Volume 1, Chapter 52 – Ancestral Ground

Nanshan camp.

On a watchtower in the camp’s northern sector, Bai Xiang was checking her phone.

Mosquitoes and flies swarmed, yet none could actually land on her; the moment they touched down they were shaken off, forced to circle her and whine.

She ignored the pests, scrolling as she reviewed what she had just discussed with Cao Chuan.

So that fever-like warning sense, others do not have it.

After a swordsman forges the sword, until Condensing the Aspect succeeds there is no command link with the Demon Pool inside the blade; they can only rely on the pool’s own field to fend off external taint.

Even after Condensing the Aspect, when one can actively control the ‘field’ the sword’s pool emits, their sensing still goes through that field. Things like the heart aspect heating, heart flow warning, even using that heat to resist contamination, do not exist for Cao Chuan.

It seemed her spirit-soul was to blame.

Watching the cloud of insects dance in the light, she set the thoughts aside and returned the missed calls.

Civil infrastructure in Great Yu was nothing special; the ‘Nokia’ had abstract reception and in the wilds turned into a brick, so you had to go to the edge, get up high, to catch a signal.

Otherwise Cao Chuan would not have told her to use a radio.

“Hello…?”

The call connected; Bai Shengju’s hoarse voice came through.

“Xiang’er?”

“It’s me,” Bai Xiang said. “I’m at the field camp already. I’m fine, Grandpa, don’t worry.”

There had been three missed calls from Bai Zhuqing, and five from Bai Shengju.

He had called the most and he was the elder, so this call should come first; she could also ask how the medicine was working.

“It works great!” Bai Shengju coughed, sounding much stronger. “Guanshan and the others mixed it into a draught for me. Fine stuff.”

“Give me five or six days of this and I’ll make that Liu girl lose face for sure!”

Even laid up, he would not admit age, still fretting about the match.

He cared about her situation, asked for details of her meeting with the State Chancery, and what she had seen at the camp; he was not at all surprised that Governor Fang met her in person.

“Governor Fang is famous for filial piety and benevolence,” he told her. “When he first took office, his most famous deed was refusing an imperial audience to stay home and serve his ailing mother to the end. At first the imperial house thought it was a pose; after asking around they learned he truly waited on her day and night, even tending the bedpans himself, and they remembered his name.”

“You saved his daughter. Seeing you and rewarding you fits his image. Do not read too much into it. Do not tie your fate to mine.”

Great Yu was a feudal realm; its moral order was built on filiality and loyalty, and the throne rested on that order.

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Fang Xiaochun’s unbending filiality fits the realm’s highest political virtue, so the imperial house marked him, and any rise in his fortunes would bring swift promotion.

It sounded reasonable, yet Bai Xiang narrowed her eyes.

Great Yu had lived sixteen centuries and had broken off in between; each time, a scion of the imperial line had been propped up to revive it, and so it endured.

After several restorations the idea of the nation ran deep; even if an outsider clan seized the realm in chaos, they would borrow an imperial name to claim legitimacy.

As with the Han.

Had the Three Kingdoms ended with Shu-Han triumphant and Han restored, then afterward, no matter the dynastic turns, many contenders would have taken the surname Liu.

Without that, the realm would not settle and hearts would not rest, which is the logic of the age.

Only, in that order, loyalty should come before filiality.

So what was Great Yu doing?

Since when did it start following the Sima clan?

She understood him: Fang Xiaochun might not be sincere. Officialdom is full of theater; she was not to feel beholden for her grandfather’s recovery and so lean toward serving him.

“Don’t worry, Grandpa,” she said softly. “I know where I stand.”

“Good!”

Bai Shengju sounded pleased.

If another child had said it, he would not have believed it.

But since Bai Xiang entered the Dao, she had yet to disappoint him.

“But… you said the demon kingdom out there… and that blocking Demon Pool shows a ‘sound’ trait…”

He fell silent for a long while.

She could guess what he was weighing, and waited quietly.

“Truth is, I should have thought of it when you asked me earlier,” Bai Shengju sighed.

“After I woke, Zhuqing told me about the sword forms.”

“You suspect the Shenming Sword Dao’s core law lies in ‘sound,’ don’t you?”

“Yes,” Bai Xiang admitted.

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Be it the odd forms of the Shenming sword art or the associations in the name ‘Shenming,’ the answer was plainly on the table.

Liu Mengqing’s chosen visualization chart, ‘Crying Infant,’ began with a wail when unfurled, its cry almost a psychic strike.

Saying it suited Shenming was itself an emphasis on that answer.

“I doubted that flute music too,” Bai Shengju said, shaking his head. “Couldn’t trace it.”

“But, Xiang’er, if that blocking pool at the demon kingdom’s mouth also has a ‘sound’ trait, then I… there are things you should know.”

“This is why I insisted on staying in the Chilong Circuit.”

“Why I would not leave the Shenming dojo.”

He coughed lightly and went on, “You have likely guessed it.”

“Yes. It is all to seek our Bai clan’s broken inheritance, to find the lost Demon Pool ancestral ground.”

He stressed ‘ancestral ground,’ then explained in detail what it meant.

Demon Pool, visualization chart, forging method, the three are one lineage, a single system.

Take the Qingya Dragon Python. The Zhou clan has a chart, and a forging method, and knows how to tame it and seal it in a blade, but those two alone are not enough.

You must also run a channel, a demon-breeding ground, to steadily raise that specific pool for disciples.

This is easy to grasp: great sword lineages are systems; within a school, most disciples’ blades house the same kind of pool.

Relying on wild hunts alone, the odds of finding the same pool are far too low.

This isn’t catching wild Pokémon; running around more will not cut it.

A ‘Qingya Dragon Python’ pool is obviously rare. To match disciples with it you need artificial raising, which means a cultivation site, the so-called demon-breeding ground.

Such places are, of course, secret, hidden where only the sect itself knows; outsiders cannot get in.

But…

Precisely because they are secret, calamity makes them easy to lose; even later heirs cannot be sure of the sites.

“Shenming Sword Dao once ranked among the Seventy-Two Paths, even among the best,” Bai Shengju sniffed. “What Zhou Jing’an has, we had too.”

“You mean,” Bai Xiang ventured, “since our dojo is in Chilong, the Bai clan’s demon-breeding ground, that ancestral ground, must also be hidden in the wilds around the Chilong Circuit.”

“Exactly!” he said. “That is why I stayed.”

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“But for years there was nothing to show. I nearly gave up.”

“Now you tell me they found a ‘demon kingdom’ to the south, and the blocking pool has that trait—!?”

“Xiang’er!”

The old man grew excited.

“Do you realize, that demon kingdom may be our ancestral breeding ground!”

…

After the call, deep in the night, Bai Xiang returned to her tent and laid the wooden sword across her knees to nurture it.

He wanted her to keep an eye on the demon kingdom and, if possible, to speak to Governor Fang, asking him, for his daughter’s sake, to help their dojo reclaim the ancestral ground.

In the extreme, Bai Shengju could forgo the site itself, but the visualization charts and forging methods likely preserved there must somehow be secured.

“When a breeding ground is abandoned it leaks demonic aura and will naturally spawn Demon Pools.”

“Enough aberrations arise, and such pools can indeed grow into a demon kingdom, until that pocket of void is saturated and its miasma spills out.”

“Then people will find it, and the Demon-Immortal Dao will be drawn in.”

“It is only conjecture so far, but with so many coincidences together, the odds it is Shenming’s ancestral ground are high.”

Thinking, Bai Xiang’s mind turned to Benling Sword Dao’s visit to No. 1 High.

Benling Sword Dao.

Qizhou University’s Sword Institute.

Instead of staying in Qiyun Circuit, they had come to Chilong for no good reason. Suspicious, in hindsight.

Would Chai Xuan be among them.

If she was, and given she once ‘played the flute to steal a treasure’ at their dojo, and now turned up for Shenming’s ancestral ground, the chain of events felt a bit too neat.

Bai Xiang closed her eyes and let it go for now.

She was already in the Black Water Serpent Max combat suit: a black one-piece underlayer, a vest stuffed with plates, guards on arms and legs, paired with all-black field boots.

The manual said the bodysuit alone could stop small-caliber rounds, while the guards and plates would take high-energy hits.

Limited for an ordinary person, but for someone with a trained body like hers, the boost was huge.

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In the cramped tent she pulled on a cap, her white hair gathered into a ponytail through the back, settled in lotus, and began feeding both spirit-soul and heart flow into the wooden sword across her knees to see what would happen.

Heart flow entered the blade—the start was normal.

As more poured in, ‘crowding’ formed within the sword body, and the plain cloud-pattern wooden sword rose into the air as the air around it warped.

Was the heart flow being compressed inside?

She opened her eyes and squinted at the blade.

A hunch came: that ring of invisible distortion around the sword might be the embryo of qi-force.

Interesting.

She was intrigued.

This scene should have been impossible; no one’s heart flow leaves the body at Nurture the Spirit, much less gets poured into a weapon.

Unless the sword was born a part of them, with their blood and nerves running through it.

“Bzz—”

The wooden sword began to thrum.

Through her spirit-soul she sensed the cause at once: the sword body could not bear the strain of the distortion and its inner structure was starting to fail.

It still needed spirit-soul to brace and cradle it.

Without that infusion, if she kept forcing in heart flow, the sword might simply explode.

Boom…

Just then a muffled blast rolled in from outside, the ground shuddering.

“Alert!”

“Alert!”

Shouts and whistles followed.

She stepped out to see a Chilong soldier biting his whistle and blowing hard in the night mist.

Behind him a tide of blood-red mist came surging.