Smells Good? Better Not...

The Chang'an Commerce Guild's caravan stayed an extra day at its temporary camp below Ghost Gate Mountain to rest and regroup.

When they left, the Nanping Trade Association's people were still camped there.

For one thing, many of them needed time to recover from their injuries. Sky-Supporting Hand Li Zhong, whom King of Nine Mountains He Ping'an had gravely wounded on the Ghost Gate Mountain plank road, needed at least another ten days to two weeks of rest. Otherwise, the injury might leave him with a lingering ailment.

For another, they had lost their manager, and no one knew how to handle many of their affairs. They had to wait for the Nanping Trade Association to send a replacement and hand everything over before operations could resume.

The Chang'an Commerce Guild had no such problems. Not one of them had been wounded in the fight with the King of Nine Mountains, because everyone who had dared draw a blade against him had been killed.

With no one needing to recover, a day was enough to see to the dead.

Pan Long's clan uncle Pan Ying had died in that battle. His body was cremated, his ashes placed in an iron box, and his belongings gathered into a bundle.

Zhao Lin would take them to the Central Plains and deliver them to Pan Ying's family.

Pan Long and the others sighed over his death, but they bore the King of Nine Mountains no grudge.

For a Greenwood leader, the man's character was actually quite decent. Neither on the plank road nor at the foot of the mountain had he slaughtered innocents. Every person who died by his hand had attacked him first and been killed when he struck back.

Pan Ying, for instance, had joined the assault on him and died beneath that earth-shaking saber stroke.

Children of the Martial World built their lives on martial arts and wagered their futures on their blades. They were prepared to die by the blade. If someone killed them in a fair fight, there was nothing to resent.

If Northerners held grudges over such things, they would have died out long ago.

What they discussed more often was why the King of Nine Mountains had been so "softhearted."

Pan Long even wondered whether the man practiced some unusual cultivation method that imposed certain restrictions on him.

Otherwise, surely he should have killed every witness.

But Pan Long quickly rejected the idea. Killing people was easy; silencing everyone was hard. Heaven knew how many people had heard that the Nanping Trade Association had obtained bamboo slips suspected to be what the Great Xia Dynasty was seeking. Even if the King of Nine Mountains had been strong enough to kill all thousand-plus people in the two caravans, the traces of battle alone would have exposed his identity.

And even without those traces, how many people in the entire Northwest Region could kill more than a thousand people in one go?

With something like this at stake, the Great Xia Dynasty would rather kill the wrong man than let a suspect go. As the foremost Greenwood leader in the Northwest Region, he could never have kept himself out of it.

He was better off seizing the thing and fleeing: across a thousand mountains and ten thousand rivers, beyond the borders of the Nine Provinces, to somewhere the Great Xia Dynasty's reach fell short.

It was like Xie Xun's plan after seizing the Dragon-Slaying Saber on Wangpan Mountain. He had intended to hide somewhere no one went, study the treasured blade, then return for revenge once he had uncovered its secret.

...Of course, Xie Xun had something wrong with his head. The reason he could not take revenge was that he could not find his enemy. What good was supreme martial skill if he could not find the man?

The King of Nine Mountains certainly did not have that problem. By now, he had probably fled to some unknown place.

The only question was whom the Great Xia Dynasty would send after him. Perhaps Li Wu would make a move?

Li Wu was a Great Grandmaster of the True Person Realm, and the King of Nine Mountains had most likely entered the True Person Realm too. Their battle would surely be spectacular, and anyone watching stood to learn a great deal.

Too bad I won't get to see it...

Pan Long did regret that. If he were strong enough not to fear the King of Nine Mountains, he could follow him and watch the spectacle.

...But if I were that strong, would I still need to follow him to watch it?

Ah, that's life. When you want something, you can't get it; by the time you can, it often no longer matters to you.

Han Feng had no such reflections. Lately, he had been diligent, practicing every day.

The King of Nine Mountains' "way to grow stronger" had been nothing new; Han Feng's father, Han Ting, had said the same thing long ago. But the very same words sounded entirely different coming from his father, who had yet to reach the Innate Realm, and from the King of Nine Mountains, who killed Innate experts as easily as chickens.

The man was an authority!

So Han Feng became much more diligent. He trained hard during every rest stop, and even on horseback, his hands traced movements as he pondered his family's martial arts.

Unlike the steady, weighty martial arts of the Pan Lineage, the Han Family's arts favored agility and variation. Their strongest technique was the Surging River Saber Technique. Paired with their heirloom saber, Spring Brook, it was powerful enough to contend with relatively weaker Innate Masters such as Pan Long's grandfather, Pan Shou.

Unfortunately, Spring Brook was bound to pass to Han Shan, the eldest Han Family son. Without the treasured saber, the Surging River Saber Technique lost much of its power, so Han Feng spent even more time practicing his fists than his saber.

Pan Long thought his ancestors had shown considerable foresight in making unarmed combat the heart of their family's martial arts.

Watching Han Feng train so hard made him itch to practice too. His first thought was to enter the world of the Classic of Mountains and Seas Fragment.

The Classic of Mountains and Seas Fragment could open a Void World containing nothing at all. Such a world produced nothing; its only use was as a place to train. If you could endure the loneliness, you could train there until heaven aged and the seas dried up, master peerless martial arts, and then return to reality.

But that was impossible. No one could bear such loneliness. Anyone who could probably was not entirely sound of mind.

Opening such a world consumed little spiritual energy. The only question was whether a person's mind could withstand the solitude.

Pan Long felt that, for the moment at least, solitude would not trouble him much.

So one evening, during a rest stop, he entered the world of the Classic of Mountains and Seas Fragment.

The moment he entered, he froze.

His store of spiritual energy had grown considerably.

"Strange. I haven't hunted any Mountain Spirits or Demon Beasts lately, and I haven't been living somewhere rich in spiritual energy. Where did it come from?"

The ancestors of the Pan Lineage had long since established that spiritual energy could not appear from nowhere. It could only be gained by hunting things that possessed it or accumulated slowly by living in a region rich in it.

Most things that possessed spiritual energy were demons, monsters, ghosts, and the like.

One important reason the Pan ancestors had settled in the Northlands was the abundance of low-level Demon Beasts there. Hunting them made it relatively easy to accumulate spiritual energy.

Even so, during the twenty-five years Pan Shou had possessed the Classic of Mountains and Seas Fragment, he had gathered only enough spiritual energy to open an Illusory World four times.

Yet Pan Long had done nothing and now found he had gained a considerable amount. Together with what remained from last time, his reserves had passed eighty percent. Before long, perhaps, he could open an Illusory World and undergo another round of training.

"What's going on?"

Puzzled, he sat in the void and swept a hand through the air.

An old bamboo slip appeared before him, and he caught it.

Then a record of his recent gains and losses of spiritual energy appeared before his eyes.

The next instant, his body jolted, and shock filled his eyes.

"I can actually gain spiritual energy from people?!"

According to the record, he had indeed received a large influx of spiritual energy recently. It had come from the people killed by the King of Nine Mountains at the foot of Ghost Gate Mountain.

He immediately remembered something from that moment.

When the King of Nine Mountains' gaze had cowed him, a sudden warm current had helped him regain his senses.

Now it seemed that current had been the spiritual energy he had gained from those the King of Nine Mountains had killed.

Pan Long was not puzzled that people possessed spiritual energy. In theory, every living being did, and people were no exception. Those accomplished in martial arts or blessed with exceptional talent had far more than ordinary people.

But none of the Pan ancestors had ever gained so much as a trace of spiritual energy from a person. Why could he?

Could this be another of the Classic of Mountains and Seas' true powers?

He soon calmed down and sank into thought.

For a mysterious treasure like the Classic of Mountains and Seas, it would have been odd if it could gain spiritual energy only from Mountain Spirits, River Demons, and other monsters and ghosts, or by slowly absorbing what rose from the earth.

By comparison, what was happening to him now made more sense.

After all, spiritual energy was spiritual energy, regardless of where it came from.

This was certainly good for him. If he could gain spiritual energy from people, he could accumulate it much faster. Perhaps it would not be long before he had enough to begin his next round of training.

What was more, he had arrived late at the foot of Ghost Gate Mountain. Many people had already been dead for some time, and much of their spiritual energy had dispersed. He had not gone near the battlefield, either, so he had gathered it inefficiently.

If he killed his enemies himself in the future, he would surely gain far more.

The thought pleased Pan Long at first, but he quickly grew wary.

Human life was precious. He absolutely could not become a murderous fiend out of greed for spiritual energy!

Even the Greenwood leader, the King of Nine Mountains, refrained from slaughtering innocents. Pan Long could not let his hunger for more spiritual energy make him worse than that man!

"I have to restrain myself!" he told himself. "Spiritual energy matters, but the principles I live by matter more. If I stop being myself and become someone I despise, what joy would there be in living?"

He repeated this several times, yet still could not calm down.

Those were fine words, but when a tremendous benefit lay before you, could you really feel no temptation?

Of course not!

The saying "smells good" had become a classic precisely because people so often lacked self-control in the face of temptation!

Am I going to say "smells good" too? Better not... I feel like I'd lose something very important!

Pan Long thought for a long time. At last, he sighed, set his tangled thoughts aside, and focused on practicing his martial arts.

He felt he was no good at pondering such profound matters. He might as well train.

If he mastered martial arts powerful enough to roam the world unchallenged, he would have no need to covet the treasures of the Illusory World. Without temptation, he would not have to face these headaches.

"Progress matters most," he told himself. "A problem I can't solve now might not be a problem in the future."

With that thought, he buried himself in training in the Void World, sweating like rain.