The city below the mountain finally fell silent; no matter how lively, fireworks always had to come to an end. Halfway up the mountain, the two men suddenly felt that once the clamor faded, the world was left extraordinarily bleak. One could not get drunk, the other could hardly drink, each burdened by his own troubles.
When the city had quieted and its lights grew sparse, Xu Wenwu finally swayed to his feet. "I’ve got to... go!" he slurred. "Had a great... time... chatting with you tonight..."
Wei Yuan wore a helpless expression. In the second half of the night, they had sat facing each other in silence, lost in their own thoughts with barely a word exchanged. Did that really count as having a great chat?
Xu Wenwu waved at Wei Yuan and took straight to the air. With a loud bang, he slammed headfirst into an invisible barrier and rebounded violently onto the ground!
Wei Yuan could not bear to watch. His courtyard was protected by a Scenery Command-grade defensive formation; aside from himself, everyone had to enter and exit through the gate. It was common sense. Fortunately, Xu Wenwu had not drunk too much; having hit the wall, he finally remembered to take the gate. He walked out on his own, not forgetting to wave back at Wei Yuan before stepping through.
He had just cleared the gate when his figure vanished. A moment later, a loud thud echoed against a distant cliff face, leaving behind a massive crater. Then a silhouette shot into the sky, traced a bizarre curve in the air, and dived headlong toward the earth. Another boom erupted, billowing clouds of dust comparable to a heavy artillery shell striking the ground.
Wei Yuan shook his head with a wry sigh. In any case, a Dharma Idol cultivator possessed a formidable physical body; an ordinary crash like that would hardly scratch him, so Wei Yuan left him to his antics.
A series of rumbling crashes drifted further and further into the distance.
Having seen Xu Wenwu off, Wei Yuan sat alone in the courtyard and began looking through official business. Yet his mind refused to settle. Inexplicably, thoughts kept drifting back to that utterly destroyed world.
Thinking of what that world had become, Wei Yuan felt a faint melancholy. Tonight was a special occasion, so he allowed himself a moment of indulgence, letting this wisp of sorrow linger and flow.
According to the black-robed woman into whom the three-headed bird had transformed, that heaven and earth was Wei Yuan's true father. At that time, standing there felt as if he were treading upon his father's withered bones, utterly at a loss.
Deep down, Wei Yuan still regarded Wei Youcai as his father. But the moment he set foot in that world, he knew what the black-robed woman said was true. No explanation was needed; it was simply fact.
Facing a world like that, could he really only be like Xu Wenwu, nursing sullen drinks on important days to drown his sorrows alone?
Yet Wei Yuan was never one to wallow. After letting his melancholy run its course for a brief while, he reined in his emotions, pulled up a batch of research reports from the Splendor of the Many Realms, and began reading them in detail.
These reports all concerned a small stone he had brought back from the world of his birth during his last visit. The stone was exceedingly strange, composed of several hundred fragments that never touched yet never drifted far apart, eternally maintaining that miraculous state.
Wei Yuan had been unable to decipher it himself, so he had sent the stone to the Academy of Sciences for the cultivators there to study collectively. For a time after that, he had set the matter aside. Looking at it today, several thousand papers had already been published under the project!
To be formally registered in the Splendor of the Many Realms, a paper had to meet rigorous standards: sound reasoning, substantiated data, verified conclusions, and review by senior researchers. That several thousand papers could emerge from such a strict process filled Wei Yuan with deep admiration; he could hardly fathom how they had managed to write so many.
As this was a matter of grave importance, Wei Yuan immersed himself in reading. In the blink of an eye, the night passed, and he had finished nearly ninety percent. The vast majority of the papers verified only a tiny, isolated topic, some of which even seemed slightly comical. Yet many verified topics served as the foundation for newer papers, upon which subsequent researchers built further expansions and validations.
Wei Yuan could almost see thousands of researching cultivators starting from a single stone, scrutinizing it bit by bit and pushing back the frontiers of the known world—no leaps, only steady, methodical extension.
Yet stacked across thousands of papers, the field had grown immensely vast. The cultivators had even formulated several theoretical equations to describe the force that bound the fragments together while keeping them strictly apart.
This train of thought astonished Wei Yuan. He reviewed it carefully once more, confirming that he truly could not understand it.
Not understanding the derivation did not matter, so long as he understood the conclusion. The ultimate conclusion of numerous papers confirmed Wei Yuan’s suspicion: the fundamental substance of that world was calamity ash.
Calamity ash was not uncommon in the cultivation world. If Wei Yuan ever failed a heavenly tribulation, for instance, he would be reduced to two things: a mangled corpse and calamity ash. If his body contained many impurities, a few sparkling stones might remain as well.
There was usually nothing to study about calamity ash; its essential nature was a return to silence. Thoroughly obliterated at the finest, mustard-seed level, it possessed not a shred of vitality or activity—merely a handful of ash that not even immortal power could refine.
To reduce an entire world to calamity ash spoke volumes of how terrifying that apocalyptic disaster had been. Wei Yuan was even reluctant to dwell too deeply on it, lest it shake his Dao heart.
And yet!
Wei Yuan’s spirits lifted as he pulled up several specific papers. They noted that if the peculiar force binding the stone he brought back were stripped away, its properties differed slightly from pure calamity ash.
Naturally, to prove this distinction, the author had deliberately talked a Dharma Idol cultivator into braving a heavenly tribulation. The poor cultivator was left half-crippled, but the author successfully obtained fresh calamity ash...
Relying on this relentlessly rigorous scientific spirit, the paper arrived at a conclusion: calamity ash could indeed be altered!
At the very end of the paper, the author wrote:
"Past immortals have said: ash left after tribulation marks the ultimate end of existence, destined to return to nothingness, unalterable even by immortals..."
Wei Yuan had seen this quote before. It came from a book by the Third Generation Palace Master, Immortal Venerable Suchan. Similar sayings existed across various sects, dating back a hundred thousand years, but the Palace of Grand Beginning's version had been compiled and reedited by Immortal Venerable Suchan.
Back then, after Immortal Venerable Suchan assumed the position of Palace Master with undisputed dominance, he entered the Hall of Myriad Mysteries—the repository of scriptures—for the first time, and was stunned on the spot.
In those days, the supreme immortal treasure known as the Hall of Merits had not yet been forged. The so-called Hall of Myriad Mysteries was merely a floating peak in the sky, housing Dao treatises written by past palace masters and works by various Scenery Command cultivators.
At that time, Suchan still carried the title of Demon Venerable; "Immortal Venerable" came a year later, and only after he forcibly compelled all fellow Daoists across the world to change how they addressed him. What shocked Suchan back then was how pitifully sparse and crude the Palace of Grand Beginning's collection was!
The founding Patriarch had left behind very few treatises on the Dao to begin with. They were scattered here and there, and many were only half-written, followed by an offhand remark: "I suddenly had a new idea. This Dao art should be clear enough up to this point; let future generations figure out the rest..."
Who knew how many heavenly paths and miraculous divine arts had ended up cut in half simply because the Patriarch's interest shifted...
And that was considered the better sort. In several manuals, the Patriarch had written: "When cultivated to this stage, one or two heavenly tribulations should arrive. Just step outside to undergo them so as not to damage the cave dwelling..."
Later, Demon Venerable Suchan calculated that the ferocity of those tribulations would probably strike an ordinary immortal half-dead. Even he would have needed prior preparation, or risk coming away battered and disgraced. The trouble was that, according to the Patriarch himself, these were supposed to be manuals for the Scenery Command realm!
Back then, Suchan pored over all of the Patriarch's manuscripts, then compared them against every historical deed and record he could find, finally piecing together how the Patriarch had cultivated in his day:
The Patriarch felt weak in some area;
The Patriarch pondered a moment and thought a certain method might work;
The Patriarch entered closed-door seclusion;
The Patriarch crossed a tribulation;
The method indeed worked...
Having mastered the secret technique, the Patriarch went out and pulled off something monumental, only to feel weak once again.
...And so the cycle repeated.
Until one day, the Patriarch abruptly uncovered an earth-shattering scheme orchestrated by the Ancestral Shaman, at a time when humanity faced an existential crisis! With no time to overthink, the Patriarch hastily created several immortal arts and sword routines, journeyed west alone, pulled off something monumental in the City of Heaven, and stabbed the Ancestral Shaman in passing.
Upon returning to the Palace of Grand Beginning, the Patriarch selected three people from among his nominal disciples to inherit his mantle. But in the Patriarch's own words, the three fellows were stupid as bricks—utterly unteachable.
After the Patriarch passed away, those three "stupid as bricks" disciples crossed the immortal gate one after another, descended from the mountain side by side, and conquered Yunzhou.
Demon Venerable Suchan had compiled these past tales of Grand Beginning, but never entered them into the archives; instead, he stored them in his divine sense and ultimately passed them down to Wei Yuan.
Afterward, Demon Venerable Suchan felt that venturing out to slaughter in all directions meant he might fall at any moment. At that time, the Palace of Grand Beginning faced a gap between generations, and he deeply sympathized with the plight of the second-generation three immortals. Thus, he settled down to organize the texts and Dao scriptures left by his predecessors, rewriting them so the Great Dao would be clearly discernible and preserving as much insight and true intent as possible.
Hence, for the lineage of the Palace of Grand Beginning, Demon Venerable Suchan had rendered immense service. As for calamity ash, he had written about it in the *Comprehensive Overview of Immortal Materials*, a book meant to teach disciples of the Palace of Grand Beginning to identify common spiritual objects—the very book Yu Zhizhuo had brought to Qingming back then.
And now, the author of the paper in Wei Yuan’s hands offered this critique of Demon Venerable Suchan’s conclusion: "Just because you cannot do something, you assume nobody else can. Where does such confidence come from? Though I am merely a template, I beg to differ!"
Reading this, Wei Yuan felt an ominous premonition. Pulling up the author’s file, sure enough, there were three large characters: Wen Guantian!
Beyond his amazement, Wei Yuan suddenly realized that the past palace masters had all forged paths for posterity in their capacity as transcendent immortals. From the founding Patriarch down to the second-generation three immortals, apart from the Three Views Dao Paths, most of the treatises left behind were unsystematic and lacked rigor, each master following their own whims.
For example, to make reading karmic luck easier, the Patriarch had arbitrarily assigned his favorite colors to specific kinds of karmic luck; ever since, disciples of the Palace of Grand Beginning saw karmic luck in the exact same hues he favored.
Only beginning with Suchan did the Palace of Grand Beginning establish a complete cultivation system, clearly defining the Three Views and Seven Halls. Later, Fourth Generation Palace Master Xihe, with sword Dao that dominated an entire era, seized numerous rare immortal materials to forge the rough vessel of the Hall of Merits. Afterward, Fifth Generation Immortal Master Qingkong refined and completed it on that foundation. From that point on, the Palace of Grand Beginning had orderly transmission and clear rewards and punishments, gradually rising to prosperity.
In those days, an immortal’s writings carried supreme authority. The worlds perceived by immortals and mortals were vastly different; without reaching that realm, one had no standing to question whether an immortal was right or wrong.
Wei Yuan had never expected that among the template Dao Foundations he personally developed and nurtured, a great talent capable of pointing out an immortal's errors would emerge!
He glanced through the remaining papers and found that Wen Guantian was not the only such talent.
Wei Yuan pondered for a moment, then chuckled softly. He felt this was rather wonderful. Perhaps this was the true foundation of prosperity.
Chapter 1195