Fishing

Now that the new spear had birthed a nascent spirituality, Wei Yuan's next task was to nourish it patiently, steadily strengthening and expanding that tiny spark before slowly drawing it into his sea of consciousness. Several days slipped by in a flash. Wei Yuan suddenly roused from deep meditation. The spiritual treasure, Brutal, had fully entered his sea of consciousness and was thoroughly awakened. The weapon's miraculous trait had also taken shape: at the cost of permanently consuming the spear's spirituality, it could blast out a single strike of doubled power! With the spiritual treasure completed, Wei Yuan opened his eyes. An intuitive stirring touched his heart, and before him floated two pills the size of hen's eggs, as translucent as rubies. The pair of pills hovered quietly, looking merely exquisite, but the instant Wei Yuan's touch grazed them, a true dragon's roar seemed to thunder in his ears, and the bloodline throughout his body erupted into an immediate boil! These were the precious medicines refined from two drops of dragon liver blood. There were few traces of heavy compounding; it was more a matter of smoothing out the medicinal properties so that the essence within the dragon liver blood would release little by little, without meddling too much with the essence itself. Perfected Person Danming had always held that refining pills was like cooking delicate delicacies—the more exalted the ingredient, the more vital it was to preserve its original flavor. Wei Yuan suppressed the boiling blood within his veins, stowed the two pills away, and went to find Zhang Sheng. Zhang Sheng was still reading Daoist scriptures, serene and unruffled. Even though finding a new path forward from the scriptures was as hard as scaling the heavens, she was neither flustered nor anxious, perusing the sacred texts as leisurely as someone flipping through a popular romance after tea. Wei Yuan stepped quietly behind her and leaned down slightly, as if intending to catch the scent of her hair. But the thought of the omniscient True Monarchs forced him to rein in all unnecessary movements. In silence, he set the two pills before Zhang Sheng. Zhang Sheng looked up, a smile surfacing in her eyes—a natural, spontaneous joy born simply of seeing Wei Yuan. Only then did she glance at the pills and ask, "What are these?" "To nourish your body." Zhang Sheng chided with mock annoyance, "I don't have... where would I need nourishing?" Wei Yuan's instinctive impulse was to say *everywhere needs nourishing*, but the thought of the assembled True Monarchs made him swallow the words in an instant. In truth, Wei Yuan had already probed his surroundings with great care and detected nothing whatsoever. Yet detecting nothing at all seemed, in itself, somewhat suspicious. Seeing Wei Yuan's expression, Zhang Sheng immediately understood what he was doing and said, "When all four wilds fall silent, the fierce tiger approaches. If not a single divine sense is lingering around, then every single divine sense is right here." Wei Yuan understood the principle well enough. Disappointed as he was, he could do nothing about it; after all, countless eyes were watching. Besides, there was nothing he could have done anyway. Zhang Sheng had to take the medicine soon; her body was currently frail and broken, and if her stamina fell short, she might not even withstand the medicine's potency. Zhang Sheng gave a faint smile, laid aside the Daoist scripture, rose to her feet, and lightly pecked Wei Yuan on the lips. Wei Yuan's mind went completely blank. Thunder rumbled across Ten Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains, striking down dozens of people. A few among them harbored ill intent, but most were simply unlucky. Only a single thought occupied his mind: *So many True Monarchs are watching—what do I do now?* Zhang Sheng sat back down in her original spot and prepared to resume reading, as if what had just occurred had never happened. Yet Wei Yuan vaguely sensed a distant pocket of the void boil for a brief instant before falling still once more. Wei Yuan barely managed to steady his wits and said, "Th-these two pills were refined by Senior Danming using dragon liver blood. They can regenerate your Dao Foundation. Please take them at once!" Zhang Sheng gave him a gentle nudge and said, "All right, I shall take them now. You may head back." Wei Yuan instinctively reached to take her hand, but after a momentary daze, he hurried to restrain himself. He truly had no idea how to strike the right balance at a time like this; it was better to let Zhang Sheng take the lead. In a daze, Wei Yuan left the small courtyard, and in a daze, he returned to his own quarters. Beneath a great tree by the Northern Mountain Gate, a woman in red gazed at the familiar line on the page—*five hundred and ten words omitted here*—closed the storybook in her hands, and sighed. "Today's chapter was truly dull." Back in his room, Wei Yuan threw himself onto the couch and stared blankly at the ceiling. The dragon blood pills were complete and placed safely in Zhang Sheng's hands, offering a remedy for her broken body. Only now did the joy finally catch up to Wei Yuan, welling up within him. This delight was so vast that it filled heaven and earth, permeating every corner of his mind and spirit, omnipresent, irresistible, capable of enduring until the end of time. Originally, Wei Yuan could only watch helplessly as Zhang Sheng slipped toward the abyss. Who could have known that Longying's treasure would yield such a pleasant surprise? Had he not journeyed to the far north and slain Longying, how could this stroke of fortune have come to pass? To pull her back from the abyss of death with his own hands brought a happiness so immense that Wei Yuan felt as if he were dreaming, scarcely daring to believe it. Wei Yuan sprang up, retrieved a history book, and began studying hard at his desk. In such a joyous hour, not reading a few more chapters of mortal wisdom would truly be squandering this heaven-sent good fortune. The shadows of the trees against the window fluttered alongside the turning pages as hundreds of thousands of years of human history unfurled little by little before Wei Yuan's eyes. Suddenly, his brow furrowed. He stopped turning the pages and stared repeatedly at a single sentence: *If the realm and the house are like a body, then the great clans are its bones, and cultivators are its flesh and blood; such is the governing principle of the world.* This essay discussed the governance of states and was a celebrated work across the world. Wei Yuan had read it during his youth as well. Back then, he had grasped only the barest surface. Now, with a different cultivation, different experiences, and a different perspective, he sensed that something was amiss. He read through the piece once more and finally confirmed one thing: in the entire text, the word *person* did not appear even once. Wei Yuan set the essay down, his earlier pleasant mood fading somewhat. Just as he was pondering his current circumstances, Wei Yuan suddenly heard a summons. The scenery before his eyes shifted, and he found himself standing beside a small lake. A young Daoist sat by the water's edge, fishing. Seeing Wei Yuan arrive, the young Daoist said nothing, merely handing him a fishing rod. Wei Yuan had never fished before, so he simply imitated the other's posture, swinging the rod to cast the hook, and waited quietly for a fish to bite. However, the rod had no bait, and the hook was straight. The young Daoist said slowly, "You now possess the qualifications to fish. Although your pond is currently only this small lake, the day will come when you cast your line across the sea of clouds and angle for the entire world." Wei Yuan did not know how to reply. The main issue was that he genuinely knew nothing about fishing; without the proper terminology, any response felt somewhat lacking. The young Daoist said leisurely, "Man fishes for the fish, yet the fish also fishes for the man. Though our hook is straight, there are plenty of fish in this world willing to take the hook of their own accord. Soon you will see: no matter how cunning the fish, there is always a way to reel it in." Wei Yuan held the rod, lacking even a shred of confidence. The young Daoist appeared entirely at ease as he gazed at the calm lake surface. "Under the Karma Great Curse, you breached the void and went north, returning successfully after surviving a narrow brush with death, your cultivation advancing by leaps and bounds. Don't you find it all a bit too coincidental?" "This disciple feels the same." "The True Dragon scions were all arranged, without even an attempt at concealment. Yet as long as True Dragon scions cross paths, they are bound to fight to the death, whether they wish to or not. Heh. The one who laid this board is truly an angler of the highest order." This had been Wei Yuan's enduring worry all along, so he seized the opening to ask, "How should this disciple break this game?" The young Daoist merely chuckled and said, "Keep fishing for now. When a fish bites, I shall tell you. Once you see the fish, even if I say nothing, you will already understand most of it." And so the two continued to fish. The time it took to drink a cup of tea passed... The time it took an incense stick to burn passed as well... A gentle breeze swept by, carrying what sounded like the chirping of birds. Two hours slipped away, yet neither of their fishing rods showed the slightest twitch. The young Daoist's smile remained, an image of supreme confidence. Yet Wei Yuan instinctively sensed that the atmosphere on the wind had quietly shifted. Striking up a conversation of his own accord at such a moment might easily invite unforeseen trouble. The lake surface was as smooth as a mirror, without the faintest ripple. Within Wei Yuan's perception, however, countless pairs of eyes beneath the water were staring fixedly at their hooks—yet none of them made a move. A rather absurd thought suddenly crossed Wei Yuan's mind: *Could these fish simply be too full?* But when he remembered that the two of them were using straight hooks, Wei Yuan felt that it was rather the anglers who had too much time on their hands. The young Daoist did not move a muscle, but a tiny wisp of karmic luck drifted secretly from his broad sleeve, clinging unnoticed to the hook. For reasons unknown to the fish in the lake, their thoughts suddenly felt extraordinarily lucid today. Perplexities that had confounded them for years vanished in an instant, and they saw straight through the sinister immortal's scheme. A large fish nudged a small fish beside it. With an air of marching bravely toward death, the small fish darted upward, snapped the wisp of karmic luck off the line, spat out the hook, and swam back to present the karmic luck to the large fish. The large fish swallowed the karmic luck with satisfaction, and a single scale atop its head turned golden. It nudged the small fish once more, whereupon the little fish swam behind the large fish in sheer jubilation, joining the ranks of the other small fish. Another two hours slipped by... The young Daoist remarked placidly, "Just now, a fish took the bait only to slip away. From this, one can see how difficult it is to grasp the karmic luck of this world. As the saying goes, form is emptiness, and emptiness is form. Fish or no fish, all may serve to preach the Dao..."