Volume 5, Chapter 53 – Sorting Things Out

When Bai Xiang bluntly declared that “your path of cultivation has already been cut off,” Chen Jing, standing beside her, was actually a little downcast.

But she felt this had been her own choice and that Senior Brother Xu Shu could not be blamed in the slightest, so the moment she heard that, she opened her mouth to speak up for him.

“Dao Master…”

“This has nothing to do with you.” Bai Xiang shot her a glare in warning, telling her to shut up.

In other cultivation worlds or fantasy settings, saying that disability meant the end of one’s path would sound utterly absurd. But the central principle here lay in qi cultivation. The further one advanced, the more one was in fact cultivating oneself.

There were so many apertures and meridians. You had to manifest and temper them before they could attain sufficient strength. If you were missing an arm, then a corresponding number of apertures and channels could never be manifested and tempered.

Even if someone had heaven-defying comprehension and still managed to break through, even if they later cultivated to an exalted realm, it would still definitely be a crippled version. Their battle strength would inevitably fail to match their realm.

Actually, solving this problem would not be difficult.

Bai Xiang had inherited the memories contained within the remnant soul of the demon ancestor Yao Yu. Those memories covered not merely sixteen hundred years, but reached several centuries farther back still. Buried inside them was a hodgepodge of herbal knowledge. According to those records, some extinct spiritual herbs could regrow severed limbs.

They had gone extinct because they had been swept away by the Void Tribulation. The reason the problem could now be solved was also because of the “primordial return”: the parts that had been swept away were once more merging back into the main world.

In recent years, what had been newly discovered was not limited to all kinds of voidfiend species. There had also been vast quantities of herbs and ores. They had all played a role on the technical level, and some had even directly replaced old materials, becoming indispensable elements in new technologies.

Bai Xiang had already made up her mind. As she moved about in the future, she would search for the proper “immortal herbs” for these disciples. But she had no intention of letting this matter pass so easily. She had to get a clear answer out of Xu Shu.

“Th-this…” Xu Shu instantly felt an enormous weight descend on him.

Whether it was Liu Yong’s disability or the mechanical arm on Chen Jing’s left side, both had ultimately been caused by incursions of the voidfiends.

In theory, it was not his fault. At the time, he had also been elsewhere killing demons. It was impossible for him to keep diverting his attention to what was happening in other places.

But Bai Xiang had deliberately called him by his courtesy name, Xu Kainian.

That courtesy name had been given to him by old master Bai Shengju after he had formally entered the Sword Dao. Its meaning stood in complete contrast to the “Shu” in his given name. Bai Shengju had hoped he would open up his heart and mind, and stop being so restrained all the time.

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Thanks to the effect of that label and his own conscious self-discipline, Xu Shu really had become much more bright and open than he used to be. But habits carved into the bones over many years were not so easy to change. Whenever it came to killing, or the battlefield, places that demanded extreme concentration, he had no spare attention for anything else and would slip back into that tightly wound state.

In other words, once he got into the killing, he got carried away by it. He preferred charging forward at the head of a team to sitting in the rear and acting like a commanding general.

What Bai Xiang meant was probably this: as the senior disciple, he was no longer suited to charging wildly like an ordinary soldier. He should have kept his edge sheathed from the rear and taken charge of everyone else’s cultivation affairs.

“Dao Master… I was wrong.” Xu Shu tried once more to bow.

This time he was allowed to do it. He relaxed inwardly, completed the salute in proper form, and began describing to Bai Xiang what the inner disciples had done over the past ten years.

Not counting Bai Zhuqing, the core inner circle of the Shenming Sword Dao had really only consisted of six people. Even after adding Liu Yong later, that made only seven. Nominally, these people all belonged under Bai Shengju, but in truth, even Bai Shengju himself knew it perfectly well: Bai Xiang was the one who had actually taught them.

Even though Bai Xiang had been trapped in the Sky Sea for ten years, during that time they had all used the Shenming Sword to comprehend higher realms. That too counted as receiving her inheritance. So their attitude toward Bai Xiang had long since shifted from the original “Senior Sister.” Now they even regarded her as their “Dao Master and teacher.”

Among these people, Xu Shu himself had never wanted to go far from Zhennan. Aside from the occasional trip leading disciples to support other base cities, he was only willing to operate in Zhennan.

Zhennan was the Bai family’s home ground, the place where their foundation had been built and maintained the longest. Of Great Xia’s many battlefronts, Zhennan was the most stable. Compared to the defenses outside Xia Capital, it had one extra ring of natural protection in the Longchuan barrier. Where other fronts could only pile in manpower and resist head-on, they could open a gap in Longchuan, let an appropriate demon tide flood into its interior, then transfer reinforcements from rearward base cities and strike those tides with precision.

The reason Xu Shu did this was not because he was timid. It was because, aside from him, most of the inner disciples had chosen reassignment and gone elsewhere.

Ma Yue and Lian Feng had gone to the southern front.

Chen Shi, Hu Hu, and Chen Jing had gone to the northwestern front not far from Maozhou. Of those ten years, they had spent nearly eight stationed on Tianji Circuit.

There was no place more suited to tempering one’s skills than the front lines of a battlefield. After all these years, everyone had accordingly made real names for themselves.

Especially Ma Yue and Lian Feng. They had gone the farthest and suffered the harshest tempering. They had respectively earned the titles of “Blackrock Sword King” and “Flash Sword King,” and their cultivation had risen all the way to the peak of the Golden Core Realm.

Next came Chen Shi. He had slaughtered countless demons on Tianji Circuit, and he also excelled in pills and medicine. Many soldiers injured on the front lines had received his care, and he enjoyed considerable prestige within the army as well.

The others were correspondingly a little less gifted. Xu Shu, for instance, had only recently broken through to the middle stage of the Golden Core Realm, while Hu Hu and Chen Jing were both still stuck at the False Core stage. They had been bottlenecked for three or four years without being able to break through.

There were differences in talent.

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After hearing all this, Bai Xiang nodded inwardly.

If she really had to rank them, then among her many disciples, Hu Hu and Chen Jing did indeed have the poorer talent.

Chen Jing had never joined in order to enter the Dao through sword practice in the first place. Bai Xiang had personally given her permission to join the Shenming lineage for one reason only: to help her avoid disaster.

There was nothing wrong with Hu Hu’s talent. Her main problem was that her thoughts were too lively.

Her mind was restless, forever chasing one thing after another. That made it bad for subduing the qi that darted wildly through her body.

Further up the list, Ma Yue had a steady temperament. He was rough on the outside but careful on the inside, a textbook example of someone who was taciturn outwardly and perceptive within. People like that were naturally suited to cultivation.

He might usually be as steady as a rock, but when he truly became ruthless, none of the other disciples could match the desperation with which he trained.

Then there was Lian Feng. After taking his revenge, he had changed his goal. At first he had intended to become a Sword Lord, but later he discovered that being a Sword Lord no longer meant much… The newly emerged Sword Lords could barely even stand against independent Venerables, so he had set himself a new goal: to be “the first to advance to the Origin Realm.”

With that kind of drive, Lian Feng was the fiercest in daily cultivation. Ma Yue only got ruthless from time to time. Lian Feng was ruthless all the time, to the point of practically tormenting himself.

Bai Xiang suspected that Ma Yue had gone with him to Luezhou precisely because he was afraid Lian Feng would push himself too hard. Otherwise, given Ma Yue’s temperament, he probably would have chosen Xia Capital and gone to support Bai Zhuqing, their junior senior sister.

As for Chen Shi… his family owned a pharmaceutical company, yet he himself excelled equally in alchemy and the sword. By now, he too was in the Golden Core Realm.

By contrast, Xu Shu had only recently broken through. In terms of cultivation, he had dropped all the way to fourth place. That really should not have happened.

The problem was that his thoughts were too mixed. He was always thinking, “Everyone else has left, so I have to stay behind and protect the lineage.” The more he thought that way, the slower his cultivation became.

Zhennan was simply too much of a greenhouse. Staying there was too comfortable. Compared with other frontline base cities, which had been battered by storm after storm and spent the last ten years repeatedly issuing emergency calls as they neared the point of falling, Xu Shu had lacked far too many chances to temper himself in real crisis.

“Chen Jing’s injury was suffered in the fourth year of Zhengyuan, during a fight with a demon king.”

“It was my incompetence… By the time I got there, I only had time to save her life. I could do nothing but watch as one of her arms was torn off and eaten by the demon.”

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Xu Shu admitted it frankly.

Demon king.

Bai Xiang narrowed her eyes.

The cultivation system and cultivation laws of the former dynasty had already been abolished in the world of today. The Path of Qi had wholly replaced the Sword Dao. Not only did schools teach qi cultivation theory, even the wanderers who roamed the wilds and the caravan merchants who did dangerous business, when they gathered and talked about martial skill or immortals, framed everything through the system of qi cultivation. They would say things like, “So-and-so broke through to the nth layer of Refining Qi,” or “That family’s genius has advanced to False Core.”

Correspondingly, the strength of the demon race had also been reclassified.

In the past, the title “demon king” had not been especially remarkable. It referred to those “demonic beasts” who acted as leaders inside demon kingdoms. They belonged neither to Demon Pools nor to Void Demons, and most of them possessed only basic intelligence.

Most of the time, these demon kings stayed hidden inside the secret realms of the demon kingdoms and did not come out. Once they had intelligence, they understood how to seek advantage and avoid harm. They were not stupid. When they knew the human race was stronger, they had no desire to come out and die. Some demon kings even formed friendly relations with humans and tried to learn from them.

Take Xiang Xian, for example. The Yuming Dao had once maintained ties with quite a few demon kings.

The fact that those demon kings had been willing to speak with her already let one infer their level of cultivation. They were roughly equivalent to Divine Fetus Earth Masters in the old system.

In rank, that corresponded to False Core in the Path of Qi.

But they were still a little weaker than a False Core cultivator.

Xu Shu had just said that Chen Jing had been stuck at False Core for four years.

And now it was spring.

That meant she had probably already reached False Core around the fifth year of Zhengyuan.

She had been injured in the fourth year of Zhengyuan. Back then, even if she had met a False Core demon king and could not defeat it, she should still have been able to get away. It should not have been possible for a demon king to catch her and “forcibly tear off and eat one of her arms.”

Sure enough, just like the records said, the title of demon king now actually corresponded to Golden Core cultivators.

Golden Core cultivators, demon kings, Sword Lords of Northern Yu, and the Federation’s general-class mechanized troops were roughly comparable to one another. Among them, some individuals possessed battle strength that could cross realms.

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At this level were the most active backbone fighters openly visible within the great powers. Anyone above this level belonged more to the category of “seniors,” and those ecological niches were mostly being gradually occupied by the returning Venerables.

However, qi cultivation had one convenience: it allowed people to switch paths.

It was very easy for a sword cultivator to switch over to the Path of Qi, and the Dao-Void Methods were the very source of the Sword Dao. Theoretically, if any of those Venerables or Immortal Venerables wanted to change over to qi cultivation, it should have been easy for them too.

Of course, the earlier such a conversion happened, the easier it was. The farther along one was, the more difficult it became. But no matter how difficult, they had still been given ten full years.

Throughout those ten years, the protagonists on Great Xia’s many fronts had always been the human race and the voidfiends. Those Venerables seemed to have completely hidden their traces. Only every few months would news emerge that somewhere along some battle line, one or more “mysterious figures” had appeared, described as people whose every gesture seemed to carry power stronger than Golden Core.

The temptation of longevity?

That had not gone beyond Bai Xiang’s expectations at all. She had long since thought of it. Not everyone could accept the life-form of the Sacred Weapon Clan. Unless they had truly reached the end of the road, as in Kong Tianbao’s case, most of them would probably still choose to convert to qi cultivation.

Of the Venerables who had returned, more than half of them should probably already be in the Origin Realm by now, right?

And these were only the ones who had already shown themselves once every few months. What about those who had not appeared at all?

Yet they still had not chosen to step forward openly and pledge themselves to Great Xia.

They were probably wary of Pilgrimage Mountain, and wary of Fang Yang’s attitude.

After all, what they were doing amounted to betraying the Dao-Void Methods. Although Great Xia, through the Shenming Sword and through the development of “qi-talisman technology” and “qi-array technology,” had made it possible for Golden Core cultivators gathered together to contend against Venerables, it still ultimately lacked a supreme powerhouse capable of holding the field.

So long as that supreme being did not appear, they would remain apprehensive and would not openly choose a side.

But now I have returned.

Bai Xiang pondered.

With the influence set in motion by my trip north, those “old Origin Realm monsters” will surely appear one after another and make what they see as the wisest choice.