Chapter 100: The Origins of the Array

“My life is insignificant, but someone among us must escape! Perhaps if some of us get out, they’ll be wary, and won’t slaughter us all... cough, cough—”
His soul trembled, and Sanzhong felt a rush of blood gathering in his chest, spitting out a mouthful that shot three feet into the air.
“Hold on, my friend!”
Sanzhong rolled his eyes in exasperation—couldn’t this brother focus on what mattered?
“You’re right, but how are we supposed to escape?”
Sanzhong’s eyes brightened at last—someone sensible!
“We must stay united and get out together. Right now, we shouldn’t—cough, cough—follow the rules too strictly,” Sanzhong said, his voice weak but firm in his opinion.
“Break the rules, go together despite our differences! Even that demon priest wants out—should we...?”
Everyone looked toward the priest who had spoken. Many of them harbored the same thought, but none dared say it aloud—after all, this would mean joining forces with someone of demonic ways.
Just as Sanzhong was pleased the others had reached this point, he felt a gaze shift toward him, different from the rest. His soul shuddered, and in his already weakened state, his spirit nearly fled his body.
“Master…” Sanzhong forced a pale and harmless smile.
Suddenly, his arm was seized in a firm grip. Startled, Sanzhong looked up into the face of an old man with white hair like withered reeds, so close he could see each line.
“Relax.”
“Master…”
As Sanzhong floundered in panic, a warm current pulsed from his wrist, flowing through his veins and soothing his battered body. The wild, rampaging energy within him settled, as though a beast had been tamed.
His soul no longer drifted restlessly, and the agony in his heart eased.
“Thank you, Master.”
He was about to let out a sigh of relief when the Daoist with the green brows fixed him with a penetrating gaze that seemed to see straight through him. Sanzhong felt as though he stood naked before this man—it was a most unsettling sensation.
The Green-Browed Daoist had Sanzhong sit down and meditate, then stood up himself.
Everyone turned to him.

Jiang Lan had been nearby, watching Sanzhong try to stir up action among the crowd. The throng was too dense for her to maneuver freely—though she was invisible, she still had a physical form and couldn’t entirely avoid notice, so she drifted to the side.
She’d intended to give Sanzhong a word of warning, but suddenly her body was wracked with shudders, cold sweat pouring from every pore.
She slowly rolled up her left sleeve. The wound that had seemed calm now began to widen rapidly, the flesh decaying at a visible rate.
Beneath the skin, golden and crimson blood churned violently through her ruined meridians, which had been painstakingly forged but were now riddled with holes, utterly destroyed.
Clenching her teeth, she forced herself to swallow the searing pain, and scanned her surroundings.
What was accelerating this?
People, objects, the building...
She looked up at the brilliant stars overhead, a strange suspicion flickering in her mind.
Suddenly her eyes lit up—it was the Two Stars of Opposition!
The Shen and Shang stars, usually taking turns to appear, now hung together in the sky.
Counting her steps against the constellations, Jiang Lan found the barrier exactly eighty-one paces away.
“The Celestial Star Array?”
The glowing pattern that appeared beneath her palm confirmed her suspicion.
An image flashed in her mind.
“Yao’er, what do you think of the new formation Grandfather designed? Isn’t it impressive?”
An old man with a head of wild white hair and plain clothes grinned at the child playing by a distant pond.
On hearing his voice, the pink-cheeked child ran toward him, but tripped in her haste and tumbled into her original form—a tiny red dragon, no bigger than a palm, flew across the ground.
Ji Ran held his belly, laughing at his granddaughter who couldn’t shift back to human form.
“For someone born a celestial, you do look ridiculous like this. Out in the world, people would laugh themselves silly.”
Yin Xun was frantic, but no matter what, she couldn’t change shape. She hopped onto the stone table before the old man, who, startled, snatched her up by the claw.
“Careful! This is a divine snow-jade stone your grandfather dug out of Mount Zhongshan over half a year—don’t break it with your strength, or I’ll have to send your father to get me an even bigger one!”
The little dragon’s slitted eyes narrowed further in irritation. When she shut them, daylight vanished in an instant, and the world was draped in a cloak of starlight, faint and cold.
Ji Ran smacked his lips and looked at his granddaughter, now lying limp in his palm, sighing, “Yao’er, your mother went and found herself an ancient Candle Dragon for a husband. Now you come along, able to summon storms or block out the sun at a whim—frightening, truly frightening.”
Though his words were grumbling, the old man gave a gentle flick of the finger, and in a flash, the red dragon became a fair-skinned girl once more.
“Hmph!”
Despite their mutual bickering, she obediently sat on his left knee, and he held her close, worried she might fall—after all, the steps below were carved from the bones of an ancient Yinglong! One or two holes smashed through would mean trouble for his old bones.
“Here, Yao’er, look at this new Celestial Star Array I designed—think it could trap your father?”
She rolled her eyes, but studied the star map on the stone table intently, her brows furrowing deeper the longer she looked.

“Stubborn old man, this formation might harness the power of the sea of stars, but my father is a god of creation—his divinity is unparalleled, and which of the star spirits or immortals would dare lend you their power without his leave?”
“Unparalleled divinity? He’s just old! Shameless, humph!”
The girl sighed—her grandfather never had a good word for her father, who was older in age and higher in rank by far. Ever since her mother had conceived her brother and come to stay at her grandfather’s, craving the taste of the demon realm, her father’s life had only grown more difficult.
Now, with her brother nearly due, her father still hadn’t fetched her mother home.
Ah, the road ahead was long.
But seeing the old man so alone, and the demon realm so much more interesting than Wushan, Yin Xun decided to play another trick on her father.
“If you can’t rely on the stars, why not draw on another power?”
Ji Ran’s eyes gleamed as he ruffled his granddaughter’s fiery hair. “That’s the bloodline of our Ji family—so clever!”
She rolled her eyes and slipped off his knee, running back to the pond to catch sprites.
Jiang Lan stared at the patterns shifting on the array, lost in memory. “I wonder if Grandfather ever did manage to trap the old man?”
The pain in her arm yanked her back to reality.
She surveyed the vast array, searching for its weak points as she recalled them.
But as she found one, others found her.
The Patriarch of Qimen stood guard at the spot with a dozen skilled disciples, clearly waiting for her to walk into their trap.
Jiang Lan halted, using up another concealment talisman, this one enhanced with Chifeng power.
She scrutinized the formation. Years ago, when her grandfather had taken a liking to a certain artifact, he gifted a simplified version of this formation to Taibai of the Ninth Heaven. This was that very array.
It drew on the power of the stars, but also relied on the guardians to strengthen it.
Over time, the formation had changed much.
For an array of this might to be wielded even by mortal cultivators was unthinkable—if the guardians’ strength didn’t match the array, they would be consumed as offerings instead.
Was the Patriarch of Qimen truly ready to gamble everything?