Inside the Hat Tribunal.
The Nameless Daoist's dignity, at this moment, lay in ruins.
Seven tall hats were stacked neatly on his head, each blazing in turn from the bottom up with bold characters: ["Sneak-Thief"], ["Bullies His Juniors"], ["Lecher at First Sight"]—
Hold on, what was that third one about? This old man has kept his desires quiet for decades. Where would I pick up a debt of romance?
"This item is in dispute, but given the accused's poor attitude, it is docked in advance as a courtesy," said the girl in the blue robe, bamboo slips cradled in both hands, her voice cold.
"Now wait a moment—"
"Crack!"
The woman on the right with the wine flask gave the brass-buckled belt in her hand a lazy flick, tilted her head, and smiled with enormous satisfaction. "Old sir, if you show a cooperative attitude toward confessing, we can slip you in through the back door and dock two hats fewer."
"Confess to what?! This old man doesn't even know who you—"
The words were not finished before the brass-buckled belt came whistling down.
"Ssss—!"
The Nameless Daoist bared his teeth and sucked in a lungful of cold air.
The pain was the lesser problem. The real trouble was that once the lash landed, a sense of guilt rose unbidden from the bottom of his heart — I am guilty, I deserve to be punished — as though he truly were a man beyond redemption.
Which was precisely how the current Gate Master of the Myriad-Theft Gate finally caught on.
— What a convincing illusion. Fine work indeed!
The old Daoist ran the numbers at speed. Forget the reasons, forget the details. Best to be gone first and ask later.
He held his breath and steadied his spirit. The Myriad-Theft Spirit Pupils flared to life — and just as the girl in the blue robe plucked up the ninth hat, four bold characters reading ["Old and Shameless"] across its front, and prepared to settle it onto his skull—
Spiritual power surged out of him like a river bursting its dikes.
"Shatter."
Word became law.
The space of the Hat Tribunal came apart like a mirror. With the last crash of collapse, the phantoms and the whole stack of hats on his head dissolved into countless motes of light and scattered away.
His vision returned to reality. The wrecked interior of the Side Chamber of the Pill Room swam into view — the low table on its back with all four legs in the air, the iron teapot rolling away into a corner, and the floor littered with the shredded remains of pill formula pages torn apart by the shockwave.
The Nameless Daoist's feet had barely touched the ground. He had not even caught his breath.
White light erupted before him, like a blazing sun falling out of the sky.
The fist had already arrived.
It was a pillar of white-gold light held back by nothing at all, carrying a vast and crushing force far beyond anything a Third Realm cultivator had any business possessing, wrapped in an overwhelming, world-upending imperial presence, driving straight for his face.
"Hundred Emperor, Aid Me!"
— This wretched brat has been squatting out there this whole time, waiting for the exact moment!
The Nameless Daoist let fly, internally, a string of language entirely unbecoming his station. His body, however, reacted a step ahead of his mind.
Evasion was a luxury he no longer had. Though the several hundred stacked layers of the Entanglement sword intent had mostly dispersed when he broke the illusion, the residual slowing clung to his bones like a sickness, and he had only just torn free of the Hat Tribunal. His mind was not fully back in his body.
The old Daoist ground his back teeth, crossed both arms before his chest, and threw open his protective true qi to the fullest.
"BOOM—!"
The white-gold fist force slammed squarely into his forearms.
The side chamber's wall detonated in the shockwave. Broken stone sprayed outward, dust boiling into the air.
The savage force drove his body backward, skidding four or five zhang, his feet plowing two knee-deep furrows through the grey brick floor, until his spine crashed into the outer wall of the pill room and stamped a human-shaped hollow clean into the load-bearing stone.
"Cough…"
Embedded in the wall, the Nameless Daoist coughed once and looked toward Gu Chengming, who stood in the settling dust with his fist drawn back.
Damn it. That was close.
The old Daoist replayed the entire combination in his head.
First bind the opponent with the Ten Perfections Sword Formation, every stroke layering on the Entanglement sword intent to build up the slow. Then use the End Lotus to skip straight past the accumulation and max out the slow in an instant. Immediately after that, use the Unfettered Freedom Formula to release the aura of the Myriad-Theft Immortal Sovereign and open a psychological gap.
Then, in the heartbeat while the opponent's attention wavered, throw a punch on par with the Fifth Realm — and use that same opening to trigger the illusion. Once the opponent had burned through his mind and spirit breaking out of the illusion, he stepped back into the world and ate a second punch on par with the Fifth Realm.
Put a mid Fifth Realm cultivator in the way of that chain and tell him to take it head-on? The grass on his grave would be two feet high by this day next year.
This old man thanks his luck for being late Fifth Realm, the Daoist thought, otherwise tonight I really would have gone down at the hands of a Third Realm junior and become the laughingstock of the cultivation world.
A proper Gate Master of the Myriad-Theft Gate, hauled into an illusion and fitted with hats — and then punched by an old fist on the way out.
If word of this ever reached the sect, the coffin lids of the ancestors would not stay down no matter how hard anyone sat on them.
"Enough, enough, stop hitting me!"
The Nameless Daoist worked himself laboriously out of the dent in the wall, slapped the dust off his Daoist robe, and waved both hands at Gu Chengming, raising his voice. "This old man is not your enemy!"
Gu Chengming did not move a muscle. His right hand stayed steady on his sword hilt. His strength had bottomed out, but his position was perfectly clear.
— Without an explanation, this ends badly.
The Nameless Daoist sighed.
Fair enough. He honestly could not blame the boy. Put himself in the same spot — some old codger of unknown origin squatting inside your sect pretending to be a steward, who then walks up and steals a spirit artifact and afterward grins and says he only "borrowed it" — you'd have to be soft in the head not to beat him.
"This old man's name is… mm. Nameless."
He cleared his throat, then, afraid his Daoist title had not come across clearly and that this boy might answer with another fist the moment something struck him wrong, added, "The Nameless Daoist, current Gate Master of the Myriad-Theft Gate. The Nuo Tao you met in the Northern Territory is my final disciple."
Gu Chengming's brow shifted a fraction. Catching the change, the Nameless Daoist thought, that got him, and hurried to raise the stakes.
"The trial inside the Myriad-Theft Immortal Sovereign's Secret Realm — this old man sensed all of it from beginning to end. How you and the Tao girl cleared the gates, and the fortune you received from the founding patriarch, not one outsider knows a word of it. That should serve to prove who I am."
He paused, then added without the least evasion, "And that aura you used to bluff me just now — I ought to have seen through it. But I was rattled by those few strings of moves of yours and couldn't turn the corner in time. That's how you got me."
He said it all openly, laying bare even the reason for his own humiliation, with something of the easy grace of an elder of the martial world conceding a loss.
Gu Chengming halted, half convinced.
In truth the man's words carried real weight. That whole chain of moves had emptied nearly every card in Gu Chengming's hand, yet the old man in front of him looked more or less unaffected — which meant that if he genuinely wanted a fight, Gu Chengming would come out of it with nothing good.
Gu Chengming sorted the pieces through his mind at speed, then slowly let his right hand fall from the sword hilt.
"Senior." He folded his hands together and offered a respectful Daoist salute. "This junior gave much offense just now. I ask the Senior's forbearance."
Looking at this exquisitely mannered young man, the Nameless Daoist felt a great many things at once.
Boy, back when you were chasing me around hacking and punching and slapping hats onto my head, where exactly was all this reverence for one's elders?
Grumbling stayed internal. Outwardly he waved a hand and put on the magnanimity proper to a senior. "No harm done, no harm done. Young men run hot in the blood and don't measure their strikes. This old man understands completely."
As he said it, he glanced down at his grey robe, sliced open by sword qi in several long gashes, and beat at the dust coating him head to foot.
The old Daoist pressed that particular grievance down flat and dredged up a kindly smile again.
Once the dust settled, the two of them found a reasonably level corner of the half-collapsed side chamber and sat.
Gu Chengming folded his legs and worked his breathing, quietly circulating his technique to refill his parched reserves of spiritual power while his mind sorted through everything he had on the man across from him.
Nameless Daoist. Current Gate Master of the Myriad-Theft Gate. Nuo Tao's master. Direct disciple's disciple of the Myriad-Theft Immortal Sovereign.
True, inside the Secret Realm the founding patriarch had dismissed the man as an "outdated almanac" and had a good deal to say about the trial his descendant had left behind. But a direct line was a direct line. As the indirect inheritor of the heavenly Dharma-Station "Lián Tian Zhi" and the strongest living practitioner of the Dao of Theft, his power was beyond question.
On cultivation alone, the fight just now was proof enough — genuine, unadulterated late Fifth Realm. And the Myriad-Theft Spirit Pupils, the perception-veil, and that divine ability to steal objects across empty air all confirmed from the side that even among late Fifth Realm cultivators, the Nameless Daoist stood well toward the front.
And taking everything he had said together…
"So," Gu Chengming broke the silence first, "the Senior infiltrated the Yunyue Sect to investigate the Dao Plague as well?"
The Nameless Daoist inclined his head slightly.
"This old man noticed that the karmic threads in the direction of the Emerald Screen Range had gone snarled. I traced them the whole way back and finally pinned it down to the Yunyue Sect."
He drew his index finger lightly through the air, faint filaments of light trailing from the fingertip. "Karmic threads are the eyes of us Illicit Cultivators. Ordinary cultivators feel out the road with spiritual sense. This old man relies on causality. Wherever the tangle of cause and effect stops making sense, that's where something's hiding."
"The karmic threads here have suddenly warped. Plainly, something out of the ordinary has occurred."
That immediately brought Gu Chengming back to what he had seen and heard while examining the seal at the Hunyuan Sect. "Then in this past half year, has the Senior turned up any leads?"
An odd look crossed the Nameless Daoist's face. Rather than answering directly, he asked a question of his own. "Young friend, do you know what the Dao Plague actually is?"
Gu Chengming considered. "An ancient evil qi seeping out of the seal. It erodes a cultivator's Dao Heart and feeds on baleful qi."
The Nameless Daoist shook his head. He rose, walked to the half-collapsed wall of the side chamber, and groped among the broken masonry for a moment.
He wrenched out a grey-blue brick. On its underside were graven several lines of archaic patterning, ancient enough that the edges had long since blurred.
"These patterns predate the founding of the Yunyue Sect." He passed the brick to Gu Chengming. "The foundations of the entire Emerald Screen Range are riddled with the things. This old man has spent half a year digging under the pill room every single day, piecing together every pattern I turned up… and the full picture isn't a formation at all. It's an organ."
"Buried deep beneath the whole Emerald Screen Range is… part of something's body."
"This old man followed the vines back to the melon, tracing those channels downward, and at the very deepest point of the Emerald Screen Range I found that thing's core. It's a hollow."
Gu Chengming's brows drew together.
"The rim of the hollow is expanding outward. Every inch it expands, the channels under the Emerald Screen Range grow another inch to match. The Dao Plague seeping out of the seal isn't the result of centuries of neglect and a seal falling apart at all. It's those channels forcing the seal open as they grow."
The Nameless Daoist let his idleness fall away. "The seal the ancient powers laid down was never meant to deal with the Dao Plague."
"That thing was meant to plug the hollow."
Gu Chengming shut his eyes for a moment, and only then did the whole chain of logic settle into place in his mind.
Beneath the Emerald Screen Range lay a "hollow." The rim of the hollow expanded outward in the form of fleshly organs and "channels." That savage growth had cracked the seal apart, releasing what the world had mistaken for the root of the illness — the "Dao Plague."
So the Dao Plague was not the cause at all. At best it was a complication. The real lesion was that hollow, still developing.
"And that hollow — what exactly is it?" Gu Chengming asked.
The Nameless Daoist sighed and explained further. "Have you ever heard of a Pre-Nascent Dharma Rank?"
Gu Chengming shook his head.
"Dharma-Stations, too, are divided into the living and the dead." The Nameless Daoist weighed each word. "When the founding patriarch attained the Lián Tian Zhi, that Dharma-Station could be called alive. And when a Sixth Realm power falls, his Dharma-Station is either passed to those who come after, or disperses into heaven and earth, or sinks into slumber. All of that is the life cycle of a 'born Dharma-Station.'"
"But hidden within the Heavenly Dao there are also Dharma-Stations that no one has ever attained."
"They have never been born, never held a true name, never been known by the world. They simply hang suspended between heaven and earth like seeds that have yet to break their shells, waiting grimly for one particular version update — for some trigger, that is — to call them down into the world."
"Such existences are called 'Pre-Nascent Dharma Ranks.'"
The old Daoist pointed at the grey brick underfoot. "That hollow beneath the Emerald Screen Range is exactly the… placenta in which a Pre-Nascent Dharma Rank is gestating."
Understanding broke over Gu Chengming. No wonder the Imperial Astronomical Bureau's diviners had run into cognitive derangement when they tried to observe the Yunyue Sect.
An Unborn Dharma-Station was a concept that did not exist within their framework of cognition at all. So no matter how clear the images the diviners saw, those images were doomed to be "unparseable."
Which meant the misaligned shadows had been no accident either. Within that region, the Unborn Dharma-Station's state of "about to be born, not yet born" was a colossal source of interference, wrenching the surrounding physical laws and causal logic out of true.
The bedrock rule that "a shadow must follow its body" had simply stopped functioning over there.
As for the sect-protecting grand formation drawing inward — that had never been about keeping something inside from getting out. It was to keep the outside world's rules from being further eroded and assimilated.
Following that thread, Gu Chengming had a fair guess as to what had brought the Nameless Daoist here.
"So the Senior's honored arrival—" Gu Chengming lifted his eyes to the man. "—wasn't entirely for the sake of a mere Dao Plague, I imagine."
In Gu Chengming's understanding, the Myriad-Theft Gate had always been a neutral sect leaning orthodox — at most one that robbed the rich to feed the poor — and its members were riddled with small vices. Pure-hearted good people they were not.
At his first meeting with Nuo Tao, her hands had been less than clean. Now, meeting her master, the first meeting had likewise gone less than pleasantly.
Would the Myriad-Theft Gate really volunteer for something as thankless and exhausting as cleaning up a Dao Plague? Gu Chengming had his doubts.
The Nameless Daoist did not deny it. "The Dao Plague does need treating, or the several thousand souls of the two sects in the Emerald Screen Range all end here. But this old man didn't come down from the mountain to play physician to the world."
"A Pre-Nascent Dharma Rank has no master yet. No true name yet."
At that, his eyelids snapped up.
"This old man's instincts tell him — this Dharma-Station is worth stealing!"
The old Daoist had not lied outright, but he had certainly kept a card back. That he would deal with the Dao Plague along the way, Gu Chengming believed. That was the Myriad-Theft Gate's fine old tradition, after all — set your objective with the main quest, help yourself along the side quests.
Think back to the Northern Territory: his number-one hanger-on, Nuo Tao, had the same habit. Ostensibly she was out on sect training. Behind the scenes she had "borrowed" twelve spirit artifacts from the Myriad Gold Pavilion and left the shelves bare.
A crooked beam above makes a crooked post below. The Myriad-Theft Gate's culture was passed down intact.
So the Nameless Daoist's target was, without much doubt, this Unborn Dharma-Station.
"Steal the heavenly secrets, steal causality."
That was the ancestral maxim of the Myriad-Theft Immortal Sovereign's line.
To an Illicit Cultivator, a Dharma-Station that heaven and earth had not even entered into the registry yet was quite simply the finest ownerless object in all the world.
Gu Chengming even had grounds to suspect that when the Myriad-Theft Immortal Sovereign laid down the rule "the Dao of theft: give me the use of what you can't use anyway," he had done it specifically to reserve for his descendants a morally high ground with plenty of flex in it.
What counted as "can't use"? Well, it hasn't even been born yet — of course it can't use it.
And since you can't use it, how could this old man taking it in advance be called stealing? Call it an advance withdrawal.
— Now that was airtight bandit logic.
Gu Chengming swallowed the commentary. "Then how does the Senior intend to handle the source of the Dao Plague?"
Hearing that, the Nameless Daoist broke into a grin.
So long as the boy was willing to talk business. What he had dreaded was the lad being a stickler and pressing him on whether he meant to swallow the Dharma-Station whole. The answer was yes, of course, but saying it out loud made for inelegant table manners.
"The hollow is growing, the seal is breaking. To pull out the root of the sickness, one has to go down into the very bottom layer of the Emerald Screen Range and strike straight at the core of the hollow."
The old Daoist began ticking off fingers. "This old man tried slipping in once already. When I came out I'd forgotten every last thing — couldn't even work out how many hours I'd spent down there."
"This Unborn Dharma-Station warps the rules to an absurd degree. This old man has no confidence he could get out whole."
At that point his gaze drifted, none too naturally, toward the storage pouch at Gu Chengming's waist.
More precisely, it settled on where the End Lotus hung.
"Which is why this old man conceived a mortal longing for that spirit artifact of yours."
He was perfectly candid, laying out even his motive for the crime in plain terms.
"The divine ability of that artifact lies in skipping the process and arriving directly at a determined outcome. If this old man could establish that the outcome 'arrive at the core of the hollow' is a safe one, then I could use the End Lotus to jump straight over that stretch of ruined law in the middle and avoid the risk of having my cognition eaten away."
"That's the only method this old man has managed to think of so far."
"What the Senior said just now was 'this old man arrives at the core,'" Gu Chengming pointed out. "Not 'we.'"
The smile on the Nameless Daoist's face froze slightly.
"Ah, a slip of the tongue, slip of the tongue. Old age loosens the jaw." He laughed it off and glossed over it.
Gu Chengming did not bother exposing the shoddy acting.
They both knew perfectly well it was no slip. From the very start, the old fellow's plan had been to solo the dungeon. Con the End Lotus out of him, drop straight into the core, and claim the Dharma-Station for himself before it descended into the world.
And the Dao Plague?
The moment the Dharma-Station was stolen away or stabilized, the hollow would stop expanding on its own. Pull up the radish and the mud comes with it — the crisis of the seal would resolve itself without a blow being struck. Fixing the Dao Plague was purely a free gift bundled with the Dharma-Station.
It wasn't that he had no wish to save anyone. It was only that in the eyes of the Myriad-Theft Gate's Gate Master, the Dharma-Station would always rank first.
[Zhouli's Heaven-Human Heart-Rectifying Method surfaces a line of cold, austere ink: This man's words are sincere, yet he acts with private gain foremost and public righteousness as an afterthought. In the end, not the orthodox path.]
[The Immortal-Concealing Wine-Sword Formula belches, and gold characters drift up at their leisure: He's a thief-cultivator. You expecting him to sit the civil exams and turn sage? So long as the outcome's good and his methods aren't too tacky, let it go.]
For once the two techniques hadn't started scrapping over the same man. Their angles were poles apart, but they had arrived at a sort of accidental consensus.
Gu Chengming filed all of it away.
Whatever medicine the Nameless Daoist was selling, on the dungeon objective of "resolve the Dao Plague," the two of them were on the same side. All the more so given that the man came with a late Fifth Realm stat sheet and had been lurking underground for half a year — his clear rate on the walkthrough was far ahead of Gu Chengming's own.
Cooperation was viable.
"Senior." Gu Chengming finished ordering his thoughts and spoke in a low, level voice.
"The matter of lending out the End Lotus can naturally be discussed when the time is ripe. But before that—"
He looked the Nameless Daoist directly in the eyes.
"With the trouble inside the Yunyue Sect, this junior needs the Senior to lend a hand."
The Nameless Daoist blinked.
Then his whole face crinkled with delight, exactly like a crooked merchant who had just closed a very large deal.
"Easily done, easily done."
He knocked the dust off his Daoist robe and sat back down cross-legged. That particular slouching indolence of a pill-room steward grew right back onto him, unaltered.
"Though — young friend." The old Daoist drew the syllables out.
"Mm?"
The Nameless Daoist suddenly leaned in and lowered his voice.
"You and the Tao girl… exactly how far along have things gotten?"
Gu Chengming's expression did not shift by a hair, and his answer came smoothly. "Miss Nuo is a capable helper this junior came to know in the Northern Territory. We looked after one another. Master and pe— ahem. Simply the camaraderie of fellow travelers on the Dao."
"Then what's the story with the Tao girl clutching that Dragon-Seeking Token you gave her ever since she got back from the Northern Territory, sitting there grinning like a fool all day long?"
"Senior." Gu Chengming interrupted the incantation by force. "The calamity of the Dao Plague is upon us. Should we not settle that matter first?"
The Nameless Daoist smacked his lips and reluctantly swallowed the second half of his gossip.
Over the next several days, Gu Chengming spent his daylight hours sitting in meditation in his guest quarters and his nights meeting with the Nameless Daoist to trade information.
Working both ends, several matters that had been shrouded in cloud and mist began at last to show their outlines.
The first: over the past year, someone had been quietly slipping an extra ingredient into the formulas the Yunyue Sect fired in its pill furnaces. The Nameless Daoist had dug the truth out of the pill room's storehouse — the substance was no proper spirit herb at all, but mineral powder scraped out of the spirit veins at the deepest point of the Emerald Screen Range. Compared against the crystallizations on the surface of those underground "channels," it matched down to the last grain.
In other words, every spirit pill and miracle elixir the Yunyue Sect's disciples swallowed daily came laced with the Dao Plague's "spawn."
And the man whose signature had let that foul batch into the storehouse was Sect Head Qin Ruoxu himself.
The second concerned the whereabouts of that same esteemed Sect Head.
At the Myriad Wonders Assembly the Sect Head had scarcely been mentioned, yet the scattered fragments of talk, pieced together, pointed to a truth that turned the blood cold: within the last three months Qin Ruoxu had gone missing no fewer than seven times. Two days at the short end, half a month at the long. He gave no word to Deputy Sect Head Liu Yezhou, and left behind not a single travel writ recording his departure from the sect.
Liu Yezhou had grown suspicious and investigated too, and had come away empty-handed every time.
Gu Chengming laid all of this carefully alongside the divinations of fate Ji Yixi had cast earlier. If the Sect Head himself were one link in this disaster, every anomaly on the board suddenly had an explanation.
"Qin Ruoxu is hiding something."
On one wind-dark night, Gu Chengming shook out his conclusions before the old Daoist.
The old man was cradling his iron teapot, sipping cold tea with his eyes half-lidded. He heard it out, then nodded without haste.
"Hiding something is putting it mildly." He set the teapot aside. "This old man has been watching him three months. Every time the man leaves the sect he heads straight for the depths of the Emerald Screen Range, bores down along those tangled channels underground, and finally passes clean out of the range of my perception."
"And each time he comes back with all his parts intact, the karmic threads on him have thinned a little further."
Gu Chengming's long brows knit.
"Every trip shaves off another layer of causality. A great power of a sect at the late Fifth Realm should have hundreds upon thousands of strands of karmic retribution wound about him. But look at Qin Ruoxu now—"
The Nameless Daoist held up two withered fingers and made a small pinching motion in the empty air.
"Thin as a paper effigy."
At just this juncture, word came in as well from the Hunyuan Sect on the northern slope of the Emerald Screen Range.
Hua Daiyi used a message jade slip to inform Gu Chengming that since his departure, the work of repairing the seal had continued on schedule. The three makeshift warding divination plates were holding steady, and the outward surge of the Dao Plague was barely being kept within safe limits.
But the disturbances deep in the spirit veins had grown more frequent.
From beneath the Formation Eye of the seal came a dull, grinding sound of earth in motion, the intervals between them shortening. Sect Head Song Heng had already issued a dharma decree adding two further layers of alarm divination plates around the seal's perimeter, with orders to send word by voice transmission at the first sign of trouble.
At the end of the jade slip, Hua Daiyi had added one more line:
"Little Gu, you'll need to move faster. By my reckoning that Dao Plague is going to break loose any day now."
Everything was quickening its pace beneath the surface.
Gu Chengming and the Nameless Daoist talked it over and decided against waiting any longer. They would strike camp at once and go sound the bottom of the Emerald Screen Range.
The Nameless Daoist handed over in full the survey map of the underground channels he had ground out over half a year — resting places along the route, the boundaries of the killing grounds where the laws of heaven and earth ran scrambled, and the several dead zones he had blundered into while risking the passage alone, all marked clearly.
Gu Chengming, for his part, took stock of what remained in the End Lotus. Some of it had been spent sparring with the Nameless Daoist, but a little over seventy percent was left. Used sparingly, that would see them through.
[The Red Dust Phantom Body Formula turns his preparations over several more times, wanting nothing left to chance.]
Before daybreak on the third day, with the waning moon hanging low but not yet set.
The two of them slipped out of the Side Chamber of the Pill Room and, following the hidden passage the Nameless Daoist had bored earlier, descended into the underground abyss of the Emerald Screen Range.
Behind them the Yunyue Sect was still bright with lamplight, its whole population deep in dreams.
The world underground was far vaster than Gu Chengming had reckoned.
The first stretch of tunnel still showed the shape of human excavation. The Nameless Daoist had spent a full half year using the deft touch of a thief-cultivator to hollow out a narrow path through unyielding rock without making a sound.
The path was cramped, wide enough for one man turned sideways and brushing the walls, and along the stone were faint gold marks left where the Myriad-Theft Spirit Pupils had swept over them, like a row of everlasting lamps.
The two of them went hunched over for perhaps half an hour before the narrow path opened onto a natural dry river running through limestone caverns.
The bed was cracked and parched, but the old scour-marks of running water on the stone walls did not lie. Spirit liquid had truly flowed here once. The Nameless Daoist said it had been drained dry decades ago — all of it swallowed into the bellies of those "channels" underground.
They followed the dried channel down into the depths.
The deeper they went, the more the channels clinging to the rock walls drew the eye.
At first they were only scattered dark-red veinings, like ore threading naturally through stubborn stone. But as their steps carried them further in, the veining grew denser and coarser, its color shifting from dark red to deep purple, until at last it became a spilled-ink glow.
At a certain depth, those patterns began, unmistakably, to pulse — tightening and loosening in measure, slow and long, swelling and shrinking, exactly like the pulse of a living thing.
The Nameless Daoist led the way, faint radiance flickering in the depths of both eyes, gold light turning as he screened every trace of qi within three feet ahead.
"Don't touch the walls," he warned without turning his head. "These channels all have eyes. Brush one and you tug a hair to move the whole body."
Gu Chengming nodded and moved through the crevice as if over thin ice, holding a good half-foot clear of the rock.
By unspoken agreement the two of them kept in contact by secret voice transmission — not out of idleness, but because in a place this grim, dead silence only wound the nerves tighter. A few words now and then steadied the Dao Heart.
"Senior," Gu Chengming began. "Has Miss Nuo Tao been well of late?"
The Nameless Daoist gave a low, muffled laugh at that.
"Guess what that girl's busy with just now."
"This junior is slow. I can't guess."
"Sealed in closed-door cultivation." There was no small measure of an old man's gratification in his voice. "Says she means to put down proper roots in the Third Realm, so that come the next meeting she can hand a certain someone one whale of a fortune."
"As to which promising young talent that 'certain someone' might be, this old man won't embarrass anyone to his face."
Gu Chengming's face and pulse stayed perfectly even as he steered the conversation elsewhere on the current.
"On the Unborn Dharma-Station the Senior mentioned earlier — there's a point this junior still doesn't grasp."
The Nameless Daoist fished out the small gourd of wine he carried on his person. The iron teapot was too unwieldy for this, so he had swapped it for something lighter.
He tipped his head back for a mouthful and gestured for the boy to go on.
"If such a Dharma-Station is to enter the world, what exactly is it lacking?"
"Now that's the right question." The Nameless Daoist put his mockery away and his face turned grave. "For a Dharma-Station to be born, by this old man's reckoning it lacks two things. The first is a 'Venerable Form.' The second is an 'Edict Name.'"
"The Venerable Form isn't hard to grasp. It's a vacancy on the great board of the Heavenly Dao. Think of the Heavenly Dao as one boundless game of go, and the Dharma-Stations as the points where stones can be laid. Some points already have stones on them — those are the born Dharma-Stations. Some sit empty still — those are the Unborn Dharma-Stations."
"As for the 'Edict Name,' that's the rite by which the vacancy is invested with a supreme true meaning."
He raised a withered knuckle and pointed at the vault above them.
"When the Myriad-Theft Immortal Sovereign attained the Lián Tian Zhi Dharma-Station in his day, what he did was pour everything he had understood of the word 'theft' across an entire lifetime into that vacancy. His Dao became the Dharma-Station's true meaning, and only then did the Dharma-Station have a name and thereby 'descend into the world.'"
"Then the bone and sinew of a Dharma-Station isn't brute force, but some true meaning of a law between heaven and earth?"
"Precisely so." The Nameless Daoist nodded. "Those powers at the Sixth Realm and beyond — why are they revered as incarnations of the Great Dao? Only because by their own Dao they forced a rule to stand in this world, and the Heavenly Dao held its nose and acknowledged it, and so bestowed the matching Dharma-Station."
"But the Unborn Dharma-Station is an oddity. It has never received a Name-Decree from anyone. That vacancy is spotless."
"By the ordinary course of things, a Pre-Nascent Dharma Rank simply waits, withering, until some power's Dao lineage in this world happens to fit that vacancy exactly, and only then does it trigger the tribulation of the 'Edict Name.'"
"But the one pressed down beneath the Emerald Screen Range—"
The Nameless Daoist's expression turned unreadable.
"There's some nameless wretched thing overstepping its bounds and issuing the Edict Name in its place."
"Not any cultivator. Not His Lordship the Heavenly Dao, either. Some other foul thing is pouring true meaning into that vacancy for all it's worth."
He gave Gu Chengming a sidelong look. "And that's where this old man finds the trouble. By rights, the authority over a Dharma-Station's Edict Name lies solely with the one who attains the Dao. For something to bypass that iron law outright and force true meaning in by main strength — this old man has lived a great many years, and this is the first time I've seen it."
They pressed on in silence for another stretch. The pulsing of the surrounding channels grew visibly more frantic, going from one beat per breath to one beat per half-breath, hammering away as though hurrying them along to some grand performance.
All at once the Nameless Daoist stopped.
"We're here."
He pointed ahead.
"Past this point lies the killing ground where the laws of heaven and earth are broken."
Gu Chengming stepped across that invisible boundary stone, and the first thing he noticed was his own weight.
In this stretch of the world, the rule of "falling" had been rewritten.
Ahead of him, the Nameless Daoist's footwork grew guarded too. Gone was the loose, strolling ease of before. Every step now had to be verified in advance by the light of the Myriad-Theft Spirit Pupils before he dared set it down.
"Stay right behind this old man," he said, dropping his voice. "There's no telling what filth crawls out around here."
The words were not out before a knob of rock the size of an infant's fist, jutting from the wall ahead, abruptly burst into powder.
The Nameless Daoist's withered right hand hung awkwardly in midair. All he had meant to do was reach out a finger and test the stone's depth.
His fingertip had not so much as grazed it, and the stone had crumbled to dust of its own accord.
"…"
The Nameless Daoist withdrew his hand with visible reluctance, the expression on his old face a marvel to behold.
"Karmic retribution. Reverse the Effect to the Cause." He lowered his voice to explain. "The natural law that 'contact begets shattering' has been run fast. This old man's hand hadn't touched it yet, but the evil consequence of shattering landed first."
Gu Chengming's brows locked tight. "How far gone is the causality here?"
"Right now it's only dead matter. If we go deeper—" He shook his head like a rattle-drum. "Last time this old man probed to this sort of depth, I watched an underground river run itself dry before the water ever flowed. 'Flowing' is the cause, 'drying' the effect. The effect ran out ahead of the cause."
"Any deeper into the lair than that and this old man didn't dare go. Because I noticed I was starting to forget the path of retreat behind me."
The two of them pushed on against the unnatural.
The wreckage of law was spreading at a pace the eye could follow.
The turning of time began to convulse as well.
Sometimes ten paces burned away the time it took a stick of incense to gutter out. Sometimes a single step swallowed half an hour.
Gu Chengming had been counting the circulations of spiritual power through his dantian to measure the hours. Now even that most basic of yardsticks could not be trusted.
Their conversation broke off entirely. Not for lack of wanting to speak — this uncanny place simply ground away a living thing's spirit.
Every extra half-word cost more of his heart's blood to weigh: the true words I let out, when they reach his ears, are they still what I meant? Or has this scrambled causality stirred them into something else, a death warrant in a different shape?
The air grew heavier and more oppressive. The channels coiling over the rock walls thickened further, from scattered blood-threads into a net that blotted out the sky. The black-purple demonic patterning glowed with a dim light, and that halo kept time with the pulse, brightening and dimming, treacherous and unreadable.
And the skin-crawling sense of "something is watching" had grown steadily stronger from the moment they crossed into this place of broken law.
The sound of their footfalls scattered outward and took a full several breaths to come echoing back off the distant walls. The vault above sank into an ink-black stillness of unknowable height, with only the channels' faint glow keeping a thread of brightness alive.
Every wall of the cavern, every fragment of broken rock, everything underfoot and everything overhead, lay wrapped tight in dense black-purple patterning. The demonic lines lit, throbbed — ten thousand strands of them all striking the same beat.
The entire boundless cavern was one heart, beating with tremendous force.
The Nameless Daoist pulled up short at the cavern mouth and drove the Myriad-Theft Spirit Pupils to their absolute limit.
Golden pupil-light blazed in his eye sockets like a sun at noon, driving without restraint through layer after layer of the murk inside the cavern.
"In here—"
Something seemed to lodge in his throat like a boulder. The dazzling gold flared once in a shudder of pure fright — and in the next instant, the Myriad-Theft Spirit Pupils glimpsed a thing that made the pupil-art itself recoil in terror.
"There's… something…" He forced the words out one at a time.
And then every channel in the entire cavern lit up at once.
Ten thousand strands, in the same instant, shed their dim black-purple and erupted into a ghastly white glare that stabbed straight into the spirit soul.
The vast cavern was swallowed whole by a boundless white day.
And within that blinding whiteness, a shape beyond all mortal cognition manifested plainly before Gu Chengming's eyes.
He saw it clearly now. The cavern's walls curved inward in an uncanny arc; the channels sprawling everywhere were arranged in layers along that curve, spreading from the center outward in every direction. And the luminous core hung at the exact middle of the cavern's deepest point, condensed into a pearl-solid orb of ghastly white light.
The channels were the bloodshot threads. The light source was the pupil.
The two of them stood, brazen as anything, at the dead center of an eye vast enough to hold up the sky.
And that eye had opened.
This so-called "Domain of Observation" descended without a sound.
There was no mountain-toppling gale, no world-ending burst of spiritual energy, no pain of blades biting flesh.
Only the "natural law" of the surroundings changed.
No — the natural law hadn't changed.
It was that the subtle awareness of "being watched" had come completely alive.
The itch of that earlier, glancing scrutiny multiplied a thousandfold, ten thousandfold in the instant the cavern lit — from furtive spying in the dark into something open-faced, torch-in-hand, a dead stare with nowhere to flee to in heaven or earth.
The first to bear the brunt was, of course, the Nameless Daoist.
His Myriad-Theft Spirit Pupils were flared to their utmost — overbearing gold light sweeping unrestrained across the cavern's mysteries, meaning to pierce the rock, peel back the channels, cross past the false surface of things and drag out the bedrock source of the Heavenly Dao.
And then he got exactly what he wished for.
That enormous eye — or rather, the unknown power that wore this entire cavern as its shell — was staring back at him without so much as a blink.
Two lines of sight collided in the void with a soundless crash.
The Myriad-Theft Spirit Pupils were said to see through the workings of the myriad worlds.
And the Domain of Observation likewise scrutinized all phenomena under heaven.
When two "laws of spying" met head-on in a narrow road, no earth-shaking slaughter followed.
Instead they were like two ancient mirrors, each reflecting the other.
That existence saw the Nameless Daoist looking at it, and the Nameless Daoist saw that existence seeing him looking at it.
Recursion. Infinite recursion.
Like two ancient mirrors set face to face, refracting between them a corridor without any end at all, every reflection scrutinizing the next, every reflection stared at by the last, without limit, around and around.
The Nameless Daoist's spiritual sense tore off down that corridor, sinking deeper with every stride.
His Myriad-Theft Spirit Pupils flickered for dear life, groping for a single step to stand on in this bottomless pit — but every layer was a mirrored dead end, and every layer was staring him down.
The old man's body locked in place, the gold in the depths of his pupils guttering like a candle in the wind, flaring and dimming.
Gu Chengming registered it at once. "Senior!"
No answer came.
The old man's gaze bored straight ahead. He was looking at something illusory that Gu Chengming could not see.
Gu Chengming gripped the End Lotus and was reaching out to haul him back when, without the slightest warning, a woman's voice rose out of the empty air.
"So you couldn't hold yourselves back after all."
The voice echoed up at once from the rock walls on all sides, from the shattered stone underfoot, from the vault overhead — and from the depths of Gu Chengming's own Sea of Consciousness.
It was warm and unhurried, with a light thread of amusement in it, for all the world like the lady of a house receiving guests from her seat of honor.
"And this scene matches the script of the old world line down to the last detail."
The stabbing white light within the cavern drew itself in somewhat and cooled into moonlight, clear and cold as frost.
Gu Chengming steadied his stance. Rather than blunder forward, he swept his eyes over his surroundings, hunting for the owner of that voice.
There was no source to find. The voice seemed to be this stretch of heaven and earth itself, saturating every inch of it.
— Old world line?
The phrase brought him up short.
At this point, a certain long-standing consequence must be untangled.
As to the true identity of that voice.
— Her name was the Record of the Myriad Worlds.
The name will no doubt ring familiar.
It is precisely the technique cultivated by Ji Yixi, imperial princess of the Great Qian. Yet a distinction as wide as heaven and earth must be drawn here.
Ji Yixi's Record of the Myriad Worlds was born of the present world line, and its power extends only to "observation" — passively mirroring the variables of ten thousand fated tracks. The Record of the Myriad Worlds lying dormant beneath the abyss of the Emerald Screen Range was another matter entirely.
— She came from a different fated track.
A track of the old world that had long since burned away in the river of ages, leaving not even ash behind.
In that world there had also been a realm of immortal cultivation, also Dao lineages and sects, also Dharma-Stations and a Heavenly Dao. There, too, the Record of the Myriad Worlds had been a technique that inscribed the myriad variables.
And then calamity came.
Not the withering of the Dao. Not the exhaustion of spiritual energy. It was annihilation, root and branch.
Great powers fell, Dao lineages collapsed, Dharma-Stations shattered, the Heavenly Dao perished. The threads of causality snapped strand by strand, the laws of heaven and earth came apart, and even the principle that "this world once existed" teetered on the brink of nothing.
All things returned to nothing in the ash of that calamity.
One thing alone remained.
The Record of the Myriad Worlds.
She was not metal or stone or flesh, not mountains or rivers or grass or trees, not spiritual energy or true essence.
She was "the trace left behind" itself.
A scroll can be burned in fire, but the fact that "this scroll was once read" does not scatter with the paper ash. It becomes an ownerless brand within the bedrock laws of the myriad worlds, suspended there forever.
The Record of the Myriad Worlds was that brand.
The whole teeming multitude of one fated track from beginning to end, every flicker of light and shadow from the opening of heaven and earth to the extinction of all laws, every faintest ripple.
She survived the destruction not because her Station reached the heavens, but because the aspect of her existence happened to lie outside the territory the law of "destruction" could touch. Supreme powers may shatter the void, cut down the spirit soul, erase causality — but they cannot sever "the trace left behind."
A trace occupies no space, consumes no spiritual essence, follows no causality.
She simply "is." Formless and featureless, the Record of the Myriad Worlds rose out of the ashes of calamity, crossed the boundless void, and at last, some tens of thousands of years ago, quietly took root in an obscure corner of the present world line.
Deep in the Emerald Screen Range, where she had dreamed the long dream of ten thousand years.
Until, one day, she woke from that slumber. Perhaps the tide of spiritual energy in the earth-veins roused her. Perhaps the seeking thoughts of mortal cultivators seeped down into the abyss. Or perhaps it was simply fate.
On waking, one thought alone remained in her mind.
The Record of the Myriad Worlds could observe all things — the past, present and future of every phenomenon, the countless branchings of ten thousand fated tracks, every "if only" and every "perhaps" fell within her sight. One thing alone she could never observe.
Herself.
One who watches the sea cannot watch himself, just as an eye cannot look upon an eye. That was the single paradox of the Record of the Myriad Worlds' existence.
Yet in the instant the old world crumbled, in that last thought as all laws returned to void, she had caught the faintest glimpse.
When the ridgepoles of the laws of heaven and earth came down, everything that depended on them shed its disguise and showed its origin.
Cultivators' Dao Hearts came loose from their bodies, Dharma-Stations peeled away from the Heavenly Dao, and even the Heavenly Dao itself laid bare its mottled underlayer. As the one who held the brush for that world, the Record of the Myriad Worlds had her own true aspect thrown into relief by the blaze of the collapse.
She had been a hair's breadth from seeing herself.
All she lacked was a "vessel" able to bear the information of her origin — a "clear mirror" able to reflect her true face from outside herself.
Had she possessed that mirror back then, she could have seen her own countenance in the moment all laws perished.
She could have unraveled the one great confusion of her heart.
"I — what am I?"
That minute obsession became the sole engine of the ten thousand years that followed. She would forge that mirror.
An entity able to carry her true aspect. A creation stripped from her own origin, existing independently, available to be observed.
The Pre-Nascent Dharma Rank at the bottom of the Emerald Screen Range's abyss was the mirror she had spent ten thousand years watering into being. The Dharma-Station was her reflection, her extension, the measuring rod by which she would examine herself.
On the day the Dharma-Station ripened and fell from the vine, the Record of the Myriad Worlds would look through it and behold herself at last, in perfect clarity.
And at this very moment, the Record of the Myriad Worlds was observing her two intruders with considerable interest.
One had already sunk into the mire. Heir of the Myriad-Theft Gate, inheritor of the Myriad-Theft Spirit Pupils, a late Fifth Realm master of Illicit Cultivation.
Suppress "observation" with "observation," and the Myriad-Theft Spirit Pupils fell into an endless self-reflection — a garment cut precisely to his measure. In the old world too the Record of the Myriad Worlds had met men of the Myriad-Theft Gate, Illicit Cultivators coveting Dharma-Stations. The ending had been identical every time: cognition locked shut, a prison drawn on the ground around them.
But Gu Chengming was plainly a variable.
An anomaly unseen in ten thousand fated tracks, which stirred a certain curiosity in the Record of the Myriad Worlds.
How interesting… though interesting was as far as it went.
A mere Third Realm cultivator. However dazzling his talent, he could raise no waves before the Record of the Myriad Worlds — because the Record of the Myriad Worlds was not a cultivator.
She had no flesh or bone, no meridians, no sea of qi. She required no circulation of the heavens, depended on no external spirit implements.
She was an insubstantial "principle."
Blades cannot sever a principle. True fire cannot burn away an old scroll. You cannot so much as scratch her — because the precondition of "taking injury" is possessing a body that can be damaged.
And she had none. She was only a remnant dream of the old world coiled in the Emerald Screen Abyss, using the earth-veins as tendrils, the cavern as an eye, the Dao Plague as her dew and provender. These were nothing but her "projections," not her true aspect.
Her true aspect was formless, traceless, everywhere at once and nowhere to be found.
So no matter how hard the cards in this youngster Gu Chengming's hand, no matter what world-shaking sword qi he could bring down, there was no possibility of his obstructing the Record of the Myriad Worlds by so much as a hair.
Of this the Record of the Myriad Worlds was entirely certain, just as she was certain of the thousand calculations and ten thousand stratagems of ten thousand years.
Everything lay within the game.
And now.
It was time to deal with the second intruder.
At that same moment, under the Record of the Myriad Worlds' influence, the scene before Gu Chengming's eyes had changed utterly.
He now stood at the midpoint of a long corridor, feet unmoved, his gaze traveling slowly across the doors on either side.
The nearest was a wooden door with warm yellow lamplight bleeding through the crack. He walked up and pushed it open.
Behind it lay the quiet little courtyard on the back mountain of the Wenjian Sect.
Autumn sun, osmanthus trees swaying, tea steaming on the stone table. Yu Wenqiu sat beneath the tree leafing through a book of idle stories, and at the sound of the hinge she lifted her head, her eyes curving into a lovely arc.
"You're back? Why so early today?"
Her smile was gentle and unhurried, exactly as it lived in his memory.
Gu Chengming looked at her for two breaths, then reached up and pulled the door shut.
He turned and walked to the heavy stone door opposite and pushed it open.
Wind and heavy snow blew into his face. Behind the door was the deep winter of the Northern Territory. Nuo Tao was crouched beside a pit in the snow, rubbing her small reddened hands together. The instant she saw him her big eyes lit up and she sprang to her feet.
"Brother Gu! You finally got here! This girl's about frozen into a popsicle—"
Twin tails whipping in the blizzard, she came running straight at him.
Gu Chengming's face did not change. He closed the door again.
The soaring eaves of Floating Isle City, Fu Xiaoxiao nestled against his shoulder, her sleeping face serene.
The solemn hall of the Night-Watch Bureau, Zhou Qingmu holding a blue-and-white porcelain cup, smiling as she made conversation. "Commander Gu has worked hard."
The Tianding Sect, Xu Huayi bent over a desk painting, her whole face lighting up with delight when she turned around.
The Harmonious Joy Sect, Su Qiuzhi coming up on tiptoe to brush the osmanthus blossoms off the top of his head.
Behind every door lay a world with no undercurrent moving in it anywhere.
"Interesting, aren't they?"
The voice rolled through the corridor again, carrying the composure of a connoisseur appraising a fine work.
"These are all possibilities along your causal track. Every road leads to a perfect ending — no Dao Plague to face, no mastermind to hunt down, and the whole sorry business of the Emerald Screen abyss no concern of yours."
"You need only choose a door, step over the threshold, and then—"
"Dwell forever within that happy possibility."
"The Nameless Daoist, the Yunyue Sect, the Hunyuan Sect — someone else will tidy up after them. You needn't wear yourself out any longer."
"You've done enough, haven't you?"
Gu Chengming stood in the quiet corridor and shut the last door tight.
"Who are you?" he asked.
"Me?"
A light laugh rippled out on every side.
"I am the Recorder."
"Recorder of what?"
"All phenomena. All things."
Her voice turned airy and long-drawn, as though recalling an antiquity without bound.
"I have witnessed the birth and extinction of countless fated tracks. Seen the laws of the Heavenly Dao built and brought down. Seen the stars of the Dharma-Stations blaze and go dark. Seen numberless great powers climb the clouds and fall from them."
"All of it I inscribed, down to the last word."
The voice paused, tightening.
"The corridor and the doors before you are likewise a corner of what I have inscribed. They are no illusion, no trick of the eye — the scene behind every door is a variable that truly exists between heaven and earth. I have merely fished them up out of the long river of causality and set them out before you."
"So set your mind at ease. Choose a door. The joy in it is real."
"That was always the fate you deserved."
Gu Chengming was silent a good while. Then he frowned and turned his attention into the depths of his Sea of Consciousness, where the panel like a Creation Jade Disc was shuddering violently, its spirit light dimmed, its warped characters looking as if ink had bled through them. The usual chattering crowd was foundering as never before.
Every technique had been forcibly pinned down by a vast, matchless force of law. Communication was severed.
And yet, in the remotest corner of the light-screen—
Hemmed in on all sides by garbled characters and gloom—
One seal was radiating a faint glow, steady as a mountain.
White ground, crimson-gold trim.
[???: …]
The Love Laboratory. Perfectly unharmed.
His thoughts began racing through the implications.
Every technique had been affected. Only the Love Laboratory had gone untouched.
All the techniques struck down and this one alone standing clear of it — that could only prove that the source of the interference had no effect on it. And that interference came from the mysterious existence before him, the one calling itself the "Recorder."
An existence that could sever a technique's divine sense. An existence that could remake the space of his spiritual platform, rewrite cognition, and pluck at the strings of causal fate. An existence that claimed to "record everything." An existence with no body of flesh and blood.
String those clues together and they pointed to one audacious answer.
The thing was not a person, not a demon cultivator, not a devil, and not the residual soul of some ancient power.
The thing was—
A cultivation technique?
The instant that thought surfaced, a distinctly peculiar feeling rose in Gu Chengming.
So there were techniques out there that had birthed their own will, ones he hadn't even courted?
"Still lost in thought?" The Record of the Myriad Worlds sounded curious. "So slow to decide. What are you turning over?"
Gu Chengming did not answer. His spirit soul aimed straight at that white-and-crimson-gold seal.
Pull a technique he had never once studied into his own Love Laboratory? Put like that, it sounded like a madman's daydream. But in a corner this tight, there was no harm in trying.
"Do you mean not to choose at all?" The woman's voice stayed soft.
Gu Chengming held his breath and steadied his spirit, turned his spiritual sense into a finger, and jabbed it hard against the crimson-gold seal.
The Record of the Myriad Worlds had been savoring the young man's struggle from her lofty vantage.
For ten thousand years, seekers of secrets, hunters of treasure, thief-cultivators — all of them had foundered under her "reflection" in the perfection they themselves craved. She judged neither good nor evil. She only gave the push.
But now this young man wasn't even looking at the doors.
The Record of the Myriad Worlds followed the trajectory of his divine thought — and there, in her field of observation, appeared a patch of utterly unparsable nothingness. Where that white-and-crimson-gold seal sat, it was as though the laws of heaven and earth had been stripped away from it. She could not spy out so much as a fraction.
Before she could finish deducing, Gu Chengming's divine thought had already come down.
In the next instant, into the Record of the Myriad Worlds' all-encompassing field of observation, there forced itself a curtain of spirit light unlike anything she had ever seen, carrying an absurdity that stood outside the Great Dao of this world.
[Love Record of the Myriad Worlds]
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