Volume 3, Chapter 13 – The Imperial Canon

Skipping over that little episode, she went up to the third floor to the guest room arranged for Han Yuanfeng. The moment she pushed open the door, a thick, pungent smell of reagents hit her.

Formalin?

Probably something with about the same effect.

The room had already been packed with all kinds of experimental apparatus the day before. Han Yuanfeng was standing beside that cylindrical glass vessel, pacing around it, eyes wide as he studied the monster inside.

It was the very same “nerve” that had crawled out of “Bai Chenyu’s” body—it looked almost exactly like a fully stripped nerve trunk, as if some portion of the human nervous system had gained sentience and a will of its own, then used demon arts to wriggle free.

For the moment, the thing had quieted down. Four main root-like trunks of its body were bound in coils and hung in the culture fluid, motionless.

On the nearby dissection table lay “Bai Chenyu’s” corpse. He was face down, the back of his neck exposed, various electrode patches and metal needles stuck all over his body, and the monitor to the side was crammed with charts and data readouts.

“Elder Han.”

Lian Feng didn’t come in. Bai Xiang walked alone to stand behind Han Yuanfeng. “Any insights on this thing?”

“I wouldn’t dare call them ‘insights’!”

Han Yuanfeng suddenly turned to look at Bai Xiang, his eyes shining almost frighteningly bright.

“Frankly… the Hongchen Heart-Refining methods should have been the natural nemesis of this sort of Aberration. But my learning is shallow, I’ve only cultivated that method to the second module, and my own cultivation base is pitiful… I let this thing slip right past me on the way here!”

He straightened up, folded his hands, and bowed deeply to Bai Xiang.

“Many thanks, Dao Lord Bai, for designing this rescue!”

He seemed to think the thing had been coming for him.

That was a misunderstanding, but Bai Xiang had no intention of correcting him.

“Dao Lord Bai must be wondering what exactly this is.” Seeing her silent, Han Yuanfeng assumed she was waiting for an answer, so once he straightened up he hurried on, “I can’t say for sure… I’ve never seen its like before.”

“But I once flipped through a Daoist classic that said our Founder, about a hundred years ago while traveling the wilds to aid villages and subdue monsters, came upon a very strange village. The behavior of its residents was highly irregular…”

In just a few lines, Han Yuanfeng unfolded a long-buried story.

It concerned the seventh Dao Lord of Hongchen Dao, called “Longlou,” Dao-name “Wangchen.”

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One day, while out traveling, he came upon a village and discovered no one working in the fields and not a soul walking the roads.

At first he thought the place had suffered an Aberration attack and sighed that he had come too late, but very soon he realized the village wasn’t empty at all—everyone was at home, snoring away.

Finding this odd, Longlou went to a house and knocked hard on the door, enduring the householder’s angry glare as he politely asked why, with such fine daylight—neither cold nor hot—they weren’t taking the chance to plow their fields and work.

The householder, a middle-aged farmer, shouted that this was just how things were done in their village, and Longlou should mind his own business and stop making a racket.

With that, he slammed the door shut, leaving Longlou staring at the wood.

Any ordinary Daoist, seeing that the villagers could still think and speak normally, would probably have left it at that.

But Hongchen Dao’s focus was the refinement of the heart—and they practiced an extremely radical “wrathful-method heart cultivation.”

What did that mean?

It meant the more you feared something, the harder you trained against it.

Fear fire? Then jump into the flames.

Fear water? Then plunge yourself into the river.

If you’re a coward, force yourself to do outward-facing things.

If you’re indifferent, drive yourself to seek out human affection.

They believed that only by facing the deepest terror in one’s own heart head-on could you grind your heart-aspect into unshakable steel—and with such a heart-aspect, subdue the “heart demons.”

In other words: I will stare directly into the abyss.

In even plainer terms: Daoist grandpa is going to stick his nose into things.

So Longlou didn’t leave.

He quietly found a rooftop, lay down, and rested.

When night fell, he was jolted awake by a noise. Stretching his neck to look down, he saw people coming out of every house, all heading toward the fields.

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How strange.

He instantly frowned.

Working in the middle of the night?

Not that it was impossible, but in this pitch darkness—could they even see?

Taking advantage of the night, he simply jumped down from the roof and slipped into the back of the line. As he walked along, he noticed more and more things were off.

Under normal circumstances, field work would be done by the able-bodied.

Even if there were women, they’d mostly be sturdy, quick-handed types—something an outsider could spot at a glance.

But the people coming out now… they weren’t just adult men, and not just hardy women. There were quite a few elderly folk and children among them.

What were people like that doing in the fields?

Longlou’s suspicions solidified. He followed them all the way out and saw that, regardless of age or gender, every villager was carrying something sharp.

Small blades, scissors, spindles, sickles… even the children had iron wire in their hands, though he had no idea why.

Just as he was puzzling this out, the clouds parted and moonlight poured over the fields.

As if acting on a command, the villagers lined up and went down into the furrows one by one. They used their weapons to slice open their own wrists, sprinkling the fresh blood with sowing motions across the soil.

Longlou stared as the droplets fell into the fields and, in that instant, stalk after stalk of “human-shaped demon grass” burst up—heads down, feet up, shaped like ginseng roots tangled into a crude human form, writhing and swaying in the moonlight.

The sight scared him half to death and instantly triggered the instinctive mechanism of his wrathful-method heart cultivation. He drew his sword and charged into the fields, chopping every villager and demon-grass body into scraps.

“And then?”

Bai Xiang clearly wasn’t satisfied with that. When Han Yuanfeng paused, she couldn’t help urging him on.

“Then nothing came of it,” Han Yuanfeng said, shaking his head. “Every time Ancestor Longlou traveled, he ran into some bizarre event or other. This one wasn’t even especially dangerous, just extremely strange, so he made a special note of it.”

He meant that those demon grasses that sprouted were somewhat similar to this nerve monster, though he couldn’t be sure they were the same thing.

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Bai Xiang asked again, “Did anything else happen to the field afterward?”

Han Yuanfeng shook his head. “Nothing.”

“And the chopped-up remains?”

Another shake. “They sank into the soil and were… assimilated.”

So the trail broke there?

Bai Xiang frowned and looked back toward the glass vessel.

They did have a specimen in hand now, but it seemed that unless this thing was inside a human body, it couldn’t communicate at all.

Studying it slowly would take too long. Naturally, she was hoping Han Yuanfeng could offer more clues.

“Don’t worry, Dao Lord Bai. Let me think.”

Han Yuanfeng leaned against the table, arms folded and brow furrowed in thought, then suddenly snapped his eyes wide. “Oh—I remember!”

Remember what?

Bai Xiang glanced at him, and heard him say, “Dao Lord Bai, have you heard of the Xuan Emperor Canon ?”

Bai Xiang shook her head. “Not really.”

“It’s the Xuan Emperor Canon !” Han Yuanfeng said, looking genuinely surprised. “That heretical Xuan Emperor Canon —the one that divides all things under heaven into ‘Five Worms.’ You’ve never heard of it?”

Oh.

With that, Bai Xiang suddenly had a concrete reference.

There were fragments of this text recorded in the Yuming Library, carved into her heart along with the inheritance.

The whole book was obscure and difficult to understand, but after reading it carefully, she’d found it remarkably similar in principle to the Huangdi Neijing from her previous life.

It was useless for cultivation, though. Bai Xiang had lost interest after a few pages and spent more time later studying various crooked methods, drawing quite a bit of inspiration from them.

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But still… however little use it was, it was the Huangdi Neijing , wasn’t it?

What did that even mean?

And Han Yuanfeng was calling it heretical?

This…

Bai Xiang finally realized something was off.

Many poems and texts from her previous life also existed in the history of Great Yu.

The background might differ here and there, and a few lines might be altered, but the overall meaning was about the same.

So what was going on with this Xuan Emperor Canon ?

It proposed theories equivalent to parts of the Huangdi Neijing , yet here it was condemned as heterodox?

“‘Of feathered creatures there are three hundred and sixty, with the phoenix as their chief; “‘Of furred creatures there are three hundred and sixty, with the qilin as their chief; “‘Of shelled creatures there are three hundred and sixty, with the divine tortoise as their chief; “‘Of scaled creatures there are three hundred and sixty, with the flood-dragon as their chief; “‘Of naked creatures there are three hundred and sixty, with the sage as their chief. “‘Such are the fine types under Heaven and Earth, the tally of all birds, beasts, and living things.’”

Han Yuanfeng recited a passage, then said angrily, “This text classifies all living beings as ‘Five Worms’—even humans are listed as ‘naked worms’ and ‘蠃 worms’! It’s an outrage!”

“But if this defiant doctrine ever had followers, and they extrapolated cultivation methods from it, it would inevitably spawn heretical sects. One of them was called ‘Yuhua’—‘Metamorphosis.’”

Closing his eyes, Han Yuanfeng muttered on and on: “‘When the worm sheds and transforms, it casts off the cocoon to keep the true.’ This sect revered the Xuan Emperor’s teachings and had its believers cultivate demon arts, compressing their true spirit ever inward so that after death, they could break out of the cocoon and ascend in feathered form.”

Break out of the cocoon and ascend?

Bai Xiang frowned, turning to look at “Bai Chenyu’s” corpse, her gaze settling on the split in the back of his neck.

“Exactly!” Han Yuanfeng pointed to the same spot.

“I can’t say whether Ancestor Longlou’s experience was related to this.”

“But this kind of demon art… really does resemble the heretical ways of the Yuhua Sect.”