The next morning, the wind and snow over Snowfall Pass had still not ceased. Flurries of snow-powder drifted in through the cracks of the window lattice, only to be baked by the earth-fire formation within the room into wisps of white mist.
In the side hall of the Northern Garrison Manor, the aroma of breakfast hung thick.
Yu Wenqiu cradled a bowl of steaming spirit-rice porridge in her hands, her cheeks puffed full—yet those almond eyes, usually half-narrowed, were now opened wide and round, fixed unblinkingly on the figure seated at the other corner of the table.
There sat a girl with her hair tied in twin ponytails, dutifully sipping her porridge, every motion cautious and careful, like a put-upon little daughter-in-law.
She was none other than the Walker of the Myriad-Theft Gate whom Gu Chengming had brought back the night before—now turned over a new leaf and entered onto the books as a registered person: Nuo Tao.
Yu Wenqiu chewed, finding that the spirit-vegetables, usually so crisp and refreshing, somehow had no flavor to them today.
She looked at Nuo Tao, then turned to look at Gu Chengming, her gaze full of resentment.
At last unable to hold back, she set down her porridge bowl. "Granted, it's not as if we can't afford to keep an idle mouth around—but how could you bring someone back without breathing a word to me first? And on top of that, it's a—"
She shot a glance at Nuo Tao and swallowed the rest of the sentence: "—a rather fresh and pretty little girl, at that."
Gu Chengming couldn't help but laugh, and patiently recounted the whole affair from start to finish—Nuo Tao as a "tainted witness," and the case of the theft from the Myriad Gold Pavilion's storehouse.
At his words, Nuo Tao immediately buried her head even lower, wishing she could shrink down into her bowl; she would never have dared to offer half a word of rebuttal.
Yu Wenqiu gazed at the white porridge in her bowl, and inexplicably half the anger in her heart faded away. Somewhat sullenly, she poked at the porridge.
Reason told her that Gu Chengming's explanation was perfectly sound and reasonable, made out of consideration for the bigger picture. But emotionally...
Yu Wenqiu stole a glance at Gu Chengming's profile, which looked all the more gentle and jade-like in the morning light, and that sense of crisis welled up in her heart.
Back on the mountain she'd never noticed it, but how was it that ever since they'd come down the mountain—especially after reaching this Northern Territory—this lad Little Gu's luck with women had grown so flourishing?
First there was that Yun Wan steward, or whatever she was, from the Harmonious Joy Sect; then that female elder who looked all of fifteen; and now, just look—he goes out to buy some bedding and comes back having picked up a thief-cultivator girl?
Did this Little Gu have some kind of constitution that drew female cultivators to him?
Into Yu Wenqiu's mind there suddenly popped something Gu Chengming had once mentioned offhand—that new cultivation method he was practicing, called something like the «Yin-Yang Creation Strategy»?
Granted, Little Gu had explained that it was some proper, orthodox great-dao method, but the very name made it impossible to disentangle from the Harmonious Joy Sect.
Yu Wenqiu bit the tips of her chopsticks and conjured up an entire melodrama in her head.
—What if this Little Gu's willpower wasn't strong enough, and he truly did let his eyes be dazzled by the gaudy world out there, and ran off with some girl from another sect?
At this thought, Yu Wenqiu was suddenly seized by a flicker of panic.
She very much wanted to slam the table and rise to her feet, to tell Gu Chengming, "In life you are a person of the Wenjian Sect, in death a ghost of the Wenjian Sect," and to drive out this girl of unknown origins while she was at it.
But looking at the way Gu Chengming was, this little Elder Yu lost her nerve again.
"Forget it, forget it."
She comforted herself inwardly: "Anyway, as long as I don't die, I'll keep my eye on him forever... Mm—as long as I keep him well-fed, he won't have the heart to go running off."
And so Yu Wenqiu turned her grief and indignation into appetite, and viciously shoveled in a mouthful of porridge.
With no idea of his elder's rich inner theatrics, Gu Chengming steered the conversation toward business:
"Elder, today I need to go pay a visit to a vice-general."
"Hm? A vice-general?"
Yu Wenqiu, with food still in her mouth, asked rather indistinctly, "What do you want with a vice-general? Don't we have the pass-guarding warrant? We could swagger sideways through this whole city if we liked."
Gu Chengming gave a clear and concise recap of the information he had obtained from Nuo Tao the day before, along with the cause and effect of the dharma artifacts that he had probed with the Red Dust Art.
"The Myriad Gold Pavilion has operated in Snowfall Pass for many years; its foundations run quite deep. If it were merely a matter of marking up prices and cornering the market, well, that's just the profit-seeking nature of merchants—so long as they don't cross the bottom line, we'd have no reason to move against them.
"But the cause and effect entangled around these twelve dharma artifacts is far too heavy; the grievance-qi has congealed and will not disperse. They were plainly obtained by killing people and seizing their treasures—and the dead were, in all likelihood, cultivators of our own human race.
"A trading house set up within a great human stronghold, if it is secretly engaged in hunting its own kind—or even colluding with the demon race—then it is digging away at the very roots of Snowfall Pass.
"If I investigate them, I'm bound to disturb the interests of a great many people. By my own strength alone, though I wouldn't be afraid, it would be all too easy to alert the snake by beating the grass, and all too easy for the other side to turn around and bite me back. So I need someone within the Snowfall Pass system who carries weight, and whose stance is absolutely reliable, to back me up."
Hearing it was serious business, Yu Wenqiu's expression turned a little more solemn as well.
Lazy though she was, she was after all an elder of the Wenjian Sect, and in matters of right and wrong of this magnitude she could still tell what was what.
Yu Wenqiu nodded and swallowed the food in her mouth. "This is the Northern Territory, after all, where the powers of every faction are tangled together like roots. With Senior Sister Luo away just now, if we act rashly we really could get stabbed in the back.
"So who are you thinking of going to?"
Gu Chengming drew a token from his robes—the one Luo Jinyao had deliberately left him before her departure, saying that if he ran into difficulties, he could use it to seek out several trustworthy vice-generals.
"Liang Si. Vice-General Liang."
With the plan settled, Gu Chengming wasted no more time and set off, taking Nuo Tao along with him.
Though Snowfall Pass was called a "pass," the sheer scale of it had long since exceeded the category of an ordinary walled city.
Here there were army-supervisors representing the interests of the Great Qian imperial house; there were garrison elders representing the interests of the great sects; there were commerce-guild magnates who had come purely for the Northern Territory's abundant resources; and there were speculators who wished to fish in troubled waters amid the chaotic age—or even to hedge their bets on both sides.
These people were like so many invisible nets, shrouding the whole of Snowfall Pass within them.
And within this net, those who truly held real power and were acknowledged by all factions were, apart from the garrison's commanding general Luo Jinyao, the several vice-generals who each managed their own affairs.
The Northern Territory had an unwritten rule.
Any cultivator who had won illustrious military merit in this place, and whose cultivation had reached a certain realm, would be granted a unique "title," notarized by the Great Qian court and the Imperial Astronomical Bureau.
Generally speaking, only great cultivators at the full perfection of the third realm, or even at the fourth realm, were qualified to be conferred such a title; but if one's war-merits were astonishing enough to shake the world, a second-realm cultivator could be ennobled with a title as well.
Take Luo Jinyao back in those years: at the second realm she had already earned the fair name of "Snowfall Sword," and thereafter she had pressed onward in triumphant advance, all the way to her present rank of seventh on the Heaven Ranking—"First Sword of the Northern Territory."
And this Vice-General Liang Si whom Gu Chengming was going to visit was known as [Myriad Ingenuities].
Rumor had it that several years ago, Snowfall Pass had once suffered an exceedingly bizarre surprise attack. Several hundred second-realm demon-beasts, driven on by several third-realm great demons, had evaded every detection formation and charged straight up to the foot of the city walls.
At that time the main force was tied down elsewhere and the pass left empty within; it was precisely this Vice-General Liang Si who, by his own strength alone, within the span of a single stick of incense, controlled several thousand mechanical puppets and forcibly raised up a wall of steel, holding those several hundred demon-beasts firmly outside the pass until reinforcements arrived.
This single battle made the name "Myriad Ingenuities" resound throughout the Northern Territory.
But what interested Gu Chengming even more was Liang Si's origin—the Mohist Gate.
On the way to the vice-general's residence, information about this mysterious sect could not help surfacing in Gu Chengming's mind.
In the Great Qian, the Mohist Gate's reputation was not as illustrious as that of the Daoist Gate or the Buddhist Gate—one might even call it rather low-key.
The world knew only that the Minister of Works often hailed from the Mohist Gate, and that those few sky-patrolling colossal warships of the Great Qian that overawed all under heaven were likewise the Mohist Gate's handiwork—yet few people knew the true core of the Mohist Gate's cultivation.
Back on the forums of the original game «Immortal Gate», though the discussion threads about the Mohist Gate had been few, every one of them had been quite fascinating.
What had impressed him most was that, in the end, Mohist Gate cultivators were able to hand-build artificial intelligence.
Of course, the cultivators of the Mohist Gate called these artificial artifact-spirits.
And because the Mohist Gate's cultivators were exceedingly few, with rather harsh admission requirements, very few people ever came into contact with members of the Mohist Gate—which in turn rendered the Mohist Gate quite mysterious.
Harboring his curiosity about the Mohist Gate's methods, Gu Chengming soon arrived at his destination.
The vice-general's residence lay on the western side of Snowfall Pass, which was also the region of the entire pass where the formation fluctuations were the most obscure and intricate.
There was none of the heavily guarded, grim scene he had imagined—a sentry every three paces, a watch-post every five.
The residence's main gate was even somewhat shabby; there wasn't so much as a single guard at the door—only two oddly shaped lions, cast entirely of bronze, crouching at the entrance.
As Gu Chengming drew near, the eyeballs of those two bronze lions suddenly swiveled, giving off a soft "clack," and the gate swung open of its own accord, without any wind.
Gu Chengming raised an eyebrow, thinking privately how interesting it was, and stepped inside.
Passing through the front courtyard, Gu Chengming came upon that Vice-General Liang within an exceedingly spacious workshop.
Utterly different from the image Gu Chengming had imagined, Liang Si looked very quiet.
He appeared to be about thirty or so, dressed in a long robe washed pale with age, his hair carelessly bound up with a single wooden hairpin, his features lean and gaunt, carrying an air of bookish scholarliness.
At that moment he was seated before an enormous worktable, an extremely small carving knife in hand, wholly absorbed in carving a piece of wood no larger than a thumb.
The whole workshop was piled high with all manner of gears, connecting rods, blueprints, and as-yet-unfinished puppet parts, yet it did not look disorderly. Sensing Gu Chengming's entrance, Liang Si did not stop the work in his hands at once; rather, he waited until the final stroke had fallen, gently blew away the wood shavings, and only then lifted his head.
"Gu Chengming?" Liang Si set down his carving knife, his voice mild. "General Luo mentioned you to me. Tenth on the Hidden Dragon Ranking—young and promising."
"Greetings, Vice-General Liang." Gu Chengming cupped his hands in salute, not letting the other man's easygoing manner cost him his own courtesy. "Forgive the intrusion; I truly have an important matter to discuss."
"Sit." Liang Si pointed to a stool nearby that looked like some kind of mechanism-chair. "There are no outsiders here; no need to stand on ceremony. Since you've come to me bearing General Luo's token, you must have run into something thorny that calls for a certain accommodation."
Gu Chengming cupped his hands in salute and, without superfluous pleasantries, came straight to the point, laying out the suspicious points concerning the Myriad Gold Pavilion and those twelve dharma artifacts.
When Liang Si had heard him out, a flicker of surprise crossed his eyes.
He was in no hurry to declare his position; instead he took several scrolls out of a mechanism-compartment behind him.
Liang Si pushed the sheepskin scroll across in front of Gu Chengming, a note of admiration in his tone. "This is something I began gathering half a year ago—charts of the Myriad Gold Pavilion's cargo-shipping trade routes."
Gu Chengming unrolled the sheepskin scroll, his gaze sweeping over the dense red lines and annotations upon it, his brows gradually knitting together.
The map clearly depicted the terrain of the Northern Territory, and among it one route, deliberately marked red in cinnabar, stood out as especially glaring.
This route set out from Snowfall Pass and ran northward all the way, winding deep into the fringes of the Demon Domain, passing through several regions flagged in the intelligence as extremely dangerous, and finally looping around in a great circle to double back through a few hidden defiles.
Liang Si pointed at the red line and said slowly, "The trade routes of the Northern Territory carry risk and reward in equal measure. But these few routes the Myriad Gold Pavilion has chosen are coveted even by fourth-realm great demons.
"And yet—" Liang Si tapped lightly on the chart with a finger. "The Myriad Gold Pavilion's caravans run twice a month, regular as clockwork. And in all these many years, there has never once been a record of their goods being plundered or their personnel wiped out.
"That is very strange indeed.
"The demon-beasts of the Northern Territory may lack intelligence, but those few great demons entrenched in the perilous places are no fools. A fat sheep laden with spirit stones, dharma artifacts, and elixir pills, strutting brazenly past their very doorstep every single month—and they simply turn a blind eye to it?"
"Since Vice-General Liang has long since grasped all this, then why..." Gu Chengming was somewhat puzzled.
"Why haven't I acted?" Liang Si sighed, leaning back against his chair and rubbing the space between his brows. "Because there is no hard proof.
"Suspicious as this route is, the Myriad Gold Pavilion can claim that the guards they've hired are simply powerful, or that they've merely had good luck. Unless we can catch them red-handed trading with the demon race, or turn up contraband among their goods.
"But this lot are far too cunning. The caravans not only have experts holding the fort, but also shielding artifacts aimed specifically at spiritual-sense probing. I once sent several invisible puppets to tail them, yet every one of them inexplicably lost contact after entering the depths of the Demon Domain.
"What's more—" Liang Si pointed upward. "The Myriad Gold Pavilion's web of connections within the pass is very tough. Without ironclad proof, if I were to seal them up rashly, I'd be called to account by those great personages up top who want nothing more than to amass wealth in peace."
"So that is how it is. It seems that this time, this subordinate has stumbled onto the truth by sheer accident."
"It isn't exactly a lucky fluke." Liang Si waved a hand. "To spot the clues through a mere handful of dharma artifacts, and yet to restrain yourself from acting directly—coming first to me to compare notes and seek support instead. This sharpness and steadiness really doesn't seem like that of a Wenjian Sect sword-cultivator."
Gu Chengming was taken aback. "Is Vice-General Liang praising me?"
Why did that remark sound a little off, somehow? What did he mean, "doesn't seem like a Wenjian Sect sword-cultivator"? What was wrong with Wenjian Sect sword-cultivators?
Liang Si seemed to see through his thoughts, and sighed. "If you were to look over General Luo's case files from these past few years at Snowfall Pass, you'd understand what I mean."
He rose to his feet and walked over to a cabinet at the side, rummaging for something while remarking offhandedly, "That General Luo of ours—her swordsmanship is divine, her killing decisive; that, naturally, is excellent. But when it comes to handling this sort of roundabout, convoluted affair, her style is really... a bit too plain and unsophisticated.
"If General Luo had discovered today's matter, can you guess what she'd do?"
Gu Chengming ventured a guess. "Lead troops in to seal the place?"
"No." Liang Si shook his head and turned around, a bronze command-arrow now in his hand. "In all likelihood she'd simply take up her sword and cut her way up from the first floor of the Myriad Gold Pavilion. Anyone who blocked her, she'd cut down; anyone who wouldn't talk, she'd cut down; she'd slaughter her way all the way to the top floor, until she'd dragged out that pavilion master, laid her blade across his neck, and put the question to him."
Mm... that really did fit Senior Sister Luo's 'great strength sends bricks flying' style of doing things.
"Although this can solve the problem too—you could even say it's deeply satisfying." Liang Si handed the command-arrow in his hand to Gu Chengming, his tone carrying a few notes of bitterness: "But the mess left behind afterward is far too hard to clean up. The chain of evidence is broken, the witnesses are dead, the people behind it haven't been dug out—and on top of that, one might even get impeached at court for slaughtering the innocent and disrupting trade. These past few years, cleaning up after General Luo has all but made my hair fall out."
Gu Chengming instinctively glanced at Liang Si, then hurriedly received the command-arrow with both hands: "You've had a hard time of it, Vice-General Liang."
"So, to see a sword cultivator like you—one who knows to use his head and values planning before acting—truly puts my mind at ease."
Gu Chengming felt this was a bit odd, but he didn't dwell on it.
After the two had exchanged a round of intelligence, Gu Chengming and Liang Si decided to go investigate the inner workings of the Myriad Gold Pavilion.
But quite obviously, the pretext still needed to be sufficient.
"Getting in is easy; sneaking all the way to the core secrets undetected is hard."
Liang Si frowned slightly: "The Myriad Gold Pavilion's master is at the early fourth realm in cultivation, and he's extremely cautious. That storehouse of his, a place of vital importance, is covered year-round by third-tier formations. At the slightest disturbance, he'll arrive in an instant."
"And this is the second bargaining chip I wanted to mention."
Gu Chengming called out toward the door: "Come in, Miss Nuo Tao."
The door curtain was lifted, and Nuo Tao, her face full of reluctance, dawdled her way in.
She glanced at Vice-General Liang Si, shrank her neck, but still steeled herself and stood behind Gu Chengming.
Upon learning Nuo Tao's identity, Liang Si was somewhat taken aback.
The heirs of the Myriad-Theft Gate were for the most part both upright and unscrupulous—you couldn't call them bad, exactly, but they didn't quite count as good people either.
How had this fellow Little Gu tamed an heir of the Myriad-Theft Gate into this state?
The look in Liang Si's eyes as he turned to Gu Chengming instantly grew odd.
Sure enough, a genius who could earn Senior Sister Luo's regard had his own unique merits.
The silence within the workshop lasted a moment before it was broken by a light cough from Liang Si.
Now that both witness and evidence were in hand, and with an heir of the Myriad-Theft Gate as the key, many plans that had originally been impossible to carry out now had room to maneuver.
Neither man was the dithering type. After a round of secret deliberation, a probing plan targeting the Myriad Gold Pavilion had already taken shape.
Liang Si would handle the overt side; Gu Chengming and Nuo Tao would handle the covert.
But this "overt" was not a frontal assault—rather, it would use Vice-General Liang Si's status and authority to create, within the rules, a bit of trouble that the Myriad Gold Pavilion would have no choice but to deal with.
The latter, meanwhile, would be responsible for infiltrating the Myriad Gold Pavilion to investigate.
Out of the Vice-General's residence, the wind and snow continued as before.
Nuo Tao drooped her head and trailed behind Gu Chengming, kicking the accumulated snow underfoot so that it sprayed everywhere, as though that snowdrift were Gu Chengming's face.
"Does Miss Nuo feel wronged?"
Gu Chengming slowed his steps, his voice especially clear amid the wind and snow.
Nuo Tao gave a snort and turned her face away: "You're the official; an official catching a thief is only natural. I admit defeat. I'll willingly serve as your coolie—but just this once. Once this matter's done, we're square; I'll leave Snowfall Pass at once and never come back."
"Coolie?"
Gu Chengming halted his steps, turned, and looked at that little face of the girl's, written all over with indignation, then suddenly shook his head, his tone carrying a few notes of 'hating that iron won't become steel': "Miss Nuo, this vision of yours is, I'm afraid, a bit too small."
"What do you mean?" Nuo Tao's eyes went wide.
"Think about it—what did you come down the mountain for this time?"
Gu Chengming guided her along step by step: "Wasn't it to temper yourself, to seek the token of your sect, and even more to put into practice your Myriad-Theft Gate's orthodox way of stealing heaven's secrets and filching cause and effect—am I right?"
Nuo Tao instinctively nodded: "That goes without saying."
"Then think again—what kind of place is the Myriad Gold Pavilion?"
Gu Chengming pointed at that magnificent tower in the distance, still ablaze with lights amid the wind and snow.
"It's a den of filth and corruption, a black-hearted shop that kills for goods. A place like that is naturally bound up with ten thousand strands of cause and effect."
"So what?"
"Since it's great cause and effect, then as a Walker of the Myriad-Theft Gate, if you can uncover the truth within it and sever the cause and effect of all that ill-gotten wealth—wouldn't that be of immense benefit to your cultivation?" Gu Chengming countered: "And more importantly—in this operation, who exactly is helping whom?"
Nuo Tao was stunned: "Isn't it me helping you investigate the case?"
"Wrong!" Gu Chengming denied it with absolute certainty: "It was you who discovered something fishy about the Myriad Gold Pavilion; it was you who wanted to lift this dark veil. But you found that with your strength alone, it would be very hard to penetrate to the core without tipping them off. And so, relying on your extraordinary wits, you successfully drew the attention of me, an official of the Night-Watch Bureau."
He pointed at himself, then pointed in the direction of the Vice-General's residence: "Now, you have successfully mobilized a sword cultivator ranked in the top ten of the Hidden Dragon Ranking as your aid, mobilized a vice-general holding heavy troops as your bait, and even borrowed the power of the Great Qian's officialdom to help you complete this earth-shaking deed of a 'chivalrous thief.'"
"In this grand play, we are all pawns being used by you—and you are the one orchestrating from behind the curtain, borrowing strength to strike, the strategist behind it all."
Gu Chengming leaned forward slightly, his gaze meeting the girl's eyes, which were gradually lighting up.
"As the saying goes, the supreme strategy is to attack with schemes—without expending a single soldier, you can make the Great Qian's officials do your bidding. Miss Nuo, if your master came to know of this maneuver, he'd probably praise you with a 'the indigo surpasses the blue from which it comes,' no?"
Borrowing strength to strike? Orchestrating it all? The officials are my pawns? I'm the mastermind behind the curtain?
With this string of high hats clapped onto her head, Nuo Tao felt her whole body go light and floaty, as if she were treading on the clouds.
That's right! How did I never think of it?!
It was clearly I who was a cut above—who, through a 'delivering myself into the net' stratagem of placing oneself in a death-ground to win life, successfully bamboozled these two foolish officials into helping me get the work done!
I'm not the errand-runner—I'm the one playing the chess game!
"Ahem, ahem..."
Nuo Tao straightened her back, the put-upon look from before vanishing utterly. She clasped her hands behind her, struggling to suppress the smile tugging at the corners of her mouth, and said in a tone of grudging concession:
"Although what you say has a whiff of trying to hoodwink me... when I think it over carefully, there's actually not a little sense in it."
"Fine then. Seeing as you've all been so cooperative, this young lady will give you a hand this time."
...
Three days later. Snowfall Pass. The wind and snow had abated somewhat.
Before the resplendent, golden gate of the Myriad Gold Pavilion, Liang Si's carriage slowly came to a stop.
As a vice-general of Snowfall Pass, Liang Si's retinue was not large, but his identity as an heir of the Mohist Gate was enough to make any trading house sweep clean its couches to welcome him.
The master of the Myriad Gold Pavilion—a portly old man in a brocade robe, his face flush and glowing—had long since been waiting at the door with several elders.
Seeing Liang Si step down from the carriage, he immediately greeted him with a face wreathed in smiles.
"Vice-General Liang graces us with his presence—the Myriad Gold Pavilion is bathed in glory!"
Liang Si's expression was placid. He did not bother with much pleasantry, merely giving a faint nod and getting straight to the point:
"You're too kind, Pavilion Master Jin. This general has of late been reinforcing the defensive formation-arrays of the northern city wall, and urgently needs a batch of high-purity Star-Patterned Steel, along with several sets of formation-disc cores capable of sustaining fourth-tier spiritual-power output. I've heard the Myriad Gold Pavilion has wide-reaching channels, so I've come especially to see whether there's any suitable stock."
Hearing it was this sort of big business, the light in Pavilion Master Jin's eyes grew even brighter.
Stepping aside to lead the way, he thumped his chest in guarantee: "Rest assured, Vice-General Liang. Other things this old one dares not claim, but as for the rare spirit-materials of the Northern Territory—if even this old one's Myriad Gold Pavilion doesn't have them, then they'd be all the harder to find elsewhere. Please, let us discuss in detail in a private room upstairs."
As Liang Si was ushered into the top-floor guest chamber amid a throng like stars cupping the moon, the Myriad Gold Pavilion's originally tight defensive forces inevitably shifted their center of gravity a little.
Several elders at the consummation of the third realm, eager to display their trading house's foundation before this vice-general, hurried off one after another to the storehouse to fetch precious wares; and Pavilion Master Jin personally kept him company, his attention mostly fixed for the duration on fielding Liang Si's tricky questions.
Meanwhile, in a patch of shadow in the back alley of the Myriad Gold Pavilion.
Two figures, like green smoke melting into the air, passed soundlessly through the outer perimeter.
Once inside, Gu Chengming discovered that the Myriad Gold Pavilion's foundation was indeed out of the ordinary.
What Nuo Tao had stolen before was merely the dharma artifacts displayed out in the open, used for auction and exhibition.
But in this true inner core region, the degree of luxury and tight security was simply comparable to a small-scale sect treasury.
On the walls on either side of the corridor, every five paces, was set a fist-sized night-luminescent pearl, their gentle glow illuminating the passage down to the finest detail.
"Such extravagance... it's nearly on par with the Night-Watch Bureau's grade-C storehouse."
Gu Chengming pressed close to the shadows as he advanced, secretly clicking his tongue in astonishment.
"Careful."
Nuo Tao suddenly halted her steps and reached out to bar Gu Chengming. He saw her take from her storage pouch a handful of what looked like ordinary powder and lightly blow it out.
The powder scattered through the air, and in the corridor ahead—previously empty of anything—there instantly appeared countless crisscrossing red beams of light, dense and packed, sealing off the path like a spider's web.
"This formation is linked to the earth-veins. The moment it's touched, it'll not only trigger a thunder-fire explosion, but also instantly lock down every exit and simultaneously raise the alarm to the top floor."
As Nuo Tao explained, she fished out from her bosom a jade talisman of bizarre design.
She bit open her fingertip, dripped a drop of essence-blood onto the jade talisman, then formed a seal with both hands, murmuring incantations under her breath.
"Myriad forms formless, cause and effect lend me passage... open!"
At her low cry, the jade talisman transformed into a streak of flowing light that melded into the formation ahead.
Immediately after, the red beams of light slowly parted to either side, forcibly yielding within the net a passage wide enough for just one person to pass through.
"Quickly! This can only hold for half an incense-stick's time!"
Fine beads of sweat seeped from Nuo Tao's forehead; clearly this maneuver was no small drain on her either.
Gu Chengming wasted no words. After crossing this outermost line of defense, the two gradually penetrated into the core region of the Myriad Gold Pavilion.
The atmosphere here grew increasingly cold and grim, with an added trace of a nauseating, bloody stench.
The two found a side hall that looked like a place for storing odds and ends.
Behind a heap of worn-out chests and cases, Nuo Tao discovered an extremely well-concealed hidden door.
This hidden door had no keyhole of any kind, only a roiling mass of black qi—and that black qi was not spiritual power, but an extremely vicious restriction.
"Ssss... this doesn't seem to be an ordinary formation restriction." Nuo Tao leaned in for a closer look: "This is a Blood-Soul Seal? This thing counts as a vicious technique even among devil-cultivators."
Using this sort of evil art to seal a door in a trading house's storehouse?
"Can you undo it?"
"Of course." Nuo Tao gave a smug little laugh: "In the eyes of the Myriad-Theft Gate, there's no restriction in this world that can't be undone."
She drew a deep breath and took from her sleeve a pair of dharma artifacts, which she put on.
"Brother Gu, guard me while I work. This thing's got a bit of an evil streak to it—don't let that grievance-qi disturb my mind."
With that, Nuo Tao's hands began to dance over the mass of black qi like butterflies flitting through flowers.
Each time her fingertips pressed down, they raised a strange ripple, as though teasing apart silk from a cocoon, gradually combing, guiding, and dissolving that tangled mass of grievance-qi strand by strand.
As time passed, the mass of black qi began to tremble violently, and faintly, it was as if countless shrill ghostly wails echoed in the ears.
Gu Chengming's expression did not stir. Within his body, the «Zhouli Heavenly Harmony Righteous Heart Method» circulated, and a wave of Righteous Noble Breath quietly spread out, blocking all the yin-evil qi that sought to erode Nuo Tao's mind a full three feet away.
After roughly an incense-stick's time, Nuo Tao suddenly let out a delicate cry and fiercely tore both hands apart to either side.
"Rrrip—"
A crisp sound, like the tearing of cloth.
That mass of black qi abruptly collapsed and scattered, revealing the heavy dark-iron door behind it.
The great door slowly swung inward, revealing its true contents within.
A bloody stench and a putrid reek, so thick as to be all but tangible, surged out from within the door in an instant, like floodwaters long pent up.
It was a vast underground space, its four walls hung all over with ever-burning lamps still dripping oil, lighting the place up as bright as day.
But there was no mountain of gold and silver treasures piled here, nor any dazzling array of dharma artifacts and pills.
There was only row upon row of iron hooks, like the kind used to hang meat in a slaughterhouse.
And on those iron hooks, what hung was not pigs and sheep, but living, breathing human beings, one after another.
No—perhaps calling them "people" was no longer quite accurate.
Most of them were stark naked, their bodies carved all over with bizarre runes, and those runes were giving off a faint, eerie red glow, as if draining away their very life force. Some had already had their limbs severed, the stumps hastily bandaged—clearly to keep them from bleeding to death. Others had had their chests cut open, exposing throbbing organs, and into those organs were inserted transparent tubes, one after another, ceaselessly siphoning out their essence-blood.
They were still breathing—still conscious, even.
Those pairs of murky, numb, despairing eyes turned slightly the instant the great door opened, yet could not make a single sound—for their tongues had long since been cut out.
Beneath these "hanging ornaments" stood rows of neatly arranged worktables.
On the tables were set all manner of exquisite jars and vials, alongside freshly stripped spirit-roots, freshly extracted spines, freshly gouged-out eyeballs...
[The «Zhouli Heavenly Harmony Righteous Heart Method», gazing upon the scene before it, felt nothing but fury.]
[The reason a man is a man is that he has rites, has measure, has the bonds of kinship! To treat one's own kind as pigs and dogs, to commit such an act in defiance of the Heavenly Dao—this is lower than the beasts, this is the utter collapse of rites and the ruin of music!]
["Kill!" It forced the word out through gritted teeth: "Against villains of such monstrous evil, only by halting violence with punishment, only by halting chaos with slaughter, is the Great Rite fulfilled! Is the Great Good achieved!"]
[The «Qingxin Formula» looked upon that hell on earth, and those eyes that always carried a hint of a smile were now brimming with disgust.]
[Though it loved to watch the myriad facets of the mortal red dust, loved to watch love and hate, passion and enmity, what it watched were the stories of "people"—not this sickening "livestock" farce.]
[It let out a soft sigh: How utterly off-putting... and here I'd been hoping to watch you take that little thief-girl on an adventure game.]
[It said earnestly: Chengming, follow your true heart. I will always be by your side.]
[Huiyuan Sword Formula: M-me too!]
Gu Chengming stared fixedly at this hell on earth, and slowly drew the "Jiao-Slayer" sword from his waist.
"Eternal Life Sect..."
That method of treating people as sacrificial offerings, as materials, as vessels; that all-too-familiar style of runework—who else could it be but that pack of madmen?
"It seems today's matter cannot be settled peacefully after all."
Gu Chengming turned his head and looked toward Nuo Tao, the killing intent in his eyes drawing in:
"Nuo Tao, can you break the restrictions here and take these people down?"
Nuo Tao, who had been feeling rather nauseated, lifted her head—but her gaze had changed too: "Yes!"
Nuo Tao's hands wove like flitting flowers, and soon, those cultivators were lowered down one by one.
But the very next instant...
"Wuuu——!!!"
The sound was extreme in its shrillness, like the dying wail of some demon-beast on the brink of death, and in an instant it pierced through the thick walls and formations, echoing through every floor of the tower.
"Damn it, this restriction was linked to an alarm?"
Nuo Tao's face went pale. As a Walker of the Myriad-Theft Gate, she had failed to detect, in that first moment, this second layer of restriction hidden beneath the resentful aura—a veritable Waterloo of her professional career.
"It's not your fault."
Gu Chengming's expression did not change. His gaze lingered but a moment upon the human bodies hung throughout the room, and then he turned, the «Jiao-Slayer» already unsheathed in his hand, its blade trembling.
"A pity, though—looks like Vice-General Liang won't get to finish his tea."
Top floor, the private room.
Pavilion Master Qian, who had been all smiles, boasting to Liang Si that his own formations were impregnable as iron, found the smile on his face frozen the instant that alarm rang out—stiffened right there.
An instant later, a horrifying killing intent erupted within those murky old eyes.
That was the commotion of his own core storehouse being opened!
"Vice-General Liang."
Pavilion Master Qian shot to his feet, his loose, voluminous brocade robe stirring without any wind, the terrifying pressure of a fourth-realm cultivator instantly filling the entire private room, crushing those priceless porcelains to powder:
"This old one's pavilion seems to have some trifling matter to attend to. I fear I cannot keep the Vice-General company to his heart's content today. Another day, this old one shall call upon you to apologize!"
As he spoke, his figure flickered, and he made to crash straight through the window lattice and dive for the underground.
"Pavilion Master Qian, why such haste?"
A calm voice rang out.
There sat Liang Si, still seated firmly in the grand armchair—only, at some unknown point, an exquisite mechanism-casket had appeared in his hand.
As his fingers flicked it lightly, countless silver threads, fine as ox-hairs, instantly spread to fill the entire room, like a heaven-and-earth net, sealing off Pavilion Master Qian's path of escape utterly.
"Since it's only a trifling matter, then just let your underlings handle it."
"We haven't finished discussing this formation diagram. For the Pavilion Master to want to leave now—isn't that rather disrespectful to the Mohist Gate?"
Pavilion Master Qian's figure halted. Looking at those silver threads radiating a faint blue glow, his face went gloomy to the utmost in an instant.
He was no fool. His storehouse breached, Liang Si blocking his way—with these two things strung together, if he still couldn't grasp that this was a trap, then his several hundred years had been lived to the dogs.
"Good... very good!"
Pavilion Master Qian laughed in the extremity of his rage, that originally kindly, benevolent face now contorted like a vengeful wraith: "So the so-called reinforcing of formations was a sham, and scheming against my Myriad Gold Pavilion was the truth! Liang Si, do you truly think that with you—a single Vice-General who toys with contraptions—you can hold this old one here?!"
"Since the gloves are off, then today this Myriad Gold Pavilion shall be your burial ground!"
Boom!
A violent surge of spiritual power erupted from within Pavilion Master Qian's body, and the formations of the entire Myriad Gold Pavilion were, in this moment, fully activated by him, the light of countless killing-formations blazing to life.
Liang Si sighed, his ten fingers moving in concert, and countless puppets gleaming with metallic luster flew out from his storage ring, instantly forming a battle array.
"Whether I can hold you or not—we'll only know once we've tried."
Underground, the antechamber of the storehouse.
With the alarm sounding, the Myriad Gold Pavilion's reaction speed was astonishing.
One could only hear bursts of hurried footsteps surging in from all directions—and these were no ordinary guards, but a band of death-warriors clad in blood-colored leather armor, wielding standard-issue dharma artifacts.
"This... this many?!" Nuo Tao looked at the death-warriors packed densely enough to block every passage, and her scalp prickled all over. Though she was a Walker of the Myriad-Theft Gate, what she cultivated was movement-arts and escape; head-on, brute confrontation had never been her strong suit.
"Brother Gu... shouldn't we be pulling out?" Nuo Tao instinctively shrank back behind Gu Chengming.
"Pull out?"
Gu Chengming twirled the long sword in his hand into a sword-flourish, and the dragon-patterns coursing across that blade seemed to come alive, faintly issuing the furious roar of a jiao-dragon.
"If we leave, who is to deliver the wronged souls here?"
The words had scarcely fallen before he stepped forth.
"Hummm——"
It was not just one sword.
As Gu Chengming's thought stirred faintly, four streaks of flowing light surged skyward from behind him.
Four Tier-Two Dharma Swords, together with the Tier-Three «Jiao-Slayer» in his hand—five swords sallying forth at once, instantly constructing a sword formation within the narrow corridor.
At their head, a second-realm-consummation death-warrior captain let out a hoarse roar and was the first to charge, blade swinging, the several dozen death-warriors behind him welling up like a tide.
Facing this siege—enough to make ordinary third-realm cultivators give way and retreat—Gu Chengming not only did not fall back, he charged headlong into the gleam of the blades.
And then, Nuo Tao beheld a scene she would never forget for the rest of her life.
Gu Chengming used no flashy techniques whatsoever—he merely commanded his swords.
But in his hands, those five flying swords seemed to possess minds of their own, while Gu Chengming himself, the «Jiao-Slayer» in hand, roved through the crowd as if strolling at leisure through a courtyard.
A late-second-realm death-warrior roared and chopped down with his blade. Gu Chengming neither dodged nor evaded, but flipped his wrist and swept a sword upward.
"Clang!"
That top-grade dharma-artifact-class saber was severed outright by the «Jiao-Slayer», and the sword-edge then sliced onward in the same motion. The death-warrior had no time even to scream before his whole body was cleaved neatly in two, from shoulder to crotch.
Fresh blood gushed forth, yet within three feet of Gu Chengming it was bounced aside of its own accord by his sword-qi—not even the hem of his robe was stained in the slightest.
"Pucha, pucha, pucha..."
The sound of keen blades sinking into flesh rose one after another, yet there was not so much as a single crisp clash of weapons—because the weapons in those death-warriors' hands, before Gu Chengming's sword, were as fragile as rotten wood.
Nuo Tao gaped, staring blankly at that figure weaving through the rain of blood and the reek of carnage.
She had seen second-realm cultivators duel before—nothing more than everyone opening up the distance, tossing out a few talismans, loosing a few spells, or hacking at each other with dharma artifacts for a few hundred rounds.
But what was this before her eyes?
One came, one died; a pair came, a pair died.
Whether it was an earth-cultivator skilled in defense or a wind-cultivator skilled in speed, before that man there was no difference at all.
It was all a matter of a single sword.
"This... is this really mid-second-realm?"
Nuo Tao swallowed a mouthful of saliva, feeling her entire worldview crumbling.
She had always reckoned that, as a Walker of the Myriad-Theft Gate, among her own realm—barring those freaks—she should have nothing to fear for her own safety.
But now it seemed that, were she herself the target of that sword...
She gave a shudder, and reached up to feel the head still sitting on her neck.
"What petty rogue dares run wild in my Myriad Gold Pavilion!"
Just as the death-warriors were nearly slaughtered to the last, a thunderous roar exploded out.
A pressure belonging to a third-realm powerhouse came crushing down from the far end of the corridor, like a landslide, like a tidal wave.
There came a giant of a man, fully nine feet tall, his body knotted with muscle like an iron tower, hefting an enormous flower-bossed battle-axe, charging over with great, ground-eating strides.
With every step he set down, the ground quaked along with it, the hard bluestone slabs cracking inch by inch.
Nuo Tao recognized this as the very guard-captain who had hunted her down that day when she'd stolen the Myriad Gold Pavilion's dharma artifacts, and she cried out in alarm: "Brother Gu, careful! This man is an early-third-realm body-cultivator..."
Her words had not yet finished before they cut off abruptly.
Because she saw Gu Chengming come to a halt.
Facing that single axe-blow that could split mountains and rend stone, facing that menacing third-realm body-cultivator who looked set to grind him into pulp—
Gu Chengming did not draw his sword. He merely, slowly, clenched his right fist.
Deep within his sea of consciousness, that white figure which had all this while been clamoring that it hadn't killed to its satisfaction now abruptly opened its eyes.
The next moment.
With no ripple of spiritual power whatsoever, and no light or shadow of any technique, a single fist blasted out, simple and plain.
[Hundred Bones Resonance: Kneel before Emperor Gu!]
"Boom——!!!"
The air in that instant seemed compressed to the very extreme, and then violently burst apart.
That giant, the one named Zhang Man, his ferocity not even having time to turn into terror, felt an indescribable, unstoppable, horrifying force slam viciously into his chest.
"Thud!"
A muffled sound, not crisp at all, yet so dull and heavy it made one's heart seize.
Nuo Tao saw only a blur before her eyes.
That third-realm body-cultivator, so insufferably arrogant a moment ago, was like a balloon filled with water, stomped viciously underfoot and burst.
No whole corpse, no severed limbs.
Only a blood-mist exploding across the heavens, and a clump of mangled flesh smeared on the wall, slowly sliding down.
Upon that indestructible black-iron wall was left a fist-print, several inches deep, utterly distinct.
[CG / Hundred Heavens Emperor, Aid Me: damage multiplier raised to 1.15]
The remaining few death-warriors, gazing at that man standing within the blood-mist, not a hair out of place, found the hands gripping their blades beginning to tremble violently.
Nuo Tao leaned against the wall, her legs gone weak, her whole self already thoroughly dazed.
She looked at that clump of "body-cultivator" on the wall, then looked at Gu Chengming, who was shaking out his wrist.
"A third-realm body-cultivator gone in one punch?"
She felt she might be dreaming.
Was this really something a second-realm cultivator could do?
Was this person even from the same world as her?
That fifth-realm master of mine—back when he was young, was he this monstrous?
"Stop spacing out."
Gu Chengming drew a deep breath. Although the «Hundred Bones Resonance» within him was still clamoring for another punch, he knew now was not the time to linger in battle.
That punch had felt good, but it had also drained all his physical strength. After using the sword formation to cut down the remaining few death-warriors, he turned and hauled up Nuo Tao, who was still doubting her very existence:
"The commotion upstairs is off. Vice-General Liang can't hold out. Come—let's go support him."
...
The battle on the top floor was far more brutal than Gu Chengming had imagined.
Or rather, it was a one-sided kind of brutal.
When Gu Chengming burst through the floorboards with Nuo Tao and reached the top floor, what he saw was a scene of utter wreckage.
The entire private chamber had been smashed to pieces; the roof had been blown clean off, and wind and snow poured in.
Liang Si's once-elegant scholar's robe had now been reduced to ragged strips; he was wounded in many places, blood staining half his body red.
And around him, the dozens of once-exquisitely-crafted mechanical puppets had now become so much scrap metal littering the ground.
Some had their limbs torn off, others had their cores blasted apart outright; only a scant two or three battered puppets still barely held the line of defense.
Vice-General Liang truly was strong. His mechanism arts, when facing opponents of the same realm or even a shade higher, could seize the upper hand through sheer numbers and exquisite coordination—what one might call a "god at sweeping away rank-and-file soldiers."
But his greatest shortcoming was a lack of decisive, finishing burst-power, and the fragility of his own body when confronted with absolute violence.
And Pavilion Master Qian happened to be exactly the type he found hardest to deal with.
He wasn't using any spirit treasure; rather, his whole body was wreathed in a black-red miasma of malice, within which countless wronged souls could faintly be heard shrieking. Every blow he struck carried a virulent poison that corroded both spiritual power and soul.
This was clearly an evil art of the Eternal Life Sect, cultivated by borrowing the resentment of cultivators tortured to death—unstable at its foundation, yes, but its killing power was genuinely, solidly terrifying.
"Pft—"
Liang Si spat out a mouthful of blood, and more than half the threads in his hands controlling the puppets snapped.
He looked at Gu Chengming charging up, his eyes filled with nothing but anxiety: "Gu Chengming! Who told you to come up here?!"
"Take that girl and go, quickly! As long as you get out of here and spread the word, he's finished!"
Liang Si knew very well that he had lost.
He had underestimated Pavilion Master Qian's strength, and underestimated the man's madness after cultivating that evil art.
For Gu Chengming to come up now was not reinforcement at all—it was throwing his life away.
The chasm between the second realm and the fourth realm simply could not be bridged by numbers.
"Go?" Hearing this, Pavilion Master Qian, hovering in midair, let out a blood-curdling cold laugh.
His condition was extremely unstable now—his eyes blood-red, the skin of his face writhing as though insects squirmed beneath it. These were the signs of the evil art's backlash, yet at this moment they only made him look all the more savage.
Pavilion Master Qian's gaze locked tightly onto Gu Chengming, and the pressure of a fourth-realm cultivator bore down like a great mountain:
"I was just worried that if you ran off it'd be hard for me to slip away—never imagined you'd deliver yourself right to my door."
The words were not yet finished when Pavilion Master Qian's figure vanished in an instant.
When he reappeared, he was already three feet above Gu Chengming's head.
He paid no heed at all to the spent, exhausted Liang Si, and instead brought down a palm strike.
That hand swelled rapidly in midair, transforming into a giant palm as large as a millstone, wreathed with countless black-red ghostly faces, and it came smothering down straight at Gu Chengming's head with a suffocating stench and pressure.
At the critical, hair's-breadth instant when the giant palm was about to touch the strands of Gu Chengming's hair, his figure suddenly flickered into something illusory.
There was no burst of spiritual power, nor any dodging movement.
It was like a flower in a mirror, a moon in water, brushed by a gentle breeze.
"Bang!" Pavilion Master Qian's palm—powerful enough to shatter metal and stone—landed squarely and solidly upon "Gu Chengming's" body.
There was no sensation of flesh and blood splattering.
Pavilion Master Qian was slightly stunned.
The feel of it was wrong!
Empty? Before his brain—grown somewhat sluggish from cultivating the evil art—could even react, the "Gu Chengming" he had struck suddenly smiled an eerie smile.
And then that figure shattered like a bubble.
The Red Dust Phantom Body Formula!
But the truly disgusting, truly lethal thing was not this phantom body.
It was that, in the instant the phantom body shattered, a point of white light—carrying a chill cold enough to freeze heaven and earth itself—bloomed forth from the phantom body's "heart."
That was not Gu Chengming's sword.
It was an ancient, unadorned sword-talisman, hidden at some unknown moment within the phantom body.
It was the life-saving trump card that Luo Jinyao—seventh on the Heaven Ranking, who had guarded the Northern Territory for ten years and slain demons until their race quailed—had personally left to Gu Chengming before his departure.
"This is—"
Pavilion Master Qian's pupils abruptly contracted to pinpricks, and a terror rising from the depths of his soul made every hair on his body stand on end.
He wanted to flee, to retreat, to defend.
But that light was too fast.
"Zheng—!!!"
A sword-cry of utmost clarity drowned out the wind and snow, drowned out the slaughter, and rang throughout the whole of Snowfall Pass.
It was not a stroke of sword-qi, but a sweep of snow.
The sword-talisman shattered, and the sword intent burst forth!
In that moment, heaven and earth seemed to lose all color, leaving only that single streak of sword-light, dazzling to the very extreme.
Without the slightest resistance, it sliced through Pavilion Master Qian's body-guarding malice, sliced through the fourth-realm flesh he so prided himself on, sliced through the spirit treasure he raised in his hand to try to block.
Like a hot knife through butter.
Pavilion Master Qian had time only to utter half a syllable before that sword-light cut in at the center of his brow and passed out below his groin.
Then, its momentum undiminished, it shot straight into the heavens, cleaving open the Myriad Gold Pavilion's defensive grand formation—said to be impregnable as iron—together with the thick black clouds overhead, slashing a colossal rift a thousand zhang long!
Sunlight spilled down along that rift.
It fell upon Pavilion Master Qian's body, frozen stiff in midair.
A thin red line surfaced down the very center of his body.
"Pft—"
Blood sprayed out like rain.
This fourth-realm great cultivator—who had held sway over Snowfall Pass for years, colluded with the Eternal Life Sect, butchered his own kind, and deemed himself peerless—was thus, in full view of all, split neatly into two halves.
The corpse fell, landing with two dull thuds.
The whole world fell silent.
Liang Si held the posture of one about to rush over to the rescue, his mouth gaping wide enough to stuff in an egg, staring dumbstruck at the corpse on the ground, then glancing at Gu Chengming standing not far off.
Nuo Tao, for her part, simply slumped straight to the ground.
Who am I? Where am I? What just happened?
Gu Chengming's body swayed; he barely propped himself up with the [Jiao-Slayer] sword to keep from collapsing.
Activating that sword-talisman, though it had not required him to supply all of the spiritual power, the instantaneous surge of sword intent it drew upon had nonetheless drained every last drop of true essence and physical strength from his body in an instant.
At this moment, he didn't even have the strength to move a single finger.
Gu Chengming, panting heavily, looked at the corpse and tugged a faint smile to the corner of his mouth.
—Do you have any idea of the sheer worth of a life-saving item that a sect genius's elders give them?
Still, this sword-talisman of Senior Sister Luo's took far too much out of him... Had he not feared that Vice-General Liang wouldn't hold out while he went to fetch reinforcements, he definitely wouldn't have taken such a risk.
[The Red Dust Phantom Body Formula is quite gratified. Though your rash dash up here to help someone was impulsive, your handling of what followed could be said to suit her tastes perfectly... Using the phantom body in concert with the sword-talisman to outright slaughter a fourth-realm cultivator—Fellow Daoist Gu, you are simply a genius!]
[Red Dust Phantom Body Formula favorability +10]
[Current favorability: 20 / Stranger]
[The «Zhouli Heavenly Harmony Righteous Heart Method», gazing at the wreckage of the death-warriors strewn across the ground, gazing at Pavilion Master Qian cut in two by a single sword-stroke, finally let out a breath of relief.]
[To safeguard the peace of a region, to sweep away the filth of the world, to grant the dead their justice and the living their clarity. This is great benevolence, this is great righteousness, this is great propriety!
The look it turns upon you now holds nothing but approval and admiration.]
[Zhouli Heavenly Harmony Righteous Heart Method favorability +8]
[Current favorability: 85 / Fond]
Truly a bountiful harvest...
Gu Chengming found it amusing, and after a sigh of feeling in his heart, he called out toward Liang Si, who was still dazed over there: "Vice-General Liang... stop staring."
"That was Senior Sister Luo's sword-talisman. Hurry up and clean up the mess..."
Only then did Liang Si snap out of it as if waking from a dream.
The ruins of the Myriad Gold Pavilion were, in the end, buried by the seemingly never-ceasing wind and snow of the Northern Territory.
Vice-General Liang Si, with the thunderous methods of the Mohist Gate, swiftly sealed off all the trading company's holdings; the mountain of incriminating evidence was laid directly upon the desk, enough to stop the mouths of every powerful noble who might want to make trouble of the occasion.
And as for the once-arrogant Pavilion Master Qian, in death he amounted to no more than a single cold line in the official gazette: "Colluded with an evil cult; executed."
And that Myriad-Theft Gate Walker, who by rights should have used the chaos and her exquisite escape arts to flee without a trace, instead made a decision that defied her ancestral teachings.
—She stayed.
Perhaps this was because of the secret-realm token in Gu Chengming's hand, or perhaps because, after witnessing with her own eyes the terrifying spectacle of that young sword cultivator shattering a third-realm with a single punch and cutting down a fourth-realm with a single sword-stroke amid talk and laughter, the girl's once-restless, freedom-yearning thieving heart suddenly arrived at an epiphany called "following one's heart."
Rather than drift through the jianghu in fear and dread, liable at any moment to be slapped dead by some mighty being come from who-knows-where, it would be better to lie low at this sword-cultivator fellow's side.
At least in the matter of a sense of security, he certainly delivered in full.
Of course, for Gu Chengming, aside from the vast amount of merit and the mountains of spoils this upheaval brought, there was also a new title that spread of its own accord throughout the Northern Territory—one that left the man himself rather helpless.
Though it was likewise a title earned in the second realm, unlike Senior Sister Luo's "Snowfall Sword," Gu Chengming's title was a good deal more blunt.
[The Murder-Demon of Snowfall Pass]
Looking at the newly added suffix on the Hidden Dragon Ranking.
—This thing should change later along with one's battle record, right?
Right?!
Of course, this question ultimately had no answer, but the cultivation methods all chimed in to console him.
[The Hundred Bones Resonance laughed: Emperor Gu! Why sigh? Though if it could be changed to "The Heaven-Burying Demon Emperor of Snowfall Pass," that would be even more perfect.]
—I'll stick with the Murder-Demon of Snowfall Pass, then.
[Zhouli consoled him: As the saying goes, law and punishment establish authority by such means. With this fearsome name preceding you, henceforth those villains who would commit wrongdoing and crime will feel dread in their hearts when facing you, and so will not dare act rashly. You need not even lift a hand, and yet you can halt the spear. To subdue the enemy's troops without battle—this is the ultimate intent of moral transformation!]
[The Qingxin Formula laughed softly behind her hand: Isn't it rather nice, though? This title is quite cute.]
[The Huiyuan Sword Formula said in a small voice: As long as it's Chengming's title, then it's the best one! And "Murder-Demon" actually sounds kind of... rather impressive?]
Gu Chengming gazed speechlessly at the sky, leaving only a long sigh to dissolve into the wind.
The youth lifts his sword; his name rises from the wind and snow; the story is only just beginning.
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