He could govern heaven and earth, but could he govern what other people thought?
No matter how bitterly Huiming and Huizhi resented him, even if they longed to tear him, Hong Yuan, into ten thousand pieces, they still had to bow and scrape before him, respectful and deferential. That was enough.
Hong Yuan grew interested in the Phantom-Soul Astral Art and continued his questions. Huiming answered them all honestly.
Then Hong Yuan waved a hand and told Huiming and Huizhi to take him to Vajra Temple's book collections.
At those words, the two monks' faces visibly twitched.
The richest collection in Vajra Temple had been housed in the Hidden Treasury Pagoda, which had burned down.
The pagoda could be rebuilt, but its many rare treasures and vast collection of texts had truly gone up in smoke.
And there was the most important treasure of all-the Nirvana Dharma Eye!
The Nirvana Dharma Eye was in Hong Yuan's hands, but neither monk was naive enough to believe he would freely return it.
Fortunately, Vajra Temple had accumulated such abundant resources over nearly four hundred years that, even without the Hidden Treasury Pagoda, several libraries still stood.
Hong Yuan leisurely entered one of the heavily guarded libraries and found ten thousand volumes within, sorted into categories: sorcery, calamities and portents, historical documents, unofficial histories and miscellaneous accounts, secret Buddhist texts, and more.
After dismissing Huiming and the others, Hong Yuan began reading on his own, starting with sorcery.
He leafed through volume after volume and even found fragments of the Compendium of a Hundred Arts, recording more than a dozen forms of sorcery: the common five-element arts, Mechanism Arts, Poison Gu Secret Art, Talisman Forbidden Art, Celestial Phenomena Secret Art...
Three days slipped by. Hong Yuan moved between the libraries, gathering a wealth