Radiant Blade of the Wilderness

Chapter 118: From Small Signs to Great Truths

There’s a Li Bai here too, one who writes poetry that are the same poems I know? Isn’t that too much of a coincidence? Ding Songyan quickly flipped to other sections of Three Hundred Han Poems.

He found many familiar poems, but the authors were no longer the ones he remembered. Each had a different name, and quite a few lines differed as well, particularly the parts involving dedicatees and specific locations.

In other words, the only poet whose work and name both matched Ding Songyan’s past life was Li Bai.

That makes even less fucking sense!

If the poems are similar but had different authors, that could be explained as the two worlds sharing some connection. After literary development reaches a certain stage, it’s inevitable to produce similar imagery, emotions, and lines. But "Li Bai" writing Li Bai’s poems? What is that supposed to mean?

Was there a Li Bai at some higher dimension, influencing both Earth and the Great Wilderness simultaneously?

Wait, my name is Ding Songyan, and the body I transmigrated into is also called Ding Songyan. I once theorized that sharing the same name might be a prerequisite for transmigration...

So... Li Bai drowned chasing the moon’s reflection and ended up in this world?

Ding Songyan sat at the desk in a daze, his expression changing rapidly.

Then another person came to mind.

Sage Zuo.

This great figure had risen during an era similar to the Hundred Schools of Thought. In his youth, he led military reforms. In middle age, he taught Confucian thought and championed propriety. In old age, he founded Daoism and expounded on virtue and the Way...

And he had also compiled and edited the Classic of Poetry!

A forerunner in transmigration? Ding Songyan set down Three Hundred Han Poems and picked up Pillow Wei Lyrics.

After flipping through it quickly, he found another familiar name among the familiar verses.

Qin Shaoyou.

Ding Songyan snapped the book shut and went to the courtyard, where he found his senior sister practicing her swordwork.

When she reached a stopping point, Ding Songyan walked over and asked pensively, "Senior Sister, could you tell me about Li Bai?"

Zheng Zhuxi blinked in confusion.

Not long ago this junior brother of hers was a complete martial fanatic, and now he’s absorbed in poetry?

It was a good thing Zheng Zhuxi had a literary background due to her family. Any other Brightnight Sect disciple could probably only give a brief answer. She recalled as she spoke.

"During the Eastern Han, Li Bai appeared seemingly out of nowhere and restored Han poetry to glory, becoming the Immortal Poet of his age. He was also skilled in swordsmanship. He led troops all the way to the Western Sea, expanded the territory by thousands of miles, was enfeoffed as a Han marquis, and left his name for posterity...

"I love his poetry. That line I recited during the Mid-Autumn moon-viewing was his. Are you reading his work too, Junior Brother?"

So Li Taibai fulfilled his life’s ambitions after all? Ding Songyan gave a thoughtful hum and asked, "And Qin Shaoyou?"

Zheng Zhuxi still looked baffled, but dutifully answered, "Lyrics used to be sung only in pleasure houses. Qin Shaoyou single-handedly elevated them to stand alongside poetry in the halls of high culture, giving rise to what is now called Wei Lyrics...

"He later became chancellor of Wei as well..."

Both of them have the profile of transmigrators... With their influence, it makes sense that other poems and lyrics would resemble ones from my past life... Ding Songyan thought for a moment and asked, "What was Sage Zuo’s real name?"

"Unknown. He abandoned his birth name before leading the military reforms, as a gesture of breaking from the old. He had been completely obscure before that, so the history books have no record of it." Zheng Zhuxi found the question odd; it seemed unrelated to the previous two.

That fits even better... Ding Songyan thought of how Sage Zuo had also written on virtue and the Way, founding Daoism. He paused and then asked, "Senior Sister, who founded Buddhism?"

"Dao’an of the Western Han. He used the doctrine of the emptiness of inherent nature to found the Fundamental Void Sect, and he accepted disciples widely, teaching all without discrimination. But because different disciples inherited different traditions of divine beasts and spirit creatures, their understandings of Buddha-nature diverged. Not long after Dao’an entered nirvana, the Fundamental Void Sect quickly fractured, giving rise to schools such as the Consciousness-Only, the Vinaya, the Chan, and the Body-and-Will. Today, the Fundamental Void Sect is only a minor branch of Buddhism." Zheng Zhuxi watched her junior brother with an expression of complete bewilderment, but held her tongue.

Dao’an, that name sounds familiar too... Ding Songyan reined in his thoughts and smiled at his senior sister.

"I’m thinking through some people and events in history. It might offer some insight into what’s happening now."

"Do you need my help?" Zheng Zhuxi asked, her dimples showing.

She didn’t quite see the connection between history and the present situation, but if her junior brother said so, he must have found some lead.

Ding Songyan shook his head.

"Not for now."

He pointed outside the door.

"I’m going to buy some history books."

The story pamphlets he had used for storytelling before had been taken to the Brightnight Sect and weren’t here; besides, they were too shallow—introductory material at best.

Before long, Ding Songyan returned to the Ding residence accompanied by a bookshop attendant pushing a cart, having spent a considerable five taels of silver on multiple volumes of history.

In the time before lunch, he went through the books with focused speed, reading only the parts that felt familiar or that described figures who had reshaped an era in some field.

After racing through one set, Ding Songyan reviewed his findings and confirmed: the four most likely candidates were still Sage Zuo, Dao’an, Li Bai, and Qin Shaoyou.

He thought for a moment and decided to draw up a timeline, as was his habit, to look for patterns.

He set the accession of Xia Hou Qi to the human throne as his starting point, calling it Year 0 of the Mountains-and-Seas Calendar for ease of calculation.

From that foundation, he filled a grid on white paper with the start and end of each dynasty and their major events, in chronological order.

With that done, he added the converted years for Sage Zuo and the others.

Year 1692 of the Mountains-and-Seas Calendar: Sage Zuo’s first military reform. If he was a transmigrator, the actual transmigration would have been a few years or even ten years earlier...

Year 2460: Dao’an first opened a platform to teach Buddhism...

Year 2832: Li Bai wrote his first poem and made a name for himself...

Year 3170: Qin Shaoyou’s first widely circulated lyric...

The current year is 4090...

From Sage Zuo to Dao’an, roughly 768 years passed. It’s impossible to be precise, since pinpointing the exact year of transmigration is difficult. From Dao’an to Li Bai, roughly 372 years. From Li Bai to Qin Shaoyou, roughly 338 years. From Qin Shaoyou to me, roughly 920 years... There’s no obvious pattern here. I can’t work backward to confirm these four were transmigrators... Ding Songyan stared at the figures and fell into thought.

In situations like this, his approach was to first set aside the outliers, find a pattern in the smaller range, then extend it to the larger range to derive some conjecture, then test it, use the results to refine the pattern, and step by step close in on the truth.

Dao’an, Li Bai, and Qin Shaoyou are all separated by about 300 years. Let me use that as a baseline and extrapolate...

If this pattern holds, then there must be another transmigrator between Sage Zuo and Dao’an. 768 divided by two is 384—within the expected range, with a margin of about 20 years on either side. Year 1692 plus 384 is 2076. Give or take 20 years, that falls in the early Qin period. There were no particularly major events or notable figures. The person who made Qin poetry famous doesn’t seem like a transmigrator either...

Maybe I’ve gotten the pattern wrong. Maybe that transmigrator had no particular talents and remained entirely unknown. Or perhaps the First Emperor of Qin’s endless campaigns across the realm got him killed in battle. He was thrown into the wrong place and wrong time...

From Qin Shaoyou to me is 920 years. Dividing by two doesn’t fit the pattern I just found, so it has to be divided by three, which gives about 307 years. That means there are likely two more transmigrators in between...

Year 3170 plus 307 is 3477. Give or take ten years, the history books place that in the late Wei period. Wei fell in Year 3517, about 30 to 40 years later. If there really was a transmigrator who lived for a meaningful span of time, they would have been active in the late Wei to early Zhao period...

At that point in his reasoning, Ding Songyan froze.

He wasn’t familiar with the late Wei to early Zhao period. Most of what he knew had come from the history books he had just skimmed, and he hadn’t found anyone there who seemed like a likely transmigrator.

But not long ago, he had learned about someone who had been active in exactly that period, and who might be connected to the whereabouts of Kunlun and the Celestial Thearch’s palace.

The person Miss Xiao Qing had mentioned in her letter.

Jiang Weichen!

Surely not? Ding Songyan felt a prickling across his scalp.

Then he thought of himself.

His own transmigration had occurred in Linjiang County, Dingjiang Prefecture—right next to Heaven’s Gate Lookout Island, where the Heavenly Realm had once been visible. And he had already been drawn into the matters of Kunlun’s location and the Celestial Thearch’s palace.

Seen from that angle, Jiang Weichen wasn’t impossible.

Ding Songyan suppressed the tremor running through him and continued.

Another 307 years forward is Year 3784. Give or take ten years, the history books show that the imperial court’s southward crossing happened between 3832 and 3833, and the Hundred Species rebellion had signs as early as 3810. That’s very close...

That upheaval produced so many notable figures. None of them reshaped an era on their own, but every transmigrator would excel in a different way. If there really was one, who would it be...

A name suddenly surfaced in Ding Songyan’s mind, one he had been thinking about frequently of late.

Demon Sovereign Tan Guanchan!

More significantly, Tan Guanchan could create Two-Faced, and the Two-Faced had once been confined in a small settlement at the foot of Mount Dique. Mount Dique was also one of the special ancient sites where the Heavenly Realm had once been visible!

And Tan Guanchan had been coming regularly to Dingjiang Prefecture, home of Heaven’s Gate Lookout Island!

Following this logic, combined with my own situation, could this person have transmigrated directly to the foot of Mount Dique and into the body of a Two-Faced? He then found a way to escape, encountered the Accumulated Evil Way’s demonic arts, and developed his own unique situation into the Demon Seed method? Ding Songyan’s thoughts spread outward into conjecture.

In the future, he could test whether Demon Sovereign Tan Guanchan was in fact a Two-Faced, and use that to refine or confirm his deductions.

A cold sweat had broken out on Ding Songyan’s back.

Following the line of reasoning he had written out, he arrived at two further conjectures.

First: their transmigrations followed a fixed, regular pattern, apparently connected to the Celestial Court, the Celestial Thearch’s palace, and the vanished Kunlun.

Second: the purpose behind Demon Sovereign Tan Guanchan’s annual visit to Dingjiang Prefecture in recent years might be...

Ding Songyan’s gaze fixed on the bronze mirror sitting on the desk. In it, he saw his own clean-cut, fair-faced face.

Thunder seemed to rumble through his chest.

The Demon Sovereign has been waiting for me?

Waiting for me—the next transmigrator?