After Liu Zhengfeng's Golden Basin Hand-Washing Ceremony came to a complete end, the various martial artists of the jianghu dispersed as well.
As for your rashly taking action against the Songshan Sect, your master, Yue Buqun, merely rebuked you a few times before letting the matter drop.
You also told your master, Yue Buqun, about Mu Gaofeng and Yu Canghai's deaths.
However, regarding their deaths, your master merely said lightly, "Dead is dead. Just clean up the mess."
Since your master had put it that way, you naturally said nothing more.
Three days later, you bid farewell to your master and the rest of your fellow disciples, who were preparing to return to Mount Hua, and set off for Fuzhou Prefecture to retrieve and examine the Evil Warding Sword Manual hidden in the Lin family's old residence in Xiangyang Lane.
Of course, the reason you gave was that you had been staying in one place too long and wanted to travel around.
Your master did not think much of it and agreed to your request immediately.
Half a month later, after traveling and cultivating along the way, you finally arrived at Fuzhou Prefecture. You easily learned the location of Xiangyang Lane and found the Lin family's old residence there.
That night, you entered the Lin family's old residence in Xiangyang Lane alone.
The Lin family's escort business had once spread across several provinces, and they could certainly be considered wealthy magnates.
Thus, even their abandoned old residence was enormous. There were dozens of rooms of various sizes, and if you searched them one by one, you would have no idea when you would finish.
But you knew that the Evil Warding Sword Manual was hidden in the ancestral hall at the very center of the residence.
So you did not waste any time. You went straight into the ancestral hall and found the cassock bearing the Evil Warding Sword Manual in the gap between the roof tiles.
As for the "White-Headed Immortal" Bu Chen and the "Bald Vulture" Sha Tianjiang, who appeared in the original plot, Zuo Lengchan had not sent them here yet.
After obtaining the Evil Warding Sword Manual, you did not linger. You returned directly to the inn where you were staying and began studying it.
It took you only a quarter of an hour to examine the Evil Warding Sword Manual carefully from beginning to end.
What left the deepest impression on you were the eight large characters: "To practice this skill, one must first castrate oneself!"
If those eight characters had not been there, you might have practiced it. What a pity...
With your level of insight, you discovered that the reason the Evil Warding Sword Manual required its practitioner to castrate himself first was very simple—an imbalance between yin and yang.
The internal skill paired with the Evil Warding Sword Manual was actually an extremely yang internal skill, one that had completely abandoned the yin attribute.
After all, even the Nine Yang Divine Skill, publicly acknowledged as the most rigid and yang-oriented skill, ultimately required yin and yang to combine.
As the saying went, solitary yin could not generate life, and solitary yang could not grow. This was the fundamental principle governing the workings of heaven and earth.
Thus, if someone forcibly practiced the Evil Warding Sword Manual without castrating himself, there could only be one outcome—deviation into demonic practice, followed by shattered meridians and death.
Conversely, if he castrated himself, he would use his own physical deficiency to forcibly make up for the imbalance between yin and yang in the technique.
At the beginning of cultivation, the union of yang with yang would make progress astonishingly rapid. Once cultivation reached its limit, extreme yang would give birth to yin, allowing yin and yang to combine and circulate endlessly, causing one's strength to grow rapidly like a rolling snowball.
That was also why the Evil Warding Sword Manual could be mastered so quickly.
However, the Evil Warding Sword Manual had been adapted from the incomplete Falling Flower Manual, so its ultimate realm could reach only the mid-Xiantian stage. It held no attraction for you and could at most broaden your experience.
But to those who had been unable to break through to the Xiantian Realm after a dozen or even several decades, this was absolutely a peerless divine skill with immense appeal.
To them, trading a mere inch or two for strength powerful enough to unify the jianghu was unquestionably an incredible bargain.
But that did not include you, because you had four or five inches, and you already possessed enough strength to unify the jianghu. You had no need for the Evil Warding Sword Manual.
As for having women with naturally yin constitutions practice the Evil Warding Sword Manual, that simply would not work.
Making women born with yin constitutions practice an extremely yang technique would merely be making trouble for themselves.
Not only would they get half the results with twice the effort and advance slowly, they would also grow increasingly masculine, eventually becoming a monster that was neither man nor woman. It was completely not worth the loss.
"Is this the secret of the Evil Warding Sword Manual? No wonder it was created by a eunuch. These human monstrosities really are desperate for masculine energy..."
Watching the content appear in the subtitles before him, Zheng Qian muttered in amazement.
In his previous life, the Evil Warding Sword Manual and the Sunflower Manual had been so famous that they were even considered on par with the Nine Yang Divine Skill and the Eighteen Dragon Subduing Palms. They were household names.
Of course, that was merely fame, not power.
Half a month later, after thoroughly researching the Evil Warding Sword Manual, you left Fuzhou Prefecture and headed toward Hangzhou.
After half a month of painstaking study, you used the seventy-two forms of Bixie Swordplay, which focused on yin softness, as the foundation. Combining them with the orthodox and reverse Five Peaks Swordplay you knew, you created twenty-four innate-level sword techniques suited to you.
Twelve were at the early innate level, and twelve were at the mid-innate level.
Although they were inferior in power to the complete seventy-two forms of Bixie Swordplay, they still raised your strength to another level.
The reason you detoured to Hangzhou was to obtain another divine skill from The Smiling, Proud Wanderer world—the Star Absorbing Great Method.
As far as you knew, more than a decade ago, Dongfang Bubai had launched a rebellion while Ren Woxing was cultivating the Star Absorbing Great Method in seclusion. In the end, she successfully imprisoned Ren Woxing beneath Plum Manor, in the bottom of the West Lake Prison.
During the years he was imprisoned, bored Ren Woxing carved the formulas of the Star Absorbing Great Method onto the iron cage that held him.
There was still more than a year before Ren Woxing would be released in the original story, and you did not know whether he had already carved down the formulas of the Star Absorbing Great Method.
However, it made no difference to you. Even if he had not, you could simply force the formulas out of him.
Your confidence came from the fact that you had successfully opened the sixth of the Eight Extraordinary Meridians three days earlier—the Yang Qiao Meridian.
Your realm had also broken through to the late Xiantian Realm Peak at that moment, and you had completely cultivated the Purple Cloud Divine Skill to the Grand Perfection Realm.
The Purple Cloud Divine Skill at Grand Perfection had already reached the state where yin and yang followed one another, the primordial unity was one, and energy circulated endlessly. Ren Woxing's Star Absorbing Great Method probably could not absorb it at all.
Even if he could absorb your true qi, he was merely a prisoner with his hands tied. You had plenty of ways to kill him.
Three days later, after arriving beside West Lake, you easily found Plum Manor.
That night, you broke into Plum Manor and effortlessly subdued the four manor masters—Huang Zhonggong, Heibaizi, Tubi Weng, and Danqingsheng—whose strength was above the Houtian Peak. From them, you extracted the location where Ren Woxing was imprisoned.
Afterward, you killed the four members of the Demon Cult to silence them and headed alone toward the bottom of the West Lake Prison.
Before you continue