A Needle in the Sea

In Luzhou, the municipal library stood in the new district to the east. Eighteen stories tall, it was a landmark of the district, and a civil engineering grand mage had even been specially commissioned to build it in the abstract shape of the character "庐."

Interestingly, the city had spent years pleading with the authorities to approve the building's height. Qinghuan's prevailing architectural schools held that skyscrapers had no beauty whatsoever and were spectacles built purely for spectacle's sake.

They instead favored using immortal power and modern elements to build magnificent megastructures. Skyscrapers were nothing but piles of civil engineering work, with no technical sophistication whatsoever. A Foundation Establishment master of civil engineering could throw together a frame in a month.

From a distance, the library's exterior did look a little like the character "庐," so residents often called it the Lu Library. Some students simply called it the Lu Library Hall.

The Lu Library's collection was roughly divided into three levels. At the bottom were all kinds of modern books. The middle held Techniques commonly used by Embryonic Breathing cultivators, as well as some Cultivation Methods circulated among the public.

Cultivation Methods and Techniques were distinguished by grade. A fourth-grade Cultivation Method from a Dao lineage often included a fourth-grade Technique, and the highest grade currently circulating in the world was the sixth.

An ordinary fourth-grade Cultivation Method could take one straight to the Purple Mansion Divine Ability realm. Sixth-grade methods were mostly hidden away in the various Xuantian. Above the sixth grade were Immortal Methods, a domain only True Lords could touch.

Since he was already at the Lu Library, Jiang Wangxuan decided he might as well bait the waters while he was there. He used his spiritual sense to have Big Fat Fish gnaw on some valuable Cultivation Methods. Unfortunately, the best were only fourth-grade, and one was an Earth Virtue method.

What a pity. The haul was meager.

Speaking of Cultivation Methods, Qinghuan had a little anecdote about the Immortal Lords. Once, an Immortal Lord had wanted to create a prosperous Qinghuan where everyone was like a dragon, so he had Huaqi teach the masses Cultivation Methods of the fifth grade and above.

Less than a dozen years later, it was said, the True Lords had swarmed the Immortal Lord who dreamed of everyone being like a dragon, blocking him inside Xuantian so he could not come out.

This is the number one, and this is the number two. One plus two equals three.

Wonderful! You have already grasped the supreme truth that one gives birth to two, two to three, and three to all things. Here, this is a sixth-grade supreme Cultivation Method, second only to Immortal Methods. Give cultivating it a try!

His own younger brother Dezhao looked at the ungraded Three Hundred Questions on the Dao as if it were a heavenly book. Give him a sixth-grade Cultivation Method and he would not understand it either.

There were countless absurd little stories like that from the first few centuries after Qinghuan's founding. Many True Lords of long standing had been barred from attending the Mysterious Heaven Joint Consultative Conference at the time.

Your Dao wisdom shocks the world, and your Immortal Methods are beyond compare, but this mortal world of red dust is not something your immortal Dao wisdom should be meddling in.

So please stop making trouble for everyone. Be good, go back to Xuantian, and wait for news!

The top few floors of the Lu Library held all the county gazetteers that could be gathered from Luzhou and its surrounding areas over the past thousand years. They recorded the history of Luzhou.

As the internet had risen in recent years, many voices had called for cities to build their own geographical and historical archives.

Unfortunately, the thirteen hundred years of Qinghuan's passing clouds were too vast for ordinary people, and the great figures in Xuantian had no interest in the matter either.

What history? I am history.

A lot of the things written in your shabby little books were things I casually mentioned. By the time they reached the end of the line, they had almost nothing to do with the original version.

Golden Core True Lords lived fifteen hundred years, those at the Purple Mansion Divine Ability realm five hundred, Foundation Establishment cultivators two hundred, and those below Foundation Establishment a century. Having an ordinary person with a hundred-year lifespan record the history of the great figures of the immortal Dao was rather absurd.

What the immortals of Xuantian needed to record was every open and hidden change in the attainments of the world's many Dao lineages. That was the mighty force that truly belonged to history.

"Big Fat Fish, how is it? Have you found any thread to follow?" Jiang Wangxuan asked, cracking his little whip in the Rising Yang Mansion.

"A bloody capitalist who abuses child labor, a divinely chosen white-feathered person, a useless ox and horse on the assembly line..."

Big Fat Fish seemed to wail and lament, then was fed a mouthful of "mooncake." The whale girl narrowed her eyes in satisfaction and patted her little belly.

"Still hungry!"

"No talking, no food." Jiang Wangxuan turned a page of a travel account and replied irritably.

"Cheapskate! Ahem, ahem, then I'll give you a brief rundown! First..., second..., after that..., and then..."

"You're definitely going hungry tonight!" Jiang Wangxuan felt he was going to be defeated by his own supreme Dao wisdom.

For more than ten minutes, Big Fat Fish had prattled on about nothing but supernatural stories that had as much to do with one another as wind, horses, and oxen. Jiang Wangxuan suspected that some had been made up on the spot from a scrap or two of hearsay.

Though yesterday's pleasant dream had benefited him greatly, the immense terror he had seen in it had left Jiang Wangxuan with an urgent sense of crisis.

What had caused the power in his bloodline to awaken the moment he stepped into Luzhou? That magnificent vision of heaven and earth made Jiang Wangxuan feel that even if the "black tide" was not a True Lord bloodline, it could only be something more terrifying than one.

And whom had He been playing against in the dream? The howling heaven and earth, the crescent moon, or some unspeakable existence?

In particular, there was the moonlight that had shone on him. If the crescent moon had not appeared, He could never have made it to the middle game. He had clearly occupied Jiang Wangxuan's true spirit in the dream, then relied on the divine power of the moonlight to hold out until that point.

Jiang Wangxuan himself had also been fortunate enough to obtain that "moonlight," giving him the silvery-white lunar disc in his Qi Sea.

What Jiang Wangxuan could not put out of his mind was the game played on the nineteen-line stone board, with the "Great Avalanche" and the "Mi Family Flying Dagger" played simultaneously in the lower left and lower right. Perhaps a fellow countryman who had wandered into this world had taught those joseki.

Or perhaps the Immortal Lords and True Lords of this world possessed such wisdom themselves. A nineteen-line board was, after all, only a minor path.

But I was the one who played that game. He possessed me, but I was the one playing.

In the end, He was obliterated beneath the black stone held by that enormous azure hand. What about my ending? To wander into such a vision of heaven and earth and still escape unscathed with an "immortal opportunity" was truly a "divinely ordained lucky break."

The key to the problem, however, remained the mysterious existence currently hidden in Luzhou. It might be a place, or an inconspicuous object, but whatever it was, it had to have an indelible connection to the Jiang Household's bloodline.

At first, he had feared that the black tide would affect his Foundation Establishment and had been anxious and afraid. Now, misfortune had turned into a blessing, but that did not mean the black tide would have no effect on him in the future.

No, the black tide would certainly have an effect. As his cultivation grew deeper, the black tide would grow along with it. It came from his bloodline.

Jiang Wangxuan had a vague feeling that the power of Grand Yin he cultivated, that solidified ray of Luminous White Moonlight, had ultimately triggered the birth of the black tide.

Such were the times; such was fate.

Big Fat Fish could not connect to the dreamscape and could only gather up every legend related to immortals in one gulp. The process was too inefficient, like searching for a needle in the sea.

A bloodline's inheritance had to have a traceable course. The Jiang Household was probably not native to Luzhou, but had moved there from another nearby region.

There was a river to the north, and the lands beyond it could be ruled out. A lineage migrating south to Luzhou would not cross a great river; that made no sense. So, Jiangbei: pass.

With Jiangbei ruled out, the database Big Fat Fish had compiled instantly shrank by nearly half. It seemed there really were many immortal opportunities in Jiangbei!

Jiang Wangxuan's father was an only child, his grandparents' generation had died young, and the family had little contact with any uncles. His own generation had two people with Spirit Apertures, so there was a strong chance his ancestors had included people with Spirit Apertures as well.

Misfortune never came singly.

Luzhou had not produced a native Purple Mansion cultivator in a thousand years, but it had produced Foundation Establishment cultivators in every generation. Leaving aside cultivators who concealed their names, the established Yang Household to the east had produced the most Foundation Establishment cultivators in Luzhou over the past millennium.

The Yang Household was a local established family. Trace it back a few hundred years, and it could call itself the Luzhou Yang Clan. Unfortunately, for some reason, the Yang Clan had been wiped out overnight by a series of calamities.

The world had not been as peaceful then as it was now.

If any of the Jiang Household's ancestors had possessed Spirit Apertures, there was a strong chance the Yang Household of that time would have recruited and supplied them with resources. The Yang Household's former lands, not far east of Luzhou, were the first place he needed to investigate.

As long as that thing was within Luzhou's borders, he would surely sense it.

"Stupid master, by the way, that Foundation Establishment cultivator who returned from elsewhere twenty years ago was a member of the Yang Clan. It was because of him that construction of the new district officially got underway, too."

The Yang Clan? A huge question mark appeared in Jiang Wangxuan's mind. After the Wancheng heaven-and-earth high-speed railway opened, Foundation Establishment cultivators in the cities near Wancheng had all chosen to move there. Luzhou, which had already struggled to retain them, had suffered particularly heavy losses.

Only that Yang Clan member had returned against the tide, something Luzhou had made a great deal of publicity about at the time.

The Yang Clan. He needed to take a good look at its former lands. As an old local snake in Luzhou, the Yang Clan would naturally have drawn Luzhou's good things to itself.

There was another possibility, though. Assuming an ancestor of the Jiang Household had possessed Spirit Apertures, he might not have joined the local powers operating in the open, instead choosing the great marsh to the south.

Several hundred years ago, a "demonic sect" had existed in the great marsh south of Luzhou. Its master had merely learned a few paltry skills in the south, then returned to Luzhou to recruit followers in the marsh.

Luzhou's records were detailed on this point. Trouble had broken out in the south at the time, but Thunder Palace had sent only a few Foundation Establishment cultivators to sink the demonic sect into the great marsh. Although the sect had been destroyed in no time, some of its Cultivation Methods had spread, and there were said to be inheritances related to witchcraft as well.

If an ancestor of the Jiang Household had possessed Spirit Apertures, yet the family now lacked even an Embryonic Breathing inheritance, there was a strong chance that ancestor had not followed the righteous path and could not show himself openly. That would also explain the Jiang Household's present circumstances: its ordinariness.

He would have to spend some time exploring the south too. That was called making bold hypotheses and verifying them carefully.

Jiang Wangxuan soon marked several sights to the east and south that were worth "visiting." All had immortal stories circulating locally, and a look on the spot would tell him how deep the waters ran.

Fortunately, Luzhou was not large. At his current pace, three or four days would be enough to make a circuit. Dezhao was due to receive his Spirit Root implantation, so Jiang Wangxuan also had a legitimate reason to stay in Luzhou for a little while.