That red-robed cultivator walked through endless solitude for a full ten thousand years. Throughout those unbearable days, Xian Qinglin could clearly see him unable to sleep night after night, only managing the shallowest of naps whenever he cradled that lantern in his arms.
Then the scene shifted again. The air filled with the scent of smoke and fire. Xian Qinglin saw a thick fog, and within it, that red-robed cultivator lifted an egg from a scorched, still-smoking crater, as though something enormous had just burned there. The egg bore not a speck of dust, its shell pure white and gleaming like crystal.
The man pressed his face against the eggshell, tears falling without pause. Xian Qinglin couldn’t make out his features clearly, but the man’s silhouette flickered faintly, as if it might scatter and vanish on the wind at any moment, his entire being radiating an aura of something sacred.
“…I’ll bring you back to his side,” the man’s voice was very soft, as though carried from some far distant place, thick with sorrow and hoarseness, and yet ethereal and beautiful all the same. Cradling the egg, he lowered his head to gently nuzzle it against the side of his face, saying, “This time, you must protect him well in my place… never deceive him again.”
The man walked on, staggering, cradling the egg, growing further and further away, his figure gradually dissolving like thin mist until it vanished entirely.
For some reason, hearing these words, Xian Qinglin’s heart clenched painfully, an inexplicable wave of grief rising within him, that sorrow crashing over him like an overwhelming tide. He instinctively reached out to grab hold of the man, but no matter how he tried, he couldn’t catch him. The devastated scene before his eyes shifted once more, and he saw that man entrusting the egg to someone else…
The Seventh Elder, unable to spare himself to save him, watched helplessly as the Burst-Pattern Tiger’s claw swung down toward Xian Qinglin’s head, his eyes nearly splitting with fury.
“…Qinglin.”
This pressure was simply too immense, an ordinary Qi Refining cultivator couldn’t withstand it at all. Xian Qinglin lay collapsed on the ground, his consciousness hazy, but the Seventh Elder’s cry snapped a fragment of his awareness back. As the demonic beast’s massive claw swept toward him, he instinctively closed his eyes.
His chest suddenly burned hot, and a talisman flew out from within it, blooming with light. Xian Qinglin found himself entirely enveloped in golden radiance, and the suffocating pressure bearing down on him dissipated instantly.
The Burst-Pattern Tiger’s claw, pressed against the top of Xian Qinglin’s head, couldn’t push down any further, as if blocked by some invisible force.
It roared in fury, leapt into midair, opened its jaws toward Xian Qinglin, and spat out an orb of light from its mouth.
The Seventh Elder tried to fly over to block it, but the Burst-Pattern Tiger tangled him up again.
A deafening boom, dust and smoke exploding outward.
“Qinglin…”
The Burst-Pattern Tiger’s cultivation surpassed the Seventh Elder’s by two full tiers, and the sword in his hand was far too low-grade, one flick of the tiger’s tail snapped his magic sword clean in two.
A sword cultivator without a sword was like a tiger without fangs.
The Seventh Elder abandoned his sword outright, eyes red with fury, fighting bare-handed instead.
Unfortunately, the gap in strength was simply too vast. Before long, he was struck by a claw and sent plummeting from the sky.
Xian Qinglin flew to catch him. “Master, are you alright?”
The Seventh Elder spat out a mouthful of blood, exclaiming in shock, “Qinglin, you’re okay?”
“I’m fine.”
The moment the two of them landed, two Burst-Pattern Tigers closed in right behind them, surrounding them.
Xian Qinglin gripped a talisman, and the instant they lunged, hurled it forward, shouting, “Explode!”
The talisman burst apart.
An even more thunderous boom than before rang out.
The talisman’s power was simply too great, the ground shook and mountains trembled the instant it detonated, a fierce gale erupting outward, energy rippling outward like waves from the center where the Burst-Pattern Tiger stood.
Massive trees toppled across a wide swath of the forest. The Second Elder, mid-fight with the Burst-Pattern Tiger in midair, was sent flying backward by the shockwave, being so close, Xian Qinglin and the Seventh Elder were no exception.
The Second Elder flew over, just managing to help the two of them up, when bits of something began pattering down all around them like rain.
Calling it rain wasn’t quite right, more precisely, it was small chunks of flesh.
The Seventh Elder, suppressing his own shock, caught his breath and asked, “Qinglin, where did you get that… talisman?”
That should be considered a talisman, right?
Xian Qinglin lowered his eyes, his expression composed. “Someone gave it to me.”
Someone gave it to him again.
Who had this kind of extravagant generosity?
Why not send him two of them, then?
The Second Elder, at this point utterly disregarding his own wounds, had eyes gleaming like a wolf’s, his heart burning with excitement. “How many did he give you? Are there more? Could I take a look at one?”
Was this really the time to be discussing this?
Even the Seventh Elder couldn’t help wanting to roll his eyes.
His fellow senior martial brothers usually behaved normally enough, but the moment anything touched on their own particular field of study, they’d transform into completely different people, their intelligence plummeting as if struck simple.
The Seventh Elder said, exasperated, “Let’s get out of here first.”
The two Burst-Pattern Tigers had just been shredded into chunks of meat, but a third one had been sent flying off earlier and there was no telling when it might come searching for them again, not to mention the other demonic beasts still lurking in the forest.
This place reeked of blood and carnage…
Not a good place to linger.
The Second Elder snapped back to attention. “Oh, oh, right you are.”
Aside from Xian Qinglin, both the Second Elder and Seventh Elder had suffered severe spiritual energy depletion and grave wounds during the earlier fight, leaving them with no choice but to seek out a hidden cave to hole up in.
The moment they’d settled in, rather than sitting to meditate and heal, the Second Elder immediately asked Xian Qinglin for the talisman.
He flipped the talisman back and forth, his expression grave. After a good while, the Seventh Elder asked, “Is something wrong with this talisman?”
“No,” the Second Elder shook his head, his expression somewhat awkward. “Not wrong exactly, it’s that I can’t make out what runes are actually inscribed on it at all.”
“Hm?” The Seventh Elder had no particular study in the art of talismans, but wasn’t entirely ignorant of it either. From what he’d just witnessed, this should be an explosive talisman.
As Dean of the Talisman Academy and a fourth-grade talisman master, there was no way the Second Elder couldn’t even recognize an explosive talisman.
“This should be some new variant of third-grade explosive talisman,” the Second Elder said. “The runes on it are somewhat profound, with a lot of added phantom lines I can’t quite parse through. But an ordinary third-grade explosive talisman wouldn’t have anywhere near this kind of power. And besides—”
His gaze landed on Xian Qinglin. “He’s only at Qi Refining eighth layer. For him to activate a third-grade talisman, he’d have to drain his entire body’s spiritual energy, there’s no other way it should be possible. And yet look at him now, clearly his spiritual energy is still abundant, not a trace of depletion.”
Talismancy wasn’t the hardest of the five supplementary arts to learn, but it wasn’t the easiest either. The arts of cultivation techniques weren’t something one could master purely through intelligence, hard work, or good aptitude, otherwise technique masters would be a dime a dozen by now.
To study these arts, the first and foremost factor was one’s soul power, which was also a matter of aptitude.
Second was one’s comprehension ability.
Third was one’s mastery and control.
How to channel soul power to separate medicinal properties, or to refine magic tools, all of this depended on the individual practitioner.
Controlling soul power was an intricately mysterious thing, most cultivators could never fully grasp the techniques involved.
Because of this, the arts of cultivation techniques were famously difficult to learn, and creating an entirely new type of rune was harder still.
Regardless, the Second Elder now felt certain he himself didn’t have the skill for something like this.
Hearing this, the Seventh Elder grew serious. The Second Elder handed the talisman back. “Keep it safe. Who knows, maybe we can use it to break out of Lianyun Mountain.”
That was really just self-comfort talking.
In fact, they all knew perfectly well that a single explosive talisman could only buy them a little time to survive, relying on it alone to escape Lianyun Mountain entirely was more like something out of a dream than a real plan.
Xian Qinglin sat beside the Seventh Elder, brow furrowed. “Master, are you alright?”
“I’m fine,” the Seventh Elder’s face was noticeably pale, that tiger’s claw strike had carried seven layers of internal energy, and his wounds truly weren’t light. To spare Xian Qinglin worry, he downplayed it. “I’ll recover after some time resting up.”
The Second Elder opened his mouth, but a glance from the Seventh Elder made him shut it again, sullen.
He fiddled with the broken bell in his hand and sighed. “What a waste, a fourth-grade magic tool. I spent eighty-nine years just gathering the materials, then spent eighty thousand spirit stones to get Old Five to forge it. He ruined two batches of materials before he finally managed to produce this one, and now it’s broken too. Ugh~”
A fourth-grade magic tool truly was a rare thing.
The Seventh Elder said nothing.
The magic sword in his own hand had only been second-grade.
Looking across Xianhao Sect, from the Grand Elder down to the Fifth Elder, each of them relied on their mastery of the technical arts to earn a comfortable fortune. Only he and Old Six were the poorest of the bunch, the sword he carried had been won at auction only after spending everything he had.
And it had just met a heroic end just now.
The Seventh Elder felt a pang of melancholy. That second-grade magic sword had drained his entire savings, he’d once thought it would last him all the way to Nascent Soul, never expecting it to snap before he’d even reached mid Golden Core.
Still, seeing the Second Elder’s expression as if he’d just lost his own parents, he offered some comfort. “Once we’re back, show it to Fifth Senior Martial Brother. Maybe he can repair it.”
“Yeah, right,” the Second Elder said, displeased. “With his skill, not that I’m trying to put him down deliberately, but I genuinely suspect his fourth-grade artifact-refining certificate is fake, bought off from the association staff. Look at how many fourth-grade magic tools he’s actually produced over the years? Nothing but junk. Repairing a magic tool is even harder than forging a new one, I wouldn’t count on him for this.”
“Then what do we do?” the Seventh Elder clutched his chest, coughing violently twice. Xian Qinglin patted his back to help. The Seventh Elder told him he was fine, then turned back and asked, “So what do we do? Just give up on it?”
Giving up wasn’t an option.
“We’ll think of something once we’re back.” The Second Elder looked toward the cave entrance, where the slanting evening sun was setting in the west, night falling soon. The roars of strange beasts drifted in from the distance.
“The priority right now is figuring out how to get out of this Lianyun Mountain,” the Second Elder said. “Lianyun Mountain, the Tomb That Claims Lives, we need to be careful.”
The moment the sun set, the cave plunged into darkness instantly.
The cave was fairly spacious, lined with some soft grass on the floor. At first, busy fleeing for their lives, no one had paid it any attention. Now that they’d caught their breath, Xian Qinglin leaned against the stone wall to rest, stretching out his leg, and accidentally kicked something. The object rolled with a rattling sound.
Not the sound of a rock.
He reached out, feeling around to see what it was, when the Seventh Elder snapped, “Don’t move.”
“What is it?” The Second Elder, sitting at the cave entrance, immediately went on alert.
Once a cultivator formed their Golden Core, they gained night vision. Xian Qinglin couldn’t see in the dark, but the Seventh Elder could see clearly.
The Second Elder squinted, looking closer, and a chill instantly washed over him. He blurted out a curse. “Damn it, this—”
No one had noticed it before, but now they realized, aside from near the cave entrance, the entire floor was littered with bones.
Both human and beast.
A pale, ghastly white expanse.
What Xian Qinglin had kicked was a skull.