Only a cultivator of the same level could have cut a gash like this into the body of a shed skin sword cultivator.

But if two shed skins had been fighting, after over two centuries, the traces still wouldn’t have vanished altogether. In other words, the killer had only struck one blow here.

At the time, the Third Elder was on the Southern He Peninsula, Wu Lingxiao wasn’t yet the Sword Slave, and the Kunlun shed skin could only have been one person…a person the Second Elder could trust to have his back among the perils beyond the Beijue Mountains.

The Second Elder hadn’t been born in time for the era when the Sword Ancestor had widely accepted disciples. While in the eyes of the current younger generations, he was also among the most ancient sword cultivators in the world, he was halfway to a junior in front of the Sect Leader.

The Sect Leader was the person who had led everyone in the struggle to get a foothold on the icy and barren northern continent after the sage had left the mortal dust. Each and every Kunlun sword cultivator had looked to him for guidance and support. Though the times had changed and many of their ideas had begun to clash, the Second Elder still made allowances for the difficulties the Sect Leader had in keeping equilibrium on all sides, and he remembered with gratitude the many compromises the Sect Leader had made for his sake.

To make a somewhat inappropriate comparison, the Sect Leader was to the Second Elder what Zhi Xiu was to Pang Jian.

As reliable and prudent as the Second Elder was, why would he have dared to run the risk of entering the Beijue Array in his true body? It wasn’t just because he had a thorough understanding of the terrain after many years of guarding the Beijue Array; it was also because he hadn’t been alone then. Another person had gone with him, someone who was like a father and a brother.

The Second Elder’s body was with Zhou Ying, and his name token hadn’t cracked after his death. That showed that before his essence could disperse, he had been sent into the Ceaseless Mirror.

In other words, the High Priest had also played a role in this.

He had been…killed in a conspiracy by the same Kunlun he had loved and protected for centuries.

Perhaps Zhou Ying had realized that it would be too hard on the Blind Wolf King to make him listen to flying goose code under these circumstances. His hand brushed the mirror, and a line of fleeting mist appeared on the surface.

Before the mist disappeared, as if racing against time, he quickly wrote a line of Northern Li writing—so that Xie Chu could see it clearly, he even wrote it mirrored.

“You can’t survive here for long. A person who is dead cannot come back to life. Better to do something more useful than wailing in mourning.” Perhaps because he was no longer in the land of the living, Zhou Ying didn’t even bother with basic courtesy, revealing his callous nature, impervious to reason. “Go find the reason your honored teacher was silenced.”

Xie Chu shot him a hateful look and cursed in Northern Li slang.

But after all, he was also a master sword cultivator with many years of fame behind him; even if his heart burst from grief, he still had his guts. Xie Chu grit his teeth and suddenly clapped a half-immortal grade talisman against the ground—he wasn’t a shed skin; his cultivation level was too far below the two who had come here before. Even with Zhou Ying’s guidance, he was a spent force. At the slightest movement, his essence would be in danger of freezing altogether. He had to lower himself to being a half-immortal.

Spiritual energy held up his legs, which had only bones remaining. Xie Chu took a bone jade cane from his mustard seed and walked toward the sword cut leaning on it.

The sword cut marked the place where the Sect Leader had launched a sneak attack on the Second Elder. The two of them must have seen something here.

Before Xie Chu could find his footing, another gust of fierce wind came crashing toward him. The mighty ascended spirit sword cultivator was nearly blown away by the wind. In the mirror, Zhou Ying was watching the flying snow filling the sky. He was different from the Second Elder’s corpse next to him; his figure was hollow.

Xie Chu followed the direction of his gaze, and his eyes suddenly stopped. His hand, which was like that of a burnt corpse, reached into his mustard seed and pulled out a big handful of spiritual stones. The spiritual stones broke in his palm; they turned into a talisman and flew away. The snow piled over a zhang high on the ground was sent flying. With a loud clatter, the edges of the big mirror on the ground were revealed.

“Inscriptions…”

Inscriptions that clearly belonged to a single set had also appeared now in the Unbound Furnace. The Luwu had come through in the clutch. Lin Chi and Wen Fei had quickly obtained a complete inscription recording. Only by concentrating their full attention and trying innumerable times did the two of them succeed in relaying these inscriptions to the Unbound Furnace. The Xuanyin Mountains seemed to sense something. The silent Bell of Tribulation on the Principal Peak moved.

It seemed to know that the Xuanyin Mountains’ sole shed skin wasn’t here, and that he couldn’t spare the attention to look after events in the north. It flashed intermittently in the air, turning with unfathomable intent in the direction of Moon Plated Peak.

Just then, an aged hand reached out from midair and touched the Bell of Tribulation—the Dignitary of Fate Zhang Jue landed on Xuanyin’s Principal Peak.

Before, his appearance had been that of a sedate middle-aged man, but in a little over a month, his hair and beard had turned white, and of the skin of his hands, only the thinnest layer remained, covered in the wrinkles made by time.

Beneath Zhang Jue’s feet was the main hall of the Principal Peak. On the roof tiles, an enormous karma beast appeared. It looked at him as though it understood human emotions, the expression in its eyes affectionate and calm.

Zhang Jue was an orphan taken in by the Southern Sage. He had grown up on the karma beast’s back. At the time, the karma beast had not yet been committed to drawings and walls. It had fur like satin and warm breath. Its nature was proud. When it was angry, its furious roars could be heard dozens of li away. But it never screamed at children. When little kids roughly grabbed its ears and plucked its fur and annoyed it, at most it would snort out a breath and avoid them.

Zhang Jue never did mischievous things like that. At seven, he had been as quiet and prudent as he was now. He hadn’t been old before his time like Li Fengshan, hadn’t had Lin Zongyi’s extraordinary natural talents, and he certainly hadn’t been as charming as Zhao Yin. He was always silent, as if he didn’t exist. The Southern Sage hadn’t been a very strict teacher. If his young disciples violated a rule, as long as they hadn’t gone too far out of bounds, he would usually turn a blind eye. Even Lin Zongyi, who later became Yuntian Palace’s Dignitary of Rule, had tested their shizun’s bottom line and taken beatings for it in his youth. Only Zhang Jue had never broken any rules.

Whether there was someone supervising him or not, he would do whatever shizun said, down to the slightest detail; he had no objections, he asked no questions, he didn’t fall short of what was required. He’d known enough of the suffering caused by the turmoil of war. He abhorred all inconstancy. Carefully observing the rules within a framework set down by the strong gave him an unparalleled sense of security. The day that the Sea of Stars had landed in the Xuanyin Mountains, Zhang Jue had become an ascended spirit. In that moment, he thought he had practically found perfect satisfaction—if one could catch glimpses of fate by observing the paths of the stars, wasn’t that the best evidence that “everything has its course”?

He became the Dignitary of Fate and in a thousand years hadn’t taken a single step out of line. He had taken a disciple just as “rule-abiding and sedate” as himself.

Right up till that “rule-abiding and sedate” disciple forfeited the Xuanyin Mountains in a single strike, smashed the Sea of Stars, and came to see him with a tiny karma beast squeezed into a drawing.

“I’ve seen that the main hall and the Southern Sage Great Hall have drawings of auspicious signs all over their walls. Those must be provided for the karma beast,” Zhi Xiu said. “I’ve heard that in earlier years, it often came to play here, but since I came to the mountains, the karma beast never again entered the inner sect without being summoned. Shifu, the sage is gone."

Zhang Jue hadn’t wanted to speak, but hearing this, he couldn’t resist opening his mouth. “The sage shed his encumbrances and became free of the mundane dust. He is one with the universe.”

“All right,” Zhi Xiu said, changing his wording accordingly, “then he evaporated into the air.”

Zhang Jue: “…”

“Sages turn into rain and fall to earth, common people fall like leaves and become mud,” Zhi Xiu said. “Truly, there is a difference.”

After a long moment, Zhang Jue sighed. He said, “Jingzhai, you never learned to observe the stars and natural phenomena. From the bottom of your heart, you never believed that fixed destiny exists. You don’t belong to the way of the Dignitary of Fate.”

“I don’t believe it. Is destiny in the Sea of Stars?” Zhi Xiu calmly asked. “Did you see what the Sea of Stars was when it was turned upside down, see what you have been scrupulously abiding by? Shifu, after all these years, when the Sea of Stars disappeared, didn’t you feel the tiniest bit pleased?”

Zhang Jue froze.

“The karma beast misses its former master very much, and it misses you very much… It couldn’t come here to see you, so it asked me to bring it.” Zhi Xiu looked around the empty walls of the place where Zhang Jue was in seclusion—the karma beast could only appear in a place with human markings on the walls—and bent down to place a drawing in front of Zhang Jue’s prayer mat. “Though perhaps you don’t remember it anymore.”

However much it understood of human emotion, the sacred beast was still only a beast. There were many marvels of the mundane dust that it could not understand, and it could not interpret the laws and commandments of heaven and earth.

It only loyally remembered its master’s heart—the living, human heart buried beneath history and stone.

Zhang Jue closed his eyes briefly. Spiritual light flashed on his wizened hand laid against the Bell of Tribulation. The unrest and droning of the Bell of Tribulation were suppressed by his hand; it made no more sound.

Lin Chi and Wen Fei’s physical senses were fully occupied by the dazzling inscriptions, and their spiritual senses were numb. They had no idea that they had had a close brush with death just now.

Lin Chi watched the inscriptions closely. His seventh sense melded with the Unbound Furnace. The furnace fire of a toolmaking master could read inscriptions.

Inside the furnace fire, an entire universe took shape with a bang.

Lin Chi heard innumerable murmurs. He whipped his head around and saw two ancient cultivators doing battle by debate; he couldn’t hear what they were saying—ancient cultivators engaged in debate didn’t argue out in the street. There would be layer upon layer of barrier laid down around them, without a single sound allowed to leak out into the ears of outsiders.

Lin Chi saw the eyes of one of the cultivators suddenly grow round; signs of age appeared on their face, and their Way of the Heart shattered.

Neither of these two had weak cultivation. After the Way of the Heart shattered, the essence would explode. Lin Chi was startled, automatically wanting to dodge, but he saw that the dead person’s essence didn’t explode; instead, it passed through an inscription and blended into the body of the winner, the person’s aura disappearing entirely.

Lin Chi was all at sea. What kind of evil art is this? he thought. How could they absorb another person’s cultivation?

But he quickly found that this was no evil art. The ancient gods and demons had grown strong precisely by consuming each other in this way.

Countless people brushed shoulders with him. The greater the masters, the more terrible their fights. Apart from the frequent appearance of evildoers creating chaos in recent years, cultivators of the ascended spirit level rarely fought, and it was almost impossible to catch a glimpse of the various nations’ shed skins. Lin Chi had never beheld a scene of all the gods and demons of heaven locked in chaotic battle like this.

Through the furnace fire, Lin Chi saw invisible inscriptions “flowing” from cultivators’ spirits during debates. The surroundings changed immediately. An ascended spirit could make a river run backward, ignite snow and boil ice. Shed skins could even overthrow time and season within a certain scope.

Cultivators who knew restraint would establish boundaries with their arts, but the ones running wild didn’t care how many crops in fertile farmlands would be ruined by sweltering heat in early spring or frosty winds at midsummer. In places where cultivators were common, the four seasons were in total disarray.

But Lin Chi suddenly took a step back, cold sweat rising on his back.

The difference between inscriptions on the one hand and arrays and talismans on the other lay in the fact that talismans and arrays were manmade; only inscriptions were “naturally occurring.”

Talismans were more convenient and could be activated by a cultivator with spiritual energy. Arrays were a little more complex, relying on additional spiritual stones to power them. In fact, any random cultivator could create their own talismans and arrays any time, it was just that the majority of them weren’t very good. Only the most concise and practical, the ones that best economized on spiritual energy, would spread widely.

But inscriptions were different. New inscriptions weren’t called “newly made,” they were called “newly discovered.” Inscriptions in themselves could change the pattern of the spiritual energy flow around them. As long as they weren’t in a place like the Land of Turmoil, where the spiritual veins had been severed, they would need no additional source of spiritual energy.

Even mortals knew that inscriptions were the language of the origin of the world, that they had emerged from the primeval universe. The path of the sun and the phases of the moon, the cycle of day and night, living things existing and propagating—all these were contained within them.

But the inscriptions he saw now were clearly flying out of the cultivators’ spirits and influencing the surroundings!

It was just as if… inscriptions weren’t the origin of the world, but the language of Ways of the Heart.

How could that be? Lin Chi had always believed that the vast majority of the time, each person spoke for them themself. Then wouldn’t inscriptions each be speaking for themselves as well? Wouldn’t that lead to total chaos?

As soon as this thought arose, Lin Chi’s seventh sense trembled acutely. The wild and disordered struggle of the gods and demons suddenly appeared before his eyes.

The northerners had been warlike since ancient times, with the most sword cultivators among them. The northern continent had been the first to crumble.

Lin Chi’s vision went white. He was nearly buried by the blizzard. In the Unbound Furnace, he saw the boundless snow fields… in a time before the Kunlun Mountains had existed.

He struggled to recall the history books he had read upon entering the sect. It was said that snowstorms in the northern continent had turned into a disaster. The people were destitute. The Sword Ancestor, defending the northern border, couldn’t stand to watch. Several times he proposed that cultivators stop fighting, but no one heeded him. He tried using his sword to do the talking, beating each one in turn, but cultivators had always won their fates in defiance of heaven, lived a hairsbreadth from death. Not only did Wanshuang fail to stabilize the four points, it instead provoked even more challenges.

Finally, that famous natural disaster of utter cold descended upon the north. The Sword Ancestor boldly stepped forward, leading his disciples and acolytes, and used his own essence to cast a spiritual shield to block the wind in the north.

That scene was replaying within the Unbound Furnace, because the inscriptions flying from the brows of the Sword Ancestor and his followers were precisely the ones Lin Chi was using the furnace flame to analyze.

The disciples with the weakest cultivation were the first to exhaust their essence and die. But when they died, their Ways of the Heart did not shatter. Their Ways of the Heart sank into the earth, still ringed with inscriptions. The vast majority of the inscriptions disappeared shortly. Only those that shared an origin in the Sword Ancestor were preserved under the influence of that powerful shed skin, their forms imprinted on the ground. After the deaths of their owners, the leftover inscriptions continued to help draw spiritual energy for their fellows.

The mortals protected by the Sword Ancestor were attempting to send all kinds of goods up to the cultivators. Seeing the foregoing, they took rubbings of those inscriptions and brought them home to worship them. There were experienced and knowledgeable old people who knew that inscriptions could automatically draw spiritual energy, so they began to draw them as well. They passed quickly from person to person—those inscriptions practically became a sacred totem, covering houses, marketplaces, farms and edges of fields…

Lin Chi thought their efforts were futile. It was common knowledge: only a cultivator of the established foundation level and above could draw inscriptions; even a half-immortal couldn’t do it. Even if mortals made identical rubbings, what use…

Could… it…

Lin Chi suddenly held his breath. A spiritual wind rose amid the fire of the Unbound Furnace. Something beyond his imagination was taking place.

On the northern continent, in all the places where there were mortals, a sea of inscriptions appeared.

Linked together, they unexpectedly made great waves.

That sea of inscriptions drew upon the scattered spiritual energy in a frenzy, concentrating it in the north. Cultivators who wanted to profit from others’ misfortunes seemed out of nowhere to encounter a formidable opponent in debate. They didn’t even have a chance to learn what the subject of debate was before their Ways of the Heart were shattered by the torrent of inscriptions, and their essences went north, following the current.

Lin Chi suddenly realized that those who had not established foundations weren’t unable to draw inscriptions; it was just that the effects were so feeble as to be practically nonexistent. It took thousands upon tens of thousands at once for the water droplets to form a sea.

He turned and saw spiritual energy flowing north along human tracks. It penetrated the landscape, became veins of the earth. At the northernmost extremity of the continent, it precipitated into spiritual stones. The spiritual mountains rose from the ground, from the most populous east and spreading west.

The inscriptions scattered throughout the mortal world all came from the Sword Ancestor, and they were upheld by his Way of the Heart as they upheld it. When the spiritual mountains began to be pushed up by the veins of the earth with a rumble, his consciousness instantly joined with the whole country—

Thus the world’s first spiritual mountains arose.

Thus the world’s first full moon sage came to be.

The spiritual wind of the northern continent was limpid. His way was quiet and still, leaving no marks.

It continued until both immortals and mortals were exhausted upon reaching the Beijue Pass. There the submerged Ways of the Heart grouped together, sinking into the earth like a mirror. At the mirror’s four corners were the inscriptions that had raised the spiritual mountains.

They appeared in perfect detail in front of the Blind Wolf King. Xie Chu used the last of his strength to keep his eyes open, attaching his spiritual sense, which was frozen numb, to his vision. In the “mirror,” he saw his own reflection—at the center of his brow, there was also a ring of inscriptions.