Radiant Blade of the Wilderness

Chapter 152: Mystical Pass True-Nature Preservation Art

Only when Seventh Ge’s soul had come to a full stop within the Chaos Realm, less than four meters away, did Ding Songyan notice how it differed from other souls.

Seventh Ge’s ghost still appeared as a man in his prime, no different from his body other than it had turned translucent and was tinged with spectral green. But a second soul had grown from his back, shaped like a crow that had a white beak, red feet, and strange markings on its head. Its face was deeply human: fearful, wrathful, touched with age, suffused with confusion, and trailed by wisps of crimson fire.

This phantom resembles the Jingwei bird yet has its own face... Someone from the Imperial Daughter Sect? The connection came to Ding Songyan in an instant.

During the fight earlier, he had only been able to make out a crow-like shape with a whitish beak in the void, the rest too indistinct to identify the lineage quickly. Now that the haze had cleared and the details were visible, the answer came readily.

According to the Secret Classic of Mountains and Seas:

Jingwei, Flame Emperor’s daughter, named Nüwa. She drowned in the Eastern Sea and transformed into Jingwei. Its form resembles a bird: patterned head, white beak, red feet, and its cry is its own name. Steadfast and unyielding, it stills waves and calms seas, scorches mountains and boils oceans. Dying yet never perishing.

Body-seizing rebirth derived from the "dying yet never perishing" trait? Stills waves and calms seas... No wonder the vortex created by Candlelight Illuminates All dissipated so strangely and brought backlash... The Imperial Daughter Sect is based in the Eastern Sea, belongs to no nation, and has always been shrouded in mystery. All I know is that they trace their lineage to Jingwei and their primary cultivation art is the Scripture of Scorching Mountains and Filling Seas... Ding Songyan’s understanding clicked into place. He looked at Seventh Ge’s soul with deep, measured eyes and waited for an answer.

"I am Seventh Ge..." The ghost had barely gotten that far when he suddenly twisted into an expression of pain.

The white-beaked, red-footed crow phantom on his back beat its wings and scattered trailing flames, speaking in the same voice as Seventh Ge but more hoarse.

"I am Jiang... I, I can’t remember who I am..."

The crow’s face grew ever more lifelike, its anguish written plainly across its features.

Ding Songyan was not the least bit surprised by the answer "I can’t remember." If Seventh Ge had been a Grandmaster with all his faculties intact, he would have recognized that the huangliang awakening block contained a dream-related Sword Intent. Would he really have carried it on his person and walked into the trap at the critical moment?

Seeing that the enemy’s ghost had grown quite transparent and thin, Ding Songyan pressed quickly.

"You seized the storyteller Ding Songyan’s body?"

"Yes..." Seventh Ge’s ghost and the crow phantom behind him answered in unison in a deeply unsettling manner.

Both furrowed their brows at the same time, faces full of confusion.

"No... if I had seized the body, why would I still be here...

"And who are you?"

My transmigration caused a problem during your body seizure, severing part of your divine soul and leaving it behind, where it merged with Seventh Ge? Ding Songyan tried to piece together a possible truth from the contradictory words.

He chose his words carefully.

"What method did you use to seize a body and be reborn, and why did you choose the storyteller Ding Songyan?"

With the Great Dream of Three Lifetimes attack, Ding Songyan had awakened some of the other man’s real memories, but most of the scenes and events were his own invention. For instance, if the Grandmaster surnamed Jiang had truly come from the Imperial Daughter Sect, there would almost certainly have been a senior sister in his life, but whether such a person had actually been important to him, disavowed him, and moved against him to cleanse the sect was anyone’s guess. Ding Songyan had simply felt that adding such a figure would make the story flow more smoothly and draw the target in deeper.

The reason Grandmaster Jiang had chosen to seize the storyteller Ding Songyan was also something Ding Songyan had invented based on novels from his past life. They weren’t necessarily true, and something he needed to confirm.

Seventh Ge’s ghost and the crow phantom behind it spoke in one voice.

"His fate was compatible with mine, and he was young enough...

"The method used was, was, I, I can’t remember..."

The ghost clutched his head and wailed—then, in the span of two or three breaths, dissolved into the Chaos Realm, returning to the primordial.

Ding Songyan gave a short cough, somewhat at a loss.

If he hadn’t deployed the Chaos Realm to intercept Seventh Ge’s soul, the other man would have bored through his mystical pass and attempted to seize his body. Whether that would have succeeded was one question; whether he was willing to take that risk was another. But once the Chaos Realm was deployed, it contained not only a powerful Banishing Demons and Warding Off Evil force but also a trace of the Bringing All Things Into Unity ability—both lethal to anything that was only a soul.

For Seventh Ge’s soul to hold on this long was proof enough that he surpassed the vast majority of Grandmasters in that regard.

Ding Songyan withdrew the Chaos Realm and crouched beside Seventh Ge’s body, carefully searching it.

On this "farmer" he found only 22 copper coins, a front door key, and the huangliang awakening block, now stripped of its dreamlike quality.

Ding Songyan held the huangliang awakening block and turned it over in his hands for a few moments, a feeling of reflection washing over him.

When he had first given the thing to Seventh Ge, he hadn’t yet suspected the man was Old Jiang. He had simply felt that one should always guard against people, and so used the huangliang awakening block to test him. He wanted to see whether Seventh Ge would recognize something imbued with Sword Intent and how he would react. If he didn’t recognize it, letting him carry it for a while might prove useful at a critical moment.

Who could have thought it would actually come in handy and play such a decisive role.

If the Dream Sword Intent within the huangliang awakening block hadn’t reached Seventh Ge’s soul and consciousness unimpeded, the Dream Sword alone might not have been enough for a killing blow. The man had been clearly unbothered by nightmares and hexes.

In that case, Ding Songyan would have had to channel his fast-slow sword and Sword Intent of Winter and Summer through the Seven Swords of Candlelit Night and Celestial Stars Sword Art, supplemented by the influence of the Establishing the Six Directions trait.

If that still wasn’t enough to win, he planned to make a strategic retreat, waiting until the strange disconnect between Seventh Ge’s body and his martial power reached its peak and he could no longer maintain his current strength, then turning back to fight.

Ahem... Nursing a few injuries, Ding Songyan pocketed the huangliang awakening block and the rest and turned his gaze to the two mud huts, their roofs burning in crimson flames.

By now the pond had lost nearly half its water, the ground was covered in char marks, and the scattered flames further out had long since extinguished.

Ding Songyan approached the mud huts, closed his eyes, and deployed the Chaos Realm again, enveloping the full twenty-meter range in darkness.

In that dim obscurity, the burning crimson flames all wavered, as though reduced to guttering candles in the wind, while the details inside the mud huts mapped themselves clearly into Ding Songyan’s sea of consciousness.

He used this to search for anything that might be hidden inside.

This was a capability available only to a Chaos Grandmaster. Other warriors might need to reach the Heaven-Man Realm before they could do anything comparable.

A dozen or so breaths later, Ding Songyan’s eyes lit up. He had found an anomaly.

He stepped into the dazzling firelight of the mud hut, using the Chaos Realm to disperse the black smoke the same way he had once dealt with miasma, and made his way to the inner room. At the wall separating the two chambers, he reached up and felt along a spot about two meters high.

The mud there was slightly loose, as though a hole had once been made and filled in, though not thoroughly.

He removed the loose mud and felt paper inside.

It seemed to be a book and a letter.

Ding Songyan quickly retrieved what was inside the hollow in the mud wall, but had no time to examine it yet. Instead, he used the Chaos Realm again to check the surroundings.

Finding nothing else, he left the still-burning hut and went to the edge of the pond, where he turned his attention to what he held.

The thread-bound book had fairly new pages. The cover bore several words: Mystical Pass True-Nature Preservation Art

Seeing the name of the art, Ding Songyan looked as though he’d seen a ghost. His hand jerked, and he nearly threw the book into the pond.

Not because the Mystical Pass True-Nature Preservation Art sounded formidable, but because the calligraphy was the delicate, elegant hairpin-flower script that Ding Songyan knew all too well.

This was Ji Hanyi’s handwriting—his undeserved little sister!

Hiss... I’m constantly haunted by that demoness... Ding Songyan steadied himself and quickly flipped through the Mystical Pass True-Nature Preservation Art confirming there was no personal note tucked inside, and that all the text was indeed in Ji Hanyi’s hairpin-flower script.

He then opened the letter that had been stored alongside the book.

"Second Brother:

"I have missed you dearly these past months.

"I was certain you would find this lead and trace it here, so I left this letter to convey my thoughts.

"Ha, I lied. It wasn’t a guess. I divined that you would trace it here before March of the ninth year of Jianwu. Was I right?

"I know you must be worried about me, spending all your days wondering whether your little sister is eating enough, how long it will take her to step into the Heaven-Man Realm, where she might be in seclusion. Second Brother, rest easy. I’m perfectly well. It only took three months to fully master my newly gained powers and thoroughly integrate everything I had previously learned. As for the Heaven-Man Realm, sitting in dead meditation behind closed doors will never get me there. One must see heaven and earth, see all living beings, and through that, see the true self.

"I passed through Yuejiang Prefecture and looked into the mystery of your earlier stupor. I had actually handed the matter to subordinates back in October last year, but perhaps it’s because they cultivate the Scripture of Sage-Severing and Wisdom Abandonment, making them only skilled with people and have no ability to follow a trail of clues, no progress was ever made.

"After getting a general picture of what happened to you, I found the whole matter quite fascinating.

"Since the divine spirits and strange beasts of the underworld either returned to the Heavenly Realm or perished when their lifespan ran out, there has been no more reincarnation in the world. Now, heaven and earth naturally nurture souls, place them into the womb, and let them enter the world crying; after a living being dies, its soul wanders the underworld and gradually dissipates—as it was in ancient times.

"But as the saying goes, there are always exceptions in the world. There remain a few arts that allow cultivators to reincarnate, and one of them is the Imperial Daughter Sect’s Mystical Pass True-Nature Preservation Art.

"It is not a secret technique but a martial art, focused primarily on cultivating one’s nature: nurturing character, strengthening the spirit, tempering the soul, and concealing intent. Only a select few in each generation of the Imperial Daughter Sect—those groomed as candidates for sect master—can cultivate it as a secondary art. It can refine the soul and help its cultivator survive tribulations of the underworld such as the Nether Wind Tribulation, Nether Fire Tribulation, and Nether Lightning Tribulation, as well as the Womb Tribulation, completing the cycle of reincarnation.

"However, when Jingwei founded the Imperial Daughter Sect, She established a sect rule strictly forbidding cultivators of the Mystical Pass True-Nature Preservation Art from reincarnating or seizing another’s body.

"The art’s primary use within the Imperial Daughter Sect is to strengthen a warrior’s soul, and to allow the cultivator to transmit their knowledge, experience, and pure intent to their chosen successor before death. This is why every generation of the Imperial Daughter Sect always produces a handful of disciples born with innate wisdom, formidable beyond their years.

"Second Brother, you also seem to carry such innate wisdom, but in my view, it doesn’t quite resemble the Imperial Daughter Sect’s kind."