Chapter 3: West Kunlun

Cao Chuan now understood — these people had taken him for a ghost or monster. He saw the young man who had just shouted, one finger pointed at him, face full of panic, head swiveling back and forth between him and the middle-aged man who seemed to be the leader, feet inching backward bit by bit.

"Didn't the ancients all believe in ghosts and gods?" He was a bit frustrated — in theory, shouldn't these people be kowtowing at once? Looking again, the situation seemed off; no one was bowing to him, but a few were stepping back to the wall to grab knives.

Zhou Tong could hold back no longer. He cupped his fists and asked slowly in a raised voice, "Which friend has come to visit, and from where?"

Cao Chuan noted the man's somewhat strange accent. Fortunately, Zhou Tong spoke slowly, and with his temporary comprehension he roughly understood — yet for a moment he was speechless. If he said he was just here to get some soy sauce, they probably wouldn't believe him either.

Fortunately, the art of playing along for appearances was something he had practiced hard over these past few years; his acting skill amounted to at least a little. Now forced onto Mount Liang with no way out, in this crisis he could only forcibly calm himself and silently recite: life is but a play, all depends on acting.

Under the tense gaze of dozens of eyes, Cao Chuan slowly raised both arms, gave a Daoist bow, and while recalling the movements of various young scholars and licentiates he had seen, spoke slowly in a raised voice: "Cao Chuan, Inner Disciple of the Shangqing Sect of the West Kunlun Realm, greets all you benefactors."

Another "boom" — the crowd that had been so tense they were about to suffocate could no longer suppress their agitated emotions and began chattering noisily. Though Cao Chuan's tone was somewhat peculiar, the majority still grasped the meaning.

"Bang!" — the scene instantly fell silent. Chen Erye first smashed a wine bowl to steady the situation, then bellowed, "What's all the racket about? Mind your manners in front of the guest!" After eliminating the noise, Chen Erye turned to Zhou Tong and said, "Big Brother, a guest has broken through the mountain gate. Shall we follow the rules, or…?"

Zhou Tong shook his head, pressed his palm down in the air to signal the Second-in-Command to steady himself, then slowly took a few steps forward. After a careful look, he cupped his fist before Cao Chuan and spoke with some difficulty:

"The brothers have never seen the world — please forgive us. Perhaps the guest would first take a seat, and then state his purpose?"

Cao Chuan naturally smiled and nodded with his chest slightly drawn in. Zhou Tong led him to the short Zhang Fei's bamboo chair. Beside him, an old man in a blue robe with a goatee was stammering as he called for someone to bring good tea to entertain the honored guest.

After Chen Erye kicked two more men in the hip and marked out the proper distance, the jostling crowd finally formed a rough circle centered on Cao Zhenren. After exchanging greetings all around, they at last sat down properly.

Looking at these ancients with their hair buns and short robes of homespun cloth, Cao Chuan felt immense pressure. Fortunately, someone who had spent time on film sets still had some immunity to being watched. He cleared his throat lightly and asked Zhou Tong, "May I ask what year and month it is now in this place, and who the reigning Emperor is?"

A wave of gasps, sighs, and clicking sounds rose from all around again. Zhou Tong, about to speak, also paused for a moment — the thought of an old immortal from the mountains flashed through his mind. He quickly replied with respect, "It is now the twentieth day of the second month, in the seventh year of the Tianqi reign of the Great Ming."

Hearing this, Cao Chuan nodded as if perfectly composed, while thinking to himself: So it's the Ming Dynasty. I've crossed over from winter into early spring? The problem is, I don't seem to know this Ming Dynasty very well.

From the scraps of knowledge still left in his head, he could roughly determine that Tianqi was some emperor in the mid-to-late Ming Dynasty, but exactly which emperor in the sequence, that was still a bit hazy — he'd need to go online and search to know for sure.

Seeing this seemingly young immortal lost in thought, the wrinkled old Lü Accountant with the goatee could not help but cup his fist and say: "The True Man has broken through the void and come — perhaps he has some business with us? In my younger years, I too was a Daoist for a time. This, heh, this West Kunlun Shangqing Sect… well, it is my ignorance and limited knowledge — I truly have never heard of it."

After hearing the old man's halting words, Cao Chuan understood that they were probing his background. But his own origins were truly hard to explain — he could hardly say that a descendant had come to pay respects to his ancestors, could he?

The current situation gave him no more time to hesitate, so Cao Chuan could only rally his spirits and begin giving these people a popular-science lecture on planar flow.

In brief summary: the Shangqing Sect was in the West Kunlun immortal realm and had a connection with the Ming people — throughout the dynasties, those who ascended from the Central Plains also went to West Kunlun. Fifty thousand years ago, everyone shared a single ancestor, which was why they all had black hair and yellow skin.

To nurture rising talents, every so many years the immortal realm would use the Void Grand Array to dispatch a batch of young disciples to various subordinate planes to temper themselves in the mortal world, laying a good foundation for the future breakthrough to the Golden Core. Today, by fate, everyone had encountered him, Cao Zhenren, emerging from the mountain for his tempering — and so on and so forth.

This popular-science session took an hour. By the time Cao Chuan had finished spinning his tale, aside from having their worldview and views on gods and ghosts corrected, the bandits had roughly understood one more thing: this Immortal Cao had come to sport in the mortal world, to temper himself and gather qi — not to carry out the Dao on anyone's behalf.

The atmosphere in the scene instantly grew much warmer than before. The several leaders, amid their shock, called for wine and meat, all expressing that to be fortunate enough to meet a true immortal today — they absolutely must form a good karmic bond and cultivate a bit for the next life.

A group of bandits who had witnessed the descent of a True Man, and a crowd actor tossed into the Great Ming Dynasty — their startled emotions spanned four hundred years of time and space, coming together in these deep mountains to form a bizarre welcome banquet.

Upon learning that the honored sect also did not abstain from wine and meat, Zhou Datong hurriedly ordered his men to slaughter chickens and cut meat. Though lacking in seasonings and the taste was really nothing special, Cao Chuan still ate until his mouth was slick with grease — popularizing science was very taxing on the mind and made one hungry.

In this short while, the several leaders increasingly felt that this True Man who had appeared out of thin air was extraordinary — not just the material and style of his ritual robe, or the black leather quick-boots on his feet, but even his speech and bearing were greatly different from ordinary people.

However, based on his worldly experience observing kidnap victims, Zhou Tong did notice one oddity: where did Cao Zhenren's Jiangsu-Zhejiang accent come from? Seeing the man set down a chicken bone, Zhou Tong then asked cautiously, "Has the True Man perhaps traveled through this region before? Your accent, I note, is not far from that of the brothers here."

Cao Chuan's heart thumped. A lie, in the end, must be patched with bigger lies. He knew that the story he had spun in his desperation was surely full of holes, and whether these people believed it or not was another matter entirely. That he could sit here now gnawing on a chicken leg was mostly thanks to the light-and-shadow effect of his "Step of Void" entrance. But he could not worry about too much now — he had to get past this hurdle first.

He nodded, gave an "Mm," and then slowly explained: "You may not know this, but whenever the seniors of our sect return from their travels, they always store the geography, people, customs, and languages of each place within a piece of 'Image Retaining Stone' in the sect, using their magic power. The images, voices, and appearances of the people are all preserved within. Whenever a junior is to travel to a certain place, they need only view it beforehand and learn a few local dialects — it is no difficult matter. Heh heh, heh heh."

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