Great Spirit Courtyard [This Book Has Been Signed]
The two on the mountain neighboring Yu Tunzhou were a Daoist True Lord and a Buddhist arhat who guarded the Luofu Grotto-Heaven.
Compared to that guardian, those two were the Grotto-Heaven's pillars that held the seas steady, its final line of defense.
As a disciple of Evergreen Mountain, Xie Linchuan was required by its rules to visit them at an appropriate time.
"Both seniors are very refined and kind," Yu Tunzhou said sincerely and earnestly.
Hearing that, Xie Linchuan had no more reservations. He turned and hurried toward his own "territory."
Only then did Yu Tunzhou remember the copper coin, but after a glance at Xie Linchuan's busy figure, he decided to bring it up that evening and threw himself back into his great undertaking.
At four in the afternoon.
Yu Tunzhou finished clearing the last stretch of the water channel and opened the sluice gate. The water, which had been held back by mud, branches, and leaves for so long, seemed to come alive, suddenly rushing out and washing past the boy's feet.
Standing at the channel's mouth, Yu Tunzhou let out a long breath. Watching the water flow freely again was like seeing the vegetable garden behind his house put in perfect order by his own hands, and a satisfied smile appeared on his face.
He bent down, cupped some clear water in his hands, washed off the mud, and climbed onto the bank.
The old residence had been derelict for years, but now it was quite crowded. From time to time, disputes of varying intensity even broke out over "clearing territory," with neither side willing to give way.
This confirmed Yu Tunzhou's thinking: the town's thirty-nine households had never been a single, solid block. Each had its own designs, and their internal strife was in full swing.
From beginning to end, though, no one had come to contest the water channel with him. Yu Tunzhou figured that, aside from the deterrent he had provided that morning, it was probably more because the channel was mostly full of mud, branches, and leaves that no one had tried to snatch this "thankless chore" from him.
As he pondered, golden light suddenly flowed through his mind. After being worked on for most of the day, the [Refining the True] he had obtained from the Zhang Household appeared "before" him in a completely new form.
The string of golden characters wavered slightly, and, as though the golden light had been covered in dust, their true forms revealed themselves one by one.
Yu Tunzhou focused and looked closely, unwilling to miss a single detail. Yet the meaning contained in just the first character was nearly "endless," leaving his eyes unable to take it all in and his mind reeling. Even straining with all his might, he could make out only that first character:
"Change."
Yu Tunzhou's mind trembled.
Could it really be the Book of Changes Senior Zhang had spoken of?
Then the golden characters returned to their former appearance, shimmering with flowing colors, their mysteries concealed within.
Yu Tunzhou took a deep breath and suppressed the agitation in his heart.
It was the character for "change"!
This method was definitely connected to the [Book of Changes] Senior Zhang had mentioned!
Without betraying anything, he looked around, remembering the experts from the various households who might be watching him at any moment. His expression unchanged, he walked to the back courtyard and continued sweeping.
According to Old Mo, he could not tell anyone about this method.
As Yu Tunzhou swept, he browsed the new [Refining the True] Method Formula in his mind.
According to Old Mo, this was merely a "little Qi circulation trick" popular among aristocratic families and sects. Old Mo himself had not even practiced it back then.
The Method Formula even contained a message from its creator.
[One day, I asked a sage, what exactly is this so-called Profound Qi?]
[The sage replied: It is "true" Qi.]
[I asked again, what is truth?]
[The sage replied: The Great Dao holds truth alone.]
[I rolled my eyes. I should have known this old thing couldn't speak like a human. I turned and left, taking with me the clouds that covered the mountain.]
[Before descending the mountain, I looked back and saw the old thing pointing at me and laughing. Pah!]
[From then on, I searched far and wide beneath the mountain, through winters and summers without count, studying thousands of methods. At last, I attained the Dao at South Mountain. Looking back, I saw that the Profound Qi which had once confounded me was merely the bearing of the Great Dao, no more than the fur on its hide.]
[Alas, the Qi Ingestion methods of later generations are indeed the pinnacle of the Qi refinement techniques of High Antiquity.]
[On a certain day of a certain month of a certain year, under clear skies, I cut off the head of a Supreme Origin Sect grand elder of the Six Paths of Evil and Demons with my blade at the Coming Dragon River. No one witnessed the battle, a great regret.]
[After this battle, a question arose in my mind-the Lower Vehicle of Qi Ingestion refines the essence Qi of flesh and blood; the Higher Vehicle of Qi Ingestion takes in and expels Heaven and Earth Spiritual Qi. Of these, only Heaven and Earth Spiritual Qi is regarded as the lowest grade of Profound Qi. Yet the pinnacle of the essence Qi of flesh and blood is Blood Essence, and the Six Paths of Evil and Demons have long proven that Blood Essence is not inferior to Profound Qi.]
[Does this mean that acquired Qi, at its pinnacle, is also innate Profound Qi? In that case, why must martial artists exhaust every means to seek Profound Qi? With sufficient dedication, they need only temper their own Inner Qi to its pinnacle.]
[I created this method to verify one thing alone—can Inner Qi at its pinnacle become Profound Qi?]
After reading the creator's account, especially the part at the very beginning where he called a sage an old thing and even dared to spit in disdain, Yu Tunzhou was left speechless.
He supposed this senior was also a man of unrestrained temperament...
The name Refining the True meant both "refining true gold in fire" and "practicing the false until it became true," a lofty implication.
The fundamental key to the Refining the True method was tempering Inner Qi.
In the view of this senior with his unrestrained temperament, turning Inner Qi into Profound Qi could be approached by referring to the pinnacle of the essence Qi of flesh and blood. Turning essence Qi into Blood Essence was a process in which a quantitative change brought about a qualitative one, with a purification step along the way.
The Blood Essence method of the Six Paths of Evil and Demons, however, was truly a demonic path, nourishing oneself with the blood of living beings. To turn Inner Qi into Blood Essence, one had to have the deaths of at least ten thousand people on one's hands.
This path could not be taken.
And seeking help from external things, such as heavenly materials and earthly treasures, would go against his original intent and be no different from searching for Profound Qi.
So, after considering hundreds of methods, he finally settled on a method of internal cultivation.
Through breathing and guidance, one circulated Inner Qi. Every passage of Inner Qi through the body was a form of tempering, but it still fell a little short of becoming Profound Qi. That little gap was the difference between clouds and mud.
The crucial point lay in the acupoints and Qi chambers through which Inner Qi flowed: they had to subtly correspond to the workings of the Great Dao.
A miss by a hair's breadth here would lead one a thousand miles astray.
In this senior's eyes, the saying that the human body was a world close to the Dao was no empty talk. All 365 major acupoints and Qi chambers were the foundations of grotto-heavens and blessed lands, and the hidden acupoints that the world did not consider "ground worth fighting over" also held great untapped value.
In the end, he settled on forty-nine of the many acupoints, encompassing the entire cycle, with nothing omitted and nothing superfluous. Not one could be left out.
And he gave the Qi circulation route linking those forty-nine acupoints the name-
Great Spirit Courtyard.
The key to this method was to condense a breath of Inner Qi into a single thread, like a flood dragon coursing through water. Beginning at the Dantian, it passed through many major acupoints and Qi chambers, including Qihai, Sanyin, Yongquan, Mingmen, Taiyuan, Juque, and Zhiyang.
Along the way, it twisted and turned a hundred, a thousand times. First it plunged straight down for a thousand miles to build momentum, then climbed straight upward. As the Qi circulated, speed was paramount: it had to pour forth like a thundering waterfall, sounding like rolling thunder. Once it had built momentum to the utmost, it could climb higher and higher, winding like a flood dragon, until it passed Zhiyang and, like a carp leaping over the Dragon Gate, soared straight up to Shenting!
Just reading the few lines of description in the Method Formula, Yu Tunzhou felt the Qi within him, strengthened by the Dragon Fish, grow increasingly restless!
His heart shook. Could this method truly correspond to the Great Dao?
He suppressed his restless Inner Qi and read on.
The Method Formula stated that following the route through one complete cycle, without the Qi breaking off or becoming sluggish along the way, counted as one revolution.
Two consecutive cycles made two revolutions.
And so on.
The more consecutive cycles one completed, the purer the Inner Qi became, and the wider the Qi meridians grew.
According to this senior's deductions, [Refining the True] should reach a maximum of forty-nine revolutions, subtly corresponding to the Heavenly Dao.
If one could reach forty-nine revolutions in the Qi Ingestion Realm, one should be able to align with some profoundly mysterious working of the Great Dao and transform Inner Qi into Profound Qi.
But if one had already broken through the Qi Ingestion Realm, then even reaching forty-nine revolutions would be meaningless.
The Method Formula also mentioned that circulating Inner Qi along the Great Spirit Courtyard route would cause tides of Blood Qi, so the method placed certain demands on the physical body.
Reading the Method Formula's description, Yu Tunzhou found that of the forty-nine acupoints, nearly all of the first forty-eight served to build momentum, all for the final rush straight to Shenting after passing Zhiyang.
From this, he guessed that the true difficulty of [Refining the True] probably lay in how long the Qi lasted, which directly determined whether it could ultimately reach Shenting.
Yu Tunzhou pondered, then suddenly remembered-
Over most of the day, what exactly had his "change" done to [Refining the True]?
Compared to the previous night, this time seemed simply to have taken longer, and his mind had not even been damaged.
Or was it precisely because it had taken longer that the damage to his mind had been reduced to a minimum?
Yu Tunzhou suddenly guessed at something.
He counted the acupoints along the current Great Spirit Courtyard circulation route again and found that there were indeed not forty-nine acupoints and Qi chambers along the way, but fifty!
"The Great Dao is fifty, heaven unfolds forty-nine, and one escapes for humanity..."
For some reason, Yu Tunzhou recalled that saying.
Applied here, it seemed remarkably fitting.
The additional acupoint was called the Shendao Acupoint. It lay hidden in the center of the back, above Zhiyang, and had replaced Zhiyang as the second-to-last acupoint, closest to Shenting.
After the modification, the final route passed Zhiyang first, sent Qi through Shendao, and followed the great dragon of the spine straight upward until the Qi finally reached Shenting.