Vessel of Worlds

"Youlan—by this text, the Sea Confluence Gate truly was a great sect once. Who'd have thought that a few thousand years would bring it down to this."

Andy was at that moment a streak of blue escape-light, flying above the waters near Island Five.

There was no one anywhere around him—he was conversing, through his spiritual sense, with the ghost servant dwelling within his own body.

Two years earlier, having anchored his early-stage Core Formation cultivation, Andy had been in no hurry to leave his dwelling.

For his spirit beast, the Ice-Wind Python, nourished through thirty years of practice by great quantities of rank-four Dragon Transformation Pills, had begun molting toward advancement yet again—and this advancement went unusually smoothly. Within months, the python shed its skin once more and became a true rank-four beast, the peer of a human late-stage Foundation Establishment cultivator.

Its size changed little, but the nascent horn atop its skull had hardened fully to true horn—dense and unyielding, though still only two or three cun long, easy to overlook.

Whether the advanced python had gained further powers, Andy did not test one by one; he set it instead to quiet cultivation, letting the new realm settle.

For a spirit beast to reach rank four in under a century was ferociously fast. A beast's powers grew mostly out of its body; advance too quickly, before the flesh could follow, and not only would its true strength fail to show—hidden flaws might take root.

His beast was a mutated creature of twin anomalous attributes, ice and wind—and of the flood dragon line besides, mightiest and deepest in potential of all. He would not gut that immeasurable future for the greed of a little speed.

Andy used the interval to refine the two legacy treasures from Recluse Ximen's dwelling—the green jade ruler and the little golden bell.

The green ruler was named Verdant Sap, a wood-attribute dharma treasure: deployed, it could dissolve everything within a hundred zhang into numberless shadowed images of green leaves—a treasure inclined toward illusion attack.

The golden bell was named Heart-Beguiler, a metal-attribute treasure: it could toll with deafening force, or loose soundless, formless waves that struck at an enemy's spiritual sense rather than his body.

Both were auxiliary treasures—endlessly versatile, but modest in raw attack. Andy's high-grade spirit tool, the Blazing Heaven Blade, wielded at full power, still outhit either of them.

So Andy did not bind them by blood as destined treasures, to be nurtured as extensions of his life.

A Core Formation cultivator could not endlessly absorb treasures into destined bonds. Constrained by the dantian's space and one's own cultivation, a Core Formation cultivator could sustain one or two destined treasures at most.

Hence the rule: one bound the mightiest treasure, or the one that best fit one's primary technique—never mere numbers. And for most Core Formation cultivators the question hardly arose: with each treasure costing better than tenfold a peak-grade artifact, one or two was all they would ever own.

Once he could wield the Verdant Sap Ruler and the Heart-Beguiling Bell with fair fluency, Andy carefully took out the jade box that held the Soul Sacrifice Pearl.

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He laid a small soul-anchoring formation in the meditation chamber, then stripped the warding talismans from the box, took up the pearl—and swallowed it into his dantian.

Borrowing the innate Core Fire of his Primal Unity Golden Core, he tempered the pearl over and over. A month of hard work later, he had refined it utterly to his will, able to summon the sister ghost servants at any moment.

Yet with the pearl fully refined, his spiritual sense showed no increase at all—whether because his sense was already formidable, or because the pearl's virtue in that regard was simply slight, he couldn't tell.

Andy summoned the sisters at once. They wore, as before, their semi-transparent gauze, exquisite curves glimmering in and out of sight—but both had unfocused, wandering eyes, newly woken from their long sleep and not yet clear of mind.

After a period of recuperation they recovered, and gave Andy what account of themselves they could.

The sisters were pitiable creatures. Their souls had been sacrificially refined by another's hand, and after untold years inside the soul vessel, the greater part of their memories had rotted away—of their own origins, nothing at all remained; only scattered fragments of the cultivation world of their lifetime could still be recalled.

Their names were Youlan and Youruo—truly twin sisters, Youlan the elder by only a little.

Neither remembered what cultivation they had held in life, nor what techniques they had practiced. And as ghosts now, they could never again practice the methods of living cultivators. By the measure of their present soul-strength, they stood at roughly mid-stage Foundation Establishment.

Since the pearl was wholly refined, the sisters' every thought registered within it—so Andy knew they did not lie. They truly knew nothing, three questions and three blanks.

It troubled him little. He had taken the sisters as ghost servants only in hope of dependable helpers—watchers for his dwelling and hands for small chores while he sat in meditation—never counting on any great strength from them.

And so, in the fifth year after forming his core, Andy set out from seclusion with the rank-four Ice-Wind Python and the sisters Youlan and Youruo, bound for Recluse Ximen's dwelling—to attempt, at last, the restriction he had never been able to open. Beyond that curtain's outer chamber had lain the Verdant Sap Ruler and the Heart-Beguiling Bell, two auxiliary treasures of real quality; behind the curtain itself, perhaps, waited a treasure of a higher order still—one that might vault his strength in a single bound.

At any time, in any place, raising one's own strength came first. That was the lesson of all Andy's years in the cultivation world—and so, upon emerging, his first destination was Island Five of the Outer Star Sea.

But at his dwelling's gate, when the early-stage girl Chen Shuiyi had spoken the words "Sea Confluence Gate," the elder sister Youlan had abruptly recalled some broken shard of memory: she had heard of this Sea Confluence Gate—and in her day it had been a sect of no small power. More than that, she could not recall.

When Youlan pressed this straight into Andy's mind, a thread of interest in the girl's sect had stirred in him—hence his willingness to wait for Elder Ma.

Alas, that Elder Ma had offered not one meaningful clue, only a string of pointless noise. So Andy had gone straight to the market to search the texts instead.

Beyond that, his knowledge of the "scholar's aura" and the "baleful aura" was thin as well—both were worth understanding more deeply.

Rummaging through the text shop, he had indeed found the Sea Confluence Gate's trail in a jade slip of considerable age.

By its record, the Gate had been a famous power of the Star Sea thousands of years ago—it had even produced a married pair of late-stage Nascent Soul cultivators. But zenith turned to decline: after that couple, the Gate withered year upon year, its Nascent Soul cultivators dwindling until, for over a thousand years, none appeared at all, and it sank into a minor sect of the Star Sea.

Why the Sea Confluence Gate had come to such an end, the slip did not say—and Andy had no wish to dig.

What cultivation the sisters had held in life he couldn't be sure of, but it was unlikely to have been high; the fall of a great sect could hardly have turned on those two. That being so, his interest in the Sea Confluence Gate faded.

"Mm... Master, Youlan only remembers that such a sect existed—there's no feeling of familiarity at all. It doesn't seem tied to our origins. Master searched all that for nothing," came the girl's apologetic voice in his mind.

"It was a passing effort—I had plenty else to look up regardless," Andy answered in thought.

"What is Master searching for? Youruo hasn't recovered as much memory as Elder Sister—but sometimes fragments do come back!" Youruo's voice chimed in his mind, sweet as birdsong.