Three Forms

Tu Shan Jun left.

Leaving behind a lonely grave.

The pit had been dug with that spirit sword, deep enough.

Even wild dogs could not dig that deep.

In the end, people still had to return to the earth and rest in peace.

Neither Zhao Shixian nor Hou Boxu could afford storage bags, so they could only use Storage Talismans.

Opening a Storage Talisman required only a strand-thin wisp of spiritual power.

There was very little of value inside Zhao Shixian's Storage Talisman.

A cultivation manual, the Blood Fiend Art.

A somewhat damaged talisman, and three neat azure stone blocks.

With the knowledge from the manual, Tu Shan Jun recognized the talisman as a Swift Travel Talisman, though it could be used at most twice more.

Those stone blocks were low-grade Spirit Stones, the universal currency.

Half a piece of incomplete, unknown beast hide recorded three moves.

They were precisely the three forms of the Demon Ape Mind-Settling Fist.

The remaining jars and bottles contained fairly ordinary things: a change of clothes, some dried rations and flatbread, drinking water, and loose silver.

There was also a rough map.

If such a thing had been found in an ordinary household, it would have been a crime punishable by beheading.

But to cultivators, worldly imperial authority did not carry such force.

Tu Shan Jun was now using this rough map to determine where he should go.

As for Hou Boxu's Storage Talisman, Tu Shan Jun did not open it, instead swallowing it into his stomach for safekeeping.

The Soul Banner was not strong enough yet and had no internal space. The Main Soul was the only thing capable of storing objects.

Fortunately, the Main Soul did not need to eat, drink, piss, or shit.

There was no need to hide the Hairpin Spirit Sword, but it consumed an enormous amount of spiritual power.

That tiny remnant of spiritual power could not sustain it for long, so he simply tossed it into the Storage Talisman and sealed it away as well.

In the dog days of summer, the blazing sun hung high overhead.

Tu Shan Jun trudged onward beneath his burden, feeling as though he were dragging a corpse on his back.

There was no sweat pouring down like rain, only an inexplicable exhaustion.

Tu Shan Jun had originally intended to travel at midnight, but the spiritual power stored within the Banner Slave was slowly dissipating, leaving him no choice but to keep moving.

If he stopped in the wilderness, who knew when he would encounter a living person?

Ten days or half a month would be manageable, but what if no one picked up the Soul Banner for a year or half a year? Was he supposed to wait forever?

Tu Shan Jun did not wish to sit still and await death. At the very least, he had to head somewhere populated.

Tu Shan Jun did not know how long he had walked, but the spiritual power stored in the Banner Slave had already completely dried up.

Yet the sight before him filled Tu Shan Jun with delight. He had finally reached a road.

Not some rural path, but a broad, orderly road where dust rose in clouds.

It had been packed firm with wooden rammers to prevent weeds from growing. Aside from becoming muddy on rainy days, it was quite convenient.

Thud.

The corpse crashed heavily into the weeds beside the road.

Tu Shan Jun tossed the loose silver nearby, then arranged Zhao Shixian's body to look as though he had died clutching the Soul Banner with all his strength.

By then, only a final hair-thin thread of spiritual power remained.

In the end, he could only return to the Soul Banner helplessly and wait for someone fated to find it.

On the official road, very few commoners dared travel beneath such a scorching sun.

Tu Shan Jun waited for a long while without seeing a single soul.

If not for the fresh animal dung on the road, he might even have thought no one traveled this official road at all.

Rumble.

The ground shook, as though a large force of men and horses were charging toward him.

Before long, Black Armor Cavalry came into view, escorting a carriage down the official road.

A black banner embroidered with the character "Zhang" flew above them.

The Baleful Intent washing over him immediately stirred Tu Shan Jun, hidden within the Soul Banner, to alertness.

He smelled a thick stench of blood. This force of fewer than a hundred Black Armor Cavalry had likely just returned from a bloody battle.

If he could enter the army, he would no longer lack Living Souls and Baleful Intent to advance his rank.

But while Tu Shan Jun's hopes were beautiful, reality was harsh. The Black Armor Cavalry escorted the carriage past him in a streak of dust without any intention of stopping.

They hurried onward, every one of them grim-faced and anxious.

Not only had no one noticed the corpse in the roadside weeds, but even if they had, they would not have considered it anything important.

They had more important matters to attend to.

Tu Shan Jun considered using his final thread of spiritual power to manifest himself, but by the time he finished thinking, the cavalry had already charged a hundred meters away.

"What a pity," Tu Shan Jun murmured.

Since he had already missed the chance, he stopped dwelling on it and focused on the present.

"Could it be that the silver was hidden too well?"

"Or does Zhao Shixian's body not look like some reclusive master?"

The silver scattered through the grass was indeed difficult to notice.

Moreover, Zhao Shixian's body had been severely injured and drained of vitality. After digging the pit and raising the grave, he was dusty and disheveled, looking no different from a beggar.

Tu Shan Jun gritted his teeth and used his final thread of spiritual power to toss the silver into a conspicuous spot by the roadside.

When someone came by, they would surely follow the silver and spot the corpse.

There was no sense of time within the banner.

While no one came, Tu Shan Jun instead began studying the Demon Ape Mind-Settling Fist.

There was not actually much room within the Soul Banner, only enough to cram in more than a hundred ghostly yin souls. Their expressions were dull, their eyes vacant.

Tu Shan Jun's Main Soul occupied the very center, comprehending the cultivation seed extracted from Zhao Shixian.

The Demon Ape Mind-Settling Fist had three forms.

The first form: Old Ape Hanging Seal.

Its posture resembled a hunched ape, decrepit with age. This form focused on standing in stance and laying foundations.

It was also the opening stance of the Demon Ape Mind-Settling Fist.

Only after searching for the feeling more than a dozen times did he find the best state and complete the movements exactly as depicted on the beast hide.

Once he assumed the opening posture, Tu Shan Jun felt as though countless fleas had sprouted across his body, hopping back and forth and making him itch unbearably.

Yet he could not reach out and scratch. The moment he scratched, the stance would break, and the skill would be gone.

He maintained the entire posture for the time it took an incense stick to burn.

Next came the second form: Demon Ape Worshipping the Moon.

By then, the ape no longer bore any trace of old age, resembling instead a ferocious beast unleashed from its cage.

The beast hide fully depicted the direction of the muscles and the flow of blood when the Demon Ape Worshipped the Moon, even marking every bone with utmost clarity.

Unfortunately, a killing move was still a killing move. It was of no use whatsoever to a soul-body Main Soul like Tu Shan Jun.

This move was meant to fully unleash the frenzy that had been restrained from the beginning.

In truth, many people feared to strike.

To cultivate killing moves, one had to nurture three parts of viciousness in one's chest. That viciousness gave one the courage to strike.

"Someone has finally come."

Tu Shan Jun opened his eyes, a smile appearing on his face.

"Young Master, look what this is."

"Silver! I wonder who dropped it on the ground." The bookboy in a square cap snatched up the silver as if presenting flowers and ran to the scholar.

The blue-robed scholar holding an umbrella said with a smile, "I wonder who was so careless as to let you pick up such a bargain."

But the moment his words fell, the scholar's face turned deathly pale. He pointed at the weeds beside the bookboy.

"It's a person."

The bookboy jumped in fright, only then realizing that a person was lying face-down in the roadside grass.

"Hey, who are you?"

"Say something!"

After shouting for quite a while without receiving an answer, he finally crouched down to inspect him and reached out to check for breath.

"Young Master, he's dead."

The blue-robed scholar also sheathed the treasured sword at his waist and stepped forward to inspect Zhao Shixian's condition.

"From the look of him, he doesn't seem to come from a poor family."

"Hm?"

The scholar finally noticed the Soul Banner Zhao Shixian held tightly in his hand.

With a casual tug, the clenched hand loosened, and the blue-robed scholar picked up the Soul Banner, which had been wrapped to resemble a command flag.

The blue-robed scholar examined it carefully. "It does not seem ordinary. It looks like it is made of cold jade."

"But why can't this silk surface be unfolded?"

Tu Shan Jun could only feel helpless.

If ordinary people saw the lifelike ghost face on the banner's surface, they would certainly not dare pick it up.

Thus, he had used spiritual power to draw the entire banner surface closed.

Only spiritual power could open it again.

This blue-robed scholar possessed no spiritual power and was not a cultivator.

Still, Tu Shan Jun had left himself another option. The Blood Fiend Art could help those with spiritual roots cultivate. As long as the scholar had spiritual roots, there would be a chance.

While the scholar was picking up the Soul Banner, the bookboy had already stripped Zhao Shixian completely bare.

He even searched through his underclothes, afraid of overlooking so much as a single copper coin.

"Young Master, there's a book here too."

But to his disappointment, aside from less than five taels of loose silver, there was only this one book.