Burning the Heart Furnace, Illuminating the Inner Landscape

The Three Heroes were, in a sense, Old Huang's Adopted Sons.

They paid nothing to study martial arts under Old Huang.

Before the Three Heroes rose to prominence, Old Huang had invested plenty in them.

Li Xiuwen's modest goal was to become... the Fourth Prodigy.

Chen's Rice Noodle Factory.

After a bath, Li Xiuwen sat cross-legged on his bed and took out a piece of golden cloth: the Heart Furnace Three Forgings.

He opened the manual and read it word by word, line by line. At last, he began to grasp its many obscure Incantations and subtle principles.

Suddenly, his gaze turned solemn. As he stared at the faintly glowing cloth, he seemed, in a daze, to arrive somewhere strange.

Buddha-light hung in the air, encircling ancient temples.

Chants drifted on the breeze, and clouds and mist stretched into the distance.

Dong! A sound like a great bronze bell rang out from the unbroken mountain range.

He saw magnificent, sacred monasteries standing among the peaks, with countless monks passing through them and practicing martial arts.

The Xingguo Zen Chamber, the Guanyin Zen Convent, the Thousand-Buddha Cliff, the Ten-Thousand-Buddha Cave... and the golden Buddha atop the Maitreya Sacred Land.

"The Thousand-Buddha Holy Land? This is Thousand-Buddha Mountain in Qizhou Prefecture, in the Lu Region—the ancestral seat of the Heart Furnace School that Old Madman mentioned!"

Li Xiuwen was shaken. Hiding an illusion inside a piece of cloth was beyond anything he had encountered in the Martial Way.

When the illusion faded, streams of information had appeared in Li Xiuwen's mind, as though wisdom had been poured into him from above.

He gazed at the cloth and murmured, "Just as I suspected. It was hard to practice because the manual I could see back then was incomplete. Only when one's martial