Chapter 17: The Rules of the Fangcun Space
"That woman." Fang Xun's eyes went a burning red, an uncontrollable killing intent surging up behind them.
"Go capture her at once!"
"This..." Wu Kuang's face fell into a complicated wince. He hesitated.
He glanced at Fang Xun, who was hovering at the edge of an eruption, swallowed, and reported with considerable trepidation. "My lord, ever since Yu Niang entered the city, she has been telling everyone she encounters that she is carrying your child. At this point the matter has likely spread through the entire county."
The sound that went through Fang Xun's head was somewhere between a thunderclap and the ringing of a bell. His vision darkened at the edges. In a burst of furious, uncontained rage, he brought his hand across Wu Kuang's face with full force.
The blow sent the unprepared Wu Kuang stumbling, nearly pitching him to the ground.
"You useless wretch, why didn't you stop her!"
Wu Kuang held his face, brimming with aggrieved misery. "This... who would dare lay hands on her? She's carrying a child, if the men were too rough and something happened to your bloodline, my lord—"
Bang.
Fang Xun, in his fury, drove a kick into Wu Kuang that sent him sprawling, cutting him off mid-sentence.
"What do you mean 'my bloodline'?! The last time I saw that woman was barely a month ago and her stomach was flat. How in the world would she be showing already?!"
At that, Fang Xun's voice cut off sharply.
Something had occurred to him. The rage drained out of him as swiftly as it had risen, replaced by a sudden, cold clarity.
After a long silence, Fang Xun ground out the words through clenched teeth: "Yin-Yang secret technique, accumulating essence within the body, releasing it at a chosen time. I underestimated this woman."
Fang Xun drew a slow, deep breath and closed his eyes.
He suddenly realized, perhaps because of the intoxicating speed at which he'd risen or the imminent return to the Holy Capital that had loomed so tantalizingly close that he had, in recent days truly lost himself. The composure and caution that had been hammered into him through years of navigating the dangerous lower tiers of officialdom had quietly evaporated without his noticing. His emotions had become volatile and easily roused. And worst of all blinded by desire, he had dared to set his sights on the utterly unreachable Changle Marquis.
Yu Niang's reappearance was a bucket of ice water over the head, dragging him back to earth.
In this moment, he had no capacity left for thoughts of cultivating the Marquis's favor or leveraging her connections for greater advancement.
"Until the transfer order arrives next spring, my reputation must not carry a single blemish. The promotion cannot afford even the smallest complication. If it does… Twenty-seven years of waiting, and the hope that finally came within reach, would be shattered in one stroke.
"And my teacher would never forgive me for it."
A long while passed. Fang Xun opened his eyes again. The air around him had settled back into its characteristic dark, unruffled stillness.
He gave each word its own weight, biting them out one at a time: "Go and invite Yu Niang inside the residence. And treat her well."
Wu Kuang bore his pain in silence, bowed his head, and went to carry out his orders.
Yu Niang's pregnant appearance had, predictably, created no small commotion in Lengshan County.
Li Shun had naturally taken note of it as well.
"This woman is still alive? She disappeared for over half a month straight, I'd assumed Fang Xun had already had her silenced.
"And now she's shown herself so openly, deliberately stirring up a storm across the whole county. What on earth is she thinking?
"Surely she doesn't naively believe that having his child in her belly will stop Fang Xun from moving against her?"
He turned it over from every angle for a long while and ultimately could not make sense of it. Since he couldn't, he set it aside.
He gathered all his attention back and concentrated it on the new region within the [Fangcun] space, the one that had very nearly finished taking shape.
After days and nights of relentless, exhausting labor, the new region had at last fully emerged from its intangible state and solidified into reality.
Li Shun also noticed that the white mist at the edge of the space, which had been churning as violently as a storm-wracked sea, was diminishing in intensity, its fluctuations growing smaller, and pushing against it with his spirit sense had become increasingly difficult and unyielding.
"The expansion is approaching its current limit." A clear understanding settled in his mind.
"I still don't know what factor governs the changes in this white mist."
When the last section of the new region was finally opened, the surrounding mist hardened once more into something that felt entirely solid. It became again the impassable barrier it had been before, forcing back Li Shun's probing consciousness each time he tested it.
Li Shun's awareness hovered in the air and gazed quietly at this newly born fourth region of the [Fangcun] space.
It existed at the periphery, beyond the three core regions at the center.
While the four regions were all connected to one another, this newest one occupied a clearly subordinate tier.
That said, in terms of sheer size, it was roughly comparable to the other three.
As Li Shun's spirit sense drifted through the new region, a great deal of ancient and obscure information rose unbidden in his mind.
"Now that the Fangcun space has been expanded, from this day forward this new territory may serve, like the three before it, to hold persons and store objects.
"The rules for taking living people into the Fangcun space and forging them into puppets divide into two methods, 'Voluntary' and 'Involuntary'."
"The Voluntary method requires that the person enter the Fangcun space of their own free will, with no resistance whatsoever. Furthermore, the process of taking them in is not instantaneous, it is prolonged, like watching oneself sink slowly from the surface of a lake into a bottomless abyss. Throughout this entire process, the person being taken in must not resist in any way. Any resistance breaks the process entirely."
Li Shun's brow furrowed deeply. "The conditions are almost impossibly strict. In reality, this would be almost impossible to achieve.
"The Involuntary method, however, is considerably simpler.
"I need only kill someone with my own hands in the outside world. In the instant of their death, the moment their body and remnant soul are extinguished, I may forcibly draw the remains and the residual consciousness into the Fangcun space and forge them into a puppet."
With the information organized, Li Shun's gaze moved slowly across the three puppets that had been standing within the space from the beginning, and understanding settled in his mind.
In truth, he had been puzzled from the very start by the origin of those three original puppets.
Setting aside the two ancient, crumbling, mysterious stone statues for the moment, why would the Fangcun space contain a puppet [Li Shun] that was an exact replica of his current physical body in the outside world?
He had harbored a quiet suspicion about it for some time. But he had no way to confirm it.
Until today, when he had opened the new region himself and come to understand the laws governing puppet acquisition did that suspicion finally find its answer.
"I arrived by crossing over and displacing the original body. Is that not, in essence, killing him? And so, [Li Shun] appears in the Fangcun space as a puppet. Which means [Li Shun] is the first and up to now, the only person I have ever killed."
Li Shun stared at the shape of the puppet, currently encased in a temporary seal because it was out digging the escape tunnel, and found that it stirred very little emotion in him.
"As for the other two, the stone statues of unknown origin..."
"Perhaps they entered the Fangcun space voluntarily."
Li Shun's eyes moved with quiet thought. "Which means I must have possessed this [Fangcun] space before I crossed over and inhabited Li Shun's body. Whatever happened in the moment of crossing, that led to me arriving with such a treasure, and encountering these two statues..."
No matter how hard he searched his mind, he could recover no memory of it whatsoever. He let the question rest for now.
"Additionally, since the first two reflections of a Self-Reflection cycle are effectively unrealized, killing someone during those passes cannot successfully result in acquiring a puppet. Only in the third reflection does the condition for acquisition become truly fulfillable."
On this point, Li Shun had long since prepared himself. Based on his experience from past reversals, no physical object acquired in the first two passes could be retained within the Fangcun space.
Only intangible information could persist.
"The new region is open but the choice of subject for the new puppet remains unsettled.
"For one thing, the selection must be made with extreme care. I currently have only this one slot. Whoever fills it should ideally be of the greatest possible help in transforming my current circumstances.
"For another, convincing someone to willingly become my puppet is essentially impossible. And the Involuntary method...
"In reality, I am as weak as a man who cannot tie a chicken. Those I could kill would be of no use to me. Those who would be of use to me, I have no means of killing.
"It seems the only path forward is, once again, something like the approach I used to obtain the Lengshan Vessel… Fish in troubled waters. Pluck the chestnut from the fire."
Li Shun's thoughts churned on, for a long while finding no rest.
...