Half an incense stick’s time later.
Deep in the quiet of night, before the entrance of the “Youjian” teahouse, three men stripped of every stitch of clothing hung upside down by their bound limbs from the signboard.
Luo Jiao clapped her hands. “I found some sleeping drug in the storeroom, the same stuff they used to knock us out. Now their seven orifices… are smeared with it too. If they live, it’s sheer luck. Hahaha.”
Xu Liangdi didn’t laugh along. She only sighed, “These past few days… you’ve truly sown a great deal of karma.”
Luo Jiao found that amusing. “You call this sowing karma?” She tugged the corner of her mouth, exasperated. “If people don’t offend me, I don’t offend them. If you’d lived by that rule, you wouldn’t have ended up the way you did.”
Xu Liangdi made no reply.
Jinguan City lay hushed in the night. Luo Jiao walked down the empty avenue, heading in the direction of Sanqing Mountain as she remembered it.
“I’m going to Sanqing Mountain.” Whether talking to herself or reporting her itinerary to Xu Liangdi, she announced it loudly all the same. “I want to see whether the mountain was really cleaved apart.”
Xu Liangdi gave a dull “oh.”
They had walked another long stretch when Xu Liangdi sneezed, then asked abruptly, “How did you die?”
Luo Jiao: “Huh?”
Xu Liangdi pressed on. “Since you’re dwelling in my body, you must be a… ghost too, right? From the way you talk, you can’t have been old. And it doesn’t feel like you died a natural death. You seem rather strong, too… Hey, do you have some kind of story?”
The moonlight was still, the night wrapped around Jinguan City.
Luo Jiao kept walking at her leisure, as deaf to the question as if she hadn’t heard it, and said nothing.
Xu Liangdi assumed she had overstepped and stopped awkwardly. “All right, forget I…”
Unexpectedly, Luo Jiao cut her off with a laugh.
“You’re asking me?” She cleared her throat, and when she spoke again, her tone was strangely proud. “I died a heroic death. For the greater good of all under heaven, I gave my all, righteous and unflinching.”
Xu Liangdi: “…A worthy death, then?”
Luo Jiao drawled, “Not bad.”
Xu Liangdi kept pressing. “Then why didn’t you reincarnate? Or is it that all ghosts are like this, with no next life to speak of?”
They were far from the teahouse now. Not far off, the silhouette of Sanqing Mountain flickered in and out of view in the moonlight.
“The next life?” Luo Jiao twisted her neck. “Oh, there is one. I just haven’t made myself ready to start all over again.”
Xu Liangdi burst out laughing, rare for her. “So in the end, it was I who forced you to start over?”
“Living in someone else’s body is strange, admittedly,” Luo Jiao said. “But coming back to this world, with its old scenery and old faces, isn’t so terrible either.”
Whether out of genuine curiosity, or because the hour of parting drew near, Xu Liangdi was unusually talkative tonight. “What kind of place do you go to, after you truly die?”
“After death, huh…”
Luo Jiao thought of her own situation after death. Pitch darkness, trapped in chaos. Locked in a struggle for survival inside her own inner demon, day and night, year upon year.
But she didn’t say any of that. She only answered, “You can rest easy. The land after death is different for everyone. Some find peace. Some find torment…”
Xu Liangdi asked, “Then were you tormented, or at peace?”
“Neither. But you, you should be at peace. After all…” Luo Jiao pulled at the corner of her mouth, turning to teasing. “I’ll recite the Great Compassion Mantra for you.”
“Haha! Well, many thanks for that.” Xu Liangdi laughed on the spot. “In the days I’ve spent with you, being dead felt almost like being alive.”
Luo Jiao gave a mock sneer. “So happy with me, are you? A few days ago you kept playing the mute.”
Xu Liangdi said sheepishly, “Sorry about that.” Then she giggled, fawning. “But… I really do think you’re an interesting person. With a temperament like yours, you must have had plenty of friends while you lived?”
Luo Jiao answered without a moment’s thought. “Naturally.”
Xu Liangdi: “Could you tell me more about your life?”
Luo Jiao stopped walking, tilted her head toward the moonlight, and narrowed her eyes.
She didn’t know where to begin. It had all happened a hundred years ago, an age and a world too distant from anything Xu Liangdi knew.
Then, suddenly, she remembered the gossip in the teahouse, about that “Grand Elder of the Wind Grace Sect” who had cleaved Sanqing Mountain apart with a single sword.
Luo Jiao spoke slowly. “Do you remember that Ye Qingzhou they were talking about in the teahouse?”
“I remember.” Xu Liangdi said, “The Mad Elder, right?”
Luo Jiao sighed. “She is not a madwoman.”
Though she didn’t understand, Xu Liangdi corrected herself readily enough. “Oh. Oh, well, I never knew her, but she must have been someone remarkable.”
“She was my Junior Sister.” Luo Jiao repeated it once more. “…My Junior Sister is not a madwoman.”
Her voice was flat as she said it, her expression unruffled, without the slightest stir of emotion.
Yet within the sea of consciousness, Xu Liangdi froze, then erupted into a gong-crashing cheer. “That’s so amazing!!” Remembering the “heroic death” and “righteous and unflinching,” she marveled, “Heavens, your life must have been spectacular. Vast and magnificent!”
Magnificent… was it?
Hearing that word, Luo Jiao visibly froze.
A hundred years ago, her brief, dewdrop of a life had once been as vast as the sky, as wide as the sea.
South along the Thousand-Li Slope, north to Mojiang City.
The Sanqing Dao Arts, one sword cold as frost.
The Bujue Sword Immortal, exalted above ten thousand. How could such a life not be magnificent?
How could it not be.
Yet at that thought, the light in Luo Jiao’s eyes dimmed all too plainly.
Fortunately, Xu Liangdi couldn’t see it. She only chattered on. “I’ve gone and summoned such an extraordinary figure! Hahaha! No wonder you know so many spell techniques!…”
As she talked, Luo Jiao quickened her pace, speeding along the small road out of the city toward Sanqing Mountain.
The mountain’s silhouette gradually emerged.
In the moonlight, the great mountain showed a deep verdant green, hazy and indistinct, as though veiled in a layer of gauze.
Standing before it, Luo Jiao braced her hands on her knees and caught her breath.
She reached out and lightly tapped the air ahead with one fingertip.
Sure enough, the instant she touched the barrier before her, wild winds howled up, followed by a fierce searing heat that shot from her fingertip straight into her skull.
“What’s happening?!” Xu Liangdi cried out in a panic.
Luo Jiao lowered her hand.
Everything around them instantly returned to stillness, as if the wind and fire of a moment ago had been nothing but a shared delusion.
Luo Jiao said flatly, “Remember what those people in the teahouse said… Sanqing Mountain was cleaved away.” She waved a hand at the air ahead, watching sparks crackle and pop at her fingertip.
Xu Liangdi pressed, “What does ‘cleaved away’ mean? So we can’t get up there?”
“We can.” Luo Jiao drew a deep breath and explained with care. “Remember the spell technique I used before? The Heart Illusion Art. The first layer is Heart Control, the second is Person Control… What I used on that Young Master of the Zou Manor was the second layer. Back at the fishing village, it was the third layer, Emotion Control. I drew on the fear buried deepest in those people’s hearts and conjured them a nightmare. As for this mountain… it should be the fourth layer.”
“Realm Control.”
“Simply put, the mountain is still there, but no one else can see it. They can’t even get close. It’s like a barrier shrouding the entire mountain. To anyone looking at it, there is only a drifting haze of mountain mist. And that mist forms the outline of the whole mountain.”
“A barrier?” Xu Liangdi marveled. “A… a barrier this big? One as big as the mountain itself?”
“Bigger than the mountain,” Luo Jiao corrected.
Xu Liangdi: “Then what do we do?”
Luo Jiao: “Find the Formation Core.”
Xu Liangdi: “How?”
Luo Jiao closed her eyes.
In her past life, her mastery of the Heart Illusion Art had been nearly equal to Ye Qingzhou’s. True, a hundred years had surely carried Ye Qingzhou far beyond her, but clearly, the art laid over the outside of Sanqing Mountain was nowhere near her finest work.
Besides, she only needed to find the Formation Core, not restore the illusion entire. For Luo Jiao, it was not especially difficult.
After a short while, Luo Jiao had her answer, and she opened her eyes.
She heard Xu Liangdi murmur, “The sun is about to rise.” It was unclear who she was saying it for.
But Luo Jiao knew. At sunrise, Xu Liangdi’s soul spirit would scatter for good.
She tilted her head back and looked up toward the summit.
The next moment, she plunged straight into the barrier!
It was like falling into raging fire, like dropping into a valley of howling wind. Luo Jiao felt flame and gale assail her whole body, the pain nearly unbearable.
In her ears, Xu Liangdi’s screams rose and fell.
In truth, with the hour of parting so near, Xu Liangdi could no longer feel pain at all. But the panic remained. “Wh-what are you doing?!”
Before the words had even faded, before Luo Jiao could answer, she felt the body suddenly plunge into water.
Spring water, ice cold, striking her skin with a chill that cut to the bone.
And yet it felt achingly familiar.
She remembered, a hundred years ago, as a girl too fond of play, she could never wait for her rest days before clamoring to go down the mountain. When her Shiniang refused, she sneaked down anyway. On her way back up, she would hide all her little purchases in a stone cave beside the spring, then stroll up the mountain empty-handed as if she’d bought nothing at all.
She also remembered how, when the water ran shallow, she would carry her shoes and stockings and wade barefoot across the little spring, sitting on the bank to put them back on. It was in just such a scene that she first saw Ye Qingzhou, led up the mountain by her Shiniang.
She was fourteen then, the same age Xu Liangdi had been.
And Ye Qingzhou was only seven.
A porcelain-sweet, snow-clever little child.
That was Luo Jiao’s first impression of Ye Qingzhou.
