Flower Stealing Master

Song Qingshu had asked the question to probe how much the Isle of Heroes’ people had grasped of the Supreme Mysteries Scripture — a rough measure of the island’s overall fighting strength. He hadn’t expected it to make Zhang San suspicious instead.

“I never used to be interested, that’s true — but tonight someone tried to kill me. If I hadn’t stumbled into deflecting that assassin’s blow by sheer chance, I’d be dead. It occurred to me that learning a little martial arts for self-protection might not be a bad idea. Otherwise, dying young, I’d never have the chance to meet all the beauties the world has to offer.” Song Qingshu produced the excuse without missing a beat, while inwardly cursing the dead young lord savagely. ‘Good-looking and utterly useless — nearly got me exposed right there.’

“Ah, so that’s it. In that case, the assassination attempt wasn’t entirely a bad thing. The Island Master will surely be gratified to hear the Young Lord thinks this way.” Zhang San smiled pleasantly.

Song Qingshu smiled back, while privately wondering what the relationship between the Island Master and this young lord actually was. The tone suggested something quite particular — could the young lord be one of the Island Masters’ illegitimate sons? He wasn’t sure which of the two, the Dragon or the Wood — those old reprobates…

“Here we are. The Young Lord may go in alone — we cannot enter.” Zhang San’s voice cut through his wandering thoughts.

Song Qingshu looked up. He was standing before a stone chamber — and a quick glance at the surroundings confirmed it was the last one, the one that had been barred to him before.

‘So this chamber is reserved for the Island Masters alone. No wonder I was turned away.’ He straightened and raised his voice: “This time, this young lord intends to master what’s inside in one sitting.”

“With the Young Lord’s natural brilliance, some understanding will surely follow,” Zhang San said with his smile — while laughing coldly to himself. Even after years of the Island Masters’ tireless study, neither of them would claim to have grasped even a tenth of it. This pampered young lord is going in to look at gibberish and nothing more.

Seeing that they were indeed staying outside, Song Qingshu felt his tension ease and walked in unhurriedly. A long corridor opened into a space of startling size — something like the interior of a sports gymnasium. Against one wall, two brocade cushions had been laid on the ground. Song Qingshu concluded this was where the Long and Mu Island Masters practised, and looking up, found a smooth stone wall before them — covered from edge to edge in dense, carved text.

Unlike the other twenty-three chambers, which had both diagrams and writing, this chamber had only text.

Calling it text was perhaps generous. Song Qingshu considered himself a man of some linguistic breadth — fluent in Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean, and French, if one counted certain… phonetically approximated terms as fluency. But he could not make out a single character on this wall.

‘Tadpole script. Of course.’ He had thought he might have some advantage over the oblivious Shi Potian. Apparently not, in front of this particular wall.

Left with no better option, Song Qingshu fell back on the same blunt approach Shi Potian had used in the original novel — he started with the individual brushstrokes. Each stroke seemed to writhe and wriggle like a tadpole on the stone, in constant motion — until he fixed his gaze on a single one, at which point it went still.

He studied them carefully. Countless tadpoles darted up and down, each in its own posture, endlessly varied and oddly fascinating.

‘These must be linked to inner energy circulation.’ With his current level of insight, he spotted the essential principle at once.

He watched for a long while. Suddenly he felt a pulse at the Zhiyang acupoint on his upper back, and as he looked to another tadpole, the Xuanshu acupoint pulsed in response — yet the thread of energy connecting the two refused to link up. He looked at a third, and nothing moved at all.

A surge of excitement ran through him. His meridians had been still for so long because of the Heavenly Devil Flower — and now, merely looking at these tadpoles, the acupoints were beginning to stir. If he could link all the meridian pathways throughout his body, he might not need Qi Fang’s help at all to restore his cultivation.

Galvanised, he worked through the tadpoles one by one, each corresponding acupoint leaping in answer. There were thousands upon thousands of the tiny shapes on the wall, and occasionally, by chance, two acupoints would connect — and when they did, a wave of ease flooded through him.

He was searching for the right pairings, trying to thread the acupoints together into one continuous circuit, when he suddenly made a sound and spat a mouthful of blood — faintly tinged with gold.

‘No.’ Song Qingshu’s face went grim. The awakening of the acupoints had seemingly agitated the Heavenly Devil Flower’s toxin, and it had chosen this moment to surge.

He tried urgently to suppress the poison with his qi — but his true energy was not yet linked into a single flow. Each acupoint was fighting its own isolated battle, and the ferocious toxin pushed them back one by one.

‘This won’t hold.’ He tried to stand and make for the door — if he could reach Qi Fang, perhaps she could help him suppress it again. The moment he rose, his legs went numb, and he crashed back down onto the cushion.

At this critical juncture, Song Qingshu gave up worrying about suspicion and opened his mouth to call out to Zhang San and Li Si. No sound came.

The familiar paralysis was spreading through him again. He smiled bitterly. ‘Joy turned to sorrow — the oldest story in the world.’ If he hadn’t been greedy for the Supreme Mysteries Scripture, the Heavenly Devil Flower’s toxin would have stayed dormant, and he would not be facing death again.

‘Am I going to die here quietly, without a sound?’ His thoughts wavered — then settled on Zhou Zhiruo waiting for him, and all the others. His resolve came back. ‘No. Not yet.’

But resolve without a path forward changed nothing. He had tried everything he knew when the poison struck before, and without Xiao Longnu arriving by chance with the Rhino Horn Earth Dragon Circulation Pill, he would have been dead long since.

This chamber was forbidden ground. No one would come. There was no one to help.

Only himself.

Song Qingshu bit his lip and tried to force clarity into his mind. Perhaps it was the nearness of death — his thoughts moved faster than usual. Everything he had tried before had already failed; no point revisiting it. The only remaining hope was the wall in front of him.

He gathered his concentration and turned back to the tadpoles, tracing their movements. But within moments his spirit sank. There were countless thousands of them. Threading hundreds of acupoints across his entire body into a single unbroken circuit — how could that possibly be done quickly?

In the original novel, the Long and Mu Island Masters had spent their entire lives studying this wall and never achieved it. Even Shi Potian, stumbling through without going astray, had taken over three months to link all his acupoints into a unified whole. Song Qingshu’s understanding and cultivation were far beyond that blunt young man’s — perhaps he could do it in less time — but even so, with this many tadpoles to work through, ten days to a fortnight would be the minimum. And ten days was ten days more than he had.

The more urgently he pressed, the slower the progress. After several wrong attempts in sequence, Song Qingshu finally let go. ‘If I have to wait until I’ve mastered this Scripture before the poison is beaten, I’ll have died a hundred times over — eighty at the very least.’

Related← Previous ChapterChapter 1155: Found After Searching ☰Table of ContentsNext Chapter →Chapter 1157: After Bitter Comes Sweet