Four trails of footprints, some deep and some shallow, marked the muddy mountain road.
After returning home, Great-Grandfather lay down and fell asleep. He did not wake until six days later.
He sat on the edge of the bed and called Cui Jiuyang over.
"Jiuyang, the old man was right. I wronged you."
What could Cui Jiuyang say?
Everything he had experienced over the past few days had far exceeded his imagination. That earlier earth-shaking battle had been a blockbuster no movie could ever match.
All he could say was, "It's all right, Great-Grandfather. We're family. You only called me over to help, and nothing much happened to me. You haven't wronged me."
Cui Chengshou's face was as pale as gold-leaf paper. Though he had survived, clearly less than a tenth of his cultivation remained. For a man as fiercely arrogant as he was, who knew what he felt inside?
Cui Jiuyang's words brought him some comfort, and he waved him away to attend to his chores.
Over the next few days, Cui Chengshou shut himself indoors, taking up his brush to write page after page, producing stack after stack of tiny, meticulous script.
As he wrote, he sometimes laughed aloud, sometimes cursed furiously, sometimes sighed with emotion, and sometimes wore a face full of murderous intent.
It made Cui Jiuyang suspect that the beating had damaged not only his dantian, but his brain as well.
A month later, just as Cui Jiuyang could no longer restrain himself from asking Great-Grandfather when he could return to a hundred years in the future, Great-Grandfather walked out of his room carrying three bound books.
He handed them to Cui Jiuyang. "The first is The Eight Extremes, the second contains the insights from my years of cultivation, and the third records what I saw and heard while traveling the world."
Cui Jiuyang looked at the three books in his hands and felt they were almost too heavy to hold.
He had seen both Great-Grandfathers strike Drought Ghosts down with lightning as easily as slaughtering chickens. He had also witnessed what it meant for a single thought to change the colors of heaven and earth and set thunder roaring in all eight directions. Now the extraordinary book Great-Grandfather had cultivated from, along with his cultivation insights, lay in his hands. How could he not be thrilled?
He was about to speak when Cui Chengshou pressed down on his hand and drew him over to sit in the courtyard.
"Ahem. There are two things I must tell you first. One, you can't go back. Two, you haven't long to live." Still pale, Cui Chengshou coughed and delivered those two statements without preamble.
By the end of the first statement, Cui Jiuyang's face was paler than his gravely injured Great-Grandfather's. By the end of the second, his face had gone from white to red, then from red to livid green. He nearly leaped to his feet!
"What did you say?!" Cui Jiuyang demanded.
Cui Chengshou patted his leg, signaling him not to panic. "Haven't I just passed The Eight Extremes on to you? The solution to both problems is in there."
Only then did Cui Jiuyang settle back down and patiently hear him out.
"Sealing the Drought Ghost inside you would shorten your life by fifty years... Ah, don't panic. Under those circumstances, if I had ascended, I could easily have restored the years you lost."
"But the old man ruined my calculations and kept the Drought Ghost from being fully sealed inside you. Still... the Drought Ghost's yin energy really did complete a full circuit through your body. Otherwise, the old man couldn't have used its power."
"With your ordinary flesh and blood, how could you withstand that chilling ghostly energy? That's why I said you haven't long to live."
"As for not being able to go back... isn't that obvious? In this state, how could I possibly send you back?"
Cui Jiuyang's gaze shifted of its own accord to the three books in his hands.
Watching his great-grandson, Cui Chengshou smiled. "Exactly, exactly. Why not cultivate it yourself?"
"Reach ultimate unity, and you can purge the malign yin that entered your body. Then you can live to thirty.
"Reach second extremity and draw yang into your apertures, and you can live to forty.
"Reach the third and fourth extremities, and you'll have a normal lifespan. You can subdue demons, capture monsters, and travel the world.
"Reach seven extremes... and you can reverse the Heaven and Earth Creation Art once more, returning to that world a hundred years hence that you long for so dearly."
Cui Jiuyang's hands tightened unconsciously around the three books.
"I can remain lucid for another nine years. During those nine years, I ought to marry and have children, keep cats and play with dogs, and savor the pleasures of mortal life. Nine years from now, I'll become one of the living dead and be buried in the ancestral graveyard."
"When that time comes, visit me if you wish. Before then, do not return, or the auras of our Eight Extremes cultivation will draw one another in, harming us both. If something truly urgent comes up, write home."
"Go. The world is vast, and its opportunities are endless. You and I share the same fate. One day, you too can attain the eight extremes."
A few days later, Cui Jiuyang left the village with his pack on his back. Behind him, Cui Chengshou stood beneath the eaves, reciting the opening line of The Eight Extremes to see him off.
"Above, below, and the four directions are space; all ages, past and present, are time. He who attains the eight extremes commands the universe."
From then on, the world had one more wandering occult adept, single-mindedly seeking the eight extremes so that he might command the universe.
Volume Two: Blood and Fire Quell the River
Opening verse:
Iron divination parts the turbid from the clear; turtle patterns secretly bind the spirit of the Ji River.
Now through the sluice gates, I quell the Water Palace, daring to demand peace from the flood dragon's court.
Chapter 13: The Canal
The Yan and Si tributaries flow beneath Mount Lu, meeting the Ji and branching north and south.
-These words, recorded in the "Treatise on Rivers and Canals" in the History of Yuan, described how the grain-transport canal of Jining Prefecture connected the three great waterways of the Wen River, Guang River, and Si River from north to south. This opened waterborne transport throughout western and southern Shandong, greatly facilitating the Yuan court's plunder of the Divine Land's resources.
Ever since the Yuan Tartars dug this canal in Jining, through the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties, boats had come and gone at Jining Prefecture's canal docks amid the clamor of men and horses, making the old city ever more bustling.
Grain transport drew wealth, and wherever wealth gathered, people inevitably gathered too.
And people had a hundred different motives and a thousand different thoughts, spanning the three teachings and nine streams, of every imaginable sort.
Thus gods, diviners, shamans, demons, devils, ghosts, monsters, and every breed of lurking fiend naturally gathered here as well, feeding on human hearts as they cultivated their way toward heaven.
Cui Jiuyang, who scoured the world for opportunities, naturally could not pass up such a place.
At that moment, he sat upright and solemn by the roadside, a small square table before him. A taiji-and-eight-trigrams diagram covered the tabletop, which held every tool of a diviner's trade: a fortune-stick cylinder, the Compass, a writing brush, rough paper, divining stalks, an old almanac, copper coins, the Book of Changes, and more.
Beside the little square table stood a tall banner bearing eight large characters: "Unerring pronouncements; dispel worries and avert calamity."
Some time had passed since Cui Jiuyang left his home village to make his way through the martial world.
At first, naturally, everything had felt unfamiliar. But after so much time, he already considered himself half a man of this century past.
Though he still dreamed at night of playing games online and scrolling through funny posts on his phone, upon waking he usually only smiled, no longer sighing in heartache.
Having come, he might as well settle in. As the old saying went, he was already here, so he might as well make the best of it.
In just two short months of telling fortunes in Jining Prefecture, Cui Jiuyang had already won tremendous renown.
Everyone was saying that an extraordinarily capable fortune-teller had arrived on the street beside the docks. He had only been in Jining City a few days, yet he had already saved two lives!
The first was the wife of Wang Dali, who lived on the western side of the city.
Wang Dali had been lonely and destitute since childhood, but he had grit. In his twenties, he had earned enough money to buy a carrying pole by hauling heavy sacks at the docks with the strength of his own two arms.
A carrying pole did not cost much, really. Thirty large copper coins could buy a first-rate mulberry-wood pole, and seven or eight days of hauling sacks would surely be enough to save that sum.
But the carrying pole in question was not merely a carrying pole.
It also included the large baskets at either end and the hundred kinds of sundries inside them: needles and thread, cloth scraps and patches, candy melons for children, pumpkin seeds and dried walnuts, assorted pastries, paper kites, clay people and clay dogs... whatever anyone wanted, he had it.
Wang Dali truly knew how to endure hardship. After earning his starting capital hauling sacks at the docks, he turned to peddling goods through streets and alleys. His big feet carried him all over Jining Prefecture, north, south, and everywhere in between. Wind or rain, bitter winter or scorching summer, he went out to do business all the same.
He had his own business philosophy. There are peddlers everywhere, but they stay home when the weather's bad. If I go out, won't that money fall to me? A little hardship, a little exhaustion-so what? I can't complain that money weighs too much in my hands, can I?
Within a few years, he had built a house and married a wife.
But one persistent worry kept Wang Dali from being happy.
They had been married for over three years, and his wife still could not conceive.
In that era, how could a household have no heir?
So Wang Dali found fault with everything his wife did at home, and spoon kept knocking against the rim of the pot between the two of them.
One day, after arguing with his wife, Wang Dali went out to peddle his wares. Depressed and unwilling to go home, he filled both baskets to the brim and decided to head toward Dongping County, spending ten days or half a month making the rounds of its markets and villages.
That was what he planned, and that was what he did. But as he stalked away in a huff, he forgot how the argument with his wife had ended.
After their quarrel that day, Wang Dali shouldered his carrying pole and headed out. Though his wife was still angry, she cared about her man, so she asked stiffly, "Where the hell are you going?"
Wang Dali was angry too, and shot back, "To jump in the river." With that, he lowered his head and walked out.
He carried his baskets off toward Dongping County. When he did not come home for one day, his wife cursed him a little. When he did not come home for two days, she cursed him a little more. But when he stayed away for seven days straight, she began to worry.
That stupid man has a one-track mind. He wouldn't really have jumped into the river, would he?!
She was frantic. She searched everywhere along the canal, but however many people she asked, nobody had seen a corpse floating in the river.
His wife grew anxious and agitated, and the more frantic she became, the less she could see any hopeful explanation.
That man is proud and determined to save face. If he jumped into the river, he certainly wouldn't do it beside Jining City. He must have gone far, far away, where nobody could see him jump!
But if he died somewhere far away, where am I supposed to find him?!
After that, she stopped searching and spent every day at home washing her face with tears.
As it happened, when Wang Dali returned from Dongping County, he passed right by Cui Jiuyang's fortune-telling stall.
Cui Jiuyang saw this travel-worn man carrying his baskets, yet an aura of mourning rose from his body. It puzzled him greatly.
He had already made some small progress in cultivating The Eight Extremes. Though he had yet to attain first extremity, calculating the fortune of an unfortunate soul on his fingers was already well within his abilities.
That calculation revealed something terrible: there should be a death in this man's household, and the person would die today!
He hurriedly called out to stop Wang Dali.
"Hey, you rough fellow! Disaster is hanging over your head, and you don't even know it. Where are you going with that carrying pole? Can it bear the head of a coffin?"
Hearing the fortune-teller suddenly utter such frightening words, people in the street stopped to look, exchanging glances. But Wang Dali was the only person present carrying a pole.
Wang Dali had a blunt temper. How could he put up with that? He wanted to go over and curse him out, but seeing that Cui Jiuyang was respectably dressed and did not look like someone stirring up trouble, he restrained himself and asked, "Sir, why are you cursing me in broad daylight?"
Cui Jiuyang pointed to the seat before his little square table. "Please sit and hear me out."
Wang Dali wanted to leave, but what this fortune-teller had said was truly outrageous. He had to get to the bottom of it.
Besides, so many people were watching. Proud as he was, he did not want to slink away.
Cui Jiuyang and Wang Dali sat facing each other. Cui Jiuyang asked, "Have you been away on a long journey?"
Wang Dali nodded. "Yes. Anyone can see that. I'm a peddler. I travel through streets and alleys. It's perfectly normal for me to go a little farther afield."
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