Hua Xianchen spat three times, her face burning. The bell had stripped her bare in front of everyone.
"Your golden core," it continued, merciless. "Look at it now. Still want to claim those weren't your thoughts?"
She looked up. Her core had turned filthy — once golden and radiant, now dark and lightless.
"Your own desires poisoned it," the bell said. "Cultivate some dao-heart, girl. Stop filling your head with nonsense. A-Yan, this one's a lost cause. Poor roots."
Su Yan rested the axe blade against her core. The darkness melted away, purity returning. "What are roots? People are bundles of contradictions. If purity of mind made immortals, why bother cultivating at all?"
Hua Xianchen's heart warmed. Brother Ying understood her.
She laughed, coy. "Brother Ying, why didn't the axe corrupt you?"
Su Yan smirked. "Because my roots are good."
Her smile vanished. One con. All of them, con artists.
"Go cultivate," Su Yan said. "Your roots are poor, so it'll take time to grasp Samadhi Fire. That core needs Samadhi Water too — slow, steady work to purge the impurities. Without that, you'll never form a Primordial Spirit."
"Samadhi Water?" She frowned. "Fire and water oppose each other. How can they coexist?"
"How did you form your golden core? Dual Refinement means forging the furnace with Samadhi Fire and Samadhi Water. That's how you create a true core."
Hua Xianchen's voice dropped. "But everyone uses the fire and water from their Dual Refinement stage. A sea of flame, a river of heaven's water — that's how we all forge our cores..."
Su Yan went silent. Then he laughed, bitter and sharp.
"No wonder nuo masters replaced cultivators. You can't even read your own techniques. Your understanding of the stages is broken. It's a miracle you haven't all died."
She opened her mouth, closed it. "Many do die. Cultivation deviation takes hundreds every year..."
"Could it be... we're really doing it wrong?"
Su Yan had no answer. He was only at the fourth level of Gate-Breaking. He hadn't reached Dual Refinement yet. He didn't know the Samadhi Water method either.
Hua Xianchen's eyes lit up. "I know someone cultivating Samadhi Water! He'll have the true formula!"
She glanced at Avia, hesitated, then rushed out. Minutes later she returned with Dong Meiqing — a towering man from the Eastern Han, his presence heavy as a mountain.
After Xu Fu, he was the oldest and most powerful. He had formed a Primordial Spirit, reached ascension stage. His qi rolled off him in visible waves.
He presented a silk text with both hands. "Lord Xu, this is the Five Lamps Water Guidance. Passed down through my family. I am unworthy, yet it has kept me alive, my body unaged. But my lifespan nears its end."
Su Yan read through it. The marginal notes showed generations of effort. The text had flaws, but fewer than most. It rivaled Tuo's Immortal Scripture in clarity.
"You only cultivate water, never fire?"
Dong Meiqing shook his head.
Su Yan circled him, stopped. "You live in a volcano?"
"How did you know?"
"You'd be dead otherwise. Samadhi Water hollows you out. Without Samadhi Fire to balance it, you need external heat. And more — some kind of immortal medicine. What have you been eating?"
"Nothing like that."
Su Yan studied him, then laughed. "You're a nuo master."
Dong Meiqing paled. He checked their surroundings, then whispered, "Your insight is unmatched. During Emperor Wu's reign, Heaven-Man Resonance swept the land. I was a cultivator, but I learned nuo arts like everyone else. We keep it secret. Other cultivators... they don't like nuo masters."
"I opened Secrets too. Which one?"
"The Mud Pill."
"That explains it. The Mud Pill Secret steals immortal medicine. The water hollows you, but the Secret fills you with longevity elixir. That's how you survived."
Su Yan frowned. "Then why haven't you been consumed?"
Dong Meiqing looked baffled. Su Yan caught himself. "Who taught you the Mud Palace nuo art?"
"It was everywhere back then. After the Emperor suppressed the hundred schools and elevated nuo alone, texts on the Six Secrets circulated freely. Then Heaven-Man Resonance went wrong, and people stopped teaching them."
Su Yan's blood ran cold. "Went wrong? What do you mean?"
Dong Meiqing's voice grew distant. He spoke of his childhood — the sky twisting, the earth floating overhead. Rivers ten thousand li long hung in the air like serpents of silver. Mountains drifted above the clouds.
Heaven-Man Resonance had warped reality itself.
Giant abysses opened, swallowing everything. He had spent his youth hiding, fleeing, watching the world dissolve into nightmare.
When the chaos ended, the world had shrunk. The Yuan Shou continent was a fraction of its former size. The other cultivators — the powerful ones, the ancient ones — had simply vanished.
Gone. Erased. As if they had never existed.
Su Yan listened, heart heavy. In Emperor Wu's time, true nuo arts had circulated — arts that could steal and refine immortal medicine. Dong Meiqing had survived because of them.
But those true arts had disappeared along with the vanished cultivators.
Why had the nuo arts that survived become man-eating traps?
What had gone wrong with Heaven-Man Resonance?
He looked up at the sky, searching for answers that weren't there.