Xi Ping searched around inside the mustard seed he was carrying and turned up a set of stealth clothes. He had taken along a complete assortment of all kinds of clothing. Never mind long robes and sets of jacket and pants, he had beggar’s clothes and stealth clothes, all you could want of each country’s distinctive apparel…and he had even brought burial robes; it was anyone’s guess what occasion he was planning to wear them to. 

He put on the stealth clothes, covering up the white hair and wrinkled skin, making himself look about the same as the group of black-clothed people below. 

Xi Ping considered further, put away his flashy sword, and, preparing for any eventuality, stamped a “Hither and Yon” on the back of a big tree—if things didn’t go well, he could slip away in time. 

Then he felt he was absolutely safe. Excitedly stepping on a tree branch, he passed out through the thick forest, rushing towards the spiritual beast pool. 

He had just caught up with the number one Indignant Cicada believer, made up a “holy woman” out of nowhere and convinced them to invite her in, and now he was going to impersonate the black-clothed people who were impersonating the Indignant Cicadas—it was too stimulating. 

In the future, when he had become powerful and eliminated the evil cultivators, he would have to write an elaborate record of this story so later generations could sing its praises far and wide. 

Xi Ping, beside himself with self-satisfaction, flew away and didn’t see that in the place where he had just stamped a spiritual seal, the branches began to move on their own without a wind. Shortly, a little spiritual beast in the form of a lizard gradually appeared. 

The little spiritual beast had just seen someone sneakily leaving something on the tree and crawled over curiously to investigate. It didn’t find anything. It was a little suspicious and reached out its paw to scratch the tree trunk. This little thing was clearly only palm-sized and looked adorable, but when it extended its paw, a half-chi nail popped out of it, like a sharp blade, cutting a nick over a cun long into the tree trunk! 

The spiritual seal immediately leaked spiritual energy and was sucked up by the spiritual beast’s long extended tongue. The seal script characters of “Hither and Yon” flickered on the tree trunk, then vanished. 

The spiritual beast let out a satisfied burp. 

Xi Ping didn’t know yet that a “lizard” had made off with his retreat. He had already made his way to the edge of the spiritual beast pool. 

The two groups of cultivators had sent the water in the spiritual beast pool boiling high. A stench assaulted the nose. A black-clothed person had just been brought down by the Shu cultivators’ talismans and was about to fall onto an array beside the spiritual beast pool. 

Xi Ping’s spirit-winding silk quietly left his hand and hooked the array lightly. The unimpeded spiritual energy in the array instantly went astray, breaking the jade stamps next to it and ruining the array. 

Xi Ping picked the right moment to step forward. He lightly borrowed power from the ruined array, reached out to scoop up the injured black-clothed person, and quietly said, “Careful, shixiong.” 

The black-clothed person heard his pure West Jinping accent and, in the dark, didn’t suspect him for a moment. He only said, “Thank you, go help out at the kan position of the array.” 

Xi Ping thought, All right, no problem.

Like a swimming fish, he took his chance and joined the battle, blending into the group of black-clothed people without a trace. 

Putting on a show, he casually loafed around and arrived beside the big net. 

There were too many spiritual beasts caught in the big net. The silk dragon was squeezed into the very center and unreachable. Xi Ping attempted to haul on the big spiritual energy net. He had just pulled on it when a cold and sharp gaze came his way. 

No good. Randomly touching the spiritual energy net would touch the established foundation senior’s spiritual sense. 

A Shu cultivator was just coming towards him with a knife raised. Xi Ping dodged quickly and let his attacker’s knife fall on the spiritual energy net and rebound, pretending that he had accidentally bumped into the net while “arduously resisting the enemy.” 

In the night, the almost invisible spirit-winding silk silently wound around the sword at the Shu cultivator’s feet. The fiercely charging Shu cultivator felt himself standing on emptiness, and the constantly circulating spiritual energy suddenly broke off. He stagnated in midair, then plummeted down. Xi Ping took the opportunity to pluck the knife from his hand and waved it around with a “hi-ya!”, putting on a rather convincing performance of “summoning all his courage.” 

Only then did the gaze that had fallen on him withdraw. 

Xi Ping let out a breath and thought, I’m too obvious on the surface. I’d better try going down. 

So he took a deep breath. When yet another Southern Shu cultivator came towards him, before he could make contact, Xi Ping grandly threw himself backwards and fell into the spiritual beast pool, “brought down.” 

The Southern Shu cultivator, having encountered an insurance scammer, was stunned. Before he could work out what was going on, a talisman sent him flying. 

Pang Jian hadn’t rushed in without thinking. He hid in the shadows, carefully studying precisely what moves these familiar names had—after an open-eyed cultivator had their spiritual bones, they would acquire a unique magic power, like Pang Jian’s ability to walk through walls and Bai Ling’s to turn into paper. These powers didn’t come out of nowhere. When cultivators could only rely on external objects, they would display different preferences, have affinities for different immortal tools. These preferences couldn’t be covered up even if you hid your spiritual image. 

The longer he looked, the more he thought that these “evil cultivators” were in fact people from the Mining Office. He was just hesitating about whether to contact Great Wan’s Mining Office when he suddenly saw a familiar name through the glasses. 

Pang Jian: “…” 

When had that son-of-a-bitch Xi Shiyong gotten mixed in?! 

Xi Ping jumped into the water and squeezed through the cracks between the dizzy spiritual beasts. He saw the fangs of a big spiritual beast he couldn’t identify and couldn’t resist idly touching them. 

Some of the spiritual beasts had been caught in the spiritual energy net, and others were floating around randomly, bumping into each other. As expected, they blocked Xi Ping’s way firmly. 

He stepped on the back of a spiritual beast, got a fix on the spiritual energy net, quietly pulled out the spirit-winding silk, and sent it through a hole in the net. 

The silk dragon’s heart was like a natural spiritual energy pump. The spirit-winding silk quickly locked onto it. The soft, thin strand passed through the closely packed spiritual beasts and lightly hooked the silk dragon’s tail. 

Like pressing down on instrument strings, Xi Ping held down the spirit-winding silk to steady it, cutting off the bit of spiritual energy that the spiritual energy net had placed on the silk dragon without anyone knowing. He pulled the dragon down—

Just then, someone suddenly raised the spiritual energy net. Xi Ping clicked his tongue and was just about to give chase when the Southern Shu cultivators dropped talismans in unison, sending the net flopping back into the water. 

The spiritual energy net couldn’t handle this much pushing and pulling. It tore at once. All the big spiritual beasts caught in the spiritual energy net fell right on Xi Ping’s head. 

To avoid being squished to death by spiritual beasts, Xi Ping casually grabbed the thigh of a one swimming by and hid under the beast’s belly. 

The water in the spiritual beast pool was so muddy that Xi Ping couldn’t see anything clearly for a time. Luckily, an open-eyed cultivator wasn’t like a mortal. It was nothing to stay submerged underwater for half a shichen on one breath. He paddled around groping blindly for ages before finding that the leg he was holding was covered in gold scales—looking up along the big, thick leg that was like a column, he saw that this was actually a half-unconscious gold-armored zheng. 

This gold-armored zheng was half the size of the one he had seen in the morning. Perhaps it was a zhenglet. 

It must have been dosed with something. Its eyes were half-closed as it looked blankly at Xi Ping, the “animal” holding its thigh. 

The man-eating one on the canal may have been its dad or its mom… Xi Ping thought, Doesn’t matter which, let the child pay the parent’s debt.

He snickered, pulled out the spiritual knife he had snatched out of the Southern Shu cultivator’s hand, and abruptly stuck it into a crack in the zheng’s golden armor. At the same time, he poured spiritual energy into the wound! 

The animal that had been about to turn over and float belly up gave a start and let out a furious roar. 

Pang Jian hadn’t yet had time to find where that brat Xi Ping had fallen in when he saw a huge furious beast arch out of the water like a carp, jumping right out. It indiscriminately opened its bloody maw and snapped towards the two sides of cultivators mingled in the fight. 

The cultivators, like dandelions blown by a strong wind, instantly flew everywhere. Even the spiritual energy net shook and loosened at once! 

The silk dragon immediately entered the water. The spiritual energy wrapped around it had already been broken off, so it slipped through the gaps between the other spiritual beasts. 

Next, it paused, and its slide took an unnatural turn, as if an invisible cord had pulled on it. 

The furious gold-armored zheng flopped around in the spiritual beast pool like a natural disaster. Meanwhile, a figure passed like a flash of lightning through the waves it had stirred up. 

In the instant the figure passed by the silk dragon, one horn on the miserable silk dragon’s head became a segment shorter. 

He had it! 

Xi Ping tossed the dragon’s horn into his mustard seed. 

The next moment, the all-encompassing spiritual energy net came after him. He tossed out all the spirit-winding silk he had. The half-transparent spirit-winding silk flickered in the light off the water. He seemed to have become a jellyfish that had suddenly unfolded. 

The dense spirit-winding silk threads suddenly wrung a hole out of the spiritual energy net. Before the gaze of that established foundation senior could come his way again, Xi Ping had already vaulted out of the hole. He sank to the bottom of the spiritual beast pool as if there were lead attached to his feet. 

All the spiritual beasts being kept in the pool were amphibious. The water wasn’t too deep, only about four or five zhang. 

As soon as Xi Ping landed on the bottom of the pool, he didn’t delay any longer. He pressed the hither and yon seal right to the bottom of the pool and prepared to abscond. 

But…nothing happened. 

Xi Ping: “…” 

He didn’t have time to think carefully about the reason. The gold-armored zheng he had just stabbed had been forced back into the water by the two sides of cultivators working together. It came smashing towards Xi Ping. 

Xi Ping quickly vaulted out of the way, but the spiritual beast was clever! 

The wretched gold-armored zheng recognized at once that the jerk who had just passed by it was the attacker who had stabbed it earlier. The big animal was unbelievably nimble underwater. It turned abruptly and snapped its teeth towards Xi Ping. 

No good, the injured victim had come to demand repayment. 

Xi Ping wished he could grow a fish’s tail. 

He turned and shifted in the water, practically swimming out a whole “Free and Easy Wandering¹.” Several times he felt the huge beast’s sharp teeth brush past his back. 

But just then, by coincidence, the spiritual energy net he had broken came chasing after. 

Xi Ping had been wandering around without restraint all night and had nearly forgotten his own name. Now it could be said he was encountering retribution. 

In a moment of desperation, when Xi Ping had once again been forced to the bottom of the pool by the enormous beast, he stamped another “Hither and Yon.” 

The two hither seals were less than a hundred paces apart. The two seals connected, and the space at the bottom of the spiritual energy pool instantly warped. 

Because it was only an open-eyed grade immortal tool, after the two hither seals connected, the space where they met was very limited, just about enough to allow a few people to pass from one place to another. A dear friend of the gold-armored zheng’s size certainly couldn’t pass through. Xi Ping wanted to use this opportunity to throw off the four-legged man-eating fish. 

But instead, there was a rumble, and an ominous silver light flashed over the bottom of the pool. Xi Ping’s eyelids twitched: what kind of invisible inscriptions were there at the bottom of the spiritual beast pool? 

The hither seal had joined two points, and it had also brought the inscriptions from those two points together. The mysterious inscriptions that Xi Ping had never seen before were agitated at once. An enormous flow of energy screamed up from the bottom of the pool, coming right in the face of the relentlessly pursuing gold-armored zheng and disfiguring it. 

Xi Ping rolled away, using all four limbs. Suddenly there was emptiness at his feet—it turned out this lousy pool wasn’t solid! 

As soon as the inscriptions exploded, it began to leak! 

A hurricane rose above the spiritual beast pool. An enormous whirlpool opened in the water. Not only the spiritual beasts in the water, but also the artifacts of Southern He on the surface, the plants and rocks beside the water, as well as the cultivators in midair…they were all pulled in. 

For a time, neither the black-clothed people nor the spiritual beast herding Southern Shu cultivators had attention to spare for fighting. All of them scattered in terror. 

There was an established foundation cultivator present, as well as several dozen people fighting like thunder and lightning, but none of them had made as much of a disturbance as he, Xi Shiyong, had made on his own. 

Pang Jian was overwhelmed with admiration. The admiration wasn’t towards Xi Ping; he admired the Marquis of Yongning and his wife—how extraordinarily gifted they must be to have brought such a thing up for twenty years without going bald! If they weren’t reincarnated deities, he wouldn’t believe it! 

Just then, a bunch of fireworks leapt up in the western sky. There was a team of flying horses coming against the wind. From a distance, someone loudly called: “We are cultivators from the Western Chu encampment, come to aid a friendly nation. What evildoers have imprudently come here?” 

Pang Jian frowned. Why had the Chu also come to get in on the action? It was getting messier and messier. 

He hesitated, then leapt into the chaotic spiritual beast pool, plunging towards the depths of the big whirlpool. 

For a time, Xi Ping could neither see nor hear. He only felt that he was being stretched out by the enormous attractive force beneath his feet. If not for the fact that an open-eyed cultivator’s body was far more resilient that of a mortal, he figured he would already have been pulled in two. 

He tried to play the bone qin, but while the veins stood out on the back of his hand, the qin notes that had brought down half of Flying Jade Peak were so weak that he himself couldn’t hear them—he couldn’t gather any spiritual energy, as if his meridians had been broken again. 

This was wrong…

Xi Ping suddenly realized that it wasn’t that his meridians had broken, it was that wild spiritual energy was surging all around, pouring towards his insufficiently wide meridians like a flood. He couldn’t control himself. 

Suddenly, the pull dragging him down disappeared. Xi Ping was swept up by the current. He tumbled forward along with a bunch of spiritual beasts just as confused and disoriented as he was. Covering his head, he dodged the tail of a spiritual beast that was sweeping towards him. He closed his eyes and made a grab, steadying himself with the spiritual beast’s weight. 

After some more time, the current gradually slowed down. 

Only then did Xi Ping find that he had once again grabbed onto the gold-armored zheng—its nose was still crooked. 

Shameless as he was, he still didn’t know how to react at first. He could only smile at this Brother Zheng. 

The gold-armored zheng couldn’t understand why this person was doing everything he could to bring disaster upon it. Enemies walked a narrow path. It turned its head to chew on him. 

But before the huge beast’s big mouth could clamp down, its upper jaw was pierced by an invisible metal arrow. 

The huge beast knocked into the stone wall beside it. The blood gushing out sprayed all over Xi Ping. 

Xi Ping was picked up by the scruff of the neck and hauled away. 

When Xi Ping turned his head, he saw Pang-shixiong’s indignant face. Before he could say hello, Pang Jian waved a big hand and slapped him on the back of the head. 

Xi Ping spat a big, round air bubble into the water. He was dragged by Pang Jian through the stone wall next to them. 

He didn’t know how many times he went in and out of the stone. The pangolin Pang walked in and out of stone walls as though walking on level ground, going on until Xi Ping couldn’t get his bearings. In about an incense stick, his ears popped, and he was pulled out of the water by Pang Jian. The two of them had come to a cave with signs of being manmade. 

Despite being a half-immortal, he had still nearly run out of air. A mouthful of long-awaited air filled Xi Ping’s lungs, and he coughed fit to shake the earth. 

“Pang…cough-cough…shixiong, you were choking me…” 

Pang Jian said with a sneer, “If I could have strangled you to death on the way, the nation might have built a temple for me out of gratitude.” 

Xi Ping’s words came quickly: “And then, during the holidays, everyone would come worship and pray for Master Pang to give them pretty wives and beautiful concubines, two children in three years, and the healing of all ills—sincerity guarantees results.” 

Bastard! 

Pang Jian truly couldn’t resist. He grabbed him and gave him a beating. 

When he was finished, Commander Pang himself thought it was unbelievable. This brat Xi Shiyong always had a way of bringing other people’s intelligence down to his own level, making each person who had decided not to “sink to his level” give way. He said, “Come here, I won’t hit you anymore.” 

Xi Ping didn’t buy it. In his dripping stealth clothes, he circled around the cave’s ceiling like a bat and wouldn’t come down. He said accusingly, “You’re bullying the weak… I’m only so casual with you because we get along so well. You don’t appreciate my good intentions.” 

Pang Jian said in surprise, “You’ve only known me for a few days. Why are you being so familiar?” 

Xi Ping put out his old but crafty head and stuck his tongue out at him. “Back there, when I accidentally broke the bottom of the spiritual beast pool, why did you come after me, Pang-shixiong?” 

Pang Jian scoffed. “Don’t flatter yourself. I was doing it for your shifu. I was afraid you’d die back there, and I wouldn’t be able to account for myself to General Zhi.” 

Xi Ping said, “No wonder my shifu likes you so much. He’s always saying ‘ask your Pang-shixiong’ and ‘tell your Pang-shixiong to take you.’” 

Pang Jian: “…” 

For a moment, this unruly, undisciplined man whose mouth was sharper than an arrow bristled and jammed. He nearly began to stutter. “You…you’re…” 

This brat definitely wasn’t some kind of innocent and artless loose-tongued pampered child. Pang Jian knew that perfectly well. He was a manipulator full of bad intentions, deliberately keeping to the boundary between “rude” and “direct,” specifically looking out for people’s soft spots. 

Pang Jian said, “…Did your shifu really say that?” 

Fuck, he’d hit the spot just right. 

“So now…hss!” Xi Ping leaned back and carelessly hit something hard with the back of his head. Swearing, he felt around behind himself and broke something off from the wall. “What the hell is this?” 

With a half-immortal’s vision, there was no need to light a lamp in the dark. 

Xi Ping recognized that what he had broken off was the base of a bracket light, rather old-fashioned—it had been a long time since anyone had used this kind of oil lamp. This base wasn’t made of Moon Plated Gold and was a little rusty. You could still see that the engravings were complex and exquisite, almost sumptuous. 

He brought the lamp base closer and sniffed it. He smelled a faint floral fragrance. 

Before the immortal sects had bestowed Moon Plated Gold, the mortal world’s level of metallurgical arts had been unable to sustain machinery. Back then, workers had mainly done handicrafts. Southern He in particular had brought handicrafts to the highest pitch. There had once been countless skilled artisans here. Now, of the ancient works in the collection of the Ministry of Works, half originated in Southern He. 

It was said that Southern He’s imperial family had used a special kind of lamp oil, called moon melting perfume. When a bowl was lit, the aroma in the palace wouldn’t disperse for hundreds of years. Moon melting perfume candles had once been popular in Dangui Lane. 

Relying on the bit of geography he had crammed before leaving, Xi Ping remembered that the Shu encampment seemed to be in the former location of Southern He’s capital. 

“Shixiong, why is there an antique from Southern He times here?” 

Pang Jian took the lamp base and looked at it. After hearing him describe the incredible inscriptions at the bottom of the spiritual beast pool, he roughly calculated their location and mumbled, “Could it be a secret passage from the old Southern He palace…?” 

“Ah?” said Xi Ping. 

“The spiritual beast pool is the former ‘Glimmer of Jasper Lake’ of Southern He’s imperial family’s palace away from the capital… My god, how can you be so ignorant?” Pang Jian said. “We just passed through the bottom of the spiritual beast pool, pushed east by the current the whole way. I’ve calculated it, and we ought to be close to the former imperial city of Southern He.” 

Xi Ping immediately remembered Wuchang One saying “they’re looking for that place.” “No wonder they—I mean, those shixiongs from the mines disguised as evil cultivators tonight—no wonder they made such an uproar in the spiritual beast pool. They were searching the Shu encampment! What were they looking for? Could it be this place?” 

Pang Jian narrowed his eyes. “How did you know those black-clothed people were from the mines?” 

Xi Ping said, “I guessed it by looking at your expression. I went over and tested it, and, as expected, they all spoke Jinping dialect.” 

Pang Jian asked, “Then how do you know that they were drawing attention away from their real target and searching for something in the Southern Shu encampment?” 

Xi Ping didn’t stumble. “Heard it when I mixed in with them—anyway, given the background of our Mining Office shixiongs, how could any of them be interested in a few lousy spiritual beasts?” 

Pang Jian’s instincts told him that he wasn’t being entirely straightforward. This brat mixed absolute truth with total nonsense without any trace of a transition between the two. It was impossible to take precautions against. 

He glared at Xi Ping and asked, “Weren’t you also interested in those spiritual beasts? I haven’t questioned you yet. What were you doing getting mixed in?” 

“I was looking for this.” Xi Ping opened his hand and showed Pang Jian the segment of silk dragon horn he had put away in the mustard seed earlier. “Pretty, huh? As if it were carved out of blue jade.” 

Pang Jian: “…” 

Pretty my ass! You destroyed the whole spiritual beast pool for the sake of this thing?

Commander Pang took a deep breath and warned himself: Lao Pang, you’re over a hundred years old. You have to behave properly. You can’t lose your temper at a little brat. 

He slowed his speech down as much as he could, steadied his tone, and asked, “What did you want the silk dragon horn for?” 

“A silk dragon horn can treat dim sight disease,” Xi Ping said. “I just read about it in the book. I’m bringing it back to treat my san-ge’s illness.” 

Pang Jian had to think for a while before he realized who “san-ge” was. He thought, Treat what illness? Isn’t that brat Zhou Ying faking it? 

“The silk dragon is rare, but what’s mainly rare is the heart. It changes its horns once every hundred years. They aren’t that hard to come by,” Pang Jian said. “If Prince Zhuang wanted to use a silk dragon horn, couldn’t the imperial palace get one? Is there any need for you to run a risk?” 

“Well, it’s not like I wanted to run a risk, but I was already here, so I was just picking up a gift on the way. That was an accident just now.” As Xi Ping walked forward following the bracket lights, he said, “As for whether there was any need for it, we’ll see about that—you’ve met my san-ge, shixiong. He’s reserved and care-laden. You can only get him to talk a little more by making sure he knows you’re thinking about him. Otherwise, I’m afraid he’d close himself off so much it’d make him sick.” 

Pang Jian had nothing to say to this. He could only respond with a sneer. 

As they talked, the two of them quickly passed through the secret passage. The further they went, the wider it became. But after walking roughly a hundred zhang, they came to the end of the line—a dead end. 

But with Pang Jian there, dead ends were nothing to fear. 

“It wasn’t deliberately designed like this. The passageway must have collapsed. It’s been blocked for many years.” Pang Jian knocked on the wall a few times, determined that there was no spiritual energy fluctuation from inscriptions or arrays on the other side, then grabbed Xi Ping by the shoulder and took him through the wall. 

As soon as Xi Ping landed, he heard a crack beneath his feet. 

At the other end of the collapsed passageway were several skeletons. He had just stepped on and broken a set of ribs. 

“Pardon me, pardon me.” Xi Ping quickly moved his feet and bowed towards the skeleton with folded hands. “I’m truly sorry, I really didn’t see. It’s all Lao Pang’s doing.” 

Lao Pang kicked him. “These people must have wanted to run away through the secret passage when the four nations besieged the city, but instead they were trapped here.” 

Xi Ping asked, “They didn’t have immortal tools to escape with?” 

“They’re all mortals,” Pang Jian said. “There were no downgraded immortal tools back then…and moreover, there were ascended spirit masters of the four great sects in the siege. If there had been a fluctuation of spiritual energy, wouldn’t they have noticed at once?” 

The two of them avoided the skeletons and walked down along a small flight of stone steps. Their field of vision widened. 

There was an underground hall here, a hundred meters high. Though half of it had caved in, the remaining space was enough to hold a thousand people. 

Dust was piled more than a cun high. The grandeur of the carved railings and the murals on the walls hadn’t decreased in the slightest. The ones in Guangyun Palace were far inferior. 

In the ruins of the underground palace was half of a feast that hadn’t been cleared away—the other half had been buried by boulders coming down in the collapse. 

The guests at the feast had all turned to bleached bones. Some had even been crushed beneath rocks. 

When everything had come to an end, the Southern He nobility had fled disaster up to this point, but they had been trapped here by a cave-in. 

In that hopeless situation, some people had crowded at the exit, trying to no avail to dig out a means of survival. Others, meanwhile, had arranged a feast here. 

Xi Ping saw a broken qin amid the ruins: on the point of death, these people must have danced and sung about the good times in the collapsing underground hall. Throughout the feast, people were being crushed to death by falling stones…and the string accompaniment continued until the qin broke. 

In the center of the feast was a stone platform that must have been a stage for dancing. There, a statue was arranged like an offering. It was in the form of a kneeling man with a dozen kinds of torture performed on him, vivid and lifelike. There was bloody writing all over the statue. Not even all the years of dust could obscure the obvious hate and rage. It made your blood run cold. 

Xi Ping couldn’t read Southern He’s writing, so he asked, “Pang-shixiong, what does that writing say?”