Tears of the Soaring Dragon, page 23
part #4 of Condemning the Heavens Series
"Could this have something to do with the dragon spirit?" Xue Wei focused his gaze inwards.
The Azure Dragon Spirit hovered over the middle of his dantian cave. Every time the Qi dragons passed by it, they would shiver in fear and lower their heads with respect.
It was clear that the tiny dragons that his Qi manifested were fearful of the Azure Dragon Spirit, but Xue Wei had no idea what it was on a fundamental level. He just knew that strange things had happened to him since it had hatched.
He had tried to communicate with the spirit, but it was the same as speaking to a baby. The spirit would react and look at him cutely and said a lot of strange noises. It would even leave the dantian and exit his body, rub its head against his hand, and in every other way display its love towards him, but he could not understand anything it said.
"I really need to speak with that phony prophet," Xue Wei muttered with a sigh. "He seemed to know something about the Azure Dragon Scripture, so he should be able to help me."
There was one other person who could provide him with answers to this problem, but Xue Wei was not in the mood to think about him.
Although Xiao Lei had been his most important person for five years, Xue Wei’s thoughts became muddled whenever he thought about him now.
He could not forget the image of his uncle, who he looked up to more than anyone else, killing his father right in front of him.
Deep inside, he hoped that there was some sort of reason behind it, but no matter what the reason was, Xue Wei only had positive memories of his father. And while all signs pointed at there being an actual reason for it, could he still really forgive his uncle?
Sighing, Xue Wei stood up. His body was sore all over and even creaked slightly as he moved, but he felt much better after stretching a little
He glanced around the room, wondering what the third trial would be. Nothing had happened when he had entered and taken the pill, so Xue Wei stepped further into the room.
After taking a few steps into the room, he felt the now somewhat familiar fluctuations of Qi again, and soon afterward a voice appeared in the chamber.
"Welcome and congratulations on completing the second trial. The third room is a test on whether or not you have what it takes to become my inheritor."
"As you might have noticed, I, the Moon Prince, am a specialist in formations. I wish to hand down my inheritance, but to do so I need to know if you are capable of becoming a formation master."
"Many of my skills depend on formations, and to become my successor, you need to have a talent for formations."
"I expect someone from your group to understand formations rather well. Otherwise, it will be challenging to enter my grave, but some of you might also be complete novices."
"But even novices can prove to be talented. I am willing to test you out and see whether or not you have a soul that is strong enough to become a formation master."
"Stand in the middle of the room, and a formation I have left behind will release a light beam that will enter between your eyebrows."
"This formation will test your spiritual energy, or as it is also called, soul power."
"Formations are inscribed with spiritual energy, and one needs a strong soul to be able to handle them."
Xue Wei listened with great interest. He had to admit that these formations were intriguing. He was not at all versed in the art – or any art for that matter, whether it was about pill-making or weapon-refinement – but he was very curious about it.
He stepped towards the middle of the room with a slightly quickened gait. And just as the voice had said, a light beam suddenly tore off from the ceiling and pierced his forehead faster than he could react.
The light that had entered his forehead established a strange connection with his soul. The spiritual energy that laid dormant in his mind started to flow out, and merged with the light pillar.
Xue Wei frowned. He was not comfortable with this sudden loss of control over his own powers, but he could feel that it was merely a test to check whether or not he had enough spiritual energy to pass the test.
"Gou won't pass this one," Xue Wei muttered. "I don't know if Xiaoyun could pass the first trial… and if she could, will she have enough spiritual energy to become a formation master?"
"I don't need to worry about Tianyi," he continued to muse. "He is as shrewd as a wily old fox, and besides, his body is made of soul energy. He should have passed the third room already."
By the time he was done thinking about the others, his spiritual energy finished merging itself with the light pillar.
The pillar had turned milky white and shone with the luster of a pearl. It was beautiful.
Moments after, Xue Wei’s spiritual energy returned to its place, and the light pillar vanished.
The door to the fourth room swung open when the final light vanished from the beam, and Xue Wei could once again move. He entered the fourth room and looked around.
A small table was next to him. There was a jade slip on it. He picked it up and placed it on his forehead. A little light shone, and information was transferred into his mind.
What he received were multiple formation symbols and the methods on how to inscribe them. There were passive formations like the one the Moon Prince was using to communicate with him, active formations that could be used in battles, and formations that could be used for protection.
Although these formations needed to be engraved first, they provided significant advantages in a battle. Xue Wei was very eager at this prospect.
However, he neither had time nor the practice required to test out his new toys. He still had a couple trials left to clear.
The fourth room was different from the others. There was a large table in the middle. A jade slip lay at rest atop a stack of small rocks.
The Moon Prince’s voice did not appear this time, only the jade slip and the stones were present.
Without overthinking, Xue Wei lifted the jade slip up to his forehead. A brilliant light shone as the information within embedded itself into his mind.
The jade slip’s content explained in detail about how Xue Wei should inscribe the simplest of all formations. The formation was called a Spiritual Energy Bomb.
It was a formation that gathered spiritual energy for an eventual self-destruction phase where even the inscription itself was burned as fuel for the coming explosion.
The task was simple. The door leading to the next room had a hole that perfectly fitted one of the small stones, and even Xue Wei could guess what was expected of him.
He picked up a stone. Closing his eyes, he willed his spiritual energy to leave his body from between his eyebrows and directed it to hover over the stone. Here, it took the shape of a small carving knife.
The symbols Xue Wei needed to engrave on the stone manifested as clear visualizations in his head, so he started the process right away.
However, he soon found that it was harder than expected. He needed perfect control over his spiritual energy to do it. It was like calligraphy; some strokes for the runes had to be thick, others had to be thin. Although they were different, they had to flow together in harmony.
It was in no way an easy feat, and the first stone exploded before he could even engrave the first rune out of three.
Formations could be established in different ways, through different mediums. They could be engraved onto things, or drawn onto others. The medium on which it was done and the method of ‘engravement’, whether it was carving the runes onto wood or as ink on paper, always resulted in the same formations if the runes were identical, but most formation users preferred engraving the formations on more readily available things like rock.
First of all, in most cases, it was harder to destroy an engravement. In comparison, it was easy to destroy a piece of cloth or paper. A third option was to carry around talismans that allowed the user to set up a quick formation on the go, though these were rather fickle.
Xue Wei had understood that when the jade slip taught him how to set up the formation. And he was alone in the room. He was not given any tools to draw, so carving seemed to be the simplest and only way to make a formation.
Time slowly trickled by; hour after hour passed with intermittent interruptions of the dead silence that pervaded the room whenever the stones exploded in Xue Wei’s hand. He was not exceptionally skilled in formation-making just yet, but he was making progress.
At the start, he had been incapable of even finishing the first rune, but now he could even make two runes and work on the third one.
The first rune caused him no more problems – he was a master at engraving it by now – and the second one was also under his control, but the third was challenging.
However, Xue Wei had forgotten his surroundings and his physical condition shortly after starting the endeavor. He did not notice that his hair had become disheveled, and that his clothes were messy and that the dust from the many explosions were sprinkled all over him. His eyes glistened the more he engraved, his hands moving with greater proficiency each time.
Finally, after a whole day, he succeeded at engraving the very first formation of his life. He ran like a triumphant kid towards the door into the fifth room and jammed the stone into the socket.
Then he stepped away and channeled a flow of Qi that looked like an Azure Dragon towards the stone to activate it.
The moment the dragon touched the stone, all he saw was a white flash, followed by a loud explosion. Although the other unfinished rocks had also self-destructed mid-creation prior to success, their explosions had seemed like mild tremors compared to this one.
The force behind it was so overwhelming that Xue Wei was propelled backward from the shockwave, slamming into the wall at the back. He was stunned. The Spiritual Energy Bomb’s power had exceeded his expectations by far!
Chapter 35 - Months of Trials
After the explosion, Xue Wei stood back up. He dusted off his clothes and looked at the door.
Although the explosion had been rather violent, it was not enough to destroy the door. Instead, it did just enough to trigger its unlocking mechanism.
Xue Wei thought about making a few more Spiritual Energy Bombs to blast his way through the other doors, but he quickly discarded the idea when he saw how resilient the door was and continued into the next room.
"Welcome to the fifth room of the trials." The very moment Xue Wei entered the room, the Moon Prince’s voice emerged before he could even look at his reward from clearing the fourth trial. He focused his attention towards this voice.
"If you pass the trial in the fifth room, then you will have made it halfway towards my grave. This in itself is no easy accomplishment, and thus the reward for passing the fifth trial will be my notes on formations."
"The reason I am telling you this already now is that I want you to understand one thing.
“I have given out bits and pieces of my legacy up until now because I do not wish for the art of formations to disappear. Even in my time, the interest in formations has been slowly diminishing. Although they are useful, no one is willing to spend the time needed to learn the way of formations, and not many can see the usefulness in cultivating their spiritual energy."
“I need someone who is willing to accept my legacy, but a big part of my legacy revolves around the creation of formations, and I wish that my successor shares my passion for them.”
Xue Wei had already understood this much, but he still listened intently.
"The trials from this point onwards, apart from the tenth, will all be about formations. Only those who manage to understand my formation techniques can hope to understand my legacy!"
Xue Wei acknowledged that this Moon Prince was obsessed with formations. It was clear that formations were much more important to him than even his martial art techniques and that the legacy he truly wished to pass down was his accumulated knowledge of formations.
The fifth trial required him to set up a Qi Gathering Formation, which was a step above the previous trial’s difficulty.
The concept of a Qi Gathering Formation was to attract a wide radius of heaven-and-earth essence from the surroundings to create a zone of high-density energy for accelerated cultivation.
This formation required a full seven runes. Unlike in the previous trial, they were not given stones to engrave their formation on. Instead, they were given papers, lots of them, alongside a pen and ink.
From the amount of papers that were stacked up on the table, it was clear that the Moon Prince had taken a lot of precautions in case the candidates taking his test repeatedly fail to compose the runes. The Moon Prince was aware of how difficult the beginning of formation creation was. A lot of materials had been placed in the test room as a result.
Xue Wei began his first attempt at writing the inscription for the first rune, but he found, much to his dismay, that his control over the pen had rusted over the years. He had been taught calligraphy early on, but he had not dabbled in it for years. Although he was capable of writing it, the runes did not come out as well as he wanted them to.
Xue Wei sighed. He had to refresh old muscles, so he repeatedly drew the different runes that the Moon Prince had taught him through the jade slips until he got the hang of it. This took him a full day, but he could not tell, as day-night cycles did not exist inside the grave. All light came from small light-orbs, and it was impossible to see what time of the day it was or how much time had passed.
Xue Wei had already lost track of time as he immersed himself in the art of inscribing formations.
In another place inside the grave, Wang Xiaoyun stared at a closed door with mixed emotions on her face. She had failed the very first trial. Not because she lacked willpower, but because what she had gone through was simply far too cruel for her to overcome without provoking the heart demon inside her.
Since she had failed the first trial, she had returned to the front room of the grave – the place where they had split up.
A day had gone by in a flash, and Hei Gou was the next person to appear. He had failed the trial of spiritual energy.
Although he had more spiritual energy than the average of his kin, he was still from a family of beasts that specialized in brute strength, so he was ill-equipped for the task.
When he entered the front room, he spotted Wang Xiaoyun. She had been diligently meditating since failing the first trial.
She had no time to waste. She was chasing after the Ice Harpy, but knew that she was currently too weak, so she squeezed every moment dry for cultivation.
However, Hei Gou’s movements woke her up from her meditative trance. Her eye shone dangerously, and she slowly stood up. She was swathed in an oppressive air, and her one eye gleamed with madness.
"It is all because of beasts like you!" she growled. Then she opened her hand, producing the green fan as if performing a magic trick.
"Hey, cut it out!" Hei Gou yelled with surprise and irritation. "If you kill me, then Wei won't look at you again!" he exclaimed angrily.
These words seemed to reach Wang Xiaoyun.
The murderous air around her decreased a bit, and her face turned sour. "I just have to make sure he doesn’t find out who did it!" She sneered at him, but Hei Gou snickered. "Do you think Wei is dumb?" he asked mockingly.
"The last trial I faced was focused on spiritual energy; it’s obvious these trials are not designed to test our survivability. The trials are meant for those who dabble in formations, so we won’t die no matter how problematic they are! So what excuse would you use? That I just vanished into thin air? Do you really think he will believe you?"
The more Hei Gou spoke, the more the killing intent deflated. The madness in Wang Xiaoyun's eye also faded.
Hei Gou had no favorable impression of Wang Xiaoyun. He regarded her as a walking time bomb that was ready to kill him at any moment, so his only option was to be on constant alert around her. No one knew when she would have another fit of madness and make an attempt on his life.
While Wang Xiaoyun and Hei Gou managed to come to a truce and opted to find their respective corners in the front room to cultivate, Bai Tianyi was breezing through the trials.
He was a creature made of souls, and he had previous experience with formations. Creating all of these beginners formations was as simple as breathing to him, and he quickly reached the tenth trial.
The tenth trial was exactly as the Moon Prince had said; it was a trial that did not care about formations and spiritual energy. It tested only one’s physical strength.
"I ought to wait here for a month or two," Bai Tianyi said as he looked at the empty room. He had not triggered the tenth trial yet, and he was not interested in getting the legacy of the Moon Prince. He knew that Xue Wei needed it much more than him.
