Volume 5, Chapter 40 – Contamination

Qingli Immortal Manor looked magnificent on the outside, but most of its structures, this palace included, existed mainly to conceal the seabed ruins below.

Bai Xiang passed by those resplendent halls and pavilions and made her way downward along the winding, folded stairways. She had only just descended to the “Minus One” level when she already saw large numbers of carvings in that deep black stone appearing across the walls.

Just as the carvings above had all been Buddha images, so too were the carvings here. They all looked extremely primitive. Unlike the carvings she had seen in other Buddhist temples, they did not painstakingly render the many details of Buddhas and their disciples. Each figure looked extraordinarily crude. But there were simply too many of these crude carvings, packed far too densely, so dense they seemed plastered together. At a glance, they produced an overwhelmingly powerful visual impact and possessed a peculiar kind of splendor all their own.

These things… their surfaces seemed to be coated in a layer of seal-sigils.

Holding the Shenming Sword reversed in her right hand, Bai Xiang raised her left hand and lightly brushed it across the stone carvings.

It was as if some kind of seal had been torn open. At once, a feeling of disgust rose up from the bottom of her heart. It was already very faint, but it was not unfamiliar to her.

If she remembered correctly, the first time she had felt this kind of disgust was when she faced Bolu during the Qizhou University tournament. Later, she had felt a bit of it again when facing the Black Heaven Buddha Venerable. But as she grew stronger and stronger, methods like this that polluted the soul could no longer make the Jade Spirit actively raise an alarm.

And yet now, it had appeared again.

Whether it was Taishang Response or the Jade Spirit, whether instinct or the cultivation method she had adjusted, everything was sending her premonitions of “disgust,” “discomfort,” and “ill omen.”

Was it really that exaggerated?

In He Chuan’s memories, there seemed to be a warning stating that anyone holding a Buddhist bead was forbidden to use it to reflect the murals. Anyone who violated that rule would be executed on the spot.

Bai Xiang took out the Hunyuan Buddhist Bead again and held it beneath the wall-lamp light for close inspection, only to discover that the stone murals were reflected on the bead’s surface.

It was a very strange phenomenon. Viewed from below, the stone mural appeared solemn, magnificent, and intricate. But after being reflected through the convex surface of the Hunyuan Buddhist Bead, the image that emerged looked like countless Buddhas connected together by flesh, twisting and merging into one another one after another.

Bai Xiang’s eyesight was far beyond that of ordinary people. She immediately noticed that among those blurred and twisted images, the bends and folds seemed to faintly outline a gigantic human face.

But she could not see it in full.

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The face was too enormous. The truth that the little Buddhist bead could reflect and reveal amounted to only a few hundredths of its total area. All she could make out was a small section of the contour of one nostril.

After looking up once more at the carvings above, Bai Xiang continued downward.

The “Minus Two” level had similar carved murals as well. Bai Xiang still used the Hunyuan Buddhist Bead to reflect the mural, and found that it too revealed that giant face, though a different section of its outline.

And so, each time Bai Xiang descended one level, she used the Buddhist bead to reflect the carved murals, while using the Jade Spirit to record in her mind the outline of the giant face she had observed on the previous level. The whole process was like playing a jigsaw puzzle.

By the time she reached the eighteenth level and filled in the outline from the final mural, that gigantic human face had more or less taken shape. Only a pair of eyes remained blank.

Standing there without moving, Bai Xiang closed her eyes and let her thoughts sink into her Inner Body-scape, carefully observing that giant face.

Its features were full and rounded, its expression benevolent.

Judging by its features, this was undoubtedly the face of a Buddha, and each facial detail was extremely refined.

Although the eyes were still missing, this alone was already extraordinary. The longer Bai Xiang looked at it, the more she began to feel as though the thing were alive and actually rising and falling with breath.

But what if that was not an illusion…?

As she stared at it, as if her very act of “staring” had interfered with something, the giant face actually began to tremble within her mind and slowly smear itself toward the source of her gaze.

If the giant face had had eyes, then it would undoubtedly have been looking straight at Bai Xiang. Its image in her mind changed little by little along with that “eye contact,” shifting from its original benevolent expression into one of vicious ferocity, savage and terrifying like the wrath of a vajra.

If an ordinary person were faced with such a scene, even if they did not go mad on the spot, they would still feel utterly wretched. It would seem as though that giant face were constantly changing expressions within their mind, and each transformation would place tremendous pressure on the soul.

It really was alive.

Who knew how many years and ages had worn away into nothingness, yet it still had not died. All it took was a single gaze to reactivate it.

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“So that is how the so-called myths… and the Buddhas within them… were formed.”

“What a cruel world, filthy in every corner.”

As she stared at the giant face, Bai Xiang’s tone held a trace of emotion.

The giant face seemed to be enraged by her attitude. Its expression twisted with increasing violence, making all kinds of expressions no human face should have been capable of making.

“That’s enough.”

At a single movement of Bai Xiang’s will, streak after streak of golden light burst out through the giant face from within, instantly dissolving it into nothing and revealing a Divine Palace light-orifice at the very center of her Inner Body-scape.

“Go.”

With another thought, the orifice returned to its place, gathered once more into the current of her heart, and slipped back into hiding somewhere within her body, assisting the great rivers of qi force in the Divine Palace as they cycled through their heavenly revolutions.

“For a mere reflection to carry contamination of this level, whatever lies buried below must be extraordinary.”

Bai Xiang gazed into the deep tunnel beneath the stairs.

“The Suzhen Dao must have suffered losses here before. That’s why they wrapped the murals in those obscuring seal-sigils.”

“And they still dare touch something like this? Are they in such a hurry to die?”

In Bai Xiang’s view, Wu Mengzi, a mere Sword Lord of the Suzhen Dao, was absolutely unqualified to touch a taboo of this level.

Even Chu Weiping’s Taishang Emotion-Forsaking Heart would have to endure an impact from this. What made Wu Mengzi think he had the right to look at it?

He would probably die of soul-collapse from the very first glance, and then have his body possessed by that giant face instead.

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“The Suzhen Dao has no right to occupy this place in the first place.”

Bai Xiang was extremely certain of that.

“The Yao Yu demon ancestor.”

“It’s the Yao Yu demon clan, and that lousy strategist, helping them.”

“Hmph. As expected, they’re all in cahoots.”

Standing where she was, Bai Xiang first looked at the deep tunnel below, then lifted her head to look at the stairs above, as well as the murals carved there.

Dou Feiyun’s patrol duties included prohibiting unauthorized people from entering the ruins. If Bai Xiang had not been disguised as someone from the Wendao Institute and thereby counted as being officially on the rolls, no other Suzhen disciple could possibly have been allowed in here.

Such protective measures really were exceedingly tight.

But what if this was not merely a form of protection?

Her eyelids lowered halfway.

Bai Xiang had already decided what to do next.

…

At the same time, another hundred meters farther down, in an extremely deep underground cavern, a group of people dressed in the robes of Suzhen Dao disciples were working in great tension.

Their task was very simple. Their tools were nothing more than chisels and hammers, used to chip away at the loose seafloor rock and expose the black stone carvings underneath.

This cavern was extremely spacious. The underground area seemed even broader than Qingli Immortal Manor aboveground. Aside from the uneven seafloor stone underfoot, the surroundings were filled with exposed black stone carvings, and from time to time carvings also jutted up from the middle of the ground.

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There were more than two hundred disciples doing the work. Most of them were carefully excavating the ground, while another third were working along the edges. Each person remained taciturn and worked with head down, chipping, brushing away powder, hauling off debris. Every task was proceeding in orderly fashion.

But among the crowd, two people stood out as completely out of place.

They did not work at all. They merely walked around like overseers. The one on the left had crane-white hair, a youthful face, and a shrunken body. It was Wu Mengzi. The one on the right had a tall, straight figure and an imposing bearing. It was Zhao Feng.

Zhao Feng looked at the Wendao Institute disciples around him, and a trace of pity showed in his gaze.

The building material used in Qingli Immortal Manor was Yuqing Stone, a material with excellent isolating properties that could greatly impede the transmission of energy. That included some of the contamination of Loss of Order as well.

At Zhao Feng’s level of cultivation, simply walking through the great halls of these ruins was already enough for him to faintly sense that discomfort.

Every carving he saw, those Buddhas, bodhisattvas, and arhats, could maintain their forms for only a single instant at first glance. After that, they inevitably began to spin, twisting into something else.

The feeling was so disgusting that Zhao Feng never dared remain below for too long. At most, he could stay for six hours before he had to go back up.

But these disciples—

These Wendao Institute disciples instead felt none of that pressure because their cultivation was too low.

So long as they could not sense it and did not “deliberately stare,” this contamination would not erupt.

His master made use of that fact to drive them into excavating the ruins, yet never told them the truth.

They surely could never imagine it.

What they were digging up now might well be the corpse of one of the Buddhas from the canonical myths of history.