Volume 5, Chapter 90 – Gu Arts

“Birth mother?”

Northwest, wasteland.

Inside a sealed vehicle rattling along over rough ground, Tao Sicheng had originally still been immersed in the shock of “Jiuli has fallen, and the future of the Li people is uncertain.” Then she suddenly heard a particular term and could not help lifting her head.

This journey was no short one. Because the various circuits of Great Xia lacked overland routes, Rongyin often had to drive through extremely treacherous and jarring stretches of terrain. They had been traveling on and off for a week and a half, passing through more than a dozen towns, and still had not reached their destination.

In truth, after Rongyin had gone half-mad over the past few days, frantically making and taking several phone calls and letting slip in her words that the Li people’s plan had failed, Tao Sicheng had already felt that there was no need to continue this trip.

A demon god… If the Li people’s true objective, after years of preparation, had really been to revive the totem their tribe worshiped, that is, a living, breathing demon god, then perhaps they would still have been worth attaching herself to.

But from the look of things, the demon god Jiuli had already been slain by Di Xiang in the northwestern desert. The Li people had effectively lost the greatest bargaining chip on which their survival depended. Tao Sicheng felt there was no future left in continuing to stay tangled up with them.

Her thoughts were deep, but she was young in the end. She had probably let something slip, and Rongyin had guessed what was in her heart.

So, perhaps to steady her, to steady this gifted blood-descendant they had not unearthed without difficulty, Rongyin chose to reveal a “heaven-shaking secret,” namely the mystery of Di Xiang’s birth mother.

“I do know about that… She was adopted into the Bai family.” Tao Sicheng looked up toward the front seat. “It’s said that her true identity is that of an Imperial Daughter of the former dynasty, a descendant of Emperor Feng of the Great Xuan Dynasty. And the reason she was able to accomplish all those feats at the tender age of eighteen was because she inherited Emperor Feng’s legacy, namely the Xuandi Scripture—that book coveted by countless people, yet never once heard of as having truly been mastered by a second person!”

“You know quite a lot.” Rongyin cast her a sidelong glance. “Looks like you once admired her quite a bit?”

Tao Sicheng narrowed her eyes. “I merely use certain examples as points of reference.”

“No one else can learn her road, much less walk it.” Rongyin shook her head. “The miracles she created can’t be explained by mere bloodline alone. Back then, the Xuandi was what kind of genius? After attaining sainthood, he suppressed the four seas and swept the eight directions with nothing but a pair of iron fists. And in the end, didn’t he still die with his Dao dissipated, not even leaving a whole corpse behind?… Emperor Feng never created a new orthodoxy like the Path of Qi. On that point alone, she has left her forebear a hundred thousand li behind.”

Tao Sicheng was starting to lose the thread. “You specifically brought up the fact that she has a birth mother, and yet here you are denying the significance of her bloodline… What exactly are you trying to say?”

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In fact, Tao Sicheng had her own calculations. She guessed that the reason Rongyin had brought this up was that Di Xiang’s birth mother was still alive, and not only alive but still connected to the Li people—possibly even in a cooperative relationship with them.

“Di Xiang… this Xia Emperor is proud and unruly by nature, utterly unlike ordinary women. Trying to pressure her with family background alone is useless.”

As expected, Rongyin’s explanation followed exactly that line of thought.

“However, she has a birth mother. Her birth mother is still alive. Not only alive, but revered by the Feathering Sect as the ‘Xuantian Holy Mother,’ and has become the symbol of the state called ‘Xuanxia’—and that too is a fact, a fact she cannot deny no matter how she tries.”

So it was actually that “Xuantian Holy Mother” of Xuanxia?

Wait, then did that mean Xuanxia’s claim was real?

Tao Sicheng was a little stunned, because she had heard the rough outline of this matter before.

After Eastern Xia was founded, beset by internal troubles and foreign threats, it temporarily lacked the strength to carry out a thorough campaign of conquest and suppression against the remnants of the northern court. And as for a state like Xuanxia, even smaller in scale than Northern Yu, it had been even less able to spare the effort, and could only allow such places to continue existing.

And the reason “Xuanxia” had chosen that name was because they publicly proclaimed that “the High Ancestor of Xia was actually an Imperial Daughter of the Xuan Dynasty,” while the Feathering Sect, Xuanxia’s predecessor, had inherited the legitimate orthodoxy of Great Xuan. On that basis, they asserted that Xuanxia also possessed legal ownership of and succession rights to Eastern Xia.

There were actually plenty of claims like that. Among all sorts of backwater little states, and even among those countries around the wilderness that had been entirely founded and controlled by sects, quite a few made the same kind of argument.

Tao Sicheng had previously assumed they were just talking big, waving fabricated slogans like banners to rally people’s hearts. But from Rongyin’s meaning, Xuanxia’s claim was actually true?

Now that was interesting…

Tao Sicheng could not help letting her imagination run a little. Previously, Xuanxia had stayed hidden and inactive; on one hand, it had been constrained by strength, and on the other, everyone had tacitly assumed that the Xia Emperor was dead, making their claim useless.

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After all, the ones actually governing the country were bona fide members of the Bai family. They did not recognize Great Xuan’s orthodoxy. You could talk until your mouth split and it still would not amount to a damn thing.

But now that person had returned, Xuanxia’s claim instantly became delicate.

And Eastern Xia just happened to be a country founded on overthrowing the Yu people and Yu rites. The newly compiled Xia Code had certainly stripped away quite a few feudal remnants, but the most basic virtues—loyalty, filial piety, righteousness… those morals were still preserved.

If the supreme ruler of such a country were suddenly approached by her mother to acknowledge their kinship, openly and without any guard, and if it were made a vast spectacle known to the whole world, what kind of reaction would she have?

She probably could not just kill her outright… could she?

At that thought, Tao Sicheng’s expression turned a little strange.

But a move like that… aside from wasting Di Xiang’s time and energy, it did not seem to offer the slightest help in weakening her, much less killing her.

Unless there was another scheme hidden inside it.

Some scheme that needed to be linked together through this blood tie.

“Gu Arts?”

A flash of inspiration struck. An ancient, mysterious word leapt straight from Tao Sicheng’s mouth. “You’re planning to use the ‘Xuantian Holy Mother’ to plant a gu in her?”

There really were such rumors: that among the “ancient witch clans,” some knew gu arts, and could work spells through a combination of insect gu and curses. The most skilled were even said to be capable of reversing life and death and overturning reincarnation itself. The claims were fantastical enough that Tao Sicheng had always taken them for myths when she was little.

Did the Li people count as one of those “ancient witch clans”?

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Or was it the Feathering Sect?

In her impression, the Feathering Sect seemed to be associated with all kinds of insects, so it was probably them, wasn’t it?

How were they planning to deal with Di Xiang?

“Gu arts aren’t that mystical.” Rongyin frowned. “Don’t treat them as a standalone method. You have to look at them together with pool methods.”

“Pool methods?” Tao Sicheng pressed. “Gu arts raise gu—are you saying what they raise are actually Demon Pools?”

“You shouldn’t be asking me about the specifics.” Rongyin shook her head. “All I know is that they have a verse over there that goes, ‘Let the fleshly shell serve as cocoon and the spirit as body; break the seal, feather forth, and ascend through the immortal gate’… Here, ‘shell’ refers to the fleshly body, while ‘spirit’ means the soul. I imagine they must have some means of refining a person’s soul into a ‘gu.’ To be honest, even I think something like that would be almost impossible to guard against…”

Rongyin was not exaggerating.

If the Feathering Sect’s claim was true, then this so-called “gu” was practically something akin to the soul-eroding Void Demons.

No—rather, it should be said to be even more formidable than the soul-eroding Void Demons.

It could cast off form and let the soul fly free, seize body and consciousness, lie dormant without striking, and hide its killing edge.

It was practically a fusion of the soul-eroding Void Demons and the ancient demon You.

“So that means our destination, straight to the northwest, is to seek refuge with the Feathering Sect.”

Tao Sicheng laid bare the purpose of the trip in a single sentence.

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“Don’t tell me we’re going to merge with the party that’s going to ‘claim kinship’? Do the Li people truly have nowhere else to go now?”

There was displeasure in her tone.

Rongyin may have revealed this matter to steady Tao Sicheng’s heart, but it had also exposed a reality: the Li people were now pitifully weak. They could no longer exist independently as they once had. If they wanted room to grow, they needed to rely on and unite with other forces.

“That is not something you should be asking.”

Rongyin’s tone turned cold at once.

She suddenly realized that she really had been frightened senseless by Di Xiang’s might and reputation. Unconsciously, she had drawn in all her own momentum and temper. She had even become humble toward a still-unformed genius like Tao Sicheng. It was cowardly to an absurd degree.

Upon realizing that, Rongyin recovered the bearing of an expert. For the rest of the journey, she hardly spoke to the back seat at all. She simply kept driving on detours, and only three days later did she finally bring the Tao siblings to their destination.

This place was already far beyond Eastern Xia’s territory: an unfamiliar town built along rolling hillsides.

Its city walls and gate towers were all present and accounted for, and it looked fairly proper at a glance. Sitting in the vehicle, Tao Sicheng watched Rongyin present a token to the armed guards for the instruments to scan, and thought to herself that judging from the look of the place, this should be a city whose main population was human.

That much was obvious. Eastern Xia definitely had no interest in fighting all the way out here. That strict level of vigilance could not possibly be for the sake of guarding against Xia people.

Common bandits and drifting outlaws would not call for such a grand defensive arrangement either. It could only be meant to defend against packs of bloodthirsty demon beasts roaming in groups.

And demon beasts would never launch large-scale attacks on settlements inhabited by their own kind, so the main population here could only be human.

…Which made it seem rather strange.