The Heavenly Stele of Recorded Names

In an instant, Chen Chong, Liu Zhen, Buck Teeth and the others all felt a numbness spread through their bodies and their heads go slightly blank. The last time, those three had been the sort of thing the whole Great Qin border together might see once in a year at most. This time they had run into triplets again! And the demon-catching compass still showed only a single dot. Which meant that if it had been any other squad, this would have been another disaster. Chen Chong had a deeper worry: if from now on what turned up was always two or three at a time... how were the patrols ever to be completed? Xu Yao couldn't follow every squad. And sooner or later Xu Yao would not be here at all... Not every cliff allowed several people to be sent down at once, and they didn't set out with every rope they had, either. If everyone went down, who would keep watch above? With only seven rope ends up top, even an ordinary hunter could take several lives: just cut the ropes, and everyone below becomes meat paste. And the mountain forest was thick with danger — and not only demons and spirits. By any reasonable measure, three ropes was the limit. "I'll go down. Liu Zhen goes down. Xu Yao goes down." This time Chen Chong did not have them draw lots; he named the men himself. By the time the three of them were descending the ropes, Ning Weiyu and his sister were already standing at the edge, white robes fluttering. They would not interfere in any action of the mountain patrol, in any part of the work of carrying out the mission. "Just as expected — peach trees again!" Chen Chong's face was dark. Three peach trees jutted out from a recess in the cliff face below, their trunks bending down about a zhang before turning to grow upward again. Their roots were sunk deep into the rock of the cliff wall. "Triplets, all right." Chen Chong gazed at the three peach trees with a grave expression and sighed softly. Then, with something complicated in his eyes, he looked at Xu Yao and said quietly, "Big Fatty, your ability... in just these two days, you've saved our brigade's lives twice!" "You're too kind, Brigade Captain." "I'm not being kind. That is how it is." Chen Chong's eyes were full of worry: "But lately, every time our brigade runs into a mountain demon, we get this omen of triplets. That's badly wrong. Very bad..." Off to one side, when Ning Weiyu and Ning Wuxia saw those three peach trees, their eyes flickered too, and they glanced at Xu Yao in surprise. So he really could see them! They had heard of it before; now they had witnessed it with their own eyes. And he was only an ordinary man who had never cultivated... Ning Weiyu's eyes grew thoughtful. "Brother, what do you make of Xu Yao's eyes?" Ning Wuxia asked. "It doesn't look like any of the eye-cultivation methods I've heard of." Ning Weiyu frowned, thinking hard. "But I can't come up with anything else." The brother and sister were talking by voice transmission, in a way no one else could hear. "He says he was born with it," Ning Wuxia said. Ning Weiyu said, "I made some inquiries. Some people in Peach Blossom Valley still remember that when Xu Yao was small he said he could see strange, uncanny things. Because of it, his father took him from one medicine to another, and in the end they said he could no longer see them. That much is true." "You actually looked into it!" "It's a serious matter; of course I looked into it. Elder Bai's remains were found here, yet the treasures he carried are missing. Whether the killer took them, hid them, or whether they can be found at all — Xu Yao is the key." "So the method you spoke of, you really do mean to teach him?" "Of course. Even if Chen Chong had not pulled his little stunt, I would teach him a cultivation method. Not only because he earned merit, but also because of those Seven-Star Soul-Sealing Nails — the soul was pinned in place by that yin poison. By rights, now that we have found the body, Elder Bai's soul could have been brought back to become part of our sect's foundation strength. But there was no trace of a soul left in the corpse, and the only thing that showed good intent at the time was a piece of Xu Yao's clothing." "'The true spirit's lingering favor' — isn't that a bit far-fetched?" "A little. It may be nothing; it may be something. So one cultivation method is no great matter. If there's nothing to it, then it's a throwaway move; if there is, we'll see what his fortune brings. But taking him into the sect — his aptitude still falls short for that." "Ah, they say a disreputable martial arts school cost him three years." "Fate and fortune — it shows that this Xu Yao's own fortune isn't very strong either. So..." "A bit of a pity." The brother and sister went on with their discussion. Over there, the work had already begun. The brigade captain and the squad captain did theirs with their own hands; Xu Yao swung his pick only a dozen or so times before the two captains were finished. Then the two captains came over and stood to one side watching as Xu Yao tap-tap-tapped at the cliff rock by himself. They didn't help, and they didn't speak — they just watched in silence the whole time. Only when the entire root mass was exposed enough to start cutting did Chen Chong and Liu Zhen turn and take their places before their own roots. Both men looked satisfied: Xu Yao's work had been entirely by the book. The boy had clearly taken it seriously. Chen Chong checked the sun. "An hour left." "Still early." Chen Chong cleared a narrow ledge wide enough to sit on, and the men simply sat down to wait. Ning Weiyu and Ning Wuxia sat directly on the branches of the three peach trees — branches no thicker than a finger, yet they sat as steady as a mountain, rising and falling with the wind, relaxed and at ease. The three patrol men watched with open envy. "Sir Ning, we've been at Black Mountain so long we've never been out," Chen Chong said, opening a topic. "What is it like out there?" "How to put it..." Ning Weiyu frowned. "Chaos everywhere. The great empires are at war, fighting over hegemony on the continent, and fighting over the fortunes tied to the Heavenly Stele of Recorded Names as well. And beyond this continent there is endless more land and river; how big the world is, even our elders don't know." "In the jianghu there is every kind of crushing and scheming, struggles for power, struggles for profit, sects under the different empires each taking their part, old feuds and grudges, killing back and forth — the jianghu too is one long disaster of war... Wars between empires at least have a beginning and an end, but in the jianghu men fight for their respective countries all the time; whenever they meet, they fight." "At every border, in the wild mountains and hills, monsters keep emerging, and the demon alliance beyond the borders is stirring as well, and eyeing the Heavenly Stele of Recorded Names just as hungrily..." "Sects like ours live year-round in every kind of competition — competition with our own fellows, competition with other sects. It isn't only resources we fight over; the peerless geniuses of the higher levels all hope that one day they may have the chance to have their names recorded on the Stele. Those places are fought over too." "In short — it's hard to put into words." Ning Weiyu's account was very brief. But Xu Yao noticed the four words that came up most often: the Heavenly Stele of Recorded Names. He couldn't help asking, "What is the Heavenly Stele of Recorded Names?" "..." Ning Weiyu was silent for a moment, then smiled wryly. "I truly don't know. For now, I am not even qualified to go and have my name recorded. All I know is that the Stele is kept by the royal houses of each nation, that it is closely bound up with the nation's fortune and the fortune of heaven, that it is a kind of qualification trial, and that it has something to do with some great world. But what it actually does — at my present rank, having missed the first tier back then and being unable to touch the tier beyond, I am not worthy to know." Not worthy to know! "!!" Xu Yao drew a deep breath and lowered his head. For some reason he felt that the outside world... sounded like a lot of fun, very exciting. Ning Weiyu sighed softly, remembering the past, and looked a little melancholy. Chen Chong asked from the side, "Big Fatty, you're grown now. What plans do you have for the future?" He encouraged him: "A man's ambitions lie in the four directions. It does no harm to aim high." In his heart he was howling: Say something nice — score some impression points in front of Sir Ning! Xu Yao thought it over seriously, then said, "A settled place in life, and promotion and wealth." "Pfft—" Ning Wuxia nearly fell off her peach branch. Chen Chong, who had been longing with all his heart for some grand aspiration, choked on it. His mouth twitched for a long while, then he sighed over the hopelessness of it. "Tch! Fine ambition." Ning Weiyu was rather curious. "Captain Chen, your martial cultivation appears to have reached the Self-Establishing realm — why would you take a Lion-Tiger Pill and cut off your own future?" Chen Chong's three brows twitched; a complicated look crossed his eyes. He smiled faintly and said, "My dantian is destroyed. My road in martial arts is finished." "..." Ning Weiyu said apologetically, "I'm sorry." Xu Yao was puzzled: Self-Establishing realm? What realm was that? Seeing Xu Yao's bewildered look, Chen Chong smiled and said to him, "The martial arts have seven realms: Body-Cultivation, Intent-Establishing, Self-Establishing, Heart-Establishing, Life-Establishing, Soul-Establishing, and Dao-Establishing. That is the naming used across the continent; within each realm the various martial systems have their own names, and some divide things very finely. If you can walk the martial path in the future, you'll learn it all in time. If you can't, knowing it in that much detail is useless."