Chapter 19
Chapter 19: A Heart Like an Arrow
Shao Heng’s expression cooled. She didn’t play along.
“What do you want from me this time?”
She didn’t care how rare the azure carp’s bloodline was, or what kind of fortune it counted as. She didn’t care that Jiang Yun Jiang had formed a Demon-Contract Spell.
With her current cultivation speed, as long as resources kept up, she might not even need three years to reach late First Realm.
With that kind of talent, why would she care whether a carp demon could become a flood dragon?
Even if it became a Pseudo Dragon, as long as her cultivation was high enough, it would still be a bug she could crush underfoot.
What she cared about was this: Jiang Yun Jiang always had an angle. Always a scheme.
And disgust was easy.
The moment Shao Heng felt that gaze again—the look of someone weighing her like goods on a table, calculating what could be squeezed out of her—disgust surged, hot and sharp.
Her words were blunt. Her gaze was a blade.
In her qi sea and dantian, the Azure Emperor sigils trembled soundlessly. Spiritual power rolled through her yellow sprout, and an aura spilled out—faint, but unmistakably different from before.
For an instant, Jiang Yun Jiang actually stumbled back half a step.
When she realized it, embarrassment flashed, then anger. She drew a breath, forcing her smile back into place. “Shao Heng, you’ve misunderstood.”
“It’s only you and me here,” Shao Heng said. “Whether it’s a misunderstanding or not—you know it, and I know it.”
She turned and walked away, following the pointer of her Route-Pass Talisman toward her spirit field.
Her voice carried back over her shoulder, cold as iron. “If anyone tries to run schemes on me, I don’t care what inner sect disciple she is. I’ll make her hurt down to the bone.”
She glanced back just enough for Jiang Yun Jiang to see her eyes. “Once you become a cultivator, your spiritual sense grows. Will the strength of your soul still support the Heart-Bewitching Eye the way it did before?”
Of course not.
Among True Lord Tian Bai’s disciples, aside from Jiang Yun Jiang, the lowest cultivation belonged to Song Fei Sheng. He was mid First Realm, and he could still be affected by the Heart-Bewitching Eye to some extent.
But the world wasn’t full of fools. As the disciple of a Sixth Realm True Lord, how could he be a useless drunkard?
He noticed the sudden wave of goodwill. The very next day, he wore a prayer-bead artifact to protect the soul in his niwan palace. After that, he was no longer affected. If anything, he began to look at Jiang Yun Jiang with wary eyes.
Jiang Yun Jiang was used to borrowing strength to strike strength. Compared to inner sect disciples—stronger, harder to handle, and more likely to bring backlash later—her gaze began to shift toward the outer sect.
It was a pity, really.
Watching Shao Heng’s back disappear, the softness on Jiang Yun Jiang’s face vanished without a trace.
The little carp on her shoulder seemed to sense her mood and rubbed against her cheek, flattering.
Dan Hua’s voice returned, slow and weighted with experience. “Yun Jiang, I’ve seen too many people and too many things.”
“Know that a daoist’s heart is hard to grasp. Some people are like blades, but even a blade has a hilt that limits it.”
“And some are like arrows loosed from the string—once fired, they only surge forward. If you try to seize them by force, you’ll only wound yourself.”
Jiang Yun Jiang’s smile didn’t reach her eyes. “Senior Dan Hua, I understand.”
Shao Heng replayed the encounter as she walked. The surprise on Jiang Yun Jiang’s face at the start hadn’t looked fake. It truly had been a chance meeting.
[Jiang Yun Jiang mentioned her Master. That should be an inner sect elder.]
[High Grade aptitude is rare even in the inner sect, so it’s no surprise an elder took her in.]
Her thoughts sharpened into a hard, almost absurd certainty.
[It’s just not strong enough.]
[If I were strong enough—so strong I could slap her Master to death—would Jiang Yun Jiang dare to have even one crooked thought about me?]
Back in the Marquis of Pacifying the South’s manor, whenever she clashed with Jiang Yun Jiang and Lu Shao Jia and Lu Shao Jing demanded she “hand things over,” an almost ridiculous thought had flashed through her mind.
If she were an emperor, they’d have no choice but to bow and scrape, breaking their backs to please her. Would they still dare say those things?
Or rather… would they even dare breathe too loudly?
That thought quickened her steps.
Soon she reached a new area.
Ahead lay a flat plain without towering peaks. A thick layer of white mist covered it, hiding the terrain. Disciples came and went through the haze.
Shao Heng poured more spiritual power into the Route-Pass Talisman. A thin red beam shot out and landed on a spot.
She ran over. The mist before her felt almost solid—impossible to pass through. It formed an orderly pattern. Where it thinned, the land was divided into neat grids. This had to be how the spirit fields were sectioned.
When she reached where the red beam sank in, she held the Route-Pass Talisman out and tested with a foot.
The mist didn’t block her.
She stepped inside smoothly.
Within the isolation, a stretch of black soil spread before her. When she focused, she sensed the earth-aspect qi here was richer than the other four aspects.
Shao Heng set the rice bag down and looked over the plot without the slightest fear.
With the mist as a barrier, anyone without the matching Route-Pass Talisman couldn’t enter—or even glimpse the condition of the fields.
And the strangest part was this: from inside, she could clearly see the outside. Sunlight poured through unimpeded, as if the mist were glass.
With her plan firm, Shao Heng got to work.
First, she recited the spell and drew on her spiritual power, casting Earth-Breaking Art to cultivate the field. Once the soil loosened and turned, she untied the rice bag and used the Object-Command Spell to scatter the seeds in neat order.
Two spells in a row burned through much of the eleven furnaces of spiritual power in her body. She sat down cross-legged to recover, breathing evenly, while also calling on Azure Emperor to condense blue-green droplets.
A quarter hour later, Shao Heng rose. A whole handful of green liquid pooled in her left palm.
She formed seals with her right hand and chanted, “Guard the spirit, move the qi—let the dragon travel and rain pour.”
The Spirit Rain Technique drew in water-aspect qi from the air. Above the plot, clouds gathered in thin, obedient clusters. She guided the green liquid into those clouds with her spiritual power.
A fine pale-green rain fell across the field.
When it stopped and the clouds dispersed, green shoots were already pushing out of the soil, growing fast, nearly to the stage of tillering and branching.
Shao Heng watched as seedlings spread across the field like a living carpet. Then she marked off a small corner at the edge and triggered the first change of Azure Emperor again, letting droplets sink directly into the soil.
The seedlings drank the surrounding qi greedily and surged upward even faster.
In less than a quarter hour, they began to head and flower.
Excitement burned in Shao Heng’s chest. She forced it down—steady hands, steady mind—and used the Wind-Blowing Technique to stir a breeze over that corner, completing pollination.
But the moment her fingertips stopped dripping green liquid, the seedlings in that corner yellowed with shocking speed.
Leaves curled. Stalks sagged.
Then they withered and collapsed.
“They can’t handle it?”
Disappointment flashed through her, sharp as a bite. But it was also what she’d expected.
If the droplets could push rice seedlings to maturity in one go, the effect would be too terrifying—so shocking it would break the normal rules of growth. This result, strangely, made her feel more at ease.
“That’s enough for today,” Shao Heng murmured. “I’ll come back tomorrow and use part of the seedlings to experiment, so I can pin down the rules.”
Then she looked over the whole field again, and a rare worry crept onto her face.
Coming here every day to tend it would be a nuisance—pulling weeds, killing pests, loosening soil, watering. It would waste too much time. And if she went into seclusion and forgot, these delicate spirit-rice seedlings might wither and die.
“If only I could find a helper…”
Shao Heng’s eyes lit. Her lips curled into a grin.
“I’ve got it!”