The formation had been laid for decades, bound together with whatever remained of the Yang Family’s fortune. Forcibly breaking it would send the fortune energy into violent recoil, and the first to suffer would be Yang Xiuyong — the clan’s last remaining descendant.
A nameless rage surged through Gong Tinglan’s heart. Several great clans, bearing a thousand years of fortune, had been drained in complete silence, that fortune stolen away for another’s use. And what the robbed Yang, Li, and Qian families were left to bear was the collapse of their clan fortune, endless ill luck, a cascade of disasters, and ultimately the severing of all their bloodlines — extinction without a single descendant.
“The National Preceptor is the faith of tens of millions in the Great Yan. He has accumulated boundless merit, and already possesses the power of vow-force. Why would he need to commit such a deranged act? Is he not afraid of karmic backlash?” he demanded, his fury plain. “Is the venerable National Preceptor — like Rong Yiming — nothing more than a villain of the wicked path wearing the skin of righteousness?”
The National Preceptor’s Daoist cultivation ran deep; Gong Tinglan had admired him, had even regarded him as a senior, as the light of the righteous path.
But was that light false?
Gong Tinglan felt both furious and helpless — furious at Tantai Qing’s sanctimonious hypocrisy, secretly stealing the fortune of entire lineages in the shadows; helpless because even now, having seen through the formation, wanting to break it still required such careful restraint, for fear of injuring the innocent while trying to strike at the rat.
What made Gong Tinglan feel the most profound desolation was this: if even the National Preceptor was like this, then the righteous path of the Mysterious Gate — was it truly on the verge of collapse? Was there truly no longer any light of the righteous path?
Did that mean the Dao itself could die?
A grief crossed his face.
But very quickly, a resolution settled within his heart.
Lang Jiuchuan sensed the shift in Gong Tinglan’s aura and glanced at him several times. “What he seeks is immense. When the merit and fortune he has accumulated is no longer sufficient to achieve whatever great ambition he harbors, he will naturally turn to the methods of the wicked path to make up the difference. As for karmic backlash — he even thought to arrange for a calamity-transfer mechanism. Naturally he will do everything possible to deflect and circumvent that cause-and-effect karma. By any means necessary, to reach his goal — that is simply who he is. But do not forget: those who persist in wrongdoing will inevitably be destroyed by it. He will face his backlash one day. It is only a matter of time.”
Her voice was cold and even, and it was unclear whether she was saying it for his benefit or for her own.
She looked toward the transformative talisman array. “Now that we have found it, we cannot simply leave it as it was. One way or another, it must be broken.”
Gong Tinglan looked over, asking with his eyes: How?
“Let me think.” Lang Jiuchuan’s gaze grew still and calm as she studied those familiar talismans. Her memories seemed to drift back to the days she had spent learning the Dao under that man’s guidance — his teachings, the texts she had read in his collection — and her mind began running rapid calculations.
“Since he used the slow-boiling-frog method, can we not also use a slow, grinding approach to deceive his senses?” she murmured.
A flash of insight crossed Gong Tinglan’s mind, and he completed her thought: “Something like swapping the beam for a rotten one — a substitution?”
Lang Jiuchuan’s eyes curved with a smile. “Exactly.” She pondered briefly, then sent Jiangche back to Tongtian Tower to retrieve materials, saying: “Five-hundred-year lightning-struck peach heartwood, nine liang and nine qian of Crimson-Yang cinnabar. And, Young Master, please retrieve nine drops of Yang Xiuyong’s heart’s-blood. Time is short — go quickly.”
Jiangche disappeared in an instant. Gong Tinglan, though a touch envious, did not dawdle either, and immediately returned to the Yang Family ancestral estate to draw Yang Xiuyong’s blood from the heart.
Every moment of delay meant another moment of weakening life force. They had to race against Tantai Qing for this last sliver of fortune — however small it was.
After they departed, Lang Jiuchuan stepped out of the low hill and looked out over the vast expanse of the Yang Family’s ancestral tombs. She gently closed her eyes, and once again perceived those cries of grief and indignation. Then it seemed as though those spirits sensed the similarity between her power and aura and Tantai Qing’s, and their fury redoubled, coiling around her in an attempt to tear her apart.
Lang Jiuchuan remained unmoved. Both hands formed mudra seals, her lips began to murmur a profound incantation, and then her fingertips forced out several drops of essence-blood. She summoned her talisman brush, dipped it in the blood, and began to paint talismans.
The Taiyin Fortune-Anchoring Talisman — she painted seven in total. When they were complete, she breathed quietly, gathering herself, and drove each of those talismans into the earth-vein positions she had already determined, using them to suppress and stabilize the Yang Family’s precarious, teetering clan fortune — to prevent a complete collapse at the critical moment when the formation was being broken.
Perhaps sensing Lang Jiuchuan’s intent, the furious wailing gradually began to ebb, no longer as piercingly raw.
Seeing this, Lang Jiuchuan sat cross-legged in the center of the ancestral tombs, removed the Dizhong Bell from her waist, and with a single intent, the bell tones rang out.
“Namo Ratna Trayāya…” The Great Compassion Mantra rose from her lips, the sutras compassionate and serene, soothing the resentment of the wandering spirits.
A gentle breeze gathered around her, circling as it turned, peaceful and still — lifting the loose strands of hair at her temple.
By the time Jiangche and Gong Tinglan left and returned, what they saw was Lang Jiuchuan enveloped in what seemed like a faint layer of golden light, luminous and radiant.
They waited in silence until Lang Jiuchuan herself broke the stillness, stepping forward to take the section of lightning-struck peach heartwood that Jiangche had brought back. The moment it touched her hand, she felt the upright, vigorous energy and vitality within it.
She used her talisman brush as a blade and carved the peach wood into a small figure that bore a faint resemblance to Yang Xiuyong. Then she directed Gong Tinglan to blend the Crimson-Yang cinnabar with Yang Xiuyong’s heart’s-blood, mixing them into one. She then dipped her brush in that mixture of blood and, with great care, inscribed around the entirety of the small figure the Reversed-Resonance Talisman — a set of symbols diametrically opposed in nature to the core talisman array of the Fortune-Stealing Life-Nourishing formation, yet close enough in aura and intent to pass as similar.
“The lightning-struck peach heartwood already carries within it life force and the power to break through evil. The Crimson-Yang cinnabar is likewise an extreme-yang substance that disperses inauspicious darkness. Using Yang Xiuyong’s heart’s-blood as the catalyst, the result is this substitution instrument.” Lang Jiuchuan finished inscribing the talisman and explained to Gong Tinglan: “With this effigy as the medium, we deceive the formation’s arrays into believing this is the convergence point of the Yang Family’s fortune. Meanwhile, the innate vitality of the peach heartwood and the yang energy of the cinnabar will feed back into the ancestral tomb, suppressing and purifying the decaying inauspicious energy — so that Yang Xiuyong’s life force ceases to drain away.”
Jiangche said: “Then what of the fortune that was stolen from their clan — can it be reclaimed?”
Lang Jiuchuan shook her head. “The formation has been active for decades. The stolen fortune has long since been converted and used. There is no recovering it. Our purpose in breaking the formation is only to cut our losses, and to sever the connection between this formation and the National Preceptor — leaving the Yang Family with a single thread of life to hold onto. Beyond that, we are powerless.”
Hearing it said aloud was somewhat painful, but compared to the Qian and Li families, preserving a single bloodline was already the greatest fortune within misfortune.
Without further explanation, Lang Jiuchuan took the effigy and went back into the low hill’s false acupoint eye. She placed it within the acupoint, then formed seals with both hands — moving with such speed her gestures blurred like shadows — and drove several streams of Daoist energy into it.
A hum resonated outward.
The talisman inscriptions on the effigy blazed to life all at once, emanating an aura almost identical to the Yang Family’s decaying fortune, yet threaded through with a hint of pure-yang vitality. The acupoint paused — as though sensing something and trying to identify it — and in a mere instant, it greedily began drawing the energy from the effigy. But this time, what was being drawn was not Yang Xiuyong’s life force. It was the substitute — a decoy, concealing the truth.
It was done. Almost too smoothly.
Lang Jiuchuan’s face went pale, and a sweet, metallic taste rose in her throat — the qi and blood surging backward from the vast expenditure of vital energy — which she forcibly suppressed. She let out a long, slow breath. Once the effigy’s energy was entirely exhausted, the Fortune-Stealing Life-Nourishing formation would collapse on its own — for when even the last thread of “fortune” had been drained, it would serve no further purpose.
Unless Tantai Qing came personally to inspect it, he would not discover this at all. And even if he did notice, it would be meaningless — the formation would already be broken. If he was so unwilling to relinquish even this last drop of fortune that he sought to lay down the formation anew, then she had nothing more to say.
“Has it succeeded…” Gong Tinglan’s words were not yet finished when, without warning — catastrophe struck.
Boom—!