Volume 4, Chapter 85 – The Remnant Page

After sending Zhuye away, Bai Xiang remained alone in the training room. The first thing she did was lower her head toward the metal wall beside her and catch sight of her current appearance in its clear reflection.

It was not as if she was exposing anything, but the whole look was a bit of a mess, far too ragged and mismatched.

There was a wardrobe in the training room, and inside were all kinds of robes she could pick from freely. But Bai Xiang was in no hurry to wash up and change. Instead, she reached through the tear at the side of her skintight battle suit and pulled out the Heavenly Stem Precious Jade wrapped in the remnant page from between her breasts.

She unfolded the wrinkles, and the yellow jade glowed warmly in her hand. She tried lowering her palm and found that the yellow jade could actually float in midair by its own power.

Bai Xiang thought to herself that this thing truly did look very different from ordinary jade essences and jade spirits. If normal treasure-jades were a fifty-cent special effect, this yellow jade looked like at least a ten-dollar one.

And the thing seemed faintly… intelligent?

She was not sure. But under Taishang Perception, when the object floated up and shed its radiance, that halo seemed to convey a kind of delight. It was as though it was extremely happy to have found a master like Bai Xiang and was deeply attached to her aura.

As for the reason, Bai Xiang felt it probably lay in that label: Order-Preserving Treasure.

“Order-Preserving Treasure” was the collective name for this class of treasures. The reason for the name was simple: all of them had been stripped away from the original primary order. They were the largest fragments of the primary order itself, and by nature they possessed the effect of suppressing Loss of Order and safeguarding order.

And what Bai Xiang cultivated was the Path of Qi. Compared with Dao-Void Methods, the Path of Qi had almost no effect on the outside world. It was a standard path of preserving order, and that was probably why this yellow jade seemed so close to her.

“Little thing.” Bai Xiang extended a finger into the air and lightly teased the yellow jade. “You’d better stay like this and not turn into the kind of sentient being that starts haughty and ends obsequious.”

Perhaps for now, the Path of Qi could be counted as a method of preserving order. But in truth, Bai Xiang knew very well that this was only because the Path of Qi was not yet flourishing.

That was true. Compared with traditional cultivation methods, which required devouring vast quantities of heaven-and-earth energy, the Path of Qi she had created emphasized excavating the Inner Body-scape, treating the self as a world unto itself, a minor world, and drawing out its hidden potential from within, uncovering the secrets of those acupoints in order to improve one’s quality.

But one thing had to be said: the Path of Qi’s demand for outside energy was not zero.

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Even she herself, when breaking through to the Origin Realm, had seized the ten thousand demon-beast eggs Monk Daokong had stockpiled for her. It was by drawing on the energy inside them that the breakthrough had gone so smoothly. From that alone, it was obvious that “eating things” could at the very least speed up cultivation in the early stages of the Path of Qi.

As long as that concept existed, the Path of Qi could never truly preserve order.

If you were still seizing energy in this way to strengthen yourself, and still forcing your way past the ordained limit of lifespan in pursuit of immortality, then how could that possibly count as preserving order?

True preservation of order ought to mean cultivating nothing, doing nothing, simply letting nature take its course, living as an ordinary mortal and dying in accordance with one’s allotted years.

Bai Xiang could never accept a path like that. She had never taken any “preserving order” evaluation to heart, because from the very beginning she had known that the Path of Qi, devoted as it was to longevity and to struggling against the ordained limit of lifespan, was in essence rebelling against destiny as well.

After toying with the little yellow jade for a while, Bai Xiang began to study what exactly it could do.

At present, aside from herself, the only person who knew this thing was in her hands was Zhuye. This Spirit-Command Sect successor had also given her a few suggestions, and she tried them one by one, only to find that none of them had any effect on the little yellow jade.

According to legend, this thing was a supreme treasure. The moment one obtained it, one could immediately fuse with it, and from then on one’s own existence would be folded into the order it symbolized. If one someday had the chance to return to the primary order, one could then be deathless and undying together with it.

As for what order it represented… judging from the name Yang-Earth Essence, Wu, and from the title Heavenly Stem Precious Jade, it ought to be the order of the Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches.

That was quite an ancient concept. Bai Xiang could not help letting her thoughts wander again. All those cultivation methods and dynasties condensed aspiration-force into spirit pools. Had the order-concept of the Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches also originally been something innate?

This thing truly touched on quite a lot: the scales of time and space, the classification of directions and the five phases. These could all be counted within the Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches.

But who was it that first laid out that concept?

Surely it was not that the primary order itself was conscious and, for the convenience of the sentient beings it nurtured, deliberately taught it to them?

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The moment she thought of that, the little yellow jade took on an entirely different look in Bai Xiang’s eyes. She began to feel a little wary of it.

“I’ll leave it alone for now.” She found a gift box meant for storing medicinal herbs and tucked the little yellow jade inside for safekeeping.

The ordinary methods of using it were all ineffective. It seemed that if one wanted to make use of it, there was only one path: to do as the Wu Emperor had done and completely open one’s body and mind to fuse with it.

But Bai Xiang refused to do that. Putting aside whether there might be hidden dangers behind it… her road had not yet reached its end, so why should she nail down her own future so early?

She could not be sure that, after fusing with the little yellow jade, she would still be able to continue cultivating the path she walked now.

Even if she were going to use it, there was no way it would be this early. For the moment, she would just leave it where it was and take it out if an opportunity arose later.

Once she made that decision, her thoughts instantly became clear. She felt as though a knot had loosened, as though she had seen through something, and even her cultivation in the Path of Qi advanced a little.

Because this was no ordinary temptation.

Eternal life. Undying and indestructible. There were not many people who, when faced with such an opportunity, could remain as true to themselves as she had.

“This thing is called ‘Wu,’ and the little world it ended up in was called ‘Shenwu Heaven.’ Is that a coincidence, or is there some reason behind it?”

Now that she had the spare time to study such things, Bai Xiang found the clue left by the name Shenwu Heaven so obvious, and the Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches so commonplace as a concept, that she could not help wondering how no one over all those long years had made the connection that a treasure was hidden here.

That doubt had only just arisen when it dissolved. A flood of chaotic memories welled up and told Bai Xiang that, in the Void Realm, the number of minor worlds named with “Wu” was terrifyingly large.

Because it could also be used as a counting marker. Jia, Yi, Bing, Ding, and after Ding came Wu. There were countless “Wu-something Heavens” and “something-Wu Heavens” in the Void Realm, and on top of that, the many Illusory Realm minor worlds named with Jia, Yi, Bing, Ding, and the rest. There was simply no way to sift through them all.

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After sorting through those miscellaneous doubts, Bai Xiang reviewed the gains from this trip, got to her feet, stripped off her tattered clothing, and drifted naked into the bathing room.

A medium-sized flying vessel really did come with well-equipped facilities.

As she bathed, Bai Xiang let her thoughts roam and decided that later on she should have Guo Rongzhi build her an even larger flying vessel.

When she came out, she casually changed into a plain white training robe of a completely generic sort, the kind that would not stand out anywhere. Her two fair lower legs were folded in the air beneath the long robe as she sat in the void, then she began to read and study the remnant page that had been wrapped around the yellow jade.

Monk Zhuye had told her quite a bit about the Xuan Dynasty.

Its historical background, how it had fallen.

And one especially important thing: now she finally knew Xuandi’s full name.

Emperor Feng.

If I attain the Dao, will people have to call me Emperor Xiang?

The corner of her mouth lifted slightly.

But Bai Xiang knew very well that what Monk Zhuye had told her belonged only to history and culture. In terms of cultivation, it was not actually much help.

If she wanted to cultivate, if she wanted to uncover the secrets of the Xuandi Scripture and of her own Xuandi bloodline, then the key still had to lie in some concrete thing, for example, the remnant page before her.

Shed the Flesh and Restore the Bones, Spirit Condenses the Mysterious Embryo.

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She looked once more at the line of title at the beginning of the page.

The content was written in ancient language, but ancient language and Yu speech shared the same roots, so she had no difficulty reading it at all.

Looking through the contents, it seemed to describe a method similar to projecting the divine soul from the body.

But unlike the kind of evil method Shen Quan had practiced, the technique described on this remnant page did not require abandoning the body. Instead, it emphasized that “the soul governs spirit, the body governs essence.” The separation of the two seemed to be mutually reinforcing, and could simultaneously bring an explosive increase to both divine soul cultivation and body-tempering progress.

That does have a little of the flavor of my own soul-vision of the Body-scape.

As Bai Xiang pondered the art, she wondered whether this might be a part of the Xuandi Scripture itself, or at the very least a technique copied out from it.

And it had not even been copied in full.

It was precisely because it was incomplete, because it only mentioned the concept of the Xuandi Scripture in many places, that the Wu Emperor had not dared practice it himself and had instead gone out to search for the complete method.

As for why, one reason was obvious: everyone wanted to practice wondrous methods.

The other was that, if this technique could truly be cultivated to completion, it would inevitably solve the Wu Emperor’s dilemma of being trapped within Shenwu Heaven, unable to move.

What he wanted was freedom. He wanted his soul-body to come out while his flesh-body stood guard. That was why he had been so obsessed with the Xuandi Scripture.

After thinking it over, Bai Xiang chose to use the Golden-Pupil Illusory God on the remnant page.