Volume 3, Chapter 90 – Secret (Two-in-One)

The black qi was extremely faint and had no presence at all. If Bai Xiang had not been using soul-vision of the body-scape to monitor herself in real time, she probably would not have noticed it. For an ordinary person, it would have been all but impossible to detect.

Once it formed, the thing seemed to “come alive.” It first twisted its body, then, in a very human way, cocked its “head” upward as if observing, seeming puzzled as to why the subsequent Brahmic chanting had not continued.

Bai Xiang did not bother talking nonsense with it. She drove Qi-Origin to press in from all directions, turning it into an invisible hand that clamped down on the thing in one grasp.

In that instant, her eyes seemed to pierce time and space, skipping straight from dawn’s daylight into pitch-black outer space. There, in a haze of mist, countless “stars” lit up.

No, those were not stars at all, but one enormous single eye after another.

Like a gradient painting drawn by an AI, like the “little people” you saw after eating poisonous mushrooms, the cosmic stars began to flow, using mist and starlight to sketch out a brilliant picture of “Buddhas filling the sky.”

“Yi ma mai a ru nuo ke… bo qie fan ye na mo qie…”

At the same time, Brahmic chanting began to echo by Bai Xiang’s ears. It was clearly that Black-Heaven Scripture of Deliverance from Suffering and Salvation of the World, and some unknown existence was obviously trying to use this method to hypnotize her, to “save” her.

Playing at ghosts and gods…

A cruel curve appeared at the corner of Bai Xiang’s lips. She stared straight at that sky full of deities and Buddhas, and her golden eyes plunged into the painted scroll, turning into two blazing Great Suns. They grew, and grew, and grew again, until they became twin nebula vortices colliding with each other. The sky full of gods and Buddhas was squeezed in between them and ground to shreds. From the void there suddenly came a shrieked “Aaah—” containing shades of surprise, astonishment, and venomous hatred.

At the same time, that wisp of black qi inside her was also strangled by Qi-Origin, letting out a sharp scream as it was refined directly into pure energy and poured into Bai Xiang’s qi sea.

Nothing special for her.

But for others, it would be a different story.

Having confirmed that the root of the problem lay in the Black-Heaven Scripture of Deliverance from Suffering and Salvation of the World, Bai Xiang no longer felt like continuing to study the Dharma. She summoned Guangyuan again, intending to further smooth out his inner body-scape.

Guangyuan was delighted to oblige, up until Bai Xiang casually voiced her concern, explaining that when she had just now chanted the Black-Heaven Scripture of Deliverance from Suffering and Salvation of the World, it had triggered a strand of black qi trying to attach to her, and that she suspected others might have it on them as well. Only then did the old monk jolt. He seemed to recall that he had chanted it too, had he not?

Although he found it sinister and unsuitable as an object of faith, he had indeed chanted it. And now, with Bai Xiang in his heart no different from an “Immortal,” he did not for a moment suspect that she might be deceiving him.

“Can’t find it…” Bai Xiang withdrew her hand and pondered for a moment. When she looked up again, she saw Guangyuan’s expression had gone very ugly.

“Don’t panic. This thing can’t be hiding too deep,” she comforted him, thinking that soul-abilities really only worked well on herself. The moment she tried probing someone else’s inner body-scape, her efficiency dropped off sharply and she could only rely purely on soul and experience.

A probe like this naturally could not be fully thorough. Many nooks and crannies of the meridians, especially the insides of the bone marrow, were beyond her reach.

So she simply called Aurora over and asked if she had any way to transfer a batch of instruments from Baco City to do a full-body examination.

“You suspect they have ‘puppet-worms’ here too?” Aurora looked a bit tense.

In her view, measures like this could only be aimed at puppet-worms.

“Something like that,” Bai Xiang said, not planning to spell her hypothesis out. She might as well let Aurora keep this misunderstanding. “How long will it take to get the equipment here?”

“Today is doable.” Aurora did a quick calculation and gave a firm answer. “It’s just air transport… Two hours will be enough.”

Hearing this, Guangyuan opened his mouth, looking like he wanted to say something but could not.

Bai Xiang knew what he was worried about and voiced it for him. “But there are over a thousand people in Fuhu Temple.”

“Ah!” Aurora suddenly understood. “No way we can get that many sets. Mobilizing full suites of equipment is not a simple matter. I can probably get you three sets. I can guarantee they’ll be here before dusk this afternoon.”

“On behalf of all the disciples, I thank you, Immortal!” Guangyuan immediately dropped to his knees and bowed to Bai Xiang. “The Immortal’s grace is a favor as vast as mountains and seas, as clouds and ocean!”

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“From now on, same as Bolu, call me ‘Dao Lord Bai’.” Bai Xiang frowned. She really did not like seeing honest people put on flattery like this.

The Black-Heaven Dharma was a hidden danger, but for the moment it did not appear to be closely tied to her. On the contrary, it had given her quite a bit of inspiration in the area of creating cultivation methods.

Just the act of chanting the scripture and immediately being parasitized by black qi was obviously an extremely sophisticated vibration-and-sound formula. It transformed form by using unique rhythms to vibrate air and energy, and faintly resembled the kind of divine ability she had envisioned only appearing at the Yuan Orifice realm.

Using this as reference, Bai Xiang could at once derive plenty of variations in vibration-based sound formulas. She immediately handed these methods over to Jade Spirit, letting Jade Spirit run simulations on separated soul-bodies, “run the program,” and was delighted to find that it really worked.

From now on, entry into the path of qi no longer needed spirit-pointing.

She gave a satisfied nod.

With such a subtle vibrational sound method in hand, she could absolutely research a Shenming Refining-Qi Formula in the future, letting everyone form their first wisp of Yuan Qi by using sound formulas to vibrate while they recited.

If she pushed the research further, even the steps of opening up the inner body-scape and establishing circulation could be compressed and handed over to vibrational sound.

Since everyone’s inner body-scape was different, letting them vibrate themselves and cultivate themselves might produce heart-and-meridian circulations that were most suited to each individual. That would actually be much more refined than the brute-force approach of spirit-pointing, not only in efficiency but in results as well.

Not bad.

Just for this harvest alone, the trip to Luohou had not been in vain.

Having summed up her gains, Bai Xiang turned her thoughts back to the Black-Heaven Dharma.

Though this thing had been played openly as a “face-up card,” the black qi inside it was very well hidden. The Luohou royal house was clearly unaware of it. She simply did not know whether Yao Qingyuan, when he cooperated with Fuhu Temple, had known of this hidden danger.

In Bai Xiang’s eyes, this was a textbook evil art.

The reasoning was very simple. How many people in all of Luohou believed in the Demon Buddha?

Diming City had a population near a million. Even if you assumed just over half had faith, that was still close to half a million.

There were six such cities in Luohou. Add in all the villages and settlements, and the total number of believers probably approached ten million.

Evil arts came in categories. Some focused only on cultivating oneself; those were “self-harming.” Others took shortcuts, transplanting organs into one’s own body, or having others practice branch methods so you could draw on their blood-qi. Those were “other-harming.”

The Black-Heaven Scripture of Deliverance from Suffering and Salvation of the World spread through faith, which meant it required a certain number of people polluted. It was without doubt an “other-harming” kind.

Once the back door was triggered, either it would refine everyone into some black-qi-like energy, or it would cause some kind of mutation in its hosts.

If it was the former, refining flesh and blood into black-qi energy, then it might be to feed some great power’s appetite, to help him practice some evil art.

Just like Yao Qingyuan previously, with his Marrow-Washing Pills being such a method.

If it was the latter, then it was hard to say.

For now, this thing showed no sign of activating. Bai Xiang put it aside for the moment and still decided to focus her main energy on finding the Tongmai Method.

With that in mind, she pulled a book titled A Shinu Woman’s Record of What She Saw and Heard from the copied library. Outwardly, she seemed to be resting with her eyes closed, but in fact she was flipping through page after page of its contents.

This too was a scripture written in the Brahmic language.

But there was no filth in this Brahmic text. It simply recorded the travels and experiences of a woman in ancient Shinu, telling a supernatural story about how she went deep into the mountains to seek a Buddha and ask for medicine to save her gravely ill child.

Why supernatural? Because it involved the Burning-Saliva Demon Kingdom.

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The woman traveled far, but a sick child could not be left at home. Terrified that the child might be snatched and eaten by evildoers or wild beasts, she wrapped him in cloth and bound him to her chest. Then she wove a frame from vines to carry on her back, putting some daily necessities inside. In this way, she resolutely set out on her journey.

One day, when she reached the foot of a mountain forest, she saw a thatched hut by the roadside and knocked to ask the hut’s owner whether there was a Buddhist temple in the nearby hills.

The owner turned out to be a great monk, and in his hut he worshiped a strange Buddha, bald-headed with a pair of bull horns, fanged, and with eyes that spewed fire.

The woman was frightened at the sight of the strange Buddha, but the monk told her not to worry, saying the one he worshiped was “Buddha Burning-Saliva,” a righteous Buddha, and that he even had a seat in the Treasure Hall in the Western Mountains.

Only then did the woman relax, and she accepted the monk’s invitation to stay the night in the hut.

That night, the monk told her about conditions in the mountains. He said there was indeed a Buddhist temple deeper in, but that “the road is dangerous and wild beasts prowling,” and so he did not want her to go further. He added that he had medicine in his own home that could certainly cure the child.

The woman chose to trust him and remained in the hut as he said. Each night the monk would get up to tend the furnace and boil medicine, and he told her that the brewing process “must not be disturbed,” instructing her to put up another small shack by the roadside as her own lodging.

At first, the woman did not feel anything was off. But after six full days like this, on the seventh night she suddenly woke, looked out the shack, and saw that the shadow cast on the ground by the firelight, dragged out long, clearly belonged to a tiger.

She cried out in fright. Realizing its true form had been seen, the tiger turned its head, revealing itself as a ferocious tiger demon with green fire blazing in its eyes and green drool dripping from its mouth.

There was nothing to discuss. Terrified, the woman took her child and fled into the mountains in the middle of the night. On the way, she thought of the direction the tiger demon as monk had forbidden her to go, and decided that must be the path of escape. So she ignored everything else and sprinted that way, scrambling over cliffs and along mountain streams until she finally found a valley ahead.

The valley was dark and gloomy, yet inside it hid a ruined village. The woman went from house to house but saw no sign of life. Just as she felt something was wrong, she suddenly heard a sharp cry. She turned around, and saw a terrifying demon beast leaping out from a cave, eyes blazing green fire and even its fur seeming to burn with green flames, its mouth opening wide to swallow her whole.

At that moment, however, the tiger demon that had been the monk sprang from behind and grappled with the beast. After a fierce struggle, he drove it off.

Facing the woman, who was still quaking with fear, the tiger demon turned back into the appearance of a great monk and finally confessed the truth to her.

He had once been a member of the Burning-Saliva Demon Kingdom, but after submitting to the Human Principle and believing in the Dharma, he had found himself utterly out of place in demon society. So he left the demon kingdom and came to live among humans.

He said he had studied medicine techniques hard and often saved travelers, intending to use the merit of the Dharma to cleanse the killing and blood-reek of demonkind. Boiling medicine was not to harm the woman; he simply did not want her to be frightened if she learned the truth.

As for the mountain path he had refused to let her take, that road led to the Illusory Realm where the Burning-Saliva Demon Kingdom resided. By ignoring his warning and coming this close, she had already entered a hunting ground under demon jurisdiction. If he had not chased after her, both she and her child would have ended up as food for demon beasts.

The book’s ending was not bad. The woman and the tiger demon cleared up their misunderstanding, and after her child was cured, she even joined lives with the tiger demon and they lived together. After two generations died, the tiger demon raised a monument for them at the foot of the mountain, and the author swore up and down that he had written the book after reading the story carved on that monument.

It still had some reference value.

Bai Xiang pondered.

For example, the fact that the woman did not seek doctors or physicians for her sick child but insisted on “seeking a Buddha and asking for medicine” was a realistic portrayal tied to its era.

Because in ancient Shinu, there was no such profession as doctor.

Buddhism in the southern lands had flourished very early on. Monks living in communities could not do without healing methods, so in many ancient records, when the people of Shinu fell ill, they either sought shamans or went to Buddhist temples for medicine.

As for a demon from the Burning-Saliva Demon Kingdom actually coming out to believe in the Buddha… she treated that as myth for now.

The odds were far too low.

Bloodthirst and the eating of human flesh were instincts carved into the bones of demonkind.

Many people who took the demon path at first did so only to gain power or pursue longevity in the Dao, but after undergoing their first Body Tribulation, their craving for blood food became very hard to suppress with reason.

Bai Xiang had already flipped through this book once in the Scripture Pavilion before. This time, as she read it again, she noticed more details.

For example, although the book did not record the monument’s geographical location, not even a vague description, it did mention that along the way the woman had used “bosa leaves” crushed up to treat a snakebite.

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“Bosa leaves” grew on the bosa tree, named because its slender five-part leaves looked like a crowd of tiny people dancing when the wind blew.

This sort of tree grew only in the southern parts of Luohou, and in very small numbers. Sometimes you would find only three or four scattered trees across dozens of li, which went very much against normal patterns in nature.

The detail that it was “in the south” overlapped with the information Bai Xiang had learned from Daokong’s demon-age, but the “bosa tree” might be an excellent marker.

After all, the author later mentioned in particular that beside the monument there was a “bosa treasure tree,” “huge and leaning long,” “its dense canopy said to blot out the sky and cover the sun.”

Guidebooks in the style of biographies, especially ones several hundred years old… to be honest, odds were high that such things could not be taken at face value.

Still, it was better than nothing. Bai Xiang simply noted it down as a backup plan.

Next, she planned to ask Aurora and Guangyuan about the Black-Rock Demon Kingdom and the Lilu Demon Kingdom.

…

At the same time, in nearby Baco City, an old monk opened his eyes in a side room of a temple in a busy downtown district.

“A wisp of the World-Honored One’s Origin qi… it appeared and then vanished?”

“Even the Sword Lord might not detect any trace of this method that Senior Brother came up with. How could anyone here possibly notice something amiss?”

“Could I have sensed it wrong?”

After muttering to himself, he got to his feet, restless, and decided he should still call “Senior Brother.”

“Hello?” On the other end, in the Great Yu Protectorate Office in Luohou, the black-robed monk who had faced Master Hua’an before picked up the phone, sounding a bit lazy. “Didn’t I tell you to stop calling so often… You think this is back home? Those ‘companies’ are not lacking in wiretapping methods.”

“But this is truly very important!” The old monk panicked and used coded language to describe what had happened, then emphasized at the end, “You said she would be coming over. Could it be because of what’s happening on that side?”

“So that’s what happened.”

The black-robed monk furrowed his brows, also feeling that things were slipping a bit beyond his control.

He had never regarded Bai Xiang as a threat.

On the contrary, because of Golden Cicada Temple’s cooperation with the Yuhua Sect, he had even received some secret intel and learned that Bai Xiang might also be entangled with the Yuhua Sect.

Someone like that, no matter how strong, could not become a shackle on Golden Cicada Temple. The only ones who would worry about her were those orthodox sects of good repute and the Great Yu court.

They would target her the way they had once targeted Golden Cicada Temple, which would just drive Bai Xiang to his side.

Had she not come here to rope Fuhu Temple in?

How had she ended up idly poking into the Black-Heaven Dharma… What did that have to do with her?

A person’s name casts a long shadow.

That the black-robed monk did not treat Bai Xiang as an enemy was one thing; Bai Xiang’s age, and what she had accomplished at this stage, was another.

“If it’s her, then noticing it is not so surprising.”

Thinking it over, he gave the old monk his instructions.

“We’re all fellow travelers. Don’t leave each other out in the cold.”

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He was constantly guarding against the call being monitored, doing his best to avoid speaking any concrete terms.

“You can send someone over to take a look.”

“Make contact. Maybe we can draw her into a collaboration.”

After hanging up, he turned again to face the empty courtyard.

But now the courtyard was very different from a few days ago. Not only had large sections of walls and buildings collapsed, and the ground become strewn with blood and corpses, there was also a group of black-robed monks sitting in the yard, hemming Master Hua’an in at the center.

“Yi ma mai a ru nuo ke…”

“Bo qie fan ye na mo qie…”

Some of the monks were striking wooden fish, some were chanting scriptures. Line after line of scripture converged out of thin air into yin-sha demonic qi, circling ceaselessly around Master Hua’an.

Master Hua’an was chanting as well.

Eyes tightly shut, he sat in full lotus, holding a string of white-bone prayer beads and murmuring under his breath.

But judging from the sweat flowing down his forehead, he was not fending this off easily.

“Stop resisting, Junior Brother.”

The black-robed monk came closer and drew a heavy Yu sword with a clang.

“Only out of old friendship have I stopped them from killing you outright.”

“After all, you know how we feel about traitors. And your Kan clan is still working for that dog emperor. They’re already being pretty mild.”

“Amitabha—”

Master Hua’an chanted loudly, then his tone subsided. He opened his eyes and looked at the other.

“Senior Brother Huali, you’re leading them down a road of no return.”

“This isn’t about which road we take.” The monk shook his head. “From the day the sun set over Cangcui Mountain, Golden Cicada Temple lost the right to choose.”

“Besides, don’t you think this goal is realistic?”

“Compared to being a dog fleeing disaster in a human-ruled age, I would rather see an age ruled by demonkind return again.”

“Unwise, unwise,” Hua’an said, shaking his head.

“Looks like you’re still bound by so-called morality.”

The monk smiled at him.

“Let me tell you another secret.”

“The Great Yu imperial house is also demonkind.”