In the Logging Camp's hidden chamber, firelight danced, illuminating Lian Youming's bright eyes.
He sat cross-legged on the ground, an oil lamp beside him. His gaze darted over the stone bed nearby and the wall illuminated by the flame, counting off the characters carved into it.
"I have a house of three rafters, dwelling at the spirit's source. No sheltering walls on four sides, freely desolate; the myriad forms of all creation serve as brackets, the blue heavens as its tiled roof. After years without leakage, the destined bond is forged. With cultivation perfected and three thousand deeds fulfilled, the fire dragon subdued and the tiger tamed, an immortal walking on land..."
Outside, it was already late at night, and everyone in the Logging Camp had gone to sleep.
Lian Youming still held a wooden box in his lap. Inside was the Yellow Essence Yan Lingyun had asked Qin Yuhu to bring before she left.
After reading the poem, he stared silently at the three exceptionally clear fist imprints on the stone wall for more than ten minutes. Finally, he glanced over the flakes of stone scattered across the bed, his gaze gradually growing inscrutable.
Such fierce, forceful fist power had most likely been left by Xue Hen.
"Could there be some secret hidden in this poem?"
Lian Youming took out a piece of Yellow Essence and put it in his mouth, his gaze falling on an inconspicuous corner of the stone wall.
"Mount Lu?"
"And just what are these people looking for?"
Although Lian Youming had formed some guesses about the secret the Mountain-Guarding Old Man protected from Yang Shuang's scattered remarks, he still had no way of knowing the truth.
Moreover, this secret drew in forces from every side. Whether the White Lotus Sect's people or martial experts like Gong Wuer and Xue Hen, perhaps even Li Da was very likely here because of it.
Savoring the sweetness on his tongue and in his throat, Lian Youming kept sorting through everything he had encountered lately. He had even roughly guessed where the Mountain-Guarding Old Man had gone.
Times had changed. The world was neither particularly large nor particularly small, and since the man intended to withdraw from it, his destination was not hard to guess.
Across this vast Northeast, was there anywhere better than the primeval forests deep in the Greater Khingan Mountains?
"Enough thinking. Train!"
The more Lian Youming turned it over in his mind, the more irritated he became. As essence Qi rose in his belly, he simply pushed off with one arm and flipped to his feet.
With enough strength, heaven and earth would naturally open wide.
If the mountain would not come to him, he would go to the mountain.
As he breathed in and out, drawing breath into his belly, the muscles and tendons throughout his body began to engage. Under the combined effects of his movements and internal breathing, they trembled and stretched ceaselessly, extending into exaggerated curves. One moment, he supported himself on one arm like an inverted seated lotus; the next, his clenched fist hammered down like a vajra warrior pounding a pestle. Then he lunged and extended his arms like a pouncing tiger, or stamped his feet like a trampling horse...
Each of the twelve human figures engaged the muscles, tendons, and bones in different parts of the body. Combined with that strange Inner Strength, they sent ripples across his skin, his muscles knotting like coiled horned dragons.
In the lamplight, an unusual flush began to spread over Lian Youming's skin, wisps of heat rising from it.
Though his build was imposing, he did not look bulky at all. He resembled a leopard stretching every muscle and bone, seemingly holding a terrible force within him. Strange resonant sounds could even be heard coming from inside his body.
External conditioning arts such as the Iron Shirt began with striking the body with external force, supplemented by medicinal decoctions. Through day after day of hammering and tempering, as the force and intensity of the blows increased, resistance to impact would improve as well. Combined with each school's distinctive breathing method, once the muscles and bones braced outward like iron, the practitioner could be considered accomplished.
But his Golden Bell Cover required no external force. Instead, it relied on Inner Strength to stimulate the muscles and tendons continuously. Every breath in and out amounted to an invisible hammering.
Moreover, the longer he practiced the Golden Bell Cover, the more Lian Youming noticed something strange: his weight had become somewhat peculiar.
In the brief half month since returning to the mountain, his build had barely changed, yet he was growing heavier and heavier.
He said this because he had noticed that his wooden bed had taken fewer than ten days to go from sturdy and solid to teetering on the verge of collapse.
There was also the fact that the mules and horses seemed to struggle more than before when carrying him.
And this peculiar change seemed to be continuing.
Lian Youming was somewhat worried, unsure whether this was good or bad.
Unfortunately, Yan Lingyun had already left. Without the young girl nearby, he had no one to ask.
This training session alone lasted nearly half the night.
Only after he let out one last long, scalding breath did Lian Youming's heaving chest slowly settle.
Wiping the sweat from his body, he did not go upstairs, but simply lay down on the stone bed.
His wooden bed could not bear the burden, but surely this stone bed would not collapse too.
Yet later that night, as he turned over in his sleep, his right foot swept against something in his groggy state. With a crack, the stone bed beneath him suddenly flipped over with a clatter.
Lian Youming felt his body abruptly drop. By the time he opened his eyes in bewilderment, he was surrounded by pitch darkness, and a series of strange cracking sounds came from beneath him.
"Cough, cough! What rotten luck. Did it collapse again?"
Lian Youming hurriedly braced his hands and feet outward, only to discover that he was inside a rectangular enclosed space, narrow and cramped, like a coffin.
After cautiously feeling around in the darkness for a while, he picked up something vaguely round beside his head. His fingertips rubbed over it, and when they caught several holes and two rows of teeth, he felt distinctly unwell.
This seemed to be a skull.
It really was a coffin.
As he sniffed the air, he could clearly detect a faint stench of a corpse mingled with it.
There also seemed to be some crushed bones beneath him, digging into him with extreme discomfort.
Realizing this was a sealed space, Lian Youming hurriedly steadied his breathing, propped himself into a half-kneeling position, and kept feeling along the coffin's four walls in an extremely awkward posture.
Remembering that he seemed to have triggered the mechanism by kicking something, he felt toward the bottom in the darkness.
This coffin was probably the space inside the stone bed.
Lian Youming could only feel a surge of disgust at his bad luck. Wasn't this idiotic, hiding a coffin beneath a bed?
But when he recalled that this hidden chamber had originally been an ancient tomb, having a coffin did not seem so strange.
Had the person who remodeled this tomb deliberately designed it this way?
For what?
To hide?
To play dead?
Or to evade enemies?
"Found it!"
Suddenly, Lian Youming relaxed. His left hand had found a disk-shaped protrusion in a corner. Curling his five fingers around it, he kept trying to apply force.
Before long, two cracks sounded, and the stone slab overhead immediately loosened, letting in a glimmer of light.
At the sight, Lian Youming pushed upward with one hand and lunged out the instant the slab flipped.
"Whew!"
Brushing the dust and bone powder from his body and smelling the rotten odor clinging to him, Lian Youming was filled with distaste.
He looked up again at the seemingly ordinary stone bed. After a moment's thought, he picked up the oil lamp, which was nearly burned out, adjusted the wick, and circled to the foot of the bed. His gaze swept over its patterns and carvings as he began examining them one by one.
At last, his left hand touched a stone button at the center of a carved flower. Lian Youming pressed it gently, and the familiar cracking sounds rang out again.
As the stone slab flipped once more, Lian Youming took a deep breath and leaped back into the stone coffin with the oil lamp in hand.
In the lamplight, everything inside the coffin immediately came into view.
A skeleton lay starkly within.
Perhaps because Lian Youming had fallen onto it earlier, most of its bones had already been crushed.
His cheek twitched. Although the corpse's clothing was old and its full appearance hard to distinguish, a pair of horseshoe cuffs still suggested that it was in the style of Qing-dynasty Manchu dress.
Judging by how decayed and tattered the clothing was, it probably did not date back too far.
Lian Youming's gaze shifted, and he soon found the skull again. Bringing it closer, he saw fine cracks covering its forehead, with several shallow dents faintly visible in the middle.
Looking at those shallow dents, he pressed his dry lips together, his gaze shifting slightly. Then he clenched his right fist and slowly lined its protruding knuckles up against them.
This comparison alone showed that, although the size differed, it was clearly a fist imprint. Looking again at the cracks spreading outward like a spiderweb, he saw that the force had remained concentrated without dispersing, something already beyond his ability to fathom.
The longer Lian Youming looked, the more alarmed he became. But seeing that the oil lamp in his hand was about to burn out, he thought to leave first.
Gong Wuer and Xue Hen might already have searched this place. There probably would not be anything useful left.
He turned, intending to operate the mechanism, but just as he turned his head, the corner of his eye suddenly seemed to catch something. His gaze sharpened slightly, and he hurriedly leaned closer to examine the stone wall on one side.
"I possess a method, now passed down to those who come after me, called the art of the striking gaze... To practice this method, one must observe the sun and peer at the moon, tempering extraordinary eyesight. Once mastery is attained, one may subdue an enemy with a glance..."
(End of chapter)
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