For Bao Gu, setting up a formation really wasn’t difficult; it was just painstaking, time-consuming work. But this was exactly what she loved—meticulous, intricate, endlessly absorbing. While she busied herself laying out the array, she repeatedly dissected and pondered all kinds of formation theory, and gained a great deal from it.
No matter how detailed a formation diagram was, it could never fully display the grandeur of a true array. No matter how exquisite the drawing, it could not construct the actual power a formation could manifest. That was the essential difference between a picture and the real thing.
One piece of Five Elements immortal stone after another was moved into place, and the formation was assembled bit by bit. The sense of powerful satisfaction that surged inside her could only be compared to holding her senior sister in her arms.
When she was laying formations and studying them, of course she paid close attention to the materials in her hands. At first, she had thought that all these Five Elements immortal stones, cut to the same size, were identical. Only after she had handled and studied so many of them, knew their size and shape down to the last detail, did she suddenly notice that these stones were not the same after all.
Each piece of Five Elements immortal stone had its own unique aura. It was extremely faint—so faint she would never have noticed it if she hadn’t handled so many. It was hard to say exactly how that aura was different. If she had to describe it, she would say the fluctuations of energy on each one weren’t quite the same.
After sensing this oddity, Bao Gu lined the stones up in a row and compared them carefully.
She discovered that the dimensions and specifications of the stones were identical. Many of the sigil lines burned into their surfaces were also the same, as if someone had deliberately inscribed them—likely back when the Ascension Platform was built and these stones were first refined and cast.
If she mentally stripped away those identical man-made sigils, what remained were lines whose aura felt similar, yet each one was absolutely unique. They were like fingerprints, like a natural mark each stone was born with.
At a glance, these “natural” patterns resembled the artificial runes carved during refining. Looked at closely, though, they were completely different. They had the same origin, but the carved sigils were full of the traces of deliberate work, while the “naturally formed” markings were utterly smooth and flawless.
Yes—flawless. There was no sense of intentional shaping, as if the stone had simply grown that way, as if it was always meant to be this way.
Bao Gu knew exactly what these “naturally formed” sigils were.
They were the traces of the Dao of Heaven—marks left on the stones by heavenly lightning over countless years as ascendants crossed their tribulations.
The Dao of Heaven was something that could not be seen or touched, yet was present everywhere. No one could say what it looked like, whether it was round or flat, or anything else. But from the vast stars and cosmos to the tiniest speck of dust, everything was intimately tied to it. All things lived because of it, and all things perished because of it—or perhaps it was more accurate to say it recorded the life and death of all things.
Bao Gu didn’t know.
She only knew that the formations and talismans she studied all drew power from the laws and order of the Dao of Heaven. Sigils were patterns which, simply by their shape, could lead power in, release it, store it, or even trigger transformations that seemed impossible.
She had always used that power, always used those transformations. But now she suddenly realized she did not actually understand why these sigils could cause such changes.
She knew they existed. She knew how to use them. But she didn’t know why they could exist, or why they could be used in those ways.
Some people would probably find that question pointless: you already know how to use it, so just use it—what’s with all the thinking?
But Bao Gu suddenly felt that only by understanding why these things existed could she move a step further, gain the ability to create such sigils herself, and see a wider world.
Because of this realization, she became even more attentive to the sigils on every single piece of Five Elements immortal stone while she worked. Sometimes she would simply stop and stare, studying a pattern for a long time. Sometimes she became so absorbed that she even forgot she was in the middle of building the formation.
With all this “delay,” her construction progress slowed dramatically. The array she had originally planned to finish in a month or two took nearly half a year, and she had only just laid down half of it.
During this period, Yu Mi and Zi Tianjun were both extremely busy and barely had time to pay her any attention.
With no way to see Bao Gu in person, Wang Ding only contacted her on the first day of every month via communication talisman, unless something truly urgent came up that required Bao Gu’s immediate decision.
Wang Ding brought Bao Gu a piece of news.
The entire Yue Kingdom had been enveloped in blood fiend miasma and death energy, turning into a dead land. The skeleton monsters had vanished—no one had seen one for three months now. As for the corpse demons and corpse spirits they had been constantly on guard for, they had never appeared at all.
He felt that this calamity of the drought fiend was a bit different from the last one.
He had sent deathsworn into the Archaic Mountain Range to investigate, but they died suddenly before even reaching the mountains and without seeing anything.
It wasn’t just the Kan Gang. Many powers had sent people in to scout. Only the Xuantian Sect had gained anything at all.
The Xuantian Sect had taken their flood-dragon warship into the area. Before they saw anything, the ship was attacked. That warship, sturdier than a hundred-zhang battleship, snapped in half in an instant and was completely destroyed.
Later, Yu Mi had said that when the flood-dragon warship broke apart, a restrictive formation that the monster saint had set upon it—one meant to suppress the death energy aboard—suddenly erupted. A vast white light-screen surged out.
She had seen a pair of enormous, jade-white hands grasping the two ends of the warship. Before she could get a clear look, the white light-screen suddenly folded in on itself and swept her into the void.
When she came back to her senses, she and her group were in a desolate region of the Snow Domain. There was a defensive array there, a teleportation platform, and some healing medicines.
Bao Gu knew these were all protective arrangements set up by her holy aunt. Her holy aunt must have considered, back when she laid the flood-dragon warship’s defenses, how to let the people aboard escape alive if the ship was ever destroyed.
She hadn’t expected Yu Mi to personally risk entering the Archaic Mountain Range. That made her both angry and afraid, and she hastily returned to the Canglong Mountain Range to look for Yu Mi.
Construction in the Canglong Mountain Range was in full swing; the main hall had already been built. Bao Gu didn’t find Yu Mi there. She contacted her using a sound-transmission jade slip and learned that Yu Mi was currently outside with the little monkey.
She asked,
“Senior Sister, why did you take people into the Archaic Mountain Range?”
The destruction of the flood-dragon warship was one thing, but what if something had happened to Yu Mi? The thought alone made her face go pale.
Yu Mi said,
“I just couldn’t rest easy without checking. Now that I’ve seen it, at least I have a sense of the situation. Don’t worry. I promise I’ll stay far away from the Archaic Mountain Range from now on.”
Bao Gu felt her hands and feet turn cold. It was as if a ball of fire was burning in her chest, and another ball of air was ramming around in there, trying to burst out. She wanted to snap at Yu Mi, but couldn’t bear to. In the end, she could only clutch the sound-transmission jade in silence, neither speaking nor cutting the connection.
Sensing the silence on Bao Gu’s end, Yu Mi coaxed her gently,
“Don’t worry. I didn’t go alone. We were well prepared, and the little monkey and Ling’er were with me. We all had life-saving treasures from Master. Otherwise how would we have dared go?”
Hearing that Ling’er and the little monkey were with Yu Mi eased Bao Gu’s heart somewhat. She asked,
“What did Master say?”
Yu Mi replied,
“Master didn’t say anything.”
Bao Gu frowned slightly.
“With the drought fiend rampaging, Master still let Ling’er return to the cultivation world?”
Ling’er’s voice came through the jade slip.
“Bao Gu, I carry the bloodline of the demon emperor. You think I’d be scared of a single drought fiend? If I can’t even face one drought fiend, how am I supposed to return to the Upper Realm one day and restore the glory of my Celestial Fox clan, let alone avenge its destruction?”
Bao Gu asked,
“What about Xuanyue? She didn’t go out with you?”
Ling’er chuckled.
“My dear cousin’s a bit pitiful this time.”
Bao Gu made a confused sound.
“What happened?”
Ling’er broke into unrestrained laughter.
“Not telling you.”
Bao Gu could hear clearly that Ling’er was gloating. She guessed that Xuanyue had probably been confined by Master. With Ling’er, the little monkey, and Yu Mi together, she finally stopped worrying so much about Yu Mi’s safety. The three of them might be trouble magnets, but their abilities were each greater than the last.
When Ling’er didn’t hear Bao Gu’s voice, she asked,
“You’re not even going to ask me? Maybe I’d tell you if you pressed a little.”
Bao Gu made a noncommittal sound, thinking, “What’s the point of asking when I can already guess?” She asked instead,
“Why won’t Master let Yue’er out?”
“Huh? All right, I guess you guessed it. Still not telling you, though.”
Bao Gu really wanted to throw the word “boring” at her.
She was just about to cut the connection when Ling’er spoke again,
“When’s that stupid formation of yours going to be done? How can you stand cooping yourself up all alone every day? Before, at least you and Yu Mi were always… you know, I won’t bring that up. But now that you two aren’t like that anymore, why are you still hiding away like this? I’m telling you, the cultivation world is way more fun now than it used to be. And you’re still holed up by yourself. Don’t you get bored? Don’t you get annoyed? Don’t you miss your dear senior sister…”
Bao Gu couldn’t listen anymore. She silently cut the connection. If she kept listening to Ling’er nag, she’d really start wanting to strangle her.
She returned to her formation work. Though “work” was one way to put it, she was spending more and more of the time simply studying the sigils on the Five Elements immortal stones.
Every runic line seemed like an evolution, yet also a congealed imprint. Like a living mark that recorded the journey from birth to death. Like a world unto itself.
The sigils etched across the stones drew her into an endless, wondrous realm filled with countless traces of the Dao of Heaven, marked with ten thousand kinds of change. In hazy moments, she even saw glimpses of ancient forebears undergoing their ascension tribulations: saw them unleash divine abilities and fight the Heavens, their casually displayed powers dazzling her mind and soul.
She saw immortals. Real immortals. She saw their methods and their might. In that instant, the immortals she had always thought of as impossibly distant suddenly felt close enough to see and touch.
Gradually, she gained some new insights—but even more confusion and unanswered questions.
When immersed in comprehension and cultivation, time flew. A month passed in the blink of an eye. If Wang Ding hadn’t come to remind her on the first of each month, she might have completely forgotten about the formation and remained lost in those sigils.
She began to apply what she was realizing to the array itself, further perfecting it, until at last she finished laying the great interlinked mother-and-child formation that covered the nineteen cities and one mountain of Qingzhou.
The nineteen cities were the eighteen regions the Kan Gang had carved out for themselves, plus Shadowghost City. The “one mountain” was the Canglong Mountain Range, the formation’s core and eye.
Since she had used the Xuantian Sect’s grand formation manual and she herself came out of Xuantian Sect, naturally she wasn’t going to set the core of the array anywhere else.
When the formation was finally complete, Bao Gu let out a long breath. She felt she had gained a bit more confidence—an extra layer of defense in the face of the drought fiend disaster. Even though Wang Ding had told her that the calamity seemed to have stopped spreading and the blood fiend miasma was no longer expanding outward.
This drought fiend disaster was different from the last one. Bao Gu didn’t know if that was a blessing or a curse.
If it was a curse, in the end all they could do was fight—kill a path out with their own strength. To fight, they needed the power to do so.
Even after finishing the formation, Bao Gu didn’t leave. She stayed inside the great array, continuing to study and comprehend the imprints carved into the Five Elements immortal stones.
She memorized every sigil on every stone, engraving them into her mind. With her eyes closed, she could see each rune clearly. Through them, she seemed to see the evolution of all things in the world.
She imitated that evolution using a spiritual tree seed as an experiment, channeling the energy transformations she had derived from the sigils into it. The seed went from seed to sprout to a towering tree almost in an instant. Because her control was imperfect, it also withered and died.
A spiritual tree that should have lived for ten thousand years ran its entire life in a fleeting moment, then scattered countless seeds across the formation. The power of the array reduced those seeds to nothingness.
The sigils on the Five Elements immortal stones had opened a new world for Bao Gu.
She could not put the feeling and the gains into precise words. If she had to show them with something concrete, it would be this: her cultivation had broken through her previous bottleneck at peak Golden Core.
The two golden cores in her body fused and transformed into a Nascent Soul.
When she sent her divine sense into her Nascent Soul and looked at the world through its eyes, she found that everything was clearer and more transparent than when she used her ordinary sight and consciousness. Her awareness could cross a thousand li in an instant.
She moved her Nascent Soul to reside in the spiritual platform at the center of her brow.
The Nascent Soul felt very strange to her, like having condensed her consciousness into a form—a form under her control. This consciousness not only had form, but also a “body” to carry it. Not a body of flesh and blood, but one woven from spiritual power and energy according to certain laws and patterns.
Those laws and patterns were similar to the sigils on the Five Elements immortal stones, but as weak in comparison as a newborn.
Well, that was precisely it—the Nascent Soul was like a baby. Otherwise, why call it a Nascent Soul?
It had the shape of an infant. Not an actual human infant, but its structure made it resemble one.
Suddenly, Bao Gu recalled a saying: among the primates, the human form was closest to the Dao; among serpents and crawling creatures, the dragon form was closest to the Dao; and among birds, the phoenix was closest to the Dao.
That was why they said that only cultivators who stepped into the Nascent Soul stage were true cultivators—because only after refining a Nascent Soul with a form close to the Dao did one truly step over the threshold.
After forming her Nascent Soul, Bao Gu started “tormenting” it every day—trying different ways to temper it, or perhaps one should say cultivate it.
As she kept at it, her Nascent Soul grew denser and larger day by day. In terms of standard realms, she should now be in mid Nascent Soul.
Realizing how fast she was progressing, Bao Gu bit her lip and secretly rejoiced more than once.
When she reached the Deity Transformation stage, she would go out. By then, she was going to give her senior sister the fright of her life.
But it wasn’t long before she herself was the one frightened by Yu Mi.
Wang Ding told her that Yu Mi had entered Yue Kingdom and then lost all contact.
When Bao Gu heard this, she went completely blank with shock.
“Didn’t she promise me she’d stay far away from the Archaic Mountain Range? Where are you right now?”
Wang Ding replied,
“I’m at the Left Envoy’s residence in Shadowghost City.”
“I’m coming to you!”
Bao Gu cut the connection the moment she finished speaking, then rushed to the Left Envoy’s residence at top speed. She was already in the mountain-guarding formation not far from Shadowghost City; in just a few breaths, she arrived at the residence.
As she landed in front of the gate, she saw Wang Ding, Ling’er, and the little monkey perched on Ling’er’s shoulder, all staring at her with fright written across their faces.
She asked,
“What happened?”
Ling’er lowered her head.
“The blood fiend miasma and death energy in Yue Kingdom and the Archaic Mountain Range suddenly vanished completely. We went over to investigate and searched all the way into the Archaic Mountain Range. There, we saw a girl with a flame-red lotus mark between her brows. She looked about sixteen or seventeen. She wasn’t wearing a single scrap of clothing and was being harassed by a few cultivators.
“Yu Mi went over and taught those cultivators a lesson, then took out some clothes to wrap the girl up. The girl just stared at Yu Mi for a long while, then said, ‘You have a familiar scent. You know her.’
“We were completely confused. I asked, ‘Who?’
“She glanced at me, frowned, and looked disgusted. Then she stared at Yu Mi again. And then, all of a sudden, Yu Mi and that girl just disappeared. It was too fast. The little monkey and I didn’t see how they vanished. One moment they were there, the next they weren’t. I tried contacting Yu Mi with a sound-transmission jade, but I couldn’t reach her.
“We searched all over the Archaic Mountain Range, but… Bao Gu, the blood fiend miasma is gone, but all kinds of weird things have grown there—things we’ve never seen before. Even with our strength, the little monkey and I almost got into deadly danger several times. We’re not afraid of danger, but the changes in the mountains really scared us, and there was no trace of Yu Mi at all. We didn’t dare keep wasting time, so we came back for help.
“With the Kan Gang’s current strength, it shouldn’t be hard to assemble a large number of people to search the mountains, right?”
Bao Gu turned to the little monkey.
“You really didn’t see how they disappeared?”
The Duobao Spirit Monkey frowned and nodded, answering her with divine sense,
“It was teleportation. A swap of space. An instant spatial exchange from one position to another.”
“What realm was that girl in?” Bao Gu asked.
“Couldn’t see through it,” the Duobao Spirit Monkey replied.
All color drained from Bao Gu’s face.
Ling’er asked,
“Bao Gu, you know who took Yu Mi away, don’t you?”
Bao Gu forced a single word out between clenched teeth.
“Drought fiend.”
Ling’er’s face went pale as well.
She had considered the possibility that the drought fiend had taken Yu Mi, but every time she did, she dismissed it. Why would a drought fiend bother with small fry like them? If it really wanted to act, it would just slap them flat in an instant. And a drought fiend, harassed by a few little Nascent Soul cultivators? What a joke.
She said,
“That can’t be right. She clearly said there was a familiar scent on Yu Mi and that Yu Mi knew ‘her.’ Who among the people Yu Mi knows has any connection to a drought fiend?”
“Holy Aunt,” Bao Gu answered coldly.
“Holy Aunt once suppressed the drought fiend coffin. If the seal in the Archaic Mountain Range hadn’t been removed, the drought fiend might well have been suppressed to death by her. You escaped last time, and you still went back this time?”
Her heart clenched and spasmed in her chest. She didn’t know whether it was from anger or fear.
Clearly, the drought fiend was looking for Holy Aunt. Now it had grabbed her senior sister, obviously intending to use Yu Mi to get to Holy Aunt.
Ling’er asked,
“What do we do? Should the two of us go beg my aunt to act…”
Even as she said it, there was no confidence in her voice. Her aunt was still recovering her strength. In terms of cultivation realm and combat power, she was nowhere near the drought fiend’s equal. Even if she used their clan’s ancestral treasure, it was very doubtful she could win.
Besides, because of the grudges between the demon domain and the human race in this world tens of thousands of years ago, her aunt wouldn’t interfere in the affairs of the cultivation world, much less help cultivators deal with a drought fiend.
Wang Ding spoke thoughtfully,
“What if it isn’t the drought fiend? With a being like that, would it really resort to grabbing hostages? And also…”
She glanced at Ling’er and the little monkey.
“She wiped out nearly all living beings within Yue’s borders. So why did she spare Miss Ling’er and Brother Duobao?”
The Duobao Spirit Monkey squeaked and turned its backside toward Wang Ding.
Ling’er tossed Wang Ding five words.
“How should I know?”
Wang Ding said,
“Why don’t you, Miss Ling’er, provide a portrait and a trace imprint of that girl’s aura? I can send the Shadow Pavilion to investigate her origins with everything we’ve got. Lord Commander, you can take the portrait and aura imprint to the monster saint. Since the monster saint once suppressed the drought fiend, she should be able to tell whether the one who took the Arrow Envoy is truly the drought fiend.”
Bao Gu nodded. It sounded like a workable plan.
