Chapter Nine: Diverging Thoughts

“Purple Tenuity Palace?”

Staring at those three words, Shen Changan froze slightly. He had never encountered it before, but he could roughly guess that this Purple Tenuity Palace must be one of the Daoist sects of Great Qian.

Li Qingren was the name of the one who cast this spell, while the word for “edict” referred to an imperial decree or command.

“A man of the Daoist orders…”

Shen Changan fell briefly silent. So this was the work of the Purple Tenuity Palace. Having ruined their arrangement, he feared they would not let him off so easily.

As that thought crossed his mind, Shen Changan glanced once more at the shattered corpses behind him and the towering heap of human heads. A surge of fierce anger instantly blazed up within him.

“Damn your Daoist sect! If you’ve got the nerve, come at me. If your Old Shen here so much as wrinkles a brow, then I must be your own son!”

Having made up his mind, Shen Changan no longer felt sleepy. He simply continued gathering up the heads, sewing them together one by one, purifying them as he went, and before the night was over he had sent off more than twenty corpses.

Only when the eastern horizon began to pale did Shen Changan narrow his eyes and take a short nap.

With magic power within him, he was constantly washing and refining his spirit, so fatigue and drowsiness came to him only rarely. After a brief rest, by about the hour of the Dragon he had recovered, and once again picked up the heads and resumed sewing them together.

The more he stitched, the more adept Shen Changan became with this craft.

More than that, he could clearly feel that, as he kept repairing these bodies, streams of mysterious power were continuously settling into his frame, bringing him benefits beyond words.

This wondrous force seemed to be some vast and marvelous strength. When it was added to Shen Changan, he even felt as though anything he chose to do could be accomplished in a single stroke.

And this feeling was by no means illusory; it was something he could truly grasp.

The more corpses he stitched, the more obvious this strengthening became, and the more obvious it became, the faster he could sew the bodies together.

Within this endless cycle, Shen Changan’s use of the Transporting Art had already reached something like a transcendent mastery. Little by little, his control became exquisitely precise, and he could manipulate even the most delicate objects to be carried and moved.

The benefits of this change were enormous. If this were a game, then Shen Changan had taken this Transporting Art from beginner all the way to master level.

At such a level, the art could accomplish things so absurd they bordered on the unimaginable. And under these circumstances, Shen Changan could even split a single thought into two and use them separately.

In other words, he could cast two trains of thought at once, applying two utterly different forces to the same object simultaneously.

By Shen Changan’s own judgment, the most perfect form of this art would be the Five Ghost Transporting technique: five streams of thought turning at once, generating five separate forces. To achieve that, what was truly required was magic power.

Yet Shen Changan had not broken through in power; he had achieved the same result through skill alone. If he were to cultivate the Five Ghost Transporting technique to its limit as well, then the greatest number of thoughts he could operate at once would be ten.

...

While Shen Changan was sewing the corpses together, beyond the city in the distance, an army had set up camp there, and upon its banners was naturally the insignia of the Southern-Pacifying Army.

Inside the military camp, a middle-aged man in a Daoist robe suddenly changed color and woke with a start.

“Bad news. Someone has torn out one of my array cores!”

He immediately circulated his magic power, trying to draw back his edict, but the edict had already been seized and controlled by someone else. No matter how he exerted his power, it would not budge in the slightest, and only fragments of imagery could seep through.

The clearest image he saw was of a man with short hair and a Daoist robe, wielding a long staff that came crashing down and smashed a ghost general to pieces.

“Fine methods indeed. To think he could seize my edict and keep me from learning much of anything.”

To be able to draw even this much from the distant edict already showed the Daoist’s profound strength. Had his cultivation been a shade weaker, he would not have received even the slightest clue.

“Someone, at once summon General Sun for me!”

The middle-aged man called for someone outside to deliver the message. Before long, a man in battle robes entered the tent.

“Daoist Li, is something urgent afoot?”

The one in the Daoist robe was none other than the Purple Tenuity Palace’s Daoist Li, Li Qingren.

Li Qingren rose to his feet and said coldly, “One of my array cores is being destroyed.”

The middle-aged man was stunned for a moment, then flew into a rage.

“The rebel army is so bold as this? They have actually dared to plunge deep into the rear of our forces and come to destroy the Daoist’s formation? Where is the Daoist’s ghost general? Could he not stop them?”

Li Qingren shook his head. “I previously sent a ghost general out to investigate, but he never returned. A pity. Had I not already suffered losses to my ghost generals in the earlier fighting, these places would not have been left so poorly defended.”

The array cores laid down by Li Qingren were originally each guarded by a ghost general. If any mishap occurred, he could immediately dispatch all his ghost generals to respond. But because he had lost ghost generals in battle with the rebels, cracks had appeared in his defenses. Shen Changan had spent ages dealing with the wronged spirits here before Li Qingren was finally able to send a ghost general over.

“The ghost general was killed, and I also sensed something of his final moments. From the methods used, I do not think it was the rebels. Rather, it seemed to be the work of a Daoist.”

“A Daoist?” The middle-aged man’s expression shifted slightly. “Could there be men of the Daoist orders among the rebel ranks?”

Li Qingren shook his head. “That I do not know. There are so many Daoist sects beneath the heavens; who could count them all? But since this man has laid hands on my formation, I cannot simply let him go.”

As he said this, a flash of viciousness appeared in Li Qingren’s eyes. In order to help Great Qian defeat the rebels, he had already committed acts that defied heaven and morality. If he were now to retreat because of a single Daoist, then all he had done before would be for nothing.

“This is simple. I shall have one of my junior officers go at once and take this man down.”

Li Qingren waved a hand. “There is no need for the General to worry about our Daoist order. Since matters have already come to blows, I am not such a stubborn fool either. Keeping this man alive will surely become a calamity. Since he has already made a move, then let us simply kill him.”

Hearing Li Qingren say this, the great general of the Southern-Pacifying Army gave a slight nod as well. He had never intended to let the one who sabotaged the formation live in the first place. He had merely been wary of offending the Daoist orders of the world. Since Li Qingren said there was no need for such restraint, then he had nothing more to say. Once they caught the man, they would simply kill him outright.

“Pass down my order. Send Zhang Hongyu with one hundred soldiers to Qinghe Village and search for a Daoist. If you encounter any monk or Daoist, kill them without mercy!”

The military command was issued, and at once a young officer stepped forward, leading a hundred soldiers straight toward the place where Shen Changan was located.