Burning Flowers, Swaying Moon, Asking About the Past: Luofu Had a Husband-Who Played the Phoenix-Beckoning Flute?

While Monk Golden Bowl sat alone in the Quiet Room, deep in meditation, Xing Yan lay on his bed, quietly lost in thought. Outside, the green bamboo at the corner of the courtyard rustled in the evening breeze. Hazy moonlight poured down like quicksilver, filling his window with its glow.

His sleeplessness was not entirely due to excitement over everything that had happened that day. Rather, he felt that the great splendor Dao power within his body had undergone another change. Before the Mid-Autumn Festival last year, he had absorbed that counterfeit Dao Soul, and later devoured and extinguished the Nine-Headed Infant Monster. As his great splendor Dao power grew stronger, he discovered that the originally shapeless, traceless flowing-water Dao power seemed to have acquired a distinction between yin and yang.

Whenever his thoughts stirred, the fiery energy of the Dao Soul and the yin energy of the Nine-Headed Infant Ghost emerged like two sides of a single whole, lending yin and yang attributes to his great splendor flowing water. Today, he had refined the evil spirits on Duan Ruhui's Soul-Slaying Blade and swallowed the dark fire that had sprung up from the ground. Now he felt those two attributes becoming increasingly distinct. Although his great splendor Dao power remained as clear and ethereal as flowing water, after today's battle he could summon its cold and hot aspects with a mere thought, rather than stumbling upon them by accident as before.

There was no explanation of such a phenomenon in the Refining Spirit into Void Treatise that the old Daoist Qinghe had given him. Xing Yan therefore had no idea whether this was a blessing or a curse.

After circulating his great splendor Dao power through several full cycles, the young man thought of something else:

*Only after seeing Duan