“Send General Zhi to Northern…” When Bai Ling received word, he was stupefied. “Wait, you’re saying he wants to go where? Does the Viscount know?!”

Then he realized that the Luwu passing along the message was using reincarnation wood to speak to him, and Xi Ping, in the reincarnation wood, had said nothing.

“Don’t get excited, Wenchang-xiong.” Bai Ling reached out to hold down Pang Jian, who had jumped out of his chair, and said to the Luwu conveying the information through the reincarnation wood, “Pass on to General Zhi…

“General Zhi is Great Wan’s stabilizing force. The Kaiming Department is willing to cooperate with all of General Zhi’s dispatches.” Bai Ling mentally arranged his wording in a hurry. One had to honor heaven, earth, one’s sovereign, one’s parents, and one’s teacher—after all, as a junior, there were some things the Viscount couldn’t very well say, so he would have to be the one to give counsel. “But there are thousands of people in the Kaiming and the Luwu…”

Pang Jian cut in irately: “And Heaven’s Design Pavilion hasn’t died out yet!”

“And there are the millions of people of Wan. Since ancient times, it has been a place of culture, a nation of civilization, but while its customs are gentle, its people have pride.” As always, Bai Ling’s voice was restrained and chilly. He spoke with emphasis. “Even if a human sacrifice will create a heroic legend, how can we stand for it?”

How could the Viscount stand for it?

“Please reconsider, General Zhi!”

In the reincarnation wood, the Luwu transmitting the message didn’t speak. A very mild voice responded: “Thank you.”

It was Zhi Xiu.

Bai Ling froze up slightly, then said, “Unless you can imitate the Sword Ancestor and raise the Kunlun Mountains again like a thousand years before… But, General Zhi, the times have changed. With how much of the people’s resentment the spiritual mountains have amassed to this day, especially in Northern Li, would they be willing to raise another range of spiritual mountains?”

“No,” Zhi Xiu flatly interrupted him, “no new spiritual mountains will rise. You’re right, young Mr. Bai, the times have changed. Do not worry, I am only going to scout a trail, verify a hypothesis.”

Bai Ling thought that there was a peculiar joy in his tone and was just about to follow up when he received a private message from Xi Ping sent to him alone.

“Make the preparations,” said Xi Ping, “I’m here.”

Bai Ling: “…”

You’re the one I’m worried about!

For some reason, Bai Ling suddenly remembered how, when he had just reached the human world and was hiding in a stack of paper, he had first seen Xi Ping—he had just been at the most insufferable age. This human child who had grown up in a honey jar—seeing him, the half-demon who had neither father nor mother felt deep envy and jealousy, so he had always disliked that young master cousin. He’d just never said anything about it in front of his lord.

But at some point, he had begun to see that person through Zhou Ying’s eyes, so in Zhou Ying’s place, he felt so choked that his chest ached.

Once Xi Ping had spoken, there was no one who could bar the way to Zhaoting. The Luwu made arrangements with unmatched swiftness. For the first time, Zhi Xiu took a long distance trip in a car.

Northern Li had lost its inner sect, and the members of the outer sect scattered throughout the continent were at a loss, and their manpower was insufficient. The Luwu had brought in a troop of soldiers from Hongyin on the Wan-Li border.

Mortals were repairing arrays!

And succeeding!

While Northern Li was conservative, it was also valiant. The unyielding men and sturdy women who had grown up buffeted by the northwest wind, seeing the situation, ran after the Hongyin troops in rapid succession.

A crowd was the hardest thing in the world to fathom. Sometimes, a crowd would slip collectively into an abyss from unbelievable stupidity, like one hollow, apathetic puppet after another, using the same witless brain; and sometimes a crowd would be like a spark in a gold-smelting furnace, burning with incredible light, unstoppable once it got started.

The knowledge behind arrays and spirit-conducting gold, profound or mysterious, was disenchanted. All kinds of manuals passed through countless hands and were copied. When Zhi Xiu crossed the border into Northern Li, he saw arrays modified with spirit-conducting gold everywhere, spread over the northern continent, golden light glowing like a miracle.

The descendants of the Li people who in their confusion and helplessness had transmitted inscriptions and entrusted their families and their safety to a god had now taken up tools and were choosing to be gods themselves.

Where in the past the ancient inscriptions had been carved, now there were all kinds of arrays to protect against cold. Though they were all low-level arrays—one was useless, and two were also useless—tens of thousands of them had firmly blocked out the bitter cold of the utter north as it came south.

Three days later, Zhi Xiu reached the northern border of the spiritual energy prohibition.

Xi Ping had come with him—he hadn’t passed through reincarnation wood; the reincarnation wood trees here had all frozen to death. If not for the effects of a large quantity of warming arrays, Xi Ping suspected that he could only have stuck it out for a few breaths.

Neither of them spoke. The wind was too strong. Even if one spoke, it wouldn’t reach the other’s ears.

Because of the hidden bones, Xi Ping still didn’t dare to leave the spiritual energy prohibition at will. He only stood by the spiritual energy prohibition line, holding up an upgraded immortal tool that protected against the wind.

Zhi Xiu gave Xi Ping a look, and with somewhat stiffened fingers made a don’t be scared gesture at him: As we agreed.

Xi Ping didn’t move, as if he had already frozen solid. The milky white light in his hand spilled onto the blank and boundless snow as he watched Zhi Xiu step out of the spiritual energy prohibition.

Zhaoting, which had been as quiet as mundane iron, let out a clear and melodious ringing. Spiritual light spread from it. Next, countless upright snow-white accompanying plants rose steeply from the ground, amid the vast wind and snow forming an expanse, forming a forest, spreading as far as the eye could see.

Zhaoting, leaving its sheath, stirred the surrounding spiritual energy. Amid the cluster of accompanying plants, it replicated the secret spell that the living corpse warriors had drawn amid the thicket of three-day dream grass—

Across the spiritual energy prohibition line, Xi Ping sensed something. He raised his head laboriously, feeling even the violent icy wind stagnate.

When Yuan Hui had hewn apart the hidden bones, it had been equivalent to other cultivators destroying their own Ways of the Heart. His corpse ought to have exploded into dust. But instead he had lain peacefully in the depths of Impassable Sea, amid the forest of reincarnation wood, just like the living corpse warriors who had gone to rest in the three-day dream grass.

When Zhi Xiu had pointed this out in the Law Breaker, Xi Ping had immediately realized something.

Reincarnation wood, three-day dream grass…

“Three-day dream grass repels living things, because it is the resting place of the living corpses,” Zhi Xiu had said. “Have you considered that three-day dream grass may have been the ‘accompanying plant’ of the living corpse warriors?”

“Shifu, why are accompanying plants actually born? Wangge Luobao didn’t explain it clearly…”

“Because he didn’t know either. That gentleman from Southern Shu, to judge from his conduct, would not have had an accompanying plant even if he had lived to become a shed skin. Since ancient times, people have thought that when a person who does not accord with the Great Way drags their existence out to the point of becoming a shed skin, they will give birth to an accompanying plant, but actually that isn’t entirely right—otherwise, while I may be untalented, I suppose I still don’t count as more ‘evil’ than Lingyun’s Tianbo.”

“Then…what is it?”

“It is a resting place. Like the leaves falling in autumn, the summer flowers becoming the next year’s mud—no one and nothing can last forever. In the end, all will change from one thing to another, in an endless cycle. An ascended spirit can put inquiries to heaven and earth, ask questions until heaven and earth have nothing left to say to them, and then another shed skin who ‘accords with the Way and becomes heaven’ will appear in the world. I was willful and unfilial, hopelessly pigheaded, never willing to come to the ‘Way,’ so at the shed skin pass, I was interrogated for eight years—become a god and sage, or be a common fool. Gods do not fail. They last as long as heaven and earth last. But a common fool is forever himself and in the end has a resting place. Accompanying plants are ‘resting places’ for us living corpses. It isn’t only evil cultivators who have them. It is those who know that ‘I’ and ‘my Way of the Heart’ are perhaps not the same.”

The four ancient demonic gods, Hui Xiangjun who had carelessly cast the Eternal Spring Brocade’s Way of the Heart into an old furnace, Qiu Sha who had lived all her life for a single person, Zhuoming who had stored up and played with Ways of the Heart like marbles… Some were venerable, some were despicable, some were detestable, some were hard to describe, but from birth to death, they had all been themselves.

When he felt his essence flow out of him like water, Zhi Xiu suddenly thought that he had just forgotten to say something important to his little disciple.

Xi Shiyong was the wisest person he had ever met in his life.

Though his spiritual sense was average, his constitution just adequate, his heart unsettled and his mind unfocused, and he was the foremost shirker of work and responsibility…Zhi Xiu would forever remember what he had said when he hesitated, unwilling to become a disciple of Flying Jade Peak—

Everyone takes their “Way” and uses it to make inquiries of heaven and earth. If I were heaven and earth, I’d be sick of it.

Then, Zhi Xiu’s spirit trembled, and a certain indescribable calm surged up. His Way of the Heart was melting away along with his essence.

It wasn’t like Lin Zongyi, a resolute destruction, and it wasn’t like Xuanwu and the others, absorbed by force into the Unbound Furnace. When his Way of the Heart quietly flowed out, it was like eating a fruit and burying its pit in the earth.

To an observer, his body was instantly covered with frost and snow, as if he had been frozen solid.

“Shifu!” As if he could take no more, Xi Ping stepped over the spiritual energy prohibition line. His voice was carried away by the wild wind.

As spiritual energy once again began to flow through his limbs, the hidden bones, on their last gasp outside the spiritual energy prohibition, immediately fixed on him. This time, the hidden bones had obtained all the spiritual energy of the Kunlun Mountains. They threw themselves at Xi Ping with a force to topple mountains and overturn seas!

Just then, the snow shuffler forest suddenly moved on its own, rapidly growing and expanding. The frost and snow on the canopies all fell to the ground, nearly burying Xi Ping.

The secret spell on the snow shuffler was flickering rapidly. A crack that sounded like a wail came to Xi Ping’s ears. Next, spiritual energy thousands of times fiercer than Zhi Xiu’s shed skin essence poured into the snow shuffler forest.

This could only be the spiritual energy of an entire range of spiritual mountains. The snow shufflers, serving in place of three-day dream grass, had also melted away the hidden bones charging toward Xi Ping!

But Xi Ping didn’t pause for a moment. As if he was completely unsurprised, he chose his timing precisely, flew a sword upward, grabbed hold of Zhi Xiu, and retreated back inside the spiritual energy prohibition without a look back, already casting a handful of warming talismans on Zhi Xiu, his hands moving with utmost speed. Then, not pausing in his steps, he charged into a steam carriage modified with spirit-conducting gold and raced south wildly.

“Shifu, shifu, we did it! Accompanying plants really can substitute for three-day dream grass, they can eliminate Ways of the Heart…”

There was no sound from Zhi Xiu. He had entered the spiritual energy prohibition, but the secret spell of “going rest” was still slowly dissolving his essence and Way of the Heart. Xi Ping could feel it.

He didn’t dare to look in the rearview mirror. “Shifu! What I did back there, I didn’t talk it over with you, I was wrong, you should flog me, shifu…”

Xi Ping’s vision blurred, and the modified upgraded car slammed into a big rock. The car leapt up several chi when it hit the boulder and screeched as it scraped a long mark into the ground. Zhi Xiu’s icy, stiff body bumped against Xi Ping, just as if he really were flogging him in response to his words.

Xi Ping raised his hand. Over and over, he didn’t dare to grasp that stiff sleeve. Outside the car window was a vast sea of snow, the wild wind sobbing. Ever so slowly, he bent down—

And heard a weak voice say: “…What’s wrong with you, you unfilial fiend? You wouldn’t play some happy tunes when I asked, but you’re so proactive when it comes to wailing for the dead?”