Volume 3, Chapter 115 – Three Flowers at the Origin Orifice, Sword Cuts the Bridge of Rebirth (Two-in-One)

Before she began circulating her cultivation, Bai Xiang first sorted through everything she had learned so far, confirming where she currently stood on her path.

She then realized that the small goal she had tentatively set for herself at the beginning—completely transforming the qi-force in her qi sea into Qi-Origin—was already close to being achieved during the circulation of qi and blood through the Hidden Field Orifice and Hidden Heart Orifice.

This in itself was nothing worth being shocked about. After all, Bai Xiang had already figured out that whether it was the path of qi, the demon path, that “Dao of Vacuity,” or the Sword Dao of the Great Yu human race, their core cultivation methods were all basically built around the so-called “qi orifice” of the Hidden Field Orifice.

The qi-force of the path of qi, and the demonic power used in the demon path and Sword Dao, all had to be stored in the dantian “earth sea.” This “outer dantian” and “hidden dantian” together marked how far a living being had progressed in their control over “qi,” and corresponded to how much of this type of energy their fleshly body could store.

In ancient times, the human race had not invented the Sword Dao, and could not even hope to touch demonic power and divine abilities, so they chose a more primitive route of cultivation: tempering the flesh to awaken the Hidden Heart Orifice.

The Hidden Heart Orifice was tied to waking the marrow and changing the blood. The ancient humans trained the five organs and replaced their essence and blood, battering open the gate to the extraordinary with brute force, using essence blood concentrated to the extreme to transform into an energy similar to demonic power, which could then gather into what was called “qi and blood.”

Before Bai Xiang created the path of qi, there had truly only been these two proper paths in the world.

Now, however, she had opened up both major origin orifices at the same time. Virtual energy and material essence blood were constantly merging, interpenetrating, and transforming into one another, so naturally the speed at which qi-force turned into Qi-Origin had skyrocketed.

As for why there existed “soul-refining methods” and similar soul-cultivating paths, Ji Chang’s memory understood them as… heaven-defying opportunities that one could only hope to encounter by chance.

In his impression, such methods were extremely rare. Even where complete inheritances did exist, they were usually the creator’s accidental inspiration, and the creator themselves had been in a state of “knowing that it works, but not why it works.”

There was even a legend of a mighty one who, in a dream, comprehended the Dao of the soul and created a wondrous method. When he jolted awake and was just about to express his joy, his thoughts shifted, and he discovered that he had forgotten all of the insights from the dream. Only the wondrous method itself remained clearly remembered in his mind, yet he could still perform it.

Whether all soul-path methods were like this, Ji Chang himself was not sure. His knowledge and experience ended there. In his understanding, the Dao of the soul was simply that bizarre; he did not even dare say for certain that such a path truly existed.

Then what about the demon pools…

Bai Xiang searched through Ji Chang’s memories of life in the Shenwu Immortal Dynasty and found that the grassroots level of that world was not much different from ancient Great Yu.

The only real difference was that there were more demon clans, and the cities were practically full of half-blood humans and demons. What was even stranger was that both humans and demons alike were plagued by the strange invasions of various demon pools, and this affliction was far worse than what Great Yu suffered.

If one took the frequency of demon pool incursions that Chilong Circuit City experienced in its daily life before it was abandoned as an index, and called that index 1, then after Maozhou was established, in the early period when that wave of demon pools emerged alongside the eruption of the Sea of Blood, their density would rate around 4 to 5 on that index.

As for the Shenwu Immortal Dynasty, it lived under that level of harassment at all times. Worse still, those demon pools were far more ferocious than those in the main world. Some powerful demon pools were so dangerous that even Great Demons had to treat them with care; a single careless misstep could cost them their lives.

That was bizarre… weren’t demon pools and demonic entities on the same side?

In Bai Xiang’s understanding, they were indeed together, and could be considered to share the same root and source.

Take those small Illusory Realm fragments, those miniature Demon Kingdoms. When they revived, they would simultaneously generate pollution, birthing both demon pools and demon beasts.

After thinking it over for a while, Bai Xiang tended to believe that the reason the two coexisted relatively harmoniously in the main world, and why one could often see demon-human factions studying demon pools and using them as an arm of their own strength, ultimately came down to the main world being less affected by the Void Calamity.

The source of demonic power was the Void Calamity. The first trace of demonic power and demonic aura between heaven and earth was born when the Void Calamity cut and scrambled causality.

From this perspective, it was born from “disorder,” and naturally also embodied the rules of “disorder.” Manifested in the material world, that meant making rules unruly, disturbing the heavens, nature, and Human Principle… even the appearances and cognition of living beings could be affected.

This explained why, when demonic power lost control, demon-humans turned into terrifying monsters, and why demon pools—which were even closer to the essence of demonic power—would exert such disruptive effects on all things.

It was all “disorder,” a special rule stemming from the Void Calamity, an embodiment of that power.

Once she grasped this point, Bai Xiang immediately understood why so many factions were scheming after the Xuan Emperor Scripture.

Plenty of mighty ones had died in ancient times, and the number of them, stacked up, meant many inheritances were left behind. Yet not every inheritance was hounded after by all factions like the Xuan Emperor Scripture. The reason was that this cultivation method likely contained mysteries of the soul.

Bai Xiang currently had no concrete proof, but in a sense, her own existence was proof.

Her eyes… those strange golden pupils seemed to have inherited the Xuan Emperor’s power. They could so naturally wield “Huanshen.”

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Right now this thing looked pretty useless. Its power to confuse had little effect on people whose will was highly focused; that “Huanshen” power just was not strong enough yet.

In battle, everyone’s will was highly concentrated, so she had almost never used it during combat. As a result, she mostly used this ability in daily life to bewitch Bai Zhuqing, which had caused quite a few misunderstandings, making the girl think her elder sister’s nature was not respectable.

Thinking back on it now, the fact that Qing’er had been able to resist during those times when she subconsciously released “Huanshen,” and had not immediately tried to throw her down, already meant her willpower was astonishing.

“Huanshen” did not show much effect for now, but its very existence was astonishing, to the point that if she said it out loud, it could verge on horrifying.

Because it was a special case: a lawful body harboring the power of disorder. Cases like that, as far as anyone’s memories went, were practically unheard of.

Bai Xiang guessed that the Xuan Emperor had very likely relied on a much stronger “Huanshen” power to suppress his entire era. The man had probably also awakened some soul method, thereby opening this gifted divine ability, and it was even possible that his philosophy of governance had grown out of this.

Those people chasing the Xuan Emperor Scripture were not merely after an inheritance of a mighty one. They also wanted to use it to understand the Dao of the soul, and even to further use the soul-path to understand and master the power of the Void Calamity.

Was it all for the sake of immortality?

Well, even if one became an exalted mighty being, there was still a Heaven-ordained end. That limit represented the constraints that the rules of the universe placed on life, and was undoubtedly a force of order.

The Void Calamity, by contrast, was chaos and disorder. Maybe they wanted to use the mastery of disorder to fight against that Heaven-ordained limit, in an attempt to break that fated shackle.

Bai Xiang sat within an ocean of green fire. As she went deeper into sorting out her knowledge, her understanding of the path of the soul deepened as well.

Even though none of it could really be called concrete information, and many of the descriptions she recalled were so “metaphysical,” she could still faintly gain insights from them.

She simply felt that these insights could be put to use.

It was just that her insights were not yet comprehensive. She had an incessant itching urge, as if a tiny person in her inner body-scape were scratching at the tip of her heart with a feather, but no matter how she searched that inner body-scape, she had not been able to find the legendary third origin orifice.

The Hidden Field Orifice was in the lower abdomen. The Hidden Heart Orifice was in the center of the chest. By that logic, if the Hidden Spirit Orifice existed, it should be in the head, either at the crown of the skull or between the brows.

Yet she could not find it.

Bai Xiang sank her consciousness into the inner body-scape, swept over those two locations thoroughly, and not only did she fail to find a third origin orifice, she did not find any other hidden orifices either.

Then how did I find the Hidden Heart Orifice in the first place?

All of a sudden, she opened her eyes. Her gaze went still as she sank into thought.

“The constraints of order are everywhere, including in the ‘three origin orifices.’ Even if we ignore whether the ‘Hidden Spirit Orifice’ exists, order would not allow a living being to possess even just the Hidden Field and Hidden Heart Orifices at the same time.”

Once one of them was unearthed, the other would hide away. Most people would never obtain both in their entire lives, which was why that whole “digging for both orifices at once” strategy had appeared.

If you dug this one first, you could not get the other. If you dug that one first, you also could not get the other. So you might as well try digging both at the same time, right?

Digging both at once was indeed difficult, and one careless move could send qi and blood out of control and blow you apart, but fortune favored the bold. Compared to the difficulty of trying to dig out a second orifice after taking the first, plenty of people were willing to risk it.

“But why didn’t I feel that kind of difficulty when I dug out the Hidden Heart Orifice?”

At the time, she had thought it was her soul-abilities at work—the logic of “as long as she knows something exists and wants to unearth it, she will definitely be able to find and obtain it.”

Yet if that were truly the logic, why could she not find the Hidden Spirit Orifice?

What exactly was the difference between the Hidden Heart Orifice and the Hidden Spirit Orifice?

After long deliberation, Bai Xiang ruled out the possibility that “the Hidden Spirit Orifice simply doesn’t exist.”

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There was no way it did not exist.

All things and all order had their patterns. The Daoist legends of “five qi returning to origin” and “three flowers gathering atop” could not have been entirely made up. If there were orifices for essence and qi, then there had to be one for the spirit-soul. That fact was beyond doubt.

The reason she could not find it was probably still because the descriptions of this orifice were too vague, and her conception of its formation and nature was still immature.

Bai Xiang felt that this deficiency must be the reason her soul-abilities could not fully exert their power. After all, this ability did have loopholes. Just like the last time, when she had almost fallen for the “Huanshen” of the Eroding Decree—if she herself did not realize her mind had been bewitched, her soul-abilities would not activate on their own.

It was indeed a master key, but it still had to be held by her, the owner, in order to unlock anything in a specific way.

It truly could open every lock, but she at least had to know where the keyhole was.

Given all that, Bai Xiang right now was faced with two choices.

The first choice was to take advantage of the fact that her transformation into Qi-Origin was about to be completed, that she was about to reach the end of the path of the golden core, and use her newly unearthed Hidden Heart Orifice to begin consolidating her realm, attempting to cultivate to the true realm of the origin orifices.

That had been her ultimate goal in coming to Luohou. When she had first named this realm, she had done so with the notion of the Nascent Soul in mind, only to discover later that it coincidentally meshed with the concept of the three origin orifices.

Now that she had dug out two origin orifices, with them as the foundation of her realm, her chances of successfully breaking through should have greatly increased.

The second choice was to stubbornly tackle the Hidden Spirit Orifice, find a way to unearth all three origin orifices, and only break through after laying an incomparably solid foundation.

If left to Bai Xiang to choose, of course she wanted the second path.

The Hidden Spirit Orifice was too mysterious and profound. If she did not dig it out while her current insight and sharpness were at their peak, she had a premonition that after she broke through and tried to find it again, it might be extremely difficult to locate.

Moreover, she had a strange feeling in the depths of her being that the Hidden Spirit Orifice was tied to something extremely important to her, important to a degree that surpassed even the temptation of breaking through to the origin-orifice realm, sending ripples across the surface of her heart-lake again and again.

If I force my breakthrough and fail… will I be unable to rush back to Maozhou, unable to protect them…

Face after face surfaced in Bai Xiang’s mind. There was the stern yet gentle Bai Shengju, the taciturn Bai Lianzhou, the cold-faced, warm-hearted Bai Guanshan, and the other younger siblings and disciples of the dojo.

In the end, all those faces converged into that of a pure and lively black-haired girl, dressed in a wide-sleeved silk white celestial gown. With her hands demurely folded at her waist, she smiled sweetly and called out to her.

“Sister Xiang~”

“Auntie~”

Bai Xiang instinctively wanted to lose herself in that vision, but very quickly, she furrowed her brows and cut that illusion down from her heart.

Since when did I start hesitating and looking back and forth?

I’ve lived two lives. I’ve long since tasted so-called defeat and despair. Now that fate has drawn back the curtain for me and given me the chance to do it over, how can I let human ties shackle me and lose my drive to press forward?

She hardened her heart. In an instant, a hazy figure flew out of Bai Xiang’s body. It was the phantom of her soul, just like when she had cut down Chilong, sitting opposite her in the void.

Bai Xiang narrowed her eyes. Feixiang Heaven tapped lightly at the soul’s brow, and a point of light appeared there. She forcibly tried to make it correspond to the points of light at her chest and lower abdomen.

Can’t find it?

If I can’t find it, I’ll just make one.

Bai Xiang’s mental abacus clacked away. She tried to rely on the overbearing nature of her soul-abilities to exploit a bug in the rules.

But this approach was simply too reckless. The point of light at the soul’s brow only flickered for an instant before quickly going out again, which meant this sort of “spirit-pointing” was not going to work.

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Does this really mean I have to gather more knowledge about the Hidden Spirit Orifice to fill in my understanding?

This was already Bai Xiang’s final attempt. If even this did not work, she felt there was very little hope of succeeding today.

She really could not count on her luck always being this good.

She paused, quickly adjusted her mindset, and with a faint trace of regret looked toward the soul-body, which was also to say, toward this other self.

At least I’ve tried.

It was, in the end, a beautiful hope…

Bai Xiang had in fact already decided to give up, but she herself did not realize that her eyes, the dark-gold gleam within them, were growing brighter and brighter, gradually shedding the dark sheen and turning into brilliant gold.

Under the unwavering stare of those eerie golden pupils, her soul-body suddenly underwent a strange change. Its pair of half-transparent phantom eyelids snapped open, and as if it had awakened its own intelligence, it looked straight back at her.

This—

Even with Bai Xiang’s firm will, she was badly startled by this scene.

Something that should have been held firmly under the control of her soul-abilities… how had it come alive on its own?

But very soon, her gaze fell upon the center of the soul’s brow, where, before her eyes, a point of light once again emerged.

The instant that point appeared, the two origin-orifice points of light at the soul-body’s chest and lower abdomen exploded at the same time with dazzling white radiance. The three points responded to each other, flickering over and over, as if erupting into a silent cheer, as if only this way could they properly express their joy.

What in the world… is this “Huanshen”?

Bai Xiang quickly realized that this was an influence of “Huanshen.”

My eyes, this “Huanshen” power…

Is this “disorder”?

Just as the existence of demon pools destroyed the order of the world, could the power of “Huanshen” also be used to crack “order,” to undo all the shackles imposed by Heaven’s mandate?

Forcing herself to endure the massive shock brought on by this insight, Bai Xiang focused again on the soul. She found that aside from opening its eyes, it did nothing else, as if opening them was just a bit of ritual, a way of reminding her that it was about to reveal the Hidden Spirit Orifice.

This was absolutely a fortune she could not afford to miss. Bai Xiang no longer hesitated. As her soul-abilities exerted their power, the soul-body suddenly plunged back into her, and the point of white light at its brow appeared at her own brow at the same time.

In that instant, a torrent of understanding and insight regarding the Hidden Spirit Orifice poured into her consciousness straight out of the void.

This was a method that bypassed all rules. In the Ranyan Demon Kingdom, the wind and clouds changed at once.

The sky darkened, the ground split open, and rifts in the void spread in all directions. It was as if some will were venting its anger.

Bai Xiang, however, no longer had the leisure to care.

Her body was undergoing a transformation. Her golden core Qi-Origin at grand completion continuously turned into the primordial energy used by bone marrow to generate blood, and the newborn essence blood in turn continually transformed back into Qi-Origin, pouring into her dantian qi sea. The process grew faster and faster, and she was already infinitely close to the origin-orifice realm she had envisioned.

The greater change, though, was happening to her soul, to the world of her thoughts.

Her mind plunged into the inner body-scape, and Bai Xiang was dragged into a replay of her past memories.

First, she relived her previous life, to the point that it was as if not a single detail had been missed.

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Up to that point, she did not feel much of anything, aside from a bit of sighing emotion.

But as the process continued—and moved into her second life, that is, into her life as the current Bai Xiang—her expression suddenly changed.

Because this stretch of memory did not begin when she traversed over and merged with this life’s Bai Xiang.

It began from this life’s Bai Xiang, from the moment she awakened awareness as a child.

This… why would—

Bai Xiang was shocked.

Bai Xiang did not understand.

But none of that stopped the memories from advancing, constantly replaying the experiences of Bai Xiang’s childhood.

From being adopted into the Bai family and growing up.

To growing up and interacting with her two younger sisters.

To gradually discovering that one of her younger sisters always had an excessive attachment to her.

To hearing “Sister Xiang~” again and again… Bai Xiang’s heart could not help but tremble violently.

All right.

That really was enlightenment.

So Qing’er had never mistaken her for someone else, from beginning to end.

But Qing’er herself did not understand where that certainty came from, which was why… which was why she believed all that talk about past-life bodies and awakening memories of a previous life.

She believed she had not mistaken the person.

And indeed… she had not.

Bai Xiang took a deep breath, and with that breath, all the green fire was drawn into her.

She opened her eyes. All the manifestations of her body retracted. Feixiang Heaven fell into her right hand, and she simply held it there. No sharp edge could be seen from the outside.

Then, suddenly, she casually sliced forward with her sword.

With one stroke, she simultaneously split open the Ranyan Demon Kingdom, the hollow-tree space, and the main-world plane, tearing a deep rift into the void.

This was not to say she had already reached the point of tearing through multiple spaces with a single sword. She had merely taken advantage of the inherent instability of those spatial planes and followed the trend.

Even so, it was terrifying enough. Prince Saiwei and his entourage were still in the cavern waiting for Ji Chang to emerge. When they glanced up and saw that rent in the void, shock and fear immediately surfaced on their faces.

Through that rift, they could simultaneously see layer upon layer of kaleidoscopic world fragments.

And then, as they looked deeper, a streak of sword light flew out, swept once around their necks, and cut. It turned into a rainbow and vanished into the sky.