# The Painting Hiding the Retrograde Boat
“Heaven and earth hold Ruomu, / Day and night it devours life and years.”
“Life and death have no reincarnation, / Only Longevity remains…”
Li Fan slowly recited the lines that belonged to Ruomu while leafing through the other's memories. Ruomu's true body, meanwhile, hid in a corner, trembling and letting Li Fan peer in as it wished.
From the birth of the Xuanhuang Realm to the present was an immeasurably long stretch of years. Yet reviewing it as a bystander took Li Fan only a dozen breaths or so.
“This is what counts as Longevity…” Li Fan shook his head slightly.
Perhaps because it had been near death for so long, Ruomu's memories were not particularly clear. In some crucial places there were even large stretches of blank. Still, they were enough to give Li Fan a general understanding of the Xuanhuang Realm.
From Ruomu's perspective, the Xuanhuang Realm could be roughly divided into three periods.
The first ran from the initial splitting open of Xuanhuang to the rise of cultivation sects in great numbers. At that time the Xuanhuang Realm was still under the Immortal Realm's control. Ruomu even still retained the memory of how, back then, the True Immortal had used it to balance and adjust the lifespans of all living beings under heaven.
The second ran from the fall of the Immortal Realm to the sudden annihilation of the Xuantian Sect. During that time, Xuanyuan Hong replaced the True Immortal and became the one steering the Xuanhuang Realm. The marks of the various alterations made to Ruomu and to the Xuanhuang Realm still remained on Ruomu's body today.
The third period ran from the Ten Sects of the Immortal Dao taking power to the present day.
This was also the freest stretch of days Ruomu had ever known. The Ten Sects of the Immortal Dao, and later the Alliance of Ten Thousand Immortals and Chuanfa—though they claimed to be able to control Ruomu and divide its Longevity Fruit among themselves, in truth they were fundamentally different from the True Immortal and Xuanyuan Hong before them.
Their so-called command amounted to nothing more than waiting for the fruit to ripen and then picking it. And once the Xuanhuang Realm's circulation of vitality ran a deficit and no fruit formed, they were utterly helpless.
The True Immortal and Xuanyuan Hong of old, however, could use Ruomu to forcibly drain the vitality of every living being in the Xuanhuang Realm and condense it into Longevity Fruit.
In short, there was a world of difference between being Ruomu's true master and merely its user.
This was also why the Alliance of Ten Thousand Immortals stood by and did nothing after Ruomu fell ill and its vitality withered. Whether the Heavenly Physician or Chuanfa, both had once wanted to heal Ruomu. They returned without success because of the unique creation restriction within Ruomu's body.
What a True Immortal created could naturally only be controlled by a True Immortal.
And moreover, Ruomu—indeed the entire Xuanhuang Realm—was no ordinary True Immortal creation.
Yet now, having obtained absolute control over Ruomu through the vast vitality within his own body, Li Fan—plainly a mortal frame—found the restriction on Ruomu's body strangely familiar.
The theoretical gulf between immortal and mortal, as wide as the chasm from heaven to earth, did not stop him either.
As if it were the most natural thing in the world, relying on instinct alone, Li Fan finished breaking through and slipping inside within a few breaths of sensing the restriction's existence.
The immortal restriction, so heavily guarded, before the abundant green vitality Li Fan commanded, was as though it had no defenses at all!
And at that moment, Li Fan had not only become Ruomu. He had also become Ruomu's master.
The sky-propping ancient tree, glowing with vitality once more, was covered at its core with patterns of extreme complexity.
Though this seemed to be Li Fan's first encounter with them, after a moment's observation he quickly worked out what each pattern meant.
What drew Li Fan's particular attention were the marks of modification that must have been left by Xuanyuan Hong.
After careful study, Li Fan gained some sense of why Xuanyuan Hong had modified Ruomu back then.
“Convert a portion of vitality out of Ruomu, for independent use.”
“Perhaps this is one of the important reasons the Xuanhuang Realm's circulation of vitality fell out of balance and Ruomu withered so quickly. Only… where did this diverted vitality go?”
Li Fan frowned slightly, abruptly narrowing his field of view, and swept over Ruomu's surroundings.
Regarding Xuanyuan Hong, the memories Li Fan could recall at present were not many. Still, whether from his own vague intuitive impression or from what he saw in Ruomu's memories, this Xuanyuan Hong was unquestionably among the strongest in the entire history of the Xuanhuang Realm.
Even though he had been gone for many years, Li Fan still dared not be careless.
Ruomu spread across all of Xuanhuang.
Soon Li Fan followed one of its branches and traced the diverted vitality to its destination.
A Daoist temple that appeared utterly ordinary.
Inside the temple were an aged elder and a young Daoist boy. And a pool of ordinary water.
The elder was at Nascent Soul cultivation; the child did not seem to be human.
And then…
“Hm?”
Seeing this scene, an instinctive sense of crisis surged in Li Fan's heart. Yet it did not come from the old man or the child—it came from the pool of water?
An image of countless treasures shining in the pool like stars instantly surfaced in Li Fan's mind.
At the end of the image came a terrifying scene: a cat leaping up and swallowing all the treasures of the heavens into its belly.
“The fishing pond…”
“A cat?”
Li Fan could not help but stop dead in his tracks—even though the body he now wore was only transformed from a Ruomu branch he controlled.
He did not enter the temple, only watched from afar, tracing where the vitality channeled out of Ruomu was going.
After careful examination, Li Fan realized the vitality was not flowing toward the temple or the fishing pond, but into the mountain forest nearby.
Only the two were very close, and the fishing pond was too conspicuous, which led Li Fan to misjudge at first glance.
Setting the fishing pond aside for the moment, Li Fan tracked down the place where the diverted Ruomu vitality lingered.
Stepping into this underground space, he could not help but be startled.
“This method of gathering…”
“Though so much vitality gathers here, not a trace of it spills out. If I were not Ruomu right now, I probably would not detect the vitality gathered below even standing on the surface!”
“It is worth borrowing for myself.”
Li Fan's biggest problem right now was the uncontrolled overflow of vitality. The vitality contained in his body was simply too vast. Even if only one part in a hundred million of the aura around him leaked out, to any sensing outsider it would unquestionably be a supreme treasure. And this grew more severe the more Li Fan stirred the potential of his vitality.
To actually find a solution here—he could not help but study it carefully.
Even with the knowledge left in his lost memories, he only half understood the arrangement here. Now Li Fan was truly surprised.
This was the first time he had met such a thing since beginning this new round of simulation.
“Though I cannot work out how it is done, I can pin down what the vitality is for.”
Li Fan's gaze swept left and right.
Buried within this underground space was a village. Aside from some buildings and objects, no living beings existed in the village. The Ruomu vitality drawn here served, on the one hand, to keep the village in its original state.
On the other hand, all of it gathered in one of the houses in the village.
“From the time of Xuanyuan Hong's modifications to now, the vitality continuously drawn and channeled in adds up to an utterly enormous amount. Though still not a fraction of a ten-thousandth of mine, it is far beyond the scale shown here now.”
Li Fan's heart tightened. After thinking for a moment, he finally approached slowly.
He stood outside the house for a while, then finally pushed the door open and went in.
Following the flow of vitality, he passed through the small courtyard and came to a room at the very center of the back house.
Li Fan's steps stopped short.
Because through the door and window, he vaguely saw a figure standing inside!
However, observing through the vitality gathered by Ruomu, Li Fan finally determined that the figure did not seem to be a living being in the ordinary sense.
After a moment's hesitation, Li Fan decided to investigate anyway.
The facts turned out just as he had guessed.
The so-called “figure” in the room was merely a painting.
“Why does this painting need to be nourished with vitality?” A trace of doubt flashed through Li Fan's mind.
The painting depicted several young children playing together in the mountains. Among them was a boy and a girl, holding hands as they went along together. The moment he saw it, Li Fan felt a faint sense of familiarity.
“This is Xuanyuan Hong. And…”
It was as if another switch had been triggered; the images flashing through Li Fan's mind told him that the one beside Xuanyuan Hong should be his childhood sweetheart.
Li Fan pressed his temples, restoring the brain that had just burst from the sudden flood of information it could not bear in an instant. Only then did he continue studying the scroll before him.
Because of the infusion of vast vitality, the children in the painting seemed to have come alive.
Especially Xuanyuan Hong, whose eyes looked straight ahead—as though looking out beyond the painting!
In that instant, Li Fan almost felt it was an illusion: the young Xuanyuan Hong seemed to have glanced at him!
But as he continued his study, Li Fan found that the young Xuanyuan Hong was not even the most unusual thing in the painting.
In an inconspicuous corner of the painting, outside a house in the village, lay a long-haired man in ragged clothes.
His beard and hair hid his face, so his features could not be made out.
Yet the man was gazing from afar at the group of children playing outside the village, an odd expression on his face.
Resting on the man's chest was a palm-sized wooden boat.
Looking closely, within the boat's window he could faintly see the faces of those same children outside the village!
“What is this supposed to mean?”
The painting seemed to possess a peculiar magic; before he knew it, it had captured Li Fan's attention.
And no matter what he mulled over in his mind, his gaze always ended up on that wooden boat.
The wooden boat seemed to have been through the weathering of ages; it was scarred all over and battered beyond repair, as if it might shatter completely the next moment.
But thanks to the nourishment of endless vitality, it could still barely hold its original shape.
As Li Fan watched, in a daze, he saw his own reflection in the boat's window. Just as he could not help reaching out to touch the boat,
his eyes met those of his reflection.
Some of his lost memories abruptly revived, making Li Fan pull his hand back as if struck by lightning.
“Xuanyuan Hong was, it seems, the person of greatest fortune in the history of the Xuanhuang Realm. Every time, he turned danger into safety and misfortune into blessing. He even came through unscathed a great calamity like the fall of the Immortal Realm, when countless immortals perished…”
Li Fan's gaze fixed on the wooden boat in the scroll: “Could this be the legendary Retrograde Boat?”
“The Three Treasures of Reclusion…”
Li Fan forcibly drew upon vitality, repairing his severe injuries in the hope of recalling more.
“But this is plainly a treasure forged only after the Immortal Realm fell—how could it have been in Xuanyuan Hong's hands before the great calamity arrived?”
“Retrograde… could it really have succeeded?”
Li Fan could not help turning his gaze to the disheveled man holding the wooden boat.
In the end, his current body could not support the recovery of all his memories.
Li Fan temporarily withdrew from his recollection.
Looking at the scroll before him, he showed a rarely seen look of hesitation.
This painting had been nourished by Ruomu's vitality for ten thousand years.
And now that Li Fan had become the new Ruomu, in theory he was entirely capable of using vitality to wrap up the scroll and carry it away.
Only what he would then have to face was the unknown danger hidden within the painting.
For the moment Li Fan did not act, and instead pondered the matter of Xuanyuan Hong's disappearance.
“I seem to have investigated this matter before. Xuanyuan Hong must have finally vanished inside the fishing pond.”
“As for whether he vanished of his own will or was taken…”
“Then this scroll was left behind deliberately. Left for his childhood sweetheart? Yet in the message he sent, he never mentioned it. Clearly he did not want her to know.”
“If what is hidden in this scroll really is the Retrograde Boat, then why would Xuanyuan Hong simply abandon a treasure capable of defying fate itself?”
…
Such questions obviously would not be answered by thinking alone.
In the Great Xuan pocket world, inside the Grand Preceptor Manor in Xuanjing, Li Fan's true self made an attempt and confirmed that he could return at any time to the very beginning of the simulation. Feeling the vast vitality within his body, a sharp light flashed through his eyes, and Li Fan made up his mind.
“Cowering and cringing, one can never accomplish great things. It is only a simulation either way; even if I am gravely injured again, at worst I will lose my memory once more and be force-fed a few bowls of talisman water.”
“Rather than leaving this mystery here as a hidden danger, better to find out its true face right now!”
“Since vitality works on it, then I will give it vitality!”
…
In the Xuanhuang Realm, Li Fan moved as well.
The alarm and doubt in his eyes vanished. He slowly exhaled a breath of longevity, sending it surging toward the scroll before him.
This wisp of breath of longevity had been condensed by him since he began cultivating in this life.
Compared with the vitality he had granted to Kou Hong and Dao Xuanzi, or even the vitality he used to take Ruomu's body, it exceeded them by several orders of magnitude.
Even Li Fan himself turned somewhat pale after releasing this condensed breath.
But the effect was immediate.
Li Fan stared fixedly at the changes before him.
Faced with the suddenly descending vitality, the scroll refused nothing. No matter how much vitality came, it took it all in.
Threads of green appeared within the painting.
With the influx of vitality, the scene within the painting changed accordingly.
On the earth, green grass and blooming flowers grew everywhere. In the sky, seven-colored auspicious clouds rolled down in waves.
And the wooden boat, which had been close to rotting and ruin, became brand new at a speed visible to the naked eye.
The change in the wooden boat drew the attention of the disheveled man holding it.
His beard and hair fluttered, revealing the true face that had been hidden.
The man abruptly raised his head and looked out beyond the painting.
His eyes met Li Fan's.
Then Li Fan felt the world spin, and in an instant his consciousness was drawn into the painting!
Before he could even struggle, he felt a hand press down on his shoulder.
“The Great Dao of Longevity?”
The disheveled man across from him spoke in utmost astonishment.
Leave of absence
The last few chapters have stirred up a lot of debate, so I am taking one day off to adjust the outline.
Chapter 1526