Volume 4, Chapter 79 – Finding Her Bearings

As time passed, Bai Xiang was already sitting steadily inside a medium-sized flying vessel, leaving He Xian and Zhu Canghai to act as chauffeurs as they drove it eastward at full speed.

Having proper transportation really did make a difference. The hull, forged from high-purity void crystal, could withstand most Loss of Order phenomena. Seated inside the vessel, Bai Xiang no longer needed to split her attention to deal with the chaos outside. She sat there in peace, holding the scriptures and secret arts the two men had presented and reading through them page by page.

What He Xian handed over was his survival art, Shadow-Spirit Clone Arrow. Combined with his Shadow-Spirit spirit pool, this art made full use of the spirit pool rule of the “parasitic shadow-spirit,” turning newly born shadow-spirits into arrows and detonating them to make up for his weakness of “having more than enough control, but not enough killing power.”

Yes—his Shadow-Spirit spirit pool could forcibly seize all “shadow-roots” beneath the reach of shadow, in other words, the true bodies of sentient beings. It was just completely useless against Bai Xiang. He could neither hold her nor blow her up, and he had been beaten into a miserable state earlier.

He also had a few other secret techniques he had privately stashed away, but most of them were not very useful and none were as ingenious as Shadow-Spirit Clone Arrow.

Bai Xiang became absorbed in the technique as she read. Although she could not use it without the matching spirit pool, some of its methods of circulating power and some of its balancing techniques were still worth referencing.

Part of the reasoning behind Qing’er’s path of splitting sword pellets overlapped with this method, so this would be perfect to use as supplementary material for her.

Besides that, there were also the Burst-Qi Art and the Zunyue Vajra Scripture that Zhu Canghai had offered up.

The Burst-Qi Art was an explosive technique that was common as dirt among body cultivators in the Void Realm—at least within Venerable circles. Because the Dao-Void Methods cultivated by body cultivators generally were not especially profound, most of the demonic power they condensed was used to nourish and temper the flesh. But in battle, no one had time to slowly warm and nourish the body. At such moments, a body full of demonic power became almost like dead weight: weaker than fists, kicks, or weapons, yet too wasteful to simply abandon. So people came up with the idea of developing a “burst-qi” method, using accumulated demonic power as fuel to temporarily increase explosive force.

This thing was useless to Bai Xiang, but quite useful to the Path of Qi. She could study it and incorporate it into the Shenming Qi-Refining Formula, giving every Path of Qi disciple one more explosive move.

Back when she crippled Immortal Venerable Jiuli, this technique had not dropped…

Bai Xiang narrowed her eyes.

Hmph. As expected, he had managed to tear away quite a bit of his divine soul.

The spirit pools of Immortal Venerables came in all shapes and forms. Aside from being strange and hard to defend against, their greatest strength was still survival.

Kill Shen Quan, and he could revive through his life-bound tortoise shell.

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Kill He Xian, and he probably had parasitic shadow-spirits hidden somewhere else. As for body-tempering Immortal Venerables like Jiuli and Zhu Canghai, it was even simpler. They only needed to place some flesh and blood elsewhere, or clone a body out of flesh and blood. Once the main body was destroyed, they could naturally awaken again inside that body.

As for the Zunyue Vajra Scripture, that was the technique Zhu Canghai had obtained from that lucky encounter of his—from the remains of a Venerable blown over by chaotic gale currents.

Bai Xiang had long since noticed that beneath Zhu Canghai’s broad sleeves he hid a pair of massive iron fists. With them, he had even been able to forcibly clash with the lower-tier sacred weapon Tianxuan Sword for a short time and come away with no more than superficial wounds. That was enough to show just how hard he had trained the bones of his arms and hands.

As she had expected, the Zunyue Vajra Scripture focused on cultivating both arms and both fists, and in the process involved the manifest refinement of the hidden meridians—the Arm Three Yin Meridians and the Arm Three Yang Meridians.

She had already manifestly refined the Arm Three Yin Meridians, but the Zunyue Vajra Scripture not only added the Arm Three Yang Meridians, allowing her to “open the meridians of both arms,” it also marked out many hidden acupoints even within the already refined Arm Three Yin Meridians.

Once she finished cultivating this scripture, the strength in her arms should rise another step.

But there was actually a hidden danger here as well.

As she browsed through these scriptures, Bai Xiang also reflected on the battle she had just fought against the three of them.

That combined strike had looked as though she had forced her own recovery by using her soul-abilities to move her qi and blood back into place, but only she knew that doing so had actually consumed lifespan.

Bai Xiang had originally possessed a lifespan of five hundred seventy-two years and a few more months. After this forced restoration through moving qi and blood, she had directly lost three years.

She felt that this was still because her body tempering had not yet reached the proper level. If she took an attack of this kind head-on, she would still be injured. If the intensity were any higher, she might suffer serious wounds. She absolutely could not grow too relaxed or careless.

Even now, after obtaining the Zunyue Vajra Scripture, even if she were to refine and connect every acupoint and meridian in both arms, making the bones of her arms and hands even stronger and sharper than the Tianxuan Sword, Bai Xiang estimated that she still would not be able to use that advantage without restraint.

Because bones and meridians were linked, this “sword edge” did not only face outward. It was also connected to other bones and acupoint meridians, which meant it faced inward as well.

Force worked both ways. The path she walked was not the spirit-pool path of interfering with physical laws, so she had no way to make the force she exerted affect only the outside and not the inside. If she went all out, she would very likely strain the tendons and bones elsewhere in her body… The principle was the same as back when she had first been tempering her body while nurturing her spirit.

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“But it’s still an improvement.” Bai Xiang put down the scripture in her hand. “The road has to be walked one step at a time. I still can’t rush for quick success.”

She compared the confessions of He Xian and Zhu Canghai against Shen Quan’s memories, and as a result gained an even clearer understanding of exactly where she stood in the Void Realm.

She had already discovered this before: even among figures who had reached the level of “Three Flowers and Five Qi, Xuanhua Immortal Venerable,” it was extremely difficult to excavate the origin apertures of the Three Flowers at the same time—not to mention all three, even uncovering two was hard beyond belief. Because of that, most Immortal Venerables could only choose one path from among “spell” and “body” to condense into a flower of Dao-origin, while the other two flowers were little more than placeholders.

And because most Immortal Venerables were like this, many Venerables gathered together in groups to form alliances or teams, all in pursuit of complementary Three Flowers that would improve their ability to survive in the Void Realm.

Shen Quan, He Xian, and Zhu Canghai were exactly like that. Although they each had holdings of their own in the Illusory Realm, their resources were mostly meager and their territories small—smaller, even, than Shenwu Heaven. On their own ground they could throw their weight around, but if they wanted to “get ahead,” they still had to come out and venture abroad, attaching themselves to top-tier powers like Cloud Tower and working for cultivation resources.

If they fought alone, then during that process they would inevitably run into dangerous situations they were not skilled at handling.

But if the three of them banded together, then no matter what kind of danger they encountered, they would most likely have a way to deal with it, and their margin of safety would be far higher.

The difference here mostly lay in the Hidden Field Orifice and the Hidden Heart Orifice.

Although the distinctions were not formally defined, Bai Xiang still habitually followed the xianxia novels she had read in her previous life, calling those who excavated the Hidden Field Orifice spell cultivators, and those who excavated the Hidden Heart Orifice body cultivators.

Overall, the former were more numerous. The latter amounted to less than a tenth of the former and were already considered rare.

Those who specialized in the soul path were rarer still. This did not mean that soul-path cultivators had excavated the Hidden Spirit Orifice; it was not like that. Most of them had either stumbled into a lucky encounter, or had inexplicably been invaded by Loss of Order in a dream and, by surviving a great calamity, gained insight. Only by relying on divine soul methods and divine soul arts did they then come to grasp the corresponding abilities of the soul path.

Bai Xiang called such people soul cultivators.

The old classic trinity, huh.

It was basically the standard configuration of a cultivation system—hardly something one could go without trying.

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Only a very small number of geniuses could manifestly refine both the Hidden Field Orifice and the Hidden Heart Orifice at the same time. Without exception, such people were eminent figures in the Void Realm, far beyond comparison with people like Shen Quan.

And here, another issue had to be mentioned: depth of cultivation.

Namely, that superior He Xian had mentioned—Meng Tian.

Although he specialized only in divine soul arts, it was obvious that his attainments on that path far surpassed Shen Quan’s. And when one also considered how strange and unpredictable the methods of that path were, the three men remained deeply wary of Meng Tian even though they could support one another.

This was what it meant to master a single move and dominate with it everywhere.

Without seeking breadth, without needing to wander outside and struggle for survival, someone protected by a major power really could pour all of their energy into deepening a single path, then use that absolute strength to crush other people’s shortcomings in one stroke.

And me…

Bai Xiang estimated that her own case was extremely special.

On the one hand, she possessed all Three Flowers, whole and without flaw. On the other hand, she had soul-abilities, a “rule” extremely similar to a spirit pool.

The former ensured her breadth.

The latter ensured her height.

With the two fused together, she had gained extraordinary combat power the moment she entered the Origin Realm, enough, perhaps, to compare with those long-famous Venerables—or even defeat them.

But what if some of those people had strengths that were even more exceptional?

Take Li Huiran. Thinking of him now, Bai Xiang still felt that she could not quite see through his true foundation.

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She could not slack off.

She warned herself.

If she truly wanted to reach the point where she could do whatever she pleased, she still had to keep striving upward.

Once she had clarified her thoughts, she sorted through the rest of her gains.

One thing worth mentioning was that the Void Realm really did have storage treasures.

Both He Xian and Zhu Canghai had handed over their storage jade plaques. Inside them were interstitial spaces that they called illusory realms, where some relatively unimportant odds and ends could be stored.

The flaw of these things was that they were too easily affected by Loss of Order, so they could only be used to hold miscellaneous items. No one used them to store anything important.

Bai Xiang was just about to inspect what exactly was inside when she suddenly felt the flying vessel shudder violently.

“What is it?”

She looked ahead.

“Chaotic gale currents!” came He Xian’s startled cry from the front.

“What’s going on—”

“Who the hell punched a hole in the qi-heavens?”