Flower Stealing Master

Letting go of the desperate grasping in his mind, Song Qingshu lay on the ground and let his thoughts drift back over this reborn life of his. It hadn’t been long, by any measure — yet it had been more vivid and tumultuous than anything his former life had offered. And the more vivid it had been, the sharper the regret that cut through him now. He had been on the verge of standing at the summit of this world — and then the ground had opened beneath him in the most unexpected place. He thought of the women who cared so deeply for him, and how they would grieve, and found he couldn’t settle his heart.

His gaze drifted idly to the wall. The characters seemed to swirl and wheel before him, and a wave of dizziness washed through him — at first he thought it was the poison, but he quickly dismissed that. The characters genuinely appeared to be moving.

Perhaps it was the clarity that comes at the edge of death. A thought surfaced unbidden: other people who transmigrated seemed to thrive. Why has it been so hard for me?

He turned it over, and realised: protagonists who transmigrated almost always had a cheat ability. Did he not?

He did. Any martial art — he only had to read or hear the secret once, and he could grasp it immediately. That was how it had been with the Divine Brilliance Scripture, with the Traceless Sand Treading Steps, with the Five Sacred Mountain Sword Art…

Why had it failed him here?

The answer came at once. He had been blindly following the original novel. In the source story, Shi Potian had learned the Supreme Mysteries Scripture by matching tadpole strokes to acupoints — so Song Qingshu had instinctively done the same. But what suited Shi Potian didn’t necessarily suit him.

And because he couldn’t read the tadpole script, he had unconsciously written himself off from the start — slipping entirely into Shi Potian’s perspective.

For anyone else, being unable to read the script would indeed be an insurmountable barrier. But he was different. His gift was that knowing the secret was enough to learn the art.

Previous experience had already proven it — read it once, hear it once, and the martial knowledge was his. So what if he memorised the text itself? He might not be able to read a single tadpole character, but there was nothing stopping him from using brute memory to commit every stroke and shape on this wall to mind. He didn’t need to know what the characters meant, or how they were pronounced. He only needed to remember what they looked like.

He wasn’t sure it would work. But his situation left him nothing to lose.

Even knowing the odds were against him, Song Qingshu refused to surrender the last thread of possibility. First, because this reborn life had forged in him a resilience beyond the ordinary. Second, because the thought of all those women waiting for him to come back safely made surrender impossible.

The paralysis of the Heavenly Devil Flower was spreading steadily through his body. He knew he had no time. He cleared his mind of everything and turned his full concentration to burning every character on the wall into his memory.

He stopped worrying about meaning. He stopped worrying about which tadpole corresponded to which acupoint or which meridian pathway. He simply memorised the shape of each character — pure, mechanical rote learning.

For an ordinary person, committing an entire wall of densely packed tadpole script to memory would have been impossible. But Song Qingshu’s dual-soul nature, combined with his deep cultivation, had given him a mind that ran far beyond the human norm in both speed and capacity — and with death at his elbow, something surged in him, and his thoughts became preternaturally clear.

He reached the last character and snapped his eyes shut. He recited the entire text from beginning to end. And when that single recitation was complete, the tadpole characters in his mind suddenly coalesced into a golden figure, which began to demonstrate the techniques before him — sometimes swiftly, sometimes slowly.

‘It feels like a holographic projection from a science-fiction film.’ Song Qingshu’s focus wavered for a moment, then locked back on.

As he watched the figure demonstrate, the understanding struck him like a lightning bolt. ‘So that’s how it works.’

Of the twenty-three chambers he had already studied, he had believed himself to have grasped most of it — but there had always been critical points that refused to connect, and he had known, somewhere, that the actual power of what he’d learned was far below what the Scripture was capable of. He had simply been unable to identify what he was missing.

Now he saw it all clearly. The palm art of “the Five Sacred Mountains weigh as nothing” — this was how it was deployed. The crux of the sword art “ten paces, one man slain” — there, in that movement. The conditions that had to be met before the movement art of “a silver saddle gleams upon a white horse” could be unleashed at its true potential…

The golden figure moved through every art from all twenty-three chambers in sequence. By the end, sword art, palm art, internal cultivation, and movement art had merged entirely — indistinguishable from one another, no longer separable into categories.

When the figure had demonstrated everything, it folded itself into a seated posture. Then every acupoint in its body began to flicker and glow, tracing the pathways of true qi in motion.

Song Qingshu watched with mounting astonishment. ‘Extraordinary. The final qi-circulation route runs in direct opposition to everything that came before it — the energy inverted completely. That’s the condition for full mastery.’

He had no idea how much time passed. Then he opened his eyes.

He raised one hand and pointed at the stone wall beside him. A thread of pure golden blood shot from his fingertip like a blade and buried itself in the stone, leaving a small, clean hole. Unless someone dug deep into the rock, they would never find the mass of concentrated poison-blood locked inside.

‘The Supreme Mysteries Scripture is everything it was said to be.’ He was simultaneously astonished and overjoyed. For centuries, the greatest minds of the martial world had mapped and classified the eight extraordinary meridians and their acupoints until they had become established common knowledge. Yet the Supreme Mysteries Scripture went its own way entirely — most of its acupoints had never been identified by any previous practitioner. Some overlapped with known acupoints, but their properties and functions were completely different.

In other words, the Supreme Mysteries Scripture effectively constructed an entirely new set of meridians within the human body. Whether one could even call them meridians was debatable — before learning this Scripture, Song Qingshu had examined those same locations with his full cultivation and found nothing out of the ordinary. But when the Scripture’s methods were applied, something that functioned exactly like an acupoint’s qi-vortex formed there.

Did these Supreme Mysteries acupoints exist or not?

Song Qingshu found himself genuinely uncertain. If they did exist, that meant centuries of the martial world’s greatest practitioners — including Song Qingshu himself, at the height of his previous cultivation — had all been fools. If they didn’t exist, then why could he now perceive them so clearly when using the Scripture’s methods?

‘Doesn’t matter. It works — that’s enough.’ Song Qingshu had always been the optimistic sort. Problems he couldn’t resolve, he stopped tying himself in knots over. And in any case, he had just used those newly constructed meridians to drive every trace of the Heavenly Devil Flower’s toxin out of his body.

He had not only recovered his peak cultivation.

He had mastered the true Supreme Mysteries Scripture.

Only now did he understand what Shi Potian’s achievement had actually been. Having been unable to read, Shi Potian had stumbled into the Scripture’s secrets through diagrams, by happy accident — and what he’d learned had been the surface layer, a convenient shortcut. The true Supreme Mysteries Scripture was incomparably deeper than anything Shi Potian had touched.

‘I really do want to walk out there right now and show everyone exactly what I’m capable of,’ Song Qingshu thought, a wave of barely containable satisfaction rolling through him.

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