As the gauze-like silver light drifted down, Wu Fan dropped his gaze as if scalded. The terror in his heart rapidly ballooned, and he knocked his head against the ground repeatedly with hollow thuds, stammering in fright:
"R-Report... Reporting to My Lord... Changxiao's mountain gate has scripture vaults across twenty-seven peaks, all of which have been secured by the immortal clan's heavenly soldiers. This humble one dares not make decisions on them. What remains... what remains are Seven Vaults and Six Repositories, directly overseen by the Zhenren and situated at the base of the grand array."
"There are also twelve spiritual vaults whose keys were originally held collectively by the immortal peaks... but... but..."
Wu Fan raised his brows slightly, seemingly caught between speaking and remaining silent, wearing a conflicted look of dread and dilemma. Before him, Li Zhouwei had already stepped inside, entering the celestial hall atop the sect's highest peak.
A white jade vase stood on either flank, and six grand pillars were arrayed in a single row, accented by standing screens inscribed with golden script. At the highest point hung a profound Daoist painting with silver tracery lining its background, depicting a faceless man clad in gold gently holding a treasure vase in his hands.
*Though not a magical instrument or spiritual instrument, the materials used are top-notch. Having hung here for so long, it has acquired a trace of wonder... Unfortunately, the figure was painted by Changxiao himself rather than handed down from antiquity, so it isn't of much use.*
Above the painting, four large characters were inscribed upon a golden plaque:
[Shangyi Tianxiao]
Li Zhouwei was intimately familiar with these four characters. Back when he visited Qingyi Peak within Wanling Heaven, these exact four characters had been emblazoned there!
When he saw [Xiyi Changxiao] below, he had already suspected whether they shared the same lineage. Now it was beyond doubt: the four characters at the base of the mountain were likely the name Changxiao had established for his own sect's lineage, derived directly from [Shangyi Tianxiao].
Seeing Li Zhouwei pause here, Wu Fan hurriedly came forward, only to be stopped by Li Minggong's outstretched arm. Offering a slight bow, the woman stepped forward, took down the painting from beneath the beam, and placed it into a jade box.
The instant the Daoist painting was stowed into the jade box, the entire celestial hall visibly lost its luster. The luminous pillars and treasure vases dimmed all at once, and the hall, once naturally radiant, was left with only the warm hues of lamplight.
Faint sobs drifted from outside the hall. Unmoved, Wu Fan lowered his voice:
"Lady Guiqin handled sect affairs for years and loved meddling in the vaults, borrowing the keys for safekeeping. To curry favor with the Zhenren and preserve his authority, Baibinzi feigned ignorance... Thus, everything concerning the spiritual vaults passed through the Lady's peak... We... truly had no say!"
He had sloppily seized the sect from Baibinzi's hands. Capable though he might be, by the time the Li clan stormed the peaks, he was no longer in any position to direct sect affairs. Even more fatal... he truly did not dare touch Lady Guiqin.
Chengyan in the sky had looked finished, but who knew what means a Zhenren might possess to escape? Would the clash between Zhenren truly result in a fight to the death? If Chengyan were to resurface later and submit to the Lake, anyone who had touched the Zhenren's prized possession would certainly forfeit their life!
"Lady Guiqin..."
His words provoked a stir among the surrounding disciples, who clearly harbored deep resentment but had never dared voice their fury before. Li Zhouwei swept his gaze over him and turned to Li Minggong, who nodded and murmured:
"The woman has already been confined to a side peak by our people."
Only then did Li Zhouwei look back at Wu Fan and say, "Follow."
The man straightened up, breathing a long sigh of relief. His confidence bolstered, he bowed sideways and stepped forward. Yet with just that single stride, all three had already appeared within the palace on the side peak. Lowering his gaze, Wu Fan reported:
"Reporting to My Lord, Lady Guiqin's surname is Ma. She is full sister to Zhenren Chengyan. She bore a son and a daughter, along with numerous foster sons. Her trueborn son perished in the East Sea, while the rest served within the sect. Her remaining daughter attends closely to the Lady's carriage... Both are held together..."
With a creak, the palace doors opened. Long strips of colorful silk of various sizes hung throughout the hall, swaying gently in the breeze. What should have been an exquisite haven was instead filled with wretched weeping.
Amid the fluttering silks, two women clung to each other in tears before the dais. One possessed a round face and arched brows, draped in white gauze over snow-white skin. She had a tender, pity-inducing beauty, yet cultivating Cold Qi had endowed her with an inviolable noble grace. Her expression was stricken with grief, tears glistening in her eyes.
In her embrace she held a younger woman, petite and lovely, with a porcelain face and clad in gold robes. Her pale red lips were tightly pursed, and her eyes were fixed low on the steps. At the commotion before the hall, she turned her head slightly, not daring to look up.
The sight brought Wu Fan immense satisfaction. In ordinary times, this mother and daughter had trampled all over him without him daring to resist, yet today they had fallen to such depths! Following behind Li Minggong, he barked:
"Where are the spiritual keys?!"
Lady Guiqin raised her head with venom, glaring at him through tearful eyes in stony silence, radiating a frigid elegance. Li Minggong was already a first-rate beauty, yet she had never learned the delicate, brow-furrowing coquetry of this mother and daughter, and for a fleeting moment she seemed outshone.
Eager to curry favor, Wu Fan showed no tenderness for the fair sex. He kicked the woman squarely in the shoulder, eliciting a muffled grunt. Lady Guiqin still refused to speak. Wu Fan promptly drew his sword, and amidst curses, beatings, and relentless blows, wails filled the air.
Li Minggong could no longer bear the sight. With a casual wave of her hand, she swept the man aside and stood to the side. Li Zhouwei took a step forward, bent down slightly, and pinched the woman's chin, forcing her head up to meet his gaze.
The moment Lady Guiqin locked eyes with those golden pupils, she froze. The venom filling her eyes melted away like thawing ice, transforming in an instant into a dizzy, entranced delight. In a frantic scramble, she rolled over, spread her legs, and bared her throat, a sweet chuckle bubbling up from her throat:
"My Lord... My Lord... The keys are within the secret array beneath the main throne... My Lord..."
The spectacle horrified Wu Fan, striking fresh terror deep into his marrow. Fighting the urge to collapse on rubbery legs and utterly unable to fathom the lord's intentions, he dropped to his knees beside the woman, intending to help her up.
Yet the very instant the words left her mouth, the hand gripping her chin pulled away. Lady Guiqin's head parted from her neck, lifting weightlessly into the air without spilling a single drop of blood, and rolled neatly into Wu Fan's hands.
Those sweet red lips were still opening and closing, her eyes captivatingly tender, and the cross-section of her neck was glassy and smooth, as though severed by an exceedingly sharp implement. As the man cradled the head in a stupor, the petite woman facing him toppled backward at the same moment, her fair head tumbling down with a dull thud to rest by his knees.
Rendered speechless, the man knelt frozen in a daze, the horror in his chest cresting at its zenith. Suddenly, he noticed that a smiling man in green robes had appeared beside him at some point, gently patting his shoulder:
"Rise."
Wu Fan scrambled to his feet, trembling violently. The green-robed man smiled at Li Zhouwei, speaking as if by way of explanation:
"She was a descendant of Violet Palace blood, after all. It is best to grant her dignity in death."
Belated enlightenment dawned on Wu Fan:
*This Zhenren was here all along. Our mortal eyes simply could not perceive him.*
Li Zhouwei cared little. Had he not wished to avoid revealing the Immortal Mirror, he wouldn't even have needed to question Lady Guiqin... Seeing that Si Yuanli intended to employ Wu Fan—using intimidation and honeyed words alike—he could not be bothered to intervene:
*How the Changxiao sect grounds and its remnants are handled will be Si Yuanli's business hereafter. He has no subordinates of his own, and Wu Fan is clearly useful.*
Turning his hand, Li Zhouwei extracted the spiritual keys from beneath the main throne, tossed them into Li Minggong's hands, and nodded to Si Yuanli. The two figures vanished together, leaving only Li Minggong standing in the hall.
"My Lady..."
Wu Fan turned at once, inquiring with the utmost deference. Li Minggong shook her head, and several cultivators briskly entered from outside the grand hall. A tall youth with golden pupils, wearing a long saber at his waist, took the lead. Halting in the center of the hall, he greeted Li Minggong.
The woman turned her gaze to him:
"I leave this to you."
Wu Fan needed only a glance at those golden pupils to know the newcomer was of supreme noble stock. Stepping forward hastily, he bowed with an ingratiating smile:
"Greetings, Your Highness!"
...
Deep within the mountain cavern, light flickered intermittently amidst dense silver-white array lines. The two Zhenren stepped inside, coming to a halt before the array. Si Yuanli raised his head, retrieving talismans from his sleeve with one hand while gently rolling his fingers on the other to draw forth a streak of silver radiance.
It was none other than the Thunder-Smiting Array-Breaking Wedges.
He chuckled casually:
"Since the Hundred-Ridge Darkstone Umbrella has been given to Fellow Daoist, I shall take the Wuxiao Bead... It happens that a certain senior has a use for it."
Si Yuanli clearly possessed formidable skill. Ordinarily, with neither Zhenren present, the sect's subordinates could only ever unlock the outer array. Yet even as he spoke, he was already methodically unraveling this inner array.
Changxiao was not a cultivator of the Taiyang lineage and lacked the habit of constructing palaces within an inner array. The space within was modest, with the Seven Vaults and Six Repositories partitioned and neatly secluded from one another in an orderly fashion.
Si Yuanli laughed:
"Changxiao is a cunning old fox who wouldn't leave anything good behind for the likes of us. Let us see Chengyan's treasury instead."
Li Zhouwei nodded and lightly beckoned. A golden streamer darted back through the Great Void, landing in his palm as a scroll tied to a storage bag.
With a casual pat, the contents of the storage bag poured forth in a clattering cascade, blanketing the cavern floor in layer upon layer of spiritual materials in an instant. Radiance shimmered everywhere, with hardly a spirit stone in sight.
Li Zhouwei swept his eyes across them and made a gentle gesture. Seven streamers rose from the pile, arranging themselves neatly in a row on the table, while the dense array of jade slips spread out by his feet—these would have to be left to the Changxiao Gate cultivators to unseal.
Then, shaping his palm like a blade, he swept it left and right, seemingly parting the remaining mounds of spiritual goods into two equal piles with effortless ease.
Among the seven streamers, three were jade vials containing spirit pills. Having no shortage of such items himself, Li Zhouwei turned his attention to the remaining four. Opening the first jade box, a pale white, dark-patterned rounded stone met his eye.
Si Yuanli took a look and smiled:
"An item from Anhuai Heaven. That fellow reaped quite a haul back then. This is the True Qi spiritual resource, the Crane-Embracing Stone. Its best use is for low-stage cultivators to nourish within their qi seas to aid cultivation, and it also vastly enhances wind-riding speed—enough to let a cultivator of ordinary talent stand out among their peers. Ingesting it offers little benefit to cultivators like us... though it could serve nicely as an ornament on spiritual boots."
The remaining three items consisted of a scroll and two spiritual resources. One was of True Qi, the Three-Branched Qiuxin Leaf, a fine treasure prized for healing. Deep moss-green all over, its surface was densely covered in stone-like veins. It had grown directly within the jade box, quietly breathing. Unfortunately, one of its branches had already been plucked away; the remaining two were faintly hemorrhaging medicinal potency.
Si Yuanli felt an ache in his chest at the sight and cursed:
"What a brute! If he couldn't refine pills himself, he could have found someone who could. What good does chewing it raw do... At least he had the sense to store it in a jade box, or the potency would have dispersed long ago."
Li Zhouwei examined it closely and discovered traces of Bright Yang qi upon it, surmising that Chengyan had consumed it while under the pressure of his divine ability, so he let the matter rest. As for the final spiritual resource, it was of Xi Qi, half gold and half white like water. Si Yuanli's eyes were drawn to it at once, and he smiled:
"Mingyang, supreme among Yin-Yang, commands Lihuo and has little affinity for Xi Qi, whereas it is of great use to Proper Wood... How about entrusting this item to me, giving the Crane-Embracing Stone to Fellow Daoist, and leaving the Three-Branched Qiuxin Leaf to Fellow Daoist Zhaojing for pill refinement?"
"Agreed."
When enlisting Si Yuanli, they had already agreed to split whatever was taken from Chengyan equally. With the matter easily settled, Li Zhouwei held up the scroll to inspect it, only to find it sealed by a secret repository technique that made it difficult to open. Finding it novel, he could not help looking at it a few moments longer. Si Yuanli raised an eyebrow as well:
"An artifact from antiquity. It employs a secret repository technique far more troublesome than the seal on an ordinary jade slip. If forced open improperly... it will reduce itself to a blank scroll."
"Oh? A secret repository technique? Since Fellow Daoist can unravel arrays, do you have a way to open it?"
Li Zhouwei listened attentively as Si Yuanli sighed:
"I don't mind telling you: my ancestors possessed certain arts, having cultivated the path of Gengmu, and left behind some methods for breaking arrays. But this item bears the sign of a clasp-lock; one must seek a Kujin cultivator. Where could one find such a figure nowadays?"
Li Zhouwei naturally knew of Kujin cultivators, but he raised a brow, deliberately probing his depths as he asked:
"This lineage... I wonder just how formidable it is?"
Si Yuanli thought nothing of it and lamented:
"I know of only one thing: the Xie clan possesses a treasure called the Trace-Seeking River-Watching Stone, which belongs to Kujin. Within it lies an exceedingly rare golden nature known as the Suspended-Treasury Vessel-Transcending Dao Vault Nature—the golden nature of Kujin. If not unique under heaven, it is exceedingly scarce even in the hands of the exalted lords."
Lost in thought, Li Zhouwei was about to speak when he suddenly looked up.
*Crack...*
With a crisp snap, one of Changxiao Gate's so-called Seven Vaults and Six Repositories was revealed before them. Surging white mist billowed out, and at the center rested a treasure vase gleaming with iridescent light. Si Yuanli asked:
"The Shangyi lineage... Is Your Highness interested?"
Li Zhouwei replied, "Let Fellow Daoist take a look first."
Si Yuanli smiled genially, swept a glance over the jade vase, and replied:
"It should be a spiritual object of Shangyi, used for harvesting qi."
"Shangyi belongs to the Twelve Qi. Among the Twelve Qi, it is renowned as 'late to flourish and early to hide, aloft and standing apart.' A ruling imperial scion of the Great Zhou achieved the Golden Nature through it, leading to a period of prosperity. Later, when that exalted lord retreated into seclusion, the Shangyi path grew scarce as well. The real difficulty of this path... lies in its spiritual items."
"My lineage's records mention that nearly ninety percent of Shangyi's spiritual qi requires specific spiritual objects before it can be harvested—commonly known as the spirit-corraling method. Often, securing a set of these unique spiritual objects is enough to establish a lineage. But once the world undergoes upheaval or the items are lost, the lineage ceases to flourish."
A flash of realization struck Li Zhouwei. Back in Wanling Heaven, he had obtained the Core-Extracting Mysterious Yuan Art, which used the spiritual item Dark-Feast Vast Jade to harvest qi.
Furthermore, his clan possessed another Shangyi art, Zhi Jixi, which his granduncle had obtained from Zhenren Yuanbian. Harvesting qi for it relied on Zhenren Yuanbian's spiritual item, Guangxiao Tengyun. Naturally, that item would not be given to his family, nor had Liu Changdie made a point of harvesting it himself; instead, their clan members harvested it in Qunyi before delivering it over.
As Li Zhouwei pondered this, Si Yuanli sighed:
"Lineages like this are actually not few, though none are quite so demanding as Shangyi, requiring items for ninety percent of its branches... Much like True Fire, which often requires a specific spiritual flame to harvest qi. Yet the difficulty of this path lies in its being 'aloft and standing apart'—disconnected on all sides, with no particularly close sister lineages. If you wish to compound its spiritual objects... without specialized methods, it is exceedingly difficult. What is more, it bears the drifting nature of the heavenly firmament, making its spiritual objects notoriously hard to preserve, which is why it has declined to such a state."
He turned grave and said:
"In fact, there is a corresponding path. Even my lineage is not entirely clear on it, but by correspondence, it is called Xiayi. I hear it was brought under the control of the Underworld Court very early on. It isn't merely scarce—it is only slightly better off than Banished Qi!"
Si Yuanli was intentionally doing him a favor, and Li Zhouwei nodded, rather pleased with what he heard.
*So the Twelve Qi are finally all accounted for...*
Quick-witted, Li Zhouwei reflected inwardly:
*Li Quewan's Houshenshu had once mentioned being able to compound the qi of the Two Rites. Could the 'Two Rites' refer to the Upper and Lower Rites among the Twelve Qi? If so, the ties between Complete Dan and Douxuan are far from shallow!*
The Underworld Court was unequivocally a Douxuan lineage, meaning both the Upper and Lower Rites were seats under Douxuan. Yet why would the Underworld Court, an obvious Douxuan lineage... fan the flames of Wanling Heaven's fall without the slightest concern?
The profound implications did not escape Li Zhouwei's notice. Meanwhile, Si Yuanli had already retrieved the jade vase and asked:
"The Shangyi lineage must still be on Changxiao's person. In my view, he left one or two portions of spiritual resources here to harvest qi deliberately, afraid of alarming Chengyan... Does Fellow Daoist happen to know what this item is used for?"
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Main Characters of This Chapter:
Li Zhouwei [Early Violet Palace Stage]
Si Yuanli [Early Violet Palace Stage]
Chapter 1008