Qian Chen really did look like a frail scholar on the road. Day after day he trekked at an unhurried pace along the official road, and when the sun beat down too hard he would seek out a patch of shade to hide in. Apart from circulating embryonic breathing at every moment to purify his Dao foundation, and sitting in meditation to run his cultivation at the zi and wu hours each day without fail, he was no different from any mortal.
This rare taste of the ancient mortal world did not displease him; he even found it a little novel.
Every night at the inn he listened to traveling merchants and wayfarers telling their stories, and every day he hurried along the road, just like one of the teeming multitudes. Gradually the transcendent air about him was worn away, until he had begun to fade into the crowd.
"So this is what it feels like to be a mortal," Qian Chen thought, kneading his aching toes. "Nothing at all like my original world. It's my first experience of how ordinary people in this world live — like traveling deep instead of just passing through."
With that he smiled at himself. "My head was always full of the thoughts of Louguan Dao's ascended forebears, all those lofty notions of true-transmission disciples of the righteous path. Only now, for the first time, do I know how this world's common people feel. I never noticed how far out of touch I'd grown."
"We should be near Linhai City!" Where the official road stretched out ahead, Qian Chen glimpsed a corner of a shop banner peeking out of the tree shade by the roadside. He quietly channeled his eyesight and made out a huge character for "tea" embroidered on it.
Walking up, he did indeed find a tea stall pitched at the roadside, where an honest-faced keeper was boiling water and brewing tea. The stall was small, but it was the cleanest Qian Chen had come across on the whole journey. He found a place to sit and asked its owner, "Keeper, how far is it from here to Linhai City?"
"About twenty li!" the keeper said with simple honesty. "Might you be bound for Hero Hong Sihai's Thousand-Year Banquet?"
"Mm." Qian Chen started slightly, then shook his head. "I'm a scholar. I don't meddle in jianghu affairs." Then curiosity got the better of him. "For Hero Hong Sihai's sixtieth birthday — are many jianghu men of note passing through?"
"Hero Hong is the foremost man of this whole region. The Four Seas Hall holds Linhai — who doesn't know of him! Back in the day he led the heroes of the righteous path to smash the Demonic Cult and cut down its Cult Master with his own hand, ridding the martial world of that great scourge, and so his peers in the jianghu honored him as Martial Alliance Leader. Travelers tell that story all the time. I've heard it till my ears have grown calluses!"
"Would the honored guest care for a bowl of hot tea?"
Though Qian Chen stood at the critical pass of Foundation Building and took no drink he could not trust, the man had spent all this while warming to him. Would it be proper, after all that, not to buy a bowl and give the man some business? So Qian Chen, knowing both tact and timing, said, "Then a bowl, please."
And he thought to himself, "The Four Seas Hall has real power — even a roadside stall keeper knows Hong Sihai is holding a birthday feast. That kind of excitement usually brings the most trouble. The only question is whether it'll be sworn enemies out to wipe out a whole family, or some jianghu dispute. This world's martial force is nothing to scoff at. A Grandmaster is roughly the equal of one who has broken through the Sensing threshold of the Central Lands, and can mostly wield the primordial qi of heaven and earth. They're touching the threshold of high martial!"
"Before Core Formation, a cultivator's fleshly body is fragile and can only show its might through magical implements. If someone slips in close and ambushes you, and in your shock there is no time to bring out your implement, being cut down by a Grandmaster trained in martial arts is a common enough end. I must not be careless. The Heavenly Net Umbrella must stay at my side at all times, its qi kept attuned, so my responses stay fastest."
Even as he pondered, the tea stall owner set a pot of hot tea before him.
Qian Chen thanked the keeper and casually set the pot at his side. When he saw the man grinning expectantly at him, it dawned on him, and he laid out a few copper coins to pay.
Just as he was about to return to considering how to quicken the Heavenly Net Umbrella's response, his brows knit suddenly. He took the gourd down from the book-box on his back and poured the tea into it, in the manner of a man laying in a supply for the road.
"This way no one will wonder why I'm not drinking my tea," Qian Chen noted with an inward nod. Out in the world, it all came down to one word: caution!
Seeing the hot tea before Qian Chen poured out to the last drop, the stall owner hastened to say, "Aiyo! I forgot to top up the guest's cup! Wait a moment — I'll bring you another pot. Refills are free here."
Qian Chen raised a hand, smiling. "That would be very kind, but my gourd isn't full — would you add a little water?" He shook the gourd; the water inside sloshed loudly, plainly only about half full.
The stall owner glanced at the palm-sized red gourd and thought, "A small gourd, but it holds a fair amount." He reached out and took it, and was just about to pull the stopper when a burst of yellow mist came shooting from the gourd's mouth. That pot of tea held a strand of internal force Qian Chen had hidden within it, waiting only for the owner to take hold — and the gourd's mouth, aimed at his face, erupted.
The pale-yellow mist sprayed across the stall owner's face, and in an instant half the muscles there went rigid.
The owner's expression changed completely. His left half was still fierce and twisted, but the right half, struck by the mist, had gone stiff, dragged into spasm after spasm until his face warped like a demon's.
"I've netted geese all my days, and today a little gosling pecks my eye!" The owner's face darkened, and he bared his teeth in a savage grin. "Clever youngster — how did you know my tea was drugged?"
"That question should be mine to ask," Qian Chen said, vexed. "Where did I give myself away? How did you know I wasn't some ordinary traveler passing through?"
"I even made myself up to look older!"
"Right now you look like nothing but flaws from head to toe. But at the time, though your act had holes, it was convincing enough — so I never dreamed this little gosling was anything out of the ordinary," the owner said, grinning savagely.
"Then why poison me?" Qian Chen's expression was the picture of innocence. He was only a traveler bound for Linhai City; he had provoked no one on the road. He didn't have so much as a clue about the main quest yet — and now someone had sprung up out of nowhere wanting to poison him?
"Haha..." The owner threw back his head and laughed. "I—"
The words never left his mouth; the man had already shot away. In the time it took to reach out a hand, a mote of golden light went flying. Qian Chen felt the man's whole essence, qi, and spirit pour into that one mote of golden light, and as the light left the body, what remained behind seemed nothing but an empty shell. That thread of golden light was quick as lightning — between one thought and the next it was before Qian Chen.
Too fast for anyone to react.
But at that very moment the Heavenly Net Umbrella on Qian Chen's back sprang open with a pop! and its spirit light came cascading down!
The thread of golden light struck that spirit light, was checked for one beat, and only then showed its true form: a small snake with jade-green scales threaded through with gold, its eyes like a pair of rubies...
"A guardian spirit weapon! Protective gang qi! You're a Grandmaster too..." The tea stall owner, standing a good zhang away from Qian Chen, spoke like a puppet, his voice stiff and labored.
He seemed to be voicing his own disbelief, but the golden snake, though checked for a beat, did not stop. Instead it spat out a plume of poison mist with astonishing quickness. The scarlet mist touched the spirit light raining down from the Heavenly Net Umbrella and actually fouled it. It was scoured clean in an instant, but in the turning of the implement's light there appeared a flaw too faint to see.
At that, the golden snake displayed its consummate Martial Dao wisdom, spying out that one flaw with ease.
The gold streamed like lightning and drilled in through the gap where the umbrella's spirit light wavered.
Yet the closer the golden snake flew toward Qian Chen, the slower it went — as if countless threads had wound about it, and a crushing weight had settled on its back.
Golden radiance flowed among its jade-green scales. From its mouth the small snake spat poison mist again; along its scales it spread into a thin veil of blood-colored haze, slowly fouling that spirit light of the Five Phases, fine as silk threads. And just as it was about to come within a foot of Qian Chen's body, his hand had already reached out and lightly tapped the head of the gold-threaded, green-scaled snake from afar.
The full spirit light of the Heavenly Net Umbrella bore down, sealing the void around the small snake so completely that it could not stir.
"How can this be... My Green-Scaled Golden Snake exists to pierce protective gang qi. What is the origin of this spirit weapon? Why is it nowhere named in the register of spirit weapons..." the tea stall owner forced out with difficulty. "I won't believe it — I won't! Which Grandmaster are you, to come toy with me, the Mist-Riding Lord?"
"The Mist-Riding Lord?" Qian Chen echoed.
The owner laughed strangely. "You've never even heard of me, the Mist-Riding Lord? Your origins must be from somewhere awfully out of the way! I am the Si Snake among the Twelve Yuan Chen — the Mist-Riding Lord, famed for poisons none can escape. There are eleven more as hard to handle as I. If you—"
"You're saying all this to draw my attention onto yourself!" Qian Chen cut him off.
"The Twelve Yuan Chen will break the Four Seas..."
Qian Chen reached out idly and pressed lightly down on the golden snake frozen in midair, saying evenly, "Your essence, qi, and spirit entered this snake long ago. It is your true body; the body you wear is nothing but bait to divide my attention. If your words could sway me and split my focus, you'd have your opening. Am I right?"
The spirit light above Qian Chen's head seemed about to ease its pressure, and the golden snake had just begun to struggle — when a ring of white jade on Qian Chen's hand flipped over and gathered the golden light away. The stall owner standing before him went limp all at once, losing consciousness on the spot.
"I was sorely tempted to let the Heavenly Net Umbrella relax, pretend to fall into your trap, give you one thread of hope — then, when you came within three inches of me, flip the Dragon Sparrow Ring and crush that hope utterly. It would have displayed, in full, a master's air of holding every thread in hand."
To the enemy who no longer had any awareness left, Qian Chen sighed. "A pity that in this life I put my faith in caution alone. Even with five layers of defense still behind me, I would not take that risk. Even explaining myself to you had to wait until I held every possible turn of events in hand — only then could I speak with ease.
"The Heavenly Net Umbrella is the first layer, the Dragon Sparrow Ring the second, a phantom conjured by the Spirit Light Mirror the third, the Vajra Talisman the fourth — and then there is a certain trump card I absolutely cannot speak of, which gives me the strength to resist even after being poisoned. That is the fifth. You broke through barely half of the first layer. You may allow yourself some pride."
Martial Dao experts are forged in life-and-death killing and grow skilled in the lightning shifts of combat.
The Mist-Riding Lord's swaggering air was not pure arrogance. Had some ordinary cultivator come — even one at the Spell Comprehension realm — a moment's carelessness would have ended him. First, the quality of Qian Chen's guardian implement, the Heavenly Net Umbrella, far exceeded the average for Spell Comprehension cultivators, so that once the golden snake's poison mist broke through the spirit light, it had no strength left to press on.
Second, he was never given the chance to administer poison at all. From the moment Qian Chen took the tea, he had noticed something wrong with it.
And even if he had not noticed, Qian Chen would never casually put anything in his mouth.
Third, every thought of the Mist-Riding Lord, every opening for a strike, lay within Qian Chen's foresight and grasp. The golden snake avatar he counted as his trump card might be inconceivable in this Martial Dao world, but it could not deceive a seasoned man of the immortal Dao. Of the hundred-odd possession avatars of the Five Poisons, the ways of lodging one's wisdom in a creature — how many could the Mist-Riding Lord know?
Qian Chen had guarded against them all.
This time, dealing with one Martial Dao Grandmaster had cost him a Vajra Talisman that did not a whit of good. Any ordinary cultivator who saw it would likely convulse with heartache and itch to rob this spendthrift's Qiankun bag down to the last thing in it. But Qian Chen himself didn't care in the least... That was simply the sort of man he was — magnanimous!
He plucked out a Soul-Sealing Talisman and drew the soul from the Dragon Sparrow Ring.
Qian Chen activated the talisman's power and began to interrogate this Mist-Riding Lord... From what the Mist-Riding Lord had let slip earlier, while grasping for a chance to turn the tables, he seemed to have some connection to the main quest that lay ahead. The matter had to be questioned thoroughly.
Chapter 9