Vessel of Worlds

Andy stood holding a small black bottle a few cun tall and an iron ruler artifact, his expression darkened.

He had seen both objects before. Both had belonged to Xi Feng.

The black bottle was the vessel Xi Feng used to collect beast souls; the iron ruler was what he ordinarily rode in flight.

That both items now surfaced in the Demon Gate young master's storage pouch could mean only one thing: Xi Feng had perished three years ago.

Andy gazed at them in silence for a long moment, then let out a deep sigh, put the two objects away, and turned to examine the jade slips.

He needed to determine whether the secret left behind by the legendary five-root late-stage Core Formation cultivator—Recluse Ximen—had already found its way into the Demon Gate youth's pouch.

But a rough pass through all dozen-plus slips turned up nothing related. Several held contents that interested him greatly, but careful study could wait.

Finding Recluse Ximen's legacy—that was what mattered now.

Five-rooted like himself, Recluse Ximen had nonetheless formed a golden core and cultivated all the way to late-stage Core Formation. There had to be a secret behind it.

Andy suspected the secret might even be an existence on the same order as the Vessel of Worlds. What else could raise a five-root "waste" to such heights?

Even with a heaven-defying treasure like the Vessel, he had passed through trial after mortal trial just to scrape through Foundation Establishment—let alone Core Formation!

At the thought, the blood seemed to boil in his veins. He burned to find this treasure that could carry him to Core Formation!

Yet look where he might, no treasure showed itself. Was he doomed never to form a golden core in this life? In an instant the thought plunged him into black despondency.

A restless, scorching agitation seemed to roll through Andy's mind in wave after wave, turning his ordinarily unruffled heart raw and oversensitive—one moment wildly elated, on the verge of dancing where he stood; the next sighing in bleak self-pity over his wretched roots.

His mood was a leaf that had floated on the still surface of an ancient well—suddenly caught in a howling gale, flung over and over, pitched high and dashed low.

The violent whiplash of it slowly twisted his features toward madness. Without warning he threw back his head and bellowed like a wild beast of the mountains—a sound hardly human at all!

Andy laughed wildly one moment and wept the next, as though his mind had deserted him—hurling the scattered goods across the floor, even shaking out the contents of his own storage pouches one after another, until the great hall was a wreckage of strewn treasure.

Then his hand closed around a piece of finely carved jade. A current of cool, soothing clarity flowed from the stone deep into his spiritual sense—and through the chaos of his mind cut a single thread of lucidity.

Inner demons—invading? Andy grasped his situation in a flash, and cold sweat drenched him. Clasping the jade between both palms, he dropped where he stood into meditation.

Half an hour later, his heart had at last recovered its accustomed stillness.

He studied the jade carefully. By its fluctuations it was a mere low-grade artifact, picked up in Dragon Descent Valley. He hadn't recognized its provenance then and had tossed it into his pouch without a second thought—and just now, this jade had come within a hair of saving his life.

Andy's learning had grown considerably since Dragon Descent Valley. He could now make out several Buddhist Sanskrit characters carved into the jade—it was a Buddhist artifact.

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The Buddhist arts were vast and profound, uniquely potent against the ghost and demon paths. This jade had quite possibly been refined expressly to resist inner demons—no wonder it had granted him that crucial thread of clarity.

But why had the inner demons struck now, of all times? Andy began searching for the cause.

His attention soon settled on the Blood Demon Sword. Dull and lightless though it was, it still gave off a foul reek of gore. And not just the sword—after the ferocious battle, the entire hall was saturated with that nauseating stench.

"There's something wrong about this Blood Demon Sword. Heh—if even a crude replica is this vicious, what must the true Ten Great Demon Artifacts of antiquity be like?" Andy murmured. He took out a long jade case, laid the Blood Demon Sword inside, sealed the lid, and pasted two restriction talismans over it before his unease finally settled.

"My cultivation is still too shallow—rattled to the edge of qi deviation by nothing more than the thick demonic qi in the air," he mocked himself.

First the staggering revelation, which had shaken his heart; then a life-and-death battle and the destruction of a powerful enemy, which had left his blood surging; then, hard upon it, the proof of Xi Feng's death and the grief that followed. Such violent swings of joy and sorrow in so short a span—while the air around him hung thick with demonic qi, no small amount of which he had breathed in, gnawing at his mind—had opened the door to the inner demons' invasion.

He could destroy an ordinary late-stage Foundation Establishment cultivator with ease, true—but that rested entirely on his puppets and the Blazing Heaven Blade. His own foundation remained thoroughly average. Against something like an inner demon invasion, he was no stronger than any common early-stage cultivator.

To keep more demonic qi from entering his body and eroding his mind, Andy simply erected a defensive barrier, shutting the hall's miasma outside it.

He looked at the treasures strewn in chaos across the floor, shook his head with a rueful smile, and gathered them up piece by piece.

As for the rank-five turtle—its vital blood drained utterly by the Blood Demon Sword, nothing remained but a thin, empty shell; even its core had been consumed into nothing. Andy could only marvel at the replica demon artifact's sheer tyranny.

Then he began a careful examination of the great hall.

The hall spanned several hundred zhang, rising twenty or thirty high, open and bare at a glance—nothing unusual anywhere. Of the things Andy most hoped to find—jade slips, dharma treasures, elixirs—there was not one.

Beyond some stone tables and chairs, there remained only the drifts of ash scattered everywhere.

The ash was the residue of the wooden furniture ignited and consumed whenever the Blazing Heaven Blade's fire dragon had swept past—splashed across the hall by the battle, a heap here, a scatter there.

The hall lay under some formidable restriction that suppressed spiritual sense above all. Andy's sense could probe only a few dozen zhang around him, and could not penetrate the white jade of the walls, floor, or ceiling at all. His eyes reached farther than his sense did.

With nothing else to examine, Andy worked through the hall stone chair by stone chair, stone table by stone table—and found nothing.

Undiscouraged, he even refused to spare the thin drifts of ash, raking each one apart. Still nothing.

Was this truly an empty dwelling after all—had Recluse Ximen moved elsewhere before his passing?

Then a thought struck him. From his storage pouch, Andy drew a square jade plate several cun across. He had found one in each of the three Demon Gate cultivators' pouches—this was the Blood Aura Compass of which they had spoken.

And he had heard it from the young master's own mouth: the compass could locate Recluse Ximen's remains, and it ignored ordinary restrictions.

Sure enough, a red point of light blinked on the plate—dead at its center.

Which could only mean Recluse Ximen's remains were here—hidden, no doubt, behind some ingenious mechanism.

Knowing it was here, Andy grew calm instead, and swept the hall inch by careful inch, once, twice, again.

After long and repeated observation, he finally caught the thread.

The battle had shifted nearly all the furniture—knocked it over, scattered it, burned the wooden pieces to ash outright.

Yet with his astonishing, unfailing memory, Andy reconstructed each piece's original position in his mind—and found that exactly one stone chair had not moved at all.

Plainly, the key lay in that chair.

He had already checked it once; its material was unremarkable. But now, when he threw his full strength against it, the chair did not shift a hair.

As he suspected—the chair was of one piece with the great slab of white jade beneath it.

Andy stood on no ceremony. He deployed the paired swords Ganjiang and Moye and carved away, stroke by patient stroke, until chair and jade floor alike lay in fragments—revealing a formation disc about a chi across.

The disc bore five sockets—mounting points for spirit stones, by the look of them.

Andy's knowledge of formations remained thin; even staring at the disc, he had no idea what attributes of stone it wanted.

Still—this had been laid by a five-root cultivator, and the sockets numbered five. Presumably one stone of each of the five elements.

As for their order and positions—or whether it wanted mid-grade stones or low—Andy knew nothing at all. There was no way but to try, one arrangement at a time.