Volume 5, Chapter 99 – Grand Aspiration (2-in-1)

“You…”

“Don’t bother trying to call for help. From this moment on, nothing that happens here can possibly be heard from outside.”

Bai Xiang withdrew her hands from the edge of the door, stepped inside, and went all the way to the dressing table, where she stared down at the woman opposite her.

Her gaze was icy. Those golden pupils already carried an innate majesty and divinity, and in that darkened expression they gave off an even deeper chill, making the woman in red, who was meeting her eyes, shudder violently.

“I… what are you trying to do to me?”

Only after great effort did the woman wrench herself free from the vortex of those golden eyes. Flustered at last, she stepped back to her feet, instinctively pressing both hands to the jade pendant at her waist and drawing a sword from within it.

Then she saw a trace of a smile appear on Bai Xiang’s face… exactly that kind of mocking smile.

“Sound is actually a very marvelous thing,” she heard Bai Xiang say. “Life vents itself through sound. Through sound, it listens, and confirms where it is. Sound is linked together with the other senses, forming an entire system of cognition.”

What… what did she mean by that?

The woman did not quite understand her wording, and the look in her eyes became even more guarded.

“You don’t understand?” Bai Xiang sneered. “Inside the mother’s womb, an ordinary fetus takes one to two months to form its sensory organs. In the third month, hearing and taste are formed. In the fourth month, smell is formed. By the ninth month, vision gradually matures and takes shape. Only then can a healthy life be considered fully developed.”

“It is precisely because of these nearly ten months spent forming within the mother’s body that sapient beings reckon both nominal age and actual age. And it is precisely because that journey is filled with mystery and the unknown that, throughout all ages, countless people have tried to unravel the mystery of the womb and glimpse the secret of that earliest origin.”

“You must have thought I forgot, didn’t you?” Bai Xiang stared into her eyes. “When I was still an infant, when I had not yet gained power or status, how you made that decision, and how you carried it out.”

I…

Before the woman could say anything more, Bai Xiang swept a sleeve before her eyes. When it fell, the surroundings suddenly changed, dropping them into a place of utter gloom and darkness.

Rumble…

Splash… splash…

The thunder and rain grew clearer and clearer, as if they were sounding from somewhere right beside her. The woman could not help looking up. Vaguely, she saw great swathes of treetops and canopies swaying in the violent wind. Those surging branches were like feelers grown from ghosts and monsters. The whole scene looked as though hundreds upon hundreds of tree demons were dancing in graceful motion.

“Your Highness!”

“Hurry!”

A shout of rebuke pierced through the thunder. The woman abruptly realized that she had somehow returned to that night from decades ago, being escorted by a group of trusted cult followers as they fled under relentless pursuit from the Great Yu dynasty.

But if that was the case, then didn’t that mean…

She lowered her head instinctively, and as expected, there was an infant in her arms.

This was a very, very unusual child. The softness of infancy in her features was far fainter than in an ordinary baby. If one looked carefully, even her brows, eyes, and lips carried a faint air of solemnity. At this moment, she lay quietly in the swaddling cloth, neither crying nor fussing, sleeping peacefully with her eyes shut.

“No good!” an enraged voice from behind shouted. “They’ve caught up!”

“That’s impossible! We already took seven turns! No matter how tight the pursuit, they should have been thrown off! How could they know we’re here?”

“It’s that child, isn’t it? After all, all of us, including Your Highness, know how to conceal our breath and keep our auras from leaking out. But that child alone… forget concealing her breath, her scent alone is enough to expose us!”

“Your Highness!”

A figure came close. The woman raised her head and saw an old man in a bamboo hat, drenched through by the rain.

The face beneath the hat bore some resemblance to Song Qiaoshu, but he was nothing like the rigid, formal man of the present. As soon as he came over, his eyes sharpened. In one swift motion, he drew a streak of white brilliance from his waist. Clang, it knocked aside two unknown afterimages in midair, and he barked, “Ten o’clock to the left front. Send men after them!”

“If they get back alive, we’re finished. Catch them no matter what. Kill them!”

“Yes!”

Then the old man turned back and looked over. “Your Highness! The time has come to make a choice!”

“I know this decision is exceedingly difficult. In our current situation, every bloodline is precious.”

“But Your Highness herself was entrusted with the late emperor’s hope. You are the greatest hope for deciphering the Xuandi Scripture! Your worth exceeds even that child’s! Your Highness must weigh this with the utmost care!”

“There is no need to think further.” At that moment, the woman heard her own voice.

It came from decades ago, younger than now, yet with the same steadiness, the same firmness, as though no one could make decisions in the speaker’s place. It gave exactly that feeling.

“I know what matters, Protector Song.”

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“I’ll leave the child to you.”

“If it’s convenient, find a quiet Daoist temple or Buddhist monastery and leave her at the gate.”

“If it isn’t convenient…”

At that point, the voice turned so cold and vicious that almost anyone could understand the unspoken meaning behind it.

“That must not be done!”

Protector Song immediately waved his hands.

“This child… though she is indeed somewhat uncanny, it still hasn’t come to that…”

“How about this. Leave the child directly to this old servant. I’ll take her into the city first and use the city’s environment to draw off the pursuers. Along the way, I’ll find a chance to entrust her to a suitable family, and afterward I’ll lure the pursuers away again!”

“But Protector Song! If you do that, your own safety…”

“This old servant has long since lived enough…” the old man said with a laugh. “There is no hope for becoming a Sword Lord. The further one seeks along this path, the more torment it becomes. I only ask that Your Highness grant this old servant the chance to cast off this rotting body and preserve one thread of bloodline for Great Xuan!”

What is this, exactly!?

Staring blankly, as though she were watching from a third-person perspective, the woman in red looked on helplessly as her past self placed the infant in the old man’s arms. Her body trembled. She could not believe that this old tableau buried in the depths of her heart had been unsealed and projected before her in this way.

What did this mean?

It meant that everything that had happened that year, the route, the scenery, even the conversation, had in fact been remembered by the infant in her arms!

“You…”

Little by little, she turned her head and looked at the white-haired empress standing beside her, shoulder to shoulder with her, and asked in a trembling voice, “Could it be that you are… the reincarnation of a Buddha…?”

Impossible to imagine.

Impossible to understand.

How could an infant less than two days old form such clear memories?

Only a great power reborn.

Only that could explain it.

“Whether or not I’m a Buddha isn’t important,” Bai Xiang said flatly.

“What matters is that, by using the Illusory God to control your five senses, I filled in the entirety of the memory and confirmed some things that matter to me.”

Yes, she really did possess a memory of this scene.

Not from the very beginning, but from the moment she severed the Rebirth Bridge and understood that “the me of yesterday is me, and the me of today is also me.” From that moment on, all the memories of her passing between two worlds and being reborn through the womb of a sapient being became clear to her, and that naturally included this scene.

But there was a difference. That had only been her “subjective memory,” the so-called first-person perspective.

In such a memory, she could only sense the outside world. She could not see herself, nor could she confirm what state she had been in at the time.

But now she could.

By using her birth mother’s memory to complete the picture, Bai Xiang was finally able to see clearly what she had truly looked like at the beginning of her birth into this world.

She saw it very clearly. Even as an infant, she looked nothing at all like the woman in red.

Not like her father in this life.

Not like her mother in this life.

Not like the old body from her previous life.

Only like the self she was now.

The four words “appearance arises from the heart” might, for others, mean nothing more than the traces left by facial muscle movement. Some people might even dismiss them as mysticism.

But for Bai Xiang alone, because of the existence of soul-abilities, those four words were the supreme truth.

So now she could finally rest easy…

Seeing the shock flash across the woman’s face, even as she forcibly held herself calm and steady, Bai Xiang felt no ripples in her heart.

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Clarifying this point was enough to prove that the karmic entanglement between them ran shallow.

She had borrowed the other woman’s flesh and blood to be born into form, but the actual shape of her body and spirit had all been governed only by her own subconscious will. That was why, from infancy onward, she had looked like no one else at all.

Even if there had been karma, it was true that she had received the woman’s favor. But all of that had vanished along with the woman’s decision to “abandon” her.

That meant she owed this woman nothing.

It meant she could start settling new accounts with her.

“Taishang. Hereby. Gives. Order.”

“Seal Form.”

Boom!

Thunder roared, and the woman in red’s vision went black. Suddenly, she could no longer see anything at all.

It was not only the images within the memory illusion that vanished. Even the overlapping image of the room outside was gone!

“You…”

“Silence.”

Before she could object, the decree sealed away sound once again.

In an instant, the thunder and rain in the memory, the rushing sound of the wind sweeping through the forest, all disappeared. The woman’s world no longer contained any sound at all, and even her own voice was no longer permitted.

“Strip Scent.”

“Seize Taste.”

“Forbid Touch.”

Mmgh…!

With those three commands in succession, the woman’s five senses were stripped away layer by layer, until her very thoughts sank into absolute darkness.

She could no longer see, no longer hear, no longer smell, no longer taste, no longer feel. She had completely lost all connection to her physical body, like a wandering ghost adrift in shadow.

Am I… going to die…

A trace of self-mockery rose in the woman’s heart.

So this trip really had been nothing more than a trip to die.

She doesn’t care about me. Of course. Why would she care about a mother who abandoned her without a moment’s hesitation back then?

Nor have I ever regretted what I did.

If I regret anything, it is only that I later learned what she became, and that has nothing to do with the act itself…

Suddenly, the woman felt that she could “see” light again.

Within her thoughts she opened her eyes, and in astonishment she “saw” a white-gold curtain of light rising before her. Two massive halos inscribed with Dao patterns and Sanskrit characters rose up in the darkness, turning into two enormous golden eyes that looked down upon her like supreme gods.

“Li Wenyu.”

A thought entered her mind.

It was like communication by divine sense. Though she could not hear, she naturally understood the meaning.

“Your Majesty the Xia Emperor.”

The woman barely managed a response.

Li Wenyu was her true name.

Before she became the “Xuantian Holy Mother” of the Xuanxia State, before she became “Ninth Lady Xuan” of the Feathering Sect, that was the name she had used in her mortal life.

“I will ask you only once,” the golden eyes continued, pressing the question upon her. “Are you willing to submit.”

“…May I ask, Your Majesty the Xia Emperor,” the woman paused, “what exactly is meant by ‘submit’?”

“It means abandoning your Xuanxia State, abandoning your Feathering Sect, committing both your body and your mind to my world, and through informing and labor, working off your sins.”

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“…”

The woman fell silent for a long time.

“Is it that hard a choice?”

Behind the curtain of golden light, Bai Xiang narrowed her eyes slightly as she watched her.

“Then again… I nearly forgot. If you were the sort of person who would make that choice easily here, then back then, you would not have abandoned an infant without the slightest hesitation.”

“The fact that you did that proves that, in your heart, an infant mattered far less than the Feathering Sect, far less than the Great Xuan you claim to inherit.”

“Your Majesty the Xia Emperor,” Li Wenyu sent her thoughts out as steadily as she could, “I do not understand… why you reject Great Xuan.”

She truly did not understand.

Bai Xiang’s attitude toward her was too cold, so she tried not to assume the role of a birth mother and continued addressing her with honorifics instead.

Bai Xiang said she was cold-blooded, said she was the sort of person who valued ideals and convictions above all else. Li Wenyu did not refute it, because Bai Xiang was right.

But she truly did not understand why someone willing to overthrow the order of the old world, someone who, like Xuandi, did not wish to see the living suffer beneath brutality, would choose such a far crueler path of slaughter.

Was that not going directly against her own ancestor?

She plainly possessed the same eyes as that man, and power like his, even beyond his!

She could not understand it. What a precious opportunity this was.

A chance to realize “co-governance of demons and humans, universal harmony under heaven.” Once missed, it would never come again.

So why?

Why would she acknowledge only half of that ideal? Why would she bestow her grace only upon humankind, yet raise the butcher’s blade against demonkind?

“You are confused.”

“I can feel it.”

Bai Xiang’s voice came from within the light.

“You misunderstand one thing. I do not support half of that ideal. I support Emperor Feng’s ideal in its entirety.”

What was she saying?

But… those acts of slaughter, and the Demon-Expulsion Edict, how could that possibly be called full support?

“Is it different?”

Bai Xiang shook her head.

“Co-governance of demons and humans, co-governance of demons and humans.”

“What is a human, and what is a demon?”

“Have I not left the so-called demons a path forward?”

“Did I come in intent on slaughtering them all from the outset?”

“I have clearly offered a method by which all living beings may free themselves from suffering. One leap by it, and they could attain great transcendence and great freedom, yet some turn a blind eye, preferring to sink into the sea of suffering rather than accept grace.”

“Should such a cancer not be killed?”

She meant… she meant that she wanted all demonkind to cultivate qi methods? To completely cast off the influence of the Void Tribulation? To return, or rather, to transform into another form of life?

Was that why she considered it the same?

Yes. If that were the case, then within her realm there would be no humans and no demons.

Because all would have been purified.

All would have been elevated.

She wanted to build an “ideal state” that could exist only in theory.

This was simply…

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Simply…

“But…” Li Wenyu gathered her courage and used her own understanding to refute the other party. “But, Your Majesty the Xia Emperor, if you do this… if you do this, you are destroying every law that has governed the world since heaven and earth first came into being!”

There had never been such an ideal state in the world.

Never.

Chaos divided into yin and yang. All things generate and restrain one another. In Li Wenyu’s understanding, this was the iron law by which cosmic principles operated.

Loss of Order and Order stood in precisely that contradictory relation. Each required the other to exist. If either side lost the other, the whole structure of order would collapse.

And yet the Xia Emperor wished to eliminate the influence of Loss of Order entirely…

How could that be possible…

She was practically setting herself against the Heavenly Dao…

“It would not be so.”

Those words interrupted her thoughts again.

“In my understanding, the relation between Loss of Order and Order is not fixed.”

“In the past, heaven and earth were inadequate, and order was incomplete. A link in the chain was missing.”

“People eat chickens and fish.”

“Demonic beasts eat people.”

“So why can there not be one more thing that eats demonic beasts, that feeds on Loss of Order, and is called the qi-path?”

“If such a link were embedded into the chain, how could it not count as part of order?”

“Of course I know it will be difficult, no less than challenging all the old orders that came before.”

“But this is my will.”

“This is the work I came here to accomplish.”

She really… truly thought this…?

Li Wenyu’s mind shook violently on hearing those words.

Too unbelievable.

Too mad.

She hardly dared imagine what a tremendous upheaval it would cause if those ideas were transmitted to the outside world word for word.

All living beings would unite to denounce her!

The ferocity of it would exceed even the siege laid against Xuandi by the enemies of the Eight Desolations.

“I can feel that you are hesitating now.”

Her vision blurred, and all the darkness shattered like fragments.

Along with the two vast golden halos, it all broke apart. In a daze, Li Wenyu suddenly found that she was still standing in the room, while Bai Xiang had just reached out a right hand toward her. Before she could recover herself, it plunged straight into the center of her brow.

This… this is…

Squelch!

When that hand withdrew again, an enormously fat white-gold worm was dragged out from inside her skull, with several fine, half-transparent sticky threads still connecting it. Li Wenyu’s mind instantly went dazed and muddled.

“I’ve taken the thing out for you.”

“For the sake of the karmic bond of blood, I’ll give you three more days to think.”

As those words fell, the figure before her abruptly vanished.

Li Wenyu jolted awake, staggering back several steps. She suddenly felt her five senses returning one by one. It was as though she had just woken from a nightmare, her whole body soaked through with sweat.