Chapter 333: The Buried Mai Mai Xing Zhong

Pei Ye let time continue to flow, but the man's figure remained still in the flickering cave. After a long while, he slowly tucked this note into his sleeve, lifted his sword, and wanted to go out, but after moving twice, he became still again. The light from the cave entrance illuminated half of his silent face.

Until the sky grew dark, footsteps came running over. Yang Yan's face poked out from outside the cave: "Zhang Shixiong, are you really here? It's your turn to test your sword tonight, and everyone is waiting at the sword arena!"

"Oh," Meng Li came to his senses. "I'll be right there."

"Zhang Shixiong, your face is so pale. What's wrong?"

"..." Meng Li lowered his head and crawled out of the cave silently, taking a deep breath of the air in the forest. "... Nothing."

Pei Ye arrived in Meng Li's courtyard, found a calendar from the bookshelf, slowly flipped through a few pages of the annual calendar, and pressed it on the most recent solar term.

Four days later, Rain Water.

Pei Ye walked out of the courtyard. On the mountain road, the man's tall, straight figure was swaying as he walked up the mountain.

Qu Zhoufu did not go down the mountain as usual today. Meng Li was drunk, carrying a pot of old wine. He stopped several times along the way. Pei Ye suspected three times that he would turn back, but finally, the man stood before the great hall door, paused, stretched out his arm, and pushed his way in.

"Master!" Meng Li shouted, his face flushed. In the empty hall, the old man's thin, withered figure sat with his back turned quietly.

"What are you doing?" Qu Zhoufu turned his head. His complexion was the same as usual. Seeing him reeking of alcohol, he frowned impatiently.

Meng Li stumbled and fell toward the old man. The momentum was quite fierce, but the next moment he was supported by a gentle force of Qi.

Meng Li stood up, shook his head somewhat unclearly, and tugged at the old man's sleeve: "Master... stop sitting there. They're performing an empty city strategy in the city down the mountain..."

"Go watch it yourself, don't bother me."

"I've already watched it," Meng Li gestured vaguely. "I only saw Kongming killing people in the dark at Changban Slope... A pig-headed man with big ears killed his way out from the side, raised his rake, and said like this—'Old thief Sima, die!!'"

Qi suddenly surged. Meng Li pushed out a palm like wind and thunder. Qu Zhoufu, caught off guard, blocked with his elbow, and his body, light as paper, flew out like a broken kite, hitting the hall wall. He stumbled twice and barely managed to land steadily.

"... What kind of madness are you having suddenly!" Qu Zhoufu panted twice and raised an angry face. "Is your skin itching again?!"

Meng Li stood in place, stunned, unable to say a word.

There was no need to pretend; he looked exactly like someone whose drunkenness had been scared away.

He had only used half his strength for this palm strike.

Meng Li left the great hall with a heavy heart.

In the many days that followed, he probed among the older uncles and seniors of the outer lineage and searched the empty hall during the brief gaps when his master was away... but he could never find any traces of the so-called "Star Worm."

He often went to the library. Pei Ye pulled out the books he read, which were mostly about strange beasts and monsters. Later, he left the valley. Pei Ye sat at the mountain pass and shifted the time. After more than ten days, the man walked in from the edge of the mist again, disheveled, with a sword wound on his shoulder and a small magical artifact in his hand.

It was shaped like a small snake, engraved with "Seeking Life and Finding Fate." On a night when Qu Zhoufu was temporarily away from the great hall, the man climbed the mountain against the wind and placed this magical artifact on the summit.

However, this magical artifact, obtained with such hardship, failed to achieve any success.

The entire summit seemed to consist only of bronze and white rock. Besides that, there was only the ceaseless cold wind, and there were no living creatures of sufficient size at all.

Meng Li began to turn to the other two lines—this strange beast was either extremely small or parasitic within the human body... but despite his best efforts to seek everywhere, besides the fact that "Master is indeed sending out Qi day after day for more than twenty years," he could not find any other extension.

For the next solar term, he even accompanied the old man in the hall for twelve hours... but once the time passed, the old man grew weaker by another layer, so dull that he didn't even notice his probing.

Meng Li was almost at his wit's end during this time. Pei Ye watched the man's tightly pursed lips as he did all this alone, and roughly understood his thoughts at this time—if Master wasn't controlled by this "Star Worm," why would he feed it with his own life, and why would he continue to choose the next "food" from his two beloved disciples?

So the man dared not ask, nor did he tell anyone. In front of others, he was still the unreliable first disciple, but when alone, he held his slightly trembling hands in silence.

Until he made another discovery in that cave, like a hammer knocking a beam of light out of a black wall that had blocked his way.

Meng Li had not forgotten how he obtained his first discovery. Whenever he had the chance, he went to that cave and carefully organized those books. It was clearly visible that they had been cleaned up, but he could always find some scattered words. Most of them were too fragmented to be extracted, and the content was ambiguous, until more than ten days later, when he found another ancient, fragmentary book that was worth reading.

It was still that sharp handwriting, but it was sloppy and messy. Sketches, zero strokes, chaotic lines, sometimes several pages of orderly calculations, and sometimes a ball of irritable, chaotic ink—this was clearly not a book for recording, but for drafting. But it was at the end of this book that the owner wrote down the conclusion he had reached after exhausting an entire book's worth of effort.

"Mountain drinks, lake leaks, human Qi attracts stars. For thousands of years, Hushan Jianmen... has actually been living within an array."

Below it was a map of the Hushan area. The author used more than ten pages to break it down in detail. It was unknown how he came up with such a fantastic idea, nor how much effort he spent on verification and surveying. In short, at the end of the diagram, this person, whose name was unknown, firmly classified it as a unique ancient wonder array.

Pei Ye stood beside Meng Li, watching him close the book and remain silent for a long time. He knew that without this book, the man who did not understand the Way of Arrays would never have thought in this direction.

Thus, from this day on, Meng Li began to immerse himself in the library day after day, studying the basics of the Way of Arrays from scratch, verifying the diagram at the back of the ancient book page by page—the result was only exquisite compatibility.

However, the ancient book's deduction only went this far—it was indeed an array, but what kind of array? What was its function? What was the relationship between the "Star Worm" and the "Ancient Array"? All were missing.

It was also from here that the wordless blue book was placed on the man's table. He began to use all his strength to search for the appearance of this ancient array.

Pei Ye took his hand off the blue cover, looked at this thick book that was almost full, and temporarily stopped regressing the time.

Meng Li had gathered all his heart's blood and effort here. Theoretically, one could learn the "truth" he finally discovered by flipping through this book. But Pei Ye couldn't understand it.

There were no shortcuts in the Way of Arrays. How much time and effort Meng Li spent at that time, Pei Ye would have to do the same. He clearly didn't have this time, so he could only return to organizing the man's experiences.

Fortunately, Meng Li didn't just read and calculate. At every stage of his progress, he would take the ancient book to the corresponding place in the quiet of the night and use the unfamiliar methods he had learned to calculate and survey.

But every time he truly gained something, it was because of the scattered words newly discovered in the cave.

"Swimming in the cliff, seeing the tail in two days; Winter Solstice in Ding, Summer Solstice in Gui."

In Hushan, the "Gui" position was exactly where the mountain pass was. Pei Ye stood on the night of the Summer Solstice. The man held a dim lamp and leaped onto the dangerous cliff above the mountain pass.

The mountain pass of Hushan was like a true gateway. The plaque position at the head of the gate was as steep and boring as the cliff. No one would come to such a place, and the two brothers had never been interested in this place that could be seen to the bottom at a glance.

Now, in the heavy night, there was only the echo of owls in the high forest. Meng Li dug shovel by shovel in the place he had calculated, removing soil and breaking stones. Finally, at a depth of nearly two zhang, a shovel hit a clear sound of metal.

Meng Li held his breath and lit the lamp to look down. A piece of bronze with an arc was revealed.

Ancient, heavy, and mysterious patterns permeated with an ancient aura... Meng Li gently touched its cold body, suspecting that it was actually older than Hushan Jianmen.

Meng Li did all the surveying he could, and then covered the traces here.

"Winter does not wither, summer does not overflow, lake is the heart, forest is the pulse."

Verifying this record consumed more of Meng Li's time. In the place where the disciples often lived, the lake was ten zhang deep. He dived to the bottom of the lake for seven consecutive mornings, each time consuming almost all his Qi, and finally dug out a round, disc-shaped bronze artifact at the very bottom of the lake.

It could not be taken out, and it could not be moved. Meng Li spent a long time surveying its direction, which was exactly toward the forest, connecting through the roots of the trees, and then entering the mountain cliff.

On this night, Meng Li returned to the cliff at the mountain pass where he had made marks to compare. Pei Ye also followed closely—the man's efforts over these days had almost figured out the framework of the entire array. If he could match it with the first discovery on the cliff, then the appearance of this array would basically be laid out before him.

But Meng Li climbed the high cliff with his tired body, dug up the floating soil and broken stones, and then froze in place... The huge bronze was gone.

On that day, just digging out a corner made Meng Li stand firm. If it were a column, then according to the arc, it was almost half the width of the mountain cliff. It was firmly buried in the cliff, and the hard soil and giant rocks almost cast it there.

It was precisely because of this that Meng Li couldn't even dig out its full appearance... Now it had disappeared completely.

Meng Li jumped down, looked quietly at the huge hole left at the bottom, and couldn't say a word.

"There is storage but no output, silent for a thousand years. There is no such array in the world, and no old records can be found. There are three ancient characters on the bronze carving, which must be its name. Let's call it 【Buried Mai Mai Xing Zhong】. As for the thing mentioned above, I will call it 'Star Worm'."

In the flipping of pages and the passage of time, Meng Li finally used these scattered words as bones to piece together the chilling full picture of Hushan.

Star Worm embraces the tomb.

The strange, magnificent, and beautiful array design, behind the great hall, the high cliff summit that no one could step on, was the tomb hall, but it was not guarded by Hushan Jianmen, but by this ring array that was in harmony with heaven and earth.

The bronze python body, buried in the mountain cliff, embraced the 【Buried Mai Mai Xing Zhong】, just like a snake winding around a fruit, using human Qi as a guide, drawing starlight from the sky as blood. The residual characters said it "swims in the cliff," because it was such a... living ancient array.

The Hushan disciples were just the nutrients to maintain its operation.

Even though he had only been immersed in the Way of Arrays for a short time and his learning was shallow, Meng Li knew what kind of astonishing array technique this was. It must be the blood-draining work of ancient sages. To cast it, one must exhaust the wealth of half a city.

Then, why did such an array operate secretly here for a thousand years?

Pei Ye thought of the same question as Meng Li at this time and arrived at the bronze hall on the third day.

It was the end of spring in another year. Qu Zhoufu's body was becoming weaker and weaker. Meng Li finally decided to hold all this and ask his master.

The first quarrel broke out during this meeting.

But the reason for the quarrel was beyond Pei Ye's expectations. Meng Li didn't have time to ask his questions one by one, because in the first sentence of the meeting, Qu Zhoufu first told him the thoughts in his heart.

"I want to let Zhang Xiaoyan be the master," the old man said softly.

"..." The words on Meng Li's lips were choked off. "Bug food," "life fading early"—these words that had long been pressing on his heart suddenly expanded at this time, burning into a ball of flame.

"... Nonsense," he said softly.

"..."

"Let him be like you, neither wanting cultivation nor life... feeding bugs here for a lifetime?"

"..." Qu Zhoufu looked at him quietly, then suddenly lowered his head and smiled. "I knew it... you were investigating these things long ago."

Meng Li just pursed his lips and looked at him.

Qu Zhoufu gave a long, hoarse sigh: "But I think there's no need to stop you. Anyway, you would know sooner or later."

"Answer my question."

"A person always has to do something in a lifetime."

"..."

"A sect always has to have its own mission."

"What mission?"

Qu Zhoufu said softly: "When I took over the position of master, your grandmaster told me, 'Secretly guard the Heavenly Heart. One day, the West Court Master will come to take it away'."

"What is the 'Heavenly Heart,' and who is the 'West Court Master'?"

"I don't know."

"Then what happens if he takes it away?!"

"Legend has it that the world will return to the shelter of the Immortal Court," the old man sighed softly. "That is a beautiful world."

Meng Li showed an unbelievable expression: "You believe such words?"

"Why wouldn't I believe it?" Qu Zhoufu looked at him calmly. "I have already believed it for twenty-seven years."

"... Zhang Xiaoyan cannot be this master," Meng Li took a deep breath and said. "He hasn't grown up yet, let alone prepared."

"But you have grand ambitions and stunning talent." Qu Zhoufu looked at him. "Little Meng, I do not favor one over the other, but once you become a Sect Master, you can no longer ascend to the Mystic Gate. Those with more qualifications to leave the nest should go and fly."

"... Neither of us will do it!" Meng Li said decisively, pointing to the high cliff outside through the hall roof. "Or either of us can do it, but we will never give everything for this inexplicable thing!"

"Then what do you want to do?"

"Figure out what it is, unlock it... or destroy it."

"I knew it," Qu Zhoufu sighed hoarsely, seemingly not surprised. "How can a guardian ruin the great plan of the whole world for his own selfish interests? Zhang Xiaoyan will listen."

"I say no."

"I also say, no," Qu Zhoufu looked at him calmly.

(End of chapter) ===== CHAPTER 334 =====