Volume 5, Chapter 54 – Settling the Heart

“The demon king that injured your junior sister. Does it have a name?”

While thinking things through on this side, Bai Xiang had not forgotten to ask for more details about the enemy on the other side.

What she was thinking was this: if the demon king responsible was not dead, then with her here already, she could head straight into the depths of the wilderness and vent this grievance for her disciples.

There was no such thing as taking the long view with her. Enmity had to be settled as quickly as possible. Dragging things out would only affect one’s Dao heart instead.

“Yes!” Xu Shu glanced at Chen Jing. Seeing that her expression was firm and that she no longer seemed immersed in the shadow of the past, he spoke directly. “The other party was a wolf demon called the ‘Moon-Eclipsing Demon King.’ It rose to the demon king realm by devouring sapient beings and the blood essence of other demonic beasts. It is said to possess more than three thousand years of Dao-age, and is itself a demon creature that has lived for nearly a thousand years.”

“It’s still alive?”

“I have not heard any news of it being slain.” Xu Shu lowered his head. “The ‘Moon-Eclipsing Demon King’ was quite active four or five years ago and often appeared in the Tianji Circuit defense zone. After injuring Junior Sister Chen, it hid itself away. Senior Master searched for it three times and still failed to find it.”

Master went looking for it and still could not find it?

Bai Xiang was somewhat surprised.

Xiang Xian… that is, her master, had already reached the Origin Realm.

Xiang Xian might have spent immense effort breaking through to Golden Core, struggling for a long time before finally succeeding, but that was only because the time given to her had truly been too short.

Altogether, it had not even added up to half a year. Asking someone who had only just completed a transformation of her path to break through another major realm was itself demanding the impossible. The fact that Xiang Xian had managed to enter the Golden Core Realm at all was already enough to prove how outstanding she was.

As for the Origin Realm… just as no matter how others cultivated, their understanding of the Origin Realm could never be deeper than Bai Xiang’s, Xiang Xian’s comprehension of the Origin Realm was bound to have its flaws as well.

And yet she had still managed to break through within ten years. In truth, that all came down to qi-talisman technology and qi-array technology.

Just as Bai Xiang had once used the power of the Path of Qi’s divine pools as a tool and used the power of wishes to force open the barrier to a higher realm, Xiang Xian had also followed her example and tinkered her way into creating qi-talisman divine pools and qi-array divine pools, then used the power of all living beings’ wishes contained within them to force a breakthrough.

An Origin Realm achieved this way might have certain defects, but it was still enough to suppress an ordinary “demon venerable.”[1]

[1] A demon venerable is really just a Venerable or an Immortal Venerable. Bai Xiang had made a great vow to regard all foreign races as “demons,” and the term she used had quietly shifted in her mind.

Not to mention a demon king, which was far inferior to a demon venerable. Taking hold of one should have been effortless.

Xu Shu then went on to explain the details. The reason was that the Moon-Eclipsing Demon King had backing. The wolf demon tribe under its command belonged to the Qingyun Army.

The Qingyun Army was a textbook voidfiend army. Mixed into it were all kinds of demonic beasts, Demon Pools, and Void Demon clans. Its branches were highly subdivided and bizarre. Under the command of the Qingyun Army Lord, it could suppress armies reinforced by human cultivators while also dispatching all kinds of strange Demon Pools in the midst of battle, using them to spread contamination and sow chaos in enemy morale.

According to Xu Shu, the Qingyun Army had very likely planned multiple assassination attempts against Bai Tingyun, the Warden of Tianji Circuit. Bai Tingyun had repeatedly encountered danger in the rear, and the Qingyun Army was the prime suspect.

Even the injury suffered by Liu Yong, one of Bai Xiang’s personal disciples, had been sustained in battle against the Qingyun Army.

Qingyun Army…

“What exactly is the background of this Qingyun Army?” Bai Xiang asked again. “I previously met Warden Qiao Wen of Wangchuan Circuit and learned that a voidfiend army in the northwestern desert was trying to move south. Was he referring to this Qingyun Army?”

“No.” Xu Shu shook his head. “That voidfiend force has not moved south yet, and we still haven’t come into contact with it. But the Qingyun Army has been harassing Tianji Circuit for years. It counts as an old enemy of Bai Tingyun and of us here in Maozhou.”

Bai Tingyun was also a member of the Bai family, but only of a collateral branch.

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A collateral branch, because Bai Shengju had not sprung out of a crack in a rock. His distant kin had never died out. They had simply scattered to different regions to develop over the years, and the different branches had all but stopped interacting with one another.

After the first year of Zhengyuan, the Bai family rose to prominence, no different from the imperial clan. That attracted quite a few distant relatives from the past to come and seek refuge with them, and Bai Tingyun’s family branch was one of those.

Quite a few children had just come to see Bai Xiang under the encouragement of the adults, trying to use their own obedience and sweetness to please the Empress of Great Xia and win her favor and affection. Most of them had come from collateral branches.

Bai Xiang had looked over Bai Tingyun’s records before and knew that he was “unyielding, upright, and highly skilled in the use of troops,” a born commander.

The Qingyun Army had first attacked in the second year of Zhengyuan, and the voidfiend host had come in with fierce momentum.

The Tianji Circuit defensive line had originally been a complete mess. Internal discussions within the Bai family had all agreed that they ought to avoid its edge and had already been planning to temporarily abandon that line. Yet he had stepped in at the last moment and, miraculously, held the city.

His name also happened to echo the words “qingyun,” and so it picked up a certain mythic aura, becoming widely sung of and greatly increasing his fame.

“The Qingyun Army is currently moving north.”

Xu Shu had apparently also inferred something of Bai Xiang’s present temperament from her northern campaign, and so he voiced a warning. “Judging from the momentum, it looks like they mean to join up with that voidfiend force moving south.”

In other words, the Qingyun Army was currently some distance away from Tianji Circuit.

Even for Bai Xiang, going from Zhennan to Tianji Circuit was already somewhat far. If she kept heading northwest from there and entered the desert, Xu Shu felt it would probably be too dangerous.

What Xu Shu did not understand, however, was that in the world today, aside from the Saint of Pilgrimage Mountain and the Blood Lord hidden behind the Federation, there was no third person under heaven who could force Bai Xiang to use her full strength.

This was what it meant for a single person to steady a nation. Those three Saints were the pillars guarding the three most powerful forces in the world today.

As long as Bai Xiang intended to act, even if those two waves of voidfiends joined together, they still would not be able to stop her.

Bai Xiang also intended to make that trip.

On the one hand, she would seek justice for her disciples. On the other, she was very concerned about the experiments the remnants of Blood Soul Heaven were conducting inside the voidfiends.

The Qingyun Army had been entangled with northwestern Great Xia for many years, yet the Qingyun Army Lord was extremely mysterious. No one even knew what sort of demon it originally was.

Bai Xiang intended to pry into this secret and tear away its veil.

After dismissing Xu Shu and telling him to pay attention to cultivating his mind over the next few days, Bai Xiang finally let slip one more thing: three days from now, she would give a public lecture on the Dao at Shenming Peak.

She was the Dao Master. Even through that ten-year gap, the position itself had never changed.

Even though she now also bore the added identity of Empress, she still had to fulfill part of her duties.

For example, she ought to give lectures to the disciples of the lineage from time to time. Anything she taught personally would certainly be more effective than the Shenming Sword transmitting the Dao.

Xu Shu understood the implication.

After stepping outside, he looked up at the sky and felt it was time to notify some of the disciples still away from Zhennan to return.

“Jing’er, come here.”

And inside the room, Bai Xiang continued by calling Chen Jing forward.

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Compared with ten years ago, Chen Jing’s image had changed drastically.

Her skin, once fair, had turned wheat-colored. The eyes that had once been somewhat timid and lively had become resolute.

If the old Chen Jing had been given such an order, she would definitely have answered softly, then shuffled forward, looking somewhat afraid of Bai Xiang.

But now she strode up openly and bowed firmly before Bai Xiang.

“This disciple Chen Jing greets the Dao Master.”

“Come up here.”

“Come stand in front of me.”

Bai Xiang continued issuing instructions.

“Let me see your left hand.”

Chen Jing froze for a moment, but still obeyed. She stepped forward, raised her left hand, and let Bai Xiang take it and inspect it.

It was a modified prosthetic.

Prosthetics generally fell into three broad categories. Taking arms as the example, there were the cheapest “standard mechanical arms,” the mid-to-high-priced “bionic mechanical arms,” and the extremely expensive “modified mechanical arms.”

The first kind was simply crude machinery in appearance. It did not look good and could only satisfy the needs of daily life, which was why it was the cheapest.

The second kind took appearance into account. Once clothes were on, you could not even tell it was a prosthetic, which was why it was expensive.

The third kind was not something an ordinary person would even consider. The “modification” in modified mechanical arm meant wartime modification. No matter what it looked like, the absolute first priority was combat enhancement.

Chen Jing’s left hand was a modified mechanical arm.

Once the glove was removed and the sleeve rolled up, what was revealed was a gleaming silver arm with a metal casing.

As Bai Xiang examined it, she asked Chen Jing about it and learned that this thing could deploy mantis arm-blades, fire a Blazing Radiance palm cannon, and open sixteen nozzles to help adjust the body’s movement. In a critical moment, it could even be launched outright and detonated.

It was fully equipped and extremely expensive.

The Bai family had paid for it. There was nothing much to say about that. The Bai family was now rich enough to rival a nation in earnest. Even Starwater Company counted as half under the Bai family’s control.

“Mao Xu helped adjust these functions for you, didn’t he?”

Setting the prosthetic down, Bai Xiang fixed her eyes on Chen Jing’s.

“Yes.”

Chen Jing nodded.

“He came to me before. I gave him some conductive materials. They should be usable to strengthen this thing.” As she spoke, Bai Xiang untied a jade token from her waist.

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“There are some other materials inside this jade token as well. Take it to him and have him strengthen your left arm as much as possible.”

“Yes.”

Chen Jing lowered her head, but this time she could not hide the emotion in her voice.

“There’s something I’ve always wanted to ask you.”

After seeing her take the jade token, Bai Xiang paused for a breath before speaking again.

“Back then, I brought you into the sect without giving you enough time to think it through and suddenly dragged you into such a dangerous world.”

“Have you ever regretted it?”

“No!” Chen Jing suddenly raised her head. Her widened eyes seemed to say, How could you ask me something like that?

“I don’t regret it, Dao Master!”

She hurried to explain. “This world may be dangerous, but at least I get to decide my own fate!”

“Even if I can’t win, at least I’m not completely without the power to resist!”

“I really do now have the strength to protect my mother… I don’t regret it! All I feel toward Dao Master is the deepest gratitude!”

“I see.”

Bai Xiang nodded, and the expression on her face became gentler and gentler.

“Then I’ll give you a Daoist name.”

“You still cannot forget your father’s death, and your obsession in this regard runs very deep. That emotion can indeed give you the drive to become stronger, but it can also bind your heart and make it hard for you to see your true self clearly.”

“Kongyou.”

“That will be your Daoist name. You can also treat it as your style name.”

“Remember this: from stillness, spirit is born.”

“Kongyou… Daoist Kongyou…”

Chen Jing murmured the words, sensing the resonance within them, and bowed to Bai Xiang once more.

“Thank you, Dao Master.”

“Mhm. Go on.”

After Chen Jing left, Bai Xiang met with a whole string of little kids, casually handed out a few things like teeth, shells, and flood-dragon tendons to send them off, and then prepared to go see Xiang Xian in the back.

Yet before she could even rise, a black-robed young man with a floating gait and stiff movements entered through the doorway. Before he came near, he dropped to his knees inside the room and pressed his forehead to the ground in a long bow, refusing to rise.

“This sinful disciple, Liu Yong, has disgraced Master’s name.”

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“I beg Master to punish me!”

Here we go again.

Bai Xiang could not help sighing inwardly.

Every one of my disciples is a problem child…

Unlike Chen Jing’s prosthetic, which did not hinder movement and instead strengthened her combat ability, Liu Yong’s prosthetic was visibly one that had pursued bionic imitation too far, deliberately simulating real flesh, blood vessels, and meridians.

He wanted to use it to adapt to his new prosthetic and perhaps even use it to seek the Great Dao. But clearly the results were not very good, which was why his movements seemed so stiff.

And he only had one arm left. Without the prosthetic, he would be almost completely disabled. Yet he had still forced himself to come see her and had even asked her to punish him.

Thickheaded.

A real headache.

Still, this feeling was not bad at all.

Looking at Liu Yong prostrated on the floor, Bai Xiang lifted one foot, and the emotions in her heart began to shift.

If earlier, even after cutting down the demon faction on her northern march, Bai Xiang’s feelings toward Great Xia, this newborn nation, had still retained a certain hardness, if she had still only viewed it through a mentality of “I conquered this land, so if something happens, I have to deal with it,” and deep down still felt a little like an outsider…

Then now, at this moment, Bai Xiang finally felt that she had truly returned.

Her disciples were here. Her elders were here. Her kin were here. Everything she had was here.

She had changed all of their fates. They admired her, were grateful to her, and had long since formed profound ties with her.

So how could she possibly be an outsider?

She was their Dao Master.

She was the “High Emperor” they worshiped.

…

At the same time, the view swept past Zhennan Circuit, past the Jing River, past the Tianji Circuit defensive line, then straight into the depths of the wilderness, all the way to the edge of the northwestern desert.

A team resembling a mercenary band was trekking across the land. Among them were a pretty young girl and a middle-aged man.

The girl was drenched in sweat from walking and cared only about drinking water, unwilling to speak.

The middle-aged man, meanwhile, would take out a book from time to time to flip through it and examine it.

Only from his angle of view could one see that a map was tucked inside the book.

According to his calculations, they ought to be arriving at their destination soon.