Chapter 319: Turning Bad Luck into Good, Reversing Fate with Seal Script

What truly made Liu Fengji make up his mind was the sudden incident that had just occurred.

Danger was already close at hand! The way the Personal Guard contacted him was a top-secret of the family; outsiders could never possibly know it.

If this was a trap, it meant the enemy had already obtained the means of contact, and there were only two possibilities.

One, someone in the Personal Guard had defected; two, the Witch People had forged it using a Secret Technique.

Regardless of which possibility it was, it meant his whereabouts were exposed, and the opportunity the family's powerful warriors had fought for him was about to become void.

At a time like this, one must grab onto a straw of hope as soon as it is encountered.

Liu Fengji took a deep breath, waved his hand, and said, "Xiao Xu, you step back first."

The book boy's eyes were full of suspicion as he glanced at Zhou You twice, then obediently and proactively left.

Zhou You knew that what the other party was about to say must be extremely secretive, such that even a personal book boy could not hear it.

"Let me introduce myself again. Liu Fengji is my formal name; my childhood name is Auspicious One."

Liu Fengji pointed at himself and said, "I was born with an omen. A strange person once read my fortune and said my destiny was uniquely extraordinary, summarizing it with the eight characters: 'Turn bad luck into good, meet disaster and find fortune.'"

"Therefore, both my formal name and childhood name were taken from these eight characters."

"That is the version outsiders can hear. What follows is my family's top secret; those who know it do not exceed the count of one hand," Liu Fengji said. "The truth is, I am blessed by my ancestors and possess a natural omen on my body."

His ancestors were leaders of the Seventy-two Ancestral Tribes, and they had seen the Nine Tripod Characters in person when the Celestial Beings descended to bestow the Nine Tripods.

The miraculous nature of the Nine Tripods truly exceeded the limits of imagination; a single glance at them had been passed down for ten thousand years.

Despite the countless ages that had passed, the traces of the Nine Tripods still flowed down through the bloodlines of these ancestral people.

Liu Fengji was one in a billion, a lucky one; he was discovered the day he was born, having a birthmark on his back suspected to be a remnant of the Nine Tripod Characters.

"What? A birthmark can grow into the shape of a character?"

Zhou You had truly learned something new; the Nine Tripod Characters were complex and intricate, yet they could actually grow naturally?

"It was incomplete, merely similar, and could not even be considered a complete character."

Liu Fengji explained, "From the time I was small until I grew up, the family utilized countless resources, hired experts in Seal Script to study the shape of the birthmark, and archaeologically supplemented it, finally completing this character."

"When I turned sixteen and my body had finished developing, I hired a Body Inscriber to fill in the missing parts, and thus this character was formed."

A Body Inscriber? Zhou You became curious and interrupted to ask what kind of profession that was. It turned out that a Body Inscriber was an extremely rare profession; one must possess both profound knowledge of Seal Script and control over the human body to use the flesh and blood as a carrier to engrave characters as if they were gold or stone.

The Body Inscriber invited by the Liu family successfully connected the birthmark on his body into a Nine Tripod Character.

"Amazing!"

Zhou You listened, feeling refreshed and delighted; it was truly a grand undertaking.

A noble family is a noble family; the resources they can mobilize are unimaginable to ordinary people.

He had been studying Seal Script behind closed doors with Ceng Fuzi, and he never imagined that one could actually convene experts of Seal Script from all over the world, sparing no cost just to study a single character.

And the Body Inscriber—proficient in Seal Script and in control of the human body; with those two conditions combined, they were an epic-level rare species.

Someone like Ceng Fuzi could be considered proficient in Seal Script, but he, Zhou You, still lacked some seasoning.

Controlling the human body—well, at the very least, it would be the level of an Intermediate Martial Master like his cheap big brother Zhang Huaimin.

Any one of these conditions was a goal that normal people would find difficult to reach in their entire lives, let alone having both.

Zhou You asked himself about his own conditions and realized it would be very difficult for him to meet the entry requirements for this profession.

"What is the use of this Seal Script?" Zhou You asked subconsciously.

"It can be said to be miraculous; accompanying my birth, the birthmark automatically manifested mysterious power!"

"When I was six, it happened that the Master Lineage offended a Grandmaster. The other party's palm strike shook the bloodlines of all the blood relatives in the clan, and it did not fade for three months."

"That was truly a catastrophe. The bloodlines trembled, and the children, being physically weak, could not withstand it and died one after another. I was still young, and my bloodline was close to the main lineage, so I received the greatest impact."

"I thought I would lose my life on the spot, but I only developed a high fever and was unscathed after recovering from the illness."

"Because of that catastrophe, many of my peers were either dead or crippled; only I was unscathed."

"It was precisely because of this incident that the family discovered the strange aspects of my body and the power of the character represented by the birthmark."

"The meaning of this character is... Price!"

"My talent for martial arts was excellent. I walked at one year old, started learning fist techniques at two, and by six, I had already cultivated Qi and blood, breaking through from the initial stage to the later stage."

"Conservatively estimated, I could have become a Martial Master before the age of ten."

Thump! Zhou You slapped the stone he was sitting on, breaking it into two halves.

That is just too damn bullying!

He covered it up with a loud laugh, "Brilliant, it makes my blood boil to hear it. Brother Liu has the potential of a Martial Saint!"

If one at the later stage of Qi and blood could hardly withstand a bloodline shock from an unknown number of generations away, what kind of monster was a Grandmaster exactly?

Also, Liu Fengji was at the later stage of Qi and blood at six; how come there had been no progress at all after all these years? "After that serious illness, all my martial arts realms vanished like smoke, and my realm regressed all the way to the initial stage of force."

"This change led the family to deduce that the efficacy of the Seal Script character is to use the regression of martial realms as a price to exchange for the opportunity to survive danger and turn peril into safety."

"Since then, through continuous research, this Nine Tripod Character was confirmed to be named... 'Fortune-Turning'."

"Turning bad luck into good and meeting disaster to find fortune is, in essence, reversing one's luck, changing from bad to good."

"However, the price is also high and immense; it must be exchanged with the regression of my martial arts realms. The greater the danger faced, the more intense the degree of regression."

Speaking of this, Liu Fengji sighed and asked in return, "Can you guess what my original realm was?"

Zhou You looked him up and down, only then realizing that the later stage of Qi and blood was only his strength after his realm had fallen.

He felt not only awe inside; to escape the pursuit of the Witch People, he even had to sacrifice powerful warriors and the Personal Guard. How great a price must be paid for such a perilous situation?

"Before this battle, I was preparing to break through to become a powerful warrior!"

Liu Fengji's understated sentence made Zhou You's eyes almost pop out.

The other party was only 5 or 6 years older than his real age and was already about to break through to become a powerful warrior; he could no longer be described as a genius. Falling all the way from a top-tier Martial Master, and finally not even being able to maintain the status of a Martial Master, now only Qi and blood remained.

The miraculous power of this Nine Tripod Character made Zhou You even more curious.

"What follows is the main point."

Liu Fengji said earnestly, "I am certain of the birthmark's function; I sacrificed so much cultivation realm and base to exchange for this chance meeting with Brother Lu, so it is easy to imagine that you must be the noble person who can help me escape this place!"

"What if I am not?" Zhou You asked in return.

"If you are not, Brother Lu will not be able to escape and will inevitably die, so I am not afraid of leaking these family secrets by telling you!"

Liu Fengji raised his eyebrows, making Zhou You feel that this fellow was somewhat asking for a beating!

(End of this chapter)