Once the plan for tying up the loose ends had been settled, Lang Jiuchuan and the others let the matter rest without further deliberation. They burned Zixiao Zi to ash and scattered what remained outside the city, right before the great stele carved with the names of the fallen heroes.
This was a price exacted from him for the meritorious wish-power he had secretly siphoned away over the years — and it was also an act of offering to the heroic souls.
On this point, Gong Tinglan and the others still felt some discomfort. Lang Jiuchuan felt not the slightest weight of conscience. She had already said it herself — she was no paragon of virtue. How could she possibly muster any sympathy for Zixiao Zi? And Fuyi even less so — he had devoured the man’s very soul. Did he have any feelings to spare for a handful of ash?
When Zixiao Zi chose to stand by as a bystander and aid this wrongdoing — even secretly siphoning off wish-power for his own gain — he ought to have considered the fate that would one day meet him.
Lang Jiuchuan looked at the great stele. Though it had taken on the dust of ages, not a single mark upon it lacked for precise and meticulous craftsmanship. She said, “Laying a formation of this scale is not something accomplished quickly — the materials alone would have required considerable preparation. Yet Fuyi and the others died in battle to defend the city before the Xuan Clans had even entered the world to act as its protectors. So why were their souls unable to enter the underworld?”
Gong Tinglan, hearing this, said, “What I learned from our clan leader is this: it is said that the Venerable Tongda possessed a formation plate — a true instrument of power — capable of confining tens of thousands of souls. Within the plate was a soul-confounding array that could disorient and bewitch spirits until they no longer knew how much time had passed. And layered on top of that, this Nine Palace Eight Trigrams formation added yet another illusory array that inverted yin and yang — a grand formation he had spent more than ten years researching, waiting for the perfect opportunity to test it.”
“In other words, the Venerable Tongda was present on the scene, watching, when Fuyi and the others died?” Lang Jiuchuan’s voice went slightly cold.
So long as those heroic spirits were sufficiently valiant in death and their meritorious wish-power sufficiently potent — they would serve as the ideal nourishment he had been waiting for. The moment they died, he collected their souls immediately.
Her tone was too cold. For reasons he couldn’t quite account for, Gong Tinglan found himself hesitant to respond.
Gong Qi said, “The world has always had its share of those who fix upon one pursuit and are consumed by it. Tongda was one such person.”
“Quite so,” Gong Tinglan said. “The Venerable Tongda was both passionate about and deeply accomplished in the study of formations. For him, the pinnacle of achievement — that which would make his journey into the Way worthwhile — was to lay a grand formation equal to those passed down from antiquity. He was also known for collecting ancient and fragmented formation designs, weaving his own ideas into them to complete what was broken, layering array upon array to create something of ever greater complexity. He once proclaimed that for this pursuit, he would willingly offer his very life and soul.”
The mastery of formations is endlessly mutable, and to achieve true proficiency demands an immense outpouring of spiritual power — one misstep cascades into another, and so absolute concentration is required at every stage. Yet that same relentless focus also forges and strengthens the spiritual power — like reaching a critical threshold, being drained completely, and then reconstituting — which in turn becomes its own form of reward.
With danger naturally comes reward.
“With ambitions like that, yet he gave all the benefit to the imperial family rather than keeping it for himself — what made him such a selfless paragon?” Lang Jiuchuan asked, her tone edged with mockery.
Gong Tinglan said, “Perhaps bringing a great formation to completion was what he cared about more than anything else. Regrettably, the Great Dang Dynasty had only been established three years when he died — and he died not long after the formation was complete.”
Lang Jiuchuan immediately asked, “How did he die?”
“He died from the formation’s own backlash against him. It is said he was tempering a fragmented formation plate to serve as his life-bound instrument when he failed to survive a celestial trial and was destroyed by the backlash. The archived records are full of laments that Heaven strikes down the gifted.”
Lang Jiuchuan raised an eyebrow. “In my view, it was primarily a matter of reaping what one sows.”
Gong Tinglan smiled faintly — who could say for certain? To those of their generation, a figure like that, while he belonged to the past, was still a legend in his own right. It would not do to judge him too harshly.
Those who entered the Way were not all purely righteous — there were those who walked a line between good and ill, and those who became so consumed by fixation on a single art that it became an obsession they could not escape. Tongda was such a person — consumed by his obsession with the cascading permutations of formations.
What he had done, though not something that could win everyone’s approval, could not be said to have lacked for brilliance.
Lang Jiuchuan said nothing more. The matter had reached this point — dwelling on it further served no purpose. The one who had started it all had long since passed away, and those who were still living — they could wait for another day.
For now, the matter was set aside.
But Lang Jiuchuan’s gaze lingered on the small pagoda, a faint light flickering in her eyes — until Gong Tinglan drew her attention away with talk of what to do about Fuyi.
“If the General means to follow you, he must be kept under restraint. He has devoured a living soul, and the desire to kill will come easily to him now. If he kills recklessly and harms the innocent, you will not be able to escape the entanglement of that responsibility.” Gong Tinglan said this openly, not bothering to keep it from Fuyi — it was in fact intended for Fuyi’s ears, a warning against losing control and embarking on a killing spree that would eventually turn him into a spirit of catastrophic violence.
Fuyi had been a battle-hardened general to begin with, carrying a natural air of ferocity and violence. Having been imprisoned for two hundred years, he also bore the weight of tremendous grievance. Now he had additionally devoured a living soul and made himself into a malevolent ghost of his own accord. If his nature turned further toward violence and he lost his reason, he would become something very difficult to handle.
Lang Jiuchuan looked toward Fuyi. The latter said, “I will not take lives recklessly. In all else, I defer entirely to the young woman’s command.”
Well — he truly had decided to attach himself to her.
Lang Jiuchuan looked toward Gong Tinglan and said, “If my ghost actually does something evil, there’s no need for those of your righteous path to step in. I can deal with him myself. After all — as I’ve said, I’m no paragon of virtue.”
The two people and one ghost stared at her in silence.
That part really didn’t need to be emphasized.
With that, Fuyi’s situation was settled. The group did not linger any further in Eight Trigrams City, and entered the Shadow Road to depart. But just before the gate of the Shadow Road closed, a wisp of something slipped out quietly.
Gong Qi seemed to sense something. He turned and looked back, his expression thoughtful — but he said nothing.
At this point, Lang Jiuchuan was asking Gong Tinglan, “After what happened in Eight Trigrams City, what are the young master’s thoughts on the imperial family?”
Gong Tinglan kept walking without stopping, and gave a rueful smile. “Xiao Qi told you, I imagine — the fact that Shen Qinghe of the court proposed establishing a Supervisory Bureau has already made it inevitable that the Xuan Clans and the imperial family can never be as closely bound together as they once were. A parting of ways is certain.”
Unless the imperial family were to suddenly produce cultivators in great abundance, the inevitable move would be to suppress the remaining clans — to prevent the retainers from growing too powerful and overshadowing their masters.
Lang Jiuchuan said, with a certain gleeful satisfaction, “So what you’re saying is — that bond of shared roots and common breath is about to become a thing of the past.”
Gong Tinglan gave a helpless look downward, and said quietly, “That is perhaps not a bad thing. To pursue the great path, one must return to the original heart of the Way — otherwise, where is there room for progress? If one simply rots in place, the Way dies.”
“Wrong,” Lang Jiuchuan said, shaking her head. “The Way does not die. What dies is only the rotted flesh. There are always those who are cultivating the true Way — it has never perished because of any single person, or any single clan.”
Gong Tinglan paused, and said, “I have been too attached to surface appearances again.” He hesitated a moment, then asked carefully, “May I be so bold as to ask…”
“If it’s bold, don’t ask.” Lang Jiuchuan cut him off immediately. “If you’re going to ask how I managed to escort those souls without breaking the formation — I don’t know either. Perhaps it was a surge of refusal to accept in that moment. Or perhaps some great monk or deity briefly inhabited this body of mine. It is done, and I have no regrets. I have been true to the Way my heart seeks.”
Gong Tinglan’s eyes shone with a sudden brightness. True to the Way my heart seeks — to be that pure and unclouded — was that the reason she had come to hold such an ability?
Eight Trigrams City receded into the distance behind them. What Gong Tinglan and the others did not know was this: in the deep stillness of the night that followed, a tendril of spiritual awareness crept quietly back to the base of the great stele. Using the cold and ferocious energy of the void, it fashioned itself into a small makeshift digging tool, and began to dig — scrape, scrape, scrape — into the earth at the base of the stele, going deeper and deeper, until it unearthed something roughly the size of a fist: a disc coiled with the form of a dragon. The moment it was pulled free, the formation within the city halted. The earth seemed to tremble faintly for a moment — then settled back into stillness. And in the night sky overhead, which had been dark and heavy, a few stars blinked quietly into view.