That night, true to her promise, Lang Jiuchuan set up an altar to dissolve the marriage contract that bound Ding Mangu’s unjustly deceased daughter, Ding Suqiu. She returned home filled with his heartfelt gratitude, and the moment she stepped through the door, she received the topographical map of the Eight Trigrams City and a volume of historical records that Grand Tutor Fang had sent over through a servant.

She unrolled the map first. What met her eyes was a city plan shaped like the Eight Trigrams, with lines crisscrossing in every direction, the houses and streets drawn along those lines in precise and orderly fashion.

Both Jiang Che and Fu Qi stood at the edge of the table, looking on.

Fu Qi let out a sigh. “The old Yuan City was nothing more than a simple T-shaped layout. Two hundred years have passed, and it has changed beyond recognition. If I had not already known this was the former Yuan City, I would never have recognized it — the transformation is too great.”

“Even a city burned to the ground would not be razed so completely that nothing remained. There would still be ruins and broken walls. For it to end up like this, there must have been human intervention.” Lang Jiuchuan studied the Eight Trigrams City, then turned her gaze to the mountains, rivers, and waterways depicted beyond the city walls. After a moment’s thought, she took up paper and brush and began writing down the directional positions of the Eight Trigrams City.

After a long while, she set down her brush and stared at the arrangement of the Eight Trigrams positions she had mapped out. Her expression was troubled.

“What is it? Is something wrong with this city?” Fu Qi noticed her expression and asked.

Lang Jiuchuan pointed to the various positions and drew connecting lines with her brush. “This Eight Trigrams City was built entirely in accordance with the nine palaces and eight trigrams directional layout — it looks precisely like a Nine Palace Eight Trigrams Formation. Typically, if such a formation is a living formation, it has countless variations. Within it, all is dark and dim, laden with yin energy and ghostly mist, easily giving rise to illusions. Once a person is trapped inside with no way to find the exit, they will ultimately perish within. If living people are arranged into a Nine Palace Eight Trigrams Sword Formation, the sword light moves without shadow — swift and seamless, without the faintest gap — and not even a single fly could pass through; anyone caught within would be swiftly cut down.”

Fu Qi frowned and looked at the Eight Trigrams City. “So the city was deliberately built this way. Someone intended to set a formation here to kill people?”

Lang Jiuchuan looked at him. “A living formation kills the living. A dead formation traps souls.”

Fu Qi’s expression changed drastically. His eyes went crimson once more, but he just barely remembered they were in Lang Jiuchuan’s study and did not act out — he only pressed his lips together tightly.

“The Nine Palace Eight Trigrams Formation can both kill the living and imprison souls. The principle is the same; only the materials used to lay it differ. A living formation emphasizes the quality of being alive, drawing on the mutual generation of the five elements, and so the materials used to construct it follow that logic. But to lay a dead formation, one must use objects of pure, strong, unyielding Yang energy — objects capable of suppressing and anchoring souls so they cannot escape. This, too, is a form of overwhelming pressure.”

Jiang Che did not understand. “What does this have to do with them repeatedly cycling through the flames and sacrificing themselves on that one day? If the intention is to suppress and contain their souls, simply trapping and subduing them should suffice. Why would they be made to loop endlessly through the day of their deaths?”

“Indeed — why would that be?” Lang Jiuchuan stared at the Eight Trigrams City, then shifted her gaze toward the city of Beacon Fire Pass and the surrounding area depicted on the map. For the moment, she could not make sense of it.

“Could it be that someone harbored deep enmity toward your Fu family — that even killing you was not enough, so they laid this great formation to trap you, forcing you to relive the day of your deaths night and day?” Jiang Che asked Fu Qi.

Fu Qi gave a bitter laugh. “For generations, the Fu family held military authority. We were approached by countless people seeking to win us over, yet we remained loyal only to the sovereign. We have long been regarded as a thorn in many sides.”

Military power — everyone wanted it. For imperial princes vying for the throne, having military authority greatly improved one’s chances of success. And the various factions, seeking to bolster their own strength and networks, likewise coveted military authority or sought to draw in powerful generals.

Yet the Fu family was a stubborn bone that no one could gnaw away. They were upright and loyal, devoted only to the emperor, yet they commanded an army of several hundred thousand — how could that not make others green with envy?

So the Fu family did not merely have enemies — they had many, all of whom wanted to drag them through the mud and take their place.

“Simply to fight for power, it would not be worth the effort of laying so great a formation to trap souls.” Lang Jiuchuan shook her head. “To use an entire city as a formation — and a formation of this magnitude at that — the cultivation required to complete it is considerable, and the spiritual power it would consume is immense. Getting it wrong could even result in a backlash. An ordinary enemy would not go to such lengths. There must be a far greater benefit at stake to make someone risk such a thing.”

Laying a formation was not as simple as drawing a few talismanic symbols. Without sufficient cultivation, no matter how ambitious the idea, it was all in vain. Just drawing the formation runes needed to be inscribed into the talisman alone was enormously draining on spiritual power — to say nothing of actually completing the task.

“Then could it be a coincidence?”

Lang Jiuchuan said nothing. Had there been no evidence of Fu Qi and the others repeatedly burning and sacrificing themselves in a loop on that same day, she might have been inclined to attribute it to deep obsession. But now, having seen a city laid out as a Nine Palace Eight Trigrams Formation — to call it coincidence would be to deceive herself.

Fu Qi laughed quietly. “If it is not coincidence, then whoever put in such effort to accomplish this grand undertaking truly went to great pains.”

“We still need to see the site in person before we can have our answers.”

Fu Qi glanced at the deep night outside the window, then looked at Lang Jiuchuan’s pale complexion, and said, “No matter how bad the situation, it cannot get much worse than it already is. There is no need to rush. Rest first — do not ruin your health over this.”

Lang Jiuchuan picked up the historical records of the Liang Kingdom. “Let me read a little more.”

Fu Qi could not persuade her and let the matter go.

Lang Jiuchuan read quickly, scanning nearly ten lines at a time. In less than two hours, she had finished the entire volume of the Liang Kingdom’s historical records, and said: “Within less than ten days of your death, Kangju broke through Fengyang. In barely two months, the Liang Kingdom had lost five cities in succession. At that time, the regional lords across the land raised their banners and declared themselves emperors, plunging the Liang Kingdom into great chaos. The Xuan Sect’s noble clans descended from their mountains to save the realm — first repelling the foreign invaders, then pacifying the internal rebellion.”

“Where did they get their soldiers?” Fu Qi was genuinely curious. Did the Xuan Sect noble clans conquer the realm using the arts of the Xuan school?

Lang Jiuchuan’s expression became rather complicated. “They first used their old trade to con the most militarily powerful of the regional lords — the King of Liang — and used his armies to fight for them.”

Their old trade — well, of course that was what Daoist practitioners were best known for: playing the role of divine charlatans!

Fu Qi: “…”

The King of Liang — the most cunning and militarily formidable regional lord of the Liang Kingdom, commanding sixty thousand strong troops including twenty thousand cavalry, along with a special forces unit — and he was deceived by a charlatan?

Lang Jiuchuan said, “The key point is not who was deceived. What matters is that the one who drove back the Kangju barbarians to their homeland and recovered Yuan City and several other lost territories was a young general of the Tantai family, by the name of Tantai Xiao. And the very first city he rebuilt upon recovering the lost lands was Yuan City.”

Fu Qi was stunned.

Jiang Che also drew a sharp breath. “Surely not — could this Nine Palace Eight Trigrams City actually have been built by the Xuan Sect?”

It glanced at Fu Qi, then darted swiftly over to perch on Lang Jiuchuan’s shoulder, fixing Fu Qi with a vigilant stare. “Grievances have their origins, and debts have their debtors. If you want revenge, you must find the right person. We are entirely innocent!”

This was a disaster in the making. If the Nine Palace Eight Trigrams City had been built by the Tantai clan — the current imperial family — did that not mean they had deliberately imprisoned the souls of Fu Qi and the three thousand soldiers of the Fu family army within it?

If that were truly the case, then Fu Qi and the current imperial family were mortal enemies, bound in hatred that spanned the divide between a former dynasty and the present!

One was a man from a bygone age, the other a girl who had grown up under the reign of the Great Dan — would Fu Qi fly into a rage and, in his fury, take it out on Lang Jiuchuan, going on a rampage?

This was dangerous. Exceedingly dangerous.

Lang Jiuchuan had brought enormous trouble upon herself.