novelraw Chapter 150: Return to Heaven-Attraction Mountain
Chapter 150: Return to Heaven-Attraction Mountain
Three months later.
Qi Xiu drifted slowly out of deep meditation. His eyes opened.
Chaos greeted him.
The thatched study looked like a storm had torn through it. Furniture lay overturned, splintered. Most of it was ruined. The two treasured artifacts he had carried for decades—his matching companions, the Exquisite Pagoda and the Nameless Compass—lay in pieces before him, shattered into seven or eight jagged fragments.
“So this… is what it feels like to be a Foundation Establishment cultivator?”
He murmured the words, lifted his hand, turned it over and over.
The skin that had begun to crease and dry with age had regained its smooth suppleness. He touched his face. For a dazed instant he was twenty-something again—hiding in some forgotten corner of Qi Yun, locked inside a quiet chamber, still pure, still ignorant of the world’s sharp edges.
“Cultivation…” he whispered. “They say that when a child is first born, before the very first cry, a trace of the Great Dao’s true essence hides in the pupils. Then it scatters like mist, gone forever. Everything we chase afterward is just trying to claw our way back to that lost purity—shedding the grime and wear of mortal life, seeking what we once held and can never quite reclaim.”
“N nascent Soul. Only when one reaches Nascent Soul can you even glimpse the threshold of that infant purity again. I’ve just stepped onto Foundation Establishment. I’ve barely begun.”
He forcibly reined in the wild surge of elation that threatened to burst free. The “See One’s Own Heart” talent turned inward—self-discipline, self-examination—quieting the mind.
“My innate talent really is a breakthrough cheat. Without ‘See One’s Own Heart’ standing guard, the moment Qi Refining poured into my brain and soared skyward, fear, desire, doubt, confusion—all those poisons would have drowned me in illusion. Eternal darkness would have claimed me right then.”
His brows knit.
During the most precarious moments of Foundation Establishment, when consciousness floated untethered, his entire life had flashed before him in a dizzying reel. Scenes he had never remembered before kept surfacing, stubborn and insistent.
The perspective was strange—held in someone’s arms, looking out at hazy distant mountains, gentle farmland, the familiar landscape around Qi Yun. Two men whose faces he couldn’t make out were yanking and pulling at him. One voice—high, shrill, furious—snapped:
“For this little thing I spent seven four!”
Then the memory cut off.
He turned it over carefully. They must have been fighting over the swaddled infant—himself. Who were those men? Why fight over him? What was the truth of his origins? And what in the world was “seven four”?
Nothing else came. No answers. He shook his head, shelved it. This wasn’t something he could unravel in an afternoon. The old couple who raised him were long dead. Even the former sect leader—half mentor, half father—had passed on. No witnesses remained. He would have to let it lie and wait for fate to offer another thread later.
Inside his dantian, spiritual energy had condensed into liquid. The pool hadn’t grown much larger, but its purity was on another level—nearly a hundred times denser than before. The gulf between Qi Refining and Foundation Establishment was vast, almost absurd.
More than that, he could now truly see inside himself.
Not just vague spiritual sense probing—he could look directly.
In the sea of consciousness his spiritual sense sank deep and there it was: a gray-furred Red-Buttocked Horse Monkey, rump bright scarlet, curled on its side and snoring peacefully. Beneath the gently rising and falling chest, the Seven Orifices Exquisite Heart pulsed—seven-colored, expanding and contracting with each breath.
“Hey, old friend. Fifty years. First time I’ve actually laid eyes on you. How’ve you been?”
He sent the first conscious greeting toward the monkey that had both blessed and cursed his path.
No response. The beast slept on, utterly indifferent.
Qi Xiu sighed lightly.
This heaven-and-earth spirit had made his cultivation journey hellishly difficult. Even now, at Foundation Establishment, it would likely remain a massive stumbling block. Chu Huixin’s “See One’s Own Heart” and “Seek Advantage, Avoid Calamity” techniques were useless at this realm. What came next was anyone’s guess.
Still—one aperture in the Seven Orifices Exquisite Heart had finally lit up with the breakthrough.
A seventh innate talent had awakened.
He still didn’t know what exact opportunity that soulless husk beneath the Nether Spring had been guiding him toward. Missed was missed. No going back.
But the insight that struck during his conversation with Yu Deno—that accidental epiphany—had been the true pivot.
The question of fate.
Can human destiny be calculated?
If I stood alone between heaven and earth—yes, perhaps.
But the world is never so simple. Entangled fates make calculation impossible…
On that razor’s edge he had established his Foundation.
The seventh talent: Fate Calculation Technique—Destiny Divination.
It cost ten years of lifespan to pose one true question to fate and receive an answer.
A divine ability on paper.
Except the price was ruinous, and all it revealed was an extension of his own luck line. Cross a stronger fate current and the reading would twist, leading him astray. Just like what happened at the Nether Spring—Shen Gu’s superior fortune had barged in and snatched everything.
“Ten years of life…” Qi Xiu gave a self-mocking chuckle. “Foundation Establishment added nearly a century to my lifespan, but how many decades does a man really have? Who could bear to spend one?”
He rose to his feet.
The scarlet robe disintegrated into powder, sloughing away. His naked body gleamed beneath a layer of black, foul-smelling impurities forced out during body refinement.
From his storage pouch he took a plain wooden basin, murmured an incantation.
The bowl grew—first to tub-size, then larger still—until it held a full bath of clear water already prepared.
He cast a fire-series spell, tossed in a few body-tempering herbs, then stepped in and sank down with a long, contented exhale.
Halfway through scrubbing, Min-niang’s breathtaking figure flashed through his mind.
Heat surged. Below the water his dragon reared up, proud and unyielding. He flicked it playfully with a finger—bigger now, more ferocious than before Foundation Establishment. A smug grin spread across his face.
“Wife, disciples—they must have sensed the heavenly phenomenon when I broke through. All kneeling outside, waiting for me to emerge, right?”
The thought was too much.
He hurried through the rest of the bath, dried off, pulled on the cyan Daoist robe Min-niang had given him years ago in Black River Market. Combed his hair meticulously until he looked every inch the newly ascended Foundation Establishment cultivator.
Then, with a single palm strike, he shattered the seal he himself had placed on the door.
No treasured artifact needed—his body rose into the air under pure physical power.
A long, triumphant howl burst from his throat.
It echoed across the valleys, rolling through every corner of Immortal Grove Hollow.
He didn’t hold back. Joy poured from every pore—raw, newborn delight of Foundation Establishment. He circled once, grinning.
Then he looked down.
And nearly lost his Dao Heart on the spot.
The study below was empty.
No disciples. No Min-niang. No Bai Xiaosheng.
Just Kan Da and Kan Qin, plus a handful of scattered servants kneeling here and there—three cats at best. They stared up at him in dazed reverence, but the crowd he’d imagined—the witnesses to his moment of glory—were nowhere.
Like putting on brocade robes to walk the streets at midnight.
Utterly stifled.
He swallowed the anger, dropped from the sky, caught Kan Qin as she rushed into his arms.
“Where is everyone?” he demanded of Kan Da.
Kan Da—after years serving as a boy attendant in Kan Grove Gate—managed to deliver the report clearly, point by point.
It turned out that right after Qi Xiu entered seclusion, a group of Golden Core cultivators from the Artifact-and-Talisman Alliance had returned from the depths of White Mountain.
How they had managed to walk free—despite failing to capture the Blood Shadow evil cultivator who massacred Black River Market—by somehow going through Nascent Soul late-stage cultivator Gao Guangsheng of Broad Exchange Pavilion, no one knew.
But they were back.
And naturally they wanted payback for the Heaven-Attraction Sect war years ago.
The second great battle of Heaven-Attraction Mountain had erupted.
Wei Xuan, riding the second-tier flying flood dragon that had once been Wei Tong’s mount—itself comparable to a late Golden Core—fought four Artifact-and-Talisman Alliance Golden Cores alone and actually held even.
A stalemate formed across the mountain.
The Alliance’s four Golden Cores, plus every subordinate sect they could muster, gathered on the western side. They reached out to the Luo clan in the south, quietly encircling Mountain Capital from all directions, swearing they would not withdraw until the Wei family was exterminated.
The Wei clan had no choice but to fight with everything.
Min-niang still carried some face. Chu Qin Sect was ordered to participate fully but assigned to the relatively safer southern defensive line—guarding against Luo clan cultivators.
Bai Muhan saw the disparity clearly. The situation looked dire. She sent little Zhanqiu and Yue’er to Black River Peak for safety, then led the rest of the sect south.
A life-or-death war. Even Bai Xiaosheng couldn’t sit it out.
He went too.
Originally Bai Muhan had left ten-year-old Chu Wuying and Qin Sizhao to hold Immortal Grove Hollow.
But boys will be boys. Neither truly understood how brutal cultivator wars could be. They conspired together, slipped away, and followed secretly.
So right now Immortal Grove Hollow held not a single cultivator.
No one left to witness the sect leader’s triumphant emergence.
Qi Xiu’s eyes widened. “This war is that dangerous—and everyone went? Why didn’t you stop Wuying and Sizhao!”
Kan Qin had anticipated his reaction. She hurried to explain.
“The Wei family is in mortal peril this time. Face means nothing anymore. They practically herded our cultivators south like convicts—no room for refusal. Even then, elder sister Min-niang had to swallow every shred of pride, go to Mountain Capital, and cry in front of them for days just to get us assigned to the southern line instead of the front! They didn’t even believe you were truly in seclusion attempting Foundation Establishment. If Acting Sect Leader Bai hadn’t led everyone and sworn to die resisting, they might have broken in and dragged you out too!”
“Two little Qi Refining kids—how could mere mortals like us possibly hold them back?”
“This is outrageous! I—I have to go right now!”
Qi Xiu’s composure cracked. Without another word he summoned his sword, ignited it with spiritual power, and shot south like a streak of desperate light.