Path of the Sect Leader

Chapter 61: Misfortune Begets Fortune

“Every pitiful soul has something utterly loathsome about them. If not for that bastard, Senior Brother Kan wouldn’t have suffered such a calamity.”

Mid-flight back to the mountain, He Yu tossed the words out like a dagger, no warning, no warmth.

The group had just witnessed a slaughter drenched in blood. Heads hung low, spirits crushed. A few even felt a reluctant pang of sympathy for Bai Xiaosheng, the man now broken beyond repair. No one bothered to answer He Yu.

Only Wang Fang seemed untouched by the gloom, practically humming with glee. “Kan Lin really drew the short end this time, heh. From now on, that old goat’s gonna owe me a favor he can never repay.”

Qi Xiu could only give a helpless smirk at the ancient prankster’s unshakable cheer.

A weary flock returned to the shattered sect. He Yu dragged Wang Fang off to check on Kan Lin while the rest scattered to patch up collapsed gates and scorched halls. Zhan Yuan sidled up to Qi Xiu, voice low. “Should I head out and buy a fresh batch of those Construction Giants? That esoteric-Buddhist roof Chu Qin’guan insisted on never suited our Daoist peaks anyway. Now that it’s rubble, why not rip the whole thing out and start clean?”

Qi Xiu dipped his chin. “Do whatever you think best. Just… stay clear of Black River Market for now. Chu Youguang got dragged into this mess too. The man’s pride is wounded—he might lash out at anyone wearing our colors.”

Zhan Yuan gave a quick nod and vanished into the chaos.

Qi Xiu drifted through the ruins of his own quarters. The once-elegant palm-master’s retreat lay buried under half a mountain of shattered tiles and splintered beams. He circled the wreckage once, twice, then laughed—a dry, exhausted sound. Every hall, every pavilion, every spare corner now swarmed with disciples hauling stone or sweeping ash. The grand sect leader… had nowhere to rest his head.

Bone-tired, qi threads frayed, he trudged toward the lone surviving pavilion on the lake’s edge, craving even a moment’s quiet.

From afar, a silhouette stood beneath the pavilion’s eaves—tall, familiar, wrong.

Qi Xiu’s heart slammed against his ribs. For a breath he thought exhaustion had birthed hallucinations. That gaunt face, those viper eyes… only one man wore them like a second skin: Chu Duo, Golden Core ancestor of the Southern Chu Sect.

Yet as he drew closer, dread sharpened into disbelief. The suffocating pressure that once leaked from the old monster like black fog was… gone. Completely gone. He stood there as harmless as any mortal farmer.

Why is he here? Is this nightmare not finished?

Scalp prickling, Qi Xiu forced iron into his spine, stepped forward, and dropped into the deepest salute he could manage without toppling over.

“You’re the one carrying the Scarlet-Tailed Horse Monkey spiritual root?” Chu Duo’s voice rolled out smooth, almost amused. A thread of spiritual power slipped into Qi Xiu’s sea of consciousness, circled once, and withdrew. “So it is true. No wonder the patriarch told me to entrust that matter to you.”

A storm of questions howled inside Qi Xiu’s skull.

Why did Chu Hongshang try to rip my memories open, only to stop the moment she saw my true root?

Why did her killing intent turn to… curiosity?

And now this war-general of the Southern Chu Sect crosses half the realm in person—for what?

But some debts tower higher than mountains. The Southern Chu Sect had raised the orphan Chu Qin—raised him, Qi Xiu, by extension—from nothing. Their grace was the sky above his head; their word, the earth beneath his feet. Refusal was unthinkable.

“Whatever the honored ancestor commands,” Qi Xiu said, voice steady as forged steel, “this junior will see it done, even if it costs my life ten thousand times.”

A low chuckle rumbled from Chu Duo’s throat. “Good. A man who remembers his debts.”

Two objects arced through the air and landed gently in Qi Xiu’s palms. “The Southern Chu Sect does not send its soldiers into battle hungry. These will push your cultivation forward—perhaps even tear open the great path that was sealed to you. Take them.”

Qi Xiu glanced down, pulse racing.

A jade slip, its surface etched with flowing script: Mind-Illumination and Nature-Insight Art — Revised by Chu Huixin.

And a palm-sized pagoda of shifting rainbow glass, no higher than first-tier, yet humming with a strange, intimate resonance.

Before he could speak, Chu Duo leaned in, voice dropping to a thread only the two of them could hear, and told him exactly what “that matter” was.

Then, like smoke on the wind, the Golden Core ancestor was simply… gone.

“Sect Leader!” Gu Ji came barreling across the bridge, grinning ear to ear. “Senior Wang made his move—Senior Kan’s awake!”

“Ah… right. Good, good…” Qi Xiu answered on reflex, thoughts still tangled in the abyss Chu Duo had just opened beneath him.

He drifted through the motions—thanked Wang Fang, arranged Kan Lin’s recovery chambers, ignored the puzzled stares of his disciples. Only when the last voice faded did he slip away, sealing himself inside a forgotten rear-courtyard cottage. Door barred, windows shuttered, he finally let his hands tremble as he set the two treasures on the table.

First, the jade slip.

He pressed it to his brow.

Light poured into his mind like dawn breaking over a frozen sea.

When the slip crumbled to star-dust minutes—or hours—later, Qi Xiu exhaled a breath that tasted of both wonder and dread.

Mind-Illumination and Nature-Insight Art.

At its core, a humble first-tier technique. Countless sects kept copies gathering dust. The original taught cultivators to sweep away worldly attachments, to gaze unflinchingly into the mirror of the self. “See the mind clearly, perceive true nature”—classic doctrine.

Nothing about it should have anything to do with a crippled primal spirit root.

Then came the four characters that changed everything: Revised by Chu Huixin.

Chu Huixin—a long-dead junior of the Chu clan, never advanced past Golden Core. She, too, had been born with a “waste” root.

But where others despaired, she carved a new path with sheer lunatic genius.

Her revision flipped the entire technique on its head.

Instead of illuminating one’s own mind, the cultivator now illuminated the primal spirit root itself—the very thing that had condemned them to stagnation.

Of course a broken root could not absorb qi. Everyone knew that.

So Chu Huixin did not try to fix the root.

She invented a false one.

Through relentless contemplation and refinement, the cultivator painted—brushstroke by brushstroke—an imaginary twin inside the sea of consciousness. A counterfeit spirit root that shared just enough resonance with the real one to act as a bridge.

Qi Xiu’s true root: the Scarlet-Tailed Horse Monkey—master of yin-yang shifts, peerless in reading hearts and slipping through fate’s fingers, yet incapable of cycling a single strand of spiritual qi.

Her solution: craft a surrogate called the Seven-Aperture Exquisite Heart.

A heart of pure, crystalline insight.

And the little rainbow pagoda? The Exquisite Pagoda, a first-tier artifact tuned precisely to serve as the “reference object”—a tuning fork for the soul. By meditating upon the pagoda, pouring intent into the false heart, then letting that forged heart echo back against the tiny overlapping frequencies of the true monkey root… cultivation became possible again.

A technique so insane, so elegant, it felt like cheating the Heavenly Dao itself.

Qi Xiu turned the delicate pagoda between his fingers, watching colors dance across its facets.

“Senior Chu Huixin…” he whispered, awe thick in his throat. “To stare down a dead-end road and still force the heavens to yield—you were a monster among monsters.”

A bitter smile tugged at his lips.

Yes, the sect had suffered an unprovoked catastrophe.

Yet from those ashes, he—personally—had been handed a key that might unlock the great path sealed since his birth.

But every gift from the Southern Chu Sect came with a chain.

And the task Chu Duo had laid upon him…

Once accepted, the seed of a sect-exterminating calamity would take root in his own two hands—inescapable, eternal.

He stared at the Exquisite Pagoda until its light blurred.

Fortune and disaster, two sides of the same blade.

And the blade was already falling.