Utterly cold sword energy instantly swallowed the Queen Mother of the West in one gulp. Yang Wan seemed to be annihilated amid the age-old dream of restoring her nation.

But the divine tool of the mountains had already manifested; it had repaired the great array and no longer cared for the ruinously rash ascended spirit puppet.

With no one to control it, the Lovebird Sword Array set itself in motion. The chilly light of the array’s main sword pierced the clouds. The terrifying array seemed to be inlaid along the edges of the thunderclouds, revolving along with the ghastly pale lightning flashes, scorning the human world.

On land, in the sea, every living creature sensed the murderous aura that had nearly flattened Xi Ping just now.

Everyone below a shed skin was an ant.

Amid the silence, the most authentic ninefold sword of Kunlun penetrated the Queen Mother of the West and struck the middle of the Lovebird Sword Array.

The Lovebird Sword Array swayed.

Inside the mist just now, what had that been?

Hallucination? Imagination? Or some new poisonous miasma that lowly Yang survivor had come up with?

The Sword Slave didn’t know, and the only person who could explain it to her now hadn’t yet regrown a mouth.

Prior to Zhi Xiu, Kunlun’s Second Elder had been the youngest person in the world to become a shed skin, a man who had forged a solitary way of the sword amid the ninefold sword of Kunlun. People had once said that he would perhaps one day equal the Sword Ancestor.

The Sword Slave had thought before that there was something wrong with her shixiong’s head. Everyone else said that the Second Elder was only trapped inside the Beijue Array, temporarily unable to leave; certainly no serious harm could come to so awesome a master. It was only that loose-tongued Xie Chu who was always saying that shifu was dead, just as if shifu being dead had some benefit for him. Surely it should have been the other way around? Even if the Sect Leader and the High Priest themselves had said that shifu was in fact dead, as long as they had seen no body, his disciples ought never to lose faith in their shifu being alive.

This devout belief wasn’t concerned with the truth, and it didn’t need proof. This was filial piety. A junior shouldn’t have other ideas.

Besides, could the omniscient High Priest and Sect Leader have made a mistake? Would they deliberately conceal news of shifu’s death?

But now, standing on the sea, with the icy mist from the other side of the Wangchuan curling around her and chilling her whole body, a thought appeared in her mind: Supposing that…Xie Chu was right?

As a student of the sword, Wu Lingxiao had entered the Disciple Hall when she was ten years old and entered the inner sect before she was fifteen. She had spent practically all her life in Kunlun.

The Second Elder was self-effacing to the point of coming across a little simple and taciturn. He had few students. Large numbers of sword cultivators set their minds on him every year and tried to pull in all kinds of connections. At the time, he had probably finally lost his patience with being asked by the Sect Leader when he would take another disciple, so he had yielded and pointed at random, saying, “Well, then I guess I’ll have the best of this batch of students from the Disciple Hall.” The upshot was that he had ended up with a half-grown little girl.

Wu Lingxiao hadn’t even reached marriageable age then. The girls of the northern continent all seemed to develop late. Teacher and disciple had looked at each other in dismay. She might never forget shizun’s expression then—there had almost been a bit of terror amid his blankness.

Such a small living creature, and a girl at that; she hadn’t even reached her full height! How was he supposed to raise her? The Second Elder was afraid lest he make some mistake and kill her, or feed her wrong and stunt her growth. He treated her practically with the greatest care, leading to endless ridicule, like a clumsy old father.

She had thought for a time that apart from the brother she had come hand-in-hand out of the womb with, the best person she had ever met was shifu.

But one sixty year cycle later, because of a single sentence from this best of shifus, her brother had been hanged in his courtyard, dying discontented.

Then there was Kunlun.

Though the sect had injured her, it had also given her her achievements. Every person to come out of the Disciple Hall took pride in being a “Kunlun sword cultivator.”

Two hundred years later, she suspected that shifu’s unknown fate was connected to the sect.

She was a person who sought purity and perfection, who thought that a fast sword could cut through everything. Yet she seemed fated to be pursued eternally by interwoven loves and hates that couldn’t be unknotted.

The Sword Slave fixed her eyes on the Lovebird Sword Array suspended above the Lancang Mountains.

Supposing that what she had just seen hadn’t been an illusion, then the Lancang Sect Leader’s Way of the Heart ought to still be embedded there. Even if she died, she had to pry open the Lovebird Sword Array and have a look.

Moving at the same time as her was Xi Ping.

He had broken and reformed, reformed and broken. Now he was perhaps even a little used to it. Indifferent to further attacks, he chased after her, the speed with which the hidden bones regrew his body becoming faster and faster.

At first, his consciousness had been blown a hundred li away from land, then fluttered around like a kite for ages before finally managing to grow back a few finger bones. Now, after being smacked to bits by the Sword Slave, in hardly any time, he already had his vague outlines. By the time he returned to the peninsula, where the greatest danger lay, Xi Ping’s hands had completely grown back.

The moment he landed, a pair of long, slender legs suddenly extended from his formless consciousness, narrowly managing to hold him up. Within ten steps, his meridians had practically finished linking up, and he could even sense his essence. After this dispersal and reassembly, his essence had increased by ten percent over his previous boundary, reaching the middle ascended spirit stage. And the two sword attacks that had smashed him to dust had entered his bones; when he used them again, they would be entirely his own “Anger Shifu to Death” sword attacks; and because those two sword attacks had broken him from the inside out, the third and fourth “Anger Shifu to Death” sword forms would be far handier than the others.

Before Xi Ping could go streaking, he cloaked himself in a camouflaging robe with a talisman and with another talisman summoned back Zhaoting and his mustard seed.

Next, all the flying goose machines on the Luwu ships received word from Tai Sui: “Cease fire! Leave!”

The Luwu immediately put their scant remaining spiritual stones into their protective arrays. Under the double impetus of mechanical power and spiritual energy, the big steamships of new Moon Plated Gold surged through the Grand Canal that was seething with spray.

The other ships realized what was happening and quickly followed suit, fleeing in all directions.

Xi Ping struck the water with a beam of spiritual energy, which spread like a big net, pointing the way for the wildly darting merchant ships, preventing them from crashing against each other in their haste. Close-knit sword energy hung at low altitude, blocking the fatal attacks dropping out of the sky.

In the sky, the Sword Slave was waging war against the Lovebird Sword Array. When she attacked, the Sword Slave had always acted as though there were no one else around; the Lovebird Sword Array was the only thing that remained in her eyes. This was after all a full moon grade divine tool of the mountains. Sword light tore at her body, revealing the bone jade within, carved all over with arrays and inscriptions. The bone jade was riddled with scars, just like the devastated Southern He Peninsula.

On the ground, Xi Ping would have loved nothing better than to seize this opportunity to pick up the whole Southern He Peninsula, people and all, roll it up like a rug, and toss it out of the way.

The Sword Slave, that sword maniac, cared for nothing. She was determined to pierce the Lovebird Sword Array, trying to reach in and grab its main sword.

Inside the sword array, the main sword was located at the crux of the array. How could it be grabbed just like that? The Lovebird Sword Array’s sword energy, which had just been scattered in all directions, all pointed at her, wanting to teach a lesson to this junior who had the audacity to pick a fight with a full moon grade divine weapon.

A loud rumble. Xi Ping went numb all over; for an instant, he even thought that he had been struck dead by that divine tool.

Then, his newly grown cervical vertebrae cracked back into place, and his own skin covered those bones that were always trying to teach him how to become a god. Xi Ping’s features were restored. His senses returned. He quickly raised his head and saw the Sword Slave’s huge body suspended in the Lovebird Sword Array’s sword light like a mote of dust.

But the next moment, a beam of frost abruptly flew through the sword light that was even more dazzling than a gold-smelting furnace; it shot toward the Lovebird Sword Array like a flash of lightning, knocking the big swords around the sword array off their original trajectories!

The Sword Slave’s figure reappeared. Her skin and flesh was all gone now, her naked puppet body revealed in the sword light.

She was a monster held together with bone jade, spiritual stones, and a small quantity of human bone. This body had altogether forsaken a human appearance and lived only for the sword. The hunched shoulders were unusually broad, the eyeballs had vacated. The empty eye sockets were also carved of bone jade. At the outset, perhaps to save herself trouble, she hadn’t made herself the curving brow ridge and eye sockets of an ordinary person. There were only flat, functional circles there.

The sharp gaze shooting out from within was still fixed on the array’s main sword.

Where Wanshuang passed, the frosty wind of the utter north seemed to blow over the blistering hot Southern He Peninsula. That sword puppet became especially excited when facing a powerful enemy. A battle aura that made you shiver spread in all directions. Instantly, the menacing Lovebird Sword Array actually showed faint signs of flinching.

Fair enough. The Lovebird Sword Array’s main sword was made from the Gold Sage, who legend had it was only a coward who had become a god because of a sword.

Xi Ping suddenly remembered how, long ago, the ignorant Xi Yue had shown him a book, which had described “sword-bearing half-puppets”; it had said that they “could travel a thousand li in one day, know no weariness, go until the last gasp and fight the enemy without end.”

He had only been a shallow youth then. He had taken one glance and been overwhelmed by ugliness, then impatiently driven Xi Yue off.

But now, witnessing the Sword Slave herself, he had finally discovered that judgments of beauty and ugliness were so much groundless and narrow-minded self-importance; what they revealed were only one’s own desires and fears. For a person who frightened others, her ugliness was a great part of her.

The Sword Slave gave a bellow. Wanshuang once again slashed at the Lovebird Sword Array.

Xi Ping anticipated that this blow would be earthshaking. He was about to shove a fleet of ships into the South Sea when, in a flash, his spiritual sense suddenly gave him a warning. Out of the corner of his eye, Xi Ping glimpsed cold light rising over the sea to the west.

The sword array and Wanshuang were locked in close combat. In a moment of desperation, Xi Ping sent a handful of papermen flying into midair to block the sword energy leaking through. At the same time, it was as if a ghost out for vengeance had blown on the back of his neck. All the hairs there stood up one by one. Zhaoting trembled incessantly in his hand.

That was moonlight—not from the moon in the sky, but from the Silver Moon.

“Look out!”

Before his voice could pierce the grit flying through the air, Xuanwu had already glimpsed from a distance the half-immortal ships moving unusually fast on the peninsula and the South Sea.

He lifted his chin slightly and indifferently fixed a look on the Sword Slave tied up in battle with the Lovebird Sword Array. “Evil cultivator.”

As he spoke, the Silver Moon’s perilous light fell.

Oh no!

Just then, Zhaoting slipped out of Xi Ping’s hand.

Xi Ping automatically made a grab and couldn’t hold onto it.

He abruptly raised his head. A beam of utterly chill sword light was reflected in his eyes. It instantly spilled over the South Sea.

The seawater rose sharply. Where the sword light passed, countless icebergs rose out of nowhere and grotesquely reflected the Silver Moon’s light.

But the icebergs weren’t entirely transparent. Inside them were frozen sword cuts, one after another, like whirlpools, layer upon layer of them, destroying or cutting down the Silver Moon’s light; not a sliver of it leaked onto the sea or the ground.

Xi Ping almost swayed.

Looking in the direction of Zhaoting’s sword light, he saw a man dressed in a light grey scholar’s robe come down from the clouds and salute Xuanwu from a distance. “Elder Xuanwu, the Xuanyin Mountains’ southern mines are evacuating miners and citizens residing abroad. The cultivators on those ships are subordinates of the Kaiming Department, not evil cultivators. Please let them pass.”

Xi Ping was at the estuary, with countless icebergs firmly separating him from Xuanwu.

Zhi Xiu landed lightly on the tip of an iceberg very close to him. He didn’t turn his head. With the shard of Zhaoting, he could pinpoint Xi Ping’s location. Behind his back, his hands tapped now and again on Zhaoting’s sheath.

An ascended spirit like Xi Ping, inclined to attach his spiritual sense to his hearing, could if he so wished hear a little fish burp a hundred li away from the middle of a hurricane.

He could hear that shifu was tapping out tapped sweet notes—not the mismatched old edition from back at the Latent Cultivation Temple; he had actually learned the newest version. Leave here, don’t worry about any of it.

Xi Ping closed his eyes. A sad and bitter helpless smile appeared on his face.

He was accustomed to making himself master of a situation. As soon as he saw this attitude, he understood what had happened.

When the upgraded immortal tools had unexpectedly made their appearance in Southern He, after the shock, Wangge Luobao must have given a push from behind, immediately transmitting the news all over the world.

Forget about everyone else—Kunlun’s Sect Leader had a heart demon seed growing in his head and would certainly have wanted to bury the Sword Slave in Southern He and take back Wanshuang. On the other hand, because of the appearance of spirit-conducting gold in Southern He, he would also have told Lingyun and Sanyue to come with him.

And as Chu and Shu would see it, with all three of Kunlun’s shed skins in Southern He, who wouldn’t be afraid?

They had to come, of course, but Xuanwu and Lingyun’s people were each sure to bring their divine tools—Xuanwu was already here; Lingyun and Kunlun were further away, so they were probably a step behind.

The Silver Moon, the Cauldron of Nine Dragons, and the Lovebird Sword Array would all be assembled here; adding in Kunlun and the Sword Slave on guard against each other, all these sides that each had their own axe to grind would be locked in a to-and-fro struggle, and they wouldn’t yet dare to rush at Southern Wan’s interior with its unplumbed depths.

But Zhi Xiu had come.

That crow’s mouth of the Dignitary of Fate Elder’s had spoken a prophecy—he would be censured by all.

Such an obvious thing—did he really not understand? Hadn’t they agreed that he could under no circumstances get mixed up in the Southern He business?

If Tai Sui were so easy to kill, he’d have been crushed to dust by the spiritual mountains at the bottom of the sea eight hundred years ago! Zhi Xiu coming here was as superfluous as Zhaoting with its “fear of heights.”

How could there be such a worrisome shifu in the world?

Zhi Xiu tapped on the sheath again: Do as you’re told.

His rebellious disciple didn’t move. Perhaps he didn’t know those words.

Zhi Xiu took a deep breath. I’m already here, what else can I do? I can’t beat them to begin with. Don’t distract me.

As expected, these words jabbed Xi Ping in his weak spot. The next moment, Zhi Xiu sensed the shard of Zhaoting moving quickly from where it had been, landing under the cover of the icebergs on a ship that had fled far away… The aura he sensed was different than usual; it must be that the hidden bones hadn’t entirely grown back yet.

Zhi Xiu’s fingers trembled slightly as they stroked Zhaoting’s sheath. He sighed to himself. Being crushed to dust at every step—why did he have to walk such a road?

Then he stopped worrying and raised his head to look at Xuanwu, not far from him.

This was Xuanwu’s first time publicly revealing the face under his paper mask. He was followed by the silver-colored “moon,” like Chang’e. White as the whitest snow, he hung in midair, looking Zhi Xiu up and down.

“Zhi…Jingzhai. Descendant of an illustrious family. Did not go through a proper disciple selection at the outset but entered Xuanyin’s inner sect because an exception was made, taken as a direct disciple by one of Xuanyin’s four highest managers—his only direct disciple. Progress from ascended spirit to shed skin has been unprecedented and unequaled in speed.” With the slightly stiff accent peculiar to the Chu, he enunciated each word of the Wan language distinctly. “Who could hear this and not say that you are a perfect man?”

Zhi Xiu calmly said, “There is no such thing as a perfect man. Elder Xuanwu praises me too highly.”

“But heaven has already given you such tender praise—all of you,” Xuanwu said softly. “Yet Your Excellency was unable to appreciate the favor. You grew an evil tree in the spiritual mountains, insulted your teacher and besmirched your ancestors—”

No sooner had Xuanwu spoken than there came the sound of a crash. The enormous form of a moon appeared on the South Sea and melted all the icebergs in sight in the blink of an eye.

Right now, Wei Chengxiang was keeping an eye out in all directions. Running the risk of being chopped to mincemeat by the masters, she had expanded her consciousness to its widest amid the wind of knives and rain of swords, blazing a trail for the Luwu.

Two human figures suddenly landed in front of her, moving even faster than her consciousness.

Wei Chengxiang instinctively backed up three chi before getting a clear look at the newcomers. She froze. “You…”

In front of her were two little pretty boy Xi Pings, not wearing any kind of spiritual image mask—and one of them was even paler than the other.

The paler of the two pushed the other Xi Ping toward her. “A paperman, take him away for me.”

Wei Chengxiang said, “What?”

Papermen were only somewhat useful with a consciousness injected into them. Where was Xi Ping going to find the surplus strength to split his concentration?

Xi Ping reached out a hand to touch the paperman’s head, which turned transparent. Wei Chengxiang found to her astonishment that the paperman had a fragment of a spirit, with the shard of a sword suspended on it. “This is…”

“This is the most important part of me,” Xi Ping said seriously. “I’m handing it over to you. Take it away for me along with these people… A-Xiang, you’re the most reliable friend I’ve ever had.”

Before he had even finished speaking, he was gone, vanished into a shadow.

The bone-splitting talisman san-ge had left him with had given him a bit of surplus power, making him temporarily capable of cutting parts off himself.

Many thanks to the Lovebird Sword Array for smashing him up to the middle ascended spirit stage—he had put that cultivation level to use. He could now endure cutting off a tip of his spirit and sneak back to find his scoundrel shifu, still willful even at his age.