Volume 5, Chapter 117 – Reincarnation

Meanwhile, back in the relic Buddha-realm, in Guo Family Village, Bai Xiang was chatting off and on with the old man in hemp robes.

“Your village has existed for more than a thousand years. Do you have a clan genealogy?”

“Yes… yes… Why are you all just standing there? Hurry up and bring the genealogy over for the angel!”

Bai Xiang sat there calmly. After looking through the genealogy, she asked, “From what I can see, the population of every generation hasn’t changed much. It’s always stayed around one hundred and twenty people?”

“That’s right!” The old man in hemp robes nodded repeatedly.

“In good harvest years, it’s like that.”

“Yes!”

“In bad harvest years, it’s still like that.”

“Yes!”

“And when demon scourges descend and sack the village, is it still like that?”

“Uh… when that happens, we really do lose quite a few people. But afterward, as long as we pray for the Buddha’s protection, many families will soon welcome newborn babies. In just one generation, the numbers fill back in.”

While the two of them spoke, Li Wenyu sat nearby and watched.

One moment she looked at the villagers, the next she narrowed her eyes at Bai Xiang. Every now and then, Bai Xiang’s gaze flickered slightly, clearly showing that she had picked up on some key piece of information.

How come I didn’t notice any information?

Li Wenyu had listened from beginning to end as well. She thought it over for a long while and still could not see anything wrong with what had been said. She assumed Bai Xiang had used that mind-reading method again and had surely read something directly from the souls of these mortals.

That was not a part she could participate in. After glancing around, she moved over to the front of the Buddha altar and carefully studied the brass Buddha statue.

The statue was not large, only about thirty centimeters tall, but it had been crafted with exquisite precision.

To her surprise, it was not the kind of “big-headed Buddha” she was familiar with. Although seated, it was easy to tell that the figure was long-limbed and powerfully built, with a faint, clear elegance to it.

Most of all, there was the Buddha’s face. It looked somewhat gaunt, yet it matched up in her memory with a certain person she had seen before. There was a certain resemblance.

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No way… right?

Li Wenyu was not at all sure.

That man who had seized great authority within the sect, the Demon Lord… how could his reach possibly extend even here?

Before she knew it, her eyes had traveled to the statue’s own. The whites of those brass eyes were strangely beautiful, radiating an uncanny charm.

As if under a spell, she reached out with her right hand to touch the statue. The moment her fingers made contact, she jerked back as if shocked by electricity, her mind violently shaken.

“Hm?”

Bai Xiang turned her head and looked over, only to find Li Wenyu standing beside the statue in a daze, as if lost in thought.

After watching for a moment and finding nothing abnormal, and even finding no change when she tried reading the surface layer of her soul, Bai Xiang turned back and continued speaking with the villagers.

At that moment, Li Wenyu was almost beside herself with mingled shock and delight. In the instant she had touched the statue, an immense will had flooded into her mind, forming lines of golden Sanskrit characters in her heart.

On close inspection, it was none other than the Xuandi Scripture.

The first layer of the scripture was called Locking the Spirit, Stabilizing the Soul. Its effect was to draw in one’s outward-spreading spiritual sense and qi presence, allowing one to hide oneself even more perfectly.

Th-this… how is this possible!?

Li Wenyu stole a glance at Bai Xiang. Seeing that she seemed unconcerned, Li Wenyu finally became certain that the sacred art was real.

She no longer had the leisure to investigate its source. Seizing this rare moment of privacy, she hurriedly read through every one of those Sanskrit symbols.

Locking the Spirit, Stabilizing the Soul. Guarding the Spirit through Empty Tribulation. Washing the Soul and Drawing Threads. Dividing the Spirit and Transforming into Life…

As one sacred art after another imprinted itself upon her heart, Li Wenyu became certain that this truly was the Xuandi Scripture, though incomplete. It contained only half of the text.

Only then did she have time to consider its origin. Why would a sacred art have ended up in a place like this?

Could it be that Emperor Feng had once come here?

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She lifted her head to look at the brass Buddha statue and flexed her fingers, wondering what would happen if she touched it one more time.

“What are you looking at?”

Bai Xiang suddenly stepped up in front of her, startling Li Wenyu badly.

“Nothing.” She forced herself to remain calm. “Are you done asking questions?”

“Yes. We can leave now.”

The two left Guo Family Village and followed the village chief’s directions, that old man in hemp robes, westward along the mountain path. According to him, there were other villages and towns in that direction.

“Can I ask… how long exactly do you plan to keep wandering around in here?”

On the road, Li Wenyu finally could not hold back her curiosity and asked Bai Xiang the question.

She could not understand it. Bai Xiang had not killed a single person.

To Li Wenyu, that was almost unimaginable, because she had long since accepted certain ideas from the legends, believing Bai Xiang to be the kind of person who favored using violence to reject everything and rule over everything.

Although Bai Xiang herself also possessed a relatively normal sense of morality and good and evil, Li Wenyu did not see those two traits as contradictory. So in her eyes, Bai Xiang should have judged Guo Erlang’s family to be “tainted by evil influence,” accomplices and accessories to the infant’s death.

Yet in a situation like that, Bai Xiang had not made a move. She had barely even exchanged a few words before leaving. No matter how Li Wenyu looked at it, it felt strange.

“Your powers of observation are too weak,” Bai Xiang said from up ahead, walking alone in front without turning back. “I do indeed like to solve most problems with violence, but I don’t like pointless violence.”

Li Wenyu did not understand. “Pointless violence?”

“Yes. For example, if killing someone is useless and doesn’t solve the problem anyway, that is what I call pointless violence.”

“In the eyes of the Xia Emperor, there is such a thing as pointless violence?” Li Wenyu’s voice carried a trace of grievance when she said this.

After all, she herself had experienced Bai Xiang’s violence on more than one occasion. Judging from how meek and submissive she was acting now, that violence had obviously been quite effective.

“You sound rather unconvinced.” Bai Xiang cast her a sidelong glance.

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“No. I wouldn’t dare be unconvinced.”

“There’s no real point in just saying these things, so let’s do this instead. Do you see that patch of undergrowth over there?”

Bai Xiang pointed toward a stretch of brush in the woods ahead and to the right of the road.

Li Wenyu had only just turned to look when she saw Bai Xiang make a beckoning motion. At once, a squealing little wild boar flew out of the thicket. Dragged over by Bai Xiang’s controlled qi, it was pinned in midair, kicking wildly, utterly helpless.

What is she trying to do?

Before Li Wenyu could react, Bai Xiang snapped her fingers. The qi force encasing the boar instantly returned to its violent nature, twisting around its head in a single vicious coil, and in one stroke separated the little beast’s head from its body.

“…?”

Li Wenyu frowned slightly.

With her experience, such a bloody scene naturally did not make her uncomfortable. But she genuinely could not understand what Bai Xiang was trying to prove. What did killing a beast demonstrate?

“Look carefully,” Bai Xiang told her. “Look at the wound. The cross-section.”

Li Wenyu froze for a moment, then looked again at the boar’s severed neck. A quiet sound of surprise escaped her lips, and she could not help moving closer, her brows drawing tightly together.

At first, with the head severed, some pig blood of course splashed out. But once the spray of blood dispersed, the section beneath it was not muscle and flesh at all. Instead, it was some kind of golden-red gelatinous substance.

Bai Xiang used qi again to shred both the boar’s head and body completely. At once, two streamers formed from golden specks of light drifted out of the bloody mist of the remains and shot into the sky with a rush, fleeing westward.

What was that?

Li Wenyu’s expression turned serious, and she ventured a guess. “Death in this place… does not mean true death?”

Bai Xiang completed the latter half of the thought for her. “And living peacefully here does not mean possessing real life.”

“…What exactly do you mean? Please enlighten me, Xia Emperor.”

“It means ‘reincarnation,’” Bai Xiang said, lifting her brows. “Any life-form that enters this Buddha-realm is imprisoned. I still don’t know exactly what the process looks like, but it should be a method of transformation similar to what the Sacred Weapon Clan does.”

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“Once the transformation succeeds, that life becomes bound to the Buddha-realm. Death here is not the end, because the true self reenters reincarnation and is reborn elsewhere in another form.”

A Demon Pool?

Now Li Wenyu understood completely. If it could already manipulate life, death, and reincarnation, then wasn’t this basically a “reincarnation” Demon Pool?

No, that wasn’t quite right either. An ordinary Demon Pool could never do something on this level. These were already rules on the level of a Heavenly Dao Divine Pool. Who could possibly have made such an immense move and constructed rules like these?

Thinking of the Xuandi Scripture inheritance within the Buddha statue, Li Wenyu’s eyes widened.

Could it really have been Emperor Feng?

Could the historical Emperor Feng, the founding ancestor of the Feathering Sect, have worshipped the Buddha?

But with that, she also understood what Bai Xiang had meant earlier.

If you killed a pig, that pig’s true self would not die. It would drift westward, be reincarnated, and then return to the Buddha-realm in some other form.

So that was it…

By that logic, because the Buddha-realm was sealed off, the number of living beings here should have remained fixed over a very long span of time. How heaven and earth were arranged, where settlements should exist, how large those settlements should be, how many people they should contain, and how much livestock should be nearby, every one of those things had been preset, like a computer program.

That was why Guo Family Village could maintain a stable population whether in years of abundance or years of famine.

Even if disaster struck and a great number of people died, the force directing that program would assign living beings to be reincarnated into the village.

Ah!

As she thought further, Li Wenyu suddenly shivered.

Wasn’t this the real Six Paths of Reincarnation?

No matter what form of Buddhism or branch sect one spoke of, they all basically treated the Six Paths of Reincarnation as a theoretical foundation. She had never imagined it actually existed.

Even if it did not exist outside, and only within a sealed little world, it was still something astonishing beyond measure.