Li Tongya descended the mountain, savoring Xiao Chuting's words on the long walk home. He pondered privately:
"What does he mean by that? Even the Xiao family already knows the Tang Gold Gate is marching south, yet the Qingchi Sect sits by and lets them rampage across the Xunlin Plain?"
The thought struck him like a chill, and his heart skipped a beat. He murmured to himself:
"Not good. Once the Wan family is destroyed, the Ji family will have my Li family bottled up in Greater Li Mountain. When the lips are gone, the teeth feel the cold. Xiangping will surely call out the magic mirror to take a hand, and I have no idea how matters have turned. I ought to return home at once."
"But the Xunlin Plain is now ablaze with war on every side. Going around would be a long detour — better to wait two or three days and take the shortest path."
As these worries settled on his brow, a shout broke the air:
"Brother Tongya!"
Li Tongya turned in surprise to see Xiao Yongling hurrying up behind him. Grinning, the young man seized his hand and laughed:
"It's been years, Brother Tongya! How is it you reached the Xiao family without coming to find me? I've been patrolling near that shabby tavern for days without catching sight of either of you."
"By the way, where's Brother Wan?"
Li Tongya let out a soft sigh and answered:
"When I left home, I passed by the Wan family but never saw Wan Yuankai. And I've since heard the Tang Gold Gate is marching south — by now they may well have breached Huagan Mountain. Brother Wan... I fear the worst."
Xiao Yongling's face fell, a faint sadness passing over him. He sighed deeply:
"Alas, fortune and misfortune come to all men unbidden, and the heavens make no man their friend. There is nothing to be done."
As they wandered through the market at the foot of the mountain, Xiao Yongling exchanged a few casual remarks before turning serious:
"I hear Brother Tongya achieved the Jade Capital Wheel years ago and stands only a step from the Spirit-Initial Wheel at the peak of Embryonic Breathing. Have you prepared a Qi-Refining technique, and which spiritual aura do you intend to swallow?"
Li Tongya gave a wry smile and said softly:
"To be honest with you, Brother Xiao, my family owns but a single second-grade technique, the Heavenly Origin Qi-Refining Art, and it too requires swallowing the Small Clear Qi. We have no method of gathering aura of our own, so I expect I'll have to buy the Small Clear Qi from the market. It's something of a headache."
Xiao Yongling was struck speechless. All his life he had counted out the days of his pill-poison and taken his medicines on schedule, forged his own artifacts to his fancy, and chosen his techniques and secret arts at will. Li Tongya's answer went quite beyond the grasp of a young man who had lived his whole life in luxury, and for a moment he could only stare, stunned.
Li Tongya, for his part, gave it no thought. Silently he tallied the year's harvest. After setting aside the two hundred catties owed as tribute, his storage pouch still held more than two hundred and sixty catties of spirit rice and seven White Origin Fruits, worth some four spirit stones in all.
The family's three Wu-tonic silkworms had spun twelve times in the past five years, yielding three bales of silk worth half a spirit stone. As for the Talismanic Art of the Spiritual Nexus that Li Chijing had left behind, Li Tongya had studied it for five years and only just grasped a few of its subtleties, managing a finished piece or two — and he had still never dared commit it to actual talisman paper.
Li Tongya and Li Xiangping managed the household frugally. A single spirit stone bought only thirty sheets of talisman paper, yet talismans at the Embryonic Breathing stage were sold three to a spirit stone, and only if one in ten succeeded did the paper even pay for itself — and that was before counting the cost of spirit ink. Small wonder he dared not draw them freely.
Lost in thought over where he might sell these spirit objects, Li Tongya heard Xiao Yongling speak up beside him, a complicated look on his face:
"That Small Clear Qi usually costs around thirty spirit stones. Have you set aside the spirit stones, Brother Tongya?"
Li Tongya shook his head and smiled:
"I'm in no hurry. The Small Clear Qi is dear — worth as much as my family earns in decades. I'll set the spirit stones aside as I can and see. A man at the Embryonic Breathing stage often lives a hundred and twenty years; I have time."
Xiao Yongling stared at him, then said in a low voice:
"Brother Tongya reached the Jade Capital Wheel at thirty, and Qi Refining is well within reach. Your talent is no small thing — yet your family holds you back... What a pity. Had you been born into a great house, you would surpass Yongling a hundredfold!"
Li Tongya raised an eyebrow, hearing the genuine melancholy in Xiao Yongling's voice, and laughed in good humor:
"Ha ha, what sort of talk is that? The world is hard, and men always huddle together for warmth. Don't look at my Li family's straitened state — it was the savings of a hundred years of our ancestors that bought us this thin thread of a chance to climb into the immortal path. That is no burden my family lays on me; rather, it is my family that made me."
Xiao Yongling nodded, lost in thought, and smiled:
"Yongling has learned well."
Li Tongya shook his head with a smile, let his gaze drift across the stalls, and then turned serious:
"Brother Yongling, these Qi-Refining techniques — what do they cost?"
"Those seven or eight mediocre works for rogue cultivators would cost but a few spirit stones at most; they're sold right on the road here."
Xiao Yongling pointed ahead to the pavilions and explained:
"For a proper technique of the second grade or above, you must visit any of several shops. They will run you anywhere from dozens to a hundred spirit stones or more. Some establishments sell the technique and the spiritual aura together — sparing you the trouble of hunting it down and gathering it — but they charge far more for the convenience."
"Of course, there are also ancient arts and secret methods, whose prices shift without rhyme or reason, sold case by case."
Li Tongya frowned and asked, puzzled:
"Ancient arts and secret methods?"
Xiao Yongling smiled lightly and explained:
"The ten thousand techniques all spring from a single aura. If you cannot find the aura a technique demands, then the technique can never be practiced. As the ages turn and the world changes — a method of gathering aura is lost, or the place that birthed a spiritual aura is destroyed, until some spiritual auras can no longer be found anywhere — many paired techniques lose one of their auras and become useless. Such techniques are called ancient arts."
Seeing Li Tongya listening intently, Xiao Yongling nodded and smiled:
"And there is another kind, called secret methods."
"Certain families or sects inherit some marvel of an ancient art, but with one aura gone they cannot practice it, so they slowly make their way through changes to the technique, substituting another aura, or two, in its place. These are called secret methods."
It dawned on Li Tongya, and he nodded, picking up the thread:
"That's not a bad way of going about it."
Xiao Yongling shook his head, seized by a swelling urge to speak his mind, and continued:
"Techniques patched together by later men are never so reliable as the ones hammered out over thousands of years by their forebears. Such secret methods are a cut weaker than the original, and they're usually riddled with one flaw or another besides. My own Xiao family has a few hired thugs who practice secret methods. Slow cultivation is the least of it — some of them have to be kept alive with medicine pills."
"I see."
Li Tongya nodded at last, and smiled:
"Ancient arts, secret methods, proper techniques — it's all the same to me. My purse is empty, and there's nothing I can buy regardless."
Xiao Yongling shook his head gravely:
"Don't sell yourself short, Brother Tongya. Your younger brother in the sect has talent beyond compare, and within the clan you hold the household together with your thrift. Within a few years, the name of this Li family of Lijing will ring throughout the Ancient Li Road."
Li Tongya shook his head with a wry smile and returned a few modest pleasantries, all the while thinking to himself:
"The Qingchi Sect moves in strange and sinister ways. Much about the ambush on the Immortal Estate heir remains shrouded in secrecy. I can only hope Chijing stays safe within the sect and never gets drawn into those whirlpools."