In any case, setting aside everything that had happened inside the illusion Love's Qingxin Formula had built —
at the very least, things with the Qingxin Formula had ended on a thoroughly satisfying note.
Just as Little Qing had said, she really had worked out a great many little touches before unlocking her "Love's" CG.
"And I kept every one of them hidden from Little Huiyuan, you know?" She glanced up and blinked at him. "So you'll forgive me that bit of selfishness, won't you?"
"You're forgiven," Gu Chengming said, half joking. "But if Huiyuan finds out, she might not be so generous. Brace yourself for the nagging."
"Then we simply won't tell her." She thought it over for a moment and produced a reason of impressively lofty phrasing. "The master leads you through the door; the cultivation is up to the disciple. Teach too much and the master starves."
The quiet time with the Qingxin Formula was hard to walk away from.
Fortunately, time inside Love's Qingxin Formula's room ran differently from the world outside, which gave Gu Chengming plenty of room to savor a tenderness that had been a long time coming.
Only once they'd had their fill of it did he free up a hand to look over the [Love's Qingxin Formula] CG.
[CG / Love's Qingxin Formula (Completed)]
[Holding Love's Qingxin Formula at complete attachment allows you to remain lucid under any circumstance.]
[Note: So long as you still remember who you love, nothing that exists in this world can make you forget who you are.]
Gu Chengming read the effect, and his expression turned complicated.
They say the fewer words an effect uses, the more absurd it is — but this was pushing it even by that standard.
Turning it over carefully, though, there was still a line drawn. It wasn't outright immunity to spirit-soul methods; it only guaranteed that once he was caught in one, he would keep hold of himself, remember who he was and what he meant to do.
Take the illusion he'd just endured inside the Love Laboratory. If he walked into it again as he was now, even under the influence of the Veil of the Womb, he'd stay lucid the whole way through and keep his present memories intact.
— Not a bad trump card at all.
The further along the road he went, the more numerous and more vicious the schemes aimed at the spirit soul would become. Holding on to a single "who am I" inside an illusion or a Heart Demon was a fortune countless cultivators sought and never obtained.
Gu Chengming filed the entry away in silence and closed the panel.
The instant he stepped back out through the door of the Love Laboratory, several familiar dialogue boxes surged up, unwilling to be left out.
[Huiyuan Sword Formula, still woozy: Senior Brother Chengming... huh? No, wait! That was an illusion just now!]
[Red Dust Phantom Body Formula, thoughtfully: So that is what it feels like to be sunk in an illusion — not a shred of awareness left over. Out in the world, one must guard far more carefully against spirit-soul methods.]
[Hundred Bones Resonance, blustering: This Emperor saw through it long ago! I simply held my tongue because everyone was having such a good time!]
[Qingxin Formula: ...]
So she really had dragged every last technique in there to play along.
Gu Chengming ran back through the cast of fated companions who'd appeared in that little opera:
Junior Sister Huiyuan, the demoness Zi Wuji, the maiden Cangxian, Director Zhou Lixin, the haughty sword cultivator Yun Liuyue, the little information broker Zhongmiao, the red-robed rogue cultivator Huan Hongchen, the Harmonious Joy Sect physician Hua Yinyang — plus Gu Haiming, glued to his side with the Supreme Bone in her arms.
In a certain sense, that made it the most family-friendly installment of all the "Love's" CGs.
In every other Love's CG, the ones eating meat ate meat and the ones hoarding it hoarded it, and nobody else got so much as a sip of the broth. Love's Qingxin Formula, by contrast, not only led all her sisters to the table together, she let everyone eat first and took the closing act herself.
— Absolutely debauched.
Listening to the discussion, the Qingxin Formula let out a sigh.
She had wanted to hoard a little for herself now and then too. How had it turned out like this?
Somehow she'd ended up wearing the label of "the aggrieved party" without ever meaning to.
The next morning, the dawn bell of the Capital region rang three times.
A thin frost clung to the bluestone paving and wound along it. At the mouth of the alley, the hot-soup stall had only just been set up, its white steam rising with the noise of the market to drift along the eaves.
After the clean-sweep campaign of the past stretch of days, the fiends in the Capital were plainly far fewer than before Gu Chengming's arrival.
But that led straight to a new question — the question of the dragon-qi.
By rights, with something like dragon-qi guarding the Capital, congealed out of the people's wishes and the fortune of the state itself, the Eternal Life Sect's operations should have been all but impossible, and the fiend situation could never have run so rampant.
Yet the reality was that the Eternal Life Sect behaved as though possessed, insisting on making trouble in the Capital of all places, in the very heart of the thickest dragon-qi — and the dragon-qi itself seemed to be asleep, turning a blind eye to the fiends.
The matter had lodged in his mind from the day he set foot in the Capital. Only, with the fiends running wild, he'd had to deal with the urgent things first. Now that the Capital region had quieted somewhat, it was time to pull that thorn out.
Gu Chengming decided to look into exactly what had happened to the dragon-qi.
Of course, investigating the dragon-qi wasn't something a Night-Watch Bureau post could get him access to. He was still weighing a visit to Ji Yixi when a long-silent dialogue box lit up in his Sea of Consciousness without warning.
[The Record of the Myriad Worlds speaks up, for once of her own accord: Across the other timelines, the inevitable node before the Great Tribulation arrives is the withering of the dragon-qi.]
[You need not go ask Ji Yixi. She does not yet know the cause either.]
The one who never spoke had suddenly started a conversation. Something stirred in him.
"Oh?" he answered inwardly. "Then do you know why it's withering this time?"
[The cause differs in every timeline. I do not know the specifics of this one.]
[But one thing is certain: this is an "inevitable" node. No matter what you do, you cannot change the outcome.]
In other words, she'd said nothing at all.
He clicked his tongue mentally and let it drop.
— The same routine as always.
Toss out half a sentence to bait him, then go vague exactly where it mattered, or else settle everything with the word "inevitable," never explaining why it was so or how cause led to effect.
Honestly, at this point, what lay between the Record of the Myriad Worlds and him amounted to nothing more than mutual use.
That jaw-droppingly low favorability was proof enough. She knew far more secrets than she ever let slip, and what she didn't want to tell him, she wouldn't.
The half-sentences she did offer were mostly in service of something she wanted accomplished — and as for whether they were true, not one of them had Gu Chengming ever been able to verify outright.
So rather than let the Record of the Myriad Worlds lead him by the nose, better to flip it around and trade with her using the things she was unwilling to do.
She didn't want to talk? Then he'd shelve it for now.
Gu Chengming closed the panel, straightened his cuffs, and headed out.
The carriage waiting outside the Night-Watch Bureau had long since been prepared.
The Second Imperial Princess had been staying these past few days at a detached courtyard in the eastern outskirts of the Capital, laid out even more modestly than an ordinary residence.
Grey tiles over green brick, a gate narrow enough to admit only a single small sedan chair, not even a plaque hung above the lintel.
If the Night-Watch Bureau's archives hadn't recorded who the house belonged to, Gu Chengming genuinely wouldn't have known where to find her.
He stepped down from the carriage, gave his name, and passed a Night-Watch Bureau waist token in through the gate. The guard on duty had clearly received instructions; he checked the token and stood aside.
A rustle came from inside the house. Ji Yixi pushed the door open and came out in a pale green house robe of palace cut, her hair coiled somewhat carelessly, the jade hairpin at her temple sitting a fraction crooked, as though she'd only just risen from her meditation mat.
She caught sight of Gu Chengming and froze for an instant. Her face kept its usual blank-faced calm, but something faintly flustered flickered through those pale eyes.
"Fellow Daoist Gu."
The little dragon was coiled on her shoulder, tail flicking. The moment it made out who had come, it shot up off her shoulder and circled Gu Chengming twice.
"Fourth Realm?" It hovered in front of his face, utterly disbelieving. "Last time I saw you, weren't you mid-Third Realm? How long has it even been? Don't tell me you really are some Sovereign reincarnated?"
Gu Chengming ignored it.
Sovereigns were paper tigers. Two of them had already died by his hand, directly or otherwise.
Ji Yixi, for her part, was gathering her thoughts, eyes lowered as she went over the recent affairs in her mind.
She'd heard days ago about the fiends of the Capital region being swept clean, and earlier than that, she had watched the Dao Plague at the Yunyue Sect play out in perfect clarity through the Record of the Myriad Worlds.
On the surface, none of it had anything to do with her. Underneath, every single piece of it had pulled her out of a bind.
The Dao Plague most of all. That murky, unsettled old account between the Yunyue Sect and the imperial house — she'd assumed it would take another year or more of dragging before it could be barely suppressed. Instead this Fellow Daoist Gu had made one trip and torn the whole thing out by the root.
She raised her eyes and, with rare gravity, inclined her body slightly toward him.
"For everything of late, my thanks, Fellow Daoist Gu."
Gu Chengming waved it off, and Ji Yixi seemed to breathe easier once the thanks had been set down. She sat back where she'd been.
For some reason, when she used the Record of the Myriad Worlds to observe Gu Chengming's fate of late, the mist had grown thicker than before. Once it had been like looking at him through a layer of gauze — she could still make out the rough outline. Now even the outline was gone, the whole halo blurred like ink dissolving in water.
Ji Yixi pushed the thought down and looked up. "What brings Fellow Daoist Gu here today—"
Gu Chengming came straight to it, setting his teacup back on the table. "Your Highness must be aware that the dragon-qi in the Capital region has been behaving strangely of late."
Ji Yixi stiffened, then understood. She turned her palm over, and several pale green spirit patterns slid out from between her fingers to spread across all four walls before folding silently away. Only once she was sure no one else could hear did she speak.
"In truth, I have wanted to look into what happened to the dragon-qi myself..."
"And I am the only person capable of doing it."
With that, she began to explain.
The withering of the dragon-qi had its root not in the lanes of the Capital region but deep within the Imperial City, in a place called the Royal Court.
Hidden in the Royal Court's depths was a thing called the Dragon-Qi Seed, a root laid down at the very founding of the Great Qian. All dragon-qi was born there and dispersed from there. To investigate the dragon-qi, one had to enter the Royal Court — and since ancient times, only two kinds of people had ever been permitted into that deep place.
First, the Son of Heaven of the Great Qian. Second, the holders of the Record of the Myriad Worlds, generation by generation.
Ji Yixi's voice paused there.
"But... my royal father has been in a very poor state recently. He watches me closely. He will not permit me into that place at all."
Something turned over in Gu Chengming's thoughts.
Did he himself count as a holder of the Record of the Myriad Worlds?
Still, having heard her out, he asked something else first — something he'd been wanting to ask for a while.
"Your Highness. His Majesty... what sort of man is he, exactly?"
He had heard no shortage of rumors about the Sage Emperor before, and for reasons of his own besides, he held not a shred of goodwill toward this Emperor of Great Qian. He had even begun to genuinely suspect that everything in the Great Qian was rotten at the root.
Which was to say: that this Emperor of Great Qian was, in fact, connected to the Eternal Life Sect.
Ji Yixi hesitated a moment, then said, "In truth, I speak with my royal father seldom. I see him seldom."
She seemed to be weighing how far she could go with what came next.
"My royal father once took a wound, for reasons I do not know. That wound is irreversible, and dreadful to outsiders' eyes. To preserve his majesty, he has never since shown his true face to anyone. Court audiences, decrees, deliberations of state — he appears in all of them as a mass of dragon-qi."
"...All of this was many years ago."
She lowered her eyes. "From the day I was born, I have never once seen my royal father's true face."
Gu Chengming's expression grew stranger still.
Never shows his true face? Don't tell me he's been swapped out.
That plot turned up often enough in JRPGs. He could already picture it: fighting his way through a thousand hardships into the throne hall at last, tearing away the dragon robe, and finding underneath not the old emperor he'd expected but some Jìntian of the Eternal Life Sect wearing a human skin — or simply a squirming mass of some nameless fiend.
He'd better not turn out to be right.
He kept the thought to himself and said instead, "So Your Highness's meaning is: you need to enter the depths of the Royal Court to examine the Dragon-Qi Seed, but His Majesty forbids it?"
Ji Yixi nodded.
"Then if it isn't convenient for Your Highness to go in person..." Gu Chengming paused. "What if someone else went?"
Ji Yixi blinked, not quite following.
The little dragon didn't follow either, but it jumped in anyway on reflex. "What's that supposed to mean? The only one who can get in is the Record of the Myriad Wor—"
Its voice cut off halfway.
Because Gu Chengming had raised his hand, palm up, and let a breath of spiritual power slip free.
An exceedingly faint aura belonging to the Record of the Myriad Worlds spilled from his fingertips.
It came from the same lineage as the one inside Ji Yixi.
For a moment the room was quiet enough to hear the little dragon swallow up on the beam. Ji Yixi's mouth opened and closed, and she stammered:
"...Fel— Fellow Daoist Gu, what is this?"
Gu Chengming didn't answer at once. He was remembering the first time he'd met this Second Imperial Princess, when Ji Yixi had opened with "I know it was you who stirred the dragon-qi earlier" and given him a proper fright, with the unmistakable undertone of using the dragon-qi as leverage over him.
Now it was his turn to drop an even bigger secret in front of her — and she was the one stammering.
Fortunes really did turn.
His fingers loosened around the teacup, and his mood, complicated as it was, tipped over into something rather amused.
____
Gift for Everyone: Once we hit 50 Powerstones, I'll release +1 bonus chapter
________________________________________
If you want more chapters, please consider supporting my page on (P). with 50 advanced chapters available on (P)
👻 Join the crew by searching Leanzin on (P). You know the spot! 😉