Old Skeleton, Master Peach, looked at the mask in his hand and sighed. "Such a promising seedling, one who should have transcended the mortal dust... With the Wei Family's Martial Scripture in his hands, he would surely have reached the pinnacle of the Ninth Realm, perhaps even glimpsed the Tenth Realm. Yet a single obsession tormented him all his life."
Lü Bufan looked at the thin booklet Old Skeleton had casually repaired for him and read on carefully...
...Martial Warriors command qi, following the acquired path! Cultivators nourish qi, seeking heaven and uniting with truth! Wandering sword control, Yin-Yang Evasion. Innate and acquired, one qi of water and fire, five channels and four meridians, wondrous tree pure origin...
Old Skeleton looked at the engrossed Lü Bufan. "Can you understand it?"
"Some of it, but it also feels a little profound and awkward..."
"Come here. Put your head over here..."
Lü Bufan leaned his head toward him suspiciously.
"Do you know what anointment and the ritual touching of the crown are?"
Lü Bufan said, "Really? The kind that makes you a hundred times smarter and opens up your mind in an instant?"
Smack! A vicious slap landed on Lü Bufan's head, nearly knocking the breath out of him!
"Idiot! I just wanted to beat you up!"
A few more sharp knocks left Lü Bufan's head covered in lumps, but Old Skeleton still hadn't vented his anger... "Bragging your ass off, were you? The Wei Clan's Wandering Swordsmanship blends the fighting arts of Qi Refiners and Martial Warriors with their own unique understanding of the Great Dao of heaven and earth! A half-baked cultivator and little Martial Warrior like you dares claim you understood it on your first reading?"
Clutching his head, Lü Bufan fled to one side and studied it over and over... "I just feel like I can understand it... If you don't believe me, I'll show you!"
Old Skeleton glared, ready to deliver another round of knocks!
Following the qi circulation method in the first section of Wandering Swordsmanship, Lü Bufan drew up a breath of a Martial Warrior's true qi and channeled it into his palm. Then, his face flushed red, he pointed at a pebble on the ground... "Strike!"
A slender thread of force shot out silently... Snap! The little pebble tumbled and bounced away!
Old Skeleton stared at the pebble, dumbfounded, and asked, "That was a fucking fluke, right? A First Realm cultivator like you can already use innate true qi to control acquired gang qi?"
"Innate controlling acquired? I only used a Martial Warrior's gang qi to stimulate that breath of true qi in my dantian..."
"You fucking did it backward? How did your dantian not shatter and kill you?"
"...I don't know..."
Old Skeleton raised a hand, and a suction force immediately dragged Lü Bufan over. He pinned him to the ground and examined him for a long while...
"Did Shameless ever say anything to you?"
"No..."
Old Skeleton pondered for a moment, then murmured, "That fellow Wei Wuchen... saw much further ahead than that idiot Mingxin!"
Old Skeleton waved Lü Bufan away, then sighed to himself and fell silent...
Lü Bufan promptly fled for his life.
Old Skeleton looked up at the sky and murmured, "Wei Wuchen! Since you silently left a sword seed of the Wandering Sword Dao in this child's mind... you must have noticed long ago that his divine soul was unlike an ordinary person's. How could you just die like that? A mortal of utmost sincerity and purity... How many such mortals are left in this world now? Wei Wuchen... you fool!"
The Wei Family had always been a second-rate aristocratic clan in the Great Jin Dynasty, seemingly keeping apart from both the first-rate sects and the imperial court's forces...
Many tales of the Wei Family circulated both in the martial world and within the sects.
Yet the Wei Family had always sheltered from wind and snow, unwilling to draw attention.
Now Old Skeleton felt that the calamity the Wei Family had suffered back then was growing ever more suspicious... What an astute man Wei Wuchen had been! Why would he rashly draw his sword against the immortal Yunxia over Liu Xian'er alone? Mount Zhilin had exterminated the Wei Clan to the last... Had it merely wanted to swallow up the Wei Clan's stores of resources and the mountains, rivers, commanderies, and cities under its name?
Liu Xian'er... Did that woman know something of the inside story?
Old Skeleton shook his head and stopped dwelling on it. These matters... he would leave them to those useless good-for-nothings, Master Ming, Du Yuan, and the rest, to worry about!
An old man sat cross-legged on a hilltop, his back hunched. His clouded eyes stared blankly at the world before him...
A female cultivator strolled up behind him and sighed softly. "Mingxin, still can't make sense of it?"
Master Ming shook his head. "We killed an immortal and weakened two Immortal Sects... Why did everything return to the way it was in the blink of an eye? People died in heaps, and all we did was replace one set of lofty rulers with another... Those who feared the Immortal Sects fear them even more now. It's merely a different set of people throwing their weight around the world."
"And you lot... You calculate heaven and earth, seemingly choosing the best enemies and friends every time, yet every time you start with a tiger's head and end with a snake's tail, retreating in a muddle."
Guo'er, a Ninth Realm female cultivator from the Wild Spirit Land, frowned. "You should know something of the general situation inside the Wild Spirit Land... Some people fear Big Black and Master Peach every bit as much as they fear the immortals of the Upper Realm!"
"What they did back then was wrong! Why can't they just admit it?"
"They can admit it, but ask Big Black whether that is enough! Ask the Corpse Demons and ghostly souls in the Wild Spirit Land whether they accept it!"
Master Ming sighed, seeming to age considerably...
Guo'er stepped southward... "Mingxin, I still have to thank you all on behalf of the Wild Spirit Land... Without you these past years, the Immortal Sects would have completely cut the Wild Spirit Land off from Central Earth."
Master Ming said nothing, merely gazing at the green mountains and clear waters before him.
Guo'er left, taking more than ten Upper Third Realm cultivators who had infiltrated Great Jin territory from the Wild Spirit Land. They became a cluster of streaking light and swiftly vanished into the sky...
The light flickered in and out of sight as it headed straight for the breach in the restraining formation that Big Black had torn open... as though they had coordinated perfectly with Big Black.
Master Ming knew this was a carefully staged performance arranged by Bai Ye of the Eleventh Guardian City... He was proclaiming to the world that everything in Great Jin's Southern Borderlands was the work of the fiends within the Wild Spirit Land! The Wild Spirit Land was Central Earth's foremost enemy!
A streak of sword light landed, followed closely by a burly figure who had traveled from afar on the wind...
Huang Jiu and Han Wu had returned.
"Boss Ming! Why the long face? Didn't you kill enough to satisfy yourself?"
Han Wu shook his right arm, which had only just begun to heal. "I smashed a chunk off that Investiture Stele the Liu Clan treasured on Mount Yuekong with one punch... Heh, and those Sixth and Seventh Realm small fry stationed at the branch sect below Mount Zhilin, one punch each! Hahaha..."
Huang Jiu was beaming too, flicking aside the stray hair over his forehead with a showy flourish... "That Taihua Sect has been strutting around the Southern Borderlands all these years. I cut down more than a dozen of their big names... But I missed the Wild Spirit Land group's ambush on the lord of the twelfth Guardian City. Judging by the traces afterward, it was quite interesting! More than three hundred Attendants and Martial Warriors of the Twelve Guardian Cities died..."
Master Ming asked quietly, "Have you gathered all the materials to repair your bonded flying sword?"
Huang Jiu fell silent for a moment, his expression complicated, then took out the half of the Dustless Sword that still had its hilt... "I've gathered them all, but I made an agreement with that damned traitor... He gets the sword tip. I brought back the hilt, which might have Shameless's remnant soul attached to it."
Master Ming took the broken sword and removed a deep-blue starstone from its hilt. "Take the broken sword back and let Old Skeleton examine it properly... Lü Bufan is a disciple Wei Wuchen chose as well. Have the cripple forge a weapon and set it aside for Lü Bufan!"
"Mm..."
Master Ming continued gazing at the distant landscape beneath the sky... Then he said softly, "This time... we still suffered an utter defeat."
Huang Jiu hesitated for a long while before finally saying, "I think... letting that fellow Bai Ye carve out his own territory in Great Jin and become a thorn in the side of the Great Jin Dynasty and its Four Great Immortal Sects might not be such a bad thing..."
Master Ming shook his head with a smile. "Bai Ye thinks so too... The laughable part is that Guo'er and the Wild Spirit Land think the same thing! That... makes things a little troublesome!"
The trouble in Master Ming's eyes, Bai Ye, was at that moment kneeling serenely on an ordinary meditation cushion, with a pot of Immortal Rejuvenation Tea on the low table before him.
"Excellent tea! No wonder it's worth three hundred spirit stones per tael..."
Bai Ye set down his teacup and spoke with a broad smile to Xu Yi, the deputy sect master of the Taihua Sect on Mozi Mountain, and a supreme elder of the Liu Clan of Mount Zhlin seated before him.
Xu Yi, the Taihua Sect's deputy sect master, smiled faintly. "You flatter us, Lord Guardian... It's merely a mountain delicacy, just right for nourishing your injured internal organs..."
Bai Ye sighed. "What a pity about Guardian Fang Yun. He is the fourth of the twelve guardians to be murdered by the Wild Spirit Land in five hundred years... The Wild Spirit Land will ultimately become a grave threat to us all!"
The Liu Clan supreme elder, who had been silent beside them, shook his head. "Such matters have never allowed perfection! Ever since Central Earth stabilized, the immortals of the Upper Realm seem to have been unwilling to interfere too much with the workings of the Great Dao in the mortal realm... Only a balance of yin and yang can keep the four poles stable! Tolerating the existence of a dark place in the mortal world such as the Wild Spirit Land is also an expression of the immortals' care for the entire mortal realm..."
Bai Ye clapped softly... "Wonderful, wonderful! Elder Liu, your eyes burn bright as torches. With a single remark, you've revealed the heavenly secret of how the immortals hold the Great Dao in their hearts..."
The Liu Clan elder nodded slightly. "It is only the shortsighted people of the mortal world and those ordinary, ineffectual folk who cannot see through this. They merely grumble in secret about why the immortals do not descend and wipe out the Wild Spirit Land outright... How could they know that, if the immortals wished to erase the Wild Spirit Land, it would surely be as easy as turning over a hand! But who can know what harm that would cause to the workings of the Great Dao throughout the mortal realm? A pack of ignorant fools..."
Beside him, the Taihua Sect's deputy sect master raised his celadon teacup and took a gentle sip.
Bai Ye smiled. "Among Great Jin's Four Great Immortal Sects and the Four Great Guardian Cities... who, whether on the mountains or below them, doesn't know that Mount Zhilin enjoys the immortals' greatest favor? Only the Liu Clan sees these matters most clearly!"
The Liu Clan elder inclined his head slightly without showing much pride and said, "This time, our two Immortal Sects and two Guardian Cities suffered considerable losses... Our sect master is already negotiating with the Great Jin court to see whether we can recover some of those losses... The taxes and tribute that Great Jin's Southern Borderlands owe the court should be waived for the next ten years!"
Bai Ye pondered in silence.
A thought stirred in the otherwise unruffled Taihua Sect deputy sect master's mind... "Fellow Daoist Liu! In that case... has there been any news concerning the new Immortal Venerable who may descend to the mortal realm in the coming days?"
The Liu Clan elder smiled proudly. "Naturally. The Jinhu Immortal Abode remains under the protection and care of our Liu Clan. Within these next three days, we should receive word!"
Xu Yi, the Taihua Sect's deputy sect master, showed a slight change of expression, then said with a smile, "In that case, we must all prepare our tribute and make ready to pay our respects to this newly descended Immortal Venerable..."
Bai Ye smiled. "The previous Immortal Venerable nobly gave his life to protect the mortal realm from slaughter by the fiends of the Wild Spirit Land... I wonder whether the immortal descending this time will avenge him by sending troops against the Wild Spirit Land and Two Realms Village?"
Xu Yi, the Taihua Sect's deputy sect master, nodded. "But the Southern Borderlands are unsettled, and the flames of war have only just died down... If the northern frontier troops and the Immortal Sects' armies are drawn here again, I'm afraid the people under our rule will suffer..."
All three spoke softly and sipped their immortal tea at leisure. Each harbored a hidden agenda, each entertained different thoughts...