Zhou Ying very patiently finished listening to Xi Ping, then asked with a slightly peculiar expression, “When you were in Western Chu’s Tao County, did you see the Silver Moon with your own eyes?” 

“I did,” said Xi Ping, “don’t mention it. I nearly got caught and sent off by that opera singer.” 

Zhou Ying: “…” 

He couldn’t quite tell whether this brat had finally learned to avoid the name of a shed skin or whether he was purely being loose-tongued. 

He had seen the might of the Silver Moon and brushed shoulders with Xuanwu, yet he still dared to think like this… Amazing. 

Fair enough. It was just like when he had only recently opened his spiritual eyes and knew fewer talismans than the disciples at the Latent Cultivation Temple, yet had dared to steal an offering from the mouths of the demon host and engage in a battle of wits against the heart demon at the bottom of the Impassable Sea. Now, having narrowly escaped death, he was still fearless, daring to hang around the Xuanyin Mountains right in front of the shed skin elders who had nearly killed him. 

Zhou Ying sighed towards the thin smoke in the Riverward. “No matter what, I never should have let you accept that selection card.” 

Xi Ping thought, If I hadn’t accepted the selection card, I wouldn’t have had a chance to go to the southern mines, and I certainly never would have found the Impassable Sea. Who would have fished up your spiritual bones? You’d be dead by now. 

So he calmly took this as san-ge praising him. 

Xi Ping added, “I’ll ask Lin Chi to think of something to do for disguises. There’s no need for the junk his passel of nominal disciples turns out—the skins Xu Rucheng and the others wear can only fool common evil cultivators. They’ll be easily seen through if they meet a master.” 

Zhou Ying frowned. “Since when are you so familiar with the Golden Hand?” 

“Everyone loves me,” Xi Ping said flippantly. “Of course it’s because he wants the Unbound Furnace even more than I do. If not for the fact that he can’t keep up in a conversation, he might even want to go himself.” 

In an insipid tone, Zhou Ying poured a bucket of cold water over him. “This is so you can repair your shifu’s broken sword and help him become a shed skin? A word of warning to you. While ascended spirits are called ‘people among the high heavens’, they’re still ‘people’ in the end. At the shed skin level…well. Your luck is unusually bad. Thus far, you’ve seen quite a few shed skins. Has any one of them seemed human to you? They are bound by the Way of Heaven. They have practically become a portion of heavenly law. The one who leaves seclusion in a hundred years won’t necessarily be the person you know. If your old acquaintance changes beyond recognition and you regret it, don’t come crying.” 

Without so much as thinking about it, Xi Ping said, “What would I have to regret? That’s his business.” 

Zhou Ying paused. 

“When it comes to lecturing on doctrine, imparting knowledge, dispelling doubts, my shizun…well, while he’s not really any good at teaching, he’s still protecting me even though Zhaoting has shattered. Shifu hasn’t let me down,” Xi Ping said. “As for whether he wants to merge his way with heaven and earth, what stage he wants to reach, whether he decides to keep his eyes closed or never open his mouth in the future, that’s for him to take up with his Way of the Heart. Shifu didn’t interfere no matter what classics I departed from or what orthodoxies I rebelled against. Can I control what he does? Anyway, that’s all a question for later. Haven’t we come upon the chance of lifetime here? It would be pointless not to take it. San-ge, don’t you think it would be a pity to waste this opportunity?” 

Zhou Ying was trapped in the Resurrection Vortex. Hearing this scoundrel say “It would be pointless not to take it,” his chest began to hurt immediately. “Scram.” 

“Great! Then it’s settled, san-ge.” Xi Ping took advantage of his weakness. “I’ll go consult with Master Lin!” 

Zhou Ying: “…” 

Xi Ping had been gone for many years and had become like a dragon’s reverse scale¹. Even a gust of wind could incite the vicious dragon’s fury. Apart from when he was ruminating over his revenge, Zhou Ying normally didn’t think of him; it exhausted his strength. 

So had he always been this annoying? 

The thin smoke of the Riverward descended and became Xi Ping…looking somewhat younger than he did now. 

Zhou Ying looked at him blankly for a moment, and the taboo-like, unmentionable memories came crashing back into place, then calmly unfolded before him, brushing away the smoke and dust. 

Zhou Ying, who hadn’t coughed since his spiritual bones had been restored, suddenly felt his throat begin to itch. 

Yes, he remembered now—he really had been this obnoxious! 

It was night. The Zhao clan that covered all of Great Wan had received the news that the city of Jinping had been sealed and thereupon had celebrated—with the Dragon Vein and the capital under control, they had the country! 

Zhao Xi, commander of the Hongyin branch of Heaven’s Design Pavilion, climbed the city gate tower and looked down from on high. 

Hongyin was located at Great Wan’s northern border, next door to the Hong River. Across the river was Northern Li. This area, along with Suling and Ning’an, had been one of the first three provinces to fall to the Zhao family. 

At this time, all of Hongyin was temporarily under curfew; no one could go out as they pleased. They held the provincial yamen and the garrisons. In the eyes of half-immortals, mortals were all made of clay, to be molded at will. They would belong to whoever took the initiative first. At present, the arrays in all the counties and regions had been altered. There were fifty large cannons aimed at Hongyin. With just a thought, they could level it. 

Zhao Xi was a half-immortal and cared nothing about Ways of the Heart. If he wanted to go higher in the future, he would think about it then—after all, if you put down your butcher’s knife, you could become a Buddha. He didn’t believe that the shed skins and ascended spirit peak masters in the inner sect could ignore the eight million mortals in Hongyin. 

The stars and moon were hidden. A letter from Heaven’s Design Pavilion’s head office flew up in front of him. As soon as Zhao Xi opened it, he saw that this was the handwriting of the main family’s Captain Zhao Yu of the Azure Dragon Heart Tower. When he began to read, he saw that the first line was: Pang has been taken. The capital is secure. 

Before the smile on Zhao Xi’s face could take shape, he saw that his relative in Jinping had gone on to write calmly: The inner sect has been sealed. The shed skin elders are in the human world. You must not lower your guard. You must prepare for all eventualities. 

Zhao Xi quickly inspected himself; indeed, he had been somewhat beside himself. He quickly calmed down and tore open the attached secret letter. 

The secret letter instructed him to send a portion of his family members and family property to Northern Li in case of accident. There followed a map of Northern Li, with a few places marked with special inscriptions—these were all the Zhao family’s own inscriptions. 

Though the points on the map were clearly indicated, without the connecting inscriptions, others wouldn’t be able to find anything in those places even if they paced them flat. 

There were various degrees among the powerful people of the mortal world. Those with money and connections often indirectly asked people to draw arrays in their homes, whether they were useful or not; what they wanted was to make it conspicuous that their resources were out of the ordinary; in Cui Ji’s big compound in the capital, for example, there were many of these gaudy things. Those who had some kinship with the immortal sect or even had a half-immortal relative, on the other hand, believed themselves to be a “higher class” of person and viewed these people who played with arrays as “upstart amateurs”; though they had performed no service to their country, they would go against regulations to acquire inscriptions—for example, the local thugs Zhou Ying had killed on his inspection tour of the south; their stealthily obtained inscriptions were much the same as those that the immortal mountains bestowed upon imperial kinsmen and meritorious individuals, some of them even more slipshod, all leftovers that the immortals mountains hadn’t awarded to anyone—so Zhou Ying could work out how to break them even with his eyes closed. 

But direct descendants of the big families turned their noses up at all of these. 

They flaunted their position as so-called “true nobility with a thousand-year inheritance”; they had long family traditions and a profound store of secret information; each brick in their houses had its history, and even the cracked tiles had once borne the footstep of a person now in the high heavens. The clan had turned out countless inscription masters. Generation by generation, they had constructed a highly secret body of inscriptions that only their own family could use. 

In other words, there was a whole set of secret inscriptions on earth that didn’t belong to heaven and earth; they belonged to the Zhao family. 

It was these special inscriptions that gave the members of the great family’s main bloodline the confidence for their bone-deep sense of superiority, distinguishing them from commonplace people who shamelessly sought personal gain. 

As soon as Zhao Xi saw the secret letter, he felt a chill. He thought that, as expected, the main family’s considerations were profound. It was true—no matter how smoothly things were going, they should still prepare a line of retreat. 

Therefore, he went to give orders for preparations to be made. At the same time, he asked the clan leader to personally write to the Zhao family’s old friends in Northern Li and Kunlun. 

The Zhao clan’s collateral branches all over the country received more or less the same warnings and secret letters. Yuzhou in the west had always had secret passages connecting it to Chu, and Shuozhou and Hongyin’s Zhao clans in the north arranged to meet in Northern Li, while Guzhou by the sea had already prepared ships, ready to set sail for Southern Shu’s Three Islands if anything went wrong. 

At the same time, with a thousand-year-old great family of Xuanyin in revolt, Northern Li’s Kunlun, Western Chu’s Sanyue, and Southern Shu’s Lingyun were all watching closely. As soon as they received signals, they crowded around like hawks and vultures that had scented meat.  

The two sides acted together—the Luwu invisibly and untraceably scattered across the three countries put on their skins and picked up the Zhao family’s secret inscriptions that had been transmitted from Jinping, then anonymously acted as a Magpie Bridge for the “immortal clan” of nobles on both sides. 

“Good heavens, ‘Zhao family inscriptions’. Thank you, Paper-xiong, you’ve opened the country bumpkin Lao Pang’s eyes.” Pang Jian watched “Zhao Yu”’s series of arrangements, gaining experience along with him. Laughing, he said, “Those who have just attained enough status to put on long robes want to fasten their belts and go eat like they do in Dangui Lane, so they go give long-winded speeches at the Phoenix’s Perch Pavilion every day; meanwhile, the true wealthy and noble people have long since disdained making an issue of living expenses. What they want instead is to claim ties of blood or friendship with Xuanyin’s big families, scrambling and fighting to become farm animals that have ascended to the heavens and use a few irrelevant leftover inscriptions… Heh, after all this fuss, farm animals are still farm animals. Like a favorite concubine imitating the principal wife—nothing but a joke.” 

“Zhao Yu” politely praised, “Well said, general commander.” 

Pang Jian raised his eyelids and glanced at him. He said, “But the Luwu could have done this more covertly.” 

With the Zhao family moving a large quantity of spiritual stones and immortal tools out of the country in so organized a fashion, the immortal mountains were sure to notice after the fact. Such open tactics didn’t seem like Zhou Ying—unless he didn’t want to gain any advantage from it. 

“Zhao Yu” spoke with the force of justice: “While the Luwu shamefully act in secret, their actions are for the sake of the nation and the people. It’s enough to be secretive when facing the enemy. We ourselves are very open. How could we covet the paltry wealth of criminals? Obeying the orders of Heaven’s Design Pavilion’s General Commander Pang, the Kaiming and the Luwu are assisting Heaven’s Design Pavilion in putting down the revolt. If we take these things, we’ll have to hand over exactly the right amount to the sect when this is over. We do rely on the sect for support.” 

Pang Jian gave an exclamation. “Pardon my lack of manners. Your lord truly is loyal and righteous down to his guts.” 

How shameless. 

“Zhao Yu” was unmoved. “We are only doing our duty.” 

Pang Jian said, “What, it’s not enough for you to expand the Kaiming domestically, the Luwu is also looting the burning house? You’ve turned your noses up at the spiritual stones, so where are you trying to worm your way in while the Zhao family escapes abroad? Which sect’s possession has Zhou Ying set his mind on? What is it?” 

“It might be a furnace,” “Zhao Yu” said, smiling. “You’re joking, general commander. His Highness naturally acts for the sake of Great Wan. The Kaiming and the Luwu are willing to be their country’s watchdogs. As long as Great Wan is at peace and its people can live safely and be happy in their livelihoods, what more can we ask?” 

General Commander Pang commented: “Bah.” 

Meanwhile, in the midst of their night of revelry, the Zhaos were silently sliding into the abyss via the ditch others had dug. 

It seemed that they already had Heaven’s Design Pavilion’s head office under control. In a single night, they had left the Kaiming Department and Heaven’s Design Pavilion with no strength to fight back, sending them retreating again and again in defeat. In secret, they had also taken the opportunity to send half of their property out of the country, taking double precautions; they thought they were perfectly safe. 

In Chu, the first batch of Zhaos to cross the Xia River made landfall and silently infiltrated the sparsely peopled mountains by the Xia River and matched their family’s secret inscriptions. 

Among the mountains, a mobile hidden realm accordingly appeared. It opened its mouth and absorbed them. 

After that came batch after batch of spiritual stones and dazzling immortal tools. Dongheng’s Sanyue’s great mountain array was soon alerted, and Sanyue soon dispatched an ascended spirit. 

Under the East Sea, Zhou Ying told Bai Ling: “That’s fine. Haul in the nets.” 

Early in the morning on the eleventh day of the seventh month, Jinping abruptly broke off contact with the Zhao family forces throughout the country. All the letters burst into flames. At the same time, the smug Zhaos suddenly discovered that those Kaiming Cultivators who hadn’t even washed the mud from their feet seemed to have grown up from underfoot, silently infiltrating their impregnable circles of arrays, cooperating from the inside with Heaven’s Design Pavilion on the outside! 

Before the Zhaos could work out what was happening, they had been caught by the throats, their spiritual stone warehouses seized. 

In their haste, they only had time to send a final batch out of the country.