Volume 3, Chapter 72 – The Grand Ceremony (II)

As the chosen day drew ever closer, the situation finally grew tense enough that even the residents of Zhennan could feel it. They could clearly see more and more cultivators around them, and the streets had noticeably filled with groups of sword-bearers moving together.

The busiest of all was Bai Shengju, because many of these cultivator delegations were not planning to wait until the day of the ceremony to ascend the mountain. They came early, presented their gifts first, and then had to be arranged in the front-court guest quarters. The so-called formal greeting on the day of the ceremony itself would, in truth, be just a formality.

“Hantian Sword Dao, Pei Yongqun, offering congratulations that Shenming’s qi will shape mountains and rivers!”

“Jingzhu Sword Dao, Kong An, here to congratulate Old Master Bai.”

These were the two most important delegations among the well-wishers. Setting aside the fact that the Kong father and son had stayed in Zhennan and never left, Hantian Sword Dao counted as the first Mountains-and-Rivers-ranked dojo to openly offer its support.

“That Pei Yongqun is quite a character.”

In the grand and imposing audience hall, Bai Xiang sat upright in the main seat while Xiang Xian sat beside her, lips moving as she spoke in a voice only Bai Xiang could hear. “Though people outside say he’s just a brute with courage, as your teacher I feel he’s one of the very few people who are ‘without controversy’.”

Bai Xiang understood what “without controversy” meant. It was really saying that the man still acted fairly upright, unlike some long-famous cultivators whose shells were already rotten underneath, who had done all kinds of filthy things in order to resist demonic pollution.

Just think of Chan Master Daokong. Because of the sword Zhenyuan, he had a reputation in the outside world on par with the Sacred Emperors of old. Yet within the cultivator circle, he could not compare to those people at all.

The reason Sacred Emperors were Sacred Emperors, besides their great martial might, was that they had few moral stains.

Even if they had some, there was no need to blow them up. They were the kind of faults that, when weighing merits and demerits, could be brushed past in a single line.

Daokong was different. He had indeed forged Zhenyuan, a holy sword of Sword Dao, and suppressed the rampaging Demon Kingdom of the northern frontier, accomplishing feats many Sacred Emperors had never managed. There was no doubt he was worthy of being called great, yet what came after his death was far too disgraceful.

A great cultivator who might have become a Sage took one wrong step, then used the Nine Methods to create endless slaughter. The fragmentary souls and Yaosui he split off had, over the course of a thousand years, tricked and killed an unknown number of outstanding figures. That clearly could not be written off as “merits balancing faults,” it was full-blown deviation into madness.

And that was exactly the norm for cultivators.

Bai Xiang thought of the “Ghost of Southern Qi” from the sixth year of Yingwu.

Before he “became a ghost,” that Zheng Boqing had long been famous throughout Qi lands. He had been the son of a merchant. During one trip, a change of route left his whole family ambushed in the jungle by bandits and a demon disaster, with only him surviving. He had then sworn to train in martial arts and the sword.

Relying on word-of-mouth bank codes and paying with most of the family fortune, Zheng Boqing had entered Benling Sword Dao. It was said he had even been a monk for a time. One version said it was to hide from his enemies, another that his master, “Chan Master Jingxin,” had seen that his killing intent was too heavy and wanted him to shave his head to lessen his anger.

Zheng Boqing had been a monk for six years, then finally found he could not endure temple life any longer. He snuck down the mountain, put on a wig, and returned to secular life. Using the sword skills he had learned in the monastery, he cut down bandits and brigands and scraped together some fame.

Feeling he had cooked enough, he wanted to take revenge on that bandit gang. After asking around, he learned that the group that had once haunted the Jing River had, after several moves, gone to hide in the southern mountains. Sword in hand, he went after them alone, only to catch a chill on the way. His half-baked skills weakened even further.

In that state, he naturally could not be a match for the bandit chief. After barely recovering from his illness and fighting for half a day, Zheng Boqing was about to lose and die when he heard the worst news from his foe’s own mouth: the bandit gang that had slaughtered his family back then had already been wiped out.

Back then, the wilderness had been incredibly dangerous. You could not say aberrations and beasts ran wild without fear, but once night fell, there were frequent tales of monsters eating people. No bandit, no matter how vicious, could claim to last long in such a wilderness. The mountain they now occupied had been drenched in blood four years ago. In a single night, something unknown had butchered them all and hung strings of severed heads from the eaves like wind chimes.

The group he had found now was only a new gang that had taken over the abandoned mountain stockade.

When Zheng Boqing heard this, his spirit was shaken. Learning his opponents were not his true enemies, he almost couldn’t even hold his sword. Just as he was about to lose and be killed, his master, Chan Master Jingxin, appeared in time, and with his “Flying-Snake Soft Sword” cut down every last bandit there.

Still shaken, Zheng Boqing did not know how to face his master. As he hesitated, he discovered that Chan Master Jingxin was standing there without moving.

When he felt for breath, the old monk’s heart meridians were already snapped. Not even an immortal could have saved him.

The event hit Zheng Boqing very hard. He struggled to carry his master’s body back to Benling, and feeling he had no face to stay on, resigned his status as a legacy disciple and had the sect send him to one of Benling’s subordinate businesses as staff. Whenever he had a free moment, he drank and sought pleasure. Even in his dreams, he saw the scene of Chan Master Jingxin’s death.

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Why had his master died?

Having examined the old monk’s condition, he knew very well that it had been to save some dignity.

Chan Master Jingxin had been over eighty. Even among cultivators, that meant one foot was in the coffin. His qi and blood and his spirit had long since ceased to be as vigorous as in his youth. His ability to suppress demonic power grew weaker by the day.

Before that, he had been holding back from acting precisely to avoid his own demon power going out of control. He could not, however, watch Zheng Boqing go off to his death, and in the end chose to save his disciple.

The history books did not record this part, but Bai Xiang guessed it had been like that.

He had not wanted to fade away in silence. If possible, he had hoped to die “usefully,” at least trading one life for another. Using his own death to wake his disciple might well have been a kind of completion.

This was what later drove Zheng Boqing to become obsessed with cultivation. Even though he gradually rebuilt his family fortune and turned it into one of Benling’s well-known enterprises, and he himself became famous in the south for “wide friendships and a charitable heart,” what he sought in his bones had changed.

As time passed, the “young and ignorant Zheng Boqing” and the “compassionate, kind-eyed Zheng Boqing” both vanished, replaced by “Zheng Boqing who pursued longevity with harsh desperation.” He did not want to end up like Chan Master Jingxin.

So he grew urgent and afraid. In his later years, with nowhere left to turn, he fell into madness, went demonic, fled into the wilderness to preserve his reputation, and still could not avoid becoming the “Ghost of Southern Qi.”

Refusing to judge “Charity Sword Zheng Boqing” and the “Ghost of Southern Qi” as one and the same was the last mercy historians showed him. Cases like his, of ominous ends in later life, were all too common along the road of Sword Dao.

In a thousand years of Sword Dao history, few had died with dignity. Most, at the very end, either went insane or fell into demonic paths. The better outcomes were to die in battle, perhaps earning a name that would be sung after death. That was one of the few hopes roaming cultivators cherished.

Zheng Boqing had been like that, and so had Chan Master Daokong.

Cultivators who had nearly become Sages, but ended up like this. In the end, it all came down to a pursuit of “longevity,” and losing themselves in demonic qi.

Bai Xiang shook her head and once again felt how deeply Sword Dao harmed people.

But that thought brought her to a question she could not unravel.

The flourishing of Sword Dao had grown out of the fact that “humans are not born with the extraordinary.”

Compared to aberrations, humans had nothing special about them. Only the mental flow and inner body-scape were worth mentioning, yet even those had been judged as not belonging to “outer Aspect power” and thus as not real extraordinary force that could affect the material world.

That was why the Sacred Emperor Gu had created Sword Dao, and why people had gathered around this lineage and helped him found a new dynasty.

Which raised a problem: were humans really not born with the extraordinary?

In the past, Bai Xiang had believed this firmly. But after cultivating the Sun-Chasing Scripture, especially after seeing how terrifying the ancient demon “Shi Ling” was, she now deeply doubted it.

She had mastered the Mountain-Crashing Section of the Sun-Chasing Scripture. In a sense, that already proved the scripture was not fake.

Her feeling was very clear. The qi-and-blood circulation method of the Sun-Chasing Scripture did in fact make use of hidden meridians and acupoints in the human body. Those hidden things truly existed.

This proved that ancient humans could seek the extraordinary by excavating the great medicine within the body. Perhaps their outward Aspect abilities were not as dazzling as the divine powers of aberrations, but when your physical strength reached the point of “shaking mountains and drinking rivers,” would you still fear divine powers?

Bai Xiang had only initially cultivated the Mountain-Crashing Section, and already she could hardly say clearly how strong her physical body had become. At the very least, she could hold Feixiang Heaven in her hand and fail to cut the skin of her own palm even if she did not use force. That was clearly a form of extraordinary power.

With a body that strong, it might well be able to take divine powers head-on. This was obviously a very desirable kind of extraordinary strength, so why had the Sacred Emperor Gu and the Suzhen Sword Dao abandoned it?

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Perhaps they had simply been unable to cultivate it, but the existence of the Sun-Chasing Scripture at least indicated that some of the old myths were true. In the wild era before Great Yu, there had likely been another branch of humanity. Among them were giants like Kuafu, who could move mountains and swallow rivers, pluck stars and shift moons, strength that could rival the ancient demons.

Why, then, had such power not been passed down?

Why had almost all traces of it been wiped out, leaving only one line in the history books, “All unknown, unfit for orthodox history”?

Sitting straight in her seat, Bai Xiang fell into thought.

After Hantian Sword Dao and Jingzhu Sword Dao, the delegations arriving today were all from minor sects, such as Huanxi Sword Dao. They did not require Bai Xiang to rise and receive them. Bai Shengju and Xiang Xian were more than enough to handle them.

So she had time to let her thoughts wander and mull over more abstract things.

Two possibilities.

Bai Xiang weighed them in her mind.

First, the giants and humans did not belong to the same race, and the Sun-Chasing Scripture was not a human cultivation method. The fact that she could cultivate it was a special case. Normally, it should be impossible.

If that were true, the puzzle would be neatly solved. Humans would indeed only have Sword Dao to choose.

But if it was the second possibility, that the creator of the Sun-Chasing Scripture had also been human…

Bai Xiang thought of the mysterious acupoint above the dantian, the one she had named the Hidden-Field Acupoint, and reasoned that the second possibility was more likely from a logical standpoint.

She might be a special case, but what about Zhuqing?

She had a Hidden-Field Acupoint too.

That meant it was universal, that all humans actually had such potential, it just had never been uncovered.

Thinking a step further, the ability to stimulate these “hidden meridians and hidden acupoints” probably decided whether a Divine Fetus cultivator could pursue the state of “Innate enlightenment.”

Was that not, in essence, the excavation of one’s own potential?

Viewed from that angle, everything from Forge the Sword to the peak of the Divine Fetus was extraordinary power obtained by borrowing the strength of aberrations, but from Innate enlightenment to “Sword Lord,” that was drawing on human potential. Was that not “the extraordinary of humankind”?

The more she thought along those lines, the more Bai Xiang felt that many things she had not understood before now had explanations.

For example, why “Sword Lord” was called a “fruit position,” why a Sword Lord could maintain their mental and energetic state at a peak and stretch their lifespan to over one hundred thirty years, so close to the “human limit” of one hundred fifty.

Perhaps that was the true path.

Judged purely as Sword Dao, this road might end at the Divine Fetus. The breakthrough made on that basis, “Sword Lord,” could then count as a return to simplicity, a slight return to the original Dao lineage.

It was the same approach as the Sun-Chasing Scripture, which sought to dig out hidden meridians and acupoints, except that this breakthrough was still very unstable. So through the ages, the number of Sword Lords had remained tiny, and whether one could reach it really did come down to luck.

They had dug too shallowly.

Bai Xiang sighed.

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The hidden meridians and acupoints were surely more than just the Hidden-Field Acupoint.

Leaving aside everything else, just from what she had sensed by swallowing the essence qi of Shi Ling, the “human limit” was one hundred fifty years. If Sword Lords had truly found the right path, they shouldn’t only be able to live to one hundred thirty; they should reach one hundred forty-eight, one hundred forty-nine, at least very close to the limit.

Since they could not, and only reached one hundred thirty-plus, it showed they had still dug too shallowly along this path.

So-called “pressing down an era” and “master of Sword Dao” were empty titles. In the eyes of the demanding Dao, they were children, toddlers stumbling forward on this road with their eyes covered.

For no clear reason, Bai Xiang had completed the final demystification of “Sword Lords” and the like. She no longer felt that Sword Lords were particularly impressive. Some Sword Lords might well understand this road less deeply than she already did.

But she did not feel any joy.

Because if this was the truth of Sword Dao, then the reasons that had guided humankind to choose Sword Dao, the reasons that had erased the “true path” from human history, were all far too thought-provoking.

She thought of the strange arrangement of the Thirty-Six Circuits of the Nine Provinces.

Thirty-six circuit cities were, in reality, thirty-six base cities, thirty-six fortress strongholds.

Great Yu had not started out with so many circuit cities, but the scale of this system had indeed been set from the start, at least according to the histories.

Why?

You could say that in modern times, with advanced communication and fast information flow, such a system was feasible.

But in ancient times, those conditions had clearly not existed. The earliest establishment of this system could be traced back to the founding of the Sacred Dynasty over sixteen hundred years ago. Why had the Yu Emperor’s court designed its cities this way at the very beginning?

Bai Xiang half-furrowed her brows. She kept feeling there were some very important secrets hidden in the middle of it all.

If only the fragmentary souls of Daokong’s Yaosui had intact memories.

She felt it a pity.

All of ancient history might well have been distorted and fabricated. Relying on historians was unrealistic now. Her only hope was to find some souls that had survived from the distant past and see if she could refine them and piece together the truth.

“Shangqing Sword Dao, Li Sheng, offering congratulations that Shenming’s qi will shape mountains and rivers.”

Just then, a steady female voice carried in. Bai Xiang looked up and saw Abbess Li Sheng in Daoist robes, with Leng Qiu, Zhao Jinyan, and the other disciples at her side. They had already come up from the steps to the square and were heading toward the hall in a group.

She had stood up for Kong An earlier, and since Li Sheng belonged to one of the Nine Daos as well, she could not slight her.

Bai Xiang rose at once to greet them, stepped forward to take the “gift box” in Leng Qiu’s hands, and passed it on to rest atop the tray Bai Leying was holding.

Call Second Sis “Qing’er,” recruit her as a lackey to stand by and help with the greetings, and when it comes to me, I get stuck doing this kind of grunt work!

Bai Leying rolled her eyes very slightly, then carried the tray with the gift box away.

Bai Xiang and Li Sheng had not seen each other in some time. Li Sheng’s gaze toward her was extremely gentle, gentle enough to make Xiang Xian grind her teeth.

She glared at Li Sheng again and again from the side, and Li Sheng simply acted as if she did not see.

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You must be joking. I’m the one who taught girl Xiang her swordsmanship.

Why should you be the only one who gets to show off?

I contributed too!

Perhaps that was why Abbess Li Sheng’s attitude toward Bai Xiang had turned one hundred eighty degrees, in stark contrast to Wang Ran’s hesitation.

She affectionately took Bai Xiang’s arm and chatted about odds and ends, praising how grand the hall was. Just as she was about to sit down, something changed in the hall.

“Qingping Dao, Qin Wuyang…”

“Offering congratulations that Shenming now stands among its peers.”

A weathered yet unbroken voice suddenly carried over from the distance.

At first it sounded several li away. By the time the last word fell, it was right beside them.

Everyone turned to look and saw a lean old man suddenly standing at the far end of the square, right where the steps came up.

He wore a black robe, carried a sword box on his back, and his silver hair and beard were a tangled mess, making him look more like a beggar.

Qin Wuyang?

Who was that?

Bai Xiang narrowed her eyes on reflex, puzzled.

Qingping Dao… Hadn’t Tao Muyun and the others told her that Qingping Dao always had one master and one disciple, that its Dao lineage was different from other sects?

She had heard that the current Qingping Sword Lord was named Chu Weiping, so what was this Qin Wuyang?

A disciple?

A disciple this old?

“It’s him?”

Bai Xiang did not move, but Xiang Xian and Li Sheng beside her—even Kong An and the others—had all changed expression.

“Be careful.”

Abbess Li Sheng glanced at Bai Xiang.

“He is the evil corpse Chu Weiping cut off.”