Chapter 20: Extreme yin Transforms into True Gold
The attendant caught herself and said no more.
Li Shun, as though he had noticed nothing, continued rambling on. "You may not know this, without the nourishment of blood essence, Lengshan Grass depends on the cold radiance of the yin moon to grow. So the closer to the surface, the more plentiful the Lengshan Grass should be. There's no earthly reason to go deeper underground—"
"Will you stop!" The attendant snapped, cutting him off.
She stared at him for a long considering moment then took a deep breath and made her decision.
Without another word, she bent down, grabbed the startled Li Shun, and hoisted him onto her back. Then, moving swift as a bolt of light, she launched herself along the steep shaft of the mine passage and shot straight down into the darkness below.
"Oh, oh dear, young lady this really isn't necessary, you'll embarrass this old man completely—" Li Shun yelped but his arms wrapped themselves firmly around the attendant's neck with quite natural ease, and showed absolutely no sign of loosening.
He did notice, however, that with each step the attendant took, he was being carried further and further underground. A weight settled quietly in his eyes.
Within the Fangcun space,
The seal on the brocade case had been broken open some days earlier. What floated inside, suspended in midair as though weightless, was a translucent plant radiating a soft silver luminescence like a miniature crescent moon, hanging still and quiet.
Around it, the Lengshan Grass plants still remaining in the space bowed their heads, as though receiving the arrival of their sovereign.
"The Lengshan Vessel..."
Small wonder it was called a once-in-a-century rarity. Li Shun had only brought his spirit sense close to it, and already a tide of utterly pure, crystalline clarity was flooding through his entire being.
The strength of his spirit sense seemed to be growing by fine, continuous degrees, his mind felt clearer than it had ever been, and the speed at which his thoughts moved was several times what it had been before.
More significantly, as Li Shun's primary consciousness continued absorbing the emanations of the Lengshan Vessel, he found himself growing increasingly sensitive to something wrong about this underground mine.
"There seems to be a pervasive cold and yin quality here. Not cold in any ordinary, physical sense, but rather...
"As though some vast and enormous presence is lurking in the darkness, watching everything that dares to enter."
The very instant this thought formed in Li Shun's mind, he felt the cold energy around him stir, as though it had come alive and turn to look directly at him.
The cold entered his body. Even shielded by the Langhuan Flame-Robe, which radiated a continuous warmth, Li Shun found it increasingly difficult to resist.
His body temperature dropped sharply.
The attendant, still carrying Li Shun and moving at speed, noticed immediately that something was wrong. She skidded to a stop and turned her head. "What's the matter?"
"You-young lady... you don't feel it? This... this wretched place is... rather cold, wouldn't you say..." Li Shun chattered through chattering teeth.
The attendant's brow furrowed sharply. She had no choice but to halt. She set the shivering Li Shun down on the ground.
She scanned the surrounding passage with wary eyes. A moment later, a look of genuine seriousness settled over her fine features as well.
After a brief hesitation, she reached into her robes and produced a small medicinal pill, which she had Li Shun swallow.
The effect was immediate, a ball of fire seemed to ignite in Li Shun's stomach, spreading outward through his body in an instant. The cold retreated, and a fine layer of sweat even broke out across his forehead.
Seeing Li Shun stabilize, the attendant hoisted him onto her back again and plunged straight back on into the darkness below without a backward glance.
"If you sense any Lengshan Grass in the vicinity, call out," she instructed.
"Young lady, are we still going deeper? What on earth is down there...
"The young lady saved my life just now, for which I am extremely grateful. I don't suppose I might ask the young lady's name? On some future occasion this old man would absolutely want to repay the kindness..."
Despite Li Shun's steady stream of distractions, attempts to derail the conversation, and general chatter aimed at slowing his escort's pace—
She paid every word exactly no attention.
And so, inevitably, they went deeper.
The cold intensified with every step. Even the Langhuan Flame-Robe which had been shedding its red light steadily before, now had that glow pressed down to almost nothing, as though it were a candle in a gale, moments from going out entirely.
More importantly, in the darkness around him, Li Shun caught an energy signature that was intimately familiar, extraordinarily similar to that of the [Lengshan Vessel].
The same origin. But somehow this presence felt somewhat weaker than the one in the Fangcun space.
"Stop!"
After a moment's deliberation, Li Shun called out and had the attendant halt.
"That way!"
Following Li Shun's pointed direction, the attendant wound through the passages. Before long, at the dead end of one shaft, a burst of blue light came quietly into bloom.
Its source was a plant similar to Lengshan Grass but five or six times its size.
"This is... extraordinary! How can there possibly be such an enormous Lengshan Grass!" Li Shun exclaimed with great theatrical astonishment.
"That is a Lengshan Vessel-Grass. One in every hundred thousand Lengshan Grass plants mutates to become one. It is worth considerably less than the Lengshan Vessel itself, but far more than an ordinary Lengshan Grass stalk." The attendant supplied the explanation.
Oddly, however, her attention did not linger on the Lengshan Vessel-Grass. Her eyes moved instead in careful, methodical sweeps across the stone walls of the surrounding shaft.
A moment later, she appeared to find what she was looking for. A quiet look of satisfaction crossed her features.
She was just about to hoist Li Shun back up and move on when Li Shun carefully raised a hand and pointed at the Lengshan Vessel-Grass ahead. "Young lady, might this old man be permitted to pick that?
"I've cultivated Lengshan Grass my entire life and never once seen anything like it. Truly, terribly tempting..."
The attendant had not intended to invite any complications. But catching Li Shun's expression, the picture of sincere guileless longing, she hesitated briefly and gave a small nod.
Li Shun beamed cheerfully and brought out the agricultural Soul-Splitting Transformation Art technique, carefully harvesting the Lengshan Vessel-Grass and stowing it away.
The two then continued on their way.
Li Shun caught the faint signature of several more Lengshan Vessel-Grass plants as they traveled and said nothing about any of them.
He let the attendant carry him wherever she was headed.
She appeared to know the layout of this underground mine system through some method Li Shun couldn't account for, navigating directly toward her destination without a single moment's uncertainty.
When they neared what appeared to be the endpoint, she came to a sudden halt.
"Come." She set Li Shun down and murmured for him to follow.
Li Shun nodded and shuffled along after her, hunched over in the dark.
Ahead was a narrow passage faintly radiating a pale cyan light.
"It should be here."
The attendant seemed uncertain and yet, for reasons she couldn't quite explain, unwilling to go further herself.
She settled in to wait patiently for the others.
About half a day later, five other attendants arrived in succession.
The six of them exchanged glances. Something seemed to be confirmed among them.
They transmitted the information to the Changle Marquis.
Within barely half the time it takes to drink a cup of tea, the Changle Marquis had arrived from the surface.
She looked at the passageway ahead, its depths shimmering with that cyan glow and then looked at the ring of laborers standing around her, fear evident in their eyes. She waved a hand. "Take them back. Seal this location. No one is to enter, not a single step."
The attendants acknowledged the order in unison and immediately began escorting the laborers back the way they had come.
The Changle Marquis went forward alone, stepping into the dark passage.
With every step deeper, the cold, the kind that stripped away life itself, grew more savage.
Every surface within sight, the floor underfoot, the stone walls on either side, was sealed beneath layer upon layer of ice.
Yet the Changle Marquis showed not the slightest hesitation. She walked across the frozen ground, step by deliberate step, until she arrived at the innermost heart of the mine.
There, suspended motionless in midair, was a blurred and nearly transparent silhouette of pale cyan, barely perceptible, almost as though it weren't there at all.
It had the look of something lost in a distant memory, staring blankly at nothing ahead of it. It showed not the slightest awareness of the Changle Marquis's uninvited arrival.
She looked at that pale cyan shape ahead, and a trace of reverence crossed her eyes.
Then she continued forward, step by careful step.
The nearer she drew to the cyan figure, the more unbearable the cold became. Gradually, even her level of cultivation began to struggle against it. Frost gathered at her brows and lashes, and her body began to tremble beyond her control.
When she reached the absolute limit of what she could endure, the Changle Marquis finally stopped.
She knelt heavily on the frozen ground.
"Your unworthy descendant, Si Zhanqing, pays her respects to the ancestor."
The cyan figure remained utterly unmoved.
After a long silence, Si Zhanqing rose.
The sorrow that had been in her eyes had dissolved. In its place was a faint, quiet resolution.
"The yin energy here should be sufficient."
Unconcerned by the bone-deep cold of the ground, Si Zhanqing sat cross-legged on the ice. From her robes she withdrew a small gourd of pale cyan color.
The gourd hovered in the air before her. Si Zhanqing began to chant.
"The Nine-Abyss Earth Veins, the Grand yin descends.
Steal the workings, seize the mechanism, secretly accord with heaven's heart.
Condense the void into substance, transmute breath into silver.
Clear and manifest the Five Elements — from extreme yin, gold is born!"
As the chant rose from Si Zhanqing's lips, the air around her began to vibrate in slow, concentric waves.
Like drops of water forming, falling.
And then the drops came faster and faster, until they were a downpour.
A single droplet of liquid gold, blazing with its own light, was born within that rain.
It fell into the pale cyan gourd waiting below.
And then another. And another.
One by one, without cease.
...
Three days later.
Si Zhanqing returned to the surface, her harvest was complete, and made her way back to Lengshan County.
The pervasive yin chill that had long blanketed Lengshan began, quietly and imperceptibly, to thin and dissipate.
"Congratulations to the Changle Marquis on achieving what you came for!" County Magistrate Fang Xun read the situation with practiced precision and bowed deeply in congratulation.
Then, with studied subtlety, he ventured a probe: "Marquis, as for those laborers, should they perhaps be..."