Chapter 14: Qiankun Art

Niu Youdao's excitement was obvious. He quickly turned the bronze mirror over in his hands. The relief of a hundred flowers on the back was vivid and lifelike. There was no mistake: this was the bronze mirror Dong Guo Haoran had given him. He had only taken it out by accident tonight, yet the mystery he had failed to solve for so long had unexpectedly cracked open beneath the moonlight.

Before this, in his attempts to uncover the bronze mirror's secret, he had tried far more than moonlight. He had examined it beneath the blazing sun, boiled it in water, roasted it over fire, and still failed to spot the slightest clue. Who would have imagined that the first sign would appear under such accidental circumstances?

He reached into the jar and stirred the cool water with his fingers, still muttering to himself.

"The moon is yin. Earth's disposition is Kun. Water gathers yin and reveals it. Nine Palaces and Eight Trigrams... Why didn't I think of that?"

After muttering for a while, he fell into thought again. He remembered what had happened shortly before the accident in the ancient tomb. He had found the tomb's entrance only after breaking through a Nine Palaces and Eight Trigrams concealment in the mountain. And it was after touching the ancient bronze mirror inside the tomb that disaster had struck him.

Could this bronze mirror truly be connected to the ancient bronze mirror in that tomb? If so, then whoever had laid out that Nine Palaces and Eight Trigrams formation around the tomb might have been pointing deliberately toward the bronze mirror. Anyone capable of breaking the formation would naturally possess the knowledge needed to solve the mirror's mystery.

At the thought, Niu Youdao slapped his forehead hard and shook his head again and again. Because the bronze mirror in his hands had come from Dong Guo Haoran, he had overlooked an obvious connection. If the accident in the tomb had never happened and he had taken that ancient bronze mirror back for examination with scientific instruments, any anomaly found inside it might have reminded him of the great formation he had already broken and led him to the solution much earlier.

The matter did not bear too much contemplation. The more he thought, the more uncertain and astonished he became. He suppressed those doubts for the moment and returned his attention to the problem before him. Again he held the mirror face to the moon with its back toward the water. Nine hazy points of light reappeared on the gently rippling surface.

Holding the bronze mirror in one hand, Niu Youdao began calculating on the fingers of the other. He slowly circled the water jar, using the pattern on the mirror back to determine the corresponding positions. Once he had worked them out, he checked the mirror's angle against the moon. Then he flipped it over, exposing the back to the moonlight. His finger moved from one raised flower to another as he murmured:

"Qian, Kan, Gen, Zhen, Center, Xun, Li, Kun, Dui."

Having identified the nine flowers, he crouched beside the water jar and placed the bronze mirror face-down on the ground. He spread both hands, brought his thumbs together side by side, and pressed the joined thumbs onto the largest flower. The remaining four fingers of each hand each settled onto one of the other flowers.

Eight fingers on the outside, plus the joined thumbs in the center, made nine. The two thumbs could also separate and rise like the twin eyes of the yin-yang fish within the Eight Trigrams. With all ten fingers arranged this way, they formed the finger pattern of the Nine Palaces and Eight Trigrams.

Niu Youdao pressed all nine flowers at the same time and applied force evenly.

Click.

A faint sound came from inside the bronze mirror. Niu Youdao's brow jumped. Just as he had expected, the seal could only be opened by identifying the correct nine flowers and pressing them simultaneously. The slightest error in position would make it impossible. He released his hands.

The nine flowers, which before had shown neither movement nor seam, had now sprung slightly upward, revealing narrow gaps underneath. Niu Youdao picked up the bronze mirror and again aimed it toward the moon above the water. The nine points of light had disappeared. He looked up at the sky and nodded faintly.

"Right. Break yin and yang emerges. Looks like I'll have to wait for the sun tomorrow."

He glanced around, then hurried back indoors. For the entire night, he had no mind for cultivation. He simply waited for sunrise.

The next morning, when he showed himself outside, Xu Yitian had taken over guard duty. Xu Yitian had never been willing to say one unnecessary word to Niu Youdao. Niu Youdao greeted him and, not wanting to invite a rebuff, did not bother trying to make conversation. He knew asking anything would be pointless anyway.

After eating the breakfast Xu Yitian had brought, he returned to the courtyard. Seeing the light of the rising sun, Niu Youdao went back into Peach Blossom Hall, retrieved the bronze mirror from where he had hidden it, and found a room with a window facing the sunlight. He opened the window and held the back of the mirror toward the sun.

A hazy golden glow immediately appeared across the polished mirror face. Dense lines of golden characters emerged within it. Beside them, three larger golden characters formed the opening title: Qiankun Art. Those three characters alone were enough to make Niu Youdao's spirits surge.

He bent closer to read the smaller writing and quickly confirmed it. This was unquestionably a cultivation method. One mirror face, however, could hold only so many characters. He flipped the bronze mirror over again and studied the flower relief on the back. Now that he had broken the first layer of its secret, the remaining patterns could no longer stump him. After a brief calculation, he pinched one flower and gently rotated it.

A faint click sounded. He stopped and turned the mirror back toward the sunlight. The writing on the face had changed to another page, continuing directly from the previous text. Niu Youdao laughed softly. Exactly as he had expected. He spent the entire day clutching the bronze mirror and reading until he was nearly entranced. To keep following the sunlight, he moved continuously from room to room. At noon, he even climbed onto a roof beam and pried aside one of the tiles just to let sunlight through.

Only when the last of the sunlight vanished from the sky did Niu Youdao, now hiding in a room in the western wing, finally close the window. He reset all the raised patterns on the back of the bronze mirror to their original positions, then flicked the mirror with one finger. It once again rang as though it were a single seamless piece.

Who could have imagined that so intricate a mechanism lay concealed inside? Over the course of the day, he had already skimmed through most of the contents hidden within the mirror. There were text and illustrations alike. It was indeed a complete system of cultivation, incomparable to the fragmentary Taiyi in his possession.

In truth, storing so much material inside one mirror was not impossible. As the internal Nine Palaces and Eight Trigrams mechanism shifted through different configurations, the image displayed on the mirror could change endlessly, turning page after page. There was more than enough room to contain all of it.

What truly made Niu Youdao stroke the mirror and sigh was the complexity and precision of its internal construction. Even the technology of his previous world would have struggled to manufacture such a thing. Replicating it might have been difficult in itself. The forging arts of this world had exceeded his imagination by far.

And precisely because of that, he had even greater confidence that the cultivation method hidden inside could not be simple. No wonder Dong Guo Haoran had said this object had cost him his life. The mystery of the bronze mirror had finally been solved. What lay inside filled Niu Youdao with eager anticipation.

Over the following days, he devoted himself seriously to studying the Qiankun Art. Once he had grasped its essentials, he formally began cultivating it. Less than half a month later, he could already feel how formidable the Qiankun Art was. Its cultivation speed was not something the Shangqing Heart Sutra could compare with. It was even considerably faster than Taiyi at increasing his cultivation.

Whenever he circulated the Qiankun Art, that strand of Taiyi true qi would be stirred into restless motion. The Shangqing Heart Sutra, by contrast, had barely been able to move it at all. This only strengthened his confidence in continuing. His one regret was that, if he had known the bronze mirror hid something like this, he might as well have stayed in Small Temple Village. Why had he come all this way only to get himself confined?

Then again, had he remained in Small Temple Village, he would probably have spent all his time worrying about filling his stomach. For a cultivator, which of the four essentials—wealth, companions, method, and place—could be lacking? At least here he currently had no worries about food or clothing.

For now, that was the only way he could comfort himself. Several more days passed. Niu Youdao distinctly sensed that the integrated true qi within him had begun to acquire the character of Heaven and Earth, of Qiankun itself. Yin and yang separated within it: one current was hot, the other cold.

Several days after that, the suspended Taiyi true qi seemed extraordinarily fragile beneath the tempering of those hot and cold currents. At last it could no longer hold together. It snapped apart and contracted into four clusters. Two glimmered faintly gold. Two glimmered faintly silver.

One golden cluster and one silver cluster paired together, intertwining and revolving without end. They formed two matched pairs. Each pair rushed toward one of the Ren and Du meridians, only to encounter the obstruction Dong Guo Haoran had left inside him. Thirty-three Transmission Protective Talismans remained, linked to his blood and qi like spiderwebs and entrenched within thirty-three acupoints.

There had originally been thirty-six. One had been used to blast apart the monster at the little mountain temple. Another had been consumed when he nearly froze to death while drifting downriver on the bamboo raft. A third had been lost blocking Tang Susu's killing palm. Thirty-three were left.

Earlier, when the Taiyi true qi collided with one of those blood-red webs, it had been knocked away. Now Niu Youdao deliberately guided the Qiankun true qi forward to see how it would react. Just as before, powerful force rebounded from the Transmission Protective Talisman. The paired golden and silver clusters were knocked back, but they did not fly far. Instead, the two masses spun rapidly, dissipating most of the force through their rotation.

The sight gave Niu Youdao an idea. He immediately directed the golden and silver currents forward again. This time he did not meet the talisman head-on. Once they drew close, he separated them and sent them circling around the strands of the blood-red web. Just as they had refined the Taiyi true qi, the hot and cold currents of Qiankun true qi wound around the strands and began tempering them from opposite sides.

Sure enough, wisps of blood mist gradually seeped from the portions of the web being refined. It was not Niu Youdao's blood. It was blood Dong Guo Haoran had driven into his body when casting the art. What shocked and delighted Niu Youdao even more was that the Qiankun true qi was not merely refining away the foreign blood qi within the Transmission Protective Talisman. The foreign true qi inside it was also being refined little by little.

And after it was refined, the revolving Qiankun true qi actually absorbed and merged with it. Before his death, Dong Guo Haoran had used all that remained of his lifelong cultivation to place these Transmission Protective Talismans inside Niu Youdao. True qi that powerful—true qi belonging to someone else—could actually be refined and absorbed by the Qiankun true qi for his own use.

Did that mean he could inherit Dong Guo Haoran's cultivation? Once he confirmed that it truly worked, Niu Youdao was almost delirious with joy. Dong Guo Haoran's cultivation was unimaginably powerful compared with his own. He could clearly feel that using Dong Guo Haoran's true qi to increase his cultivation was vastly faster than cultivating on his own. The difference in progress could probably be measured in hundreds or even thousands of times.

Through inner vision with his true qi, the Qiankun true qi he had cultivated was like an ant beside a great tree when compared with the Transmission Protective Talismans entrenched within him. Refining even one talisman would probably not be something he could accomplish in a short period.

Yet precisely because of that, one could imagine how much cultivation was contained within the remaining thirty-three. Niu Youdao had never dreamed that such an unexpected windfall would fall into his hands. He failed to notice faint traces of blood mist slowly drifting from the pores of his skin. They came from the blood Dong Guo Haoran had left inside him, now being refined and expelled.

Once again, a faint smell of blood began to spread through the room...

"Elder! I heard Senior Sister is going to marry Niu Youdao?"

Tang Susu was offering incense before the seated statue of the Founding Patriarch when Song Yanqing burst into the hall looking half mad. He rushed up behind her and demanded an answer in a raised voice. Tang Susu placed the incense into the burner, then spun around sharply. Killing intent flashed in her eyes as she stared coldly at the agitated Song Yanqing.

"Have you forgotten every rule? What are you trying to do? Do you think the Shangqing Sect's discipline cannot deal with you?"

The words poured over Song Yanqing like a bucket of cold water. He jolted and immediately lost much of his frenzy, forcing himself back under control. It was true that the Shangqing Sect feared the Song clan's power. But if he genuinely enraged these people, killing him would still be as easy for them as crushing an ant.

Song Yanqing straightened himself and properly saluted before asking with a tortured expression, "Elder, is it true?"

Tang Susu slowly turned back around. "And if it is?"

Grief and anger immediately spread across Song Yanqing's face.

"Elder, you promised me that Senior Sister would marry me. Why are you going back on your word?"

[End of Chapter 14]