Sect Master Wen's Junior Martial Brother Who Shared His Hardships Has Returned - Chapter 3

Wen Chaoxi calmly picked up the book, placed it back on the bookshelf, and carried Xu Chaoqi away.

Some movement came from behind him, but he did not turn his head.

The next day, Xu Chaoqi came to the Library Pavilion again.

He wandered around the same spot for a long while, but that book with the four-character title was nowhere to be found.

He leaned against the bookshelf, secretly glancing from the corner of his eye at the figure writing a cultivation technique in the distance, his gaze somewhat evasive.

The desk sat beside the window; outside, the sky was cloudless for ten thousand li, and everything was silent. Beside it, an incense burner burned sandalwood, its smoke curling upward.

Wen Chaoxi held his sleeve as he dipped his brush in ink, the tip of the brush pressing onto the paper like a startled dragon in flight, the strokes penetrating deep into the wood.

He wrote a string of ten-odd characters in one breath, the brush’s edge completing its final stroke. His palm pressed down on the paper, and Wen Chaoxi lifted his head to look at the fair-featured person beside the desk.

“What is it?”

Xu Chaoqi’s throat seemed to catch on something, his expression rather unnatural.

He gripped the edge of the desk with both hands, lowered his head to adjust his mood for a moment, then lifted his head again, his eyes appearing clear as he leaned in close to Wen Chaoxi. “Senior Brother, have you seen a certain book in the middle of the fourth row of shelves?”

Wen Chaoxi tapped his fingertips on the desk, then leaned back, his eyelids half-raised, a faint smile carrying a nearly imperceptible trace of helplessness.

“Senior Brother does not know which book you mean.”

Xu Chaoqi: …… Did he really have to say the name?

He bit his lip and lowered his voice. “It’s a movement technique.”

The moment he finished speaking, his forehead was lightly flicked.

Wen Chaoxi’s voice was low and calm. “Senior Brother has likely never seen it.”

Xu Chaoqi covered his head, his eyes suspicious. But this book was, after all, not something that could see the light of day, so he could only leave step by step, glancing back three times with every step, slinking away in defeat.

He could not see that on the upper level of the fourth row of bookshelves, one tier was locked by an invisible golden chain, with an enormous talisman faintly flickering in and out of view.

With no more books to read, Xu Chaoqi found that even though this immortal palace was vast and beautiful, it was inevitably a bit monotonous. What’s more, he was young and in the prime of his youth—how could a world containing only two people possibly restrain his temperament?

At noon, he sat on the stone steps at the entrance to the main hall.

Beneath his feet was a boundless sea of flowers, the stone steps laid out across it, extending all the way down into the clouds and mist below.

The sky was silent and still. He suddenly stood up and began walking downward.

His pace was unhurried at first, but gradually he walked faster and faster, until finally he was running down the stone steps.

As Xu Chaoqi ran, he brought a wind with him that scattered the flower petals lining either side of the steps. The petals rose up, swaying in the air in time with his footsteps.

But these stone steps numbered in the tens of thousands. With his mortal body, he ran for a long time, yet did not even complete one-tenth of the entire heavenly staircase.

Just as Xu Chaoqi was exhausted to the point of collapse, he gazed at the blazing sun in the distance and suddenly raised his hand in a beckoning gesture.

Gradually, wind rose up from behind him, and a shadow fell over his head, blocking out the brilliant sun.

There was light in the depths of Xu Chaoqi’s eyes—something he had never shown since entering the immortal palace.

The shadows grew more and more numerous, and the sound of fluttering paper rang out around him.

Xu Chaoqi smiled. He formed a hand seal with his ten fingers, and the shadows instantly scattered into countless fragments.

A rustling sound swirled around him as he extended a finger and drew a talisman in the air.

The wind grew stronger, his loose ink-black hair was blown up, his red robes fluttered, and those countless talisman papers rushed toward him at a speed too fast for the naked eye to follow, each vying to be first.

The talisman papers collided back and forth, bending and folding, gathering together, growing larger and larger.

Countless shadows of the talisman papers on the ground merged together, and finally formed a crane with fluttering wings, lifelike and vivid.

Xu Chaoqi raised his head. Before him was a crane made of talisman paper, colored a talisman-yellow.

The crane flapped its wings and rubbed against him ingratiatingly.

Xu Chaoqi’s eyes curved into crescents, his face brimming with a smile.

He stepped onto the crane’s back. The crane flapped its wings, carrying him into flight, rushing downward.

Xu Chaoqi thought that as long as he could fly down, he would be able to see other people.

However——

The crane was knocked flat on its rear into a cluster of flowers. It exhausted all its effort flapping its wings to struggle up, and just as it wanted to seek comfort from its master, its spiritual power proved limited—before long it dispersed into a pile of talisman paper.

Xu Chaoqi struggled to hold his waist, and he sat up to look at the steep cliff beneath his feet. Below the cliff, layers of clouds and mist connected together; through the mist, one could see the ocean, separated by ten thousand zhang.

Xu Chaoqi was not afraid of heights. As for why he didn’t fly down?

He silently extended his palm forward, and sure enough, his palm pressed against an invisible, ice-cold barrier.

Xu Chaoqi tried pushing at it, but the barrier did not budge in the slightest.

He took out a talisman paper and drew a thunderstorm talisman on the spot. The thunderstorm talisman was quite powerful—the moment it touched the barrier, the inscriptions deepened.

The talisman paper exploded, yet the barrier remained just as translucent, as if nothing had happened.

Xu Chaoqi leaned weakly against the barrier, gazing up at the sky, feeling deeply exhausted.

He supposed it made sense—Senior Brother was, big or small, someone of considerable standing now; there was no telling how many enemies he had made, so naturally his residence had to be well protected.

But since he had already come this far, he couldn’t very well just go back easily, could he?

Xu Chaoqi lowered his head and untied the pendant at his waist—this was the storage pouch Senior Brother had given him.

He rummaged through the storage pouch. There were too many magic tools inside; he searched for a long while before finally finding a mirror.

He had heard Senior Brother mention this mirror before—as long as it was suspended in the air, it could show scenery from ten thousand li away.

He pressed the mirror against the barrier. The originally pitch-black mirror suddenly flashed, gradually brightening, and within the mirror appeared a boundless expanse of ocean.

At that moment, on the vast sea, tens of thousands of ships were sailing toward the far south.

These ships varied in size, and upon closer inspection, over eighty percent of them turned out to be magic tools.

Some ships were entirely black, carrying an air of killing intent; no ship dared approach within a hundred li of them.

Some ships, though low-key in appearance, still caused the cultivators on other ships to gasp in astonishment upon seeing them.

“That is actually a high-grade Earth-tier magic tool!”

With so many ships on the sea, things inevitably grew lively.

At the very center of the sea, there was a great ship a hundred zhang tall and a thousand zhang wide. Banners fluttered atop the great ship, and whenever any other ship caught sight of it, the cultivators aboard would come out to pay their respects to the great ship.

“The Western’s Region Lord has come too,” someone murmured.

The great ship moved at no slow pace; wherever it passed, the seawater churned, and behind it followed dozens of smaller boats.

At the very top of the great ship, a young man leaned by the window, his round eyes fixed on the seagulls in the sky.

He wanted to reach out his hand, but feared the seagulls might peck it.

The young man’s name was Song Shuiqing.

Song Shuiqing shrank his neck slightly, lowered his head to look at the deep blue seawater, and asked in confusion. “Weren’t we flying the whole way? Why do we have to travel by water now that we’ve entered this sea?”

The great ship was a high-grade Heaven-tier magic tool; they had ridden the clouds all the way from the Western Region, but who knew that the moment they entered the Southern Region, they would have to honestly travel by boat.

The moment he finished speaking, he received a solid knock on the head.

The person behind him spoke with barely restrained anger, “How did this lord end up with such a foolish son as you?! No matter how formidable your old man is, he’s still just a Region Lord of one region—do you expect your old man to fly beneath… beneath that one’s domain? Why don’t you also expect your old man to have nine lives while you’re at it?”

Song Shuiqing, having been scolded, shrank further into the corner and said nothing.

Seeing his son in this state, the middle-aged cultivator’s anger also died down. He sighed, his tone turning to helplessness.

He turned around to look at the half-finished talisman paper on the desk, and while glancing sideways at his son’s back, asked, “How is your talisman practice coming along?”

Upon hearing this, Song Shuiqing lowered his head even further, nearly curling himself into a ball.

“I… I still don’t know how to draw them.”

“Don’t know how to draw them…” The middle-aged cultivator repeated these words, his brow furrowing tighter and tighter. “Can you even draw the simplest Spirit-Gathering Talisman yet?”

Song Shuiqing’s voice was as faint as a mosquito’s buzz, “No… no, I can’t.”

The middle-aged cultivator fell into silence.

He smacked his own head, glanced out the window at the sky from the corner of his eye, and his expression gradually turned despondent.

“Forget it. For your sake, this father will throw away his old face and go beg a favor at Yingtian Sect.”

He rubbed his face and muttered to himself. “Fortunately, the Way of Talismans has declined—for several thousand years now, at every Grand Competition held once a century, the Way of Talismans has ranked either dead last or second-to-last. The newly arrived disciples all look down on the Way of Talismans, which works in our favor—it’s precisely why this father can more easily pull some strings for you.”

Having said this, his mood eased somewhat.

He poured himself a cup of tea and drank it in one gulp, his gaze shifting back to his son.

Looking at his son’s somewhat foolish figure, he said, puzzled. “It’s strange, too. A few years back, the Immortal Xuanji divined that you would meet a noble benefactor at age twenty. In just a few more days you’ll turn twenty-one—why hasn’t this benefactor appeared yet?”

Song Shuiqing, who had been playing ostrich this whole time, finally stirred. He timidly raised his head and turned slightly.

“Fa— Father! I… I said long ago that swindler’s predictions aren’t accurate…”

“Nonsense! The Immortal Xuanji enters the Dao through divination trigrams—he is a Spirit Transformation expert! How could his calculations be inaccurate?!”

Song Shuiqing finally found his backbone; he straightened his neck and said, trembling. “But his final divination calculated that Sect Master Wen would fail to preserve his integrity in his later years within ten years! How could that possibly be true? And sure enough, he calculated wrong—he even vomited blood and died from misreading the will of Heaven, and Sect Master Wen became the subject of his final divination!”

The middle-aged cultivator was rendered speechless by Song Shuiqing’s words, and for a moment failed to react. Once he did, he slapped his son on the head.

“You foolish boy, is there anyone you wouldn’t dare slander?! Do you find your position as young lord of the Western Region too secure, and want to suffer through hardship to temper your character?”

The young lord was struck until his eyes welled up with tears.

The fleet of ships drew closer and closer to Yingtian Sect, and the rich, dense spiritual energy left everyone feeling refreshed and joyful.

Many cultivators emerged from their ships, spirit mist brushing against their cheeks, obscuring their vision.

They were in no hurry; instead, they thoroughly enjoyed it—some even felt bottlenecks that had stalled for a long time suddenly loosen.

By the time the clouds and mist dispersed, the magnificent scene before them made their eyes widen, and their emotions took a long while to settle.

Above the sea stood immortal mountains, mountain connected to mountain, at varying heights. Some mountains stood suspended in the air; some were buried within the clouds and mist.

At the southernmost point there was a river—this was no ordinary mortal river, but one connected directly to the heavens above, its waters falling down into the mortal world.

“This… this river water is… is Heavenly Water! Drink just one drop and it can reshape one’s spiritual body and vastly increase one’s cultivation!”

“Precisely!”

It was only unfortunate that although the Heavenly Water could be seen, it remained far distant from them. Even without approaching it, they could sense that beyond the Heavenly Water lay a barrier they could never penetrate.

The crowd sighed. Someone’s gaze followed the Heavenly Water upward, and suddenly saw what seemed to be an enormous immortal mountain suspended at a height of ten thousand zhang.

“This mountain! This mountain is…”

The immortal mountain was extremely close to the blazing sun, and the crowd was dazzled to the point they could not open their eyes.

A mature-looking man stepped forward and said in a steady voice, “This immortal mountain should be Sect Master Wen’s Dao residence.”

“Sect Master Wen!” Soft exclamations rippled through the crowd around them, expressions varying in their eyes.

But upon hearing it was Sect Master Wen’s Dao residence, none dared look directly at the immortal mountain any longer.

Someone swallowed, their voice barely audible: “Sect Master Wen achieved Tribulation-Transcendence Great Perfection several thousand years ago already—he could ascend at any moment. If I could ascend that immortal mountain in this lifetime…”

The moment he began speaking, he dared not continue.

Yet in the hearts of those around him, more or less, the same thought had taken root.

If they could ascend that immortal mountain in this lifetime, there was no telling how much fortune and transformation it might grant them…

They only dared to think it, and even having such a thought made them feel their own ambitions were too great.

The various cultivators who had just arrived at Yingtian Sect did not know that, at that very moment, ten thousand zhang up in the sky, Xu Chaoqi had pressed his face against the barrier, his face squashed flat.

He tilted his head back, looking up at the mirror above him, and within the mirror were precisely the cultivators who had just arrived at Yingtian Sect.

The cultivators wore varied, spirited expressions, chatting and laughing with those around them, and envy shone in Xu Chaoqi’s eyes.

He wanted to go down. He wanted to play and chat leisurely together with the other cultivators.