"Boundary stones have three sources in all. The first is called the essence and vigor of sentient life. Essence refers to the vitality of flesh and blood, while vigor denotes the spirit of the true soul." Cangxu's voice was as gentle as water, echoing amidst the lingering flames dancing upon the charred corpses.
An entire village had perished just like this—and it was a secondary slaughter, where their souls were dragged back to be tormented anew. Manipulating souls on such a vast scale was something Wei Yuan felt even he might find strenuous, yet that Daoist possessed merely the cultivation of the Dharma Idol realm, executing it with flowing ease as though he had performed it countless times. The agony and hatred spawned by brutal torture allowed a divine soul to erupt with immense energy on the brink of annihilation. This was common knowledge in the cultivation world and was presumably their intention: to squeeze the maximum possible value from these dead mortals.
All living things possessed an instinct for survival, and divine souls were no different.
Only when everything had ended did that child crawl out from beneath the corpses. He wiped away his tears with all his might and fled toward the outskirts of the village. The entire settlement was ruined; not a living soul remained.
Just then, a yellow dog bounded over from beyond the village—the very dog the child had raised at home. It ran to the boy's side and lay prostrate, and right beside it happened to lie a blade.
And so the child ate a full meal, obtained clothes to ward off the cold, and gained dry rations for the road ahead before leaving the little village behind.
The day after the child departed, another group of people arrived, clad in different uniforms and accompanied by many craftsmen. They destroyed the corpses, scoured away the bloodstains, and finally a Daoist took action, devastating the village with a torrential tempest. Under the driving wind and rain, every man-made structure swiftly decayed as though a millennium had elapsed. A few months later, a band of displaced refugees migrated here. Overjoyed to find the ruined village and the fallow fields, they settled down, inaugurating a new cycle of reincarnation.
Cangxu was that surviving child. He wandered far and wide before entering a minor sect, the Yunshui Sect. Starting as an odd-job laborer and an outer disciple, he worked his way up to the inner sect, valued and promoted for his talent in nurturing boundary stones.
Yet, devoid of power and backing, Cangxu was nothing more than a tool within the sect. The elder's daughter who had pledged her life to him in secret was ultimately wed to the sect master's son. Upon discovering that she was no longer a virgin, the son uncovered the truth, framed Cangxu, and plotted to quietly murder him in prison.
Relying on his talent and a stroke of luck, Cangxu broke out of the dungeon, stole two boundary stones that the sect was currently nurturing, and fled to an enemy state to defect. Utilizing this merit, he joined the military, eventually rising through years of distinguished service to become a general.
Before long, this petty state was conquered by Liang. Cangxu, serving at the time as the provincial commander of the capital, surrendered the city at the critical juncture. Entering Liang, he was enfeoffed as a general and took a princess as his bride. Cangxu received such treatment precisely because he had already advanced to Scenery Command. Once in Liang, he went with the flow, enlisting the imperial consorts' kin and the eunuch faction as allies to wage a life-and-death struggle against his political enemies in the court.
During this period, Cangxu also led troops out to obliterate the small state where the Yunshui Sect was located. By then, the sect master of the Yunshui Sect from back then had become a supreme elder, and the son who had framed Cangxu was now the sect master. However, the sect's two supreme elders were merely at the threshold of early Scenery Command; even fighting two against one, they were no match for Cangxu.
The sect master was forced to bow his head, offering up his wife, the woman who had once loved Cangxu. Cangxu adamantly refused and led his army away, leaving the Yunshui Sect spared. However, when he departed, three of the sect master's four daughters were taken by Cangxu as concubines. The fourth, being only eight years old, was also taken along, to be made a concubine once she came of age. The sect master's sons were all spared their lives. When subordinates urged Cangxu to pull up the weeds by their roots, Cangxu simply smiled and answered, "Leave the roots uncut, and harvest them again next year."
Cangxu had recorded this experience in meticulous detail, laying bare his petty, vindictive nature. Wei Yuan felt he could not approve of Cangxu's conduct in the slightest—especially the part about taking concubines; that ought to have been narrated in detail, so how could he gloss over it so perfunctorily with a single stroke of the brush?
Next came Liang's internal strife. Cangxu practically held total sway over the court, while the eunuchs and imperial in-laws ran rampant, ruthlessly crushing political rivals. Yet because Cangxu held boundary stones in his grasp, the Emperor of Liang was forced to endure him. As a result, Cangxu siphoned off a substantial amount of karmic luck, pulling the wool over the heavens' eyes and successfully ascending to immortality in a moment suspended by a hair. At the time, numerous kingdoms stood across the world, their rulers all immortals. The Saint, meanwhile, communed with the heart of heaven above and looked down upon the myriad mortals below, governing through non-action. In the realm were also countless sects; most were ordinary sects, but a few were meant to "shepherd on behalf of the Saint," and the Yunshui Sect was one of them.
The so-called "shepherding on behalf of the Saint" was, in truth, shepherding boundary stones. The village where Cangxu had been born back then was not a natural village at all, but a "pasture field"—reared generation after generation, then harvested when ripe to nourish boundary stones.
The essence-blood and souls required by boundary stones came partly from the human race and partly from alien races. The human race warred year after year against other races; the vengeful spirits and blood vigor acquired from slaying foes constituted the bulk of what boundary stones required. But for a boundary stone to fully take shape and transform heaven and earth, it still required human blood as an agent. That was the reason for this shepherding.
In the Yuangu era, the first Human Sovereign possessed earth-shattering might, capable of transforming heaven and earth by his own strength to provide a place for his subjects to recuperate and thrive. Later, having obtained sacrificial refinement methods from the Shamans and combining them with his own knowledge, boundary stones were first born. According to Cangxu, boundary stones were created by the first Human Sovereign and subsequently developed and expanded by later generations. In the Middle Ancient era, the human blood and soul vigor needed to refine boundary stones came from sacrificial rites. At that time, human sacrifice to heaven was popular throughout human lands, which was actually for refining boundary stones. Using humans as sacrificial victims was exceedingly common back then.
By Cangxu's era, it was already the end of the Middle Ancient era. The Saint had emerged, replacing human sacrifice with shepherding. Those shepherded villages were called boundary fields, and the people raised within them were treated like livestock. Since they were raised for slaughter, killing them brought no heartache or guilt. In this manner, boundary stones were refined one after another, and the domain of humanity gradually expanded. At that time, petty kingdoms stood in great numbers, producing generations of immortals. The human race navigated adroitly among the Wuliao, the Mountain Folk, and the Guiche, working for whichever side paid the most and thereby slowly expanding. Back then, because humanity waged war year after year both internally and externally, their immortals were numerous and formidable fighters—in the eyes of the major alien races, they made fine hounds. After the shepherding method was devised, the production of boundary stones surged, and humanity's rate of expansion accelerated dramatically, until its territory spanned two-thirds of present-day Great Tang.
"The second source of boundary stones is called immortal essence."
Initially, this method involved the immortals and saints of humanity slaying demonic beasts and devil lords, then refining them into boundary stones.
For some reason, upon reading up to this point, a thought stirred in Wei Yuan's heart, and he vaguely felt there was something amiss about Qingming's origin. When Qingming was first established, from the memories of the nameless immortal he had glimpsed, he had always assumed Qingming had been crafted in a manner akin to refining a magic treasure, and that its various miraculous traits stemmed from the immortal's superb artifact-crafting techniques. But seen now, that conclusion was probably flawed; Qingming's numerous miraculous properties might not have originated from just a single immortal soul. Only a select few immortal beasts and Immortal Tier demons could be refined into boundary stones, under exceptionally stringent conditions, and the stones refined from them mostly harbored grave hidden dangers. After all, those at the Immortal Tier possessed mighty divine souls and resolute Dao hearts; none were willing to be forged into a boundary stone to be trodden underfoot for all eternity.
Harboring resentment during refinement, the boundary stone's supernatural traits would manifest various negative effects, the most common being that residents within the domain would become irritable and irascible, eventually driven mad over time.
Such commandery-grade or higher boundary stones came more often from immortals—humanity's own immortals. Minor states waged war against one another; when a kingdom fell and its rule was extinguished, its captured sovereign faced the fate of being refined into a boundary stone alongside his ancestral tombs and subsequent descendants.
Reading to this point, a phrase surfaced in Wei Yuan's heart: *There is no standing ground in this realm; every inch of land won by the human race is steeped in blood.*
According to Cangxu's records, in the Middle Ancient era, the Saint shepherded the world and urged the nations of that era to implement the shepherding method, leaving boundary fields across the land. The places where new boundary stones were erected were all frontier borderlands, naturally forming the frontlines of war against alien races. Supplied with alien flesh and blood, new domains were thus the prime spots to establish shepherding boundary fields. There was even an unwritten rule that for every boundary stone erected, a boundary field had to be opened.
Yet human nature being what it was, many regarded this shepherding as an unforgivable evil. There were also many survivors like Cangxu who had fled from boundary fields, spending their lives opposing the Saint and even secretly sabotaging boundary fields to rescue the shepherded populace.
At that time, the cultural atmosphere was open, and the Hundred Schools of Thought could contend freely, so not a few people openly denounced the Saint. Immortals who opposed the Saint were not rare either, Cangxu being one among them, having penned hundreds of poems and essays in his life reviling and mocking the Saint.
Back then, humanity's expansion was too swift, alarming the alien races. The Wuliao even suspended their internal warfare and joined hands to contain the human race. With external threats mounting by the day, continuous border wars gradually drained the national strength of most human realms, while commoners rolled in the mire, living in unspeakable misery.
At this point, numerous arguments emerged. Some claimed they must not alarm the Wuliao; the majority advocated measuring the material strength of the human race to win the favor of the Wuliao. At that juncture, the Saint reached the end of his lifespan. Rather than choosing to take another step forward to unite his body with the Heavenly Dao, the Saint, who stood at the peak of the Immortal Lord realm, transformed himself into countless boundary stones scattered across the mortal world. For later generations to obtain them was entirely a matter of karmic fate.
This was the final and greatest source of boundary stones: the Saint.
Chapter 1340