Chapter 108

Tang Zhen paused in midair, the myriad of ghosts freezing in waves after him. Their faces were blank, at first, after which a subtle trace of confusion emerged upon them at the same time.

For a minute, many thoughts in his head resembled sparks blowing out in the wind after a fire had been put out, rising up and falling down in quick succession, a complete mess.

He simply could not fathom this. Who had destroyed his actual form?

Yan Zhengming and Cheng Qian?

But for what reason would they have escaped the Sea of Beiming, then not directly followed these people’s trail to Shuzhong, but instead go back to Fuyao Mountain?

Since they couldn’t freely come and go between limitless space as they wanted, how could they have been able to scramble back in such a short amount of time?

Who had sold out that his body was hidden in the Ice-hearted Fire to them?

Within the lives of these sparks, he was mystified. It was too late for him to fly into a rage.

How could this be?

He had clearly trusted no one, and never had he ever had an emotional bond with any living thing in this world. He was alone, grasping authority over infinite ghosts… yet even that hadn’t been entirely foolproof?

The ghosts that filled the sky resembled a group of unaware hanged ghosts. They consecutively stalled in midair. That ghostly and demonic qi curling about them gradually started to scatter, and then they were individually washed clean by some pure, unnamed breeze, fading into ordinary souls and dissolving.

Like a bunch of morning dew that had undergone a night of wind and dust, they quietly returned to the world, drifting clean and free to their next destination, brimming with some sort of tranquil and thought-provoking overtone.

You Liang, gripping Yan Zheng’s primordial spirit sword that had since lost its vitality, witnessed all of this at close range, and was stunned to the extreme by the scene.

Tang Zhen’s primordial spirit continued to retreat from the vanishing ghosts, ultimately forced to merge back into one piece. His powerful spirit could struggle on after losing his body.

He didn’t flee, perhaps because he was too flabbergasted and forgot, or maybe it never crossed his mind in his stupefaction.

“It doesn’t make sense…” he muttered. “The karma of the souls clearly reacted to me. This is impossible… how could something set in stone change? It makes no sense…”

Li Yun was the first to react. “What are you all staring like idiots for?!”

Shui Keng and You Liang responded immediately — right, this guy was the grandmaster of the ghost cultivator path, and there was no one in the world that was more proficient in soul techniques than he. Once he was in his element, he might be held up for a year or two, but then would use some sort of unprecedented means to make a roaring comeback.

The sword You Liang held made a sharp sound, sealing off Tang Zhen’s escape route. Li Yun drew the ornamental sword from his waist, and, together with Shui Keng, charged at the same time.

Tang Zhen’s physical body had just been shattered, and he was getting backlashed by the ghosts that were constantly flying away, his primordial spirit at its weakest point. Not having any time to dodge, he was pierced through by two successive bands of sword qi.

Stiffly arching his head back, he met the Samadhi fires head-on.

Inside that vicious fire, Tang Zhen’s still-puzzled gaze slowly fell to Shui Keng.

His memories from before his death came like a returning tide, hurtling through endless plotting, through his even more endless purgatory-esque period of contest with the Soul-Devouring Lamp, though that last final parting…

And ending on one feather.

That feather swayed lightly in his heart. His lips moved slightly, but he couldn’t say anything.

Some people’s lives were only in either black or white. All the bright colors were like the brief bloom of night flowers to him — floating for a single second, and gone once the bloom was done.

With Shui Keng in his eyes, his battered primordial spirit vanished like smoke.

The path of Heaven was ever-changing. How could its machinations ever be exhaustively calculated by humans?

Perhaps he had understood that truth, in his final moment.

Like he was in a dream, Li Yun practically couldn’t believe that this sword of his had a day it saw blood, and even slaughtered a great demon that had no predecessor, nor would have a successor. He maintained an expression of matchless astonishment, thinking that he could peel off his armor, return home, and put this ornamental, pretty-but-useless sword sword on display forevermore.

While he was unable to orient himself, Han Yuan snarled angrily, “I’m going to die! Things aren’t done over here! Why are you standing there and not helping me?!”

Getting shouted at back to his senses, Li Yun then remembered the mess Bian Xu had left. He landed on the ground from his sword while practically pissing himself; Sacrifice hadn’t actually weakened all that much, and the demonic qi Tang Zhen had just summoned wasn’t intending to go away at all.

Shui Keng immediately turned her head around and re-circled Sacrifice in fire, allowing the near-death Han Yuan to sigh in relief.

Li Yun took out a handful of pills and tossed them into Han Yuan’s mouth without demand for money, accurately blocking his voice behind him. Han Yuan choked half to death on them. Despite wanting to wear his mouth out cursing him, he had no spare space to talk.

Temporary rest and wound medication allowed his open wounds to slowly start to close. What a shame it was that the medicine could cure the symptoms, but not the root. Were Shui Keng to not maintain her guard for one second, Sacrifice would charge out and put another gash in him.

Having reached this point, Han Yuan finally recognized that he might have committed too many sins. How soul-melting this feeling of suffering this death-by-a-thousand-cuts-like pain again and again did not need to be brought up.

With a wave of Li Yun’s hand, the insect army that Tang Zhen had recently knocked down to the ground was renewed with life, jumping all over the terrain to scout for him. The already-broken Demon Extermination Array and the Spirit-Collection Array Bian Xu had set up for Sacrifice were both messaged back to his eyes — with Sacrifice completed, the latter had no present use.

You Liang, a sword cultivator that had absolutely no foundation in array-making, frowned. “Senior, this is not the way to do it. Even if we all expend ourselves into human husks, Sacrifice’s power will still likely be hard to diminish.”

“Uncle…”

A feeble cry came from nearby. Li Yun looked back to see that Nian Dada was entirely smushed beneath a pile of rocks, his head exposed via him pulling himself through a gap with difficulty. “I… I-I…”

Li Yun dug him out with total worry, feeling that Nian Dada would definitely be getting sorted out by his Master later.

Nian Dada crawled out while coughing, covered in dirt and dust. “I know… that this area isn’t far from Mingming Valley. There’s a stretch of barren mountain connected behind the Valley. The cliffs there are a thousand zhang deep, treacherous and uninhabited.”

“How do you know that no one’s there?” Li Yun wondered.

“I fell off during swordflight once. My dad sent the whole Valley out, and only managed to get me back after over half a month below…”

“Alright, keep your humiliating stories to yourself and lead the way. Shui Keng, you and You Liang will help Han Yuan defend for a while, and anyone else that’s still alive will come over and help me. We’re going to make a Spirit-Drawing Array with the wasted Spirit-Collection Array as a basis so that Sacrifice’s brunt will be lured to the barren mountain.”

“Hurry it up!” Han Yuan shouted.

As he flew away with a crowd on swords, Li Yun shouted back, “Bear with it, okay? If you really do get split in two, I’ll put in a good word with our eldest. Maybe he’ll give you the True Dragon Flag.”

Han Yuan was lacking a dragon skeleton, and had been coveting the Flag for a long time. Upon hearing this, he became unbelievably peaceful on the spot, no longer hassling him with obscenities. “Thank you so much, second brother! Don’t any of you worry, I won’t have any trouble holding up for half a month!”

Li Yun got goosebumps from getting thanked by him, refusing to turn his head.

Althought the Soul-Devouring Lamp was shattered, the Valley of the Heart Demon was still open, and the demonic qi on Fuyao Mountain hadn’t gone away at all, either.

Yan Zhengming was mentally connected to the Sect Leader Seal, able to feel that there was yet a consistent flow of demonic qi seeping out of the passage they had just gone through. “Is that ‘Hear the Universe’ of yours telling you how to seal this up?” he asked Cheng Qian directly.

“That isn’t something it needs to tell me.” Cheng Qian retracted Shuang Ren, then turned to look in the direction of the Residence of Peace. “I can already guess what it is…”

Yan Zhengming stared blankly for a second, then realized what he was referring to, immediately becoming astonished.

“You’re not saying that we need to take that rock back to the Tower of No Regrets, right?” His impatience that had been stirred up by the bottomless Valley had since been mostly vented by that earth-shattering sword strike, and he was temporarily back to his usual incompetent state. “A hundred and eight thousand steps, the Tower of No Regrets, going up it… by my ancestors, you’ve got to be messing with me.”

Cheng Qian gave him a look, showing that he was serious.

Yan Zhengming got a massive headache. “It’s not like you haven’t seen the Tower before! I was knocked down after going up one step last time! After we finish with all those stairs, we’ll probably be able to go see our martial grandfather!”

Had this taken place earlier in time, Cheng Qian would definitely have refused listened to his crap, taken the Wish-Granting Stone, and gone long ago. He wasn’t sure when it had started, but he had gradually begun to realize that that sort of attitude was actually, in Yan Zhengming’s view, a type of wounding.

All of his lifelong patience was being overdrafted for Yan Zhengming’s sake. He waited until the other was done whining, then asked without annoyance, “Are you going, or not?”

Sweeping a queasy look at the pervasive demonic qi nearby, Yan Zhengming’s shoulders drooped. “…I am.” Saying so, he gripped his sword, then took the lead in going to the Residence. “We’ll try it out! Dead horse, living horse, there’s forever more problems than solutions… pah!”

His body’s weariness, mouth’s crassness, and heart’s bitterness were all depleted within this slip of the tongue.

Upon arrival at the Residence, that Wish-Granting Stone, originally like a pond of stagnant water, now had a glow inside it that resembled a floating light. It almost looked to be ‘flowing’, simply having an incomparable magnetism.

The glow was akin to a lover’s limpid gaze, automatically ensnaring one within it. In but a short moment of looking at it, he was reaching for it, slightly entranced.

However, right before his hand touched the stone, he finally remembered that the ‘real deal’ was by his side, so that hand made a detour to land upon Cheng Qian’s shoulder in a meandering fashion.

He looped around Cheng Qian’s neck, giving a long, utterly pathetic sigh. “It’s good that you’re here.”

Cheng Qian didn’t rashly go to touch the thing. He had brought the Ice-hearted Fire that Shuang Ren had pried open along with him; one end of the stone was split open, while the other side was more or less intact, once polished by Tang Zhen. He barely managed to stuff the Stone into it, provisionally disconnecting the rich demonic qi that was winding around it. “Don’t mess around. Use the Seal to open the way for me, now.”

Knowing that they couldn’t delay, Yan Zhengming speedily and obediently opened the passage to the Valley, yet also couldn’t press down his own dissatisfaction. “Why haven’t you been affected?”

Across the partition of the half-chunk of Ice-hearted Fire, Cheng Qian shouldered the weight of the Wish-Granting Stone as he took large strides forwards. “How do you know it hasn’t affected me?” he asked without turning his head.

Yan Zhengming was startled, hurrying to follow him. “Really? In what way is it affecting you? If it’s all disorganized and irrelevant stuff, then whatever. If it’s related to me, can you put on a show of it every once in a while and make me happy… what are you walking so fast for?!”

“To make your brain dry off a bit with the wind.”

They found the Tower down a now-familiar road.

Yan Zhengming’s crow beak had once again shown off its peerlessly good looks, as he had hit the nail on the head — there were indeed more problems than solutions. They tested out countless different methods, whether it was trying to use primordial spirit swords to send the Stone higher up the Tower or all kinds of bizarre artifacts, and all of them landed on air.

The one-hundred-and-eight-thousand steps of the Tower went straight into the horizon, their height frightening as they looked down upon all living things, not tolerating the least bit of trickery.

Cheng Qian preemptively ascended a step. All the true essence around him seemed to evaporate, leaving no trace that it had ever been there at all. Before he could even come to stand stably, a burst of brutal astral wind came from the top down, rocking the both of them.

His body-protecting essence already gone like vapor, his limbs were heavy, like they’d been shackled. It made him feel like he was no different from a mortal. He drew Shuang Ren and swept it out horizontally; without true essence, all of his power came from his bones and blood. After the collision, his wrist was harshly jolted, and had he not had many years of relentless training in sword techniques, he would not have turned to the side to shake off the force in time, nearly plummeting from the stone steps.

Yan Zhengming held him up by his middle. “Careful… how do we get up? Our grandfather had to have been a pack mule.”

Cheng Qian massaged his numbed wrist. “Sect Leader, verbally disrespecting your ancestors is still disrespect. If we can’t go up, but need to, what would you say should be done?”

What should be done?

Yan Zhengming’s first answer to that was to haphazardly seal up that crack and leave this difficult issue for later generations, so in the event that an apprentice or grand-apprentice ended up being Tong Ru’s sort of talent, they could be the one to put in that hard effort.

Unfortunately, he still wanted to have some dignity in Cheng Qian’s presence. That idea sneakily circulated his heart, but he didn’t have the cheek to express it, only able to sigh and help the other walk up the Tower.

After going like so for only a hundred or so steps, Cheng Qian’s breathing had since become prominently heavier. He kept incessantly moving his wrist, its bones cracking like they had suffered injury. Each step he took seemed to be filled with lead.

Yan Zhengming stuffed the Stone into his own arms as he also seized Shuang Ren. “Why don’t you speak up, if you’re running out of strength? From this point on, we’ll switch every one hundred steps! No one needs to show off.”

With the Ice-hearted Fire added to the Stone, its weight was about a hundred or so catties. To a cultivator, that was no different from a feather, but right now, Cheng Qian had nearly stumbled from it pressing heavily down and almost sapping his strength, cramping his wrist.

He raised his head to look at the infinite heavenly staircase, smiling painfully. “Without changing back into a mortal, one won’t know how lacking in skill they actually are.”

Yan Zhengming brandished his sword to ward away a streak of astral wind, taking the time to glance at Cheng Qian and tease him. “With how handsome of a Young Master you are, even if you were mortal, who would be willing to let you do the physical labor of carrying a rock?”

Under that topic, Yan Zhengming didn’t wait for Cheng Qian to answer before he was already getting proud delusions, amusing himself with ideas. “If we were all mortals, I’d definitely be a rich landlord, and you, uh… you’d most likely be a poor scholar.”

“…Why a poor scholar?”

“You’re the type that can only spend, never make. You wouldn’t be able to resist being a spendthrift with mountains of money. If someone like you could be wealthy, then the sun will rise from the West. As for me, I’d probably be a lawless, godless fop. A fop coming across a poor scholar wouldn’t be hard. No need to worry about anything; I would straight-up rely on having money and power to get a bunch of lackeys and kidnap you!” he said like he was completely in the right.

“…”

He felt a sense of admiration towards his senior’s self-awareness.

“After kidnapping you, I’d wheedle, cajole, promise, and threaten you. First, I’d settle you in nice and give you whatever you wanted, and then, if you refused to acknowledge your situation, I’d use your family and friends as blackmail. In other words, I’d pester you all day long with no extreme I wouldn’t go to. Tell me; supposing that time allowed, would you give in?”

It was like Yan Zhengming was speaking something as true as him having a nose and eyes. Cheng Qian quietly listened, the melancholy amongst his features slowly going away completely in the wake of the other’s voice.

Upon this Tower of danger at every step, he showed an indulgent smile. “Not likely.”

Yan Zhengming was quite rueful. “Ah, right. You’ve been awful and stubborn since childhood while giving off an air of refinement. You’ve also got a temper as bad as a rock in a latrine. It definitely wouldn’t be easy to nab you. Hm… what should I have done, then?”

“If you’d be willing to try out seduction, that might have an effect.”

By coincidence, a slice of astral wind came up prior to the daydreaming Sect Leader Yan being able to come back to himself after that utterance of ‘seduction’. Sloppily, he used Shuang Ren to block, retreating a few steps back — one side of him went off-balance and narrowly made him roll off the Tower, but Cheng Qian luckily freed up a hand to grab him.

Cheng Qian effortlessly took the Stone and retrieved his sword. “It’s been another hundred steps. Swapping time.”

Then, an inexplicable thought came to him, and he turned to add something on in the midst of getting full-body goosebumps. “…My beauty.”

Yan Zhengming rubbed his nose in embarrassment. “You dare to tease your Sect Leader? I’ve really gotten so used to you, you’re about to revolt… hum. Have you recuperate from that damned inheritance now?”

The smile on Cheng Qian’s face faded away. He went quiet for several steps, a string of messy clangings from the sword and astral wind colliding to be heard.

Right as Yan Zhengming believed that he didn’t plan on answered, the other suddenly did. “In the Da Xue Mystic Site, in order to stave off the soul-painting, I borrowed your sword qi to break open Hear the Universe’s seal by force, and accept the inheritance…”

He slightly paused, his following words blocked by the prohibition. He went quiet for longer still, then whispered, “It almost merged my spiritual consciousness into it.”

“It? Where’s ‘it’?” Yan Zhengming asked on instinct.

The other made not a sound, holding Shuang Ren’s slightly-shivering hilt. After fending off astral wind, the tip of his sword revolved around evenly, drawing out a cyclic circle, after which he raised his head to gaze at the lightless sky above the Valley of the Heart Demon.

Yan Zhengming instantly caught onto something.

Cheng Qian didn’t even pay divine tribulations mind. What would be able to fuse with his spiritual consciousness, and swallow his primordial spirit?

Hear the Universe… the universe?

He watched his back, doubtful. Thinking back to that baseless bell sound he had heard through the wooden sword, he asked, “The ‘it’ in Hear the Universe is… the actual path of Heaven?”

As per standard, Cheng Qian could not answer.

Merging into the path of Heaven… that sounded like ‘ascension’, but Yan Zhengming hadn’t detected much anticipation in Cheng Qian’s tone. When he had just gotten out, the other had even been a little dazed, looking like he was trapped inside a deadland, unable to return to his senses from a nightmare.

He recalled what Han Muchun had once said to him when he was young: “Ascension… is basically death.”

For a moment, Yan Zhengming had the wildest guess: was there actually an ‘upper realm’ for cultivators to ascend to?

‘Ascension’ meant ‘cultivating until awakened’, which meant ‘attaining the Dao. So, had those that attained the Dao reformed an immortal realm out of that ‘upper realm’?

Do those that have attained the Dao also have a distinction between good and evil, and fighting amongst themselves?

But, when beginning cultivation, regardless of one’s sect, was the very first lesson passed down by their Master not ‘the Great Dao is formless, emotionless, and nameless’?

If an individual truly became formless, emotionless, and nameless, their consciousness merging into the Heavens and the Earth, were they still a person? Did they still know who they were? Did they remember the love and hatred they’d had in their previous life? Were they still… alive?

“There’s actually no such thing as attaining the Dao and becoming immortal, is there?” he asked, voice hushed.

Cheng Qian kept silent. Three strong cuts of astral wind suddenly came in a row. He flicked his wrist out, making three strikes, the tendons on his wrist jumping out harshly. His figure, as seen from the back, held an unspeakable devastation.

For uncountable generations of cultivators, ‘eternal life’ was akin to a carrot on a string leading them on, binding them in endless, lonely, bitter cultivation, disallowing them from being productive and fighting over things with mortals.

The majority of cultivating sects, like Mingming Valley, shielded one party, accepted mortal’s offerings, or sold charms to mortals. Excluding a few major disasters, cultivators and mortals had always been at peace.

Those like the Third Prince, wildly ambitious, would even relinquish the throne for the pursuit of eternal life… though he did end up walking a nefarious path.

Yet, if there came a day where these cultivators learned that they were just like mortals, where their end was death and what they sought was nothing more than an imaginary hope, what would become of those superpowers that could wield the elements so easily?

Their abilities were unmatched, readily capsizing oceans. To cultivators, mortals were akin to a group of ants in imminent danger. Nothing existed in the world that could possibly restrain them, all the nobility and generals of the human world a joke. The strong would be respected. The collapse of proper society would be inevitable. How much miasma would this land hold?

Then… had this been the cause of the forebears of the ten major sects having sealed this secret into Hear the Universe, signing the Ten-Party Pledge, and leaving the Celestial Divination Bureau’s existence well alone?

Yan Zhengming had no idea if that all was just his own random thoughts, but there was no way for him to pursue the truth back to its source, in the end.

Cheng Qian would never be able to tell.

“How did you struggle free of it later on, then?” Yan Zhengming asked.

Shuang Ren’s snow-bright swordlight lit up the gloomy Tower of No Regrets. Cheng Qian paused for just a moment as he held the sword, standing in place with it, and tilted his head to gaze deeply at Yan Zhengming.

The latter couldn’t help but think back to his abnormally serious ‘thank you’ from Da Xue, and his heartbeat sped until his mouth was dry.

There’s no need to explain any complex details; you are already my unbreakable tether to this world of red dust.