Chapter 113: Yin, Yang, and the Five Elements
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In the dense forest, the Crane Madam and the Sickly Scholar were walking side by side when Li Zheng suddenly frowned. Raising his hand, he cast a spell, and a blue curtain of light sprang into existence, completely covering the open ground within thirty feet of them.
“What is the meaning of this, Fellow Daoist?” the Crane Madam asked, turning around with a puzzled look.
“Nothing... I merely felt somewhat uncomfortable, as though someone were spying on us. Perhaps it was only my imagination. Still, in a place as strange as this, it never hurts to be a little more cautious.” Li Zheng spoke with a furrowed brow.
“Indeed, you are right!” the Crane Madam nodded emphatically. She said no more, and the two continued onward.
...
Outside the transparent orb, Ji Lai let out a faint sigh and said helplessly, “It seems those two seniors are highly vigilant. They have actually raised a ward, presumably to guard against anyone spying on them in the forest.”
Mu Rong Xuewei shrugged helplessly when she saw this. “Since we can no longer see what has happened to them, do you have any way of observing the others, Brother Ji?”
Ji Lai nodded. He formed another series of hand seals and pointed once more at the transparent orb.
The scene within the orb shifted, this time transforming into a sword-and-saber arena. Various weapons stood embedded in the ground at every angle—sabers, spears, swords, halberds, and every other kind of weapon imaginable.
Some were covered in rust and looked no different from scraps of iron, while others gleamed with spiritual radiance and were clearly no ordinary weapons.
Two people stood facing each other in the arena. One wore a black Daoist robe and possessed an exceptionally sharp gaze. It was none other than Master Cloud Void. The other wore a yellow robe and had a kindly, smiling face. He was the Smiling-Faced Monk.
Master Cloud Void gave a cold snort. “You and I have never had any enmity. Why did you launch a sneak attack on me just now?”
“Heh heh! It is true that we have no personal grudge, Benefactor. However, I happen to be very interested in that young man named Liang Yan whom you brought here,” the Smiling-Faced Monk replied.
“Oh? Could it be that you know him?” Master Cloud Void asked, his expression unchanged as he probed cautiously.
“That is not the case!” the Smiling-Faced Monk said cheerfully. “I am simply very interested in the Buddhist cultivation method practiced by that boy. I know that you drugged him. As long as I obtain the antidote from you, he will naturally be willing to exchange his cultivation method for it in order to save his life.”
“If that is all, we could have waited until we left this place before settling the matter,” Master Cloud Void said in a deep voice.
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“Hahahaha! Why bother pretending with me, old Daoist? Since we have already fallen out, how could there be any turning back? Even if I were not interested in the boy’s Buddhist cultivation method, we are still competitors within this secret realm. The more people there are, the smaller each person’s share of the treasures becomes. If you, Master Cloud Void, had arrived here first and I had come later, would you not have taken the opportunity to launch a sneak attack on me as well?”
“Hmph!”
Master Cloud Void snorted coldly and said nothing more. Instead, he silently circulated his cultivation to recover from the injuries inflicted by the monk’s sneak attack.
A murderous intent gradually appeared in the Smiling-Faced Monk’s eyes. Suddenly, he raised his hand and waved.
A palm-sized feather fan slowly flew out. Once it reached the air, it expanded with the wind, and in the blink of an eye it had grown taller than a man. The monk gave the fan a distant wave toward Master Cloud Void, and a stream of ocher-yellow mist appeared from nowhere, surging toward him.
Master Cloud Void gave another cold snort. Pure radiance flowed around his body, and he suddenly touched the ground with the tip of his foot before soaring three yards into the air.
Suspended there, he formed a seal with his left hand and pointed forward with two fingers of his right. His lips moved as he chanted an incantation, clearly preparing to unleash some ultimate technique.
But at that very moment, the orb before Ji Lai began to tremble violently. The image suddenly blurred, then a streak of light flashed across it, and every scene vanished.
“Alas...” Ji Lai sighed. “The two seniors are fighting with all their might. The spiritual pressure of Foundation Establishment cultivators is simply too powerful; it scattered my humble divination technique. I can no longer see anything.”
There was unmistakable regret in his voice.
Mu Rong Xuewei was equally disappointed. The two of them were trapped in the vast ocean, drifting wherever the waves carried them. With nothing else to do, they had developed an intense interest in peeking at the circumstances of the others.
“Brother Ji, can you still see anyone else?” Mu Rong Xuewei asked almost without thinking.
“Of course!” Ji Lai nodded.
As his hand seals changed, various scenes appeared within the transparent orb.
In a vast, boundless field, a young monk walked side by side with an old man at the ninth level of Qi Refinement. The little monk wore a blank, innocent expression, while the old man beside him had a gloomy face and seemed lost in thought.
The scene shifted, and they saw a woman in her early twenties sitting cross-legged back to back with a girl of eleven or twelve on a stone platform. Both remained silent with their eyes closed, meditating as motionlessly as ancient monks entering deep concentration.
Finally, even the confrontation between Liang Yan and the blue-robed girl before the path of flames was revealed to them.
“Heh heh, Brother Liang is certainly blessed with good fortune among women. A man and a woman alone together in one room, with kindling and raging flames all around them—something is bound to happen!” Ji Lai stared at the orb, his face alight with excitement.
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The speaker had no intention, but the listener took it to heart. Mu Rong Xuewei’s face inexplicably flushed at his words.
“You shameless scholar! Stop watching! Change to another scene!” she snapped angrily.
Although Ji Lai was thoroughly engrossed, after hearing her words he actually stopped looking.
He formed another hand seal and tapped the transparent orb once more. To his utter surprise, however, the orb that had never failed him before suddenly ceased to work.
“Huh?”
Ji Lai uttered a startled exclamation and changed his hand seals several more times, but the orb remained completely empty. Not even half an image appeared within it.
“Could it be that Qin Yuan’s demonic cultivation technique is actually capable of concealing him from my divination?” Ji Lai’s eyes were filled with shock. He had never encountered such a situation before.
“If you cannot see anything, then forget it,” Mu Rong Xuewei said, casting him a sidelong glance. “With cultivation only at the Qi Refinement stage, you can spy on Foundation Establishment cultivators without being discovered. If anything, I think you are the real monster here!”
“Heh heh!” Ji Lai came back to himself and gave an embarrassed laugh. Then, as though he had thought of something, he murmured to himself:
“I never expected that the fourteen of us would be trapped separately within the realms of metal, wood, water, fire, and earth! As for Qin Yuan and the Hound Daoist, and Meng Qi and that little girl, they must respectively be in the realms of extreme yin and extreme yang. Yin and yang, together with the five elements, form the foundation of Daoist cultivation. It seems the senior buried here must have been a great master of the Daoist sect!”
...
At the same time that Ji Lai and Mu Rong Xuewei were casting their techniques to spy on the others, inside the stone chamber they had entered earlier...
The features of the figure in the painting hanging on the wall gradually emerged. It was unmistakably an ancient old man with remarkably strange and timeworn features.
At the five locations corresponding to his heart, liver, spleen, lungs, and kidneys, five-colored rays of light—red, green, yellow, gold, and blue—slowly circulated.
Had Liang Yan and Ji Lai been there and learned that they were currently situated at the heart-fire and kidney-water locations of the figure in the painting, who could say what they might have thought...
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