The Stillness Boundary

Inside the village school's thatched study, which bore no plaque, the middle-aged Confucian scholar Qi Jingchun sat in silent contemplation over a game record. It was neither some famous ancient game passed down through the ages nor a replay of a contest between masters of the chess world.

Just as he was about to place a white stone on the board, he sighed. At the spot where the stone's landing had long been predetermined, the scholar suddenly hesitated. After withdrawing his hand, the stone nonetheless remained suspended in midair, still more than an inch above the board.

Qi Jingchun remained sitting upright and proper. As the contemporary Sage charged with guarding this place, as the former Mountain Lord of Cliff Academy, one of the Seventy-two Confucian Academies, even though he had been banished here to atone for his crimes through meritorious service, Qi Jingchun was still undeniably one of the purest Confucian scholars of the age.

To the ordinary people of the little town, vegetation withered and flourished once each year, while sixty years of spring and autumn passed in the blink of an eye. The teachers had changed several times already, their appearances and ages all different. Yet that indescribable air of the scholarly sort had been exactly the same: rigid, demanding, taciturn. In short, they were all dull and tedious. No one had imagined that those village-school teachers who came and went had actually been the same person. What was more, beyond the little town, in the vast world outside, the reclusive Mr. Qi had once held an exalted status beyond compare and wielded supreme divine powers filled with righteous grandeur.

The next instant, Qi Jingchun's Primordial Spirit left his body and traveled afar. Like an Immortal in snow-white robes with fluttering sleeves, he broke free from the prison of his flesh in an instant and drifted toward an alley in the little town.

Qi Jingchun arrived at the alley in a flash. He first looked upon the woman lying in a pool of blood, Cai Jinjian of Cloud Mist Mountain. Her Three Souls and Seven Spirits swayed and scattered like a dying candle in the wind.

After lingering for a moment, Qi Jingchun finally arrived beside the two of them.

The young city lord of Old Dragon City, dressed in a high crown and broad sleeves, leaned slightly backward, dumbstruck. Upon his handsome jade-like face, shock, confusion, and despair tangled together.

The Young Man maintained that fierce posture of leaping high and lunging forward to kill. In his left hand, he gripped a shard of porcelain as sharp as a blade. Even at this critical moment, balanced on the razor's edge between life and death, the airborne Young Man's gaze remained resolute and his expression calm. He did not resemble at all some ignorant youth born in a shabby alley home and raised amid the wilderness. Perhaps the only thing that suited his age was the helplessness concealed deep in his eyes. A scholar who had left studies and academies behind many years ago was no stranger to such helplessness. It was like watching a farmer who relied on heaven for his livelihood squat in the cracked, barren furrows of a field during drought, looking up at the blazing sun. There would be no heart-rending emotion, only deep helplessness and bewilderment.

As the temporary master of this pocket of heaven and earth, Qi Jingchun naturally knew the entire history of Chen Ping'an's family of three. Even tracing back a hundred or a thousand years, though he had never personally seen the Young Man's ancestors, he could roughly deduce their course of events. The principle was simple. It was like a county magistrate who wanted to inspect the ancestry and inheritance of the people under his rule: he merely needed to visit the office that managed household registrations and look through the archives, and everything would be clear at a glance.

After more than three thousand years of reproduction and development, the little town's branches and leaves had spread beyond its borders, its roots tangled and intertwined. Every generation had produced a few astonishingly gifted figures. Though they could not return home in glory, they could secretly nourish their Lineage through hidden channels. In the end, this created the Four Clans and Ten Tribes that now flourished most greatly in the town.

Chen Ping'an's Lineage was equally ancient. His ancestors had once soared to great heights and enjoyed considerable wealth. Yet after two upheavals amid shifting winds and clouds, it had gradually fallen silent and declined amid the countless vassal states and forest of dynasties on East Treasure Bottle Continent, yielding its place to other surnames. Over the past thousand years, it had gone steadily downhill. By the time of the Young Man's father, this branch of the Chen clan in the little town had almost completely declined throughout all of East Treasure Bottle Continent. As for the territory of the Great Li Dynasty where the town stood, it was as though they had been officials commanded by royal decree that "generation after generation, none may enter office." Their Lineage had no possibility of revival left.

For more than sixty years since arriving here to oversee the operation of the grand formation, Qi Jingchun had strictly observed his teacher's four-character instruction: "upright, proper, balanced, harmonious." He had never altered the fates of the town's people at will because of his personal preferences. Otherwise, in the eyes of this scholar, who had once hated evil as deeply as an enemy, there was far too much filth in the wealthy households and far too much poverty in the shabby alleys. Yet after observing coldly, Qi Jingchun saw that the great clans and grand residences had their own futile helplessness, while the humble households had their own utmost savagery. As time passed, Qi Jingchun became like a lofty divine statue. He neither enjoyed incense offerings nor accepted human favors, merely sitting idly with folded sleeves, indifferent to worldly affairs.

Qi Jingchun was slightly surprised. He stepped forward, focused his gaze, and nodded lightly. So the impoverished Young Man, whose momentum had surged like a rainbow, appeared determined to make this killing strike and unwilling to stop until Fu Nanhua was dead. Yet judging by his current posture, the Young Man would only smash his wrist heavily against Fu Nanhua's neck in the end. Compared to Cai Jinjian's fate, that was far better. Fu Nanhua ought to be struck hard, sent crashing sideways into the alley wall, then seized by the throat with one hand while the Young Man pressed the porcelain shard against his abdomen with the other.

Qi Jingchun was somewhat curious. Why had the Young Man not dealt a fatal blow this time? A splendid opportunity vanished in a flash, and future trouble would be endless. Qi Jingchun was a pure Confucian who honored propriety, but he did not rigidly cling to dogma. He was not one of those pedantic sour scholars who merely shook their heads and showed off their learning. He knew people like Fu Nanhua all too well, whether their talent and innate constitution or their temperament and disposition. Even if the Young Man threatened him in this alley today and forced him to temporarily abandon revenge, this matter would absolutely be the greatest humiliation Fu Nanhua had ever suffered in his life. Calling it a demon haunting his Dao heart would not be excessive. When the time came, it would not merely be Fu Nanhua who nitpicked with the Young Man, but all of Old Dragon City, ruled by the Lord of the South Sea.

Qi Jingchun had come here to obstruct the Young Man's consecutive killings partly out of selfish motives, but even more for the sake of justice. The little town was now like a porcelain vessel covered in cracks, bound to burst apart sooner or later. Qi Jingchun had to delay this unstoppable trend and arrange a Way Out for as many people as possible. Ideally, he could hand everything over safely to that blacksmith, "Master Ruan." If they could endure the final sixty years, it would barely count as a happy ending for all: Mountain Dwellers would obtain their opportunities, and those below the mountain would gain stability. One had to know that, given the usual temperament of the former, whenever roads collapsed, old and new changed places, opportunities sprang up everywhere, and immortality seemed within reach, what did the lives of hundreds or thousands of ants at the foot of the mountain matter?!

The ruthlessness of imperial households in worldly dynasties was hardly worth mentioning beside the impartiality of the Great Dao praised by so many cultivators.

After pondering for a moment, Qi Jingchun quietly concealed his figure.

Heaven and earth resumed their course, smooth and unhindered.

The previous stillness boundary quietly shattered.

The Young Man's wrist finally smashed heavily into Fu Nanhua's neck. Fu Nanhua's head jerked aside, and he crashed sideways into the alley wall. The tremendous force left him dizzy and disoriented. Once the Young Man landed, he closed in with ferocious speed and drove an elbow into Fu Nanhua's abdomen.

Fu Nanhua had not even straightened against the wall when the Young Man's elbow strike nearly made him vomit bile. His body bent instinctively.

The Young Man seized Fu Nanhua's throat with one hand and pressed the porcelain shard against the abdomen of this high-crowned young master with the other.

Fu Nanhua found it difficult to imagine why the thin Young Man, who stood a head shorter than him, possessed such tremendous strength in his fingers. The sharpness and chill of the porcelain shard against his abdomen made the young city lord of Old Dragon City once again feel death closing in. A single thread separated life from death, yin from yang.

Of course, Fu Nanhua would never know how astonishing the boundless potential was that a child, forced from an early age to roam mountains and fields in search of medicinal herbs, could unleash because of an obsession even stronger than his own desire to survive.

When that Young Man had accidentally eaten poisonous herbs in the alley and rolled around the ground in agony from twisting pain, that obsession had even enabled a child who should have been receiving Elementary Education at the village school to think that, even if he had to crawl, he would crawl back home and return the life-saving medicinal herbs in his bamboo basket to the house.

Afterward, chopping firewood and burning charcoal, firing porcelain and shaping clay, digging earth and tasting soil—there was not a single task that did not test the Young Man's strength and endurance.

Outside the little town, Fu Nanhua could casually use a little immortal family magic to crush a hundred or a thousand Young Men at will. But choosing to face him in a fight to the death inside the town truly meant that his good fortune had run out and he had kicked an iron plate.

Blinded by the double blow of agonizing pain and humiliation, Fu Nanhua's face twisted viciously. "If you kill me, you'll be walking a road to death! If you don't kill me, you still won't escape death! You little bastard, no matter what, you're dead for sure!"

Chen Ping'an tilted his head up slightly and stared at the man whose face was filled with frenzied madness. "You know I don't want to kill you. We have no grudge between us. I only fought back because you wanted to harm me."

Fu Nanhua sneered cruelly. "A little bastard like you thinks he deserves to reason with me, Fu Nanhua?!"

He stressed every word as he said, "Do you deserve it?!"

Chen Ping'an fell silent for a moment before asking, "Are you determined to kill me?"

When Fu Nanhua saw the dark Young Man's eyes, he suddenly calmed down.

Fu Nanhua's face, trapped in Chen Ping'an's grip, had flushed red, then quickly turned blue and purple. In truth, the Young Man had not increased the force of his fingers, but it was enough to suffocate a strong adult man to death.

Fu Nanhua said with difficulty, "If I say I won't kill you, would you believe me?"

He struggled violently once.

But almost at the same moment, the Young Man tightened his grip, making the arm whose five fingers had twitched droop limply.

Chen Ping'an shook his head.

Fu Nanhua grew increasingly dizzy. Though he wished he could smash this bastard's skull with one slap, he still tried to maintain a pleasant expression as he added, "What if I swear to heaven? People like us cannot swear casually."

Fu Nanhua was playing a trick. A Buddhist's great vow and a cultivator's oath made in the heart indeed carried immense binding force. But Fu Nanhua had clearly told only half the truth. Even if he swore, he would only make a solemn declaration with his lips, not a weighty heart oath that left no written words yet was no different from carving characters upon the wall of one's Elixir Chamber heart. Whether he honored it afterward would depend entirely on his mood. Besides, there were ways to break even a cultivator's heart oath. It was merely a matter of the price paid. Broadly speaking, the price had an absolute relationship with a cultivator's realm and with the gravity of what had been sworn.

Unexpectedly, the straw-sandaled youth still shook his head.

As breathing became ever more difficult, Fu Nanhua had already lost the spirit to bargain. For no reason at all, his expression became somewhat dazed.

Was he about to die?

Just like that wretch Cai Jinjian, dying at the hands of some lowly little bastard?

When this terrible news reached Old Dragon City, would he become the laughingstock of the entire city?

He did not even have the chance to reach for the hidden mechanism on his jade belt. The white jade belt tied around his waist was in fact the remaining essence spirit of an earth flood dragon.

"That's enough."

A voice rang beside both their ears. To Fu Nanhua, it was heavenly music, except he happened to faint just then and could not tell whether it was merely an illusion.

Chen Ping'an turned his head in astonishment.

Then he saw Mr. Qi, glowing snowy white and hazy as an illusion.

The latter smiled without speaking.

Chen Ping'an's gaze returned to its unyielding firmness, and the five fingers of his right hand never loosened.

Qi Jingchun neither felt anger at having his kindness treated as donkey liver and lungs, nor the gratification of seeing promising material. He merely lightly swept his sleeve toward the straw-sandaled youth, as though "fishing" an object into his hand.

The Confucian Sage opened his palm and looked at it, then laughed soundlessly.

There lay a ball of filth, like spilled ink.

So it turned out that the intention someone had planted in the Young Man was dim and lusterless, clearly having perished long ago.

Looking up again at Chen Ping'an, Qi Jingchun felt some regret. With emotion, he said, "No wonder my teacher said that among those who accomplish great things in this world, transcendent talent is merely secondary; an unyielding will is the foremost necessity. Chen Ping'an, you have taught me another lesson on my teacher's behalf. It is only a pity that I, Qi Jingchun, no longer have the chance to take a Final Disciple."