The what to-be?

For a moment, Xu Rucheng thought there was something wrong with his ears. “Is that also my lord’s command?”

His lord definitely couldn’t be so preposterous.

“It isn’t, actually,” Xi Ping said righteously. “Before the fifteenth of the eighth month, I need to get my hands on a hundred thousand liang of white spirits.”

Xu Rucheng: “…”

Today was already the last day of the seventh month. There wasn’t even time for a late change in the fillings of the mooncakes to be given as Mid-Autumn Festival gifts. And here was an evil god casually pointing to the moon itself and saying he wanted to eat that one!

Forgive his limited experience, but when the southern mines had conveyed shipments of spiritual stones to Great Wan with a navy escorted by half a dozen water dragons, would the blue jades, green stamps, and even green ore slag of one convoy put together have been worth a hundred thousand white spirits?

“You, well, you’ll have to be circumspect, think of a way to sneak into Sanyue’s inner sect in the future,” pronounced the evil god who wouldn’t have to any of the work himself. “You can keep using this identity, marry in and become part of the West Peak. It’ll be very convenient.”

“Then why don’t you…” Xu Rucheng was so mad he was steaming from the ears and nearly let his mouth get away from him. He forced himself to calm down and changed what he had been about to say. “What do you want so many spiritual stones for?”

“Well, I want to put together a little spirit-gathering array in Tao County,” the evil god said. “Tao County’s reincarnation wood trees are my foundation. At first, thanks to Qiu Sha, I could have had free run of Tao County, but that old fool shone a light on them, and they all withered. I’ve heard that the Silver Moon leaves behind a Moon Shadow where it passes. For at least the next half year, spiritual energy won’t flow freely. Won’t my reincarnation wood trees have rotted down to the roots by then? I need to gather some spiritual energy to protect them. The array needs spiritual stones.”

Xu Rucheng’s head was pounding. “Do you think I’m stupid? You told me before to cut down all the reincarnation wood trees in Tao County. Now that Sanyue’s shed skin came all this way to save you the trouble, you say you’re afraid the trees will rot and want spiritual stones?”

Xi Ping had been feeding him nonsense all along; for a moment he’d forgotten what he had cooked up before. He was brought up short. “Times change—and I wasn’t finished. To dispel the Moon Shadow over Tao County, the spirit-gathering array must be complete before the Mid-Autumn Festival. It would take too long to get spiritual stones from Dongheng’s Sanyue, so it has to be you.”

With one ear, Xu Rucheng listened to the evil god shooting off his plans. With the other, he listened to the uproar of voices outside the courtyard. He opened the little maid’s round eyes into copper bells. “Has to… What the fuck does this have to do with me? You’re always lying. Why should I help you do something like this?”

“Heh.” Xi Ping calmly spat out three words: “Heart demon oath.”

Xu Rucheng: “…”

Fuck eight generations of your ancestors!

“Young mistress!”

“Dandan!”

“Qindan-shimei!”

In a twinkling, Xu Rucheng ducked behind a swing set. Before his floating hems could touch the ground, he heard a low cry: “Break!”

The flaming third-class inscriptions were extinguished by the established foundation cultivator with spiritual energy. Fortunately, the majority of the inscriptions had been burnt beyond recognition. No one would notice at a glance that they had been tampered with.

The established foundation cultivator quickly severed the spiritual energy powering the inscriptions. The he and his consciousness breached the little courtyard almost simultaneously.

Xu Rucheng, covering his face, had no choice. With a jade stamp, he activated the immortal tool he was wearing. When he lowered his sleeves, he grew three and a half cun, and his round face stretched slightly into an oval. He took on Zhao Qindan’s appearance.

Sadly, while the immortal tool could mimic a person’s spiritual image, Xu Rucheng couldn’t imitate the young mistress’s deportment. This big fellow amply demonstrated how someone could “put on imperial robes and still not look a prince.” The tall and slender beauty ought to have resembled an immortal crane; with him at the controls, she somehow became a camel—the legs were still just as long, but the effect wasn’t at all convincing.

Xi Ping: “…”

Even the Zhaos who had charged inside were taken aback.

Xu Rucheng knew at once that he had turned the young mistress into the idiot from the neighboring village. In a flash, he demonstrated some quick wits. Before the others could work out what was wrong, he tossed a talisman at the crowd. “What do you care if I live or die? I’ll return this body to you!”

As expected, a suicide attempt was satisfactory. No one had any more attention to spare for finding fault with the young mistress’s deportment. Xu Rucheng was afraid of saying something wrong and didn’t dare to improvise. He only repeated what he had overheard Zhao Qindan saying, crying and screaming and threatening suicide. He even knew to adjust the original words and their sequence in order to avoid coming across as a parrot just repeating what he had heard.

In the Zhao family’s hidden realm, the young mistress’s little courtyard was a shambles.

Xi Ping laughed. “Genius Xu, you’re beyond compare!”

Xu Rucheng secretly ground his teeth: Too wicked—may you die without progeny!

Having successfully put Xu Rucheng in Zhao Qindan’s position, Xi Ping wasn’t concerned about his performance—this Luwu was low on ingenuity as a rule, but he was reliable enough in a crisis.

But once his consciousness left the Zhao family hidden realm, Xi Ping’s laughter no longer came so easily.

He had played it down in front of Xu Rucheng; his inward anxiety was another thing.

His “hundred thousand liang” was the absolute bottom line, the product of him harassing Lin Chi and Xi Yue in the middle of the night, making them each take a look at the spirit-gathering array, then using the plans to calculate through the night with A-Xiang. For a great array like this that would cover a whole county, no array master would dare to say that there wouldn’t be wastage of twenty to thirty percent of the spiritual stones.

He didn’t know whether Yu Family Bend had so much money, and he didn’t know how much he could get.

Half a month…

It was like A-Xiang had said—it would be more practical to drive off all the people in Tao County.

In a flash, Xi Ping’s consciousness had returned to Tao County.

It was said that the Sanyue Mountains had agreed to give Tao County disaster relief funds and emergency provisions. Getting through the winter wouldn’t be an issue. Therefore, while they were scraping the earth to make doubly sure, the people, well-behaved, kept their heads up and began to look ahead expectantly.

This wretched place didn’t look any different from previous years.

Say what you would, the people couldn’t leave. Transportation in Western Chu wasn’t as well-developed as in Great Wan. From your own town to the county seat was already a long journey. All the local thugs and despots monopolized the factories and farms, and everyone else had to eke out their food from between their clenched fingers. Therefore, people everywhere were isolationist.

Even if a prestigious and respected person came and made the matter of the Moon Shadow known to the public, at most they would be even more despairing; they wouldn’t want to leave. Because in previous years of catastrophe, one people left their homes and became refugees, far less than half of them made it in the end. If they stayed behind in the Moon Shadow—in the words of the many worm masters, the greater part of adults without major health problems would do well enough, only losing a decade or two off their lifespans.

Xi Ping weighed it up—if it were him, he wouldn’t leave either.

Since the Silver Moon had passed over the reincarnation wood, being in the wood made him uncomfortable. There seemed to be remnants of the Silver Moon’s light still inside it, pricking his consciousness like thin needles, warning him that the Way of Heaven was watching him, the established foundation ant who had an exaggerated sense of his own abilities.

“Let it look.” The pricking sent Xi Ping into something of a rage. Faced with the remaining might of the Silver Moon, his natural unruliness was aroused and changed to stubbornness. He thought, “I’m staying here, and that’s that.”

A group of small children were chasing after each other nearby. One of them opened his mouth wide and sneezed with abandon, snot spurting half a chi long. This mighty hero flung the snot toward the reincarnation wood tree without a care, then flung himself at his companions with a yowl.

Xi Ping: “…”

The “evil god” who had no fear of the Silver Moon’s remaining might flew away in terror.

Passing by another tree beside the road, he saw another crowd of kids, twittering and chirping as they surrounded a young girl. As soon as Xi Ping saw the kids, he remembered the snot. He meant to keep a respectful distance, taking an inadvertent glance as he passed by, but he saw that the young girl who was the center of the action was drawing small animals on the others’ arms with flower dye.

Xi Ping paused—she was drawing over the full moon scabs, turning the frightening scabs into the animals’ round bellies.

“I got one too, I got one too!” A child next to her raised a hand, displaying a scab like a snake scale on the back of the hand. “Draw me a little flower!”

“I wanna cat.”

“Hee-hee, a cat’s nothing, mine’s biggest, I wanna big tiger.”

“I wanted a tiger first, you can’t have one! Mine’s bigger than yours, let’s see whose is biggest if you don’t believe me!”

The ignorant children clamored and shoved, treating the full moon scabs like medals.

Xi Ping’s spiritual sense was suddenly touched. He sent out his gaze and saw an old man with a veiled face standing nearby. He was a worm master.

He was staring covetously at this crowd of little “walking ghosts.”

With a thought Xi Ping told the Luwu garrisoned at the Snake King’s Immortal Palace to come drive away the vultures who had been lured by the scent of rotting meat.

At the Snake King’s Immortal Palace, resources had previously been quite substantial, but following Qiu Sha’s antics, at least half its spiritual stones had been drained dry. Even if they put together all they had, at best it would come to one or two thousand liang of white spirits. It was like trying to put out a cartload of blazing firewood with a cup of water.

San-ge’s accounts all had to be aboveboard, and anyway, it was one thing to ask for a bit of pocket money—a large quantity of spiritual stones crossing the border was impracticable.

Time was too tight and the sum too big; he couldn’t place all his bets on Xu Rucheng, either.

Where else could he get money quickly?

As Xi Ping’s consciousness roved through the scenes of devastation in Wild Fox Country, taking Great Wan’s laws as his basis, he considered each outstanding criminal charge one by one, calculating where money would come in fastest.

Suddenly, he remembered how when Tao County had been enveloped by the Law Breaker Bracelet, the spiritual energy leaking from the ascended spirits had nearly turned the barren land into green ore fields.

Yes—when cultivators “pilfered heaven’s order,” they stole spiritual energy from their surroundings and stored it in their essences. When these people died, the spiritual energy in their essences wouldn’t just vanish.

Cultivators’ corpses could also be used as spiritual stones.

As soon as Xi Ping had this thought, there was no stopping it from growing: before the reincarnation wood rotted to the core, at least, Wild Fox Country was still his domain. No one knew that he had eyes in all the wild trees growing by the walls and roads. As long as he could keep things under control, all the cultivators who set foot in Wild Fox Country could be his prey…

An established foundation…an ascended spirit…how many white spirits were they equal to?

As his thoughts slid in an ever more dangerous direction, there was a buzz in Xi Ping’s ears, as if his consciousness had been smacked by a very thin piece of metal; the echoes quivered incessantly.

Xi Ping came back to himself at once. There was a familiar aura to the chill that had touched his consciousness…Zhaoting!

“Shifu?”

There was no answer.

Like a headless fly, Xi Ping’s consciousness turned circles searching everywhere, but before him were only boundless hills, an invisible horizon.

For some reason, he suddenly felt a bit lonely. He chose a reincarnation wood tree growing in the river, which hadn’t had any brats wipe snot on it. Xi Ping curled up his consciousness and calmed his mind. For the first time in five years, he began to meditate like the disciple of an orthodox sect.

As his undulating and irritable state of mind settled, Xi Ping “saw” the demon seal’s fetters on his consciousness. Working against the shackling demon seal, he established a faint connection with his body in the Impassable Sea.

Then he heard the murmur of the sword, knocking against his consciousness from the distant East Sea. Involuntarily, Xi Ping followed that weak sound, seeking. “Shi…hey!”

Once again, sword energy hit him gently. This time, he found that Zhaoting seemed to be angry.

Next, clear sword aura came to his consciousness, and Xi Ping received it in bewilderment: what was shifu doing? Teaching him swordsmanship? He didn’t even have hands!

But apart from the few words on Wen Fei’s fan, it had been too long since he had heard anything from his shizun. He quickly gathered his focus.

When he had been on Flying Jade Peak, Zhi Xiu hadn’t taught him swordsmanship—his young disciple had just begun to cultivate; the disparity was too great, it would have been a waste to teach him, like playing the qin to a cow. But now, Xi Ping’s body was at the pinnacle of the established foundation stage, and his consciousness had been honed during his wanderings on both banks of the Xia River and was perhaps even stronger than that of an average ascended spirit. The situation had changed completely. To his surprise, he found that he could “understand” shizun’s sword aura now.

At first, the sword was mild and fair. Then it became more and more bitingly cold, more and more unrestrained. The sword was a weapon that existed for the sake of drawing blood. Without restrictions, its ferocity was overpowering. Xi Ping was terrified. If he hadn’t believed from the bottom of his heart that shifu wouldn’t hurt him, he’d have been ready to turn tail and run.

Then the sword’s fury touched something. It clearly reflected all the thoughts Xi Ping had just had about hunting cultivators, one after another, and pushed those thoughts before his eyes all at once. It became faster and faster, blurrier and blurrier, until finally, with a bang, there was nothing before his eyes but bloody light.

Xi Ping was startled. The sword energy dispersed. There was only a faint chill touching the center of his brow, like the fine snow on Flying Jade Peak.

His consciousness abruptly woke from meditation. In that moment, he understood why heaven and earth could not abide him—he truly had no Way of the Heart.

Even the worm masters who made tools out of humans had Ways of the Heart hanging over their heads, not letting them touch ordinary people apart from “living ghosts.”

But a person without a Way of the Heart was unchecked, just like the storm over the Impassable Sea, answerable to no one.

He could run wild through heaven and earth, base his actions solely on his own likes and dislikes. What would become of him?

Xi Ping realized with a start that as they called him an evil cultivator, he was becoming more and more like the true evil god Tai Sui.

The mess in Tao County had been left behind by Qiu Sha, and he still thought that Qiu Sha was a monster who had brought calamity upon the people, but…perhaps there would come a day when people would look at him the same way they looked at Qiu Sha.

With eyes blindfolded, it was impossible to walk a straight line.

So shifu was always watching him.

Xi Ping let out a long breath. Fortunately the weather in Chu was warm, and there was no snow, or else he would have had to sweep all the rooftops in the county.

“But I still have no money, shifu. What do I do?”

This time, there was silence in his consciousness. The shard of Zhaoting didn’t answer. Shizun was a pauper who could spend a hundred years grudging the expense of two white spirits. He was powerless to help, no matter how much he wanted to.

Wei Chengxiang moved through Tao County as fast as the wind. Senior Tai Sui had said that he would think of a way to get the spiritual stones, and she had to lay out the array before the fifteenth. She had worked hard to learn talismans and arrays, but this was her first time handling such a big array. She didn’t dare to get the least bit distracted. She wished she could eat the plans of the spirit-gathering array and hold them in her belly.

When she had just finished a stroke at the border of Tao County and was letting out a breath, her spiritual sense was suddenly disturbed.

Wei Chengxiang was startled: she had sensed the Law Breaker Bracelet!

Wei Chengxiang’s left hand was a clear shade paler than her right hand; it was an immortal tool Master Lin had given her. She didn’t have the hidden bones of the “way of death,” and she wasn’t a gecko. Of course her wounds could heal, but she couldn’t regrow limbs, unless she had the chance to establish a foundation.

But the Golden Hand was after all the Golden Hand. When she put on the false hand, it was no different from her real one. It posed no impediment when she drew talismans or made arrays—the skin was even softer than that of her real hand. It had been a few days, and Wei Chengxiang had already come to regard the immortal tool as part of herself. Only now did she suddenly remember that she still had a severed hand that had been stolen by the wicked Law Breaker Bracelet.

The bracelet seemed to be stalking her.