The Quest for Immortality - Chapter 1144 (Patreon)

Chapter 1144: Great Wilderness Sect

All along the road until now, he had seen plenty of high-ranking sect elders and sect masters, even those so-called “Young Lords” of the Corpse Path. Every time, Mo Hua’s heart was full of calculations, and killing intent stirred.

But now, traveling with ordinary boatmen—eating what they ate, sleeping where they slept—he felt a simple kindness firsthand and caught a glimpse of an unadorned “humanity.”

The turmoil in Mo Hua’s heart lessened instead. His understanding of “the common folk” grew a shade clearer.

“People…”

Mo Hua paused, lost in thought.

The sand ship pushed on, wind and grit blotting out the sky.

Mo Hua set aside his cultivation and status, toiled like a common body-tempering cultivator, ate when hungry, slept when tired.

By day he leaned on the gunwale, watching the boundless sea of sand. By night he stood on the deck, gazing at the wind-swept darkness. His heart was tranquil; the baleful and bloodthirsty airs in his fate diminished by quite a bit.

Half a month passed like this, and the voyage had gone fairly smoothly.

There were no great calamities—only the occasional small trouble.

The most common were the sand fiends.

“Sand fiend” was a blanket term for the demonic beasts that dwelled within the sea of sand.

Cultivators below the Ascension realm could not take to the air. Without a sand ship, they could not stand, much less travel safely, across that vast desert.

But the sand fiends were different.

Compared to cultivators, they were innately adapted to the desert. Sheltered by the sands, they had lived and bred for generations.

Their limbs, maws, talons, feathers, tails—every part had mutated to fit the sea of sand.

Mo Hua had seen a sand fiend the color of loess, shaped like a pangolin, roaming free, diving and surfacing at will through the dunes.

He had also seen a brown, long-beaked, eagle-like sand bird fiend beating its wings to glide along the sand sea.

There were many others besides—sand fiends with strange scales and grotesque claws.

Mo Hua had never seen their like before. Seeing them now with his own eyes, he couldn’t help but marvel at the boundlessness of heaven and earth and the wonder of creation.

It looked as if these sand fiends were the true masters of the desert.

Humans were merely uninvited guests upon this sea of sand.

Naturally, since these were “demonic beasts,” they also bore the ferocity of such creatures and were far from friendly toward cultivators.

To them, cultivators were one source of “food.”

Along the way, all manner of first- or second-grade sand fiends would lurk unseen beneath the dunes, then burst out to strike at the ship—impossible to guard against.

Ordinary cultivators could hardly discern them and were always caught off guard.

Fortunately, the old boatman and his crew had spent years eking out a living on the desert, seasoned by countless voyages. Often, before a sand fiend even showed itself, they would “know in advance,” calling out a warning.

Then either they would steer to avoid the danger, or they would bring it down with harpoons. Everything was orderly and smooth.

Mo Hua secretly admired them.

His divine sense was formidable; the movements of those sand fiends hiding seamlessly within the sands could not escape him.

But these boatmen—whose cultivation wasn’t high and whose divine sense wasn’t strong—could still pick out fiends that blended with the sands using nothing but the eyesight honed by years of wind and grit and an intuition settled by time.

Mo Hua sighed in his heart.

Anyone who can scrape by on their own in the cultivation world—no matter their realm or strength—has some skill you shouldn’t take lightly.

There are prodigies with the bearing of dragons and phoenixes, true.

But among the nameless, there is no lack of capable people.

The more he traveled and the more people he met, the more Mo Hua felt this to be true.

Beyond the sand fiends, there were also the occasional wrecked hulls and wind-worn reefs of stone.

A careless collision, and the hull would be damaged.

Such “hidden reefs” of wind and sand demanded special caution.

Lastly, there were the sand bandits.

Sand bandits were much like mountain bandits—brigands who lived by plunder. They rode hide skiffs, scuttling about the sands like hyenas and bedbugs. If they spotted a weakly defended convoy, they attacked at once, killing and looting.

They were vicious desperadoes.

More vicious than mountain bandits, in fact.

A beaten mountain bandit could still flee into the hills.

A sand bandit, once defeated and cast into the desert, was as good as dead. So when they struck, they rarely held back; it was kill or be killed.

Mo Hua encountered a few sand bandits along the way.

But they were only small packs, few in number. They watched from afar, didn’t dare assail their convoy, and soon dispersed.

Such risks were for the old boatman’s crew to handle.

When free, Mo Hua studied the sand ship’s construction.

A sand ship traveled atop the desert, crushing the sand and moving forward much like a ship cleaving waves.

But it was not the same as an ordinary “ship.”

A normal ship would float even if you did nothing.

A sand ship would not. It had to use the bones of sand beasts for its keel and their hides for its sails to move upon the sea of sand without sinking.

That was what Mo Hua had believed.

The late Wang Guanshi in the little waystation city had told him as much.

But after actually boarding a sand ship and watching its systems at work, Mo Hua realized the bones and hide of sand beasts only granted temporary buoyancy and better resistance to sand erosion.

At its core, it was still an Array.

A very special Array.

Without this special Array, a sand ship could not float long upon the desert, nor could it travel across the sands.

People who didn’t understand the internals took it for granted that the bones and hides were the key to a sand ship’s voyage.

The local clans evidently had no wish to make the ship’s secrets public and thus never corrected the assumption.

So, many “facts” in the eyes of the world were merely the “obvious truths” of outsiders—hardly worth a laugh to those on the inside.

“There really are things in this world that you can’t understand correctly unless you witness them yourself.”

Mo Hua breathed out softly.

Then, as was his habit, he began to reverse-anatomize the ship’s inner layout and parse the makeup of its Arrays.

The sand ship’s Array work was highly confidential—etched on the underside of the hull and wrapped in layers of wood and iron to prevent prying eyes.

An average Array Master would see nothing.

But that was no obstacle for Mo Hua, who had learned Heavenly Mechanism Calculation.

This was a calculus of “Heavenly Mechanism,” spoken of alongside the Eerie Daoist’s Heaven-Defying Secret Calculation. It was obscure and rarely mentioned, to the point that most people had no idea how deep and terrifying a calculus of “Heavenly Mechanism” could be.

Truth be told, Mo Hua didn’t really know either.

He only knew the Heavenly Mechanism Calculation his master had taught him was formidable, although he himself had only learned a little fur.

Even the profundities he had grasped, he understood only half.

Yet even that “fur” was more than enough to benefit Mo Hua greatly.

At least, for “stealing” Arrays, it was nothing short of a divine skill.

The ship sailed through wind and sand.

The core Array beneath the hull operated, turning the grit under the keel into “liquid sand,” then pushing against it in reverse to drive the ship.

When idle, Mo Hua lay on the deck, staring blankly at the vast desert. His divine sense quietly calculated, and from the spiritual energy leaking from the Array he back-deduced its framework types and the composition of its array lines.

“There are Five Elements water patterns, earth patterns…”

“And the Eight Trigrams—Gen patterns…”

“The structure isn’t complicated, but the design is ingenious—using earth to harmonize with the sands; adding a trace of water pattern to make the surface cohere; then briefly turning it into a mountain with a Gen pattern to bear the hull…”

“And… a touch of Xun?”

“Using Xun wind to drive the ship?”

…

The more Mo Hua deduced, the more exquisite it seemed. He was secretly amazed.

In broad strokes, the ship used a hybrid of Five Elements and Eight Trigrams Arrays.

The framework wasn’t abstruse, but the ratios of the lines, the sequence of operations, the responses between lines, the Array’s influence on external matter, the feedback of the ten thousand things to the Array’s changes—there were many variables and many points of craft.

At a glance, Mo Hua could tell this Array embodied immense computational effort, deep devotion, and painstaking labor.

It was likely something the local Array Masters had ground away at for generations.

The aim was to design an Array that could help ships “cross level” over the sea of sand.

This Array was like an “answer.”

The answer itself wasn’t so difficult.

But deriving this answer—one that solved the problem—had consumed the hearts’ blood of who knew how many generations of genius Array Masters.

Mo Hua felt respect.

As he pondered, footsteps sounded. Mo Hua gathered his thoughts and turned to see the hunched, weather-beaten old boatman approaching.

The old boatman nodded when he saw Mo Hua.

Mo Hua said, “Good day, Boss.”

The old boatman seemed tired from keeping watch on the sands for fiends and bandits and had come up for a breath of air.

Finding Mo Hua there, he sat beside him, eyes still on the wind and sand, and asked, “Well? Getting used to it?”

Mo Hua nodded. “I’m fine.”

The old boatman inclined his head. “You’re a good lad.”

Just then a gust blew by. He coughed, spitting all the grit from his mouth.

Mo Hua thought for a moment and asked, “Boss, there are Arrays on this ship, aren’t there?”

“Of course,” the old boatman said. “What sand ship doesn’t have Arrays? Without them, how would it even move?”

“Who draws those Arrays?” Mo Hua asked.

The old boatman gave him a curious look. “What are you asking for?”

“I’m just curious,” Mo Hua said honestly. “Asking at random.”

The old boatman took in Mo Hua’s bronzed skin and thin frame, the bright eyes and kindly face. It was hard to feel wary of him. He nodded.

“The Array Masters from the shipping guild draw them for us.”

“Do you know what Arrays they draw?” Mo Hua asked.

“How would I know?” The old boatman shook his head. “The guild forbids us to ask and won’t let us change anything ourselves. Whatever they draw, we use.”

“And let me tell you, those Arrays are nothing but a ‘money sink.’”

“A money sink?”

He sighed. “Just the annual maintenance on a sand ship’s Arrays costs a pile of spirit stones. If something goes wrong and you have to redraw them, you bleed dry—you’ve basically worked a whole year for nothing.”

“That harsh?” Mo Hua asked.

The old boatman nodded. “And you can’t even complain. If you do, the guild won’t draw the Arrays for you. Then you’re out of the sand-ship trade entirely and can’t even eat.”

Mo Hua’s brow furrowed.

If his guess was right, these Arrays had been devised by Array Masters native to Li Province—refined and improved over generations so cultivators could cross the sands and make a living here.

Yet Arrays born of the toil of the forebears—meant to benefit cultivators—had fallen into the hands of the clans and guilds, to be used to squeeze the bottom rung for profit.

Mo Hua’s face darkened slightly as he fell into thought.

He had always wanted to research and develop Arrays—to comprehend the Dao and benefit all beings.

But now, it seemed, the mere advancement of Arraycraft wasn’t enough. In the end it mattered whose hands the Arrays were in.

Otherwise, the higher the level of research, the higher the barrier it erected—and the harsher the squeeze upon ordinary cultivators.

And those barriers were ones itinerant cultivators could scarcely break…

Mo Hua’s brow knit.

The more he personally experienced this world, the more he realized its complexity—and the trickier it would be to address its problems. Nothing was as simple as he had once imagined.

A voice sounded. “Little brother…”

Mo Hua blinked and turned. The old boatman said, “What are you thinking about?”

Mo Hua came back to himself and smiled. “Nothing. Just a bit sleepy…”

The old boatman’s tone grew stern as he admonished, “These days have indeed been tiring. But that’s life on the road. You must keep your spirits up—don’t doze off at random. One careless moment and you’ll lose your life…”

Mo Hua knew he meant well. He smiled and nodded. “Thank you, Boss. I’ll remember.”

The old boatman nodded.

After a moment, Mo Hua asked, “By the way, Boss, I heard there’s… war in the Great Wilderness?”

The old boatman started, then sighed. “They’re fighting. And harder than before…”

“You mean they’ve fought before?” Mo Hua asked, surprised.

The old boatman nodded. “The Great Wilderness is rough and backward. It’s always been chaotic. For hundreds of years, if not great wars, then small skirmishes unending. Only now…”

His face grew grave. “Now it looks like they mean business…”

“How bad is it?” Mo Hua frowned.

“How would I know?” The old boatman shook his head. “I’m just an old ferryman on the sands trying to fill my belly. How could I keep up with such big matters? But…”

He hesitated, then said slowly,

“I did hear some passengers gossiping. They say this uprising in the Great Wilderness is louder than any before—even the soldiers riding king tigers have ridden out. They’re shouting, ‘Heaven is dead; the Yellow Heaven shall rise…’”

Mo Hua’s heart gave a jolt. His fingers went reflexively to his storage ring.

Inside was still the dragon banner that read: “Heaven is dead; the Desolate Heaven shall stand.”

The old boatman, unaware, continued, “These people are too bold. But I hear the barbarian host is vast and fearsome. They’ve already broken through several passes. The Dao Court was caught off guard and suffered a crushing defeat… Of course, that’s all hearsay. I don’t know if it’s true…”

“These days, words are cheap. People take rumor for rain. Truth and lies are hard to tell apart.”

Mo Hua frowned. “Doesn’t that make Great Desert City unsafe?”

“That it won’t,” the old boatman said.

Mo Hua was puzzled.

“Chaos is chaos,” the old boatman said, “but it can’t all be chaos. At least Great Desert City won’t be.”

“It’s the only fourth-rank Immortal City within several thousand li. It stands on the sands, right where Li Province meets the Great Wilderness. Its position is very special.”

“You could say it’s a ‘gate’ the Dao Court set down.”

“What’s more, Great Desert City is the domain of the Great Wilderness Sect. And the Great Wilderness Sect is a powerful fourth-rank sect.”

Mo Hua was surprised. “Great Desert City is their territory?”

Immortal-Passage City lay in the north of Li Province, near Kan Province.

Mo Hua had lived long in Immortal-Passage City, and thus knew little about the spheres of influence south of Li Province, near the Great Wilderness.

Seeing Mo Hua’s “never seen the world” look, the old boatman didn’t mind.

A young drifter would be short on knowledge. Normal enough.

“The lands south of Li Province are called the Great Wilderness,” the old boatman said. “And if a sect dares to take the name ‘Great Wilderness’ itself, you can guess its background isn’t small.”

“What background?” Mo Hua asked.

The old boatman had a bellyful of miscellany from a life on the river and loved to chat.

Seeing Mo Hua ask, his tongue loosened. He pulled out a tin of swill wine, wet his throat, and said:

“Originally, there was no Great Wilderness Sect.”

“Thousands of years ago—I forget exactly how many—the Great Wilderness rose in rebellion, declaring an imperial court and defying the Dao Court openly.”

“The Dao Court sent its forces to suppress the Great Wilderness.”

“That war dragged on a long time, probably not less than a few hundred years, before it was put down.”

“Afterward the imperial power of the Great Wilderness was destroyed and the rebels were pacified.”

“To tighten control, the Dao Court forcibly established a sect here in the Great Wilderness—one directly under Dao Court authority. They even named it after the ‘Great Wilderness’ itself, the point being to press down what remained of the royal clans and the various princes.”

“There’s another saying—that it was to suppress the ‘fortune’ of the Great Wilderness.”

“Your Great Wilderness royal clan—your ancestral homeland—is, at the end of the day, nothing but a sect under my Dao Court.”

“With that, how could you still claim to be ‘emperor’?”

“For so many years, the Great Wilderness Sect has garrisoned the borders between the provinces and the domains of the tribes.”

“They have branch halls in many places under the name ‘Great Wilderness Sect.’”

“Great Desert City, a fourth-rank city, is the largest territory they hold aside from their main seat in Great Wilderness City.”

“Only a fourth rank?” Mo Hua asked.

The old boatman shot him a glance. “What do you mean ‘only’ fourth rank? Such a big tone—do you look down on fourth rank? You think you’re a prodigy from a fifth-rank grand sect?”

Mo Hua said nothing.

The old boatman explained:

“You’re still young. There are things you don’t grasp. Sects don’t just count up ranks on your fingers—one, two, three, four, five—as if it were easy…”

“It’s cold at the top.”

“For sects especially, once you reach fifth rank, the meaning changes completely. The authority is too great. The Dao Court wouldn’t truly grant the Great Wilderness Sect a fifth rank.”

“These days, be glad they aren’t downgrading you. Don’t expect a promotion to fifth.”

“Besides, there’s one pit for one radish. If there’s no pit, it doesn’t matter how big the radish grows.”

“And the fifth ranks near the Dao Provinces and the great provincial borders are not the same concept as some fifth rank out here at the edge of heaven.”

“If they really conferred fifth rank on the Great Wilderness Sect, it’d be like planting a ‘behemoth’ here in the Great Wilderness. They’d never keep it in hand.”

“So after all these years, the Great Wilderness Sect is still fourth rank.”

“But this fourth rank is a strong fourth rank for the borderlands—great influence, great strength…”

The old boatman spoke freely, holding nothing back.

Mo Hua’s heart stirred.

“The Great Wilderness Sect…”

He remembered that his childhood playmates—Da Hu and the other two—had joined that very sect.

Until now he hadn’t known how formidable the Great Wilderness Sect was.

Once he reached Great Desert City… would he run into Da Hu and the others?

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