Bat

In the end, all that remained were lesser arts such as commanding ghosts, driving out evil, reading feng shui, and divination. But a few decades later, even those arts, lowly as they were, had begun to lose their power.

Then the Boxer Rebellion erupted and shook the world. Countless shamans and spirit mediums gathered, using every kind of witchcraft—summoning ghosts, inviting spirits into their bodies, and more—to fight the authorities and the foreigners.

With talismans pasted to their bodies and claims that blades and bullets could not harm them, countless Boxers charged barehanded at the authorities' and foreigners' guns and cannons.

Outsiders called the force they formed the Long-Haired Army!

These events had an enormous influence on later generations, one that even carried through to the founding of the present dynasty.

But Tang Changsheng had never imagined what lay behind it all...

Why had spiritual energy vanished overnight more than two hundred years ago?

Every sect called it a great calamity of heaven and earth, but what had caused that calamity? How had it unfolded?

How had cultivators who once belonged to thriving sword sects and could fly through the heavens and burrow beneath the earth fallen, within a few short decades, to the level of lowly witchcraft? And why had that witchcraft finally erupted on such a scale?

One question after another surfaced, with no answers to any of them.

Tang Changsheng thought it over. The General's Temple had once been a sizable sect, with an unusually complete lineage.

Yet its teachings offered no answers, either!

Ling Xiaoyu was engrossed in material that outsiders would have found unbearably dry. Tang Changsheng smiled to himself and was about to leave her to read at her own pace.

Just then, something stirred in him, and he looked up toward the window.

Two red points had appeared in the black curtain of night.

Before Tang Changsheng could make them out, they struck the window not far from him.

The weather was somewhat hot, so Tang Changsheng had left the window open. The faintly cool night breeze drifting through it was more comfortable than any air conditioner in the world.

But now a pitch-black shape hurtled through it, straight at him.

Tang Changsheng reacted without a moment's thought. He snatched up the Heavenly Canopy Ruler lying on the desk as a paperweight and swung it at the shadow.

Thump...

With a soft report, the shadow burst apart and fell to the floor, blood and flesh splattering everywhere. It was a bat no bigger than his palm.

Though the little creature was a bloody mess, it seemed not to have died yet. It twitched on the floor.

"What happened? What was that?" Ling Xiaoyu had been reading intently, and the sudden commotion nearly made her jump out of her skin.

"Something's wrong!" Tang Changsheng said grimly. He had sensed it at once.

The window of Tang Changsheng's room was wide open, without even a screen. Ordinarily, a bat or some other creature from the mountains flying in would have been perfectly normal!

But a place like the General's Temple naturally had secret medicines to ward off mosquitoes, snakes, ants, and other pests. Night birds generally dared not enter, either.

Nor was the General's Temple alone in this. Every cultivation sect in the south had something similar.

Those scenes in old films where a cultivator sat meditating and a snake suddenly slithered out from a corner of the room...

They simply could not happen!

When Tang Changsheng cultivated at the Primordial Yang Abbey, for instance, he had put the Four-Spirit Guardians in place and spread the Heavenly Net.

He had also scattered lime, sulfur, and various secret medicines for repelling snakes and insects along the corners and eaves.

This was common knowledge among the sects, though each had its own recipes and methods...

That was where a sect's true foundations lay. Cultivation was not merely a matter of practicing techniques; it touched every aspect of clothing, food, shelter, and travel,

and each held knowledge of its own. Cultivation manuals generally mentioned such things only in passing. They never went into much detail.

Yet these were the very things that enabled disciples with a sect lineage to reach greater heights...

As for being bitten by a venomous snake while meditating... that was a joke.

The sort of joke cultivators in every sect could tell to get a good laugh...

So even without recalling the strange red glint in the bat's eyes, the mere fact that it had managed to get inside was enough to put Tang Changsheng on guard!

"Yin Soldier, summoned by rite, heed my command! Go..."

Without pausing to answer Ling Xiaoyu, Tang Changsheng formed a hand seal and gave the order. A wisp of gray mist immediately rose from the Soul Jade enshrined on an altar in another room. It became a tiny whirlwind, swept out of the temple in an instant, and lunged toward the dark mountain woods beyond.

Barely a heartbeat later, an exasperated scream rang out.

Night birds startled from the woods and fluttered about in confusion. The Yin Soldier returned and slipped back into the Soul Jade.

Tang Changsheng's face turned livid. "You bastard, you were lucky to get away with your life!"

It was not that he meant to let a tiger return to the mountain. The woods at night held countless dangers.

And he had no idea how capable the watcher lurking in the dark might be. If he pursued them now, he could be the one caught in an ambush!

There was good reason for the old saying: never enter a forest in pursuit!

The world held no end of strange arts, ones a person had never heard of, let alone seen.

Even if your powers far surpassed someone else's, one careless step could still overturn your boat in a shallow ditch.

Tang Changsheng was cautious by nature. He would never take such a risk.

Anyone who could escape the Yin Soldier's pursuit with their life had to be an expert!

At the thought, Tang Changsheng looked down at the Heavenly Canopy Ruler and sucked in a sharp breath!

The bat's blood still stained it, but that was not what mattered. A faint, rancid stench clung to it as well. However slight it was, Tang Changsheng knew that smell too well to mistake it!

"The smell of a Three-Corpse Worm... So the expert who attacked Ling Xiaoyu has come knocking! And it really is a method from our sect..."

The Heavenly Canopy Ruler was a ritual artifact: a short, four-sided wooden baton engraved with talismans. Its faces bore the twenty-eight lunar mansions, the sun and moon, Ziwei, the Heavenly Canopy, the six stars of the Southern Dipper, and the seven stars of the Northern Dipper.

Such rulers were usually made of peachwood or iron. Tang Changsheng's was peachwood, an ancestral artifact of the General's Temple. Like the timber used in the Quiet Room, it had been made from Peachwood Heart.

There was one difference. All the timber in the General's Temple's Quiet Room came from century-old Peachwood Hearts, while this Heavenly Canopy Ruler had been made from the heartwood of a different kind of Spirit Peach.