Volume 3, Chapter 56 – Sun-Chasing Scripture

While Han Yinshuang went to look for Kong Tianbao, Bai Xiang sank into sensing her gains from this battle.

Using Feixiang Heaven to refine a soul was already something she was very familiar with. Lu Qingning had fancied seizing her body, never imagining that Bai Xiang’s body was forbidden ground for any divine soul. The refined “heart-force” she channeled along the meridians in her arms into her treasured sword, leaving only a copy of the memories for herself. She closed her eyes and quietly savored them.

Her first impression was that the memories were incomplete.

Which made sense. Lu Qingning’s physical body had been smashed apart by the giant Buddha. By rights, her soul should have scattered as formless energy and fled, but she happened to have a treasure on her—the jade token called the Immortal-Martial Decree. It was thanks to that token’s shelter that her divine soul survived at all.

And that protection, as far as Bai Xiang could see, had its limits. The token could not preserve her soul in full; it could only keep a portion. As a result, what Bai Xiang refined was a remnant soul, and the memories of a remnant soul were, naturally, not very complete.

But they were enough.

After reading for a while, Bai Xiang opened her eyes, a sharp light flashing in them.

So the Saint-Transition Pill and the Sacred Heart Pill were not created by the imperial house of Great Yu. The true originator of these two pills was the first Dao Lord of the Suzhen Dao, Song Yutian.

Song Yutian, by the current map, should have been from Daizhou, of the Glacier Circuit. It was under his leadership and influence that the Suzhen Dao became the first human Daoist sect to recognize and submit to Sacred Emperor “Gu.”

If the Suzhen lineage wanted to be particular about it, their history was actually older than that of Great Yu.

During the era of demon rule, they did work similar to shamans. They were responsible for presenting human offerings to the demon beasts, transmitting messages on behalf of humans so the two sides could communicate.

When the human tribes grew dissatisfied with the ever-increasing quantities of blood food demanded by the beasts, when they wanted to protest, to resist, it was the Suzhen lineage who soothed the people, gathered their grievances, and went to beg the demon beasts for mercy, negotiating to reduce the frequency of the offerings.

When there were extreme disaster years—yellow earth and great drought, the people unable to live—it was also they who pleaded with the beasts through offerings, relying on their divine arts to borrow wind and rain.

Rеaԁ on КαtRеαⅾіոɡСafе

The reason Song Yutian bore that name was that he was born in a year of severe drought.

Later, when he became the leader of Suzhen, he discovered the young “Gu” during an inspection tour of the tribes. He saw the youth sitting by the river, holding a silver fish and staring off into space, and he drove him away, saying, “The current here is fierce. Get back home! Do you want the Great King to swallow you up?”

Gu looked up at him and said something which, roughly translated, went: “You’re a famed figure in these parts, the youngest ‘ceremonial shaman’ around. When you see someone by the river, instead of thinking to offer him to the Great King, you tell him to hurry home. That clearly means you don’t want the human race to be enslaved by the demons either!”

Song Yutian was utterly shocked. There was a terrifying great demon dwelling in this river, known as the Azure Flood Dragon King. He had been speaking in a hushed voice just now, and yet this hotheaded youngster dared to talk like that by the water’s edge?

Sure enough, the river instantly surged. A colossal flood dragon, a hundred zhang long with silver horns atop its head, burst out of the water, rumbling in a thunderous voice, “Who speaks so rudely upon my river path?”

Song Yutian was petrified, but Gu stood up, pointed at the Azure Flood Dragon King, and asked him, “Is this the monster that waived the last offering and brought us a gracious rain?”

Song Yutian shook his head, and Gu clapped his hands, laughing. “Excellent. Then there’s nothing more to discuss.”

With that, he pulled a gleaming long sword from the belly of the silver fish, leapt alone into the river, and fought the flood dragon king hand to hand, cutting off its head—and its silver horns—right before Song Yutian’s eyes.

Thud!

The gigantic dragon head landed on the bank. Gu climbed up and asked Song Yutian, “I want to slaughter all the aberrant demons under heaven. Will the ceremonial shaman aid me?”

Song Yutian knelt to him on the spot. “The one to end the demon rule can only be you, my lord.”

All of this was recorded in Lu Qingning’s memories—ancient secrets she had heard since childhood within the Suzhen Dao.

Reаԁ oո КαtRеαԁiոgСafе

Whether they were true was uncertain. Still, the Suzhen Dao had no reason to fabricate such ancient tales just to deceive people, and they had indeed occupied a crucial guiding role throughout the evolution of Great Yu’s history. Bai Xiang leaned toward believing these secrets were real.

If there was any discrepancy, it was probably that people back then didn’t speak so elegantly. After all, it was the age of demon rule; the human race had no city-states, tribal civilization had only just begun to transform on a large scale into an agrarian society, and there was no soil yet for culture to arise.

That line “the one to end the demon rule can only be you” had probably sounded more like, “I’m betting on you to butcher those aberrations.”

Song Yutian led his entire tribe to submit to Gu, following him everywhere to wage war on the demon beasts. Along the way, he also practiced the sword path of that era and set his root-method Demon Pool as a “spirit-nurturing object.”

What was a spirit-nurturing object?

That required mentioning an obscure category of Demon Pools: the “spiritual-root type.”

There were two current explanations for spiritual-root type Demon Pools. One was that mountains, rivers, plants, and trees became spirits and grew vivid like the aberrations of Demon Pools. The other was that the Demon Pool’s true Aspect was a plant-spirit monster, likewise containing the essence of sun and moon.

They no longer appeared in the world, but according to Suzhen records, they had been everywhere in that era. After Song Yutian mastered the sword, he believed in and revered Gu even more. To bind Gu’s army to him with greater loyalty, he wanted to develop a pill that would suppress the hidden dangers of pollution in sword cultivators once ingested.

Song Yutian was a shaman by origin, well-versed in the art of herbs and mixtures. And with a root-method Demon Pool that was itself a spirit-nurturing object, he was particularly adept at understanding pharmacology. It wasn’t long before he refined a pill—this was the first generation of Sacred Heart Pills in the human world.

The appearance of the Sacred Heart Pill accelerated Gu’s campaigns and removed the early hidden dangers of backlash in the sword path. After the Yu dynasty was tentatively established, Gu sought Song Yutian out in private and told him, “The old world’s chaos was chiefly due to demon calamities, yet the ruin brought by human sect struggles must not be forgotten. I cannot bestow the honors of a state religion on you, but I can guarantee your sect shall share the same years as my dynasty.”

The meaning was: the old world had been thrown into disorder mainly because of rampaging great demons devouring people, but the internecine slaughter among the various human tribes and sects had also been no small thing. So I cannot properly enshrine your sect as the state religion, nor formally name you national preceptor. At most I can promise that you can keep following Great Yu. However many years Great Yu endures, that many years you will be guaranteed, until Great Yu falls.

This bit of lore didn’t appear in the required history texts; if it did, Bai Xiang had never found it. In the Suzhen records, however, it was called the “Pact of Shared Years,” and it served as the foundational argument for why Suzhen was one of the two supreme Daos.

Reаd οո KatReаdinɡСаfе

It was precisely with the Pact of Shared Years as the highest legal guarantee that Song Yutian, when city-states rose and culture flourished, could rename the sect the Suzhen Sword Dao and lead it to stand above the other Daos, for a time becoming the leader of the sword path.

And with that political correctness as their backing, the Suzhen Dao could intervene time and again in the rise and fall of dynasties, to the point that whoever unified the realm had to, under their guidance and arrangements, marry a woman of the imperial clan, change his surname to Yao, and continue the rule of Yu.

It went on like this until the rise of the Qingping Dao, which shattered Suzhen’s blockade and suppression with absolute strength. Suzhen was forced to pinch its nose and recognize them; that, however, was another story entirely.

The Suzhen Dao’s power was immense—so great it could interfere with court decisions.

The Saint-Transition Pill, which Song Yutian perfected in his later years, was aimed specifically at those who had taken the Sacred Heart Pill. It could rouse the Sacred Heart Pill’s residual medicinal power from within, slowly drawing it out from the inside and temporarily clouding a person’s mind.

If that person’s allotted lifespan had not yet run out, they could still recover after the drug wore off.

But if they were already at death’s door, then even after the effect faded, the pollution would penetrate deeper.

Demonic-power pollution was closely linked to a person’s divine soul and clarity of mind. Divine Fetus cultivators could control the pollution only on the premise that their minds remained clear. That was not easy to maintain in the years right before death.

The Suzhen Dao’s solution was to refine those whose lifespans were nearly over into dried-corpse puppets.

Those puppets were certainly weaker than they had been in life, and the bodies were extremely hard to preserve for long. The upside was that there was no worry about the puppets being polluted into monsters, and if you had enough of them, they were formidable in their own right.

The most important medicinal guide in the Saint-Transition Pill was called “heart-medicine,” refined from the Suzhen root method—that is, from a Demon Pool—using a material known as “Yu Tian Jade” to extract and preserve it.

This Yu Tian Jade was extremely remarkable as well. Not only did it contain internal space like an Illusory Realm, long-term wearing could nourish the soul and replenish essence. In critical moments, it could even hide the spirit—Lu Qingning had likely relied on this function to escape as a remnant soul.

Rеаԁ oո ΚatRеαⅾіոgCafe

“So this is the Immortal-Martial Decree.”

Bai Xiang already roughly understood the method to wield this thing. Simply put, there were two prerequisites. First, one needed the ability to refine heart-medicine—that is, one’s life-bound Demon Pool had to be a spirit-nurturing object.

For example, Lu Qingning’s Demon Pool was a thousand-year-old Spirit-King Ginseng Demon; that self-shaped outer Aspect of hers had been modeled after it.

Second, one had to learn the root method Suzhen Immortal-Martial: Supreme Resonance Chapter, infuse the white jade token with heart-medicine, and mix it with the puppet’s refined blood essence within. Only then could one remote-control puppets.

Bai Xiang had nowhere to find a spirit-nurturing object right now. But the token did not only contain Lu Qingning’s remnant soul; when Lu Qingning’s body was blasted apart, there had also been a trace of the Spirit-King Ginseng Demon’s essence left, and that had been stored in the token as well. Bai Xiang could draw on it whenever she liked.

Still, she had no interest in techniques that controlled others. What truly concerned her was Suzhen Dao’s body-tempering art—The Sun-Chasing Scripture, passed down from the barbaric age of antiquity.

The Sun-Chasing Scripture was a body-tempering art created in imitation of an ancient myth, the story of “a giant chasing the sun and drinking a river dry from thirst.” It started from the most basic human acupoints, ignoring things like the heart meridian, which was fickle and always shifting, and focusing only on meridians and acupoints. It had a remarkable effect on tempering the body—especially the strength of the legs and feet.

Bai Xiang set great store by this scripture. If its description of its effects was not exaggerated, its value in body tempering even surpassed the body-tempering section of The Tiger-Subduing Arhat Scripture. It was exactly the method of improvement she needed most right now.

Unfortunately, it couldn’t have come at a worse time.

Flipping her hand, she put the jade token away. Looking at the battlefield of ravaged earth all around her, Bai Xiang slowly shook her head in genuine regret.