After leaving that street, Mr. Li kept his unhurried pace, but he had settled on a destination.
They had made a circuit of Dayuan Town.
Xu Feng was beginning to understand.
He sensed that the town was laid out as a feng shui formation.
Grandpa Li said, "That's right. The feng shui of this Dry Wharf gathers wind and draws wealth, but it also gathers baleful energy.
"The stone lion where we came in was placed there to suppress that energy.
"There should be iron chains buried beneath it, too.
"Red cloth hangs from the archway beside the lion.
"These are all ways to suppress and grind it down. The Baleful Aura escaped before, and people died, so these measures were put in place to trap their vengeful souls and grind them apart, leaving them unable to return."
It was plain to see at a glance.
The people killed by the Baleful Aura were the price of gathering wealth and drawing in qi.
Xu Feng understood. Not long ago, he had seen a Talisman form from thick Incense smoke. Since then, he had begun to think differently about the flow of qi.
It had reminded him of a book he had read.
As they walked, Xu Feng murmured, "So the words on corpses in that book left by the Daoist predecessor carried far-reaching meaning.
"The feng shui here keeps energy circulating. Dangerous as it is, it brings wealth. But if the flow of qi stopped, this place would become nothing but a deathtrap. Once the qi was sealed in, everything here, living or dead, would become a corpse.
"Everything would suffocate here.
"The whole place would become a dead toad."
Reading ten thousand books was no substitute for traveling ten thousand miles. After seeing so many things that had once