"Old Bell shows his cowardice beautifully! After all, he is a bell thousands of years old—he has learned to live wisely!"
Xu Ying secretly commended the great bell for its broad-mindedness, thinking: "The female ghost knows the master of Qinyan Cave? Then her visit this time was not to kill us, but to mourn an old friend."
He blinked. "What did she mean by calling this place a place of ascension? And what are Cangwu and the Undying Immortal?"
From inside the palace, the girl’s voice drifted, ethereal as though from high in the clouds: "Are you alive or dead? If you live, where have you gone? I have searched the whole Divine Land—why can I not find a trace of you?"
She stepped into the black coffin. The lid closed, and with chains trailing she soared out of the white jade palace and away from Qinyan Cave, leaving only a sorrowful echo behind.
"Did you ascend, or did you pass on? Why, after three thousand years, do I alone remain in the world…"
Xu Ying breathed a sigh of relief. Had the coffin girl been more observant, she would have spotted the great bell sinking to the bottom, and in her fury she might have destroyed both the Demon King Xu and the Ox Demon King on the spot.
Suddenly he remembered the bell and scrambled to fish it out.
But the bell seemed to have a mind of its own, sinking to the bottom with a glug and refusing to surface no matter how he tried.
Xu Ying tried several times without success, and irritation flared: "If you are so capable, go fight the female ghost yourself—bullying me proves nothing!"
The bell, too cowardly to challenge the coffin girl, rose from the water and drenched Xu Ying with the water sloshing inside it.
This effort seemed to exhaust its last reserves of strength, and it plunged back down, clanging after Xu Ying’s heels.
Xu Ying let it go. He stimulated his blood and qi to evaporate the water from his clothes and followed Yuan Qi toward the white jade palace.
Before the palace, Xu Ying stopped and looked up.
Above the entrance, five characters were carved—unlike any script in the modern world. They looked like tadpoles squirming through mud, or like bird-claw marks scratched across snow.
Yuan Qi said, "Don’t bother. My family has looked at these characters for three generations without ever recognizing them. I don’t even know what this place is called."
Xu Ying’s expression turned strange. "They say: Mud-Pellet Palace Heaven-Domain."
Yuan Qi looked at him, startled: "You can read this script?"
He was astonished. Three generations of the Ox family had been avid readers, steeped in scholarship, and yet none had ever deciphered the inscription. Xu Ying was a commoner—how could he read such characters?
Xu Ying’s gaze was odd. "I have never seen this script before, yet somehow, the moment I look at it, I know what it says and how to read it. As though…"
He frowned. As though the characters had been etched into his brain long ago.
Yet he racked his memory and was certain he had never learned or seen this writing.
Yuan Qi, puzzled, thought of Xu Ying’s strange episodes and asked: "A-Ying, have you ever lost your memory?"
Xu Ying laughed aloud: "I have never lost my memory! How could I? My memory is crystal clear—I can even recall being ten months old!"
His heart ached dully. He could remember every detail of the fire at Xu Family Terrace—even the moment his parents perished in the flames.
He wanted to forget that memory, but he never could.
Yuan Qi blinked, thinking: "He can’t even remember his parents’ names correctly—his memory is hardly reliable. Could someone have damaged his brain before?"
The great bell rolled across the floor, equally skeptical of Xu Ying’s recollections.
Xu Ying studied the strange characters above the entrance and felt a stir. He drew out the Mud-Pellet Hidden-Vision Qi-Refining Art, then looked up at the inscription again. "Mud-Pellet Palace Heaven-Domain and the Mud-Pellet Hidden-Vision Qi-Refining Art—both contain Mud-Pellet. Is there a connection?"
The Mud-Pellet Secret Treasury was one of the six Hidden Gates of the Body. Opening any one of them made one a Nuo Shaman. And the secret treasury mastered by the Nuo family known as the Zhou was the Mud-Pellet.
The Mud-Pellet Secret Treasury’s pull on Xu Ying was becoming an obsession.
Yuan Qi called from inside, urging him to enter. Xu Ying gathered his thoughts and stepped into the palace. Inside, shelves lined every wall, filled with neatly arranged books.
Yuan Qi had always claimed to be from a literary family with a deep scholarly tradition, and here was the proof.
"My Ox family has lived here for over three hundred years and collected countless ancient texts," Yuan Qi said proudly. "Every ancient book that could be found in Lingling is here—I have read them all."
Xu Ying felt both admiration and a pang of shame. Compared to this snake demon, he was woefully uneducated.
Suddenly Yuan Qi’s expression changed. "A-Ying, I feel my blood and qi surging into transformative force—I may be about to take human form!"
His vision blurred. Dead skin clung to his pupils, turning them white—the unmistakable sign of metamorphosis.
Yuan Qi darted into a chamber within the palace. "While I am in seclusion, do not wander. Wuwang Mountain has become Wuwang, and I no longer know the geography."
He needed a safe place to shed his old skin and complete the transformation. If he delayed, he might suffocate inside the dead shell.
Xu Ying stood before the jade disc and looked up.
The coffin girl had stood in this very spot, gazing at the disc and mourning a friend.
Carved into the disc was a mountain of extraordinary majesty—sheer cliffs soaring into the clouds, towering over all others in the world.
As a snake catcher, Xu Ying had roamed everywhere, every mountain in the land—yet he had never seen the mountain depicted on the disc.
The mountain was too tall, too magnificent. No peak in Lingling could compare. In fact, no mountain in the entire Divine Land could match its grandeur.
Xu Ying murmured softly: "South of Xiao and Xiang, in the depths of Cangwu. Beneath Mount Jiuyi, the Undying Immortal. Could the mountain in the painting be Mount Jiuyi?"
"But Mount Jiuyi is nothing like this high!"
He was thoroughly perplexed. He had visited Mount Jiuyi several times; it was beautiful as a painting, but its height was unremarkable—nothing like the towering peak on the disc.
And yet, if Wuwang Mountain could become Wuwang, then perhaps the true form of Mount Jiuyi was precisely the majestic mountain on the disc.
"What a pity Yuan Qi is in seclusion. Otherwise I would go see Mount Jiuyi."
Xu Ying was weary. He chose a room and settled in. He had been running for his life for days and was bone-tired, but his mind was too alert to sleep. He took a book from a shelf and began to read.
He made it through two or three pages before his head tilted and he drifted into sleep.
He slept for a very long time. When he opened his eyes, his blood and qi were surging with vigor. The strange vital energy in Qinyan Cave continually refined and strengthened the body; after a single night’s rest, his cultivation had advanced noticeably.
"A true blessed land!"
Xu Ying noticed a foul odor on his body—probably the stench of the underworld, clinging to him from his passage through the realm of the dead.
Yuan Qi was still in seclusion and had not emerged.
Xu Ying went outside, stripped naked, and jumped into the pool before the palace.
"Strange—I’m growing a few hairs down here," he muttered, glancing down. "Odd hairs, growing in odd places. I’ll just pull them out."
He scrubbed the grime from his body, touching the old wound sites, then noticed a spirit-grass on the bank and froze.
"No… something is wrong."
He stood as though turned to stone, and after a long moment murmured: "Is the healing force coming from Qinyan Cave’s vital energy, or from my own? Is the mysterious energy in this cave truly vitality?"
He had seen plants surge into wild growth under the influence of vital energy, yet the spirit-grass on the bank had not grown at all.
In other words, the mysterious energy suffusing Qinyan Cave was not true vital energy. The force that had healed the scars on Xu Ying and Yuan Qi did not come from the cave—it came from within themselves.
"Qinyan Cave’s mysterious energy awakens our own vital force and life-activity!"
Xu Ying’s eyes glinted. Where did the body’s vital force and life-activity come from?
"The Mud-Pellet Secret Treasury," he whispered.
The Mud-Pellet Secret Treasury housed the body’s life-activity, and this white jade palace was called the Mud-Pellet Palace. He had sensed a link between the two, and now he understood.
"The mysterious energy of Qinyan Cave can stimulate the Mud-Pellet Secret Treasury!"
He sat in the pool, murmuring to himself: "Yes—the Mud-Pellet Secret Treasury. I only need to trace the path the mysterious energy takes once it enters my body, and I can locate the dragon vein and pinpoint the Mud-Pellet Secret Treasury! But I have no wound…"
He thought for a moment, then jabbed a finger into his own thigh.
Blood streamed from the wound. Xu Ying endured the pain, summoned his focus, and beneath his eyelids divine light shimmered—his spirit sense returned.
He pushed open the gate and entered the Hidden Realm within his body.
In the inner world, faint currents seeped inward from the outside—these were the mysterious energies that had filtered in from the pool. Drawn by some hidden magnet, they all flowed toward the same destination.
"Just as I thought!"
Xu Ying’s spirit sense soared and followed the currents.
He streaked through the Hidden Realm, ascending higher and higher. Past the lungs and heart, shaped like inverted mountain ranges, he flew onward—reaching places he had never explored, discovering new marvels of the body.
Above, the structure resembled the interior of a titanic pagoda, tier upon tier; flanking him on either side were the towering lung-mountains.
He surged past the heart-lung peaks, threading through layer upon layer of the great pagoda, and suddenly a bright glow appeared ahead. He drew close and found a vast celestial lake—an emerald pool of immense scale.
Above the pool, a divine bridge arched across the sky.
Xu Ying was dazzled. He followed the currents across the bridge and looked up to see a sun of unimaginable size hanging in the heavens, blazing with tongues of flame.
Beside it hung a moon of impossible magnitude, radiating cool light that mingled with the sun’s radiance.
"Inside my own body, there are so many places I have never visited!"
Xu Ying passed between the sun and moon, following the currents as they soared upward into an uncharted expanse—a realm of primordial chaos deep within the brain.
His spirit sense hovered before a sea of chaos, and at its center floated a massive, perfectly round egg of chaos, drifting in the void.
The mysterious energy from the pool vanished into this chaotic egg, and in response his body’s life-activity was awakened, healing his wounds.
"Inside this chaotic egg lies the Mud-Pellet Secret Treasury—the first of the six Hidden Gates!"
Xu Ying steadied himself. The Mud-Pellet Secret Treasury lay before him. Without relying on any Great Nuo Shaman to guide him, he had found the treasure on his own.
"But finding it is one thing—opening it is another!"
Even as the thought formed, the chaotic region within his brain trembled and rippled.
He turned toward the source of the ripple and froze.
The great bell had drifted in from somewhere, staggering as though drunk. It floated above the chaos and settled beside the chaotic egg.
The bell nudged the egg, trying to push it aside; finding it immovable, it settled down contentedly.
On the bell’s surface was a deep palm-print—the very bell that had been trailing at Xu Ying’s heels.
The bell finally noticed Xu Ying’s spirit sense hovering nearby. The two regarded each other in silence.
The bell rose without a sound and drifted out of this region of the brain.
Xu Ying waited. The bell returned slowly, and only when it saw the spirit sense still there did it confirm it had not been imagining things.
"Young man, you’re here too?" The bell’s voice rang like the peal of a great bell.
Xu Ying’s spirit sense exploded: "What do you mean ‘you’re here too’? This is my brain! How did you get in?"
"Through the Jade Pillow acupoint at the back of your head."
The bell spoke meekly. "Your blood and qi have grown stronger, and my injuries have recovered somewhat in turn. I noticed you weren’t carrying me, so I came in first to sit for a while."
Since entering Qinyan Cave, Xu Ying’s wounds had healed, his hidden ailments had vanished, and his blood and qi had grown more vigorous than ever. The bell had taken the opportunity to absorb more of his qi to speed its recovery.
It had intended to sneak into his brain and steal more qi to heal, only to run into the owner—awkward indeed.
Xu Ying did not press the matter. "Why were you near the Mud-Pellet Secret Treasury?"
"This is the Mud-Pellet Secret Treasury?" The bell was astonished, circling the chaotic egg several times. "No wonder I couldn’t push it. I entered your brain through the Jade Pillow and had no idea this was the Mud-Pellet Secret Treasury."
Xu Ying explained how he had traced the mysterious energy back to this spot. "The mysterious energy enters here and awakens my body’s life-activity, so this must be the Mud-Pellet Secret Treasury."
In the bell’s era there had been no concept of the body’s hidden gates, and it was puzzled: "Mud-Pellet Palace Heaven-Domain—why would it possess mysterious energy capable of awakening the Mud-Pellet Secret Treasury? How peculiar."
Xu Ying said, "A Heaven-Domain blessed land possessing mysterious spiritual energy—is that not normal?"
The bell sneered: "Do you think Heaven-Domains grow on trees? Each one is rare and has a great history. This may be an ancient sanctum, but it could never be a true Heaven-Domain. The owner calling it the Mud-Pellet Palace Heaven-Domain was merely flattering himself."
Xu Ying considered. "If the mysterious energy in Qinyan Cave is not spiritual energy, then it is strange. This power was probably not formed naturally…"
His eyes lit up. "I can follow the mysterious energy to find the Mud-Pellet Secret Treasury—then I can follow it backward to find the source!"