The Quest for Immortality - Chapter 1127 (Patreon)

Chapter 1127: Twenty-One Patterns and the Dao of Causality

“Kill all the forefathers of the Gray Wolf Sect… every last one of them?” Elder Zhao’s face went pale.

“The forefathers of the Gray Wolf Sect aren’t your forefathers. Shouldn’t make much difference to you, right…” Mo Hua said.

“This…” Elder Zhao’s expression turned bitter.

Because those forefathers would not agree to let him be sect master, this Young Master Mo went and slaughtered the entire ancestral line of the Gray Wolf Sect, then drew a bloody seal for him, “appointing” him as sect master.

Elder Zhao felt that this Young Master Mo had to be joking, yet he could not laugh.

Not only could he not laugh—he was terrified.

If anyone else had said such things, he wouldn’t have believed a word.

But coming from this smiling, unfathomably terrifying Young Master Mo, Elder Zhao did not dare disbelieve.

Except…

“This Young Master Mo is clearly just Foundation Establishment. How can he do so many… deranged things?”

“Is he really just Foundation Establishment?”

Elder Zhao’s heart trembled wildly. Only after a long moment did he realize he was still sprawled on the ground in utter disgrace. Ashamed, he got up, clasped hands to Mo Hua, and said in a voice tinged with reverence:

“Many thanks, Young Master Mo… for granting me the position of sect master.”

At this point, what else could he say?

Mo Hua waved it off. “Sect Master Zhao, you flatter me. I don’t have the ability to ‘grant’ anyone a sect master’s seat. All of this—you earned it yourself. I merely gave you a little… ‘insignificant’ help.”

Elder Zhao could only smile bitterly.

“Right, I should be calling you Sect Master Zhao now, shouldn’t I?” Mo Hua added.

Elder Zhao quietly exhaled and bowed. “On the sect master’s decree there is…”

He paused, glanced at the bloody print Mo Hua had casually daubed with who-knew-whose blood, and said helplessly, “...there is the ancestral ‘seal.’ Given that, I, Zhao, should indeed count as the Gray Wolf Sect’s sect master.”

Mo Hua nodded with a look of satisfaction. “Now that you’re sect master, take me into your sect’s forbidden grounds.”

To bring an “outsider” into the sect’s forbidden grounds the very moment he took office—such blatant betrayal…

How could Sect Master Zhao dare refuse?

This sect master’s seat had been stamped and handed to him by Mo Hua.

One eats soft when eating another’s food and one’s hands are tied after taking another’s favor; he didn’t dare utter a single “no.”

But…

A bitter look crept onto Sect Master Zhao’s face, and he hesitated.

Mo Hua’s tone was even. “Is it… inconvenient?”

Sect Master Zhao shivered, terrified that Mo Hua’s next words would be, “If it’s inconvenient for you, I’ll switch sect masters and have someone else take me.”

He hurried to say, earnest to the core, “No inconvenience at all. Wherever Young Master Mo wishes to go in the Gray Wolf Sect, you may go.”

Mo Hua nodded, clearly pleased.

…

The newly minted Sect Master Zhao then played the guide and led Mo Hua into the Gray Wolf Sect’s forbidden grounds where outsiders were not allowed to tread.

The forbidden grounds lay deep in the inner mountains.

Within were stored the Gray Wolf Sect’s cultivation manuals, Daoist arts, artifact-refining and pill-refining diagrams, array diagrams, and the like.

Mo Hua skimmed through them and found little of worth, which left him slightly disappointed.

This was only to be expected.

He was a disciple of the venerable fifth-grade grand sect, the Great Void Sect.

Back at the Great Void Sect, he had access to complete and superior lines of cultivation inheritance.

In preparation for the Sword Debate Conference, not only the Great Void Mountain line, but parts of the Tai’a and Chongxu lines had been opened to him as well.

In other words, he actually bore the inheritances of the Great Void Sect, the Tai’a Sect, and the Chongxu Sect—three orthodox grand sects.

The three mountains shared a common root and origin.

What he truly carried was the ancient inheritance of that primordial sect from when the three lines had been one—its name no longer spoken.

Although what he had only went up to Foundation Establishment, with a scant portion touching the Golden Core realm…

Compared to the Gray Wolf Sect, it was worlds apart.

Between a fifth-grade and a third-grade power lay multiple orders of magnitude.

Still, holding to the creed of “better to kill by mistake than to miss one,” Mo Hua gave the Gray Wolf Sect’s inheritances a quick pass.

He ignored the cultivation methods and Dao arts—useless to him—and focused on the array diagrams, taking rubbings of unfamiliar or variant patterns to broaden his horizons and deepen his grounding in arrays.

When he finished, Mo Hua held a wolf-head xun flute in his left hand and rolled a copper coin in his right, calling upon a bit of deduction to trace Mister Wu’s qi.

Though Sect Master Zhao didn’t know what Mo Hua was doing, he watched with unfeigned awe.

Mo Hua pinched the coin, followed its pointing, then, after a few turns along the mountain paths of the forbidden grounds, stopped before a grand hall built at the foot of the mountain.

The hall’s doors were shut tight.

Mo Hua glanced at Sect Master Zhao.

Sect Master Zhao immediately produced the sect master’s jade token, recited the incantation, dispelled the seal, and opened the doors.

Inside, the hall was tall and empty, wolf statues lining the walls.

Mo Hua swept the place with Divine Sense and pierced through the false to find the real. Behind a huge prostrate wolf statue, he found a hidden door.

Sect Master Zhao tried the jade token, but even the sect master’s token could not open this door. He looked to Mo Hua.

Mo Hua pondered for a moment, then tapped his fingers, sketching out several array lines.

Golden light flared; the formation unraveled; the hidden door swung open.

Sect Master Zhao stared, stunned anew, and his reverence for Mo Hua deepened to the level of worship.

Mo Hua looked at the chamber beyond, then at Sect Master Zhao. “Going in?”

Sect Master Zhao drew back the foot he had just set forward.

He could hear the subtext. Sensible at once, he said, “I’ll stand guard for Young Master Mo.”

Mo Hua was quite pleased.

Seeing Mo Hua step toward the pitch-black chamber, Sect Master Zhao couldn’t help saying, “Young Master Mo, please be careful.”

“Don’t worry.”

Mo Hua replied lightly and stepped into the chamber saturated with Mister Wu’s aura.

Darkness filled his vision, then green fire slowly came to life.

A few wolf bones burned like torches, crackling.

A foul stink drifted in the air.

Mo Hua took in the chamber. It wasn’t large. In the center lay a formation filled with bestial patterns—eagle, tiger, snake, deer, ox…

At the heart of those complex demon lines stood a small altar.

The altar, however, was empty.

Beneath it lay various books, bone slips, and wolfhide papers covered in dense, blood-smeared script.

It looked as if someone had long kept vigil here, poring over texts and bone slips, researching something.

Under the desk squatted a brazi­er filled with several cracked wolf bones.

Mo Hua’s eyes lit up.

His guess had been right: this was Mister Wu’s “hideout.” Here he had practiced oracle-bone divination, deduced fortunes and misfortunes, studied the Causality Technique, and here he had peered into Mo Hua’s fate.

But those who ride well fall from their horses; those who swim well drown.

Those who often probe Heaven’s secrets and calculate causality tend to die to “causality” in the end.

So it had been for Mister Wu.

“Will I one day die like this too—caught by Heaven’s secrets and causality?”

A warning stirred in Mo Hua’s heart. He took it to heart.

Then he thought, that is a concern for the future. You don’t stop eating for fear of choking. You can’t refuse to study for fear of karmic entanglement and disaster.

What must be learned must be learned.

Mo Hua rifled the desk, tapped at bricks and stones nearby, and—drawing on long practice at “scavenging”—soon found a wolf-pattern storage pouch under a stone sealed by a demon-script formation.

Inside was just what he most needed right now:

A thin pictorial manual titled Great Wilderness Demon Bone Divination.

The booklet was made of some unknown demon hide, rough and ancient.

In Great Wilderness script, accompanied by obscure diagrams, it recorded the primitive, ancient secret art of the Great Wilderness clan—burning demon bones, reading the cracks to divine hexagrams, and using them to perform causal divination.

Without another word, Mo Hua tucked Great Wilderness Demon Bone Divination into his Storage Ring.

He swept up the rest of Mister Wu’s books, bone slips, and notes as well.

“These are all good things. I’ll need a quiet place to study them properly…”

His eyes were bright with delight.

With this classic of demon-bone divination, he could finally lay a foundation and shore up his lame leg in causal arts, truly stepping onto the path of a powerful Heavenly Mechanism cultivator.

No longer would he be as before—possessing powerful Divine Sense, immense computing power, and first-rate algorithms, but, for lack of a basic inheritance, forced to make blind guesses on “feel.”

In the realm of Heaven’s secrets and causality, others had “techniques” but lacked the “Dao.”

Mo Hua was the opposite—he grasped much of the “Dao,” but was short on the basic “techniques.”

Happy as he was to get Great Wilderness Demon Bone Divination, he still wasn’t quite satisfied.

He swept his gaze around and scoured the chamber with Divine Sense again and again, then plundered every suspicious item Mister Wu had left, letting nothing escape—not even a scrap—before he could finally relax.

The once-messy chamber was stripped bare.

Satisfied, Mo Hua left the chamber.

…

At the door, Sect Master Zhao—who had personally stood guard for Mo Hua—slowly let out a breath, then looked conflicted.

He neither wanted to ask about Mo Hua’s business, nor dared to.

Yet as sect master, letting an outsider into the forbidden grounds without asking a single question didn’t seem right either.

So he asked in a small voice, “Young Master Mo, inside there…”

“Mister Wu was nesting in there,” Mo Hua said. “He used shamanic arts to control minds. I’ve taken all his things and… destroyed them. Rest easy.”

Whether Sect Master Zhao truly believed or only pretended to, he nodded with conviction. “Good. Thank you for your hard work, Young Master Mo.”

“Hard? Not at all.” Mo Hua waved. “Go handle your affairs. You’ve only just become sect master—there’s a lot to do. You have to bury the former sect master, tell lies, fool people—very busy. I won’t get in your way…”

Sect Master Zhao’s expression defied description.

“And you, Young Master…”

Mo Hua sighed, looking weary. “I’m tired. I’ll return to my room and rest. Don’t disturb me unless it’s important.”

Sect Master Zhao exhaled in relief.

He would rather “enshrine” Mo Hua than anything else.

As long as this “Little King of Hell,” who killed without lifting a blade and demanded lives with a word, did nothing at all, everything would be fine.

“I’ll escort you—” Sect Master Zhao began.

“No need.” Mo Hua waved. “I can find my way. Go on.”

“Then… very well.”

Sect Master Zhao didn’t insist. He truly had much to do.

Mo Hua had pushed him into the sect master’s seat; whether he could keep it depended on himself.

“Please, Young Master Mo.” Sect Master Zhao clasped hands and took his leave.

Mo Hua returned alone to his guest room.

The door had hardly shut before his feigned languor vanished, replaced by keen excitement.

He sat cross-legged and sank his Divine Sense into his sea of consciousness.

Within, he manifested a burning array and, with a gentle “simmer” instead of a raging blaze, refined the ancestral spirits of the Gray Wolf Sect whom he had earlier devoured—now fully turned “abominations.”

Before, to save time, he would have simply tossed them into a fierce fire.

But now, out in the world with days precious and nothing to waste, he had to be patient—slow cooking, bit by bit—to leave not a wisp of “evil thought” and waste not a thread of pure “mind power.”

At last, after careful, low flame refinement—

The forefathers of the Gray Wolf Sect were completely refined away.

Threads of long-missed, abundant third-grade Golden Core–level mind power rose like pale daytime smoke. Mo Hua inhaled them all, Divine Thought circulating, refining them in an instant.

The bottleneck in Divine Sense that he had ground away at for days with meager effect melted like spring snow and began to rise.

Mo Hua’s Divine Sense grew stronger and stronger.

Black and white light flowed in his eyes.

The wellsprings of God and Heavenly Demon within him swelled without cease…

Finally—no telling how much time had passed—everything calmed.

Mo Hua opened his eyes. Golden light flashed. For a heartbeat, the powerful aura of his Divine Sense could not be held in and spilled outward.

That Divine Sense was unrivaled—like a storm-tossed sea—sweeping Gray Wolf Mountain in the realm of the formless.

The disciples of the Gray Wolf Sect noticed nothing.

Only Sect Master Zhao, a Golden Core cultivator, felt his heart jolt for an instant, as if some terrifying existence swept its abyssal Divine Sense across Gray Wolf Mountain and cast him a glance—then all was gone without a trace.

Sect Master Zhao’s pupils shrank; cold sweat beaded down his back.

Was… some great expert passing through the Gray Wolf domain?

Could a mere wisp of leaked Divine Sense really leave a Golden Core cultivator like him breathless?

“But… isn’t Divine Sense supposed to be subtle and formless? Why did it carry such crushing pressure?”

“And in a backwater like Gray Wolf City, how could such an expert be passing through?”

He pondered, then his heart lurched. He turned toward the guest quarters, pupils trembling, and muttered,

“Surely it couldn’t be… Young Master Mo…”

“Is he even… human…”

…

Inside the lavish guest room of the Gray Wolf Sect—

Mo Hua, who had “eaten and drunk his fill,” let out a long breath, a smile spreading across his face.

Twenty-one patterns!

This was his first breakthrough in Divine Sense since the blood-sacrifice upheaval.

Upon first forming the Golden Core, one had twenty patterns of Divine Sense.

Early Golden Core began at twenty-one patterns.

Most cultivators did not cultivate their Divine Sense or use it to prove the Dao; thus, in early Golden Core, most sat around twenty-one patterns.

On paper, Mo Hua’s Divine Sense now ranked “mid-tier” among early Golden Core cultivators.

Not to mention that his Divine Thought had undergone a metamorphosis—Dao-transformed like a god. In “quality,” it eclipsed ordinary cultivators by far.

How far? Even Mo Hua could not say.

Far enough. And it would keep growing stronger.

As Heaven moves with ceaseless vigor, the gentleman strives constantly for self-improvement.

No matter how strong he was, he must keep surpassing himself—until his Divine Sense left all cultivators in the dust, until his Divine Sense alone could reach the heavens and plumb the earth.

Mo Hua flexed his pale fingers.

It felt as if he held the power to grasp heaven and earth.

With twenty-one-pattern Divine Sense, he had taken another step toward Golden Core perfection. Relaxing, he pulled out another booklet:

Great Wilderness Demon Bone Divination.

This was a foundational demon-bone divination method of the Great Wilderness.

It taught how to kindle shamanic fire, burn the bones of various demonic beasts, read the crack patterns as hexagrams, judge auspice and misfortune, and divine causality.

It was an ancient Great Wilderness method—arcane and abstruse.

Mo Hua learned it at a glance.

After all, his talent in Divine Sense spoke for itself, and his insight into Heaven’s secrets and causality ran deep. He merely lacked a basic method to let him wield the strength he already possessed.

It was like martial training: he had already cultivated deep inner power through years of grueling tempering. He simply needed a simple “Founders’ Long Fist,” and with one punch he could floor an opponent.

This demon-bone divination of the Great Wilderness, though an introductory Causality Technique, was like a “key,” opening a vast door of Heavenly Mechanism before him.

Over the next two days, Mo Hua read Great Wilderness Demon Bone Divination again and again without setting it down.

Foundations are often the most important.

Within lay the constructive logic of certain underlying laws.

The more he read, the more he understood. After days of meditation, once-fuzzy notions grew clear; his understanding of causality deepened.

All things in the world operate under causality.

Everything begins with a “cause.” From cause comes “effect.” An effect then becomes a cause, which in turn begets other effects, and so on—effect becoming cause becoming effect…

Thus causality cycles and repeats, forming a chain of cause and effect.

That chain is the thread and trajectory along which a thing develops.

For a person, this is one’s “fate.”

A person’s destiny is the sum of the causes and effects of a lifetime.

What one does now is both cause and effect.

It is the “effect” produced by past causes; it is also a “cause” that will produce future effects.

Mo Hua propped his chin and reflected with himself as the example.

He was a second-grade high-tier array master now because, in the past, he had spent countless days and nights drawing arrays at the Dao stele.

Becoming an array master was the effect.

Endless study, drawing, and comprehension of arrays were the cause.

Without piling up enough “cause” by drawing array after array, he would not have the present “effect.”

In the future, if he wished to become a world-shaking grandmaster of arrays—if that was the “effect” he sought—then from this very moment he would have to steadily amass “cause” for that effect.

He would devote his every thought and effort to cultivation and to arrays.

When cause becomes sufficient, the corresponding effect appears.

When one’s practice and insight into arrays reach a certain accumulation, then one day he will inevitably become a mighty of the array path.

And all of this causality composes his “fate.”

At this, Mo Hua felt as if doused in sweet spring—his mind opened wide:

“In brief, the arts of causality are the use of causal law to peer into, influence, or alter the trajectory of things—and to change a person’s destiny.”

So-called fate-changing takes two forms. First, by causal law, one alters one’s own “fate”—

To become who one wishes to be, walk the road one chooses, and seek the Dao one pursues.

Second, by causal edicts, one manipulates the “fate” of others—

Controlling their thoughts and deeds, the ebb and flow of their lives, even their very life and death.

And when the causality one changes becomes great enough, when enough destinies are altered, “fortune” coalesces.

Such great fortune is the sum of countless causal transformations—the aggregation of myriad beings’ fate lines—and it is a broader realm upon the path of causality…

Heavenly Mechanism.

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