novelraw Chapter 30 : Chapter 30
Chapter 30 : Chapter 30
Chapter 30
In lands protected by the Sword Pavilion, Yao creatures and demons rarely caused trouble, because they were thinking of their own lives.
Those who dared stir up chaos near the Sword Pavilion were either ignorant little Yao creatures and demons, or else gamblers who hoped to cause trouble and flee immediately afterward. If someone committed a crime right on the Sword Pavilion’s doorstep and still dared remain behind, did they truly think they could stand against the many Sword Immortals within the Sword Pavilion?
Yet the strange Yao creature hidden in that earth fissure back then had done exactly that. It had possessed the ability to kill seven cultivators of the Fourth Layer of the Kaiyang Realm and even the Fifth Layer of the Yuheng Realm, yet after committing its crime, it had not fled. Instead, it stayed hidden within the fissure.
It seemed as though it had always lived cut off from the world.
Where did it come from?
Shuang Wenlü had already traced it back to its source.
It was not a Yao creature or demon that had cultivated normally at all, but a gu that had escaped.
…
Suizhou.
Most people still believed that the Blood-Rust Blade remained in the Demon Prefecture, but aside from the Blood-Rust Blade, another rare treasure in Suizhou had also drawn many cultivators into conflict.
This rare treasure was precisely something exposed because of the matter of the Blood-Rust Blade:
the treasure-seeking compass.
The cultivator who had first dug up the Blood-Rust Blade had failed to keep it, and, most unfortunately, he had exposed the secret that he possessed a treasure-seeking compass.
Competing for the Blood-Rust Blade was too difficult.
Competing for this treasure-seeking compass, which not many people knew about, was much easier.
By now, the treasure-seeking compass had already passed through more than one owner, yet its final resting place still had not been decided.
At this moment, several cultivators in a small forest were confronting one another. Their backgrounds were a chaotic mix: some came from righteous sects, some were independent cultivators, and the most eye-catching among them was a cultivator in a dark purple robe. His hair was brownish yellow, and his nails extended more than an inch past his fingertips. They were pitch black and glimmered with a metallic sheen. Of the cultivators facing one another here, more than half of them were mainly on guard against him, yet he seemed not to care in the slightest.
The first to break the silence was an independent cultivator. He looked at the man in the dark purple robe and said, “Could this be Elder Jingu of the Gu God Sect?”
The Gu God Sect was a rather famous demonic sect. Its signature skill was refining and controlling gu. Relying on their strange, sinister, and impossible-to-guard-against gu arts, they ranked among the top demonic sects that cultivators in Qiankun least wished to provoke.
Elder Jingu was one of the six great elders of the Gu God Sect, and his bizarre gu arts had reached an extraordinary level.
“Good eyesight.” Elder Jingu admitted his identity and let out a hoarse, sinister chuckle. “Since you know it’s me, why don’t you leave the item behind and get lost?”
His attitude was far too arrogant. Someone said angrily, “Your Excellency is being overly confident. Do you truly think none of the many people here are worth noticing?”
Elder Jingu stared at him. His pupils made a strange turn within his eyes as he gave a grotesque laugh. “How could that be? You’re already in my sights.”
The moment those words fell, the angry cultivator let out a scream.
He collapsed to the ground. Blood streamed from his eyes, while beneath his skin, several bulges rose and skittered back and forth as though living things were crawling inside him. Soon the bulges split open, revealing one constantly rolling eyeball after another. The cultivator wailed in agony. All the methods he tried did nothing to ease his pain. He could neither live nor die, and the sight left everyone who saw it horrified.
Elder Jingu cackled. “Who else wants me to set my sights on them?”
As his words fell, countless rustling noises rose from the surrounding darkness. In this dim forest at night, the sound was indescribably eerie and terrifying. The cultivators all felt those strange noises drawing closer, and their expressions changed.
They were all Elder Jingu’s gu!
“If you don’t want to get lost,” Elder Jingu said, “then stay and play with them.”
The other cultivators were already beginning to retreat in their hearts. If all of them truly fought with everything they had, Elder Jingu would indeed gain no advantage. But the problem was that Elder Jingu’s gu were too bizarre. No one wanted to pay such an enormous price, and even less did they want to risk their lives only to let the final benefit fall into someone else’s hands.
Though they were unwilling, it seemed the treasure-seeking compass could only fall into Elder Jingu’s hands.
Just then, a streak of sword light suddenly flew in from beyond the heavens. Beneath the moonlight, it was as graceful as an immortal. It circled once around Elder Jingu’s neck and severed his head.
The smug expression still lingered on Elder Jingu’s face. He had not even reacted before he was already dead.
The entire forest fell silent. The gu hidden within it also went still all at once, as though they too had died together with him. Even the cultivator writhing on the ground stopped screaming. He circulated his spiritual power and forced several dead gu insects out of his body.
Everyone had been stunned by this abrupt change, yet they could also guess what had happened.
Elder Jingu had likely offended some unknown Sword Immortal, who had traced him back across ten thousand miles and killed him cleanly with a single sword strike.
That sword light dissipated on its own after killing Elder Jingu, yet within the dark and sinister forest, it was as though a trace of pure, drifting moonlight had shone in because of it.
The cultivators in the forest all fell silent for a moment.
The airy freedom and elegance of that sword light had once been the very thing they longed for when they first stepped onto the path of immortality.
But that silence lasted only a moment.
Once their gazes fell again upon the treasure-seeking compass, their figures flickered, and another struggle began.
…
Outer demons could be seen.
Heart demons were hard to find.
Cultivation was, in the end, the cultivation of the heart.
To seek the Great Dao by borrowing external things was like pouring oil on a fire, vainly hoping to extinguish it and gain cool relief.
To use external things to resolve the troubles of the heart was like cutting leaves to remove weeds. Though the leaves might be severed, the roots still ran deep. How could one ever attain purity that way?
This was the Dao of Qiankun.
Shuang Wenlü had already left the estate.
The Gu God Sect’s methods of refining gu were exceptionally cruel. The gu they produced were each fierce and bloodthirsty, yet they still could not surpass the methods of those who controlled them. Given the chance, these gu would either turn on their master or flee. The gu Yao creature hidden in the earth fissure back then had been one that escaped from Elder Jingu’s hands.
Shuang Wenlü submitted the demon-extermination task to Merit Hall and, in passing, added another bit of work to Luan Huan’s burden. Then he looked toward Lang Qingyun from afar.
The “unsurpassed Dao Canon” within the Blood-Rust Blade had been stirred.
And the “Dao Seed” on Lang Qingyun’s body was almost ready to take the bait as well.
…
Lang Qingyun had a dream.
Ordinarily, once one’s cultivation reached the Third Layer of the Yaoguang Realm, meditation could replace sleep. Yet while holding the Blood-Rust Blade, Lang Qingyun had drifted off without even realizing it.
Broken sunlight flickered beneath the forest canopy.
It was morning in the mountains, and he stood in an open space beside a thatched hut.
He saw a young man practicing swordsmanship.
His sword was very fast, and very precise—so precise that he could slice the frost from a leaf without damaging the leaf itself. And after one stroke of his sword, the frost he had cut away remained perfectly balanced on the flat of the blade. It was so fast, yet so light and graceful.
In the morning light, the frost melted into droplets and fell from the tip of the sword.
His sword pursued only one thing: speed.
This was not a swordsman of peerless natural talent. His sword had become so fast because of his love for the sword and his endless practice.
But now, his swordsmanship had changed.
His swordsmanship had changed—perhaps because the sword in his hand had changed.
Holding that strange sword with one straight edge and one curved edge, his style shifted from light and graceful to one brimming with killing intent.
Lang Qingyun could not help being drawn in. He stood to one side and watched. Fallen leaves danced with the sword aura. He did not know how much time passed before the young man’s final movement suddenly came straight toward him in a fiercely sharp thrust!
Startled, Lang Qingyun held his breath and leaned back.
He suddenly opened his eyes, only then realizing that he had fallen asleep, and that what happened just now had only been a dream.
In that final sword strike of the dream, he had seen the young man’s face clearly.
It was the same young man he had seen before in Cai Suhong’s Mystic Realm.
“What’s wrong?” Cai Suhong noticed that his breathing was off and asked.
Lang Qingyun came back to himself. “I fell asleep.”
He lowered his head. The Blood-Rust Blade was still in his hands, resting across his knees.
“I had a dream,” Lang Qingyun said, and he told Cai Suhong about the dream he had just had. He was not sure whether the dream had been caused by the Blood-Rust Blade.
Hearing this, Cai Suhong said, “Let me try.”
She took the Blood-Rust Blade, closed her eyes with one hand gripping the hilt, and deliberately guided herself into sleep.
A few minutes later—
“Snrrr—rrr—snrrr—rrr—”
The next morning, Cai Suhong opened her eyes.
Lang Qingyun asked, “How was it?”
Cai Suhong said, “I slept very well.”
She had not dreamed of anything at all.
“Could it be that you were thinking about it in the daytime, so you dreamed about it at night?” Cai Suhong asked.
Mortals dreamed mostly because their thoughts rose and fell and were hard to control. In theory, once cultivators broke through to the Second Layer of the Dongming Realm, their minds became clear and their thoughts transparent, so dreams would gradually lessen. If a dream occasionally arose, it was usually because some vague sense of forewarning had appeared.
But Lang Qingyun’s cultivation was different from that of ordinary people. He did not even know how to properly control his sea of consciousness. So if he had dreamed because of what was already in his heart, that was not impossible either.
Lang Qingyun shook his head.
He picked up his own sword and performed a few sword moves.
What he used was mortal swordsmanship. Though it was very refined, it held no real use for cultivators.
But Cai Suhong’s eyes went wide.
“Isn’t this the swordsmanship of the Frostflight Sword?” she asked in surprise.
Lang Qingyun nodded. “I learned it from the dream.”
Though he still did not know what use the dream had, Lang Qingyun was already beginning to long more and more to uncover the Blood-Rust Blade’s secret, because during these days he had discovered that the Blood-Rust Blade could suppress the Dao Seed inside him.
But aside from that, their research into the Blood-Rust Blade had not made any progress. They had also considered that removing the blood-rust might mean removing the seal, yet the two of them had never found a method.
“How did those Demonic Cultivators remove the blood-rust?” Lang Qingyun murmured.
“Let’s keep following the trail,” Cai Suhong said with a stretch.
To unravel the Blood-Rust Blade, they inevitably also began pursuing the path of the blade’s past. But compared with others, they had one advantage: what they had seen earlier in the Mystic Realm.
Yet the Mystic Realm System refused to give them any more hints, so the two of them could only search around Suizhou following the pitifully few clues they had.
As they walked on, the two of them suddenly heard cries for help not far away.
Following the sound, they found a pit more than half a zhang deep, with a dark-skinned, skinny young man trapped inside. Straw and branches were scattered around the inside and outside of the pit. It looked like a trap dug by hunters.
The young man was overjoyed when he saw them and repeatedly called for help, begging them to pull him out.
The two rescued him. After thanking them, the young man began cursing loudly. “I don’t know which blind thief or idiot dug this pit! I looked away for a moment and fell right in. It was dug so deep that my waist and legs ache horribly, and I couldn’t climb out either. If you two hadn’t saved me, who knows how long I would have been stuck there!”
After cursing and thanking them, he begged again, “My legs are weak, and I don’t dare walk the mountain path alone. Could you please escort me home? My village is just nearby.”
This young man really was an ordinary mortal. The calluses on his hands were thick, and there were signs of poor blood and long-term physical strain on his body.
Lang Qingyun and Cai Suhong agreed to escort him back.
Following his directions, they eventually arrived at a village.
The village was hidden in a mountain hollow. Judging by the houses, it seemed very poor. Most of the homes were made from mud mixed with grass and vines. The better ones were stacked from stone. Not a single house had been built of brick and tile.
Yet from what could be seen in the courtyards, these villagers also seemed to be doing fairly well. Every household kept chickens and ducks, and some even raised pigs and cattle.
The villagers were very warm and grateful that the two had brought the young man back.
Cai Suhong enjoyed being thanked after saving people. She was chatting happily with the villagers when she suddenly heard Lang Qingyun’s voice transmitted to her:
“There’s something wrong with this village.”
Cai Suhong did not let anything show on her face and asked him through voice transmission.
Lang Qingyun explained:
Because of Suizhou’s special circumstances, every inhabited place had a formation laid down by cultivators of Wujiguan to repel evil beings. But this village had none.
This was a “hidden village.” It did not appear in the government records and did not communicate with the outside world. It hid here in this unknown wilderness.
Cai Suhong immediately understood.
She had the body of a Yao beast and did not spend years living in Suizhou, so she did not know such things. But Lang Qingyun was a local of Suizhou, so he recognized it at a glance.
At this moment, the warm villagers were inviting them to stay. On one hand, they wanted to thank them for saving someone. On the other, the sky was growing dark and the mountain road was difficult, so they urged them to spend one night in the village and descend the mountain the next morning.
Cai Suhong glanced at Lang Qingyun. Though his expression was calm as ever, his eyes held a complicated emotion. She sent him a message: “Stay and see?”
Lang Qingyun nodded.
Once the two agreed, the villagers arranged an empty house for them. The young man’s family also brought over a slaughtered and thoroughly stewed chicken, along with rice and dishes for them to eat. Others came as well to keep them company, chatting warmly all the while, and did not leave until the sky had dimmed and the sun was about to set.
“What do you think they’re trying to do?” Cai Suhong asked.
Lang Qingyun shook his head.
Everything in the village looked normal—except for the lack of a protective formation. But without a formation protecting it, how had this village managed to survive out here in the wilderness?
Then the two of them turned toward the door at the same time.
The door was pushed open, and a child holding an embroidered ball walked in.
It was as though she did not see them at all. She went straight to the table and stuffed herself with the food they had barely touched. The amount of food did not decrease after she ate it, but all of it rapidly turned cold. After finishing, she climbed onto the bed by herself and began playing with the embroidered ball.
Lang Qingyun and Cai Suhong sat silently in their seats. Neither moved. Neither spoke.
Suddenly, the child raised her head.
Blood seeped out from all over her body. The embroidered ball in her hands had become a dripping, bloody heart. She grinned at them.
“Big Brother, Big Sister, stay and play with me!”
She tossed the heart-like embroidered ball onto the bed, then vanished.
It was a ghost child.
Only Lang Qingyun and Cai Suhong remained in the room.
Both of their expressions had darkened.
Lang Qingyun stared at the food and wine on the table. After a long while, he sighed.
“Suizhou…”
Suizhou had many hidden Yao creatures and ghosts. That was why formations were needed for protection, and why the poll tax was so heavy. To evade the poll tax, many tragedies occurred in Suizhou: drowning infants, forcing elderly parents who could no longer work to go die, or leaving towns and villages protected by formations to survive in unknown places despite the great risks posed by Yao creatures and ghosts.
For a village to survive, it had to have protection.
They had no formation protecting them, so they could only seek another kind of protection.
The empty room the villagers had arranged for them was clean and tidy, yet no one lived there.
At the same time, it did not bear the stale odor of a place long abandoned. It was as though
every so often, someone would move in and stay there.
“Shall we go take a look around?” Cai Suhong asked.
Lang Qingyun nodded silently.
Cultivators naturally had heavenly sight.
The two came to a well in the village and stopped there at the same time.
Lang Qingyun felt a gaze fixed upon them. He looked toward an old house tucked away in the
corner. Through the crack in its window, a pair of venomous eyes was staring at them.
They were the eyes of an old woman.
Not long after, a villager walked over and deliberately blocked Lang Qingyun’s line of sight, then
began warmly chatting with them.
Lang Qingyun did not want to continue the conversation. He asked, “Aren’t you going home for
dinner?”
The villager smiled. “My wife is cooking right now. I’ll head back in a little while.”
“You should go now instead. Don’t make your family wait.”
The villager froze, still wanting to say something more to keep them there. But when he saw
Lang Qingyun’s face, he unconsciously changed his words instead.
“Alright, alright. It’s getting dark. You should head back too.”
He turned and left, thinking about Lang Qingyun’s face, which had seemed almost too calm. For some reason, it felt a little frightening, and he muttered uneasily to himself. But after glancing toward the village entrance and the deepening dusk, he relaxed and went home.
Smoke curled up from each household’s cooking fires. A few people sat beneath the large tree at the village entrance, waving fans and chatting. It all looked peaceful and serene.
Lang Qingyun and Cai Suhong stood beside the well, surrounded by one invisible ghost after another.
“If you don’t leave soon, it’ll be too late,” some of the ghosts sighed.
“They can’t leave. Someone’s watching them,” some said coldly.
“Why waste your breath? They can’t hear you anyway,” some sneered.
“Why leave? Wouldn’t it be nice if they stayed and kept us company?” some said resentfully.
That ghost child they had seen earlier was also among them. Hugging her embroidered ball, she looked at the two of them as though they were fools, full of exasperation at how hopeless they were.
Countless ghosts crowded around the well. Taking advantage of the shift between yin and yang at dusk, they emerged from the well where they had been hiding. Heavy resentment and baleful malice shrouded the entire village.
Cultivators had heavenly eyes.
With eyes closed, dusk was misty, chickens and dogs could be heard, cooking smoke curled
upward, and the villagers lived in peace and ease.
With eyes open, yin energy hung thick, ghostly howls never ceased, resentment filled the air,
and the dead writhed in bitter hatred and baleful grievance.
“Let’s go back,” Lang Qingyun said.
He did not know any spell arts for delivering resentful spirits, and Cai Suhong had not studied
such things either. Neither of them wanted to keep looking.
Seeing the two return to the house, several villagers sitting beneath the tree at the village
entrance exchanged glances. When the sky had nearly gone fully dark, they hurried back home.
They were not sitting there to enjoy the evening coolness. They had been watching Lang Qingyun and Cai Suhong, making sure the two did not leave the village. Just like the villager who had brought food and stayed to keep them company earlier, their purpose had all along been to keep them there.
The sun sank lower and lower. The sky shifted from dim yellow to gray-blue, then to dark purple, until night fully arrived, leaving only a few scattered stars. There were no lamps or candles in the village. As the sky darkened, the village too sank into darkness, and one household after another fell asleep.
Lang Qingyun and Cai Suhong did not sleep.
They sat quietly in the darkness, waiting for what would happen next.
At midnight, an extremely faint sound came from the forested hills, rapidly approaching the village.
The moment it entered the village, it headed straight for the room where Lang Qingyun
and Cai Suhong were staying.
It lightly and skillfully pushed open the window and jumped inside…
only to meet two pairs of clear, wakeful black eyes.
“So it’s a mountain spirit,” Cai Suhong said.
The thing that flipped into the room had a human-like shape, with a human face, a body covered in long black hair, arms that hung past its knees, and feet that were reversed, with the heels in front and the toes behind.
This mountain spirit had already become an essence. It reeked of blood, and who knew how many people it had eaten. Such mountain-born spirits and wild demons were naturally able to conceal their aura in the wilderness. When it saw that the two were awake, it was not afraid at all. With a shrill howl, it charged at them savagely.
Cai Suhong flipped the table and smashed it toward the creature. The mountain spirit tore it in
half with a single rip, not slowing in the least.
Lang Qingyun did not move.
The Dao Seed inside him was a hidden danger. If he could avoid using spiritual power, he would. This mountain spirit’s cultivation was not high. Cai Suhong could handle it herself.
At the instant the table blocked the mountain spirit’s line of sight, Cai Suhong had already reached its flank. A large bronze ladle appeared in her hand, and with a loud CLANG she smashed it onto the top of the mountain spirit’s head.
Both of the mountain spirit’s legs were driven straight into the ground. It swayed dizzily, shook its head twice, and passed out, yet its head showed hardly any injury at all.
Cai Suhong said in surprise, “Hah! Your skull’s tough enough!”
She put away the ladle and switched to her pot. She aimed the bottom of the pot at the mountain spirit’s head and was just about to bring it down when a second, slightly smaller mountain spirit suddenly slammed through the door with a shriek and lunged at Cai Suhong. At the same time, the large mountain spirit, which had seemed unconscious, abruptly opened its eyes, hunched low, and silently thrust its long arm upward from below toward Cai Suhong.
At the same moment, vines sprang up from under the floor and wrapped around Cai Suhong’s legs and feet.
These two mountain spirits were savage in temperament, cunning in mind, and extraordinarily well-coordinated. Even after realizing the people in the room were not easy prey, they did not retreat. They were bent only on killing. One had remained hidden outside the room observing. The moment it sensed something was wrong, it created a disturbance to draw attention. The other had pretended to faint and then seized the chance to launch a sneak attack. The timing of both had been flawless.
Lang Qingyun’s gaze sharpened.
His sword flashed out like lightning and pierced the smaller mountain spirit through the chest. The creature’s vitality was astonishing. Even with a sword through its chest, it still looked vicious, flailing its arms wildly and screeching several times before finally dying.
Cai Suhong also dealt with the larger mountain spirit.
She could have handled both of them herself, but when the two of them had been hunted by evil cultivators before, they had long since developed the habit of watching each other’s backs. When the smaller mountain spirit launched its sneak attack, Lang Qingyun had moved almost instinctively.
When Cai Suhong turned to look at him, she saw that something was wrong with his expression.
Then she looked at his hand.
What he held was not his usual short sword.
It was the Blood-Rust Blade.
“What’s wrong?” Cai Suhong asked.
Lang Qingyun looked at the Blood-Rust Blade with a complicated expression. To be safe, after obtaining the Blood-Rust Blade, they had never taken it out except when studying it in places they were certain were secure. Just now, Lang Qingyun had acted on instinct, and he too had thought he was using his own short sword. Only after killing the smaller mountain spirit had he realized that what he held was actually the Blood-Rust Blade.
But what troubled him even more was this:
“I know how to remove the blood-rust now,” Lang Qingyun said.
Cai Suhong’s spirits lifted at once. “How?”
Lang Qingyun forced out a single word through his teeth:
“Kill.”
Cai Suhong froze for a moment before understanding the meaning hidden beneath that word. Her face changed as well, and she blurted out, “That’s impossible!”
They had already sensed, from the moment they obtained the Blood-Rust Blade, that it contained the path of slaughter within it. But despite holding it for so long, neither of them had ever thought of using killing with this blade to remove the seal, because it was fundamentally such an unreasonable thing.
Setting aside everything else, one had only to look at Jianrong, the Lord of Weapons of Wan Yao Cave. Her cultivation reached the heavens. She held the path of slaughter and understood all the world’s weapons, armies, and wars—yet when had she ever been bloodthirsty or warlike?
If cultivating the path of slaughter meant one had to slaughter without cease, then was it the person cultivating the Dao, or the Dao controlling the person? If one cultivated and cultivated only to become a puppet with no self left, then what sort of cultivation was that?
Lang Qingyun reversed the blade and silently handed the Blood-Rust Blade to Cai Suhong.
Cai Suhong took it and examined it closely.
After killing a single mountain spirit, the exposed edge at the tip of the blade had indeed emerged a little farther from the blood-rust.
“That’s impossible,” she murmured again.
Lang Qingyun looked outside. “Put it away first. Someone’s coming.”
The commotion just now had already awakened the villagers.