Volume 4, Chapter 20 – Sorting Things Out

Instead of using her authority as Shenming Dao Master, Bai Xiang called Miss Aurora, who was in Longchuan Circuit handling matters at the local Starwater Company branch, and asked her to reserve a room for her on the same floor.

Soon a text came through on Bai Xiang’s phone. She followed the instructions, went down to the front desk to pick up her room card, then came back up, locked herself in the room, and told Yu He and the others to stand guard outside. No one was to disturb her during this time. Only then did she undress, sit cross-legged on the mattress, and begin her unwavering daily cultivation.

Cultivation was like rowing upstream: if you didn’t advance, you fell back. If you stopped thinking, you decayed. In her previous life, Bai Xiang had read that line many times and thought she understood it. It was only after coming to this world that she grasped its true meaning.

There was nothing complicated about it. The true meaning was simply that time moved.

Time flowed. Lifespan flowed. Every second, a cultivator’s body lost vitality and strength. In terms of cultivation, that was the worst kind of regression.

So she could not slack off.

Not for a minute, not for a second. Not even by the tiniest margin.

Still, she hadn’t brought Bai Zhuqing along this time. Without that “Qi-Origin converter” at her side, her solo cultivation efficiency wasn’t high. With her own sensitivity, she could barely detect any improvement at all.

After an hour, Bai Xiang ended her session of Path of Qi cultivation. She took two or three minutes to rest, checked the backlog of messages on her phone, then immediately took out a pill, swallowed it, and began working on the Sun-Chasing Scripture again.

She had already more or less mastered the Mountain-Ramming Chapter of this body-tempering art and was still working through the Body-Fleetness Chapter. In practice, she used her Core Realm on the Path of Qi as the Great Sun in her visualization, imagining herself sprinting across a wasteland while every inch of her skin endured the scorching blaze.

That wasn’t the “proper” way to cultivate the Body-Fleetness Chapter, but Bai Xiang already had the Three Flowers crowned above her head, with both body and soul Innate. For someone like her, even brute-forcing it with a visualization like this still produced results.

Sss, sss…

Before long, a white mist rose off her entire body, formed by sweat flashing into vapor. Her skin, usually as pale as carved jade, flushed red at the surface as if she really were being roasted by high heat.

During the process, she could feel the toughness and resilience of her flesh increasing by the tiniest fraction. More importantly, as this training deepened, she gradually developed the sense that she could “breathe” with her legs, even with the skin of her whole body.

Every sense across her body had grown sharper.

The Body-Fleetness Chapter’s goal had two steps. First, strengthen the legs and feet, remolding tendons, bones, and flesh. Second, extend that reinforcement from the legs to the whole body.

The first step was to let a person run faster while their body rested on the carrier of the earth, to make their legs and especially the soles of their feet more sensitive, so they could feel the pulse of the land, even the magnetic field in the soil beneath each step, guiding them to follow that current and even borrow its strength.

The second step was for flight. In the air a person was like a fish in water, and strengthening the skin over the whole body was like toughening a fish’s scales. It could raise the efficiency of flight even further.

If those conditions were met, the effects of cultivation would be terrifying. And for Bai Xiang, she had another advantage over those who trained the Body-Fleetness Chapter in the usual way: she had also mastered the Taishang Perception.

She had created that perception art based on her soul and consciousness being far stronger than other people’s. By sensing the energies of heaven and earth with her soul and using the Jade Spirit to construct model scenes, she had formed a kind of “mind’s eye” that could see the true world without opening her physical eyes.

Combined with a body made too keen by her training in the Body-Fleetness Chapter, this method produced a one-plus-one-greater-than-two effect.

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Keeping her eyes closed, Bai Xiang tried deepening her breathing and immediately sensed a shift in the airflow within the room.

Heaven and earth’s energy were mixed in that air. As all the vapors in the room flowed, wrapped around her, or slipped across her body, she could use even the slightest hairs and softest skin to “sense” and “analyze” them. Then, with the Jade Spirit, she turned that information into a model, almost achieving real-time monitoring of everything within ten meters of her.

Even so, this was still a shortcut.

She had already pushed the Body-Fleetness Chapter to this level a month ago. Since then, her progress had been slow, and she was basically just holding the line, gaining a little, losing a little, without falling behind overall.

Her breathing gradually steadied. Her skin returned to its pure jade-white. Bai Xiang opened her eyes, slid one bare leg off the mattress, toes sinking into the carpet, then went straight to the bathroom for a shower.

Bai Xiang had more or less stopped eating grains, which helped keep her body clean. The sweat her Innate body produced wasn’t really dirty either, but she hadn’t dropped that habit.

After rinsing off, she came out and put her clothes and dress back on. She thought for a bit, then took paper and pen from the drawer and sketched out what looked at first glance like a slightly abstract map.

She drew it based on the information Sun Yaoming had given her, and it was in fact something very precious.

It marked the locations of several prominent powers in the Upper Realm Illusory Realms. Combined with the fragmentary memories of Li Guangyuan she had refined, Bai Xiang could roughly outline part of the Upper Realm’s landscape.

There, the Demon Court was the greatest power. In a typical Illusory Realm nation, an Immortal Venerable in the Mystic-Transformation Realm would be enough to anchor and protect an entire region, but in the Demon Court, they didn’t enjoy that kind of exalted status.

After all, just among the Immortal Venerables the Demon Court openly acknowledged, there were already more than a hundred.

That didn’t mean Immortal Venerables were worthless, because the Demon Court’s internal structure was quite loose. Rather than viewing it as a royal court forcibly gathering Immortals, it was better to see it as an academic society for those seeking to advance and learn.

Some Immortal Venerables chose to pledge themselves entirely to the Demon Court’s master, but many others, even after joining, remained quite free. They only had to regularly complete a few knowledge-related assignments for the Court. Everything else they arranged as they liked.

As a result, even though the Demon Court had many Immortal Venerables, their whereabouts were mostly unpredictable.

Aside from the periodic Void Dao Festivals, where most of the Immortals would attend and show themselves, they generally scattered once it was over—this one going back to some heaven to be an emperor, that one serving as a sect’s pillar in another.

None of that meant the Demon Court was easy to provoke.

No one knew how old the organization really was. People only knew it represented the peak of research into Void Dao arts, the highest hall of seekers across the realms, and that it also shouldered the task of maintaining order between worlds.

When the Demon Court’s sky-patrols or roaming enforcers went out, very few forces dared to stand in their way.

This Demon Court was interesting.

Bai Xiang thought it over.

From the memories of Li Guangyuan and Sun Yaoming, the Demon Court actually didn’t want humanity wiped out.

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When it came to human development, the Demon Court mostly let things take their course. If a human cultivator wanted to join the Demon Court and study Void Dao arts, as long as they were willing to undergo the Body Tribulation to become yao and then swear loyalty to the Court’s master, they would be welcomed, even protected.

Without that, human forces like Tianfu Mountain could never have survived. A few sky-patrols and enforcers would have been enough to topple them.

Sun Yaoming and Li Guangyuan didn’t know the specific reasons, but Bai Xiang had a theory. The Demon Court probably wanted sole control of the “Dao paths” in every realm.

Only when order was stable could that control be stable.

By contrast, if everything fell into chaos and the realms were thrown into turmoil, even the Demon Court wouldn’t be able to watch every corner at once. Someone could easily exploit a gap in the rules to break through to the Immortal Venerable level, and that was something the Court did not want to see.

How old was this Demon Court master, then?

There was no further information on them, not even whether they were still alive.

At that thought, Bai Xiang instinctively checked her own lifespan.

Five hundred seventy-two years, three months, two days, one hour, thirteen minutes, and fifty seconds.

It sounded like a lot, and she had broken through the Heaven’s Fate Lock of one hundred and fifty years, but compared to the destruction she could inflict on the world, that lifespan wasn’t much.

How much had her combat strength increased after she broke through to the Origin Orifice.

Judging by that jump, if her lifespan had risen on a one-to-one scale with her cultivation, the number should have shot to at least a thousand years.

Bai Xiang had once tried to cheat with her soul-abilities and a bit of idealism, hoping that breaking through would give her a lifespan like a Nascent Soul cultivator from fantasy novels—one thousand to three thousand years—but she’d failed.

She didn’t understand why, and could only assume the Heaven’s Fate Lock still existed.

If I have a bit over five hundred years, do the other Immortal Venerables have the same.

Bai Xiang didn’t think so.

They almost certainly had less.

Maybe three hundred years, maybe only two hundred, maybe just barely over the previous limit of a hundred and fifty.

By that logic, even if the Demon Court’s master was at the level of “becoming a Saint”—what people usually called a great power—there was no way to estimate exactly how long they’d live.

“Becoming a Saint… Saint.”

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Sitting on the edge of the bed, Bai Xiang stroked the scabbard of Feixiang Heaven and muttered those terms under her breath.

By the Void Dao promotion system, once someone achieved Five Qi Three Flowers and the Mystic-Transformation Immortal realm, the next step was to prepare to let their Divine Pool “Return to Void.”

Return to Void—this was all anyone knew. Li Guangyuan and Sun Yaoming had no more details, and neither did Wu Qing and the others.

It wasn’t just Bai Xiang who was clueless. Human factions like Tianfu Mountain, which had been operating in the Upper Realm for so many years, were just as helpless about the later stages of training.

They had essentially given up and chosen to borrow the path of Human Dao Sacred Weapons to boost their power instead.

Borrowed was right.

That Sacred Weapon method was not, as Sun Yaoming claimed, humanity’s original invention. Li Guangyuan’s memories had shown it existed for monsters too, designed for Immortal Venerables who had no path forward and used as their guardian weapons.

Could powers created through that method truly count as Saints and great powers.

Bai Xiang had her doubts.

For now, though, it wasn’t something she needed to think about.

People like Monk Xuanyi had tried to tempt her in front of those murals, boasting that if she joined, great powers would line up to take her as a disciple.

In reality, even in the Upper Realm, sightings of great powers were extremely rare.

The Demon Court’s master was the clearest candidate, but even they had not shown themselves in hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years.

She probably didn’t need to face an enemy of that level just yet.

“Still,” Bai Xiang murmured, “speaking of great powers… does the Xuan Emperor count as one?”

That was how he was described in Wu Qing’s gifted memories. Otherwise the Xuan Emperor Scripture wouldn’t be so sought after.

“It’s not like I haven’t tried probing my awareness and visualizing that scripture, but I’ve never gotten anything out of it.”

“And the mystery of this ‘Illusory God’ in my eyes still isn’t solved. I can’t be sure yet whether there are more secrets hidden there.”

After turning it over in her mind for a long time without getting anywhere, Bai Xiang gave up.

She grabbed her phone instead, opened the Demon-Suppressing Division’s private group chat, and assigned Yu He and the others a new task: ramp up the search for and arrest of Feathering Sect members.

“The road still has to be walked one step at a time,” she sighed.

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“Whether it’s the Xuan Emperor Scripture.”

“Or whether I reference the Human Dao Sacred Weapon route.”

“Or study the Human Dao Sacred Law ‘Dao path’ to condense a Divine Pool. Those are all other people’s methods.”

“The clearest Path of Qi route in front of me is still to light up the ‘tracks’ and ‘stars’ in my body.”

Tracks meant hidden meridians.

Stars meant hidden acupoints.

There were twelve of the former and three hundred and fifty-six of the latter.

It looked like a body-focused path, but Bai Xiang was already at Three Flowers crowned in the orthodox Mystic Dao line.

The Three Flowers were the Three Flowers of essence, qi, and spirit.

The qi of the Path of Qi was now also formed by those Three Flowers combined.

Body-tempering.

So what if it was body-tempering.

With her double-Innate foundation, any improvement to her flesh would convert the extra essence into the other two, pulling them up along with it.

Likewise, if she obtained some higher-level soul secret art that rapidly boosted her soul cultivation, her soul could nourish her body and essence in turn, again raising all three together.

They were all roads.

As long as she was improving, she only needed to pick one and walk it steadily.

“It’s a shame Li Guangyuan was only a steward-level functionary,” Bai Xiang said with a shake of her head. “His body-tempering methods were too crude, and he didn’t know any of the unknown acupoints.”

She shook her head again.

Her thoughts naturally slid to the “Head Shop.”

With all its arrangements wrecked by Sun Yaoming, the mastermind behind it should be about ready to show themselves.