The night had deepened, and the moonlight was thin as gauze.
Jiang Fa sat on the edge of his bed, rubbing the jade stone in his hand with his fingertips.
Under the moonlight, a faint, cold sheen covered its surface. It felt icy to the touch, like a piece of ice just hauled out of a deep well.
He turned it over and over, studying it for a long while,
his brows drawing tighter and tighter.
Aside from its decent appearance, he really could not see anything special about the thing.
It had neither carved patterns nor inscriptions. It was just an ordinary, smooth, rounded stone.
"Could it be..."
A thought suddenly flashed through his mind. "Something valuable Qingyu left me?"
Remembering the girl who always wore green, her features as lovely as a painting,
Jiang Fa could not help feeling an unfamiliar ripple in his heart.
Back then, he had rescued her from the river through sheer chance. Who could have known that, from then on, he would have a little shadow trailing behind him that he could never shake off?
That girl had always acted freely and unpredictably. No one could fathom what was going on in her head.
"If it really were something valuable, why would she go to the trouble of sewing it into a protective talisman? She could have just given it to me!"
On second thought, he shook his head again.
Besides.
The sensation of the protective talisman heating up for no reason during the day was still fresh in his memory.
That scorching heat had been anything but ordinary.
Jiang Fa narrowed his eyes, trying hard to recall the details.
His heart suddenly jolted.
"Could it be...? I'll know if I try!"
A bold guess surfaced in his mind.
He quickly sprang to his feet and slowly adjusted the rhythm of his breathing, actually beginning to practice the Mountain-Breaking Stance in the pitch-dark room.
He kept the jade stone clenched tightly in his hand.
He immersed his entire mind in the stance practice, feeling his strength sink and gather bit by bit, flowing into his feet and rooting him to the earth.
Once, twice, until, on the third repetition, the blood and Qi within his body began flowing on their own from practicing the stance, like the burbling waters of a stream.
At that very instant,
the jade stone in his hand abruptly grew scorching hot without warning, giving off a faint light that flickered on and off.
At that moment, the jade stone seemed to have come alive, no longer a cold, lifeless object.
Li Tie and Wang Dahu were still snoring. They were sleeping like the dead, completely unaware of anything unusual happening nearby.
"That's the feeling!"
Jiang Fa's eyes snapped open, delight showing in them as he realized his guess had indeed been right.
This jade stone could sense the fluctuations of blood and Qi within his body!
Watching the miraculous sight before him, Jiang Fa involuntarily leaned his head a little closer.
All of a sudden,
a dazzling ray of light shot out of the jade stone and plunged straight into the space between his brows!
It was astonishingly fast. Jiang Fa had no time to react at all and only felt a stab of pain between his brows.
At the same time, a cold, mechanical voice rang out in his mind:
"Heaven Rank, Upper Grade cultivation art detected: Seven-Colored Glazed Glass Art. Learn it?"
Heaven Rank, Upper Grade? A martial cultivation art?
Jiang Fa stood rooted to the spot, his mind utterly blank.
His heart pounded wildly, and cold sweat had already seeped into his palms.
Although he had no idea what a "Heaven-Rank cultivation art" actually was,
his instincts told him this was anything but ordinary.
"L-learn it," he answered almost instinctively.
The instant he finished speaking,
Boom!
It was as though something had exploded inside his mind.
Countless pieces of information surged in like a flood bursting through a dam,
densely packed words, lifelike images, intricately interwoven routes for circulation through the meridians...
The vast, complex contents flashed rapidly through his consciousness, then swiftly settled, finally condensing into a series of incomparably clear images.
Those images were etched deep into his mind like brands, every minute detail perfectly distinct.
He did not know how much time passed.
The room fell into darkness again.
The jade stone lay quietly in his palm. Its light had faded, and it felt icy once more.
Were it not for those lingering images in his mind, Jiang Fa might even have suspected that everything just now had been a hallucination.
[Seven-Colored Glazed Glass Art · First Layer (Heaven Rank, Upper Grade): 0/1000]
"Seven-Colored Glazed Glass Art..." Jiang Fa murmured to himself,
his voice carrying excitement he could barely suppress.
Through the information that had poured into his mind, he finally understood what this cultivation art did.
It was an extremely profound body-refining cultivation art, divided into nine layers in total.
Unlike ordinary martial cultivation arts, it did not cultivate force, only the physical body.
Using one's own blood and Qi as its foundation, it repeatedly tempered the tendons, bones, skin, and flesh, ultimately refining the body to the supreme realm of flawless glazed glass and physical sanctification.
In terms of rarity and profundity,
the Mountain-Breaking Stance, which the students had treated like a treasure during the day, was simply not worth mentioning beside it.
Jiang Fa clenched the jade stone in his hand, his knuckles whitening from the force.
He thought of Ye Qingyu.
That delicate, lovely girl who always spoke softly and gently, her beautiful eyes clear as spring water.
Who exactly was Qingyu?
Why did she possess such an earth-shattering cultivation art? And why had she hidden something so precious inside a protective talisman?
Jiang Fa asked himself silently, his mind full of questions.
What had happened today was no coincidence!
Qingyu had clearly arranged it deliberately!
Countless questions surged into his heart like a tide, yet Jiang Fa could find no answers.
A long while passed.
He let out a long breath of stale air, carefully wrapped the jade stone back up, and hung it around his neck again.
The jade rested against his chest, its faint chill calming his restless thoughts a little.
An ordinary man was innocent; possessing a jade treasure made him guilty.
He understood that principle.
This cultivation art was far too precious. He absolutely could not mention it to anyone. Once word leaked out, there was no telling whether it might bring a fatal disaster upon him.
The night wind passed through the window screen, stirring a faint whimper.
In the next bed, Li Tie turned over, muttered something indistinct in his sleep, and sank back into deep slumber.
Everything returned to silence.
Jiang Fa lay on his bed, his eyes open as he stared at the roof beams in the darkness, thoughts churning through his mind.
He began recalling every little thing about Ye Qingyu.
Details he had never noticed before now seemed unusual in every way as he thought back on them.
Here in secluded Qingshan County, why would a girl from an ordinary farming family look so fresh and unworldly?
And her father was even stranger.
They had known each other for over a decade, yet now, thinking back carefully, he could not recall the man's appearance no matter how hard he tried,
remembering only that the man rarely left home, seldom dealt with the neighbors, and always carried an indescribable air about him.
He had thought nothing of it at the time, but looking back now, everything seemed strange.
"Qingyu... who exactly are you?"
Jiang Fa murmured softly,
his voice swallowed by the night, with no one answering.
Outside the window, the moon quietly slipped behind the clouds, and heaven and earth sank into utter darkness.