So what's a man to do when his Senior turns out to like being swung around like a weapon?
If recent events were turned into a light novel, Gu Chengming thought, that would probably be the title.
But seriously, Senior Arnold — wasn't it a little unbecoming of a Sovereign's dignity to go developing a whole technique out of "getting swung around"?
Arnold herself, for her part, didn't see anything wrong with it whatsoever.
"Dignity? What's that supposed to mean?"
Arnold launched into another round of bragging about her glory days terrorizing the cultivation world.
Well, no wonder she was ranked alongside Jiahao Sovereign back in the day — their reputations were, it had to be said, remarkably consistent.
Arnold had developed an intense enthusiasm for using her own body to smash people into paste, and if Gu Chengming was honest with himself, he had only himself to blame — it all traced back to something he'd said to her on the day he claimed Free Heaven.
Wasn't Senior Arnold's own body the best weapon there was?
That single remark seemed to have struck her like a bolt of enlightenment, and from then on she'd spent her every waking hour researching how to swing her body around for maximum destructive effect.
To give an honest assessment, with the lingering aura of Shatter Myriad Laws still clinging to her, Arnold's body really was extraordinarily effective — a single swing left nothing untouched by any law. Gu Chengming had tried out the move Arnold called the "Super Invincible Whirlwind Spin," and he had to admit, her combat instincts and tactical intelligence were both exceptionally sharp.
The name was a little abstract, sure, but the move itself was undeniably powerful, weaving together the properties of Shatter Myriad Laws, Arnold's own nature, and even the sheer physical toughness Gu Chengming's own body had accumulated under the Hundred Bones Resonance's tempering.
But before the excitement had even fully worn off, a new problem reared its head in front of Arnold.
Right now she was, at the end of the day, still just a remnant soul. Swinging around might leave no law untouched, but it couldn't actually harm a physical body at all.
Only then did Gu Chengming belatedly realize — back in the Free Heaven Secret Realm, he himself hadn't had a physical body either, and neither had Jiahao Sovereign. That was precisely why that absurd little brawl had been possible to begin with.
Now that the present-day Miss Arnold had grasped this fact, it hit her like a thunderbolt, and she visibly wilted before his eyes.
"Don't tell me our unstoppable Gu-Nuo Combat Formula is going to be cut down before it's even had its debut in front of the world?!"
Only now did Sovereign Arnold belatedly discover that her once-invincible body seemed to have slipped from her grasp — and what grieved her most wasn't the loss of combat power, but the fact that she could no longer team up with Gu Chengming, could no longer use her own body to smash people.
Here was a Seventh Realm Sovereign who'd fought through an entire lifetime of battles, reduced to tears over something like this at the very end — it was enough to make anyone laugh and sigh at once.
Fortunately, Gu Chengming's cultivation in the art of coaxing children ran deep.
Arnold had barely sunk into her slump for a moment before he trotted out the same well-worn script he'd long used to soothe the Hundred Bones Resonance, and within a few words she was all smiles again.
Perhaps body cultivators really did share the same wiring — the exact same tactics, and yet Arnold ate it up just as readily; her gloom came fast, but it vanished faster still.
This scene, witnessed by the Hundred Bones Resonance, left the self-proclaimed "World's Number One Body-Tempering Technique" positively green with jealousy.
[Heavenly Emperor Gu! This Emperor is the world's number one body-tempering technique!]
Gu Chengming, torn between laughter and exasperation, could only placate her half-heartedly in his mind — yes, yes, of course you're number one in the world.
Naturally, such an insincere placation couldn't satisfy the Hundred Bones Resonance's competitive streak. It wasn't until he personally entered Love's Hundred Bones Resonance's room and got thoroughly wrung out twice over that the Hundred Bones Resonance finally declared, chin held high, that Heavenly Emperor Gu really was the best after all.
Gu Chengming harbored a deep suspicion that the Hundred Bones Resonance was playing dumb on purpose, using "jealousy" as a pretext to extort affection from him.
Time passed, and the good news was that matters requiring his personal attention within the Capital had all but vanished.
The higher his cultivation climbed, the fewer and further between these carefree stretches of time seemed to become.
Just as the comic had said — with great power came great responsibility — and Gu Chengming's appreciation for that line deepened with each passing day.
But precisely because such moments were so rare, the half-day of stolen leisure after a stretch of busyness felt all the more healing.
At some point, without quite realizing it, Gu Chengming had come to feel a genuine sense of belonging to this world.
He had to admit, with some embarrassment, that in the beginning he'd never quite shaken the notion that this was "a game world" — and because of that, many of his choices and actions had felt like little more than clicking through dialogue options, without much real feeling behind them. But as the people he knew multiplied, and the people and techniques he cared about grew more numerous, this world had, almost without his noticing, become vividly, undeniably real.
Looking back on his old world, he could count the people worthy of the name "friend" on one hand, and he had no idea whether any blood relatives were even still alive.
If he had to name any real attachment, it was probably nothing more than the paper cutouts of some Galgame.
Honestly, if there had been anyone in that old world truly worth loving, would he ever have sunk so deep into Galgames in the first place?
But here, he had many people worth loving — many people he'd gladly risk his life to save.
Yu Wenqiu was curled up in his arms right now, dozing, her head nuzzling against his stomach, murmuring something indistinct.
"Mmm, Little Gu's smell... hehe."
Gu Chengming looked down at her smug, sleeping face and gently stroked Elder Little Yu's head, the sensation no different from petting a cat.
At the touch, Yu Wenqiu nuzzled even more contentedly, burying her whole face against him — she treasured this hard-won stretch of alone time as much as anyone.
Thinking back to when she'd first arrived in the Capital, those had been quiet, ordinary days too, though back then she'd always fumbled about, making a mess of things for Little Gu. Looking back on it now, it was all an inexpressible kind of happiness.
How long had it been since she'd last gotten to fall asleep curled up in Little Gu's arms like this?
Oh wait, she suddenly remembered — back then she hadn't even been able to let her guard down enough to allow herself this kind of closeness in the first place.
It seemed people really did have a way of romanticizing their own memories.
Counting it out, that stretch of time hadn't actually been that long ago — only a few years, all told — and yet it felt like the better part of a lifetime had passed.
Perhaps it was simply that every hour spent with Little Gu was worth savoring twice over; Elder Little Yu happily settled on this satisfying explanation for herself, then burrowed her face in even deeper, entirely at peace with it.
Days this peaceful and untroubled were never going to last every single day.
Gu Chengming had always been the sort to find trouble for himself, and besides, there truly were many things in this world that needed guarding against before they struck.
His own cultivation realm was still far too low for now — if he could successfully refine his Dharma-Station and ascend to Sovereign, there was no telling how much more he'd be able to do, how much more he could change, in the days ahead.
He didn't want to leave a single regret in his own story, and so he first had to seize firmly hold of the power capable of changing everything.
This was, in fact, the first time Gu Chengming had ever wanted, from the bottom of his heart, to grow stronger no matter what it took.
The trouble was, refining the Free Heaven Dharma-Station simply could not be rushed — there was no way he'd be claiming it fully any time soon.
Just as he was fretting over this, however, an unexpected turning point arrived without warning.
That day, as usual, Gu Chengming sat cross-legged beneath the old osmanthus tree in the courtyard, polishing his Fourth Realm true essence, while Yu Wenqiu curled up in the hammock nearby reading a storybook. Everything was exactly as it always was — until, without quite meaning to, he brought the phantom image of the Free Heaven Dharma-Station hovering at his brow together, in a single act of contemplation, with the Fourth Realm sword intent coiled within his body.
The instant that thought took shape, something stirred in Gu Chengming's mind.
These past days he'd thrown himself wholly into the question of "how to refine Free Heaven," combing through every text the Master had given him, testing every method the Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign had pointed him toward — yet he'd remained stuck at the exact same threshold the entire time.
This Dharma-Station had accepted him as its master without ever having been properly proven; ordinary refinement methods simply had no purchase on it. But that instant of contemplation just now had given birth to an entirely different understanding.
Free Heaven. Free Heaven.
What Jiahao Sovereign had sought, back when he chose a successor for it, was precisely someone who could break free of convention, someone unbound by rules.
The reason this Dharma-Station had, in its muddled way, accepted him as master was exactly because he'd used a thoroughly unorthodox method during that absurd melee.
So then — might the true key to refining it lie not in "how to properly, dutifully prove it according to the rules," but in "how to boldly, unapologetically disregard the rules altogether"?
With that thought, Gu Chengming set aside the proper method he'd been studying so diligently for so many days, and switched instead to the approach that suited him best. Rather than trying to painstakingly connect his own foundation to the Dharma-Station's main trunk, he did the opposite — he used the Unfettered Freedom Formula to prove the Dharma-Station.
These past days he'd poured himself wholly into growing stronger, polishing his Fourth Realm true essence to complete perfection — what he'd been missing all along was never depth of foundation, but exactly the right kind of nerve, the resolve needed to break through that threshold.
And the "unrestrained, freewheeling spirit" embodied in Free Heaven was precisely that last missing ingredient.
— Suddenly a spring breeze of freedom rose up, scattering every old cage from his body. —
Fifth Realm — achieved!
The old osmanthus tree in the courtyard stirred though there was no wind, golden petals drifting down in a shower to cover Gu Chengming from head to toe.
A grand Dharma-Station omen surged skyward from his brow, a pillar of pale golden light shooting up to pierce the heavens, illuminating half the sky with its glow.
Yu Wenqiu, absorbed in her storybook in the hammock, gave a violent start, and the book dropped to the ground with a slap.
"L-Little Gu, breaking through again?!"
She counted on her fingers — how many days had it even been since Little Gu had gone out and come back having broken through to the Fourth Realm?
Arnold cheered with delight: "You did it, you did it! Little Gu, you're a Sovereign now! Eh, wait, no — something still seems a little off?"
[The Hundred Bones Resonance, equally overjoyed: Heavenly Emperor Gu, magnificent!]
Gu Chengming slowly opened his eyes. Fifth Realm qi circulated through him exactly as he willed it — the Free Heaven Dharma-Station that had hovered at his brow for so many days, he had finally proven it... partially?
He looked down at his own hands, then up at the old osmanthus tree, its petals shaken loose and scattered across the ground by the omen, and felt a satisfaction he couldn't quite put into words.
The problem that had plagued him for days had, in the end, been resolved in this thoroughly unreasonable manner.
It suited the very name "Free Heaven" rather well, all things considered.
Just as he was savoring the moment, the corner of his eye caught the gaze of his own Dao companion across the courtyard, in the hammock — both dejected and happy for him at once.
Understanding dawned on him, and he walked toward Yu Wenqiu with a smile. "Elder Little Yu."
Yu Wenqiu lifted her head with a plaintive look. "Couldn't Little Gu have waited for me just a little bit?"
Gu Chengming sat down on the edge of the hammock beside her and reached out to smooth back a stray lock of her hair.
"What kind of talk is that, Elder," he said with a smile. "From here on, whatever scenery this path has to offer, I'll walk it together with you and see it all."
Yu Wenqiu froze for a moment, and all that welling frustration was instantly scalded away by his words; the tips of her ears reddened at a speed visible to the naked eye, and she didn't even remember to pick the storybook back up off the ground.
Meanwhile, as Gu Chengming took stock of the power now coursing through him, he began to sense that something wasn't quite right.
The Free Heaven Dharma-Station hovering at his brow hadn't yet been fully mastered — what he could currently wield was only a portion of its authority.
This situation was rare indeed. What people ordinarily called "half-step Sixth Realm" usually referred to cultivators who had already reached the very peak of the Fifth Realm, their foundation complete and flawless, lacking only that final push of refining a Dharma-Station to cross into the Sixth Realm.
But Gu Chengming had it backwards — his realm remained stuck at the Fifth, and yet he'd already gotten a head start on mastering part of a Dharma-Station's authority, as though the Dharma-Station were only half-refined and yet already usable by him.
By all rights, these two conditions should never have been able to coexist.
And yet, through some inexplicable quirk, Gu Chengming had, in his usual muddled fashion, become the first cultivator in the history of the cultivation world to achieve a truly literal "half-step Sixth Realm."
Gu Chengming studied his own thoroughly ill-fitting cultivation state for a long while, and in the end could only accept it with weary resignation.
Well, it wasn't as though unorthodox things hadn't happened to him plenty of times before — one more wasn't exactly a shock.
Only, once word of this half-step Sixth Realm got out, it stirred up quite a storm across the cultivation world.
Others had barely finished marveling at how Gu Chengming, at the Fourth Realm, had cut down a Sovereign and induced the birth of a Dharma-Station, when in the blink of an eye this young talent of the Wenjian Sect had broken through yet again — and in such a bizarre fashion, too.
A cultivator nominally still at only the Fifth Realm, somehow wielding Dharma-Station authority that ought to belong exclusively to the Sixth Realm — how were all those seniors who'd toiled through untold years, stuck at the very peak of the Fifth Realm, unable to refine their Dharma-Stations for the life of them, supposed to feel about that?
For a time, this never-before-heard term, "half-step Sixth Realm," became — alongside Gu Chengming's name — once again the focus of quiet discussion in every corner.
But none of that fuss had anything to do with Gu Chengming for the moment.
After his breakthrough, the very first thought in his mind was to return to the Wenjian Sect.
For one thing, an event of this magnitude ought to be reported in person to both his master and the Sect Head; for another, this half-step Sixth Realm had come about so strangely that he needed to consult several of the sect's elders on many of its finer points.
The moment Yu Wenqiu heard that Little Gu was heading back to the sect, her heart leapt with excitement.
— Finally!
These past days in the Capital she'd been thoroughly overshadowed by the Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign — unable to match the woman's presence in front of Little Gu, and on top of that, epically defeated by that legendary counter-defense, the Ghost Wall — she'd had a bellyful of frustration with nowhere to vent it.
Now that she finally had the chance to return to her own home turf, she thought to herself, this time it would be her home-field advantage — once they reached the Wenjian Sect, let's see how that Sovereign was going to compete with her for Little Gu there!
Elder Little Yu was happily scheming over how she'd hold her head high once they got back to the sect, when she heard the Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign beside her speak up unhurriedly.
"Since young friend is heading back to the sect, I'll accompany you."
Yu Wenqiu's smile froze on her face.
Gu Chengming was mildly surprised as well. He'd assumed the Sovereign, who lived so reclusively, would have absolutely no interest in a trivial family visit like this — he'd never expected her to volunteer to come along.
"Senior wants to go to the Wenjian Sect too?"
"Mm." The Sovereign's expression was perfectly composed, her justification impeccable: "Young friend's half-step Sixth Realm came about so strangely — should any difficulty arise along the way with refining the Dharma-Station, I'll be able to lend a hand nearby."
The reasoning was airtight; Gu Chengming couldn't find a single excuse to refuse, and so he simply nodded his agreement.
Only Yu Wenqiu, listening to this talk of "lending a hand nearby," felt that the sliver of home-field advantage she'd only just started warming up to had been quietly pressed back down again before she could even enjoy it.
She was seething inside, but the gap in their cultivation left her unable to voice a word of complaint; she could only shoot the Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign a resentful glance, then look at Gu Chengming with a wronged expression, and finally swallow the whole thing down.
— Wonderful. Even a trip home, and this Sovereign senior tags along like a ghost that just won't leave.
Elder Little Yu grumbled bitterly to herself in private, while on the outside she still had to maintain her dignified air as an elder — it was genuinely exhausting to keep up.
After a brief farewell to the Capital, the three of them set out together on the road back to the sect.
Naturally, Senior Arnold had a part to play in this journey as well.
This foremost body cultivator of ancient times, ever since gaining the ability to condense a physical form and walk about outside, had approached everything in this world with boundless curiosity, stopping to examine anything that caught her eye and peppering everyone with questions.
Gu Chengming was patient enough to answer her one by one at first, but eventually he simply couldn't keep up, and let her gawk and wonder to her heart's content atop the flying sword.
Partway through the journey, Arnold suddenly pointed at the mountains and rivers rushing by beneath them and remarked with some feeling, "Sword-riding flight really is a lot more convenient than it was in my day. Back then, if I wanted to travel any distance, I had to measure it out step by step on these two legs."
Gu Chengming thought to himself, Senior, weren't you the one famous for your monstrous brute strength, capable of flattening a mountain with a single punch? By rights, shouldn't you have had no need to walk on foot at all?
But the Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign, hearing this, took on a rather complicated look.
Though she and Arnold weren't quite of the same generation, both were figures who'd emerged from those ancient ages, and the "long-gone" things Arnold spoke of so casually carried, for her, a certain wistful familiarity.
Arnold, entirely oblivious to this, simply continued on with her signature brand of Arnold-babble: "Well, it doesn't matter either way. Roads are meant to be walked — walked is walked, and un-walked is still un-walked."
So the journey continued in silence, until at last the silhouette of the Wenjian Sect's mountain gate appeared on the horizon.
This time, however, the sword intent carrying Gu Chengming home through the sky was wrapped, without the least restraint, in the grand, sweeping presence of a half-step Sixth Realm cultivator — startling everyone at the mountain gate from far off.
The news spread through the entire sect even faster than it had the last time; by the time Gu Chengming's sword touched down, several of the elders capable of handling such matters had already come out en masse to greet him from the Sect Head's main peak.
The moment Ren Wencai laid eyes on his own disciple, that habitually stern face of his couldn't hide a flash of pride — but before that pride could fully bloom, it was frozen in place by the aura radiating from Gu Chengming.
"You've..." Ren Wencai's voice wavered slightly. "Broken through again?"
Beside him, Shen Qianqiu's expression shifted subtly as well. Having lived through so many years, he considered his own perception far from shallow, and yet Gu Chengming's cultivation aura genuinely left him unable to get a firm read on it.
Call it Fifth Realm, and that Dharma-Station qi already carried the faint shadow of the Sixth Realm; call it Sixth Realm, and the foundation of his cultivation remained, solidly and unmistakably, stuck at the Fifth.
Such a thoroughly ill-fitting cultivation state — he was genuinely encountering it for the first time.
Gu Chengming let out a wry laugh and was just about to explain the whole story of his half-step Sixth Realm, but before he could open his mouth, he noticed that Shen Qianqiu and the others' gazes had, in perfect unison, slid past his shoulder to land on the moon-white-robed Sovereign standing behind him.
A flash of astonishment crossed the elders' faces, all at once.
Little Gu had gone out on this trip — and come back with a Sovereign in tow?
The presiding elders of the Wenjian Sect exchanged glances, none of them having anticipated that this junior would, without so much as a word beforehand, bring back a Sovereign of unfathomably deep cultivation to the sect.
For a moment, even the momentous matter of Gu Chengming's breakthrough was pushed to the back burner, everyone's attention entirely consumed by this Sovereign of unknown origin.
But before anyone could recover from that shock, Gu Chengming himself froze first — because among the figures who'd come out to greet them, he spotted a "Senior" he'd never once laid eyes on before.
She was a rather cold and austere-looking white-haired sword cultivator, dressed in a plain white swordsman's robe, looking for all the world like a somewhat effeminate male cultivator.
Just as Gu Chengming was puzzling over this, he heard Ren Wencai clear his throat and step forward to make the introduction: "Chengming, this is our Wenjian Sect's Daoning Gate Grand Elder, Mo Wu..."
Gu Chengming couldn't help but freeze for a moment.
He was, of course, well aware of the Wenjian Sect's earlier situation. It was said that Shen Qianqiu's position as Sect Head had originally been thrust upon him only temporarily, because a great many of the sect's elders and Sovereigns had left to attend to some great matter, entrusting the entire sect to those left behind before their departure.
Hearing his master's introduction now, could this Grand Elder standing before him be one of the "Wenjian Sect Sovereigns" who had left the sect back then to face that Great Tribulation of Heaven and Earth?
A subtle feeling rose in Gu Chengming's mind.
This Senior Mo Wu's manner was quite at odds with her cold, austere appearance — warm and affable in her dealings with others, and the moment she spoke, her voice came out in a gender-neutral tone impossible to place: "You must be Chengming, then?"
She'd heard tell of Gu Chengming's various exploits well before returning to the sect, and toward this Wenjian Sect disciple who had risen from nothing to dazzling prominence within a mere handful of years, she'd developed a considerable fondness.
Gu Chengming, still puzzling over why this Grand Elder of the Daoning Gate should be male, was just about to straighten up and offer a proper bow when Ren Wencai's voice-transmission came urgently through.
[This is a female cultivator. Mind you don't offend the Senior.]
Understanding dawned, and Gu Chengming hastily swallowed back the form of address that had nearly slipped out, bowing respectfully to Senior Mo Wu instead.
Mo Wu, for her part, had likewise caught Ren Wencai's poorly-concealed voice-transmission, but her face betrayed not the slightest sign of it.
She'd never much cared what others privately said about her appearance. The technique she cultivated was a Yin-Yang sword art, one that required the harmonizing of yin and yang to reach great accomplishment — and it was precisely for this reason that she'd adopted this rather androgynous style of dress.
Over the years, even her voice and bearing had taken on a quality impossible to pin down as clearly male or female.
Her return to the sect this time was, in fact, a matter of some import — she needed to inform everyone left holding down the fort at the Wenjian Sect of the latest developments in the ongoing Great Tribulation.
Shen Qianqiu already knew the inside story on this matter.
Back then, the Wenjian Sect's whole cohort of elders and Sovereigns, along with the Sect Head of the time, had all departed for the so-called "Tribulation Grounds" in order to face the Great Tribulation.
This Tribulation Grounds was, to put it plainly, simply a place where everyone likely to "suffer tribulation" gathered together; the location itself held nothing special, and if there was any distinguishing feature to speak of, it was likely this — that this particular Great Tribulation's "single-instance tribulation" carried an upper limit.
If the Sovereigns each faced the tribulation scattered and alone, the share of calamity any single one bore might well be heavy enough to strike a Sovereign down on the spot. But if a great many Sovereigns gathered together in one place, the tribulation would instead descend upon them as a single "collective" — and while that collective calamity would inevitably grow all the more terrifying as a result, that terror, at least, had a ceiling.
In other words, the Tribulation Grounds was the place where all the Sovereigns gathered to jointly resist the Great Tribulation of Heaven and Earth.
And according to Mo Wu, this particular Great Tribulation was unlike any that had come before — this time, the calamity threatened to drag the entire cultivation world into its wake. So the Tribulation Grounds served not only as the battlefield where the Sovereigns joined forces to resist the calamity, but also as a means of sealing off that overwhelming tribulation, preventing it from spilling over onto mortals and lower-realm cultivators.
The main reason she'd rushed back to the Wenjian Sect at this particular juncture was that something had "gone wrong" at the Tribulation Grounds — and that something had the potential to spell disaster for the entire cultivation world as it stood now.
Her return was to ensure the Wenjian Sect's lineage remained absolutely secure, so that it wouldn't be cut off because of this turn of events.
"So, for the time being going forward," Mo Wu said, "Sixth Realm cultivators will begin returning to their respective sects, one after another."
The sheer weight of information in what Senior Mo Wu had just said left Gu Chengming's heart sinking.
So it seemed the "Great Tribulation of Heaven and Earth" the Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign had spoken of had already drawn this close.
With that thought, he instinctively glanced sideways at the Sovereign beside him, and caught her looking back at the exact same moment — their eyes met, and each read a certain gravity in the other's.
Mo Wu, standing off to one side, watched this exchange unfold, and the faintly suspicious notion already forming in her mind grew all the more insistent, beyond her control.
This whole matter, in fact, traced back to the Tribulation Grounds.
Even while still at the Tribulation Grounds, Mo Wu had already learned that the Wenjian Sect had produced an extraordinary prodigy — news personally divined and confirmed by several Sovereigns skilled in divination, who had proven their Dharma-Stations upon the Causality Tree; there was no room for falsehood in it.
At the time, this news had thoroughly stirred envy among the assembled Sovereigns at the Tribulation Grounds.
Thousands of years ago, the Wenjian Sect had produced the Fate-Reversing Tribulation-Severing Sovereign, that towering figure who had single-handedly blocked off the path to the Seventh Realm for the majority of the cultivation world; thousands of years later, this very sect had somehow produced yet another prodigy whose talent rivaled that same Fate-Reversing Tribulation-Severing Sovereign.
Not a few of the Sovereigns had grumbled sourly among themselves in private, remarking again and again on just how absurdly good the Wenjian Sect's luck had turned out to be.
Mo Wu still remembered how, at the time, her own Sect Head and the Guizang Gate's own Grand Elder had grinned from ear to ear upon hearing the news, and how every few days they'd drag along a few Sovereigns particularly skilled in divination to gather beneath the Causality Tree and calculate out the various particulars of Gu Chengming's life.
Among all of it, what had stuck with Mo Wu most was one particularly curious piece of news the assembled Sovereigns had divined.
And that was that this prodigy Gu Chengming's "peach-blossom luck" seemed to be growing just a touch too flourishing for its own good.
According to what those Sovereigns had divined, this Gu Chengming found himself entangled in all manner of tangled, inextricable "bonds" with a great many people and a great many powers.
Take the Tianding Sect, for instance, or the Harmonious Joy Sect — both seemed connected to Gu Chengming by a faint, unmistakable "red thread" of fate, and the depth of that causal entanglement had left even the divining Sovereigns clicking their tongues in disbelief.
At the time, hearing this divination result, Mo Wu had almost suspected Gu Chengming was secretly cultivating her own Guizang Gate's most notoriously flirtatious sword art.
And it was precisely because of this divination about his overly "flourishing peach-blossom fortune" that, back at the Tribulation Grounds, a handful of Sovereigns had used the pretext to angle for closer ties with the Wenjian Sect, hinting between the lines that they wished to reserve this young man of boundless prospects as a future "son-in-law" for some junior of their own.
Talk like that was, of course, mostly Sovereigns joking around with one another — but joke though it was, it confirmed plenty of things all the same.
At the time, Mo Wu had taken note of the matter but hadn't entirely believed it, assuming that the divination about his "flourishing peach-blossom luck" was probably somewhat exaggerated, and surely couldn't be quite so extreme in reality.
And yet, having finally returned to the sect today, she had at last laid eyes on this legendary "prodigy" in the flesh.
Well, would you look at that — this prodigy hadn't disappointed her in the slightest. Instead, right off the bat, he'd handed her a little "surprise" of no small size —
He'd brought back with him a Sovereign senior of profound Dharma-Station cultivation, and judging by the way the two of them exchanged glances, that relationship was clearly nothing so simple as ordinary mentorship.
Mo Wu's gaze traveled back and forth between Gu Chengming and the Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign a few times, and as she recalled the "overly flourishing peach-blossom" divination from the Tribulation Grounds, her earlier impression of him only deepened.
It seemed those Sovereigns' divination hadn't been exaggerated at all, after all.
Gu Chengming had no idea that Senior Mo Wu had already, quietly, formed a certain "bias" about him.
His return to the Wenjian Sect this time served two purposes: for one, it would be far more convenient to refine the Free Heaven Dharma-Station here; for another, he wanted to dig further into the old history of the Fate-Reversing Tribulation-Severing Sovereign.
After all, he currently held the Knight Dharma Sword that man had forged, and had previously received the Sword Burial Tomb inheritance from him as well — toward this eccentric senior who'd towered over an entire era and blocked off the path to the Seventh Realm for the majority of the cultivation world, Gu Chengming's curiosity ran deep indeed.
Secrets of this sort might be hard to find elsewhere, but the Wenjian Sect's own Scripture Repository might well turn up a clue or two — not to mention that plenty of trivial anecdotes and hearsay tended to circulate freely among the sect's disciples, embellished with each retelling until they took on a life of their own.
Upon hearing of this particular interest of Gu Chengming's, Senior Mo Wu was likewise rather intrigued, and led him deep into the Scripture Repository to search.
As Grand Elder of the Daoning Gate, the sealed archives and forbidden texts ordinary disciples of the sect couldn't so much as find the door to were, to her, no more than a simple matter of raising a hand.
And after this search, they truly did turn something up.
It was an ancient text titled Record of the Fate-Reversing Tribulation-Severing Sovereign's Famous Swords — its pages yellowed, its edges badly worn, clearly a text of considerable age.
Gu Chengming pored over it by what little light filtered into the repository, and gradually gained a deeper understanding of the swords that this Sovereign had forged over his lifetime.
This Sovereign had loved swords like his own life, and every blade he'd ever forged carried a formidable reputation of its own — the Knight Dharma Sword was merely one of the more famous among them.
As he read further, Gu Chengming's gaze suddenly stopped on one passage.
He compared those few scant lines on the page against the various characteristics of the broken little sword he carried on his person, then strung together everything he'd already pieced together from other clues, and a thought suddenly surfaced in his mind.
— Could this Sword Burial Tomb be none other than the sword that Sovereign had forged and named "Gold-Digger"?
Once that thought took hold, it proved impossible to shake. The more closely he examined the text's description, the more perfectly the two seemed to match, until at last he felt seventy or eighty percent certain of it.
Only, unlike the Knight Dharma Sword, which felt almost alive, Gu Chengming soon noticed another matter lurking between the lines.
This Sword Burial Tomb, it seemed, was through and through a thoroughly "dead" object.
The Knight Dharma Sword had a sword spirit, a temperament of its own, even the capacity to enact an absurd "regional discrimination" judgment mechanic — every bit a living thing with its own mind.
But the Sword Burial Tomb was nothing of the sort. Its every record carried an air of utter lifeless stillness, without the faintest trace of true sentience — purely an artifact forged and left waiting to be wielded by someone.
At this thought, something stirred in Gu Chengming's mind.
A problem he'd long wanted to solve but had never managed to find a way around suddenly showed the first glimmer of a solution.
And that was Senior Arnold's physical body.
That night, Gu Chengming returned to his own courtyard and summoned forth the thoroughly bored Senior Arnold from within his Sea of Consciousness.
The moment Arnold condensed into physical form, she yawned as usual, rubbing her eyes with a drowsy expression, as though she'd just been forcibly dragged out of some sweet dream.
"Little Gu, what did you call me out for?" she mumbled, still groggy.
Gu Chengming considered his words carefully, then laid out for her what he'd found in the Scripture Repository that day, along with the still-unpolished idea that had come from it.
"Senior," he said, his tone gentle, "I'd like to forge you a new physical body."
He'd been troubled for some time by the plight of Arnold's remnant-soul state, unable to harm any enemy — and now that he'd gotten his hands on this soulless "dead thing" that was the Sword-Burial Clan artifact, he wondered whether he might refine and recast it into an entirely new vessel for Senior Arnold.
If it worked, Senior Arnold would not only regain a genuine physical body capable of harming enemies, but his "Unstoppable Gu-Nuo Combat Formula" would finally have somewhere to be put to use.
Arnold, at first, didn't quite register what he meant. She stared blankly for a moment, but once the meaning finally sank in, her drowsy eyes snapped wide open in an instant, every last trace of sleepiness gone.
"Reforge a body? So I can go back to smashing people like before?!"
Before Gu Chengming could even nod, she lunged forward in a single bound, throwing both arms tightly around him, her head nuzzling back and forth against his chest, babbling with delight.
"Waaah, Little Gu, you're the best in the whole world!"
[Arnold Invincible Technique favorability +20]
[Current favorability: 40/Friendly]
Gu Chengming: "..."
Senior, on a matter as important as reforging your physical body, is being able to smash people really the thing you care about most?
In the end, though, he couldn't quite bring himself to say it out loud, and simply let this Senior — whose favorability was climbing steadily upward — keep nuzzling against him with growing enthusiasm.
Still, for all that, forging an entirely new body for a Seventh Realm senior was clearly not the sort of monumental undertaking one could pull off just by talking about it.
The Wenjian Sect, for all its renown as a great sword-cultivating sect whose disciples were each formidable swordsmen, genuinely couldn't boast many true masters when it came to the art of artifact-refining.
A task of this scale — recasting an artifact entirely from scratch and infusing it with fresh sentience besides — was well beyond anyone in the sect.
After much deliberation, Gu Chengming ultimately took the problem to his own Sect Head.
Shen Qianqiu heard him out, stroking his beard in thought for a long moment.
Clearly, he was wholeheartedly in favor of the idea, deep down.
Arnold was, after all, a genuine, bona fide Seventh Realm senior — and more importantly, she was a Seventh Realm senior who had lived through an actual Great Tribulation of Heaven and Earth and survived to tell of it.
Though all that remained of her now was a single lingering wisp of soul, if a reforged body could secure the aid of a Seventh Realm senior in earnest, the Wenjian Sect would undoubtedly gain that many more odds in its favor when the imminent Great Tribulation finally arrived.
"This matter absolutely should be done." After a moment of consideration, he spoke slowly. "The trouble is, the sect has no artifact master suited to the task — as for the vessel itself..."
He mulled it over briefly before an idea came to him, and promptly recommended to Gu Chengming a long-standing partner sect of the Wenjian Sect, one whose artifact-refining mastery stood unrivaled in the region.
— The Tianding Sect.
A few days later, Zong Baixing arrived at the Wenjian Sect with great fanfare, leading a whole entourage of Tianding Sect elders.
The moment this Tianding Sect artifact master laid eyes on Gu Chengming, he strode forward with a smile to exchange greetings. "It's been a while, young friend."
Gu Chengming, of course, remembered this artifact master well — their last dealing had been when the man forged him that Fifth Realm implement called the End Lotus.
He hurried to return the bow, and the two of them fell into a courteous exchange of pleasantries.
But among this particular entourage of Tianding Sect visitors was hidden an old acquaintance Gu Chengming had never expected to see.
That was Xu Huayi.
As for how this Miss Xu, who was famously no good at artifact-refining, had ended up tagging along with this crew, there was a whole roundabout story behind it.
Xu Huayi had, in fact, originally been toiling away as manual labor at the Imperial Astronomical Bureau.
But just as Gu Chengming had recently enjoyed some unusually leisurely days himself, the Imperial Astronomical Bureau, too, had gone through a rare lull of its own lately.
Taking advantage of this window, Xu Huayi had worked up the nerve to ask her superiors for some leave, hoping to properly rest for a few days — and much to her surprise, the notoriously unsympathetic Director had actually, unprecedentedly, granted her request.
Having secured this rare stretch of free time, Xu Huayi had originally planned to spend each day seeking out her fellow Daoist Gu to deepen their friendship, but arriving eagerly at the Night-Watch Bureau's gate, she'd been told that Gu Chengming had already gone back to the Wenjian Sect.
Having come up empty, Xu Huayi settled for the next best thing, thinking she'd use this leave to go visit her own sect instead.
And it was in returning to her sect that she'd learned, through her own master, about the request that had just come in from the Wenjian Sect.
So this Miss Xu, without a word of hesitation, had cooked up some pretext and shamelessly tagged along with the artifact-refining crew on their trip here.
Gu Chengming spotted that familiar figure among the crowd at a single glance.
When Xu Huayi noticed him looking her way, she gave him a sly wink, then quickly mouthed a silent "shh," signaling him not to make a fuss.
Gu Chengming got the message at once, casually looking away as though nothing had happened, though the corner of his mouth curved up slightly — a silent greeting exchanged between the two of them.
This little exchange of glances looked, to anyone else, like nothing more than an ordinary passing acknowledgment, but the quiet understanding behind it was known only to the two of them.
Compared to the subtle, private exchange between Gu Chengming and Xu Huayi, the haggling going on over there between Zong Baixing and Shen Qianqiu was, by contrast, considerably more heated.
Refining an entire mountain's worth of material was every bit as difficult as forging a Sovereign-grade Dharma implement, and the sheer quantity of rare heaven-and-earth treasures it would consume was staggering enough to make anyone's jaw drop.
Having landed such a rare piece of big business, the Tianding Sect was, naturally, hoping to collect as much as it could.
"Old Bai, how can you even bring yourself to name a price like this — we've been fellow Daoists for how many years now?"
Ren Wencai, in a setting like this, was noticeably more shameless than usual, apparently hoping to leverage their long friendship to guilt the price downward.
Zong Baixing wasn't about to fall for that, and knew exactly what sort of character Ren Wencai really was.
He gave a cold snort. "Ren Wencai, don't try that on me. If you can pay, we'll do the work. If you can't, my Tianding Sect doesn't do business with paupers."
Ren Wencai found himself somewhat at a loss for words. "It's not that — it's that you're charging far too much... At the price you've quoted, what sect under heaven could possibly afford it?"
Zong Baixing seemed to have anticipated exactly this response.
In truth, the price he'd just named had been deliberately inflated from the start.
As for why —
He glanced, with an air of studied nonchalance, toward his own hopeless disciple, still exchanging meaningful looks with Gu Chengming over there, his private calculations already ticking away.
Naturally, it was all for the sake of this unruly disciple of his.
Quoting a high price left plenty of room for haggling afterward, and more importantly, all this back-and-forth negotiation gave him a perfectly legitimate excuse to let Gu Chengming and Xu Huayi spend more time in each other's company.
Zong Baixing prided himself on this clever, retreat-to-advance arrangement, thinking he'd truly gone to great lengths on behalf of his disciple's future happiness.
Who would have thought that his hopeless disciple wouldn't appreciate the effort in the slightest, and would turn traitor on the spot.
Xu Huayi tugged at her own master's sleeve, clearly worried he'd price the whole deal right out of existence and leave her without any excuse to see Gu Chengming openly and aboveboard.
"Master," she said in a low voice, "the price we're asking really is a bit too high. Why don't we do this instead — let the Wenjian Sect's own disciples handle sourcing the materials, and we'll just handle the actual refining. That way, we can drop that whole portion of the cost, no?"
Ren Wencai and Shen Qianqiu, hearing this, both froze for a moment, then looked from Xu Huayi to Gu Chengming and back again, and seemed to catch a whiff of some deeper meaning in an instant, promptly chiming in together, playing off each other in perfect unison.
"That's right, Old Bai, look at that — your own disciple's got a much clearer head than you do!"
"Young Miss Xu's got a point there. Young people really do think more flexibly."
The two of them went back and forth, boxing Zong Baixing in from both sides until he had nowhere left to go, and in the end could only glare viciously at his hopeless, disloyal disciple before grudgingly agreeing.
Xu Huayi shrank back under that glare from her own master, and quietly inched half a step closer toward Gu Chengming.
...
And so it was that Xu Huayi and Gu Chengming came to spend some time together.
This was her first time ever setting foot in the Wenjian Sect, and once the tense negotiations had finally settled, she found a spare moment and drifted over to Gu Chengming's side, quite naturally.
That night, having somehow ferreted out the information from who-knows-where, she made her way to Gu Chengming's quarters within the sect.
After knocking and being let in, she looked the small courtyard over with evident interest, remarking with some feeling, "So this is Fellow Daoist Gu's residence here at the sect. It has quite a bit of charm to it, doesn't it."
Gu Chengming laughed and showed her into the main hall, and the two of them chatted away into the night, warming a pot of wine between them, naturally.
After a few rounds of drinking, Xu Huayi steered the conversation toward the jade pendant Gu Chengming had once given her. She said that ever since receiving it, she'd worn it against her skin every single day, never once taking it off.
As the conversation warmed, a faint flush of wine crept up onto her cheeks.
A little tipsy now, her cheeks rosy, her eyes misted with a faint sheen, Xu Huayi drew that jade pendant she always kept close to her heart out from her collar, and without any pretense, lifted it to her lips and kissed it.
That coy, unguarded gesture stirred something in Gu Chengming across from her.
Xu Huayi hadn't spent the whole of her time at the Wenjian Sect simply carrying on with Gu Chengming, either.
Though she wasn't skilled at artifact-refining herself, she was, after all, raised in the Tianding Sect, and years of exposure meant she was more than capable of lending a hand — fetching materials, running errands.
Besides, with her present, that notoriously prickly Zong Baixing kept his temper considerably more in check, which made the whole refining process go a good deal more smoothly.
The Tianding Sect, true to its reputation as a great artifact-refining power, didn't take long at all to finish forging the recast Sword-Burial Clan artifact, exactly according to Gu Chengming's design.
As it turned out, the true form of this Sword Burial Tomb was, in fact, the very broken little sword Gu Chengming always carried on his person.
If one had to put a word to it, the relationship between the two was rather like that of a "projection."
The unassuming broken sword was the fundamental root, while the Sword Burial Tomb was merely another form it manifested outwardly.
The method the Tianding Sect's artifact masters employed was to source an exceedingly rare heaven-and-earth treasure, and use it to preserve the broken sword's original "projection" quality while grafting onto it an entirely new property — one capable of embracing and encompassing all things, adapting to any change.
In other words, they had essentially recast the broken little sword from the ground up, while at the same time thoroughly fusing the Sword Burial Tomb entirely into the blade itself. The sword's body had been reshaped with an entirely different, living material — the spiritual light now flowing along its edge alone was many times purer than before.
And a reforged sword like this — one that had shed its old form entirely and now carried the property of embracing all things — proved to be the ideal "vessel" for Senior Arnold.
When Gu Chengming carefully guided that lingering wisp of remnant soul into the sword, then invoked the blade's all-embracing property to reshape flesh and blood for her, the presence of the senior within his Sea of Consciousness solidified at a visible pace.
Once the radiant light faded, Arnold opened her eyes.
She looked down at her own hands, now finally restored to genuine flesh and blood, felt the long-lost sensation of qi and blood coursing once more through every limb and bone, and couldn't help but break into a smile.
What followed was a good deal of affectionate roughhousing between Gu Chengming and Arnold.
This ancient senior, having regained a genuine physical body, took full advantage of the fact, behaving for all the world like a sloth clinging to someone and refusing to let go, spending the whole day draped over Gu Chengming's arm, nuzzling against him.
"Little Gu, Little Gu, I like you!"
Arnold tilted up that round, still baby-fat face of hers, her eyes curving into crescents, nuzzling with ever more enthusiasm.
[Arnold Invincible Technique favorability +20]
[Current favorability: 60/Fond]
[New usage unlocked: Throw.]
Looking at that freshly appeared "Throw" option, Gu Chengming's expression turned distinctly complicated.
— Well, isn't that something. First they'd been using her as a sword; now that Senior had a physical body, was she about to moonlight as a throwing weapon too?
He silently shoved that thoroughly outrageous thought out of his mind, resolving that, for now, he'd rather not dig any deeper into just what kind of thing this system was trying to turn Senior Arnold into.
Still, though Arnold's regaining a physical body was undoubtedly good news, it came bundled with a new complication of its own.
Namely — just what sort of standing should the current Senior Arnold actually hold?
She couldn't very well keep going around under the title of "artifact spirit," tucked away at Gu Chengming's brow forever, but to offer a genuine, bona fide Seventh Realm senior nothing more than an ordinary guest-cultivator status would seem far too casual an arrangement.
Shen Qianqiu stood off to the side, opening his mouth several times only to swallow the words back each time — clearly harboring some idea he couldn't quite bring himself to voice.
Gu Chengming, perceptive as he was, saw through his own Sect Head's calculations at a glance.
A Seventh Realm senior who had lived through a Great Tribulation and survived — if she could be persuaded to stay on at the Wenjian Sect, she would undoubtedly serve as an anchoring pillar capable of holding the fort in the imminent Great Tribulation to come.
It was entirely natural for his own Sect Head to have designs on recruiting her; it was only Arnold's peculiar background as a "remnant soul given refuge" — and his own consideration for her relationship with Gu Chengming — that had kept him from bringing it up so boldly.
With that in mind, Gu Chengming decided to spare his Sect Head the trouble and lay the matter out himself. He turned to Arnold and, with considerable boldness, extended the invitation.
"Senior Arnold," he said with a smile, "how about taking on the title of Guest Elder here at our Wenjian Sect?"
Arnold, still happily nuzzling away, didn't so much as blink at the suggestion.
"Whatever Little Gu says!"
Beside them, Shen Qianqiu heard this ready agreement and felt the weight lift off his chest at last, a smile breaking unbidden across his face.
And just like that, the matter of Senior Arnold's arrangement was settled, neat and tidy.
There was, in fact, one more piece of news even more gratifying still.
Under the Tianding Sect's masterful, near-miraculous artifact-refining craft, that Sword Burial Tomb — no, it ought now to be called the "Gold-Digger Sword" — had, in the process, developed an entirely unprecedented new ability.
That ability was called "Manifest Freedom."
Better still, ever since Senior Arnold's fusion into the blade as its "artifact spirit," this Gold-Digger Sword could now, like Arnold herself, be drawn in at Gu Chengming's will and stored away at his brow, hidden within his Sea of Consciousness.
This meant he'd never again need to carry the sword openly in hand wherever he went, drawing curious stares from passersby.
This was, needless to say, tremendously good news for Gu Chengming.
But with the sword forged and Senior Arnold's body successfully reconstructed, this whole task — which had cost the Tianding Sect's masters no small effort — could now be considered fully complete.
And with the task finished, the time had come to bid farewell to Fellow Daoist Xu as well.
The day the Tianding Sect's entourage set off was a rare, cloudless one.
Zong Baixing, leading his retinue of elders, was exchanging final farewells with Shen Qianqiu and Ren Wencai at the mountain gate, the usual pleasantries of "do look after each other going forward" and "we'll trouble you again next time" flowing easily between them.
Ren Wencai's face was plastered with smiles, every trace of that shameless haggling expression from earlier scrubbed clean away — an entirely different man, it seemed.
Only Xu Huayi lingered, still failing to catch up with her own master's retreating footsteps.
She'd fallen to the back of the group, her eyes sweeping the crowd until they landed on Gu Chengming, and she drifted, with studied casualness, in his direction.
"Fellow Daoist Gu." She came up close. "Before I leave, might I trouble Fellow Daoist Gu for one more of your humble little paintings?"
Gu Chengming was mildly taken aback for a moment — he certainly remembered this Miss Xu's masterful skill with a brush; every painting she'd ever gifted him had been remarkably inventive.
With that in mind, he nodded, smiling. "Fellow Daoist Xu's paintings — of course I'd welcome one gladly."
Having secured this agreement, Xu Huayi drew a wool brush from her sleeve, and without so much as dipping it in ink, simply swept it through the empty air — and everywhere the brush's tip passed, the surrounding scenery rippled outward like water.
Gu Chengming's vision blurred for an instant.
By the time the scenery solidified once more, the two of them found themselves standing together in a world of drifting, falling blossoms.
Petals rained down from the empty sky in endless drifts, blanketing the ground in a carpet of scarlet, while beneath their feet stretched a boundless sea of flowers, and overhead the sky spread clear and pristine as washed glass; even the breeze brushing past their faces carried a faint, lingering hint of fragrance.
This world within the painting, conjured entirely by Xu Huayi's own hand, was serene and enchanting — more beautiful than anything of this earthly realm.
As Gu Chengming took in this world she'd painted into being, he saw the girl step slowly toward him.
She tilted her face upward, those eyes of hers, always faintly mischievous, now brimming with an emotion impossible to name.
Xu Huayi said nothing. She simply drew that jade pendant Gu Chengming had once given her out from her collar and, right there in front of him, lifted it to her lips and kissed it.
— This particular move, Gu Chengming had already witnessed once before, back in his own courtyard.
By rights, since this world within the painting was entirely of Xu Huayi's own creation, her kissing the pendant within it should have been separated from him, the one observing the painting, by an entire layer of remove — at most, he ought only to have been watching a scene unfold, nothing more.
But at the exact instant that jade pendant touched the girl's lips, Gu Chengming distinctly felt a faint yet unmistakably real, warm and soft sensation brush against his own cheek.
In fact, ever since unlocking the CG for Love's Qingxin Formula, he'd been able to remain lucid no matter the circumstance, at any time.
And it was precisely because of this that what he'd just witnessed was never as simple as Xu Huayi merely kissing a jade pendant.
What had actually happened was that this audacious Miss Xu had, under cover of that pendant-kissing gesture, quietly risen up on her tiptoes and planted a kiss on his cheek.
In the very next instant, that world of drifting blossoms receded like an ebbing tide, and the two of them found themselves standing once more before the Wenjian Sect's mountain gate.
Xu Huayi tucked away that jade pendant — now newly "kissed by herself" — carefully back against her skin, a faint blush already creeping quietly across her pretty face.
She lowered her lashes, and it was a good while before she raised her head again to meet Gu Chengming's eyes.
"Fellow Daoist Gu..."
She paused, that faint sheen of emotion still glimmering in her eyes.
"Once Huayi goes back this time, who knows when I'll be able to find another excuse to come see Fellow Daoist Gu again." She spoke softly, her words coming a touch slower than usual, as though carefully weighed. "These past days, Fellow Daoist Gu's care for me — I'll keep it all close to my heart."
"Once this Great Tribulation has passed."
She summoned her courage and met Gu Chengming's gaze directly. "Huayi still wants to paint many, many more pictures for Fellow Daoist Gu. Paint you riding your sword through the sky. Paint you slaying demons. Paint every single sight in this world that Fellow Daoist Gu might ever wish to see."
"So — Fellow Daoist Gu absolutely must stay safe and sound."
This little speech of hers wasn't especially direct, but the feeling woven into every word of it would have been plain even to a fool.
Listening to her, Gu Chengming felt a certain warmth stir within him as well.
"I will."
He met Xu Huayi's gaze and answered her earnestly. "I will absolutely stay safe and sound. Once this Great Tribulation has passed, I'll be waiting for Fellow Daoist Xu's paintings."
He paused, then added one more thing.
"When the time comes, I'll come to the Tianding Sect myself to claim them."
Hearing this, most of that lingering sorrow of parting was swept away from Xu Huayi in an instant.
"Then it's settled." She nodded, laughing with easy good humor. "Fellow Daoist Gu had better not go back on his word!"
"Of course not."
Over at the gate, Zong Baixing's farewells were drawing to a close, and turning to find his own hopeless disciple still lingering behind with Gu Chengming, reluctant to part, he couldn't help puffing up in exasperation, raising his voice to hurry her along.
Xu Huayi, chivvied along by her own master, retreated a reluctant two steps, and only once she'd put some real distance between them did she turn, with evident reluctance, looking back over her shoulder more than once as she hurried to catch up with the Tianding Sect's departing procession.
Gu Chengming stood before the mountain gate, watching that figure grow smaller and smaller until it vanished entirely into the horizon, before finally turning his gaze away.
Mo Wu, on the other hand, had witnessed this entire scene unfold from start to finish, and found herself at a loss for words at the sheer complexity of her own feelings.
Well. It seemed this prodigy of theirs was, perhaps, a touch too much like the lead of some romance novel.
This had gone well beyond a simple matter of scattering affection in every direction. Watching that Tianding Sect girl's deeply smitten look upon parting, and recalling the Flowing Cloud Moon-Tracing Sovereign that Gu Chengming had brought back to the sect earlier, along with that "overly flourishing peach-blossom fortune" divined back at the Tribulation Grounds, an absurd thought suddenly surfaced in Mo Wu's mind.
— Mo Wu even found herself wondering whether this young friend Gu had somehow managed to collect, without missing a single one, every archetype of female lead that ever appeared in a storybook.
That reclusive, aloof, coolly detached Sovereign senior was one type; this coy, lively artifact-sect girl with her masterful brush was another type entirely. And then there was that elder of his own sect who was reportedly his Dao companion, not to mention the Tianding Sect and Harmonious Joy Sect vaguely mentioned in that divination...
The more Mo Wu thought about it, the more she felt that those Sovereigns' joking talk back at the Tribulation Grounds about "reserving a son-in-law" really hadn't been much of an exaggeration after all.
Well, this junior's private affairs were, in the end, none of an elder's business to comment on.
There was, however, one genuine matter of business she'd been meaning to bring up ever since returning to the sect, but hadn't yet found the right opening for.
With that thought, Mo Wu stepped forward, her expression gradually growing more composed.
"Young friend," she said. "You once asked me to tell you what exactly happened at the Tribulation Grounds, didn't you?"
Gu Chengming's heart tightened, and he quickly set aside that lingering wistfulness from the farewell, nodding solemnly.
This was a matter he'd been keeping in mind for a while now. Mo Wu had mentioned earlier that something had "gone wrong" at the Tribulation Grounds, but had never gone into detail — now that this senior was bringing it up of her own accord, he meant to hear the whole of it clearly.
Mo Wu found a quiet, secluded spot and sat down across from Gu Chengming, then slowly began recounting the secret that had been weighing on her heart.
The earlier Tribulation Grounds had originally been a calamity specifically targeting all the Sovereigns who'd banded together, all of them gathered in one place, pooling their strength in every way they could to resist that overwhelming disaster.
By rights, resisting the tribulation together like that, in unity, should have made things considerably easier to endure than facing it alone, targeted individually.
"But it was during that previous Great Tribulation..." Mo Wu's voice carried a heavy note of gloom. "That some of the Sovereigns chose to 'betray' the rest."
Gu Chengming's heart sank sharply.
"Betray?"
"Mm." Mo Wu nodded slowly. "At that critical juncture, they turned coat, and as a result we lost a great many Sovereigns during that previous Great Tribulation, and countless Dharma-Stations were forced to revert to Heaven because of it."
"And those Sovereigns who turned coat willingly made themselves into 'scavengers,' helping the Heavenly Dao purge cultivators, using that filthy business to buy themselves a sliver of continued survival."
"You might not believe it, but in every single Great Tribulation, cultivators like this always emerge. And of those traitors willing to serve as scavengers, some genuinely have managed, through such means, to survive all the way to the next Great Tribulation."
"So then..." Gu Chengming chose his words carefully, his expression grave. "That calamity Senior mentioned earlier, the one you said the Wenjian Sect needs to guard against — what exactly is it?"
"That Great Tribulation at the Tribulation Grounds — in the end, we simply weren't able to fully hold it back." Mo Wu let out a long sigh. "And so the portion of the calamity that couldn't be contained inevitably spilled outward from the Tribulation Grounds. Even with the Sect Head and the others straining every effort to hold back that overflow, they still couldn't manage to block it all."
"And once the calamity from the Tribulation Grounds spills out and falls upon the Nine Provinces" — her voice suddenly dropped — "for ordinary cultivators, that means an inescapable, catastrophic calamity."
Mo Wu looked at Gu Chengming. "The reason I rushed back to the sect this time is to do everything in my power to keep the Wenjian Sect from being swept up in a disaster like that as well."
Well.
Yet another bombshell of a revelation.
Gu Chengming let out a wry, inward laugh. He really should have seen this coming.
It seemed that every single time he got even a brief rest, something new and even more troublesome would inevitably be waiting for him right around the corner.
Sure enough, this world simply refused to grant him true, unbroken peace.
Fortunately, though, he'd already gotten a head start on mastering a portion of the Free Heaven Dharma-Station's authority before all this.
Only now did Gu Chengming settle his mind and turn his full attention inward, carefully sensing that Dharma-Station whose authority he'd already partially mastered.
— Free Heaven.
One of this Dharma-Station's powers was called "Freedom of Self."
One who possessed Freedom of Self existed neither within causality, nor within time, nor within space.
In other words, virtually any power belonging to the systems of causality, time, or space could do nothing at all to Gu Chengming — none of it could bind or restrain him in the slightest.
This was precisely the confidence that let Jiahao Sovereign so brazenly use his own true name as his Dao title.
— Since he existed outside causality entirely, even if others learned his true name, what could they possibly do to him through the causal power bound up in that name?
This was likewise the very reason Arnold had always insisted that Jiahao Sovereign's Free Heaven was so troublesome to deal with, that he was the single hardest opponent to pin down and the best at fleeing.
No matter how thoroughly one laid one's net, a single invocation of "Freedom of Self" would let him slip free of the shackles of causality, time, and space alike, coming and going entirely as he pleased, impossible for anyone to stop.
In the coming struggle against that spilled-over calamity, this power of Freedom of Self would, by his own reckoning, prove useful in no small measure — at the very least, no technique from the causal or spatiotemporal systems would be able to trap him so easily anymore.
Besides, Senior Mo Wu had already said the spilled calamity likely wouldn't arrive quite so quickly — there would still be some measure of breathing room in between.
That, at least, would give him ample time to prepare calmly for whatever changes lay ahead.
Gu Chengming's mind raced through the various arrangements he'd need to make going forward, weighing how best to arrange things so as to minimize the losses the Wenjian Sect might suffer.
But even as he sat there turning these thoughts over, he happened to glance up, his gaze drifting toward the clear, pristine sky.
In the very next instant, he found himself frozen in place.
— Hanging in the sky above, unnoticed until just this moment, without the faintest sound, were now two moons.
One was the bright moon that ought, by rights, to hang high in the heavens — its cool radiance unchanged, as ever.
The other, however, was like a slowly opening eye, gazing down upon this whole world below.
Gu Chengming's pupils contracted sharply.
That calamity Mo Wu had said "likely wouldn't come so quickly," the one spilling out from the Tribulation Grounds —
The first calamity of the Great Tribulation of Heaven and Earth had arrived.
____
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