Volume 3, Chapter 93 – Taishang Premonition

Luohou Tiger-Subduing Temple’s exact location was in Nongwu County on the western outskirts of Baco City. The county didn’t look like a county seat at all; it was bustling like a small city.

It was the kind of prosperity only parasitic black-market businesses could nourish. Bai Xiang wandered around the county with a mask on, and she wasn’t worried about getting nuked just because she wasn’t walking side by side with Aurora.

On the one hand, it was simply too close. From Nongwu County to Baco City, all sorts of forces overlapped in this whole area. You couldn’t just casually fire off tactical nukes in a place like this.

On the other hand… deep down, Bai Xiang’s instinctive fear of such tactical weapons was starting to weaken.

It had to do with the changes happening to her. Just like when she’d relied on a sudden “whim” to realize there might be a problem with the Dark-Heaven Dharma, from that moment on she’d noticed she’d gained a special ability.

It was like the “qi presence sensing” of the False Core realm, also like the “knowing Heaven’s mandate” after qi condensed into a Core. You could even say it was an ability extending out from those forms of spiritual intuition, making her feel as if she sometimes had mysterious premonitions.

Right now she even had a strong hunch: if someone really did press a button this very instant to nuke her, she’d sense it through that same “whim” and find a way to dodge before the fact was set in stone.

Bai Xiang guessed this was also part of the power of the yuanqiao.

Because she had made some progress in tempering her body, for the first time she could sense those mysterious energies drifting between Heaven and Earth. If she put in some effort, she could even manipulate and command them, which made her very self—her existence as a living individual—connect more tightly with the whole world.

“People’s so-called sixth sense and all those ‘psychic powers’ really point to nothing more than how humans receive and analyze information from the outside world.”

Strolling along the street, Bai Xiang was still turning cultivation over in her mind.

“For example, someone walking down the street hears a horn honk behind them. Reflexively, they sketch out an image in their head—like ‘a car coming up from behind.’”

“If they hear a horn, a crash, cursing, then the mental image their brain analyzes becomes more detailed. They fill in more elements, and the picture in their mind gets finer.”

“It’s just that some people’s capacity for receiving and analyzing in this regard is particularly strong. They can take what they hear, smell, and see and, purely on instinct, mesh it all together and instantly compute it into a tentative conclusion.”

“Because it’s instinct, they don’t know how they manage to do this, and they don’t know how that conclusion was reached.”

“If the conclusion is bad and could bring them harm, then they feel uneasy, they feel afraid. They think they’re ‘jinxing it’ or ‘overthinking it,’ and even when the result comes true, they still don’t understand why.”

Rеaⅾ оո KatRеαԁіngCafе

“But some of them gradually wake up to it. Because they find that the outcome behind that unease is always right, they begin to choose to trust their intuition, even though they still don’t understand where that unease comes from.”

“And I…” Bai Xiang suddenly stopped in the middle of the street, raised her right hand, and studied the few long, slender fingers under her black leather glove.

“Because I’ve added this process of interacting with Heaven-and-Earth energy, the qi presence sensing that used to only target cultivators and demonic entities can now directly sense the world itself.”

“That’s no different from gaining one more organ for receiving information, one more ‘sense.’”

Air was water.

All living beings on the ground were in fact living in water.

But air and water weren’t the same. Stirring the surface of water could send ripples spreading far, but you couldn’t do that with air; the efficiency of transmitting information through air was extremely low.

Heaven-and-Earth energy, however, was different. For any lifeform capable of sensing it, it undoubtedly played the role of water.

Take Bai Xiang. After she broke through in this line of insight, walking among the world felt like being immersed in the ocean.

Every slight skew and flow of Heaven-and-Earth energy was like ripples fanned out by other lives swimming through the water, and all of it could bring her an ocean of information.

As she walked, she simply shut her eyes and tried relying entirely on analyzing those ripples to find her way.

At first she was a bit clumsy about it and nearly ran into a few fruit stands.

But very quickly, with Jade Spirit’s help, she grew adept. She could walk down the street without using her sight at all, and to an onlooker she looked no different from an ordinary person.

“For me this is basically easy mode.”

Yet Bai Xiang wasn’t especially pleased.

Reаԁ οn КatRеaԁіոɡСafe

Her soul was powerful—that was one reason.

She also cultivated the Vibration Art—that was the second.

Using the Vibration Art side by side with the sensing method really did make the effect pretty much the same as sonar.

But Bai Xiang wanted to train her ability with the sensing method; relying on the Vibration Art didn’t count as real skill in her eyes. Put bluntly, it was cheating.

In the ideal case, she would temper her sensing method to perfection, best if she could read the flow of Heaven-and-Earth energy to analyze every bit of information in a wide area around her, so that not even the slightest quiver of grass or leaves could slip past her extrapolation.

Once she reached that level, there truly would be nothing left to fear.

The cicada senses autumn before the wind even stirs.

The ducks are the first to know when the river warms in spring.

The ancients said immortals grasped ten thousand arts and, with a flick of their fingers, knew all of fate. It was nothing more than this level.

But it was very hard.

Because her soul-abilities gave her absolute control over her body, Bai Xiang tried using those abilities to temporarily seal off her hearing, sense of smell, and the like. The difficulty of using the sensing method immediately shot up.

In reality, that translated into her steps veering off her intended path. Before she knew it she drifted out onto the road and ran headlong into a small truck.

“Trying to get yourself killed?!”

The truck driver was first startled by the sudden accident, then immediately leaned half his body out the window to curse at her. “If you wanna die, jump in the river! I can’t stand people like you, out here all day… uh… all day…”

Gradually, he trailed off.

Because he realized Bai Xiang hadn’t moved an inch from where she stood. Instead, she’d dented the front of his truck inward, so the effect looked exactly like he’d driven straight into a steel post.

Rеaԁ οn КαtReadіոɡCαfе

Th-this… sure, I wasn’t going that fast, but there’s no way I can’t even knock over a person, right?

For a moment, countless words flashed through the driver’s mind at high speed: “monster,” “ghost,” “spook,” “cyborg,” “test subject”… a whole jumble, one after another.

As expected, it’s tricky…

Bai Xiang lifted the seals on her senses and, with a small effort, pulled the side of her body free from the truck’s front, then looked up and asked the driver, “How much?”

The driver hadn’t done anything to her.

She’d damaged his truck, so it was only right to pay for it.

The driver was completely numb.

Once he realized Bai Xiang might not be “human,” that question in his ears was no different from a hungry ghost pressing in on his soul, asking how much money it would take to buy his life.

“Nothing! I don’t want anything!”

He shook his head and backed the truck up with a forced smile, trying to get away.

Hm?

Bai Xiang actually hadn’t planned on stopping him, but that feeling of a sudden “whim” hit her again, urging her to turn her gaze toward the driver’s cab—where a black crystal Buddha figurine was hanging from the rearview mirror.

A Demon Pool?

No… it didn’t have the unique, disgusting feel of a Demon Pool. It seemed more like a simple handicraft.

Curiosity pushed her to step in front of the truck again. She looked up at the driver and said, “I’d like to compensate you for your loss, and buy that pendant on top of it. Would that be…”

Rеаԁ οո КatRеаⅾіnɡCafe

“Take it, just take it!” The driver’s face went pale as he yanked the pendant down and threw it to her. “Don’t come any closer… go!”

He slammed on the gas, and the little truck with the crushed-in front bolted away in a panic.

“People around here are way too jumpy. Probably because they deal with Demon Pools and Aberrations all the time.”

Holding the black crystal Buddha figurine, Bai Xiang watched the exhaust from the truck’s tailpipe drift away. Her mind stirred, and she felt the faint qi presences that had been trailing her vanish.

Her disguise really wasn’t doing much.

Sure, the mask did hide her face, but even in a windbreaker and hat, the swaying white ponytail behind her and the long, slender figure outlined under the coat—these were assets in some people’s eyes.

Too much trouble to mess with?

You don’t know until you try.

But after this little “traffic accident,” no one followed her anymore.

The people of Luohou always liked to take chances for small gains, but that didn’t mean that after seeing firsthand how dangerous something was, they were still willing to crowd in and court death.

“Senior Brother Guo’s take on the locals is a bit extreme.”

Standing at the intersection, Bai Xiang’s mood brightened.

She thought of a fable called The Little Pony Crossing the River .

It was precisely because the story was so childish that, when she overlaid it onto Guo Rongzhi’s deliberately mature persona, she found it a little funny.