Volume 3, Chapter 29 – Mutation

“Chen Yuchan…”

At the same time, Bai Xiang was also looking into this person’s information.

She wasn’t spying on Bai Shengju, of course. It was just that Han Yuanfeng had brought her a piece of bad news—

The divine-vein demon they’d been keeping in a jar had dropped dead.

“I already did everything I could to stimulate it into producing neural responses.” Those were Han Yuanfeng’s exact words in his report. “But something was wrong… there was no reaction at all. I thought I’d messed up the parameters, but when I finished checking them and came back, it had turned into a puddle of thick sludge!”

“Had it reacted before?”

“A little.”

“What does it seem like to you?”

“I think it’s a bit like ‘shutting down’. It used something like a hunger strike to kill itself and destroy its own body.”

“The good news is, you don’t have to deal with all the scientists rushing in from every corner of the Nine Provinces anymore.”

“Don’t joke about that, Dao Lord Bai! This is without a doubt a demonic spy! And we haven’t managed to study anything from it at all! This is a very serious situation!”

“If those big shots aren’t in a hurry, what good does it do for you and me to panic?”

“Ah, Dao Lord Bai…”

“All right, enough. You took part as well, so report it to your Dao Lord as soon as you can and have Liangzhou put proper defenses in place.”

Normally, you couldn’t get a signal from Qizhou all the way to far-off Liangzhou. But since Han Yuanfeng was leading a long-distance team, of course he’d come prepared; he’d temporarily applied for a long-distance SIM that could call back.

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Naturally, Han Yuanfeng had already planned to do just that, but getting Bai Xiang’s approval was still a good thing. He also sold her a piece of information. “Dao Lord Bai… after this report, our Dao Lord may try to get in touch with you.”

Which was why Bai Xiang was now looking up “Chen Yuchan”.

Some things really did give you a fright once you started digging. Bai Xiang couldn’t be bothered to look at whose dojo Chen Yuchan had taken over from. Only one line caught her eye—“once temporarily resided and traveled in Chilong, Qizhou.” Combined with the name “Yuchan”—“Jade Cicada”—it was hard not to let your thoughts wander.

Yuchan, Yuchan.

Female, name matched, age matched, and her base was in Liangzhou—the very place Bai Shengju had felt comfortable letting Bai Qingmin run off to for so many years without a care.

Bai Xiang didn’t believe the world contained that many coincidences. If you put all these pieces together, that Chen Yuchan was very likely Grandpa’s lover from back in the day.

The root, in other words, of where her little aunt Bai Nianchan’s name had come from.

Hmm…

So did that mean there might be a Fourth Uncle and Fifth Uncle waiting in Liangzhou too?

Trying hard to recall what Bai Shengju’s expression had been at the time, Bai Xiang felt she really couldn’t say for sure.

Still, they would definitely have to go to her about Bai Chenyu’s matter.

She thought it over again.

The fact that Grandpa hadn’t brought it up these past few days didn’t mean he didn’t care. He’d just been sunk in the grief of burying his little daughter and hadn’t come out of it yet. Once he did, he would certainly worry twice as much about Third Uncle Bai Qingmin, fretting over how he was doing in Liangzhou.

In that case, they’d have to trouble Hongchen Dao.

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No one else would do; they couldn’t count on any of the government departments to help them now. If this Chen Yuchan really did know Grandpa, all the better—it would save them a lot of explaining.

Once Bai Xiang finished browsing through Chen Yuchan’s information, she started weighing whether to tighten cooperation with Benling and Shangqing.

On the surface, they had half a year. But there was no way Yujing would just let Shenming Sword Dao play local tyrant in Maozhou. Leaving aside that the letters of authorization, warrants, seals and so on all had to go through proper channels, afterward they would definitely also appoint a string of departmental officials to come take office.

For instance, the State Chancery, the Inspectorate, and the Transport Directorate—bodies every provincial jurisdiction had.

The State Chancery held political authority and military power. The Inspectorate served as the Imperial House’s eyes and ears. The Transport Directorate was in charge of logistics and transport. None of these units could be dispensed with, and there was no way they would hand over the power to appoint their personnel to Bai Xiang.

She wasn’t a State Governor.

Even Fang Xiaochun had his hands tied by all sorts of constraints when trying to get things done and had to care about the opinions of people like Xu Shilin the Inspector. Shenming Sword Dao—even if it truly had the strength to rank among the “Nine Dao” or even the “Ten Dao”—at most would be on an equal footing with Maozhou’s State Chancery.

So this so-called half-year window probably only meant they were allowed, for the time being, neither to answer dispatches nor heed proclamations—left to free-range.

In such circumstances, if they didn’t hurry to develop their own power, by the time Yujing’s appointees arrived and all the institutional frameworks were set up, they’d likely be sidelined entirely.

Which meant they needed people.

Even if they could pull in laborers from Luohou to do the heavy building work, they’d still have to appoint enough trustworthy people to fill all kinds of mid-level posts.

Only by putting that framework in place could they resist Yujing’s attempts to reshuffle things. That was the only way they’d survive the half-year without being slowly cut to pieces by soft knives.

The Bai family alone couldn’t produce that many people, so they’d have to second them from allies.

But that still wouldn’t be enough.

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Benling and Shangqing, after all, specialized in martial training; they didn’t have many disciples skilled in administration. Even if they had suitable candidates, they would keep most of them for themselves. In these talks, the manpower Bai Xiang could get from them would probably be very limited.

The Demon-Suppression Directorate, on the other hand, could be roped in.

She thought again of that layer of connection with Tao Shuohua.

Yu He and the others… those people were old hands. Asking them to do this sort of work long-term was a no-go, but for a short time, they could each play multiple roles.

“I still need to go south as soon as possible,” Bai Xiang muttered, frowning.

On one hand, to win Fuhu Temple over; on the other, she wanted to understand what sort of cultivation systems existed outside the country.

This world wasn’t one where only Great Yu had transcendents. Not to mention the truly distant ones, even nearby there were the Western Wu ancient clans—branches of tribes that had survived from the age when demons ruled the world. They held “sacrificial rites” and “shamanic arts” in their hands, possessing all sorts of mysterious abilities.

There were also various “outside paths”, like Luohou’s “hard-hitting” style or the Sami Union’s “qigong”. People said they were a far cry from the brilliance of Sword Dao and sneered at them as mere “peculiar minor tricks”, but they were still directions in their own right.

Bai Xiang’s primary task now was still to explore new paths on the way of qi, so she was very interested in these crooked, unorthodox methods.

Who knew—

They might just inspire something.

There was no telling with things like this.

By her reckoning, that special envoy team ought to have arrived already.

If their information network was any good, they should already know what had happened over in Yujing.

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She was very curious what their faces would look like when they met…

Amused by that thought, Bai Xiang couldn’t help but curve her lips.

But she quickly frowned again as her phone suddenly started to vibrate.

“What is it?” She picked up as she rose to her feet and headed downstairs.

Because the call was from Yu He.

An old partner under the Demon-Suppression Directorate, and one of the main forces of the Maozhou pioneering team.

She knew Yu He’s temperament well—if he hadn’t run into a problem he couldn’t handle, he would never have called to bother her.

“Ahem!” Yu He coughed once on the line, and it sounded like he spat to the side.

Bai Xiang remembered perfectly well that there was nothing wrong with his throat, and her brows furrowed at once. “You’re hurt?”

“I’ll live…” Yu He sighed. His voice sounded very hoarse.

“But I’m afraid you’re going to have to come over in person.”

“The south.”

“There’s something in these woods that’s not easy to deal with.”