Volume 5, Chapter 101 – The Plan to Trace the Source and Replicate Di Xiang

What did this thing represent?

Moving closer to the statue, Bai Xiang reached out and tried touching it.

The moment her fingertip came into contact with the statue’s surface, the immense divine sense of the Divine Palace Realm swept across its contours as well, even constructing a 3D model of it in her mind, yet she still found nothing unusual about the statue.

No demonic power.

No blood-qi.

No aura of soul or divine sense.

It looked like nothing more than an utterly ordinary large clay statue.

“An ordinary clay statue wouldn’t be able to remain intact after lying underground and being compressed for so many years.”

Bai Xiang narrowed her eyes and simply pressed a palm against the statue’s surface, instantly transmitting a burst of vibration force into it.

Boom!

The clay statue exploded apart on the spot, bursting and disintegrating under the force into a heap of broken yellow earth. The finest particles were practically indistinguishable from sand, spinning in the desolate wind.

Hm?

Focusing her gaze, Bai Xiang saw a pale object drop out from inside the statue after the yellow earth collapsed, and hurriedly reached out to scoop it up.

Taking a closer look, she found that it was actually a bone about a foot long.

The bone had been cut off through the middle. One end was intact, while the other showed a broken cross-section and jagged spur. If it had truly been buried underground inside the statue all this time, it must have a long history, yet the cut surface had not fully decayed. Not only was it not hollowed out, even the marrow inside still showed a faint pink hue.

What kind of thing was this? Buried inside for so long, and its remnant vitality still had not been severed?

From the broken surface of the bone, Bai Xiang could sense a powerfully pure blood-qi, restrained yet extremely potent. Half narrowing her eyes, she thought for a moment, then first stowed the broken bone into her jade storage plaque. After that, carrying Feixiang Heaven, she went around slicing and searching through the wasteland. Only once she was sure there was no second clay statue did she scoop up a handful of yellow earth from the collapsed “corpse” of the statue, wrap it in fine cloth, put that away as well, and step into the void.

“Hah!”

Elsewhere, in the remote northwest beyond the reach of the qi-path divine pool, a graceful young woman in a green dress suddenly jolted awake and opened her mouth wide, drawing in deep breaths with all her strength.

Her face was extremely strange. Seen from the front, the left half had a black pupil and a calm expression, but the right half was twisted in hideous contortion, as if it had just undergone some immense agony. Even that single golden eye still retained traces of panic.

Only after panting like that for quite a while did half of the girl’s face finally calm down.

Then the left side of her face took control of her lips and tongue and said, “What… your plan failed?”

The right side said nothing, only silently relaying what it had just experienced through the nerves into the brain of this body.

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Thus Tao Sicheng, too, came to witness that flash of sword-light. Her black pupil widened at once, her iris shrinking, fear rising within her beneath that overwhelming sword momentum. It took her a while to recover.

But she could not understand. “…You lost, so you lost. What’s the point of showing me all this?”

She was referring to more than just those images.

Lifting her gaze, one could see several thread-bound ancient books spread open on the desk. Among them was the same copy of the Shenming Qi-Refining Formula that Li Wenyu had held, the complete Sun-Chasing Scripture along with its annotations obtained through the Pilgrimage Mountain channel, meaning through that ancient remnant soul called Yuan Qi, and even the Scripture of Returning to Origin and Transforming Qi, which had never really entered the mainstream and had only circulated on a small scale in parts of former Yu territory in earlier years.

That was not all. Farther down the long table lay two long swords in their sheaths. Both were broad-bladed Han-style swords, and their outward appearance was almost indistinguishable.

“With your intelligence, can you really not guess?”

The Demon Lord gave a soft chuckle and revealed the answer to her directly. “Choosing a young female body, laying out the keys to her Dao before her… what I seek, of course, is to try to replicate another her.”

“But that’s completely impossible!”

Tao Sicheng’s lips twitched.

He wanted to analyze, even replicate, a second Di Xiang just by copying the pattern from the gourd?

She did not even know how to begin mocking this madman!

Ah… admittedly, not long ago she had entertained a similar fantasy herself. It had probably been a kind of resentment born from hatred, a refusal to accept, a Why can she do it while I can’t? That feeling had only been strengthened further after her younger brother Tao Kangyuan had been gravely wounded by the aftershock of heavenly tribulation.

But the failure of the Li clan, and the death of the demon god “Jiuli,” had taught her a vivid lesson: Di Xiang was undefeatable!

One had to understand that, according to Rongyin, even when perfectly drawing out the power of the Nine-Fusion Spirit Vein, Tao Sicheng would only “have hope of approaching the demon god Jiuli,” and “have a chance to become one of its favored servants,” thereby receiving some divine abilities closer to the source.

Rongyin had never expected, nor dared imagine, that she could surpass the demon god itself through bloodline alone. Because if awakening some powerful bloodline at random could allow one to surpass the source of that bloodline, then the countless tribes throughout history could never have existed. Those totemic symbols would have been devoured by their own worshippers in turn and could never have been passed down at all.

So… then…

A being so great that she did not even dare fantasize about it had, only a few days later, been reported dead, cut down by Di Xiang in the desert.

Tao Sicheng had indeed been shaken.

For a time, she had even started doubting her life choices, wondering whether taking Di Xiang as her goal had been far too arrogantly overestimating herself, whether she ought to take a step back and choose a more realistic objective instead.

For example, first finding a way to get rid of this monster called the Demon Lord and rebuilding the Tao family with her younger brother Tao Kangyuan.

“Impossible?” The Demon Lord raised a brow. “I don’t think so.”

“You probably don’t know what I am, little one.”

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“I am neither human nor demon. Strictly speaking, I have already died countless times.”

“I am the collective consciousness formed from countless dead who drifted through the void and finally gathered together.”

“It is precisely because of that accumulation that I was able to directly attain ‘great accomplishment’ on the path of the soul, even bypass the limits of the flesh and open an origin orifice, and thus possess eyes like hers.”

Tao Sicheng gritted her teeth. “‘Divine-Might Golden Pupils’…”

Whether they were really called that or not, she had no idea. In any case, it was what the Demon Lord had told her.

According to him, the Divine-Might Golden Pupils themselves possessed no divine power. They were merely an external manifestation appearing on the body once one’s spiritual strength reached a certain level.

It was like how a person’s hair turned white with age. That was because the strands lacked nourishment and had withered and decayed, yet that did not mean white hair itself carried any power.

Golden pupils were the same. The principle was the same.

“These eyes are the first threshold for understanding her,” the Demon Lord said, his tone somewhat sinister.

“What comes after that should be much easier.”

Tao Sicheng frowned. “But…”

“There is no but.” The Demon Lord cut her off.

“As you saw, she destroyed another one of my avatars.”

“In her presence, escaping by soul-thread is extremely dangerous. To prevent her from refining the soul-thread, I had no choice but to abandon everything about that avatar. That should buy me quite a bit more time.”

“For the next few days, I’ll be entering slumber. During that time, you are not to go anywhere. Stay here and study these scriptures. You must gnaw through them until you’ve completely mastered them.”

With that, the golden pupil on the right side of the face slowly closed, that half of the face returned to lifeless stillness, and control over the connected organs was yielded back.

Finally gone…

Tao Sicheng felt a delayed wave of fear.

He said he would not harm her, but he was completely different from the Spirit-Vein Demons, even down to the form of his existence, which was so incomprehensible.

Of course she was afraid. Of course she felt uneasy.

“The Demon Lord… he doesn’t seem like the sort who would stake everything on a single plan.”

That was what Tao Sicheng thought.

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She felt there was every chance that the thing hanging on her face was also just an avatar, and that this so-called “Plan to Replicate Di Xiang” was merely one plan among countless others. Even if the plan failed, even if Tao Sicheng herself died along the way, that monster might not care in the slightest.

No.

Staying with this thing was far too dangerous.

I still have to find a way to save myself.

It was only because the Demon Lord was asleep now that Tao Sicheng dared think these thoughts so freely.

She took paper and pen from a drawer and began writing down keywords, sometimes drawing lines between them, sometimes frowning, tearing off the paper, and burning it to ash with a lighter.

Based on her analysis… the Demon Lord’s true body was very likely still underground.

That enormous cocoon she had seen the first time she went down there, his real body was most likely still inside it.

It was true that she now had special privileges within the base, but those privileges were limited to this office alone.

Go outside?

The corridor beyond was full of armed guards.

So was she supposed to obediently serve as his lab rat?

He clearly valued the Nine-Fusion Spirit Vein highly. There was no way he would let her go easily. Even if she obeyed, she would most likely still not escape death in the end.

So what exactly was she supposed to do?

What could she do to save both herself and Kangyuan…?

Pressing at her brow, Tao Sicheng felt like her brain was about to overheat.

Hm?

Just then, she noticed another stack of books piled in one corner of the desk.

The Demon Lord had not mentioned these books. What were they?

Tao Sicheng pulled them over and opened one. After only a few glances, she frowned deeply.

Sanskrit… these were pure Buddhist scriptures?

As she flipped through the pages, a letter slipped out and happened to land right in her hand.

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The Demon Lord never said I wasn’t allowed to read it.

Relying on the fact that she still seemed to enjoy a certain degree of “favor,” Tao Sicheng opened the letter without hesitation, feeling the irony of it even as she did.

How ridiculous. Handwritten letters ought to have been obsolete by now, yet because of fear of Di Xiang’s surveillance, they had once again become a reliable means of communication.

With a gap that large, how could anyone possibly catch up…?

Sighing, she decided to first see what was written inside.

Likely to protect the sender’s identity, the envelope bore no signature. The content only mentioned that this batch of books all came from an ancient ruin, and that the ruin was buried within a “special Illusory Realm that shifted randomly and required a specific method to anchor its coordinates.” Just excavating these few books alone had already cost the sender enormous manpower and material resources.

“This handwriting… hm?”

Tao Sicheng stared at the letter for quite a while. Then she suddenly seemed to remember something and began rummaging through the files on her left. Soon enough, she found another similar letter.

That letter also had no signature, but the handwriting was very similar.

“The previous one came together with those two swords.”

“That would be the legendary Zhenyuan sword embryo… I remember this thing was once listed online for auction?”

She activated the light screen, took up a keyboard, and tapped away rapidly. Very soon, she pulled up the relevant information.

“Found it.”

“The Pingzhou branch of the Silver Sea Merchant Guild… They actually dared list this thing online for sale? Shouldn’t they have delivered it straight to Di Xiang instead?”

Tao Sicheng frowned and continued tapping at the keyboard to verify things.

Ten minutes later, her brows eased.

“Oh…”

“So that’s what this was about…”

“No wonder the Silver Sea Merchant Guild had already begun shrinking its operations before my family met disaster. So that was why…”

“It seems Meng Wanyu chose the latter between a unified imperial order and the sect model.”

So was there anything in this that she could maneuver and influence?

After a moment of thought, Tao Sicheng picked up the letter describing the ruin once more and placed it together with the Sanskrit Buddhist scriptures.