elders came sweeping over. 

Zhou Ying was accustomed to ditching his benefactors once he no longer needed help. He ignored the Riverward, only leaning back languidly against the thin smoke. He said to Xi Ping, “You won’t make it by the tenth. When the storm has passed, I’ll pare off a piece of reincarnation wood and have Bai Ling take it to the Marquis Manor.” 

Xi Ping said, “…aren’t you going?” 

Zhou Ying was silent a moment, not answering. He only continued his instructions: “That half-puppet footman of yours is currently at the Marquis Manor. I’ll have Bai Ling explain things to him, have him think of a way to get some of the old lady’s blood—if someone’s blood is spilled on reincarnation wood that has held your consciousness, you’ll be able to communicate through their spirit, right? Be careful when you talk, don’t scare her, just say it’s a new kind of immortal tool… Oh, right, I suppose I can’t mention you to outsiders, that’ll be annoying…” 

Before he could finish, his gaze suddenly froze—the human form in the Riverward’s thin smoke had come clear. 

This time, the Riverward hadn’t turned into Xi Ping again. The old lady with her head full of silver hair was sitting upright nearby, looking at him and smiling.