Chapter 55#
A Heavenly Master Unacquainted with the World#
The moment the monster’s heart vanished, a wisp of black mist slowly coalesced in midair. The dark silhouette appeared roughly humanoid in shape, yet profoundly different from an ordinary human. Its hands reached past its knees, each nail sharpened like a ten-inch blade. Its spine was not straight as a human’s, but arched like a drawn bowstring. A pair of horns jutted from its skull, scarlet eyes blazed, and long fangs jutted past its lips all the way to its jaw.
It was the demon soul of the high-ranking monster. The moment it appeared, it threw back its head and let out a piercing shriek. The meaning carried within that roar flooded into the consciousness of everyone present.
“You vermin! You destroyed my body—I will make you all pay!”
The demon soul began to glow with white light emanating from its dantian, and an aura of world-ending devastation slowly gathered around it.
The high-ranking demon soul intended to self-destruct. With power of that magnitude, not only would the entirety of Base W be reduced to ashes, but this entire region would likely be caught up in the blast. In that critical moment, another phantom materialized from within the grand formation.
The newly appeared phantom wore a Daoist robe of white with blue patterns, a tall white jade crown neatly gathering up its black hair. Sharp brows, starlit eyes, and a bearing of incomparable intensity.
“Founding Master,” Lu Heng said softly. This figure that had just appeared was identical to the portrait of the Founding Master preserved within the Heavenly Master Sect.
The moment the phantom of the Heavenly Master Sect’s founding master appeared, the inhuman dark silhouette twisted violently, then transformed into a handsome man draped in black robes. Apart from the scarlet eyes and the curved horns atop his head, there was nothing about him that seemed different from an ordinary person.
“Cangming, you have trapped my divine soul within this formation for thousands of years, and now you would even stop me from self-destructing?” Though his pronunciation was strange, at the very least it was human language that could be understood.
Cangming’s phantom pressed two fingers of his right hand together and casually flicked a blade of sword qi toward the man. “Meng Yu, you sought to destroy the place of my birth. You committed a grave sin a thousand years ago, and I had believed that trapping you within this formation would grind away the hostility in your heart. Instead, you have only grown worse. How can I possibly spare you?”
“I was cutting your karmic ties for your sake—paving the way for your ascension! This continent’s karmic bond with you is too heavy. One day, you will fail to weather that Heavenly Tribulation!” Meng Yu crushed the sword qi between his fingers, his expression burning with hatred.
“A demon like you will never truly be human. You will never understand the human heart.”
“I don’t understand the human heart? If I didn’t understand the human heart, I wouldn’t have been trapped in this formation for a thousand years by nothing more than a fragment of your divine soul! And in the end, all I get from you is that I don’t understand the human heart!” Meng Yu seemed to have been deeply shaken. He threw his head back and laughed wildly. That laughter was steeped in desolation.
The laughter gradually subsided. Meng Yu’s face was etched with sorrow as he gazed deeply at Cangming. His eyes blazed with madness, and an eye-searing light reignited at his dantian—his aura even fiercer than before. At a glance, Lu Heng knew: the earlier self-destruction had been a feint, likely meant only to draw out the Founding Master’s fragment of divine soul. Now Meng Yu was truly unleashing his full power.
Seeing this, Cangming’s phantom flew before Meng Yu and placed a hand directly over his dantian, suppressing the self-destructive force with spiritual energy. As Cangming’s phantom slowly faded, Meng Yu’s eyes returned to clarity. He seized Cangming’s hand and slowly guided it away from his dantian, then offered a mournful smile. “Even if you are only a fragment of divine soul… in the end, I still cannot bear to harm you in the slightest.”
No sooner had the words left his lips than Meng Yu forcibly drove the self-destructive force back into his own dantian. Even as a high-ranking demon soul, he could not withstand the backlash. His form scattered into motes of black light.
Cangming instinctively reached out to grab them, but those motes of black light passed straight through his palm and vanished between heaven and earth. Cangming’s phantom hung its head in silence in midair for a long while before finally withdrawing its hand and hiding it within its wide sleeve.
“The two of you are disciples of my sect,” Cangming said, his gaze settling on Lu Heng and Qin Yi.
The two of them performed a disciple’s salute. “Founding Master—what exactly happened with all of this?”
Cangming gave a slight nod. “In the past, Meng Yu destroyed the passage between this realm and the cultivation plane. The demonic aura and spiritual energy fell out of balance. I exhausted my efforts and set down a grand formation to seal the passage between this realm and the plane of monsters. But this was, in the end, merely treating the symptom and not the root.”
“Later, I set a formation at the ley lines of this realm, using a spiritual source as the formation’s eye, to nourish the earth veins. If this formation operated smoothly for a thousand years, it would ultimately allow this realm to generate its own spiritual energy. Then there would be no more cause for concern.”
The disturbance here had already drawn the people of the base over one by one. Yet the man in the sky possessed an aura of unfathomable depth, and despite the large crowd gathered below, not a single sound could be heard.
“After completing all of this, I observed the celestial signs and divined the fate wheel. I arrived at two entirely divergent outcomes. One was that this realm would successfully birth spiritual energy, and the passage to the cultivation plane would reopen. The other was that this realm would be invaded by demonic aura and ultimately assimilated by the plane of monsters.”
“Then this jade token?” Lu Heng asked again.
“This pocket dimension is the retreat path I left behind. The fate wheel had never once shown such an anomaly. To guard against unforeseen changes, I set a Nine-Turn Mutually Generative Formation within this pocket dimension. In the event this realm veered toward the latter outcome, I could use the Nine-Turn Mutually Generative Formation to reverse the situation. However, this formation is not yet complete…”
Cangming paused, his gaze flickering, as if recalling some past memory.
“When Meng Yu committed his grave sin, he was struck by karmic backlash. His physical body collapsed, leaving only his divine soul. I lured him into the formation with a thread of my divine soul, converting the demonic energy within his soul into spiritual energy to nourish this pocket dimension. The life force generated by the pocket dimension could, in turn, cleanse the hostility from his soul. Back and forth, continuously refining and perfecting this Nine-Turn Mutually Generative Formation. After that, I left this jade token within the sect as the final fallback.”
Cangming glanced at Jiang Sile, lying on the ground, and asked, “But how did this jade token end up in the hands of someone with such severe inner demons? His inner demon awakened Meng Yu and gave him the power to turn the tide. From that moment on, my fragment of divine soul was suppressed by Meng Yu into slumber.”
Lu Heng answered, “This matter is recorded in the sect’s records. A hundred years ago, an outer disciple who had been accepted into the sect stole a sect artifact and defected. From that point on, the sect sealed the mountain and barred outsiders from entering. Disciples were taken only from among orphaned children with spiritual roots, found by sect elders in the outside world.”
Cangming nodded, then turned his gaze to Qin Yi. “Your talent in formations is extraordinary. Ponder it well.”
With that, a beam of golden light shot from his fingertip and sank into Qin Yi’s forehead. Cangming waved his hand once more, and the jade token hanging around Jiang Sile’s neck flew into Lu Heng’s palm.
A single drop of blood seeped out from the surface of the jade token, then fell to the ground.
“I have unbound this pocket dimension from the divine soul of the one on the ground. You are a disciple of my sect—simply circulate your cultivation technique to control it at will. The Nine-Turn Mutually Generative Formation is only one final step away. All the calamities that have befallen this realm were, in the end, set in motion by me. This fragment of divine soul will remain here and rest with him in eternity, buried in this world between heaven and earth.”
No sooner had Cangming’s words faded than his phantom dissolved into motes of spiritual light, drifting softly down into the grand formation.
Nine-Turn Mutually Generative Formation—completed. All things settled to their rest.
The members of the Sharp Blade Squad who had only just begun to learn the basics of cultivation were somewhat composed. The rest of the people present, however, had simply had their understanding of the world turned completely upside down. Monsters? Cultivation? Things they had only ever heard of in legends—turns out they were actually real!
There was no time at the moment to worry about the sheer shock of the onlookers. Qin Yi arranged for people to stay behind to clean up the aftermath, and he and Lu Heng returned to their quarters together.