Hunyuan Sect. The mountain gate.
Gu Chengming's flying sword was still a hundred zhang out when Hua Daiyi's figure was already planted at the head of the mountain path like a green pine.
For once in his life the old man had put on a brand-new dark navy Daoist robe. Not only were there no holes burned through the cuffs by spirit flame, even the hem, habitually rumpled, had been pressed flat and proper. The beard that normally sprouted like weeds had been trimmed into shape, and a smooth, lustrous spirit-jade pin sat tucked at his temple.
The disciples on gate duty kept glancing sideways, half convinced the sect was about to receive some towering power from on high.
"Elder Hua, today you—"
"Enough chatter. Mind your post."
Hands clasped behind his back, Hua Daiyi kept his blazing gaze fixed on the sea of clouds to the northeast. He pressed the corners of his mouth down, then pressed them down again, and still could not quite flatten that trace of smugness.
Air tore open. Sword light split the clouds.
Gu Chengming drew in his sword intent and set down on the flagstone training grounds with an even step.
He was about to announce himself according to the diplomatic etiquette Ren Wencai had drilled into him when a gust of wind swept past his face.
"There he is, there he is!"
Hua Daiyi covered three strides in two, threw out one great arm, and hauled Gu Chengming in by the shoulder with an emphatic thump.
"Good lad. I've been waiting for you at last!"
Hua Daiyi stepped back half a pace, eyes bright as torches, looked him over top to bottom several times, and nodded again and again, only barely restraining himself from stroking his beard and laughing out loud on the spot.
The duty disciples stared, jaws slack.
Even when the sect's Grand Elder came in person, no one had ever seen this normally slack, do-as-he-pleased Elder Hua wear an expression that warm.
Gu Chengming was rather caught off guard by the sheer force of the welcome. He had prepared every contingency for inter-sect diplomacy on the way here. A bear hug as an opening move was the one thing he had not planned for.
Still, that undisguised affection put him a little more at ease.
"Senior Hua, this junior has come—"
"Senior, what senior!" Hua Daiyi waved one big hand, expansive. "Given your master-disciple bond with Wencai... never mind. Just call me Martial Uncle!"
Gu Chengming went along with it gracefully, cupping his hands. "Martial Uncle Hua is too kind. Before I set out, Master Ren asked me to convey his regards."
"That old rascal Wencai? Fine, I'll take the sentiment."
Hua Daiyi's mouth ran through pleasantries, but his hands wasted no time. He caught Gu Chengming's shoulder again and marched him straight into the depths of the sect.
And this route happened to take in every spot where the elders of the Hunyuan Sect most liked to cluster.
"See him? Gu Chengming, come from the Wenjian Sect! First place in the Grand Tournament, the one who turned the tide inside the Tianque Secret Realm!"
Hua Daiyi laced that shout with true origin power, and the sound rolled out so that every word carried clearly for dozens of zhang around.
"Proper disciple of my old friend Ren Wencai, yes, and he's also cultivated my Immortal-Concealing Wine-Sword Formula! Which makes him, when all's said and done, half an heir of this old man's!"
Cultivators along the way turned to look, reactions varying.
The younger disciples showed open awe.
His record from the Grand Tournament had long since spread everywhere. A Third Realm cultivator who beat down an Eternal Life Sect expert and stood up to a Fifth Realm great cultivator. Put that kind of ferocious record in any sect and it would give people pause.
Rumors always distort. In some versions, Gu Chengming had become a peerless war god who crushed Tianque with his fists and trampled the Eternal Life Sect underfoot.
Now the man himself appeared, bearing steady, spiritual power drawn quietly inward, which only made him seem the more unfathomable.
In the ears of the elders, however, those words went down less smoothly.
Several older cultivators, seeing how perfectly courteous Gu Chengming was, nodded back with smiles.
But that "half an heir" line made a few of Hua Daiyi's old friends knit their brows.
Hua Daiyi loved wine like life itself. He had taught his own disciples so haphazardly they'd scattered to the winds. Since when had he attached himself to a prodigy riding this high?
And Gu Chengming walked along at his side, composed, offering no objection to being called a half-taught disciple.
By the time they reached the flagstone pavilion outside the council hall, several elders in the middle of a game of weiqi could hold back no longer.
"Old Hua."
A square-faced elder in grey robes with a snow-white beard tossed his black stone back into the bowl, his tone flat. "This half-master title of yours. Did you gild yourself with it by force?"
Hua Daiyi's stride paused. The grey-robed elder rose slowly, hands behind his back, gaze making a circuit of Gu Chengming before landing back on Hua Daiyi.
"Young friend Gu's name has risen fast, and we've all heard of his various means. Fists that shattered an Eternal Life Sect hidden agent, sword arts that outclassed a whole field of rivals. Every last one of those reputations was won in life-and-death struggle."
He paused briefly, then spread his hands. "The only thing nobody has ever mentioned is any Immortal-Concealing Wine-Sword Formula."
Beside him, several other elders set down their teacups and looked over, thoroughly entertained.
A lean, spare-framed elder added, unhurried, "Why not pick a day and have young friend Gu demonstrate it publicly? And if he can't produce it..."
He drew out the syllables, eyes full of mischief. "Old Hua, that big talk of yours won't hold water."
Silence settled over the scene.
Hua Daiyi's old face flushed red.
He was not by nature a vain man. When he had passed on the sword formula, the intention had been entirely sincere, and he took that "half-master" standing quite seriously.
The trouble was, he genuinely had no idea how far Gu Chengming had progressed.
Ren Wencai's letter had said only that "my dog of a disciple has caught his first glimpse of the gate." Reasoning from ordinary aptitude, and given how little time had passed since the boy started, how much heat could there be in the furnace yet?
Provoked to his face like this, Hua Daiyi pointed at the men in the pavilion, lips working for a good while without assembling a single forceful rebuttal, until at last he squeezed out, "What can sparrows know of the ambitions of the great swan!"
It was a thoroughly feeble answer. The old friends in the pavilion traded knowing looks, their expressions growing all the more certain.
While tongues clashed like spears outside, Gu Chengming had half his attention turned inward, into his Sea of Consciousness.
This was, by his reckoning, the first time he had laid eyes on the founding ancestor of any technique he cultivated.
The Hundred Bones Resonance came from a Great Qian cultivator. The Huiyuan Sword Formula had been born out of ancient scrolls. Zhouli's Heaven-Human Heart-Rectifying Method and Flowing Cloud Moon-Following were legacies left in the long river of years, their creators long since turned to dust.
Only the Immortal-Concealing Wine-Sword Formula had its originator standing alive right there beside him, currently bristling and bug-eyed with annoyance over a few teasing remarks.
Finding this rather novel, Gu Chengming turned his attention to the dialogue box in his Sea of Consciousness.
[The Immortal-Concealing Wine-Sword Formula was surveying the landscape and atmosphere of the Hunyuan Sect with fresh curiosity, its gaze passing in turn over the flying eaves and bracket sets, the arrays of spirit patterns, and the disciples coming and going.]
[It caught sight of Hua Daiyi, tilted its head to study him a moment, and offered a verdict: Mm. Looks like an old fellow with a bit of character to him.]
Nothing followed, which came as something of a surprise.
Gu Chengming turned it over privately. Once a technique developed spiritual awareness, its temperament became entirely its own. Apparently no tie bound it to its creator.
For the rest of the day, Hua Daiyi led Gu Chengming over every inch of the Hunyuan Sect, front mountain and back.
Nominally he was playing host. In practice, wherever they went he could not resist announcing at high volume that this was his half-disciple.
Gu Chengming handled it all with easy grace, neither servile nor arrogant, and quietly committed some seventy or eighty percent of the Hunyuan Sect's spirit vein currents and formation layouts to memory.
By the time dusk closed in and the mountain wind turned cool, Hua Daiyi's voice had gone half hoarse, and only then did he reluctantly let the subject drop.
Come nightfall, Hua Daiyi used the pretext of arranging guest quarters to bring Gu Chengming to a side courtyard to stay.
The courtyard was cut from exactly the same cloth as the man himself, which is to say, entirely as the mood took him.
Empty wine jars and half-finished sword cases lay stacked at random across the yard, and from an old notched blade propped in one corner hung two withered strings of red-brown spirit peppers.
"Sit. Sit anywhere."
Hua Daiyi fished a flask of spirit wine out of the depths of a battered wooden cabinet, filled Gu Chengming's cup, and then his own.
He lifted the white porcelain cup, sent his gaze past the window lattice to the cold moon in the night sky, and made his tone deliberately offhand.
"By the way, Little Gu."
He drank a mouthful and cleared his throat. "That Immortal-Concealing Wine-Sword Formula. Has the cultivation been going smoothly?"
Gu Chengming saw straight through to the worry behind it and answered frankly, "Martial Uncle Hua, this junior has already entered the gate."
"Entered the gate!" Hua Daiyi's eyes flew wide, and the heart that had been hanging in his throat dropped back into his belly.
But the delight lasted only a few breaths before hesitation crossed his face, the hand holding his cup hanging in midair.
The gap between entering the gate and true mastery was a heavenly chasm, and no one knew that better than he did. This sword formula turned on the seamless fusion of wine qi and sword intent. To bring out an aspect that could awe an opponent, one had to grasp the state of drunkenness in real depth. Back in his own day it had cost him ten years of bitter effort just to barely feel out the way of it.
Gu Chengming had held the method for two or three years at the outside.
To enter the gate of a Fourth Realm sword formula in that short a span already put his comprehension far beyond ordinary men, and that alone was enough to warm an old man's heart.
But if tomorrow, at the exchange assembly, somebody dragged the boy out for a sparring match, a sword form only just entered would likely fail to convince the crowd.
He started to speak, then stopped. In the end he could not bear to lay extra pressure on the youngster, and swallowed his worries back down.
"Entered the gate is good. Entered the gate is good."
Hua Daiyi repeated it several times and clapped Gu Chengming's shoulder in reassurance. The words sounded like comfort offered to a junior, but they served more to settle his own nerves.
"In cultivation nothing is worse than haste. Polish it slowly. Take your time."
Gu Chengming sat upright in the wooden chair, watching the concern and anxiety the old man could not hide at the back of his eyes, and warmth spread through him.
This care was without a shred of pretense, and he accepted it fully.
...
The next day.
On the Hunyuan Sect's Martial Practice Peak, the inter-sect exchange assembly convened as scheduled.
The Hunyuan Sect was a famous body-cultivation school of the immortal cultivation world, fierce in temper, devoted to proving the Dao through strength.
Their way of receiving guests was blunt. Any visitor who came through the gate had to trade a couple of rounds on the training grounds first. To these body cultivators, the most honest exchange between cultivators was fists and feet. Fight one out to the last satisfying drop, then sit down with wine and talk, and it beat a thousand words of empty courtesy.
This suited the Hundred Emperor's taste rather well, and on the way over it had told Gu Chengming any number of times, "Heavenly Emperor Gu, our sect should be like this in the future too."
Gu Chengming felt somewhat helpless, thinking that sparring was fine, so long as the Hundred Emperor didn't slip and kill anyone.
On the training grounds, several young Hunyuan Sect disciples leapt up onto the platform first, meaning to weigh what this outside-sect sword cultivator was worth.
Body-cultivating disciples ran hot with blood and qi, their fists whistling with a savage force far past cultivators of the same stage. An ordinary Third Realm cultivator who dared to block one head-on would likely have his sinews and bones broken then and there.
But the man they faced was Gu Chengming, and with the Hundred Bones Resonance tempering him day and night, his physical strength had long since left Third Realm norms behind.
The first disciple closed in with a heavy straight punch at his face. Gu Chengming did not move his feet. He merely turned his body out of the main line of attack, raised his right arm lightly, and blocked with the forearm.
Thud.
The muffled impact rolled outward. The disciple's expression changed at once. What came back up his arm had none of the yielding softness of striking flesh and blood. It felt more like hammering into a mass of basalt cast through with iron.
Gu Chengming stood as steady as bedrock, and not a single white crack appeared in the flagstones under his feet. He rolled his wrist with the motion and pushed out a palm, force measured exactly right, shoving his opponent gently back five paces without harming his foundation.
A second disciple, then a third, took the platform in turn, and lost in precisely the same manner.
Gu Chengming showed nothing of his depths from start to finish. Without using the least trace of spiritual power or cultivation technique, relying purely on the most basic mundane body arts to dismantle them, he dissolved those heavy, driving assaults into nothing as casually as sketching a line.
Watching from the edge of the field, the Hunyuan Sect elders fell as one into silence.
As the men who spoke for a body-cultivation sect, their feel for blood, qi, and the physical frame far surpassed anyone else's.
In those brief exchanges just now, the toughness of Gu Chengming's bones, the load his meridians could bear, even the vast rushing sound of blood and qi circulating through him, all of it declared reserves far beyond the Third Realm.
Physical attainment at that level was long past what ordinary techniques could pile up.
And this was supposed to be a sword cultivator?
There had always been debates about whether a sword cultivator's offense was greater or a body cultivator's flesh harder.
Back in the day, old ghost Hua's notion had been this: if I were a sword cultivator whose body refinement was fiercer than an ordinary body cultivator's, wouldn't that make me invincible under heaven?
Everyone had only laughed at him for it.
And now, wasn't Gu Chengming exactly the form old ghost Hua had dreamed of?
The aged hand holding the grey-robed elder's teacup trembled faintly. All those sour remarks he had prepared yesterday had been punched right back down his throat by those few blows.
On the other side, Hua Daiyi stood with his arms folded, apparently unruffled, while in truth he had entirely lost control of the corners of his mouth.
Li Xianghé stifling a laugh.jpg
Silence spread around the platform, and the mood turned briefly delicate.
The winning side had not gloated. The losing side could not even bring themselves to mouth the usual polite formulas.
If this awkwardness dragged on any longer, nobody present would come out with their face intact.
After a spell of quiet, it was the tall, thin elder who could bear it least.
He coughed twice, propping up an elder's dignity, and found a fault to pick. "Young friend Gu's physique is formidable, no question, and his fists and feet are truly impressive. But if this old man remembers correctly, the Wenjian Sect is a renowned house of sword cultivators. Through all of today's sparring, our young friend has traded blows again and again without once drawing his sword, let alone showing that Immortal-Concealing Wine-Sword Formula you're so proud of, old ghost Hua."
At that the thin elder shot Hua Daiyi a sidelong glance, his tone taking on an inevitable sourness. "Could it be that the wine-sword formula is too obscure, and our young friend, having entered the gate so recently, hasn't yet penetrated it? If that's the case, it's certainly forgivable."
The other elders nodded along at this, as if they had at last recovered a little ground.
Hua Daiyi snorted coldly the moment he heard it, flicked his sleeve, stroked his beard, and put on an air of profound mystery. "To handle a few juniors in ordinary practice bouts, why draw a sword at all? This disciple of mine has deep reserves and many methods. Body arts alone are plenty to carry the occasion."
He paused, let his gaze sweep the Hunyuan Sect elders, and deliberately dragged out his last words. "Besides, the Immortal-Concealing Wine-Sword Formula is heavy with slaughter, and once the sword is out there's no taking it back. This old man simply worried that once he drew it, his sword intent couldn't be reined in, and the goodwill between our two sects would be spoiled for nothing."
The declaration landed with a ring, and left several Hunyuan Sect elders bristling and bug-eyed with nothing to say.
Only Hua Daiyi himself knew that inside those wide sleeves both his hands were clenched tight, cold sweat already seeping into his palms.
Serene on the surface, and inwardly in complete turmoil.
Chengming still hasn't shown the Immortal-Concealing Wine-Sword Formula. Is he truly too raw with it to put it on display?
Just as the elders of both sides were straining against one another under the surface, the flow of spiritual qi through heaven and earth quietly went wrong.
At some point the mountain wind around them had stalled. The air carried a needless dry heat that set blood and qi churning. On the east side of the training grounds, several spirit birds that had been preening on the treetops shrieked as though they had met a natural predator, thrashing their wings and fleeing in a panic.
Heavy banked clouds blotted out the sun without a sound. From deep in the earth veins came waves of a low droning hum, and the flagstones at the platform's edge began to shudder with it, while a few wisps of turbid black qi seeped quietly up through the seams in the stone.
The change came in an instant.
The formation zone on the east side of the training grounds let out a muffled roar. The flagstone ground split into several spiderweb cracks, and a vast, brutal surge of spiritual power came howling up out of the earth.
"The seal is coming loose!"
A duty disciple cried out in alarm.
The Hunyuan Sect stood guard over the Emerald Screen Range, and beneath its ground several vicious remnants left from antiquity had always been held down.
Recent upheavals in the spirit veins had sharply weakened the grand formation, and this savage force had at last torn open a fissure, swallowing half the training grounds in the space of a moment.
The first several disciples in its path took the black qi straight into their meridians. Their eyes went scarlet on the instant, their spiritual power ran completely wild, and they lunged and howled and struck at anyone within reach, friend or foe alike. Chaos broke out at once.
The elders moved to suppress them, but the disciples corrupted by the malevolent qi had limitless strength, and simply pinning them down drained most of everyone's attention.
At the same time, the fissure was still widening, the malevolent qi welling outward endlessly like a fountain.
Gu Chengming did not hesitate.
The instant a berserk disciple charged the crowd, he flickered forward. The Hundred Bones Resonance turned inside him, blood and qi surging, and he put several young disciples too slow to retreat firmly behind his back.
But the density of the malevolent qi kept climbing. The Hundred Bones Resonance excelled at attack and defense, and holding down a few maddened disciples was nothing. Yet to drive off a sky's worth of malevolent qi entirely, without taking a single life in the process—
Gu Chengming's fingers went to the storage pouch at his waist.
Hua Daiyi caught the motion, and his heart lurched.
What Gu Chengming drew out was not a weapon. It was a wine flask.
The lid came off, and rich wine fragrance spilled everywhere. He tipped his head back, throat working, and the strong liquor became a scalding river down his gullet, sweeping a full flood of wine qi through his four limbs and hundred bones, drunkenness surging straight up into the crown of his skull.
Then he drew his sword.
The blade came free of the scabbard, and the churning air of the training grounds seemed to be severed out of nothing.
Clear, cold sword light and dense wine qi wove together along the edge, turning into a halo that circulated without cease. Gu Chengming stepped forward, and his body lurched violently.
Not from exhaustion. He was genuinely drunk, the form drunk while the intent stayed clear.
Under the liquor's catalysis his frame turned loose and wandering, his steps skewed, like a drunkard dancing alone under the moon. Yet every one of those swerves that looked about to end in a fall slipped past the heavy blows of the berserk disciples by exactly the right margin.
His edge was aimed at no one. The point hung low, dragging along the ground, tracing winding, unbroken trails of wine qi through empty air.
Then his wrist turned over, and he swung one stroke from low to high.
One stroke, and one alone.
A vast sword light rose out of the field, wine qi and sword intent reinforcing one another, becoming a dazzling pillar of silver-white driving straight into the clouds. This sword intent took no path of overwhelming force. Instead, like the butcher parting the ox, it slid with flowing ease into precisely the weak junctures where the malevolent qi was knotted together, cleanly splitting the pervading brutal force apart, scattering it, driving it away.
Sword qi shrieked past, and the scarlet in the berserk disciples' eyes receded like an ebbing tide. The black qi coiled in their meridians was peeled bodily away by sword qi soaked in the meaning of wine, and dissolved into nothing in midair.
As for the fissure in the seal, the malevolent masses spilling out of it seemed to have met a natural predator, and under the threat of the lingering sword light they scrambled over one another to shrink back down into the deep earth.
From drawing the sword to sheathing it, no more than three breaths passed.
Only the fragrance of wine remained, hanging in the air, refusing to fade.
On the training grounds, a dropped needle would have been heard.
Every person there was struck dumb.
The first to come back to themselves were precisely those elders who moments before had been full of complaints.
The grey-robed elder's teacup slipped from his fingers with a clatter and shattered, scalding tea splashing his hem without his noticing at all. He stared fixedly at Gu Chengming, whose figure swayed slightly in the distance after sheathing his sword, lips opening and closing several times like a stranded fish, and could not force out a single word.
The tall, thin elder beside him wore an even more remarkable expression. Yesterday he had shamelessly proposed that "young friend Gu demonstrate publicly," and now the man had genuinely demonstrated, with a weight that nearly shattered his Dao Heart.
As a Fourth Realm great cultivator, he understood the true worth of that stroke better than anyone. The perfect confluence of wine qi and sword qi, the minute control of force, and on top of that judgment as clear as a mirror while drunk.
This was called merely entering the gate?
"This..."
The thin elder swallowed with difficulty and turned to look at Hua Daiyi.
Hua Daiyi still stood where he had been, arms folded. The old man was spending every last drop of a lifetime's composure on maintaining the serene bearing of a lofty master.
In the end, Hua Daiyi let out a long breath of stale air and squeezed a four-word verdict through his teeth.
"Not bad. Not bad."
Then he burst into roaring laughter. "It's only that Little Gu's comprehension is passable."
There was truth in that, at least. Hua Daiyi had never taught Gu Chengming a single concrete sword move.
But paired with the eye that was twitching hard enough to cramp, it carried no persuasive force whatsoever. Every elder present cursed inwardly in unison: what in the world is smoking on this old drunkard's ancestral grave!?
That evening.
At the Hunyuan Sect's welcome banquet, the atmosphere was a world apart from the day before.
Hua Daiyi sat squarely in the seat of honor, and by now he had told the tale of "my disciple quelled the malevolence with one stroke" three times over, each retelling a fresh iteration.
On the first hearing it had been "that stroke had considerable presence." By the second it became "that stroke shook heaven and earth." By the third it had soared to "the splendor of that stroke was hardly beneath this old man at his very peak."
Several of his old Hunyuan Sect friends sat there withering, heads down, pouring wine into themselves in silence, none willing to take up the thread.
Until night fell, and they came to Hua Daiyi's side courtyard.
It could hardly be called sect hospitality. No attendants for company, no disciples serving dishes, not even a decent table.
Moss grew on the grey bricks of the yard, and empty wine jars lay heaped every which way in the corners. The two of them simply sat on the stone steps, a flask each, drinking alone before the moon.
The night sky over the Huntian Plain was far clearer than in the central lands. The river of stars hung like an inverted waterfall, brilliant points of light packing the dark from edge to edge.
Hua Daiyi drank his own home-brewed unfiltered wine. Gu Chengming drank osmanthus wine fetched from the market town at the mountain's foot. Neither was an immortal vintage, but with a sky full of stars for company there was no need for divine nectar as accompaniment.
Three rounds in, drunkenness rose in the old man's eyes, and at last the floodgates of talk opened.
"Little Gu."
Hua Daiyi swirled the clay flask in his hand and sent his gaze over the courtyard wall into the night sky. "Do you know what came before the Hunyuan Sect?"
Gu Chengming set down his cup and shook his head slightly, waiting for the rest.
"That's an old ledger from a long time ago." Hua Daiyi spoke as if the impulse had just seized him. "The Hunyuan Sect was originally two schools joined into one. One was called the Huntian Sect, devoted to overbearing body arts that made a saint of the flesh. Fists hard enough, but most of them were coarse men beyond the reach of teaching. The other was called the Yuandian Pavilion."
He paused, tilted his head back, and swallowed a mouthful of strong liquor.
"The Yuandian Pavilion handled the gathering and dispersal of texts and the verification of ancient history. A crowd who buried their heads in old paper all day, chewing over the wording on their forebears' stone inscriptions. For killing on the battlefield they were of little use. But for teasing out threads and tracing things back to their roots, their skill was top-rank in the whole immortal cultivation world. The Huntian Sect supplied the blade's edge, the Yuandian Pavilion supplied the mind. Hun for the power of raw heaven, Yuan for the lineage of broad learning. The two houses sealed a pact, and that is how today's Hunyuan Sect came to be."
At that point a faint smile pulled at the corner of Hua Daiyi's mouth.
"When the sect was founded, letters and arms were held in equal weight, and neither could do without the other. Think about it. Brute strength alone is just a mad ox for others to drive. Learning alone can't even protect its own library when disaster comes. Two broken pieces of jade fitted together, and only then can you call it a great sect without flaw."
"But later on..."
He broke open a fresh jar and swallowed in great gulps. He drank that mouthful too fast, and the liquor ran dripping down his greying beard.
"Later, some things happened."
The old man's account began to blur.
When the wine surged he talked fast, mixed with a dry laugh that could have been grief or mockery. When he sobered his words went vague again, and he swallowed the crucial secrets back down along with the liquor.
Gu Chengming did not press him. He simply sat there quietly, fitting the fragments the old man threw out together in his mind, one by one.
A scroll of secret history that the Hunyuan Sect had deliberately erased for decades unrolled slowly before him.
Long ago.
The Yuandian Pavilion lineage was already a candle in the wind within the sect. In the space of a century the body-cultivation lineage had produced several Fourth Realm great cultivators, awing all quarters, and their seats at the table rose with the tide. What the Yuandian Pavilion could show for itself was three dust-covered catalogues of ancient books and a single survey record of the spirit veins. In the elders' council their voice had shrunk to something pitiful.
It was precisely in that storm-tossed hour that the last heir of the Yuandian Pavilion's mantle, a scholar-type cultivator named Shen Yuanbai, dug an ancient secret out of the remnant scrolls while clearing the old pavilion.
According to the records, something of the most terrible danger was pressed down beneath the Emerald Screen Range. In his notes Shen Yuanbai named it the Dao Plague Source.
It was no ordinary malevolent qi or demon, but Heaven-and-Earth Tribulation Ash, capable of fouling a cultivator's Dao Heart and twisting the operation of his techniques from the foundation up.
The seal had once been sustained not by the Hunyuan Sect alone, but by a Guardian Iron Covenant jointly established by the Hunyuan Sect's Yuandian Pavilion and the Yunyue Sect.
The two houses were linked by a Mutual-Reference Formation Array. The Hunyuan Sect held down its outer form, the Yunyue Sect locked its inner spirit. Form and spirit interwoven, and thus the grand formation endured.
Then, with the changeover of one generation's Sect Head, the conflict over direction erupted outright. The body-cultivation lineage decided the Yuandian Pavilion was squandering resources. Can verifying broken books break through a realm? Better to tip every spirit stone and elixir into the great Dao of body cultivation and hammer out a few more fighters.
Crushed in that struggle, the Yuandian Pavilion lost its footing. Its disciples scattered, its funding was cut off. Those remnant scrolls concerning the Dao plague seal, along with the lifeblood of dozens of generations of Yuandian Pavilion men, were swept into the old pavilion like worn-out shoes, locked away to gather dust.
By the time Shen Yuanbai discovered the seal was about to collapse, a full several decades had passed since the formation was last repaired. Once the Guardian Iron Covenant broke and the Dao plague leaked, the living things around the Emerald Screen Range would be the first to suffer.
Shen Yuanbai carried his bamboo slips and forced his way into the upper council, weeping blood as he begged them to restart the formation.
And then?
Hua Daiyi gave a self-mocking laugh. "They didn't believe him, of course."
The reasons were splendidly high-minded.
The bone slips were ancient, their authenticity impossible to judge. This remnant of the Yuandian Pavilion had not found them earlier or later, but jumped out with alarmist talk precisely when the sect was cutting his budget, which surely indicated sinister motives. The Emerald Screen Range had been peaceful for a century, so where was this Dao plague? Shen Yuanbai, you merely wish to seize on the pretext, hoping to overturn the verdict and restore the old Yuandian Pavilion order.
Several charges came down. Forging ancient slips. Spreading heretical talk to mislead the masses. Coercing the sect.
Shen Yuanbai was stripped of his standing and expelled from the mountain gate.
Hua Daiyi held his coarse porcelain bowl, eyes fixed blankly on the vault of heaven.
"A hall full of great cultivators, and I was the only one who stood up and said a fair word for him."
He did not describe the clash of that day in detail. But in his mind Gu Chengming had already sketched the picture. One marginal elder reeking of wine, arguing on principle for a fellow disciple already condemned as a fraud, before an enraged room of body-cultivation leadership.
The outcome went without saying.
Hua Daiyi kept his place in the sect by luck. But from that day on, every word out of his mouth became, in other ears, the raving of a madman.
His proposals were no longer entered into the sect records. His warnings drew nothing but the knowing smirks of his colleagues.
"Ah, Old Hua. Had too much again, have you?"
A drunkard. Not to be trusted.
Whatever he says is drunk talk.
The night wind stiffened.
Hua Daiyi was thoroughly drunk now, the clay bowl in his hand empty. He tipped his head back and shook the last drop of liquor onto his lips.
"Later on, well, Yuanbai simply vanished."
His tone was as level as still water, as though he were discussing tomorrow's weather.
"Some said he'd gone mad. Some said he'd died. This old man turned over every ravine on the mountain and searched a long time."
"Never found him."
Bright moonlight settled like frost on his greying hair, outlining the stooped, solitary silhouette of an old man.
"So I keep chewing it over," he said, swinging the weightless empty bowl. "Those disasters he dug up. Were they real or not?"
"I believed him. But what good did my believing him do?"
"The mad words of a drunkard—" Hua Daiyi sighed a long sigh, and his shoulders collapsed entirely. "Who listens?"
Gu Chengming still said nothing.
In this place, at this moment, any consoling words would only sound glib and hollow. Without a sound he picked up the osmanthus wine from the market town and refilled the old man's empty bowl, then lifted his own cup, touched it lightly across the space between them, and drank another cup with him.
The moonlight lay like white silk, and the little ruined courtyard sank into a long silence.
And in that silence, something struck Gu Chengming.
From the moment Hua Daiyi began speaking of the past until now, the dialogue box of [Immortal-Concealing Wine-Sword Formula] had hung there in his Sea of Consciousness, plainly lit.
The sword formula that normally loved nothing better than drunken keyboard politics and pronouncing judgment on the state of the world had offered not one sharp comment.
Gu Chengming turned it over thoughtfully. This trip to the Hunyuan Sect really had borne fruit. Martial Uncle Hua's drunken confession of truth must be the key to raising the wine-sword formula's favorability.
Seen this way, the true meaning of the Immortal-Concealing Wine-Sword Formula was not the dashing elegance of a famous scholar, nor the bold romance of riding out with a sword and a song, and certainly not the high spirits of trimming the lamp to look at one's blade while drunk.
It was the helplessness of a man who carried a bellyful of truth and could only watch the world pretend to sleep, with no one willing to believe him.
And in that light, the wine-sword formula's keyboard-politics streak explained itself easily.
Nourish sword qi with wine qi. Body light as duckweed, drunk as mud.
Because only by feigning blind drunkenness does a man dare speak the sober truth aloud. And only in the instant that truth is spoken is the sword hidden in the wine truly alive.
Gu Chengming meant to ask Hua Daiyi a few more questions, but when he turned his head the old man had already fallen fast asleep against a veranda pillar, the empty bowl tipped over on his knee, snoring like thunder.
Gu Chengming drew the outer robe that had slid off half of Hua Daiyi's shoulder back into place, said nothing further, and rose quietly to withdraw.
Walking slowly along the gravel path of the side courtyard, he met a mountain night wind carrying the bitter green scent of grass and trees, which blew away what little weariness he had.
In his mind he was still working through Hua Daiyi's words.
The wretched ruin of the Yuandian Pavilion, Shen Yuanbai's desperate final plea, all the fragments wove together in his thoughts, and gradually the deadly situation beneath the surface took shape.
If Shen Yuanbai had told the truth, that seal had gone unrepaired for decades.
Gu Chengming's steps slowed without his willing it, and his gaze turned toward the ridge on the Hunyuan Sect's western side.
Hua Daiyi had mentioned that the old pavilion stood there, listed as forbidden ground year in and year out, never visited by anyone.
The night was thick. At the guard post on the old pavilion's outer perimeter, several disciples were changing shifts with storm lanterns in hand.
Handing over tokens, verifying identities, confirming patrol routes. Every gesture correct, the procedure airtight, not a single flaw to pick at.
Yet Gu Chengming halted where he stood, watched attentively for a moment, and at once sensed the discordance.
It was not the emptiness of a place with no one about at midnight. It was that these disciples themselves were excessively lifeless.
Gu Chengming veiled his gaze, raised no alarm, and continued along the mountain road, quietly noting several other sentry positions. The closer he looked, the tighter his brows drew.
This was no isolated case.
The nearer the duty disciples were to the old pavilion, the more their bearing carried an obedience he could not put a name to.
At the more distant posts, the disciples' manner was far livelier. One dozed against a wall, others chatted in lowered voices, and now and then he even caught a couple of muffled laughing curses.
The contrast was too stark.
Almost without noticing, Gu Chengming walked out onto a ridge with an open view.
He stopped and looked. The outline of the old pavilion sat silent under the moon like an enormous tomb. There was no lamplight around it, only a faint droning hum, nearly swallowed by the night wind, coming up in broken snatches from deep beneath the ground.
He crouched down slowly, laid his five fingers flat against the cold surface of a stone slab, and set the Yin-Yang Creation Strategy turning, probing deep into the earth veins with Red Dust Qi.
What came back made him frown.
The Dao plague Hua Daiyi had spoken of. It was not something that "might leak in the future." It had already been spreading in secret for a long time.
The abnormality of the duty disciples near the old pavilion was precisely the fruit of years upon years of exposure to trace amounts of Dao plague.
Gu Chengming withdrew his palm and rose slowly to his feet.
The night wind poured into his collar with a chill that went to the bone. Hua Daiyi had to be told at once.
But a more urgent thought rose up right behind it. If a seal decades without repair was already seeping, how long remained before it collapsed completely?
The answer came far faster than he expected.
In the very instant he turned to head back to the side courtyard, the mountain rock beneath his feet shuddered violently without the slightest warning.
From the Hunyuan Sect's western side, from the direction of the old pavilion, came a muffled roar like some primordial beast throwing off its chains, one peal after another, near out of far, the muffled swelling into the deafening.
As the earth shook and the mountains trembled, the light of the formation sealing the old pavilion flared bright, then split open in appalling fissures.
The trace Dao plague that had been seeping through for decades was only a trickle running out of a crack in the dam.
And now the dam had burst.
Dense grey-black mist churned and gushed up from beneath the old pavilion, spreading at a speed that chilled the blood.
The mist rolled with an air of indifference. It had none of the wild violence of demonic qi, nor the fouled, reeking stink of an evil cultivator's Filth Tide.
Its color hung somewhere between grey and black, dull and heavy, yet it carried an eeriness that raised gooseflesh all over the body, as though every numbness in the world had been rendered into vapor and spread across the mountains.
Any cultivator the mist touched went quiet within a handful of breaths.
As the earth shook and the mountains trembled, the formation sealing the old pavilion split open in appalling fissures.
Before this, the reason those disciples on duty near the old pavilion had shown such abnormal affect was precisely that the trace Dao plague seeping up from below had already been eroding their state of mind.
Trace seepage alone could file away the edges of a human being, and tonight one layer of the sealing formation had failed outright.
Great volumes of dense grey-black mist came surging up from beneath the old pavilion.
The mist spread without a sound, lacking the wild violence of demonic qi, lacking the fouled, reeking stink of an evil cultivator's Filth Tide. Its color hung between grey and black, dull and heavy, yet it carried an eeriness that chilled a man to his marrow.
Any cultivator the mist touched went quiet within a handful of breaths.
Cultivators tainted by the Dao plague did not go berserk or mad. They simply stopped questioning. Tell them to go east, and east they went. Tell them to go west, and west they went.
Because they had lost the capacity to ask why.
Shen Yuanbai's discovery all those years ago had been real. The seal truly was failing.
The Hunyuan Sect fell into utter chaos.
Elders and great powers came tearing through the air from every peak, and when they saw the grey mist boiling up from under the old pavilion, every face went ashen. The leadership that had turned a blind eye to the old pavilion's hidden danger for decades woke as if from a dream, and woke far too late.
Hua Daiyi stood before the old pavilion.
Grey-black mist roiled and roared around his feet. Cold moonlight spilled through gaps in the clouds, throwing the grey at his temples into painful relief.
There was no anger on the old man's face, and not the faintest flicker of "I told you so." It was like every other time in the past several decades. Someone raised the old matter that should not be raised. Someone was at last forced to face the truth they had been fleeing.
And the only thing he could do was drink a mouthful of strong liquor and hold his tongue.
And at the same moment that Hua Daiyi kept silent, the dialogue box in Gu Chengming's Sea of Consciousness lit up.
[The Immortal-Concealing Wine-Sword Formula's dialogue box flickered again and again, as if hesitating over whether to speak.]
[After a long while, it spoke.]
[Immortal-Concealing Wine-Sword Formula: ...Young friend.]
[It paused, seeming to weigh its words.]
[Then it asked: Those things that got treated as nonsense. They weren't all nonsense, were they?]
The Immortal-Concealing Wine-Sword Formula did not know Hua Daiyi. It held no direct memory of its own creator.
It did not know his face, did not know the hardships of half his life, did not know the name of that dear friend of his.
All that drunken keyboard politics.
The rebukes at the unfair distribution of sect resources, the sighs over rogue cultivators' rights drifting like duckweed, the sneers at imperial governance of the provinces being nominal at best. Those grumblings that Zhouli's Heaven-Human Heart-Rectifying Method rated as "rogue-cultivator thinking," the world-weary cynicism that sounded like drunken raving, the increasingly unhinged "screw this let the first to ascend lift up those who ascend later" that got wilder the more it drank. None of it had ever been drunk talk.
It was clear to Gu Chengming now, and he smiled faintly.
Even if the Immortal-Concealing Wine-Sword Formula had never asked for help, he already knew what it truly wanted.
Miss Wine-Sword Formula, the demon king you ordered has arrived for guard duty.
Outside the old pavilion, the Hunyuan Sect's elders were at a complete loss.
The Dao plague was running rampant, and they had neither the Yuandian Pavilion's inheritance nor any notion of how to contact the Yunyue Sect and restart the Guardian Iron Covenant. Most fatal of all, they did not even know how this seal functioned.
After the Yuandian Pavilion was pushed to the margins, every text touching on the seal's maintenance had been dumped into the old pavilion. The old pavilion had been sealed off for years, with no one to sort or read anything in it. Now it was the source of the Dao plague's escape, and going in to search at this moment would be plain suicide.
At their wits' end, several elders put forward a countermeasure that sounded rather "practical."
Blow up the old pavilion, along with everything beneath it, and seal it dead.
Since the Dao plague had already leaked, rather than exhaust themselves patching a formation that might not be repairable, better to bring thunderous measures to bear and plug the source outright.
First draw on the sect's mountain-guarding grand formation to force the Dao plague back down, then lay dozens of overlapping wards, casting the ground under the old pavilion into a dead zone as tight as an iron bucket, with not a crack left anywhere.
As for the records Shen Yuanbai had left behind, matters having come to this, what use were they?
No small number of voices seconded the plan. The logic held together too.
What can't be fixed should be buried for good, which beats letting it rot further.
But when Gu Chengming heard it, his brows drew together at once.
Sealing it by brute force was no true road.
The Dao plague was in essence a tumor in heaven and earth, not a hole you could plug with any rock at hand.
If the seal's Mutual-Reference Formation Array was not repaired at the root, the Dao plague would not disperse. It would follow the earth veins and seep outward into wider heaven and earth.
The old pavilion was merely the outlet on the Hunyuan Sect's end. Seal it off and the Dao plague would certainly turn direction, driving straight for the Yunyue Sect at the far end of the Emerald Screen Range.
Through Gu Chengming's mind flashed the uncanny sights Ji Yixi had once described. The shadows of Yunyue Sect disciples all misaligned. The sect-protecting grand formation drawing inward from without and clamping down hard from above, plainly guarding against something breaking out of the ground. Even the Imperial Astronomical Bureau's diviners had developed cognitive derangement after glimpsing those images.
The anomalies over there were no isolated matter.
The seal's cracks had long been eating away at the Yunyue Sect in secret. If the Hunyuan Sect now resorted to brute sealing, it would amount to shoving an overwhelming mass of pressure entirely onto the other side. At that point the Dao plague would not be pacified. It would burst the dam from the Yunyue Sect's direction with force enough to sweep everything away.
He laid out that chain of reasoning briefly and clearly.
The elders' argument stopped dead. After a dead silence, someone asked in a lowered voice, "Then what should be done?"
Gu Chengming stepped out from the crowd and spoke up, leaving only a single line.
"Seniors, allow me to try."
What he intended to do was decisive and perfectly plain.
Go deep beneath the old pavilion, find the core of the seal, use his own methods to slow the Dao plague's spread, and at the same time retrieve the original records Shen Yuanbai had sealed away.
Those records contained not only a detailed dissection of the seal's principles, but the complete method for restarting the Guardian Iron Covenant. Without them, that covenant was so much empty talk.
In the whole sect, he alone could break this deadlock.
Not because his cultivation crowned the sect.
The Hunyuan Sect's reserves ran deep. Fifth Realm and even near-Sixth Realm powers were everywhere, and to an outsider's eye, in a straight fight any elder present was no less than he.
But the horror of the Dao plague had never lain in destructive force. It lay in erosion.
It did not harm the body, did not ruin the meridians. It went specifically for a cultivator's heart, warping judgment, stripping away will, overturning one's very understanding of the Dao.
The deeper a man's cultivation, the more deeply rooted his Dao foundation, and the more utterly beyond salvation he became once the Dao plague turned on him.
Gu Chengming, however, was an anomaly.
He carried the Legacy Teaching of Peace from Zhouli's Heaven-Human Heart-Rectifying Method, which gave him natural resistance when facing laws of alteration, distortion, and subversion, to say nothing of the techniques at his side. Ordinary illusions could do nothing to him.
The Dao plague sought to twist a man's state of mind, and he happened to be a bone too tough to chew.
Hearing Gu Chengming volunteer, the old man's hand went up on instinct to stop him. This boy counted as half his disciple, and where in this world was the sense in watching your own disciple jump into a pit of fire?
But the words were barely at his lips when he saw the look in Gu Chengming's eyes.
That gaze was clear, calm, carrying a bedrock certainty. It was identical, absolutely identical, to someone he had seen in his youth.
Hua Daiyi worked his withered lips, and in the end swallowed the words of refusal. He was silent for two breaths, then reached into his robe, drew out a rather tarnished bronze key, and pressed it solemnly into Gu Chengming's palm.
"The key to the old pavilion's inner hall." The old man's voice came rough. "Yuanbai left it with me before he went."
"He said that if the day ever came when those records were needed, this key would open the door."
"I've kept it safe for decades."
He paused, his gaze sweeping the churning grey mist in the distance.
"Today, it's finally of use."
On the stone steps before the old pavilion.
Gu Chengming did not set off at once. He lifted his hem, sat down where he was, drew a wine flask from his storage pouch, and unhurriedly filled a cup.
Ten zhang away, grey-black mist beat like an angry surf against the temporary barrier of spirit light the elders had thrown up, giving off a corrosive sound that set teeth on edge.
The barrier flickered bright and dim, ripples shuddering across it. It clearly would not hold long.
In his Sea of Consciousness, the dialogue box lit up again.
Gu Chengming assumed it was about to launch into keyboard politics once more. After all, right in front of them stood a textbook negative example of "sect leadership's blindness brings on catastrophe," material practically tailor-made for it.
Instead, it asked something else.
[Immortal-Concealing Wine-Sword Formula: Young friend, why are you helping them?]
[Back then they refused to believe the truth. They drove out the man who spoke it, and hounded the man who spoke up for him into becoming a drunkard.]
[Now disaster is upon them and they're all in a panic. Staring at one another, unable to even explain what sin they committed to begin with.]
[You're risking your own life to help them. Is it worth it?]
Gu Chengming understood the question perfectly well.
The Immortal-Concealing Wine-Sword Formula was not weighing whether helping the Hunyuan Sect was worth it at all.
What it was asking was this.
Is telling the truth itself worth it?
If speaking out for justice finds no one willing to believe. If the man who holds to the truth is driven out for it, jeered at, forgotten by the world. If the man who spent half a lifetime ordering the archives, trying to hold back the flood as the dike gave way, in the end vanished without a trace before he ever heard a single "you were right."
In that case, what meaning is there in telling the truth?
Better to drink yourself blind.
Better to pour every ounce of passion and every true word out as drunken raving. When you finish, others clap and laugh, and you laugh along with them. No one takes it seriously, and no one gets hurt.
That was the deepest knot at the bottom of the Immortal-Concealing Wine-Sword Formula's heart.
Gu Chengming thought about it, and did not hurry to answer. He raised the cup instead and drank off the last of the wine, then set the empty cup down steadily on the stone step.
"It isn't to help them." Gu Chengming spoke with a light laugh. "It's so that the man who told the truth back then didn't tell it for nothing."
Gu Chengming stood, brushed the dust from his robe, and sent his gaze through the darkness toward the grey-black mist boiling endlessly around the old pavilion.
"Do you know what the difference is between unofficial history and official history?"
[The Immortal-Concealing Wine-Sword Formula listened intently.]
"The difference isn't which one is true and which is false." Gu Chengming said it almost as a joke. "The difference is only which one you're more willing to believe."
He closed the tarnished bronze key in his palm and turned to face the old pavilion.
"And what I'm about to do is make what I believe win, just once."
Beneath the old pavilion.
The Dao plague came rushing on like water through a broken dike.
In the seal's core region the grey-black mist was thick enough to be nearly solid. In that space, every breath drawn in felt like swallowing old cotton wadding someone had kneaded to mush and left to mold.
The circulation route of Zhouli's Heaven-Human Heart-Rectifying Method ran at full speed through his meridians.
Righteous Noble Breath poured like a river in flood, grinding to powder every wisp of grey mist that tried to seep into his mind.
But Gu Chengming knew perfectly well that even with righteous qi shielding his body, at such high concentrations of Dao plague the load on his spirit veins was climbing fast. There was no room for delay.
The bronze key sank into the inner hall's lock.
With a soft click, the door pivots, sealed shut for decades, gave a heavy grinding groan, and the inner hall's doors drew slowly apart to either side.
The musty smell of aged paper and ink came at him mixed with dust. The inner hall was cramped. On the wooden racks lining all four walls sat neat stacks of yellowed bamboo slips and hide-bound scrolls. And on the rosewood table in the very center, a sealed jade casket rested in quiet enshrinement.
Beside the casket lay a letter, weighted down.
The envelope bore no sender's mark, only three characters scrawled across it.
"For Old Hua."
Gu Chengming picked up the letter, and his hand paused.
This should by rights have been delivered to Hua Daiyi untouched. But the situation was urgent and rules had to bend. The Dao plague's concentration could set off another riot at any moment, and he had to confirm in the shortest possible time that this letter and whatever lay in the jade casket were indeed the keys to breaking the deadlock.
The paper unfolded, the handwriting upright and elegant, breathing of scholarship.
"Old Hua, I knew you would come. And if not you, then someone you brought."
Gu Chengming's gaze tightened slightly, and he read on.
"The records are all in the jade casket. The method of repairing the seal, the procedure for restarting the pact of guardianship, the complete diagram of the Mutual-Reference Formation Array. I have put every bit of it in order. Even if the sect does not believe me, even if no one comes, these things sitting here will not turn false. I have no regrets."
"I know you have been grieving on my behalf all this time. Thinking that you failed to protect me, that the world is unjust, that you did stand up and speak and still changed nothing. But Old Hua, a true word does not become a false one because no one believes it. It is still true. True after one year, true after ten, still true after a hundred."
"I have left it here. One day someone will see it."
There was no name at the close, only one last line, the brushstrokes pressed down noticeably harder, cutting through the paper to the bone.
"And by then, you won't have to borrow the wine's courage to speak the truth anymore."
Gu Chengming folded the paper back exactly as it had been and put it away in his storage pouch along with the jade casket.
And in that single breath.
The rock strata beneath his feet shook with a roar, and the Dao plague's concentration exploded several times over in an instant.
The jade casket had itself been a crucial Formation Eye at the seal's core. Shen Yuanbai had cleverly borrowed the seal's own barrier to shelter these documents from corrosion. Now that the casket had left its position, it amounted to gutting the seal's last foundation.
Great volumes of grey-black mist blasted up out of the fissures in the ground. Under the warping pressure all around, even the Righteous Noble Breath circulating from the Legacy Teaching of Peace began to gutter and drag.
Alarms blared in his Sea of Consciousness.
[Zhouli's Heaven-Human Heart-Rectifying Method: Chengming, you cannot remain here long. The Legacy Teaching of Peace can ward off the invasion of the mind, but if your spiritual power is contaminated by the Dao plague, the consequences are beyond reckoning.]
He had to cut his way out before the seal collapsed entirely, and keep the lifework in his storage pouch untainted.
Gu Chengming turned his wrist, and the long sword came free of the scabbard.
To carve a path by force through this warping fog of Dao plague, the body arts of the Hundred Bones Resonance and righteous qi as armor were no longer enough. He needed a blade that could cut through falsehood.
He unhooked the wine flask at his waist and tipped back the last mouthful of spirit wine.
The liquor went down his throat, and wine qi rushed into his four limbs and hundred bones like the galaxy pouring itself upside down.
On the system panel, the Immortal-Concealing Wine-Sword Formula's dialogue box lit up.
But against all expectation, it launched into no lengthy keyboard politics, told no obscure scrap of unofficial history, raged at no rot in the sect, and cited no classics in denouncing the great trends of the world.
[Immortal-Concealing Wine-Sword Formula: ...Young friend.]
Its voice had shed all its old drunken excitement and unstoppable flood of words, becoming clear and quiet as it had never been before.
[Immortal-Concealing Wine-Sword Formula: All this while I have been using wine to say those things. To say what no one would believe, to say what got treated as a joke. Because words said while drunk don't count, and even if you're laughed at, you can brush it off with "drunken nonsense." I thought that was the only way not to get hurt.]
Gu Chengming's five fingers closed, locking hard around the hilt.
[But what you said just now made me understand something all at once. "Make a true word that lost win, just once."]
On every side the grey-black mist roared like a savage beast, and the Dao plague's pressure kept rising.
[As long as someone is willing to pick up the things that were buried, walk out with them, and hold them up for everyone to see. "Look. This is true." Not said in drink, not with the wine lending courage. Said wide awake, and standing straight.]
Gu Chengming held the sword level before him, its edge angled at the ground.
The wine qi in his meridians boiled up with it. Yet this wine qi had none of the old abandon and haze. It had become a pure will to set out.
Not drunkenness to flee reality, but a cup raised to himself for the road ahead, and the battle waiting on it.
[The Immortal-Concealing Wine-Sword Formula raised its head. Its gaze was as bright and clear as a blade.]
[Immortal-Concealing Wine-Sword Formula favorability +40]
[Current favorability: 75]
[Status change: raised from [Friendly] to [Liked]]
Sword light bloomed in the pitch-dark depths.
This time the Immortal-Concealing Wine-Sword Formula abandoned the roundabout way of "form drunk, intent sober" entirely. No lurching steps, no probing drunkard's sway. That had been the clarity hidden behind avoidance. What it was now was "the wine sobers and the sword sobers with it."
Drink the flask dry, take up every true meaning tempered out of the wine qi, and strike out clear-eyed, in earnest, without flinching a step.
The sword came down.
The edge cut through empty space with a shrill scream. This was not brute force meeting brute force. It was a severance of principle itself, something close to parting the clouds to let the sun through. Before the blazing sword light, the grey-black fog of Dao plague seemed to be torn cleanly down the middle by an invisible giant hand. As sword qi surged, every cold thing that sought to twist the mind was driven back, and out of the chaos was trodden a road straight, clear, and aimed squarely at the old pavilion's exit.
Wine fragrance and sword intent merged in perfect union.
The clear, cold fragrance of wine washed away the haze of intoxication. Gu Chengming moved with his sword, robes streaming, Shen Yuanbai's records held tight in his grasp.
The sword light became a silver-white azure dragon, savaging a trail out of the grey-black depths.
From the deepest reach of the old pavilion he fought his way out step by step, treading over the wreckage of the Dao plague.
But the Dao plague would not sit and watch its prey leave.
The instant Gu Chengming set foot on the stone stairs of the old pavilion's second floor, a roar like a landslide came from behind him. Robbed of the Formation Eye that had held it down, the Dao plague became a grey-black tide that blotted out sky and earth, carrying the breath of rot and numbness, pouring in at him madly from every direction.
The wall of that tide rose several zhang high, and in the murky grey mist countless twisted faces could be dimly seen, the residual wills of generations eaten away by the Dao plague. They knew neither grief nor joy, their features blurred, yet all of them opened their mouths at once, issuing a soundless invitation.
No need to struggle. Put down the sword.
How good it is to be drunk. Being awake is too tiring.
Gu Chengming's stride did not falter.
The Righteous Noble Breath of Zhouli's Heaven-Human Heart-Rectifying Method thundered through his meridians, smashing to nothing every whisper that tried to seep into his spiritual sense.
He cut a backhand stroke behind him, and a sword glow congealed from wine qi ripped a gap in the grey-black tide, barely buying three breaths of room.
But the tide closed again in a blink, coming on more ferociously than before.
The old pavilion's passages began to collapse in the violent shaking, the stone beams overhead snapping one after another, rubble pouring down like rain. Gu Chengming twisted aside from a falling pillar, kicked off a heap of debris with his toes, and lifted himself over a zhang into the air, just clearing the grey mist swelling up from the floor.
By now the spiritual power in his sea of qi was near exhaustion.
In his Sea of Consciousness, the Hundred Bones Resonance was the first to decide.
[The Hundred Bones Resonance took over the body's blood and qi of its own accord, recalling and compressing the body-tempering force spread through his four limbs and hundred bones, and pouring all of it into his legs.]
Not for a fight to the death. Only for escape.
Gu Chengming understood at once, sheathed his sword, clamped the jade casket and the letter tight against his chest, and gathered every drop of blood and qi beneath his feet.
The grey-black tide behind him gave chase relentlessly, those blurred faces in the mist thrown off and closing again, like a nightmare that refused to be shaken.
The collapsing passage narrowed and narrowed. He was nearly scraping along the fractured walls as he sprinted through the gaps, his shoulders and arms opened by several bloody gashes on the jagged broken stone. The blood had barely sprayed free before the churning grey mist behind him swallowed all of it.
Ahead, the outline of the old pavilion's great door finally appeared.
Through the gap between the doors came a thread of cold moonlight, fine as a silver wire, and against all this grey-black underground it looked piercing and scalding.
The Dao plague seemed to sense its prey about to slip away. The grey-black tide accelerated at his back, gathering into a colossal hand that blotted out the sky, five fingers closing to come down over his head.
Gu Chengming did not look back. On the final stride of his sprint he drew his sword with everything he had.
It was not a complete sword art, and there was next to no spiritual power left.
He simply wrung the last trace of wine qi in his body together with the sword intent that remained, poured it all without reserve into the blade, and thrust it viciously upward from below, straight into the descending grey-mist hand.
The instant the point pierced the grey mist, the fragrance of wine detonated.
Riding the recoil of that stroke, Gu Chengming shot like an arrow straight out through the old pavilion's doors.
Outside the old pavilion.
The moment Gu Chengming burst out, the temporary wards the Hunyuan Sect's elders had laid down together snapped shut, cutting off the counterattacking grey mist dead inside the doors.
The night wind passed over, and moonlight spilled down like water.
The hem of his robe still carried residual ash of the Dao plague, and his hair hung somewhat wild, but his spine remained as straight as a pine. The sword hanging reversed in his hand shivered on its own, its blade still circulating the clear, cold afterglow of wine fragrance fused with sword intent.
In his left hand, the jade casket was untouched.
And at that same moment, a dialogue box surfaced in his Sea of Consciousness.
[Immortal-Concealing Wine-Sword Formula: Young friend.]
Gu Chengming waited a moment. Going by long habit, he expected that after the greeting the other would borrow three parts of drunkenness and unroll another long discourse, or lay into the Hunyuan Sect's chronic, incurable rules.
But no grand disquisition came.
[Immortal-Concealing Wine-Sword Formula: I always used to think that words spoken from the heart while sober carried too much weight. If people mocked you, you'd have no step down, no "I'd had too much" to stand on. So I got into the habit of pouring three flasks of strong liquor into myself first, and only once my spirit was reeling and my tongue had gone soft did I dare turn out the feelings I actually wanted to say plainly.]
[And once I'd emptied myself out, I could reassure myself that it was fine. It was all drunken raving. Nothing to be taken seriously.]
[But today, you let me see something else.]
[So I want to try it too. To say one true thing, sober.]
[Young friend, I am glad this body of mine is yours to wield.]
[Not because your cultivation is profound, not because your comprehension is peerless, and not because you resolved the Hunyuan Sect's crisis.]
[Only because when you brought a true word buried under earth for decades back into the light, you did not so much as move your brow. As though that were simplythe most natural rule in the world.]
[The Immortal-Concealing Wine-Sword Formula laughed, open and unburdened, its tone free: So from now on this sword is willing to leave the scabbard for you always, with no need to borrow the wine.]
[Huiyuan Sword Formula: ?!]
[The Huiyuan Sword Formula, seized by a violent sense of crisis, hurried to assert its own existence: I don't need to borrow any wine either!]
[The Immortal-Concealing Wine-Sword Formula paid it no mind, humming a tuneless little song to itself, every trace of drunkenness gone, radiant with spirit.]
Gu Chengming smiled helplessly, returned his sword to its scabbard, and turned to walk toward Hua Daiyi.
No superfluous pleasantries passed between them. Gu Chengming held out the letter addressed "For Old Hua" together with Shen Yuanbai's jade casket.
"I did not fail the charge." His tone was level and certain.
Hua Daiyi put out both hands, and the knuckles that took the letter trembled faintly. The old man, weathered by so many years of wind and frost, did not open the envelope in front of everyone. He only pressed it solemnly against his chest, slowly closed his eyes, and let out one long breath of stale air.
Under the moonlight, the old man's stooped back straightened, without sound, by a little.
In the distance, the Hunyuan Sect's morning bell happened to toll its first note. The long peal carried out over the Emerald Screen Range, startling the birds roosting in the woods, sending them beating their wings toward a far sky going pale.
The world says words spoken in drink do not count, never knowing that what lies pressed at the bottom of the flask has always been the bitter gall of a sober man.
This morning the wine sobers and the sword sobers with it, and the truth need feign madness no longer.
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