"The bell knows when to back down. Thousands of years of wisdom!" Su Yan silently praised the bell's good sense.
If the ghost knew the cave's owner, she had come to mourn an old acquaintance, not to kill them.
Su Yan blinked. "She called this place an ascension ground. What does that mean? Deep in Cangwu, the deathless immortal... what are those?"
The girl's voice drifted from the palace, ethereal as a cloud. "Are you alive or dead? If you lived, where did you go? I searched the divine land but found no trace of you."
She entered the black coffin. The lid closed, and the coffin shot out of the palace, chains clanking, leaving only a mournful echo.
"Did you ascend, or did you pass away? Why, when I woke three thousand years later, am I the only one left in this world..."
Su Yan exhaled. If the coffin girl had been more observant, she might have noticed the bell sunk in the water. In her rage, she could have destroyed Su Yan and Yuan Qi both.
He remembered the bell and hurried to retrieve it.
But the bell had developed an attitude. It sank stubbornly to the bottom, refusing to come up.
Su Yan tried several times, failed, and grew angry. "You have the guts to fight the ghost girl but bully me instead?"
The bell was too cowardly to confront the coffin girl. It flew from the water and poured its contents over Su Yan's head.
The effort seemed to exhaust its stored strength. It clattered along behind him.
Su Yan ignored it, using his energy to dry his clothes, and followed Yuan Qi toward the palace.
Before entering, Su Yan stopped and looked up.
The palace gate bore writing unlike any script in the world today. The characters looked like tadpoles crawling through mud, or bird tracks in fresh snow.
Yuan Qi said, "Don't bother. Three generations of my family couldn't read it. I don't know what this place is called."
Su Yan's expression grew strange. "It says Mud Pill Palace Grotto Heaven."
Yuan Qi stared. "You can read this?"
He was shocked. The ox family had been scholars for three generations, deeply learned, yet they had never deciphered this writing. Su Yan was an uneducated peasant. How could he recognize such script?
Su Yan's gaze was odd. "I've never seen this writing before. But somehow, when I look at it, I just know what it says. How to read it. How to pronounce it. It's like..."
He frowned. Like this writing had been carved into his mind long ago.
But he had absolutely never learned or seen it before.
Yuan Qi was deeply puzzled. Remembering Su Yan's strange behavior, he asked, "A-Yan, have you ever lost your memory?"
Su Yan laughed. "I've never lost my memory! How could I? I've been smart since childhood. My memory is perfect. I can even remember when I was ten months old!"
His heart ached. He remembered every detail of the Sujiaping fire, even his parents dying in the flames.
He wanted to forget, but couldn't.
Yuan Qi blinked. "You can't even remember your parents' names right. Your memory isn't reliable. Did someone hit your head?"
The bell rolled on the ground, clearly sharing Yuan Qi's doubts about Su Yan's memory.
Su Yan studied the strange gate writing. His heart stirred. He took out the Mud Pill Hidden Scene Qi Refining Method and looked at the gate again. "Mud Pill Palace Grotto Heaven and Mud Pill Hidden Scene Qi Refining Method both contain 'Mud Pill.' Is there a connection?"
The Mud Pill Secret was one of the Six Secrets within the human body. Opening any secret made one a nuo master. The Zhou family had built their power on the Mud Pill Secret.
The Mud Pill Secret had become Su Yan's obsession.
Yuan Qi called him inside. Su Yan set aside his thoughts and entered.
The white jade palace was lined with bookshelves, neatly arranged with volumes upon volumes.
Yuan Qi had called his family scholarly, and he wasn't lying.
"My family has lived here for over three hundred years, collecting countless ancient texts," Yuan Qi said proudly. "Every book available in Lingling is here. I've read them all."
Su Yan felt both admiration and shame. Compared to this snake, he was truly uneducated.
Suddenly Yuan Qi's face changed. "A-Yan, I feel my qi and blood transforming into creative power. I'm about to transform into human form!"
His vision blurred. Dead skin hung over his pupils, turning them white. Signs of transformation.
Yuan Qi hurried into a side chamber. "Don't wander while I'm in seclusion. Wuwang Mountain became Wuwang Mountain, and I don't know the new geography!"
He needed a safe place to shed his old skin. Delay meant suffocating inside his old body.
Su Yan came to the jade wall and looked up.
The coffin girl had stood here, mourning her old acquaintance.
The wall depicted a strange mountain, steep and towering, rising into the clouds, dominating all other peaks.
As a snake catcher, Su Yan had traveled everywhere. He had seen every mountain. But he had never seen this one.
This mountain was too tall, too magnificent. No such peak existed in Lingling.
Probably not in the entire divine land.
Su Yan's heart stirred. He murmured, "South of the Xiao River, deep in Cangwu. Beneath Mount Jiuyi, the deathless immortal. Is this mountain Jiuyi Mountain?"
"But Jiuyi Mountain isn't this tall!"
Su Yan was full of doubts. He had visited Jiuyi Mountain several times. It was beautiful but not particularly high. It couldn't be the mountain in the painting.
But if Wuwang Mountain could become Wuwang Mountain, perhaps the true form of Jiuyi Mountain was this painted peak?
"Too bad Yuan Qi is in seclusion. Otherwise we could go see."
Su Yan was tired too. He chose a room and tried to read a book from the shelves. Two pages in, his head lolled and he fell asleep.
He slept deeply. When he woke, his qi and blood surged with energy. The cave contained some strange vital energy that boosted his cultivation. One night's sleep had brought noticeable improvement.
"Truly a grotto heaven paradise!"
Su Yan noticed a foul smell on his body, probably from passing through the underworld.
Yuan Qi was still in seclusion.
Su Yan went outside, stripped naked, and jumped into the pool.
"Strange hair growing everywhere." He glanced down, puzzled. "Weird hair. Growing all over. I'll pull it out."
He scrubbed his body and touched his old wounds. Then he saw a spirit herb on the shore and froze.
"No. No."
Su Yan stood motionless. After a long moment, he murmured, "Is the cave's energy healing me, or is my own energy healing me? Is the cave's strange energy really vital energy?"
He had seen plants grow wildly under the influence of vital energy. But the spirit herbs on the shore hadn't grown at all.
The cave's so-called vital energy wasn't true vital energy. The power that healed Su Yan and Yuan Qi's scars didn't come from the cave. It came from within themselves.
"This mysterious power in Qinyan Cave can stimulate our own vitality and activity!"
Su Yan's eyes gleamed. Where did the body's vitality and activity come from?
"The Mud Pill Secret," he whispered.
The Mud Pill Secret contained the body's vitality. And this white jade palace was called Mud Pill Palace. He had sensed a connection before, but now he understood.
"The mysterious power in Qinyan Cave can stimulate the Mud Pill Secret!"
Su Yan sat in the water, murmuring, "Yes, the Mud Pill Secret. I just need to track where the cave's mysterious power goes inside my body, and I can find the Mud Pill Secret through dragon-seeking. But I have no wounds..."
He thought of this and immediately pointed a finger, piercing his own thigh.
Blood flowed. Su Yan endured the pain, focused his mind, and his spiritual eyes opened. Spiritual awareness manifested.
He pushed open the door and entered his inner world, the realm of subtle perception.
Faint streams of energy seeped into his body from the outside world. This was the mysterious power from the pool.
These streams were drawn toward some mysterious place within him, all flowing in the same direction.
"Exactly as I thought!"
Su Yan's spiritual awareness chased the streams, soaring higher and higher. Past the mountain-sized heart and lungs, still climbing.
He followed the streams through his inner realm, reaching places he had never been before, discovering more of the body's mysteries.
Above him stretched the interior of an impossibly vast pagoda, layer upon layer. On either side rose the towering heart-lung mountains.
His spiritual awareness flew past the heart-lung peaks, through pagoda after pagoda, until a bright light appeared ahead. An enormous lake stretched before him like a sea!
Above the lake, a divine bridge spanned across.
Su Yan followed the streams across the bridge and looked up. A sun of impossible size burned with raging flames in the sky.
Beside it, a moon of equal magnitude cast cold light, the two illuminating each other.
"My body has so many places I've never reached!"
Su Yan's spiritual awareness passed between sun and moon, following the streams upward into an immeasurable expanse of chaos within his mind.
A region of primal chaos in his brain.
His spiritual awareness floated before this chaos. At its center lay a round egg of chaos, impossibly large, suspended in the turbulent energy.
The mysterious power from the pool drilled into this chaos egg and vanished. Then his body's vitality activated, healing his injuries.
"This chaos egg is the Mud Pill Secret, one of the Six Secrets!"
Su Yan steadied himself. The Mud Pill Secret was before him. He had found it without relying on a great nuo master's dragon-seeking technique.
"But finding it is one thing. Opening it is another!"
As Su Yan thought this, the chaos region trembled, ripples spreading outward.
He turned toward the source of the ripples and stared in disbelief.
A large bell had somehow wandered in, swaying drunkenly through the chaos energy. It stopped beside the chaos egg and tried to push it aside. Finding it immovable, the bell settled down.
A deep palm print marked the bell's surface. It was the same bell that had been clattering behind Su Yan.
The bell finally noticed Su Yan's spiritual awareness floating nearby. They stared at each other in dead silence.
The bell silently flew up and out of the brain region.
Su Yan waited. The bell slowly drifted back, found Su Yan's awareness still there, and confirmed it wasn't hallucinating.
"Young man, you're here too?" the bell rang out in a deep voice.
Su Yan's spiritual awareness exploded. "What do you mean 'too'? This is my brain! How did you get in?"
"Through the Jade Pillow point at the back of your head." The bell answered honestly. "Your qi and blood cultivation improved, and my injuries recovered somewhat. Seeing you weren't carrying me, I came in to rest."
Since entering Qinyan Cave, Su Yan's injuries had healed, hidden ailments cured, his qi and blood more robust than ever. The bell had absorbed more of his energy and recovered its mobility early.
It had planned to enter Su Yan's mind to steal more energy for healing. Instead it ran into the owner. Awkward.
Su Yan didn't pursue the matter. "How did you end up near my Mud Pill Secret?"
"This is the Mud Pill Secret?" The bell was surprised. It circled the chaos egg several times, marveling. "No wonder I couldn't move it. I entered through your Jade Pillow point and didn't know this was the Mud Pill Secret."
Su Yan explained how he had tracked the cave's mysterious energy to find it. "The energy enters here, and my body's vitality activates. This must be the Mud Pill Secret."
The bell came from an era before the concept of body secrets existed. It was puzzled. "Mud Pill Palace Grotto Heaven. Why would it have energy that stimulates the Mud Pill Secret? Strange."
Su Yan said, "Grotto heavens have spiritual energy. Isn't that normal?"
The bell snorted. "You think grotto heavens grow like cabbage, everywhere? Grotto heavens are limited in number, each with profound origins. This is an ancient immortal's dwelling, but it cannot possibly be a true grotto heaven. The owner calling it Mud Pill Palace Grotto Heaven was just bragging."
Su Yan pondered. "If this mysterious energy isn't spiritual energy, then it's strange indeed. This power probably isn't naturally formed..."
His eyes suddenly lit up. "I can follow the mysterious energy to find the Mud Pill Secret. I can also follow it backward to find its source!"