Let us set aside Gu Chengming's headache for the moment.
As for the matter of the Harmonious Joy Sect collectively gaining a dream lover, the person who felt the most despair was not the party actually involved, but Su Qiuzhi.
The story has to be told starting from three days ago.
At that time, the so-called "dream sword cultivator" topic had only just begun to ferment within the Harmonious Joy Sect, but it already showed signs of growing ever more heated, with disciples gathering in little clusters of threes and fives to describe the figure each of them had seen in their dreams.
And Su Qiuzhi's psychological state at that moment could roughly be captured with a very vivid metaphor:
A cat that had stolen a fish, only to one day discover that every cat on the whole street was talking about that same fish.
The matter of Yun Ni's execution had had its circle of knowledge strictly confined within the Harmonious Joy Sect to a very small group.
Fu Xiaoxiao, Kurong, Jingxin (Elder Jingxin), and a few other elders naturally understood the role Gu Chengming had played in it, but for the vast majority of disciples, what had happened that night had been simplified into this: the former sect master Yun Ni had fallen into cultivation deviation and died suddenly in a secret chamber, and Elder Fu Xiaoxiao, appointed in the crisis, had temporarily taken over the position of sect master.
As for the outsider who had stirred up the entire chessboard at the critical moment—scarcely anyone knew of him; even Su Qiuzhi could only vaguely guess.
For Gu Chengming, the Eternal Life Sect's hidden agents had not yet been cleared out, and the truth of the Red Dust Seed had not yet been uncovered. On the surface the Harmonious Joy Sect had returned to calm, but the undercurrents beneath the surface had never ceased.
In such a situation, he had to remain in the shadows to see more, so in the perception of the vast majority of Harmonious Joy Sect disciples, Gu Chengming's identity was still that of a physician's apprentice at Elder Li Suizhuang's side.
Su Qiuzhi, of course, was the exception, and so when the dream sword cultivator matter first began to ferment, a strong sense of crisis rose within her.
By the second day, she finally could not sit still, and decided to go and probe him.
Su Qiuzhi never used the front door, and now she suddenly stood properly outside it and knocked three times—that in itself carried a whiff of the unusual—but Gu Chengming let her in all the same.
Between the two of them lay a table, a pot of cold tea, and the erotic dreams of over a thousand Harmonious Joy Sect disciples.
Of course, only Su Qiuzhi thought of the latter that way; in truth, one had to add an elder surnamed Fu to the ranks of those having erotic dreams.
After sitting down, Su Qiuzhi did not immediately speak, but instead lifted the cup of cold tea and took a sip, her gaze sweeping across Gu Chengming's face without betraying anything.
"Lately there's something being passed around in the sect—have you heard about it?"
"What thing?"
"They say that on the day the Twin Yin-Yang Fish Formation fluctuated, a lot of disciples had a dream. In the dream there was a sword cultivator, very good-looking, who said something different to every single person."
She paused, then added: "And, mind you—the same sword cultivator."
Gu Chengming sighed helplessly to himself, the hand holding his tea not pausing in the slightest: "Is that so? How interesting."
Su Qiuzhi stared at the side of his face for three breaths.
Then she fished a slip of paper out of her sleeve, laid it flat on the table, and pushed it across.
On the slip, densely recorded, was the information she had gathered from all over these past two days—a compilation of the disciples' descriptions of the person in their dreams.
Seeing that this bastard was still playing dumb, Su Qiuzhi stared into his eyes and cut straight to the point: "That sword cultivator is you, isn't it."
Seeing there was no way to conceal it, Gu Chengming could only admit it.
"You said something different to every single person?"
"Yes."
"Then that line you said to me…" Su Qiuzhi's voice caught, and she swallowed the words she'd originally meant to say, switching to a different phrasing: "Was that also part of the strategy?"
Gu Chengming recalled the choice he had made regarding Su Qiuzhi within the Desires of All Beings.
The situation at the time had been this: among hundreds upon thousands of dialogue boxes, he had found the one marked with Su Qiuzhi's name. Her heart-knot was the injustice she had suffered in her youth, the unwillingness that came of always living in Su Xiashao's shadow, the despair of being unable to touch the receding figure of the goal she looked up to, no matter how hard she tried.
So when that dialogue box surfaced before Gu Chengming, he did not hesitate for long.
There were many options, but he chose the simplest one.
You don't have to become anyone, Su Qiuzhi. At least with me, you only need to be yourself.
"That line was sincere." Thinking Su Qiuzhi had mistaken his words for empty and false, Gu Chengming added by way of explanation.
Su Qiuzhi took a deep breath, then another deep breath, and then downed the cup of cold tea in one gulp, as though tossing back liquor.
She stood, braced both hands on the edge of the table, and leaned in a bit closer, the emotions churning in those eyes too tangled to name:
"You just wait for me."
Her voice carried a touch of ferocity, but the crimson at the tips of her ears betrayed her true state of mind.
"Once things in the sect settle down, I'm coming to dual-cultivate with you."
Having said it, she was the first to blush, but she stubbornly refused to look away, as if locked in a contest of wills with him—and also with those thousand-some dream rivals.
Gu Chengming watched her, his expression subtle, but what he was thinking was: In that case, you'd probably have to win out over Senior Sister Fu first.
But he did not say this aloud, and only nodded: "Then I'll wait."
Su Qiuzhi shot him a fierce glare, pulled down the brim of her hat, and vaulted out the window.
The dream sword cultivator affair finally reached its climax amid ever-mounting fervor.
The cause was a painting.
Among this generation of Harmonious Joy Sect prodigies, a girl named Qīng Luó had a peculiar hobby: she excelled at the painterly art of using Red Dust Qi as ink and spiritual power as brush to paint erotic pictures. Ever since the dream sword cultivator incident, she had lost her appetite for food and drink, painting erotic pictures every day, and dissatisfied with them every day.
Because her dream was far clearer than most people's. The face of the person in the dream was still blurred, but his figure, his bearing, his manner, even the angle at which he held his sword—she remembered every one of them with perfect clarity.
And every day, the picture she painted was of the back of a young man standing with sword in hand—no face, but the outline of that back, together with the indescribable aura about him, was enough to make everyone who saw the painting cry out the same thing in their hearts.
"It's him! It's him!"
Qīng Luó had originally only been painting for fun in her own studio, but somehow a junior sister who had dropped by saw it. That junior sister let out a high-decibel shriek on the spot, and then, with speed too swift to cover one's ears, ran off to fetch others.
Within half a shichen, a long line had formed outside Qīng Luó's studio.
The queue wound from the doorway all the way to the end of the corridor, and it kept growing longer. The disciples who came to see the painting were of the First Realm and of the Third Realm, of the outer sect and of the inner sect; every one of them, after looking, flushed red with excitement, and then couldn't wait to start adding the details from their own dreams.
"His hands! The hands you painted aren't pretty enough! I remember his fingers being longer than this!"
"No, no, his shoulders should be a bit broader—"
"His sword wasn't worn at the side of his waist—it was at the back!"
"The back of the waist? What kind of dream did you have? It was clearly at the side!"
"My dream was clearer than yours!"
"What makes you say yours was clearer than mine?!"
In the span of three days, Qīng Luó revised it forty-seven times.
Every version satisfied someone, and every version drew protest from someone, because although the broad strokes of what everyone dreamed were consistent, in the specific tiny differences they varied enormously.
This was only natural—Gu Chengming's method of "winning over" each person within the Desires of All Beings had been different, so the impression left behind was naturally not entirely the same either.
By the forty-eighth version, Qīng Luó finally broke down.
She threw down her brush, stood up, and declared: "Enough! Paint it yourselves!"
But the matter did not subside because of this; instead, it gave birth to something even more preposterous.
A spontaneously formed grassroots organization quietly came into being within the Harmonious Joy Sect, named the "Sword-Seeking Pavilion."
Nominally a cultivation-exchange society, in reality it did only one thing: collect, organize, and analyze all information related to the "dream sword cultivator," and on that basis deduce his true identity and origins.
The Sword-Seeking Pavilion's membership grew at an astonishing rate, taking in over a hundred people within a mere few days, ranging from First Realm new disciples to Third Realm veteran disciples. There was even a rumor that certain core inner-sect disciples, and even some elders, were secretly following the Sword-Seeking Pavilion's investigative progress.
Gu Chengming looked at this "Sword-Seeking Pavilion Investigation Brief" that Su Qiuzhi had delivered, and the veins at his temples twitched several times.
Though not entirely accurate, it was already accurate to a degree that made one very uncomfortable.
What made him even more uncomfortable was the latest investigative direction the Sword-Seeking Pavilion was currently pushing—they were trying to open channels outside the sect, inquiring whether the Wenjian Sect had, in recent years, any young male disciple with "a gentle, steady bearing, long slender fingers, and a reassuring way of speaking."
If this investigation really pushed forward, combined with the fact that Gu Chengming was no nobody within the Wenjian Sect…
He took a deep breath and flipped the investigation brief over.
There was more on the back. In her neat small regular script, Su Qiuzhi had appended a line at the end: "The Sword-Seeking Pavilion plans to dispatch a representative to leave the mountain in three days and travel to the Wenjian Sect to exchange cultivation insights."
Gu Chengming folded the brief and put it away, walked to the window, and gazed out at the Harmonious Joy Sect disciples gathered in twos and threes below, letting out inexplicable bursts of laughter now and then.
This bunch's capacity for action was frankly stronger than the Night-Watch Bureau's.
After Su Qiuzhi left, he was still fretting over how to handle this matter when a flurry of hurried footsteps suddenly came from behind him.
Fu Xiaoxiao pushed the door open and came in, several sheets of paper clutched in her hand, her expression subtle in the extreme.
"What's this?" Gu Chengming glanced at those sheets of paper.
Fu Xiaoxiao did not answer, but walked to the table and slapped the sheets down onto its surface.
Gu Chengming looked down—it was a handwritten dossier, titled "Compilation of the Dream Sword Cultivator's Characteristics (Third Edition · Revised)."
The contents were extremely detailed—from height estimates to body-proportion ratios, from gait analysis to temperament keywords, from sword-wearing habits to manner of speech—omitting nothing, filling a full three pages.
"This dossier was compiled by the 'Sword-Seeking Pavilion,'" she said, rather displeased. "It was just delivered to my desk this morning, saying it was for the acting sect master to review."
"This one needs to review documents concerning outer-sect security, so this dossier has been confiscated for the time being."
When she reached the doorway she suddenly halted, turning her head to glance at Gu Chengming, that gaze carrying a possessiveness she herself hadn't noticed.
"Gu Chengming."
"Mm?"
"For the next few days, you'd best go out less." And with that she left.
She walked away quickly, those few pages in her sleeve clutched deathly tight.
That very night.
On Elder Kurong's desk lay a petition jointly submitted by members of the "Sword-Seeking Pavilion"—an application to lift the seal on the mountain gate and dispatch a representative to the Wenjian Sect for "academic exchange."
Kurong finished reading the petition, expressionless.
She raised her head and glanced at Su Xiashao standing across from her.
"Do you know about this?"
Su Xiashao rather unnaturally averted her gaze: "I've heard a little."
Kurong stared at her for three breaths.
"And what about that copy of 'Sword-Seeking Pavilion Special Issue · Selected Dream-Lover Picture Album' under your desk?"
Su Xiashao: "…"
Kurong flipped the petition over and wrote two characters on the back—"Rejected"—and said, with the exasperation of one who wishes iron would just become steel:
"If you lot put this kind of energy into your cultivation, the Harmonious Joy Sect would've been number one under heaven long ago."
...
This affair came quickly and went quickly; at least after the elders joined forces to suppress it, on the surface it was more or less barely pressed back down.
But aside from the whole to-do about the Harmonious Joy Sect's one and only officially designated dream lover, there was another matter that worried Gu Chengming more.
—And that was the mess Yun Ni had left behind.
It wasn't that there was any remnant faction within the Harmonious Joy Sect stirring up trouble—after all, those confidant-disciples who had once followed Yun Ni were now, with the overall situation settled, each more well-behaved than the last, terrified that the blade of a reckoning would fall on their own heads.
Although Fu Xiaoxiao's temporary handling of sect affairs was nominally merely "acting," with the identity of Fish-Warden Elder and the authority of the Yin-Yang Fish backing her, no one dared pick a fault openly.
The real problem lay in the so-called "Red Dust Seed." She had said that what the Eternal Life Sect wanted in exchange was a "byproduct" generated during the accumulation process of the Desires of All Beings, which she called the Red Dust Seed.
It wasn't that Gu Chengming didn't believe Yun Ni's words—after all, given Yun Ni's state at the moment of her death, she had no need to lie.
What he didn't believe was the very notion of "byproduct."
The Eternal Life Sect were no pious devotees. They had racked their brains to infiltrate the Harmonious Joy Sect, provided the secret art of the Heart Gu, and risked being discovered by the Great Qian to cooperate with Yun Ni for three years—all just to collect some "byproducts"?
That pack of madmen who cultivated death qi and used the lives of all beings as firewood—since when had they ever made a losing deal?
And to know the specific function of that Red Dust Seed, one had to first understand the Heart Gu itself.
Gu Chengming had originally thought that after the Desires of All Beings system collapsed, these things would dissipate along with it, but that was not the case.
What had dissipated was only the effect produced after the Heart Gu was activated; the foundation of the Heart Gu itself was still rooted in the disciples' Seas of Consciousness, in a dormant state—painless, harmless, no longer amplifying emotional fluctuations. Nor was this thing utterly impossible to extract… it was just far too troublesome.
At Fu Xiaoxiao's level, she could at most extract the Heart Gu from a few dozen disciples in a day.
Gu Chengming did the math—this workload meant it would take at least fifty days.
He proposed starting with the batch of disciples most deeply affected by the Desires of All Beings—if the Heart Gu had any latent aftereffects, they would be the first to develop problems.
Fu Xiaoxiao nodded, and then the two of them informed Elder Kurong of the matter.
Kurong's expression was even worse than Fu Xiaoxiao's. She immediately decided to seal off the news for the time being, so as not to cause panic among the disciples, and at the same time had Fu Xiaoxiao use the authority of the Fish-Warden Elder and the power of the Yin-Yang Fish to gradually screen and clear them out.
Fu Xiaoxiao's screening work began the next morning.
Gu Chengming had originally intended to accompany her the whole way, but Fu Xiaoxiao stopped him at the door of the treatment room.
"You'll just be underfoot here." She put her hands on her hips and glared up at him. "Screening requires using the Red Dust Art to probe into the other person's Sea of Consciousness—it's a very private matter. With a man like you planted right beside them, the junior sisters won't feel comfortable."
Gu Chengming glanced at the Second Realm girl inside the door, sitting nervously on a cushion waiting to be screened, and felt that Fu Xiaoxiao did have a point.
"Then I'll wait outside."
"Wait for what?" Fu Xiaoxiao's expression turned somewhat subtle. "Go tend to your own business, no need to stand around waiting specially—it's not any big deal."
As she said this, her gaze drifted off to the side, as if she wanted to come across as very casual.
Gu Chengming smiled and did not call her out.
"Alright, then I'll go find Su Qiuzhi and see whether there've been any unusual developments in the sect lately."
"Mm." Fu Xiaoxiao nodded, pulled the door half shut, then poked half her face out through the gap and quickly added:
"Remember to come back tonight."
...
By the third day of the screening work, Fu Xiaoxiao came looking for Gu Chengming.
At the time, he was leafing through the Red Dust Art texts he'd borrowed from Kurong. Fu Xiaoxiao pushed the door open and came in, carrying a bowl of medicinal broth, her expression as grave as if she were about to announce something momentous.
"Gu Chengming, I have a matter I need to discuss with you."
"Mm?"
"Screening for Heart Gu consumes a great deal of the Red Dust Art's spiritual power. Today I examined forty-three junior sisters in a row, and my Sea of Consciousness is a bit unstable." She set the medicine bowl down on the table and looked at him, sitting bolt upright and proper. "As you know, the fastest way for the Red Dust Art's spiritual power to recover is—"
"Dual cultivation?" Gu Chengming finished for her.
"Right!" Fu Xiaoxiao nodded like a chick pecking rice. "This is for the sake of the work."
Gu Chengming looked at her—the tips of her ears had already begun to redden, yet those eyes were full of anticipation, wearing an expression that said, "Everything I've said is fact and you're not allowed to question it."
And so, the second dual cultivation took place, naturally and logically, under this pretext.
Afterward, Fu Xiaoxiao nestled in his arms, her eyes hazy, but the corners of her mouth couldn't help curving upward.
"There's still screening to do tomorrow," she mumbled. "It'll probably use up a lot too."
"Mm."
"Then tomorrow night—"
"Alright."
Fu Xiaoxiao buried her face against his chest, not letting Gu Chengming see how flushed red she was.
The fourth day's reason was, "Today I ran into a junior sister whose Heart Gu was buried especially deep. It took a huge effort to extract it, and my spiritual power is severely depleted."
The fifth day's was, "The Yin-Yang Fish's authority has been invoked too frequently; my Sea of Consciousness needs external help to stabilize."
On the sixth day she even dug out an ancient text from who-knows-where, and, with utter seriousness, pointed at a passage and read it aloud to Gu Chengming: "See, it says right here—if a Harmonious Joy Sect cultivator runs their spiritual power at high intensity for a prolonged period without harmonizing yin and yang, at best their meridians become congested, at worst they suffer cultivation deviation."
After reading it, she lifted her head and gazed at him with blazing eyes.
Gu Chengming looked down at the ancient text—its cover read "Miscellaneous Talks on the Harmonious Joy Sect's Bedchamber Health Arts," signed by some elder from two hundred years ago famed for his romantic dalliances.
He held back a laugh: "Senior Sister Fu makes a good point."
Fu Xiaoxiao let out an "mm" as if a weight had been lifted, and stuffed the book into her sleeve, her movement so quick it was as if she feared he'd get a longer look.
By the seventh day, she didn't even bother finding a reason.
Toward dusk, Gu Chengming had just returned to his quarters after getting the latest intelligence on sect movements from Su Qiuzhi, and pushed the door open to find Fu Xiaoxiao already sitting inside.
On the table were two plates of refreshments and a pot of hot tea. She herself sat cross-legged on a cushion, and hearing the door, she said without even lifting her head: "Screened fifty-one today."
"You've worked hard."
"Mm. Very hard."
Two breaths of silence.
"And so?" Gu Chengming leaned against the doorframe, a trace of amusement in his tone.
Fu Xiaoxiao finally raised her head, a bamboo slip covering half her face. She was silent for a moment, as if steeling herself one last time, then set the bamboo slip aside and said, crisp and clean:
"No more 'and so.' I just want to."
Having said it, she was the first to freeze, as if she hadn't expected to be so direct, her cheeks flushing crimson at a visible speed.
But she stubbornly refused to take the words back, only tilting her chin up slightly, with a touch of the throw-caution-to-the-wind obstinacy of a cracked pot smashing itself.
Gu Chengming looked at her, and finally couldn't help laughing out loud.
His laughter made Fu Xiaoxiao even more flustered: "What are you laughing at—yes or no?"
"Yes."
Fu Xiaoxiao's eyes lit up.
Later, when Gu Chengming occasionally recalled these days, he would feel that Fu Xiaoxiao's very habit of finding reasons was more amusing to him than the dual cultivation itself.
Because every day she racked her brains to prove "this is necessary," "this is reasonable," "this is for the sake of the greater picture," and every time he played along by nodding and saying, "Senior Sister Fu is right," and then, watching her look so relieved yet so transparently self-betraying, he felt in his heart that this person was really far too adorable.
Of course, he had indeed never refused.
Not because those reasons held any water, but because the sight of her already sitting in the room waiting for him every dusk when he pushed the door open was, in itself, something one simply didn't want to refuse.
As for Fu Xiaoxiao herself—
Every day when she left Gu Chengming's quarters, she was in a daze—she'd bump into the doorframe while walking, miss a step going down the stairs, and after returning to her own room, she'd hug a pillow and roll around on the bed a couple of times, then bury her face in the covers and let out a muffled scream of indeterminate meaning.
...
Screening for Heart Gu was originally an extremely oppressive chore—every extraction of a Heart Gu meant confronting the darkest corners of the subject's Sea of Consciousness.
Had it been before, facing the negative emotions of dozens of people in a row at high intensity would have left her spirit-soul utterly exhausted long ago.
Yet over this past week, she showed not the slightest sign of decline—on the contrary, she was positively radiant.
She had to admit, all of this owed to those few hours each night.
Every morning the moment she woke she looked forward to dusk hurrying near, and the negative effects brought on by extracting Heart Gu were washed away in an instant by the anticipation of dual cultivation.
Sometimes Fu Xiaoxiao felt that the way she was now was quite unfamiliar to her.
Once upon a time she too had been a haughty figure within the Harmonious Joy Sect, sneering at those fellow disciples who kept "dual cultivation" on their lips all day and couldn't live without a man.
She had once vowed with utter conviction that the Red Dust Art cultivated the heart, not desire.
But now?
She watched the sun gradually sinking in the west outside the window, but her mind was full of nothing but Gu Chengming—of him holding her, of that almost-melting sense of fullness when he filled her up. She had grown greedy.
Before, she'd thought it was just to recover spiritual power; later, that it was to stabilize her Sea of Consciousness; and now, she couldn't even be bothered to think of a reason.
Had she completely turned into that kind of shameless, lustful woman?
Fu Xiaoxiao buried her face in her palms, a sigh half of shame and half of vexation escaping between her fingers.
It had only been seven days—how had she come to be so unable to part from him?
That longing was not merely physical pleasure, but a kind of psychological dependence—as though so long as she stayed by his side, even doing nothing at all, just breathing in that faint scent on him, her heart could settle into quiet.
Now she was really done for.
As an elder of the Harmonious Joy Sect, she normally taught disciples to "pass through a thicket of ten thousand flowers without a single leaf clinging to them," and yet she herself had fallen so utterly for one man that she'd sprawled flat at the very bottom of the pit—and, blissfully, didn't even want to climb out.
If the sect master found out, she'd probably laugh her teeth out.
But thinking of this, a tiny bit of self-abandoning sweetness surfaced in the depths of Fu Xiaoxiao's heart.
Embarrassing, so be it. In any case, as long as she could still see Gu Chengming tonight, could still burrow into his embrace, then even cultivation deviation she'd accept.
She really, truly, so very much, so very much liked him.
And it was precisely amid such day-after-day that Fu Xiaoxiao finally discovered the problem within that so-called Heart Gu.
Had Fu Xiaoxiao not been careful enough, this anomaly might very well have simply been overlooked.
That day she was clearing the Heart Gu from a Second Realm inner-sect disciple. The procedure was the same as usual: probe into the other's Sea of Consciousness with the Red Dust Art, locate the position of the Heart Gu's residue, then use the power of the Yin-Yang Fish to peel it away bit by bit. Halfway through, she furrowed her brow and discovered an anomaly.
At the very deepest layer of the Heart Gu—one layer deeper still than any depth she had probed in all her previous screenings—was nested a seed with death qi at its core.
That seed was so small as to be nearly invisible, perfectly masked by the residual aura of the Heart Gu; had this clearing process not happened to reach a sufficiently deep layer, she would never have been able to discover its existence at all.
Fu Xiaoxiao completed the Heart Gu clearing for this disciple methodically, let the disciple leave to rest first, then stayed alone in the treatment room and began to analyze and study the composition of that seed.
The seed's essence was death qi. But its outer shell was wrapped in a layer of Red Dust Qi of the same origin as the Heart Gu, and this disguise let it blend perfectly into the Heart Gu's structure—like a pebble buried in the soil, which one might bump into while turning the earth, but which, if not deliberately dug out, would forever stay quietly in place.
What unsettled her even more was that this seed was alive.
Not alive in the sense of a spirit-creature, but a more fundamental state—akin to a seed's dormancy before sprouting.
It was waiting for some condition to be met, and then it would burst from its shell.
Over the next two days, Fu Xiaoxiao deliberately adjusted the priority and depth of her screening, and, without drawing anyone's attention, conducted a second deep probe of the disciples she had already screened.
The result sent a chill down her spine.
Of the eighty-seven disciples she had previously screened, thirty-one had the same seed nested in the deep layers of their Heart Gu. And these thirty-one shared one common trait: they were all part of the batch most deeply affected in the Desires of All Beings incident, their emotional fluctuations still not fully settled even now.
In other words, the more violent a disciple's emotional fluctuations, the more easily the seed in the deep layer of her Heart Gu could be activated.
She recounted her findings from the past two days to Gu Chengming in full detail, and then voiced her conjecture: "I suspect this is what Yun Ni called the Red Dust Seed."
Gu Chengming did not show much surprise. Ever since the day Yun Ni died, the existence of the so-called "Red Dust Seed" had kept him from ever feeling at ease about the Harmonious Joy Sect's current state.
"Can it be cleared?"
"It can, but it's far more troublesome than clearing the Heart Gu itself. The seed is rooted deeper than the Heart Gu, almost grown together with the foundation of the disciple's Sea of Consciousness. The risk of forcibly peeling it away is great."
Gu Chengming sorted through the seed's characteristics in his mind once more.
Death qi at the core, Red Dust Qi as the shell. Nested in the deep layers of the Heart Gu, existing in dependence on the host's Sea of Consciousness.
The more violent a disciple's emotional fluctuations, the closer the seed's state came to "detectable"—this point was crucial.
"Senior Sister," Gu Chengming said. "Is there a possibility that the seed is more easily found within disciples with large emotional fluctuations, not because there are more of them or bigger ones within those disciples, but because it's feeding?"
"The seed takes the host's emotional fluctuations as nourishment. The more intense the emotion, the more nourishment it absorbs, the larger it grows, the harder its disguise is to maintain—and the more easily you find it."
"And within those disciples whose emotions are calm, the seed is still slumbering—not because it doesn't exist, but because it isn't yet big enough."
Fu Xiaoxiao clenched her fists—clearly, she thought so too.
Yun Ni had thought she was making use of the Eternal Life Sect, had thought the Heart Gu was merely a tool to accelerate the accumulation of the Desires of All Beings, had thought the Red Dust Seed was merely some insignificant byproduct.
But in truth, from the very moment of their cooperation, the Eternal Life Sect had buried seeds deep in the Seas of Consciousness of the Harmonious Joy Sect's thousands of disciples.
Those seeds fed on emotion, nested in the Heart Gu, and grew with the disciples' Seas of Consciousness as their soil. The Harmonious Joy Sect's disciples, cultivating the Red Dust Art, were innately endowed with more abundant, more intense emotions than the cultivators of other sects—every single person here was the finest culture dish.
Yun Ni had spent three years penning up the Harmonious Joy Sect as livestock for the Eternal Life Sect, and she herself never knew it until her death.
"What an utter fool." Fu Xiaoxiao said these four words in a low voice.
Gu Chengming did not respond.
His attention had already turned to the next question—the seed was "eating," was growing; so what was the end point of its growth? Once it grew to maturity, what would it become?
He had no answer yet, but the answer was already drawing near.
The Eternal Life Sect's branch altar—the great hall of the "Hall of Myriad Mortal Forms."
Within the hall were enshrined several hundred clay statues, each with a different face, every one lifelike, their joys and angers and sorrows and pleasures all distinct—viewed from afar, it was as if the myriad states of the mortal world had been frozen within this small space.
Elder Jìntiān sat upright in the hall's seat of honor, pinching between his fingers a message jade-slip he had just received.
The message in the jade-slip was very brief: Yun Ni's plan had failed, the Yin-Yang Fish had returned to balance, and Yun Ni herself was dead. The Desires of All Beings system had collapsed, and a purge was underway within the Harmonious Joy Sect.
Jìntiān did not show much surprise.
He set down the jade-slip in his hand, gave a soft sigh, his tone carrying a genuine regret: "A pity. The benefactor Yun Ni was a person of great perseverance."
This was no mere courtesy.
To endure in silence for decades within an environment like the Harmonious Joy Sect, to twist the entire sect's fortune, step by step, toward the direction she wanted, and in the end even dare to gamble her own life—this kind of temperament was rare even within the Eternal Life Sect.
It was only a pity that she'd fallen a single move short.
Jìntiān did not dwell long on this matter. Yun Ni's life or death was, to him, merely a variable; what mattered was how the entire chessboard needed to be adjusted after that variable vanished.
He rose and walked toward the depths of the great hall.
There was a hidden door there, concealed behind the largest clay statue. The statue's face was smiling, but that smile, cast in the candlelight, looked especially eerie—as if mocking something.
Jìntiān pushed the hidden door open and walked in.
Behind the hidden door was a passage extending downward, the walls on either side bearing no illumination whatsoever, but Jìntiān's steps held not the slightest hesitation—clearly he had walked this path countless times.
The passage was long, extending downward at least a hundred zhang, the air growing colder and colder, heavier and heavier. At the passage's end was a secret chamber.
In the center of the secret chamber was placed a pitch-black coffin.
The coffin was wrought entirely from some unknown black stone; the whole secret chamber was like an enormous womb, and that coffin was the fetus being gestated within it.
Jìntiān halted three steps before the coffin and bowed slightly.
"There's been a variable in the Harmonious Joy Sect arrangement," he said calmly. "Yun Ni has failed, the Yin-Yang Fish has reverted to its spirit-creature form, and the Red Dust Seed cultivation plan needs adjustment."
Then, an extremely peculiar "aura" spread out from within the coffin.
Not spiritual power, not death qi, but something more fundamental, impossible to name.
If one absolutely had to describe it in a single word, that word would be—emotion.
Pure, intense emotion that belonged to no single person.
Sorrow, joy, anger, fear, longing, loathing, obsession, despair… every emotion a human being could experience surged forth at once in this instant, interweaving together into a suffocating torrent.
An outline rose from the coffin, hovering in midair.
That outline had no fixed face, nor any fixed figure. Its "face" kept switching between different emotions—now smiling, now weeping, now furious, now calm—like a mirror reflecting all the myriad phenomena of the world.
Its body, too, kept changing—now tall, now short, now the outline of a man, now the figure of a woman, now aged, now young and tender—as if the shadows of every person in the world were superimposed upon it.
Sorrow-and-Joy, one of the Eternal Life Sect's eight "Jìntiān" venerables.
To be precise, "Sorrow-and-Joy" was not one person; it was the fusion of three "parts"—"Sorrow," "Joy," and "Stillness."
Over the past thousands of years, in the massacres, disasters, and plagues the Eternal Life Sect had wrought in every land, countless people had, in the instant of death, burst forth with fear, despair, unwillingness, attachment—and these emotional residues had been collected, purified, and condensed by the Eternal Life Sect through secret arts, finally gestating this "thing."
It had no consciousness of its own—or rather, its consciousness was the sum total of all emotions.
Sorrow-and-Joy, once the three merged into one, was a Fifth Realm cultivator in the truest sense, but its terror had never lain in combat power.
It could resonate with, assimilate, and devour the emotions of any cultivator.
Any cultivator who practiced an art related to "emotion" was "food" before Sorrow-and-Joy, and the Harmonious Joy Sect's Red Dust Art took emotion as its foundation, the seven emotions and six desires as the root of its cultivation—which meant that—
Every single disciple of the Harmonious Joy Sect was utterly defenseless before Sorrow-and-Joy.
Sorrow-and-Joy did not need to defeat them. It needed only to draw near, and those cultivators who practiced the Red Dust Art would be swept up in the torrent of emotion pouring off it, falling into an emotional resonance from which they could not extricate themselves—at best losing control of their minds, at worst suffering the collapse of their Dao Hearts.
And the most ironic part was—the higher a cultivator's realm, the deeper their cultivation of the Red Dust Art, the greater the effect on them instead.
Within the coffin, Sorrow-and-Joy's "voice" rang out.
That voice was not spoken with a mouth, nor even transmitted by way of divine-sense voice-projection, but poured directly into Jìntiān's perception in the form of "emotion."
An ordinary person receiving such information would only fall into chaos, but as the Jìntiān who had long dwelt alongside Sorrow-and-Joy, he had long since learned to interpret the meanings within these emotions.
The Heart Gu remaining within the Harmonious Joy Sect disciples were seeds it had spent three years planting. Though those Heart Gu had entered a dormant state after the Desires of All Beings system collapsed, their foundations remained, tightly connected to the deep parts of the disciples' Seas of Consciousness. Every Heart Gu was the vessel of a "Red Dust Seed," and the essence of the Red Dust Seed was to slowly, imperceptibly convert a cultivator's emotional fluctuations into an "essence of emotion" that Sorrow-and-Joy could absorb.
Three years of cultivation, over a thousand disciples—this was an enormous investment; once it was all cleared away, all the prior effort would be wasted.
Although the Dharma-Station-form Yin-Yang Fish held more exploitable value for the Eternal Life Sect—after all, a Dharma-Station that had lost its spirituality was easier to seize and refashion—the spirit-creature-form Yin-Yang Fish also had one "benefit": it would continuously exude the twin qi of yin and yang along with Red Dust Qi, and this Red Dust Qi suffusing every part of the Harmonious Joy Sect was precisely the optimal environment the Red Dust Seed needed to grow.
So long as the Harmonious Joy Sect kept running normally, so long as the disciples kept cultivating the Red Dust Art, the Red Dust Seed would keep growing within their Seas of Consciousness, keep converting their emotions into nourishment for Sorrow-and-Joy.
While Yun Ni was alive, this process had been accelerated—the Desires of All Beings system had forcibly amplified all the disciples' emotional fluctuations, and the Red Dust Seed's growth rate had been several times that of the normal state.
Now Yun Ni was dead and the Desires of All Beings had collapsed; the growth rate would fall back to the normal level, but "slow" did not mean "stopped."
So long as those Heart Gu remained, the Red Dust Seed would keep growing—and it intended to go and collect these Red Dust Seeds in person.
Hearing this, Jìntiān, unusually, showed a trace of hesitation: "The Harmonious Joy Sect has just gone through internal strife; the Great Qian court and other sects are certain to be watching the developments over there. To go at this time—isn't that too risky?"
Sorrow-and-Joy's emotional fluctuation conveyed a "smile" of complex meaning. It did not care about any Great Qian court; it cared only about the Red Dust Seeds growing within the Harmonious Joy Sect disciples, and the emotions those seeds connected to—so abundant as to make one's mouth water.
Jìntiān read this layer of meaning from Sorrow-and-Joy's emotion.
He did not advise against it again.
Because he knew that Sorrow-and-Joy had never been an existence that could be "advised." Its behavior was driven entirely by instinct—perceive emotion, approach emotion, resonate with emotion, devour emotion.
Just as fire burns what is combustible and water flows to the lowest place, Sorrow-and-Joy's craving for emotion was a nature written into its very essence, one that could not be defied.
He no longer advised against it, but said mildly: "In that case, for the sake of prudence, let Sorrow go."
Sorrow-and-Joy fell silent for a moment.
Then that ever-shifting humanoid outline slowly split apart.
Like a drop of ink diffusing in water and then condensing anew, three blurred figures peeled away from that torrent of emotion.
The one on the left, its face forever wearing a smile, exuded a warm, intoxicating aura—that was "Joy."
The one on the right, without any expression, without any emotional fluctuation, like a pool of dead water, or like a stretch of nothingness—that was "Stillness."
And the one in the middle, its face grief-stricken, the corners of its eyes seemingly forever streaked with tears, its whole being suffused with a heartbreaking sorrow—that was "Sorrow."
After the three separated, their auras fell from the Fifth Realm to the peak of the Fourth Realm.
Jìntiān gazed at it, and in the end nodded.
"Go. But remember, the goal is to preserve the Red Dust Seeds, not to wage war on the Harmonious Joy Sect. If you encounter a variable you cannot handle—"
He did not finish.
Because Sorrow had already turned into a wisp of gray aura, all but imperceptible, and dissipated from the secret chamber.
Jìntiān stood where he was, looking at the empty coffin and at Joy and Stillness who still remained in the secret chamber, and a trace of unease surfaced in his heart for no reason.
Then he turned and walked out of the secret chamber, up the passage, and back into the great hall.
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