While the entire Fengming Mountain demon domain was stirring with undercurrents due to Mo Fan’s actions, he himself was quietly reading a book inside his cave dwelling.
This book was none other than the Dao De Jing that he had personally written!
Originally, he had not felt much attachment to this scripture. He had only regarded it as a tool to help wild beasts awaken their spiritual intelligence. But later, after reminders from Bai Yi and Bai Yaoyao, he hid the scripture away again, worried that it truly possessed some mysterious power that could bring great calamity to Black Wind Mountain.
After that, he would occasionally take it out to read and recite. Yet no matter how he tried, he could never enter its depths. It only felt dull and tasteless. Far from gaining any insight, the more he read, the more irritated and pained his heart became. In the end, he simply set it aside.
The reason he picked it up again had to do with Fang Ru.
In recent days, he had asked Fang Ru how she had sensed literary qi. The answer she gave was that she only began to sense what was called literary qi after reciting the Dao De Jing.
At first, she did not know it was literary qi, so she paid it little attention. She simply felt that this power allowed her to work without fatigue and grow ever more abundant. That was the real reason she could lecture on principles for ten days or half a month without eating!
Otherwise, she would have starved to death long ago!
When Mo Fan heard Fang Ru’s reply, he became extremely excited. He immediately asked her to share some of the insights she had gained from the Dao De Jing. But Fang Ru did not know how to answer.
In the end, she could only force out one sentence:
“The Dao that can be spoken of is not the eternal Dao!”
As soon as those words came out, Mo Fan felt deeply frustrated. He realised asking her was pointless. So he simply returned to the closed-door chamber in the Spring Pool Cave to ponder it alone.
“Strange. Is this broken scripture really that miraculous?”
“Why has this king nearly worn the book out flipping through it, yet seen no effect at all?”
Mo Fan sighed. While complaining, he also questioned his own intelligence.
Or perhaps the book was divine, but he simply was not the right material?
“No! Even an ordinary mortal like Fang Ru could comprehend it. Why should this king be the only one who cannot?”
Just as he was about to give up, Mo Fan shook his head again. He simply closed the book and began to put himself in Fang Ru’s position to think about the problem. In the end, he concluded one key difference: Fang Ru was of the human race, while he was of the demon race!
“Could it be that this thing even requires bloodline authentication? Only non-demons can comprehend it?”
Mo Fan grumbled. Then he directly closed his eyes and sank all his thoughts into his Shuiyue clone.
At this moment, far away on the Divine Domain continent, the Shuiyue clone was sitting cross-legged in a corner on the first floor of the Tianlu Holy Land’s Scripture Pavilion. He was flipping through a copy of the Jiuzhou Unofficial Histories.
Suddenly his eyes lit up. He immediately closed the book, stood up, and walked out of the Scripture Pavilion.
As he left the Scripture Pavilion, a nearby cultivator who was also reading a book promptly took out a sound transmission jade slip and spoke into it: “Ancestor, Senior Brother Zheng Dao has departed!”
Tianlu Holy Land, Cloudmist Peak.
Situ Yunzhen casually put away the sound transmission jade slip. A glint flashed in his eyes as he murmured to himself, “My good disciple, you have finally deigned to leave the Scripture Pavilion. You really kept your master waiting!”
“If this continues, master will not be able to hold back much longer. It is about time to send you out for some training!
If you do not go out, how can the Heavenly Demon Seed grow and strengthen?”
After leaving the Scripture Pavilion, Mo Fan went straight to the Merit Building. He exchanged his direct disciple token for a large amount of cultivation resources. Then he casually found a remote, rocky area in Tianlu Holy Land.
After confirming no one was around, he opened up a brand-new cave dwelling here.
Although Mo Fan had his own residence on Cloudmist Peak, he did not dare return there lightly.
Back then, he had obediently stayed under Situ Yunzhen’s watchful eyes because he had not yet obtained the Tianlu Divine Derivation Art.
Now that he had the supreme cultivation method in hand and knew full well that Situ Yunzhen harboured ill intentions, Mo Fan naturally did not want to take the risk of returning.
Although this was only a clone and he could return to his main body at any time, unless absolutely necessary, he still did not want to take that step.
With this clone present in the human race territory, it became much more convenient for him to do many things and far easier to learn about all major changes among the human race.
After entering the cave dwelling, Mo Fan waved his hand casually. Spiritual power surged, and soon the split stone door sealed shut again, restoring the place to its previous appearance.
After finishing this, Mo Fan embedded more than ten superior spirit stones into the stone walls. The light they emitted illuminated the darkness inside the cave.
Only then did he take out a table, stools, blank paper, and brush and ink.
Once everything was ready, he began to write out the complete Dao De Jing, and he used his self-created demon race script!
For some reason, this time he wrote with exceptional difficulty. With every stroke he made, the next line of the Dao De Jing that appeared in his mind silently vanished.
At first Mo Fan was deeply shocked. But after realising it was a kind of restriction similar to those in the Scripture Pavilion, he grew accustomed to it.
Although a mysterious force in the darkness interfered with the Shuiyue clone’s memory, it could not interfere with Mo Fan’s main body!
And the main body shared thoughts with the Shuiyue clone!
This resulted in the words disappearing from the clone’s mind as soon as he picked up the brush, yet through the main body’s eyes he could still see the characters on the Dao De Jing in his hand!
If the Dao De Jing possessed a mysterious power that was intervening, then Mo Fan was using the miraculous nature of the Shuiyue Spirit Mirror to slip through undetected!
In this way, Mo Fan ultimately succeeded in writing out the entire Dao De Jing.
The moment he finished writing it, he felt something in his heart. He directly became immersed in the lines and words of the scripture. His eyes unconsciously closed slightly, and he entered a state of meditative absorption.
It was an indescribable miraculous state. It felt as though in an instant he had arrived in a shattered world. Here, mountains and rivers were broken, the earth bled, and even the sky dome had cracked into many uneven fissures, as though the entire heavens had been forcibly divided into several layers at this moment!
“The Dao that can be spoken of is not the eternal Dao; the name that can be named is not the eternal name…”
Suddenly, a faint, distant voice drifted closer and entered Mo Fan’s ears. He followed the sound and looked over. At a ruined city gate, an aged figure riding a green ox was gradually moving farther away.
The old man seemed to sense something. He suddenly turned his head and looked towards Mo Fan.
With that one glance, Mo Fan sank completely into it. It was as though he saw the evolution of all things in the world and the flowing of the starry river in the heavens.
An indefinable thought emerged in Mo Fan’s heart, causing him to sink even deeper.
In this way, an unknown amount of time passed.
When Mo Fan awoke from his meditative state, he suddenly gained realisation!
Buzz…
In the next instant, with Mo Fan at the centre, a faint ripple of water-like waves spread through the air. It directly covered the entire cave dwelling, then the ripples bloomed and surged outward, gradually expanding to a radius of about one li before finally stopping and no longer spreading.
Within this one-li area, Mo Fan was fully aware of everything!
At this moment, outside Mo Fan’s cave dwelling, a demon general wearing armour and draped in a bright red cloak, with the head of a tiger and the body of a human, suddenly shivered. His brows furrowed slightly.
In that instant just now, he seemed to sense something, yet he could not put it into words.
But right then, an inexplicable immense force suddenly appeared behind him. It caused this demon general to stumble forward and directly kneel on the ground.
Yet in reality, he felt no fluctuation of demonic power at all!
“Commander, you must not!”
The two demon soldiers originally guarding the entrance to the Spring Pool Cave saw this and their expressions changed at once. They hurried forward to help their commander up.
“Ahem… This commander merely slipped by accident. You two did not see anything, right?” Erha climbed up from the ground and looked somewhat angrily at the two gate-guarding demon soldiers.
The two demon soldiers shook their heads in unison. They had long understood what kind of character their commander had. Naturally, they would not speak of this scene, and naturally they had seen nothing.
“Mm, that’s good…”
Thud!
Before Erha could finish speaking, he knelt down on the ground once again.
“Commander, we saw absolutely nothing!!”
This time, without waiting for Erha to speak, the two demon soldiers shook their heads like rattles. This caused the just-about-to-lose-his-temper Erha to merely snort coldly.
“Damn it, there is something strange here!”
“I have long heard that the great king’s ghost-controlling technique has become even more formidable. No wonder there are ghosts haunting this place. It is probably some little ghost that escaped…”
Erha muttered to himself. But right after, he knelt down again…
In the end, Erha was so frightened that he fled in panic. The two gate-guarding demon soldiers watched in stunned silence, having no idea what had happened. They could only enter the cave dwelling to report this bizarre scene to their toad great king, while also informing him of Commander Erha’s purpose.
That was, the sermon and transmission of the law was imminent, and the great demon lords above required the toad great king grandfather to come out of seclusion to preside over the overall situation!
