But General Zhi was accustomed to being a pillar of strength, not looking around while wielding his sword. However much of a loss he was at, he didn’t show it. He quickly averted his gaze, composed his mind, and found something he could do—

Zhaoting froze the Xia River after Xuanwu had cleaned it up and quickly carved the Law Breaker’s inscriptions on it.

As soon as a shed skin stepped in, the spiritual energy prohibition line immediately slowed. The other shed skin masters no longer had the leisure to wrangle over whether the “Law Breaker” was evil or not. All the shed skins here apart from Zhi Xiu and Wu Lingxiao represented their nation’s spiritual mountains. In this moment, all grudges and resentments were at an end. Including Kunlun’s Sect Leader, who had gone half out of his mind, the masters fell into unprecedented unity: nothing must happen to the spiritual mountains.

Several inscriptions from the hands of shed skins took shape in rapid succession, and the racing spiritual energy prohibition line, like a wild horse towed by a rope, stagnated. People inside and outside the Law Breaker simultaneously breathed a sigh of relief and fell silent on both sides of the spiritual energy prohibition line.

After a long while, Kunlun’s Third Elder at last broke the hush. “The ancient inscriptions have come into the world, and chaos has arisen. Even if today’s troubles are resolved, vile ambition has everywhere slipped its reins. What course is the orthodoxy of the immortal mountains to follow?”

With a bitter smile, Zhi Xiu said, “The elder is taking the long view—but oughtn’t we to put out the fire that’s about to burn off our eyebrows? Today’s troubles have yet to be resolved. While I was on the way here, Zisheng disseminated the Law Breaker’s inscriptions to the Kaiming Department and Heaven’s Design Pavilion, but you all know my country’s situation. There are practically only half-immortals who haven’t established foundations left in the outer sects…”

The Third Elder took his hint. He glanced at his Sect Leader, whose soul had gone wandering, and sighed. “Yes, we will take it upon ourselves to restrain our sect’s disciples.”

Having said this, he formed a Linked Heart in his hand and sent it back to the Kunlun Mountains in the capacity of an elder’s order, forbidding the sect’s disciples from propagating the ancient inscriptions. Lingyun’s Sect Leader naturally followed suit.

But when they had issued their orders, the Third Elder and Lingyun’s Sect Leader’s gazes met; then each quickly looked away. Evidently they were both well aware that these orders were merely self-consolation. The results were likely to be negligible.

Walking a centuries-long road of cultivation in an instant, established foundation ants ranking among the clouds in the blink of an eye—with the road to heaven ahead, how many people could stand the test?

With enemies everywhere striding up to heaven in a single step, if you alone scrupulously abided by orders, apart from proving that you were a fool who couldn’t adapt to changing circumstances, what other benefit could it have for the world?

Xuanwu knew the weak characters of everyone in Sanyue and didn’t bother taking useless measures. He grimly fixed his eyes on Tao County. The curved blade in his hand rose and fell, slashing at the reincarnation wood tree where Xi Ping was hidden: finishing off the hidden bones within a short time was no longer feasible; if he could finish off Xi Ping here, the portion of the ancient inscriptions that the hidden bones had lost would never come to light. That boy was bad news, anyway.

Lin Chi gave a cry of alarm.

Zhi Xiu’s hand went to Zhaoting’s hilt, but then he recalled something and held himself back from drawing the sword—indeed, as soon as Xuanwu’s mountain-cleaving blow entered the line of the spiritual energy prohibition, it was wafted apart, making only a shallow groove half a chi deep in the ground.

Xi Ping held the flame of the Unbound Furnace, which had nearly gone out earlier, in both hands. He saw Lin Chi stir. “What now?”

“Xuanwu tried to attack you,” said Lin Chi, “but luckily…”

“Luckily, my ass,” Xi Ping interrupted him. “If that old pretty boy could shatter my consciousness before the hidden bones get to it, I’d kneel and kowtow to him right now, and to that bald disciple of his along with him! Lin-shishu, I’m not trying to rush you…hss…”

Midway through speaking, Xi Ping’s spiritual sense suddenly moved. This time it wasn’t a sense of danger. Rather, it felt like someone very closely connected to him was repeatedly speaking of him with a cultivator’s methods, but for some reason, he couldn’t immediately seize on the source.

Meanwhile, Yao Qi and Chang Jun, guided by Wei Chengxiang, had smoothly found the South Sea Hidden Realm. Before they could gasp in astonishment that such a place should exist, the two half-immortals received upgraded immortal tools from the Turmoilers who had stayed back to stand guard and were sent on their way. Screened by an ascended spirit grade upgraded immortal tool, Yao Qi carefully drew a tracking talisman with Xi Ping’s blood.

As the strokes fell and the talisman took shape, Yao Qi and Chang Jun held their breaths. The lines of blood on the talisman flowed slowly, pointing the way for the two of them.

“All right, we have a direction.” Chang Jun took out a new Heavenly Question, wrote up his message, and sent it. “We’ll wait here for the masters… Wait, what does this mean?”

The blood on the talisman gave off a milky glare. The blood turned to dust.

“Someone is using a technique on Shiyong’s body,” Yao Qi said. “If I remember rightly, white light means treating wounds…”

Before he could finish, a red glow appeared over the “friendly” white light. The ominous red glow nearly fused with the blood the talisman was drawn in. Yao Qi’s voice suddenly cut off.

“Somehow I don’t think this red is for a wedding,” said Chang Jun.

The red glow grew stronger and stronger, “flowing” from the talisman like water. When it fell to the ground, it spread and solidified into a bright red mirror. In the mirror, a pair of odd-colored eyes suddenly appeared, seeming to be looking at the two of them through the talisman. Yao Qi and Chang Jun jumped, stepping back simultaneously.

But under cover of the ascended spirit grade immortal tool, Wangge Luobao’s three successive attempts at inspecting Xi Ping’s body turned up nothing unusual. He grumbled in the Miah language, then went off to continue being paranoid. Only then did Yao Qi and Chang Jun get a clear look at Xi Ping’s surroundings… Xi Ping’s body was floating in water, suspended, causing ripples when he swayed slightly. In the waves, countless slender spiritual threads seemed to be reflected, like some inscription.

Yao Qi and Chang Jun’s eyes met. Chang Jun said, “What the hell is that place? He’s not trying to make some kind of pill out of Shiyong, is he? Are…are we still going to wait for the masters?”

“By the time any masters get here, he’ll be almost fully cooked.” Yao Qi grit his teeth and looked around—the Turmoilers couldn’t speak well, but they certainly had no hidden selfish designs. The upgraded immortal tools had come from Tai Sui and Wei-laoban. When Wei Chengxiang had issued a request, they had generously given whatever was useful to Wei-laoban’s friends. Yao Qi took a deep breath and hung all the upgraded immortal tools he could carry on himself. “With these, who isn’t an ascended spirit? Let’s go!”

Yao Qi’s expectations had been right. Before their Heavenly Question could even reach Wei Chengxiang, the masters were ready to come to blows.

Zhi Xiu’s expression was slightly grave. “Elder Xuanwu, what are you doing?”

“If that disciple of yours has any conscience left, he ought to take the initiative to finish himself off.”

“The way he cultivates is special. With his consciousness separated from his body now, even if he detonates his essence, it will only be letting the hidden bones have their way. His consciousness can only be destroyed by outside forces,” Zhi Xiu said. “If Elder Xuanwu has some means of entering and destroying his consciousness, I invite you to enlighten me. The disciple of my Flying Jade Peak is willing to make the sacrifice for the sake of the world.”

Xuanwu clenched his teeth with a click: with the Law Breaker unbroken, there were only mortals inside the spiritual energy prohibition line. He couldn’t get rid of that “Tai Sui” and his loquacious qin; and once the Law Breaker was broken, the hidden bones would obtain the ancient inscriptions ahead of any of them…because that qin was sealed inside a reincarnation wood tree!

Apart from quarreling brothers and idle leeches who forced women into marriage, the Sanyue Mountains’ remaining specialty product was schemers. For a moment, judging others by his own standards, Xuanwu suspected that Xi Ping had sealed the qin in the tree deliberately from the start. He glared hatefully at Zhi Xiu. “What an excellent disciple you’ve turned out!”

“Yes, elder, it shames me.” Zhi Xiu cupped his hands gently and perfunctorily. “You’re perfectly right, I am far inferior in that regard.”

Xuanwu: “…”

In fact, Zhi Xiu really didn’t mean anything by this, he just wasn’t in the mood to show off his discoursing skills for the benefit of an old fool who had been alive over a thousand years; he had only been trying to put an end to the spat however he could. While, thanks to his busybody disciple, he had heard the tittle-tattle from the Sanyue Mountains, it had after all been most of a decade. Even when he had nothing else to do, Zhi Xiu still didn’t have the refined habit of subscribing to toilet bulletins and wagging his tongue. The tangle of grievances between Xuanwu and his brilliant disciple hadn’t come to mind, and he had jabbed Xuanwu right where it hurt.

Zhi Xiu only realized what he had said when Xuanwu slashed furiously at him. He parried the blow and simply had no idea how to respond—seriously?!

“Elder Xuanwu, have you no sense of priority?”

Xuanwu was relentless, his curved blade nearly drawing a full moon. Zhi Xiu didn’t want to engage in senseless battle and didn’t fight back. When he dodged, he suddenly realized that the look in Xuanwu’s eyes was wrong: Xuanwu’s eyes, always somewhat cold, didn’t seem as calm as usual; they were dimly clouded by madness.

Yes, his impulsive strike at Tao County just now had been a little off.

Zhi Xiu immediately realized: apart from him, the shed skins of the immortal mountains all shared their minds with the spiritual mountains. With the spiritual mountains at a dead end, the shed skins who were normally mysterious or mature and cool-headed would be affected, each one becoming irritable and impulsive!

And just then, the spiritual prohibition line that the shed skins working together had stopped moved again.

This wasn’t hard to understand. There were only so many shed skins representing the will of the spiritual mountains in the world, and they were it; their cultivation levels had all reached the pinnacle. But the cultivators being used by the hidden bones and using the bones to broaden their essences were becoming more and more numerous, and their cultivation levels were constantly increasing as they replicated the inscriptions.

“Elder Xuanwu,” said Zhi Xiu, “if you still have strength to spare, you might as well go stop those people spreading the ancient inscriptions for their own personal gain.”

Wu Lingxiao was disinclined to devote her strength to the Law Breaker’s inscriptions. She stood by watching with her hands in her sleeves. Coldly, she spat out a sentence in the Northern Li language: “If we can’t resolve this, then let’s first finish off the people who have shown themselves to be incompetent.”

Xuanwu’s icy gaze shot toward her.

Wu Lingxiao hadn’t spared him an extra glance with her pitch-dark eye sockets to begin with. Her gaze, like a flame from the netherworld, only stabbed at Kunlun’s Sect Leader. “So the inscriptions on those trees are the reason that my shifu had to die? Ha—the orthodoxy of the immortal mountains, with secrets unfit for the light of day, and if you see them you’ll be silenced… What, is there a scandal at the roots of the immortal mountains? In his whole life, my shizun, regardless of merit and demerit or right and wrong, toward Kunlun, toward Great Li, was nothing but sincerely loyal from the bottom of his heart. Even I know that. And you don’t believe it?”

The Third Elder dryly attempted to smooth over the situation: “Lingxiao, this isn’t the time to speak of…”

But Kunlun’s Sect Leader was slightly shaken. For a moment, a thought flashed through his mind: “If Lanze knew that she had said such a thing…”

The heart demon seed, which had calmed temporarily due to the disappearance of the Ceaseless Mirror, once again seized on his flicker of weakness. In the facets of the heart demon that had taken root in his spirit, the meaning behind his own words was reflected.

When he thought of the Second Elder, he only felt infinitely forlorn. No matter what, he couldn’t remember how he could have brought himself to kill him.

The heart demon and the despairing will of the spiritual mountains pulled at him from both sides. There was thunder inside the Kunlun Sect Leader’s head. And Wu Lingxiao still wouldn’t let him off.

She pushed forward aggressively. She didn’t care what happened to the spiritual mountains—the deceitful heavens were fucking welcome to fall if they liked. Everything in creation had its end; why should the spiritual mountains be able to remain eternal?

“Actually, you believe it, too, you’re just playing dumb. Tell the truth, shibo. They were saying back then that if Wanshuang were ever to take a master, only the Second Elder with his surpassing talents would be worthy of it. I think that’s why you hated him, out of jealousy. You were clearly just waiting for an opportunity to get rid of him, but you still insist on giving yourself some high-sounding excuse.”

The Third Elder heard something wrong in the sound of her voice and immediately came forward and drew his sword. He prepared to block Wanshuang, swinging at the Sect Leader. “Wu Lingxiao!”

Lingyun’s Sect Leader couldn’t resist putting in a word: “Everyone, everyone—”

No one heeded him.

Since Ancestor Tianbo had departed, with the Xiuyi supercilious and the Miah ignorant, Lingyun hadn’t been able to hold its head up on the southern continent at all. For over a thousand years, not one person of stupendous talents had come out of the Lingyun Spiritual Mountains at the edge of the South Sea, whether orthodox or evil. Foreign cultivators all privately referred to them with contempt as “farmers.” When their spiritual mountains had been damaged as the result of internal strife, they had really become the laughingstock of the other sects.

With discontented spiritual mountains stirring up an already unsteady mind, Lingyun’s Sect Leader was at the end of his endurance. On impulse, he pulled out his beast-taming flute and blew a blast on it. The sharp flute music of a master of the way of beast-taming could make a whole spiritual beast farm’s worth of spiritual beasts bend their heads. The consciousnesses of all the shed skins present were violently shaken by that blast.

But Lingyun’s Sect Leader had forgotten that there were also two innocent ascended spirits present. He knew that his cultivation gave him absolutely no advantage among those of the same grade as him, and he had wanted to make everyone listen to him, so he hadn’t held anything back in playing that note.

Whatever else he was, he was still a shed skin. The fan beneath Wen Fei’s feet instantly cracked, and blood trickled from his ears. Lin Chi’s mind was entirely inside the Unbound Furnace. When he was disturbed by the unexpected note of the beast-taming flute, the Unbound Furnace slipped right out of his hands.

Good-tempered as Zhi Xiu was, he still bristled. This crowd of fools only knows how to make things worse, he thought. Zhaoting showed no more mercy, shaking a crack into Xuanwu’s round blade. He forced Xuanwu to retreat with a single blow, swept Lingyun’s Sect Leader away with the backwash of the sword wind, and caught Lin Chi.

But he only had time to catch him; he couldn’t reach the Unbound Furnace.

When Lingyun’s Sect Leader was swept away, he just happened to block Wu Lingxiao’s path. That overbearing Sword Slave, mad enough to scour heaven and earth, pushed him aside with her sword, and he happened to collide with the Unbound Furnace.

As one would have expected, the item left behind by the ancient demonic god of the eternal spring brocade was no ordinary object. It withstood the collision, but the body of the furnace fell over. The fire inside the furnace, which there hadn’t been time to put out, drew in the spiritual energy around it and rolled up right behind Kunlun’s Sect Leader.

With Wanshuang crashing down upon his head, the Sect Leader, being torn apart by his heart demon, hastily raised his sword to parry but was a little too slow. In a panic, the Third Elder quickly pushed the Unbound Furnace toward him. The enormous body of the furnace enveloped the Sect Leader and blocked Wanshuang’s blow.

Xi Ping had just gotten halfway through talking with Lin Chi when he heard that the spiritual energy prohibition line had once again taken off. Before he could ask Zhao Qindan what the precise situation was, Lin Chi’s consciousness suddenly vanished from the furnace fire, and Kunlun’s Sect Leader fell in.

Xi Ping: “…”

What were the ancestors outside up to?!

A sword cultivator lacked the toolmaking way’s “seventh sense,” so one’s consciousness naturally couldn’t connect to the materials inside a toolmaking furnace, unless he did what the Sanyue Mountains’ presumptuous Xiang Rong had done—made himself the “material” in the furnace.

Kunlun’s Sect Leader instantly saw himself in the furnace fire…saw his wound-riddled Way of the Heart huddled on his spirit, and on that spirit, the heart demon growing rampant.

Strangely, he actually felt relieved.

He thought that, having with his own hands killed his fellow sect member and shidi, who had asked him to watch his back, it was only right and fitting that he should be pinioned by a heart demon. Had he been able to assign himself a punishment, perhaps he would have chosen something more severe.

In that moment, this shed skin ancestor could have easily escaped the Unbound Furnace, but he couldn’t resist taking a step inward. He couldn’t say why; perhaps he wanted to have a look at his heart demon…to see the Second Elder again, who had died unjustly outside the Beijue Mountains.

“Sect Leader shixiong!” The Third Elder’s voice came from outside the Unbound Furnace.

“Everyone stop!” That must be that sword cultivator junior from the Xuanyin Mountains.

“Get the hell out here and give my shifu justice—”

That was Wu Lingxiao.

Kunlun’s Sect Leader turned a deaf ear to it all. He drew near as though entranced. Then he saw that the heart demon on his spirit, beside his Way of the Heart, wasn’t Zhu Lanze.

Just as the Southern Sage had seen in the den of the demon host that he had become the puppet of the spiritual mountains, Kunlun’s Sect Leader saw in the Unbound Furnace the Second Elder’s true murderer.

“It wasn’t me…” This thought came out of nowhere. With a crack, the most ancient Way of the Heart in existence broke.

In that moment, a portion of the Kunlun Sect Leader’s mind suddenly cleared. He remembered his own name, which no one had called him for a thousand years.

His surname was also Wu, personal name Guang, courtesy name Boren.

This name had become a yellowing page in a history book, as if the person who had been known by that name were already dead. Like his shizun the Sword Ancestor, like the Southern Sage and the others, he had long ago become an empty title.

With the Way of the Heart that had fettered and blinded him for a thousand years breaking, he glanced out of the Unbound Furnace, then found that he had no one worth warning, no last words to leave behind. It had been a long time since he had had anything to say to this world.

In that moment, fortune smiled upon Wu Boren’s resourcefulness. He did the same thing Xiang Rong had once done inside the Unbound Furnace. In the furnace flame, he quickly formed the Law Breaker inscriptions he had obtained from Lin Chi, and fused his Way of the Heart with the furnace flame—

Xiang Rong had used the Unbound Furnace to remake his Way of the Heart into a copy of the Black Emperor’s, and after successfully reaching a full moon position, he had disappeared into the Sanyue Mountains. As the Black Emperor’s direct disciple, Xiang Rong’s Way of the Heart had followed in a continuous line from the Black Emperor’s. It had only needed to be partially altered. Therefore, when he had left the Unbound Furnace, he had still been able to hop around for a while. But the Kunlun Sect Leader’s original Way of the Heart was incompatible with the Law Breaker. When he fused the two together, he was immediately destroyed.

But the nearly extinguished furnace flame in Xi Ping’s hands instantly grew to more than the height of a person, and the Law Breaker’s spiritual energy prohibition line was restored in the blink of an eye to the original boundaries of Tao County and even continued to expand past them, enveloping even the shed skins on the Xia River, who didn’t have time to get out of the way.

Apart from Wen Fei, who had just fallen, and Zhi Xiu, who had landed so he could catch Lin Chi, the others tumbled down out of the sky like kites with their strings snapped.