Translator note: there’s a lot of astrology/magic babble in this chapter that I have no idea if I translated correctly (Chinese google kept turning up blank)
When Xia Duanfang finally realized he’d been had by those shameless bastards, it was already noon. He’d somehow followed Shi Wuduan to the main hall, and had somehow received an edict of conferment from the court naming him as “army surveillance commissioner.” He could even tack the words “Imperially Ordained” onto his penniless Xiaosheng Sect.
While Xia Duanfang was still busy choking on air, a dignified-looking man by his side hauled him to his feet and threw an arm over his shoulder, as if they were close as brothers, thick as thieves. The courier chuckled, “It seems General Gu and Sect Leader Xia really do share a deep friendship.”
Xia Duanfang thought, his jaw hanging open, if you hadn’t called him “General Gu,” I wouldn’t’ve even known who the hell this handsy weirdo was. Since when did we suddenly become best friends?
Gu Huaiyang sighed sentimentally and said to the courier official, “When I was young, my family was so poor we could hardly afford to eat. It’s all thanks to brother Xia here bringing me flat cakes every day that I didn’t starve to death.”
Xia Duanfang, his eyes bulging and his mouth catching flies, silently protested: I’ve been cultivating in my sect ever since I was a child, wasn’t this Gu fellow supposed to be from Jianghuai? Just how’d I manage to get some bullshit flat cakes all the way to his hands? He looked in amazement at Gu Huaiyang, who’d thrown himself into the act with gusto, and thought furiously, oh I’ll give you something to eat alright, I’ll give you flat cakes filled with rat poison, see if you croak.
Still, Xia Duanfang didn’t say anything. Everyone around him, aside from the couriers, was a saber-carrying ruffian. Plus, at the moment, General Gu was his sect’s one and only benefactor. Even if he looked down on him and his lot, he couldn’t let his three little disciples starve to death.
So, he stood there silently with a constipated expression on his face. Somehow, with General Gu mawkishly reminiscing about the past right next to him, they looked like a match made in heaven. Even the couriers were nearly moved to tears.
Xia Duanfang judged quietly in his heart that, based on the couriers’ nauseatingly gushy behavior and the fact that his beard was definitely glued on, he was most certainly an eunuch. True, conferring titles on pardoned “generals” out in backwater Haining was hardly an important task, but he couldn’t believe the court had actually sent a neutered pansy out to do it. Was the court really that shorthanded?
Then again, Sect Leader Xia really wasn’t in the mood to lament over the state of the country. His main priority was to plot an escape route, gather his luggage and some food, and book it out of this outlaw’s den as soon as night came. Then he’d flee with his little disciples and go to ground in some faraway mountain. Even though they’d have to live with the sky as their roof and the wildlife as their neighbors, it would be better than living under the power of others.
Not to mention…. Sect Leader Xia’s gaze darkened, the recollection of the white-clothed man bringing a frown onto his face. The spine-chilling feeling he’d gotten from him just simply wouldn’t go away. He thought, that man seems to be acquainted with that little bastard Shi Wuduan, who’s plenty weird himself. Just where’d he find a demon creature?
Legend had it that thousands of years ago, a great battle, known as the Battle of Gods and Demons, that had involved nearly every living cultivator at the time, resulted in the sealing of all demons into the Hall of Demons. The knowledge would’ve been lost to them, as it had been for many others, if not for the fact that one of the survivors of the battle had been an ancestor of the Xiaosheng Sect of Haining. This no-name little sect, precisely because it was inconspicuous, had preserved many historical records.
It was said that after the battle, the Xuan Sect had settled on Jiulu Mountain and become entangled with the fate of the Hall of Demons.
Had he seen wrong? No… Xia Duanfang had grown up reading the secret records of his sect. His first impression after laying eyes on the white-robed man was that he must have leaped right out of the pages of those old books.
We’re sorry for MTLers or people who like using reading mode, but our translations keep getting stolen by aggregators so we’re going to bring back the copy protection. If you need to MTL please retype the gibberish parts.
Could it be that the Hall of Demons’ seal was broken?
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Xia Duanfang felt like his life was hanging by a precarious thread that was about to snap at any minute. So, that very night, he shouldered his bags, conjured a few ‘sleeping bugs’ from his sleeve, and prepared to escape from Guji.
He crept out of his room in the dark; not a single soul was in sight. All he could hear was the snoring of the guards — they were all in deep sleep already. Even lightning and thunder wouldn’t wake them.
Still, for some reason, Xia Duanfang’s heart began pounding rapidly. He snuck two more steps forward, then finally paused. He frowned in consternation as white mist began congealing at the courtyard’s door. The plants seemed to take on an unreal quality. In a moment of distraction, even the buildings had all disappeared. All that remained were lines that crisscrossed the ground.
When he stared at the lines, he felt like he was being sucked into them. After a second of disorientation, he couldn’t even distinguish up, down, left, and right. Xia Duanfang scowled and knew he’d been trapped within an array by a powerful cultivator.
To think…. that Gu Huaiyang had someone like this under him?
However, though he was shocked, he kept his wits about him. He’d seen this array before; it was the “Warp Weft Array.” He knew that the lines beneath his feet were like the lines of a chessboard. If he could find the “piece” that was on the board, he could break the array. According to the standard Warp Weft Array that’d been passed down from generation to generation, the location of the piece was supposed to be fixed, but… the array seemed to have been altered.
He gathered his focus and closed his eyes, standing motionlessly in the courtyard. He clasped his hands in a sequence of hand seals as he silently recited an incantation. Two chains suddenly flew from his waist, sweeping out around him.
He could sense the chain’s every movement. Suddenly, Xia Duanfang’s eyes shot open, he clenched the chain and turned towards a certain direction. His gaze was sharp as an unsheathed sword. He saw a faint light in that direction, so faint it was like a firefly in the boundless night sky.
The chains chased after the light as if they had a life of their own. There was a faint clang and soon afterward, he felt the array trapping him suddenly slacken. A small whirlwind arose where he stood, bursting upwards and expanding out in every direction. The lines of the Warp Weft Array shattered beneath his feet, yet the mist didn’t thin out in the slightest.
On the contrary, it became even thicker, crowding in at him from all sides. The sky itself pressed down on him, the stars so close he could touch them if he reached out. Xia Duanfang’s eyes snapped open, he couldn’t help exclaiming, “Impossible!”
It was the Heaven’s Square Array. The Warp Weft Array was of the earth, and the Heaven’s Square Array, as the name implied, was of the skies. Unless the sky and earth became one, it was impossible to combine arrays of the sky and the earth. It defied all reason!
A peal of quiet laughter sounded next to his ear. A young man’s melodious voice slowly intoned, “Sect Leader Xia, there’s no such thing as impossible.”
Xia Duanfang looked up and saw a man wearing a long robe sitting at the other edge of the sky with a small astrolabe before him. Seemingly floating in the air thousands of leagues away, as far as the distant clouds and mountains, was Shi Wuduan.
Xia Duanfang knew that the young man could be right in front of him, and that they might be separated by nothing more than an array. Arrays had no limit; A square inch of space could become a small world with its own heaven and earth. Every novice entering a sect learned that basic concept. Xia Duanfang’s heart sank. He cupped his hands and said, “I didn’t know I was in the presence of a master, my apologies, excuse me.”
Shi Wuduan didn’t reply. He kept staring at his eerily glowing astrolabe. After a good while, he said, “Were you heading to the restroom, Sect Leader Xia?”
Xia Duanfang was dripping with cold sweat. He hurriedly replied, “Of course, of course.”
“Oh.” Shi Wuduan expressionlessly looked at the luggage on his back, nodded, and said, “You’re carrying quite a lot of toilet paper. You must’ve had some pretty serious diarrhea.”
Xia Duanfang could only respond, “Ah, I’m ashamed.”
“No, it’s I who is ashamed,” Shi Wuduan smiled, “I haven’t been a proper host; letting you get so uncomfortable that you’re staying up all night in the restroom isn’t the right way to treat guests at all.”
Xia Duanfang laughed nervously as he tried to buy time to figure out a way to examine the strange Heaven’s Square Array. All the array did was encircle someone within a small region, using a star as the eye of the array. It was easy to break; one only had to find which star it was and follow it to walk out of the trap.
Though mixing a sky array and an earth array was rather astonishing, both of the arrays were fairly basic. They were both easy to set and easy to dismantle, except….
When Xia Duanfang looked up to find the so-called “limitless place arising from the west, entering three inches into the southern sky” eye of the array, he found that — the entire sky was like an enormous astrolabe cupped over his head, the seven sacred stars were in their right place, not once deviating from their paths. Even the countless lesser stars revolved in perfect order.
How had he achieved it?
Xia Duanfang was suddenly a bit awed by this nonsense-spouting young man. Shi Wuduan said, “I didn’t know you were coming out, Sect Leader Xia. I was just practicing some arrays since it was spacious here and I was having trouble sleeping. I’m very sorry.”
Xia Duanfang looked at him, the lackadaisical smile nowhere to be seen. He said somberly, “I daren’t. If I may, Mister Shi, the earth and sky, yin and yang, are polar opposites. How is it that a sky array and earth array can coexist?”
Shi Wuduan softly replied, “Extreme yin becomes yang, extreme yang becomes yin. The Warp Weft Array was originally comprised of forty-nine rows; it’s simply the reverse of the eighteen longitudes of the sky. The earth shatters upon contact, upon shattering becomes sky. It’s not all that complicated.”
Xia Duanfang continued asking, “Then the stars….”
Shi Wuduan laughed, “The stars are real.”
He finally looked up from his astrolabe towards that shining, yet terrifyingly vast sky and replied, “I’ve always thought the Heaven’s Square Array was too stupid, fabricating a few stars that don’t cross paths, you could calculate with ten fingers where the eye of the array was. So I simplified the real constellations a bit and moved them down. What do you think, Sect Leader Xia?”
Xia Duanfang didn’t think anything about it at all. As he watched him hold his astrolabe, he was thinking, then, is he really calculating the trajectories of every star in the heavens? He couldn’t help asking, “But… can it even be calculated?”
“It can,” said Shi Wuduan. “It’s not the true sea of stars, just the seven sacred stars, and a few smaller ones. If you use the right calculations, it’s an excellent shortcut. Sixty-four expressions are more than enough.”
Xia Duanfang choked, thinking that the thing attached to Shi Wuduan’s neck wasn’t a human head but some magic relic.
Shi Wuduan sighed and said unexpectedly, “Sect Leader Xia, take a look at the sky.”
Xia Duanfang wordlessly looked at the patch of sky Shi Wuduan pointed to. The sacred stars were scattered in different regions, each a formation in and of itself, yet each affected by the others. But somehow they were bizarrely harmonious as if they’d never in a million years brush past each other.
“Do you understand?” Shi Wuduan asked smilingly.
Xia Duanfang hesitated briefly before nodding shallowly. He replied quietly, “Breaking yet unbreaking.”
“I knew you were a smart one, Sect Leader Xia,” Shi Wuduan replied.
Xia Duanfang helplessly said in response, “Mister Shi, please allow me time to consider.”
Shi Wuduan was agreeable; if he wanted time, then he’d give him time. At the wave of a hand, everything, the stars, the clouds, the mist, all vanished. They were once again standing in a quiet little courtyard, empty save for the two of them. Shi Wuduan hugged his astrolabe in his arms, turning to leave, when he remembered something, and said, “Oh, that’s right, I figured you’d be lonely staying here alone, Sect Leader Xia, so I sent some people to the Xiaosheng Sect of Haiji on an errand.”
Xia Duanfang’s fist instantly clenched tight.
Shi Wuduan carelessly continued, “Fear not, you’ll see your good disciples shortly, Sect Leader Xia.”
Then he yawned and strolled away. Xia Duanfang gazed at his silhouette; the fear and respect from earlier had crumbled to dust, he was itching to leap over and kick him a thousand times. He thought, “He’s just a little bastard after all!”
How powerful is young Shi !! 🧨🧨🧨
Thank you so much. Your translations are wonderful. They flow very well. 👏❤️💐🙏🧨
Shi Wuduan, such underhanded means! 😮