After silently reciting the couplet ten times over, Master Yuanshen stroked his beard with immense satisfaction.
“Only a disciple of mine, Master Yuanshen, could produce a couplet so profoundly imbued with the Dao.”
“Look at the brushwork! Bold as iron, sharp as silver hooks, possessing an extraordinary bearing. How could an ordinary mortal ever write such characters?”
“That bald donkey Hui Hai and that bastard Zhao Dezhu strut around showing off all day just because they snagged decent disciples.”
“Once Changsheng reaches Foundation Establishment, I will utterly crush their arrogance.”
Chuckling to himself, Master Yuanshen clasped his hands behind his back and swaggered away.
A moment later, a hazy, indistinct figure suddenly manifested at the threshold of the empty hall.
“A millennium of cultivating the Dao, yet I haven’t seen the truth as clearly as a mere grand-disciple. Interesting.”
Before the words even finished echoing, the blurry figure vanished into nothingness.
……
Several streaks of brilliant light tore across the sky.
Down below, mortals gazed upward with profound yearning, for those ascending lights represented the omnipotent Immortals of their world.
However, what they didn’t know was that among those majestic lights sat a profoundly ‘unambitious’ Immortal.
“Senior Brother, could you thicken the spiritual barrier a bit?”
“The wind resistance is too strong; I can’t focus on my book.”
A massive, translucent flying sword cut through the clouds. Qingfeng, the head disciple of the Shangqing Temple, stood sharply at the tip of the blade with his hands behind his back.
Yet, directly behind him sat a young man cross-legged, constantly slapping a hand down to keep the howling wind from flipping his pages.
Faced with his Junior Brother’s utterly lackadaisical attitude, Qingfeng sighed, waving his right hand to reinforce the protective spiritual dome.
Instantly, the aggressively fluttering pages settled flat.
“Changsheng, you bury your face in a book all day long. What exactly are you reading?”
Chen Changsheng didn’t look up, offering a faint smile. “I enjoy reading anything bound in paper.”
“I don’t just like reading books; I like observing everything this world has to offer.”
“But the world is simply too vast. Even if I walked the earth for tens of thousands of years, I might not witness it all.”
“So I choose to observe the books first, and the world second.”
“Books are written by people. And people write because they harbor a desperate need to distill their sights, sounds, emotions, and epiphanies into text, leaving a permanent mark.”
“You might not get the full, panoramic picture, but you can certainly glean the most useful fragments.”
Qingfeng arched an eyebrow, genuinely intrigued by the explanation.
“Then, having read so many books, have they actually proven useful to you?”
“Of course. If I hadn’t read, how do you think I dismantled Master’s core Formation?”
The moment those words left his mouth, every single Senior Brother snapped to attention. Even Master Yuanshen, leading the flight formation ahead of them, visibly perked up his ears.
Chen Changsheng carving up the Lightning-Struck Wood certainly gave Master Yuanshen a profound heartache, but the mystery of the event bothered him far more.
How in the world did a grand Formation, laid down by a Nascent Soul stage cultivator, get dismantled by a disciple barely at the ninth layer of Qi Condensation?
“Are you implying that Master laid down a Formation within the Scripture Depository?”
“You jest, Senior Brother. Master is notoriously terrible at the Dao of Formations. Why on earth would the Scripture Depository archive his messy work?”
Master Yuanshen: “……”
That was completely uncalled for!
I am your Master! A mighty figure at the Nascent Soul stage! What right does a measly Qi Condensation grunt have to critique my technical skills?!
“If the Depository doesn’t hold his Formations, how did you break his arrays?” Qingfeng pressed.
“Even if Master isn’t an array grandmaster, a Formation laid by a Nascent Soul cultivator operates on a frequency a ninth-layer Qi Condensation disciple shouldn’t even be able to perceive!”
“You are entirely correct, Senior Brother. Under normal parameters, I lack the processing power to comprehend Master’s Formation.”
“But you’ve overlooked a fundamental law of reality: every action under the heavens leaves a traceable pattern.”
“Master is the Abbot of the Shangqing Temple. The foundational logic of his cultivation naturally stems from our temple’s inheritance.”
“I have already consumed eighty to ninety percent of the Formation theory books archived in the Depository.”
“And the specific branch Master casually dabbled in belongs to the Five Elements Formation lineage.”
“While researching the Five Elements lineage, I cross-referenced the marginalia and personal insights Master left behind in his youth.”
“Consequently, I reverse-engineered Master’s habitual structural flaws and array-laying ticks.”
At this, Qingfeng snapped his head toward their Second Senior Brother. “Mingyue, you manage the Scripture Depository. Does the Shangqing Temple even have a Five Elements Formation lineage?”
Second Senior Brother Mingyue furrowed his brow, thinking hard.
“I might not be a walking encyclopedia like Little Junior Brother, but I know the general cataloging system.”
“I have literally never heard of a Five Elements Formation lineage.”
Chen Changsheng chuckled. “Of course Second Senior Brother wouldn’t know.”
“That specific array methodology was highly fashionable in the Cultivation world a century ago, but it was rendered obsolete by more efficient frameworks.”
Mingyue stared at Chen Changsheng, utterly speechless.
“Little Junior Brother… don’t tell me you went digging in the Book Tomb.”
“Heh.”
“Second Senior Brother’s intuition is sharp as ever. I did indeed excavate the Book Tomb.”
Hearing this confirmation, Mingyue felt a violent migraine coming on.
Nothing in the universe is static, and the Cultivation world’s martial manuals and esoteric knowledge were no exception.
From supreme treatises on the Golden Core and Nascent Soul stages down to the absolute basics of Novice Formation laying and Novice Cultivation techniques.
Paradigms shifted. The Cultivation world inevitably birthed generational geniuses who optimized old formulas and created new metas.
Consequently, the Scripture Depository underwent a massive purge every fifty years, intentionally cycling out deprecated methods and obsolete texts.
Those discarded, useless books were dumped into a designated quarantine zone, colloquially known by the Shangqing Temple disciples as the ‘Book Tomb.’
The Shangqing Temple had stood for over a millennium. Absolutely no one knew exactly how many tomes were moldering away in the Book Tomb.
Nor did anyone know the sheer variety of garbage piled within it.
Mingyue had explored it a few times back when he was a Novice, and had even stumbled across a filthy mortal smut novel, The Plum in the Golden Vase, buried in the stacks.
After statistically confirming that the vast majority of the archives were utterly useless, Mingyue had never set foot in there again.
Taking a deep breath to stabilize his blood pressure, Mingyue asked tentatively, “Little Junior Brother… you didn’t happen to read all the books in the Book Tomb, did you?”
“Senior Brother Mingyue, you joke. I have only been a Novice for ten years. How could I possibly read everything?”
“Phew—” Mingyue exhaled in relief.
“But I have thoroughly processed about three-tenths of the inventory.”
Mingyue: ???
“Three-tenths?!!”
“Three-tenths of the Book Tomb… that’s got to be around four hundred thousand books!”
“Not quite that many. The Book Tomb holds a total of nine hundred and eighty-three thousand, five hundred and twenty-one books.”
“Over the past decade, I have read exactly two hundred and eighty-six thousand, three hundred and eighty-five books. So, roughly three-tenths.”
Hearing those exact numbers, Mingyue fell dead silent. The other disciples on the sword fell dead silent. Even Master Yuanshen, a mighty Nascent Soul stage cultivator, nearly stalled out in mid-air.