Xie Chu was conceited, fastidious, fond of wearing snow-white fox-fur robes that were especially hard to clean. His natural talents were unsurpassed. Even without working particularly hard a day of his life, he could stand out among his fellows. Therefore, he was haughty down to his bones. He admitted that this was wrong and rarely spoke his sarcasm aloud, but over time, it would still show in his face; it couldn’t be hidden.

He had never been in such a wretched condition in his life. His sense of smell had gone numb, but the foul, charred odor coming from himself still came to him. There was no mirror out in the great northern plains; presumably he didn’t look human, either.

Had he known that there would come a day like this, he thought, perhaps he would have been nicer to the Snow Wolf before… That way, when that stupid young man betrayed him, he might have felt more tormented by it.

“They said that he had a disagreement with the Sect Leader, and that influenced his emotional state and caused him to be lost outside the Beijue Mountains.” Xie Chu knew perfectly well that the individual knocking on the array to guide him couldn’t hear his weak, indistinct muttering, but he still had to talk, or else he wouldn’t be able to distinguish whether he was walking a path in the world of the living or in the Yellow Springs of the Underworld. “Bullshit—after so many years, who would get angry at that old coffin board? If only he and that mystifying ‘mirror ghost’ could have spared one of their four eyes in the midst of all their pressing affairs to have a look at the northern continent instead of keeping all those eyes fixed on those trifling heaps of spiritual stones, my shizun wouldn’t have wasted so much time he could have spent training with the sword going out to get involved in trifles.”

The Second Elder had spoken very little, but there was weight to each of his words. Because of this, many people feared him. In fact, he wasn’t the type of person to get angry. Much of the time, all matters in the outside world were like passing clouds to him. He only concentrated on the things he wanted to concentrate on. Probably only the steadiest hand in the world could wield the nimblest sword; Xie Chu had always thought himself unworthy. That was why, after shizun had left, he had changed the name of his own sword to “Perplexing.”

“No one had a better sense of priority than him. He never ran an unnecessary risk, never had any superfluous curiosity…”

The Heart Sword used the consciousness as its medium; it required no physical form. The Second Elder’s physical form had never approached the Beijue Array, not because he feared death, but because he knew that if anything should happen to him, Kunlun had no one who could replace him. His elder disciple was irascible and impetuous; the Second Elder wouldn’t have felt easy about either the array or the disciple if he had let him go. His younger disciple was a genius, and all geniuses knew to seek their own path. All a teacher had to do was bless her with a little advice; it would be a waste to compel her to change her way for the sake of the big picture.

Such an introverted and cautious sword cultivator, who never had personal disputes with others—why would he have braved the wind and snow to rush hastily into the Beijue Array, as if he had been possessed by a ghost?

Not long before that, because Xie Chu had gotten drunk and made trouble, shifu had been sighing that he didn’t dare to get old, and he had been fretting about how to coax his little shimei back from the Disciple Hall.

Just then, a frenzied wind blew toward him—there were often series of frenzied freezing winds outside the Beijue Mountains. Xie Chu’s vision, hardly able to see the road, spun. Next, he realized that he had fallen on the ground, and the Lingchi Lantern had nearly slipped out of his hand. He could no longer feel his legs; he didn’t know whether they had already burned away.

His mind began to float vaguely. Xie Chu thought that this had been a very foolish thing for him to do—he asked himself the question he had asked he didn’t know how many times since crossing beyond the Beijue Mountains: Did your head get sat on by the Snow Wolf? Why did you trust that brat Zhou Ying?

Because he had a paramount spiritual sense and had preserved his reason? Or because he had succeeded in being sent to his final rest in the Ceaseless Mirror?

“I…really… Zhou, how much longer…”

The dull knocking beneath the Beijue Array suddenly paused.

There was a bang. Something blown on the wind had opened a crack in the Lingchi Lantern.

Xie Chu gave a start. His dazed soul suddenly returned to position… That had been…the remnants of a beam of sword energy.

The guiding knocking suddenly changed from a uniform speed to a specific rhythm. This was flying goose code—but there were no flying goose machines in Northern Li, and naturally the code only corresponded to a foreign language. Xie Chu’s head had nearly frozen, and he couldn’t have brought the codebook on his flame-encased body.

“I don’t understand, you scoundrel!” While he hunted in his brain for the scant remaining code there, the Blind Wolf King somewhere found the strength to hold himself up.

Laboriously facing the gale, he looked in the direction the sword energy had come from. He was stunned—

Not far ahead of him at an angle was a sword cut of the kind a master might leave behind, whose sword energy wouldn’t dissipate for centuries. The fierce wind had swept away the snow piled on the ground, revealing an enormous piece of “ice” next to the sword cut.

No, that wasn’t ice.

All the people on the northern continent were familiar with river ice. No matter how clean the water, there would still be cracks and bubbles on the surface of the ice. It wouldn’t have this even and smooth, perfectly clear texture. This was a mirror!

An enormous mirror!

Meanwhile, a Heavenly Question arrived in the Xuanyin Mountains and flew straight to Moon Plated Peak. Attached to it was a strange-looking plate.

“Sent by Heaven’s Design Pavilion from the border,” Lin Chi said, scanning the writing on the Heavenly Question. “The Southern He Luwu sent it back through an array.”

Wen Fei said, What the hell is this? A plate? It’s too shallow. What can it hold?

It could hold sound.

This was a recording plate. Unlike the mortal things that could only record sound, the sounds recorded by the upgraded immortal tool could also to a certain extent reproduce the spiritual energy fluctuations at the time—when Xi Ping had used a talisman to send Yao Qi’s recitation up to the sky, on a Luwu boat bringing up the rear nearby, a clever Luwu had recorded it, along with the Kunlun Sect Leader’s final sea-cleaving attack.

Having listened to the end, Wen Fei nearly hopped up. Kunlun’s ninefold sword? Who struck? The Sword Slave, or one of the other Kunlun shed skins? Zhi Jingzhai, is he… What’s the matter with you?

As if he had seen a ghost, Lin Chi held him down by the shoulder and lit the Unbound Furnace with a snap of his fingers, sending his seventh sense into it. He repeated the inscriptions on the disc.

But compared to Yao Qi, “possessed by a ghost,” his pronunciation had some discrepancies. The Unbound Furnace didn’t react, until he had recited up to a certain point past the middle, when the furnace fire suddenly quivered, and a fully-formed inscription leapt up inside it!

Wen Fei understood immediately. Without waiting for instructions, imitating Lin Chi, he played the recording again. The two of them tried again and again, going through it over twenty times. The sound of Kunlun’s ninefold sword had nearly activated the defensive arrays on Moon Plated Peak. Finally, some more inscriptions rose from the Unbound Furnace.

Lin Chi sent a beam of spiritual energy pointing at the library. Countless texts, new and old, flew toward them like rain, floating above their heads. Lin Chi flipped through the books with his consciousness. “One of these characters is very familiar, I think I’ve seen it somewhere before.”

Complete Glossary of Inscriptions, Ancient Hidden Realm Collection, Analysis of Inscriptions and Arrays…those known to him, those unknown, those that had been lost, those newly made—the two ascended spirits flipped through all the texts on Moon Plated Peak at the speed of “one glance per book” and came up empty.

Where had it been? Lin Chi frowned. It couldn’t have been in the Latent Cultivation Temple. Half-immortals couldn’t use inscriptions. Before Xi Shiyong had blown up the mountain, there had been very few texts concerning inscriptions in the Latent Cultivation Temple; and his shifu had left nearly all his manuscripts and texts to him, and he hadn’t left his peak for eight centuries. Where else could it have been?

Suddenly, Wen Fei carefully prodded him with his fan. For once a little ill at ease, the Tanhua gestured and said, Well…shixiong, you put it in a book, I didn’t look at it on purpose.

A piece of letter paper pressed very smooth fluttered down from inside a book, landing between the two of them. There was a special protective inscription on it. After eight hundred years, the paper was bright and clean as new.

This was a letter Hui Xiangjun had written to Lin Chi.

It was the last letter Hui Xiangjun had written to him after Lancang’s blood moon. There was nothing to indicate that it was a final parting. She only spoke lightly of some trifles and mentioned “two little toys” that she had recently made, with diagrams attached.

The diagrams were roughly drawn with a writing brush, showing only vague outlines—inscriptions weren’t like written characters, where a few missing strokes wouldn’t keep them from being understood; sometimes two inscriptions that were identical to the naked eye might have totally opposite meanings. Therefore, there was no so-called “rough” version of them; the inscriptions on diagrams of immortal tools mostly only showed general positions. Some lazy people would simply draw a circle as a stand-in… Therefore, Lin Chi hadn’t attached any importance to the fact that the inscriptions marked on the diagram were ones he had never seen. He had thought she had just doodled them.

A diagram couldn’t indicate all the inscriptions on an immortal tool. Hui Xiangjun had only written two characters, and one of them had just been deciphered by Lin Chi from the recording.

“Write to them, it’s incomplete—I need all of it!”

In the South Sea, Zhi Xiu couldn’t receive letters for the moment. Never mind Heavenly Questions, even “Earthly Questions” couldn’t reach him.

While he hadn’t especially understood why the Kunlun infighting was happening, the former high general understood the situation. Right now, he had no help on the South Sea, near or far. The shed skin masters of the various sects were all his enemies. If the Sword Slave hadn’t suddenly disrespected her elders and started fighting their Sect Leader, he would have been fighting the whole cultivation world alone.

So when the Lovebird Sword Array moved, Zhaoting also moved.

The Luwu had replenished the upgraded immortal tools’ spiritual stones. A strike from Zhaoting came flying, blocking the Lovebird Sword Array, which had taken aim at the Sword Slave’s back; the angle was extremely crafty. Zhi Xiu had poked a hole in one corner of the sword array, knocking the main sword off target, touching Xuanwu, who was hiding from the Kunlun sword wind.

The Lovebird Sword Array no longer had a master. How could this big weapon tell who occupied what position? After all, not even the masters flying all over the sky could work it out. As far as the Lancang Mountains went, all outsiders were invaders; they would grab whoever they could get.

Xuanwu was caught unawares. In a flurry, he dragged the Silver Moon over to parry the blow and wretchedly flew half a li away. The Silver Moon, dragging a tail of light like a comet, slammed against the Lovebird Sword Array. Kunlun’s Third Elder, watching the two great weapons aim at his Sect Leader, quickly drew his sword to fend them off. “Fellow Cultivator Xuanwu!”

Xuanwu didn’t want to get mixed up with a crowd of sword cultivators and paid no heed. He wanted to withdraw on the spot. Before he could get a firm footing on his curved blade, there was a sudden chill at his back. Xuanwu swept out his snow-white sleeve, spreading a handful of talismans behind himself. In the blink of an eye, spiritual wind congealed into a magnificent miragelike army, which was then pierced by a sword strike.

Nearly jabbing him in the forehead, Zhaoting forced him against the Silver Moon. In order to protect its master, the Silver Moon’s radiance blazed, plating the Lovebird Sword Array with silver. The Lovebird Sword Array was unwilling to show weakness. The humming of the swords was deafening. The sword light enveloped Xuanwu, and the Third Elder, caught up in it, certainly couldn’t get out.

This was precisely what was known as “war is the art of the unexpected.”

While Zhi Xiu single-handedly dragged all the shed skins in the air above Lancang into a chaotic battle, the Heavenly Question from the Xuanyin Mountains, having failed several times, turned and flew toward Pang Jian, then passed through the hands of several Luwu because finally being transmitted to Wei Chengxiang…and Xi Ping’s paperman.

Xi Ping’s consciousness, searching through his mustard seed, had just found Yao Qi. He saw Ziming-xiong sit upright like a risen corpse. “Ziming, how much of what Lancang’s Sect Leader said before he died can you remem…”

“Don’t speak!” Yao Qi sternly cried out in a groundbreaking moment. His lips were trembling uncontrollably.

He took an upgraded recording device from his own mustard seed, and under Xi Ping’s astonished gaze, as if he had eaten too much at once and was vomiting it up, quickly spat up a long string of inscriptions.

Xi Ping: “…”

Was this really his classmate who had spent over a decade in the southern mines without even learning to speak a single foreign language properly?

Then he saw the remnants of a talisman flash on Yao Qi’s brow. He gave a scream and rolled on the ground clutching his head. Xi Ping quickly found a mind calming pill on himself and stuffed it into Yao Qi’s mouth. “Wh-what kind of evil art is this?”

“An eidetic…eidetic memory talisman…it can record everything you see and hear within one day on your consciousness. No matter how difficult and unpronounceable, you can immediately remember it.” Yao Qi turned off the recorder and, trembling, offered the disc to Xi Ping. “It’s just…just when you remember too much, it’s like your brain is boiling… It’s…it’s all here…”

Xi Ping single-handedly drew a transport array to send the disc while clicking his tongue. “Who thought of it?”

Yao Qi glared at him, painted and hateful. “You…you…”

“Huh?” said Xi Ping. “It wasn’t me. I’ve never seen this.”

Then Yao Qi roared indignantly, “After you blew up the Qiu Courtyard, Luo-shixiong went crazy making us memorize A Selection of Common Inscriptions in its entirety, and if we got a single character wrong, we would be beheaded on the spot! I couldn’t remember it!”

Xi Ping gasped. “…Brother, my crime is unpardonable.”

Yao Qi lay face-up on the ground where he had fallen. Shortly, the mind calming pill had melted away entirely. He took a breath and whispered, “That senior used his Way of the Heart to suppress the Lovebird Sword Array. It seemed like he wanted to disseminate the inscriptions. Then there was an earthquake. The inscriptions for some reason backlashed, sweeping up that senior’s consciousness and the Lovebird Sword Array together. Then people came…”

“Who?” said Xi Ping.

Yao Qi slowly shook his head. “They were all masters far off on the horizon. How could I recognize them? Anyway they were all ascended spirits…and there were even shed skins. They said the Sect Leader wanted to counterattack with some kind of evil art… I didn’t understand, but anyway he was guilty of the most heinous crimes. They had already completely severed the Southern He Peninsula’s veins of the earth, and they said, ‘Those inauspicious articles have all been recovered.’ I don’t know what the inauspicious articles were.”

Xi Ping softly said, “It must have been the spirit-conducting gold to be used for repairing the veins of the earth.”

“I didn’t understand,” Yao Qi said quietly. “The sword cultivator senior who was there at the time…”

“Kunlun’s Second Elder?”

“Right. He explained to those people, said it wasn’t an evil art, it was Lancang’s Sect Leader trying to return the spiritual mountains’ spiritual energy to the mortal world. While he didn’t understand them, he had already memorized all the inscriptions. All they needed to do was try connecting the veins of the earth and they would know.”

Having said this, Yao Qi saw Xi Ping frown. He was already sighing.

“I saw that when those people heard him, they all had different expressions. They all looked like evil gods in an illicit temple, indescribably stiff and grim. I don’t know who started it, but they said that the spiritual sense of a person cultivating a Heart Sword was too high, and it was easy for him to be influenced by a heart demon. The Second Elder must have been bewitched by evil arts. There was someone who wanted to destroy those things that could repair the veins of the earth—the spirit-conducting gold. They’d heard that the Lancang Mountains no longer had any toolmaking cultivators. Once it was destroyed, that would be it. The Second Elder wouldn’t let them. They started arguing. There was a sword cultivator who called the Second Elder ‘shidi’ who kept trying to persuade him, and finally he brought in Kunlun’s High Priest. The High Priest and their Sect Leader ordered him to return to Northern Li immediately to go into seclusion to calm his mind, handing over the Southern He matter to the Third Elder.

“The Second Elder kept insisting. He said he had seen inscriptions like this elsewhere, they definitely weren’t an evil art. He begged them not to destroy the spirit-conducting gold, to leave the Southern He Peninsula a chance at survival. He would go find evidence… Then a heavenly tribulation fell onto the Lancang Mountains. The Lovebird Sword Array and the last of the Lancang Sect Leader’s consciousness dispersed, and I was thrown out.

“Shiyong, he—that Second Elder, he shouldn’t have said been so honest and said that he remembered everything, and he shouldn’t have said that he had seen them, right? What happened to him afterward?”

On top of the enormous mirror at the end of the Beijue Array, Xie Chu laboriously narrowed his eyes and saw Zhou Ying through the mirror.

Inside the mirror, Zhou Ying was standing next to someone.

That person was tall, plainly dressed, with traces of his solemnity in life remaining at the corners of his mouth and on his brow. He was sitting upright in the mirror…his face seemingly just as it had been over two centuries ago.

Zhou Ying respectfully cupped his hands toward the man, whose eyes were tightly shut, then bent down and turned him over, showing his back to Xie Chu, who was in another world.

Xie Chu forgot to breathe for a moment. His consciousness, which had been barely holding on, seemed to instantly explode. His teeth chattered amid the raging fire.

On that man’s back was a gash that went down to the bone. Strike him dead and Xie Chu couldn’t have seen wrong—this had been made by Kunlun’s ninefold sword.