Chapter Fifteen: Reminiscing the Past

By then, the snow had stopped for some time, and even the dark clouds had dispersed. It was not yet dark, and the sky after the snowfall was exceptionally clear.

Li Qi walked through the thin snow along the repaired river channel, leaving a trail of footprints behind him.

“I wonder how a Sage can walk across snow without leaving a trace. Wasn’t it said that the spirit cannot interfere with matter...?”

Looking at the marks he had left behind, Li Qi suddenly thought of something.

“But then again, they can turn carbon into diamonds and cut iron with wooden swords... It seems that the strong truly do not have to obey reason.”

“The scenery from those heights must be breathtakingly marvelous!”

Li Qi could not help yearning for it.

After walking a while, he suddenly turned and gazed toward the distant mountains. They stretched endlessly into the horizon. Compared with that vast range, the mountainside where he had once gone to perform ancestral rites was nothing more than a small hillock.

“The Yu Lord perished and was buried in Qishan...”

Li Qi suddenly recalled something he had read before. The so-called Qishan was the continuous mountain range he was looking at now.

Of course, what he could see at this moment was merely one corner of Qishan. The range extended for tens of millions of miles and ranked among the Three Great Mountains Under Heaven. Its territory was vast beyond measure, deep and unbroken, containing enormous stretches of uninhabited wilderness.

As for the saying that the Yu Lord had perished and been buried in Qishan, that was merely a piece of unofficial history. Throughout the ages, people had offered countless opinions regarding the location of the Yu Lord’s tomb. The orthodox histories never stated where he had been buried.

Li Qi did not believe it could truly be such a coincidence that the Yu Lord’s tomb lay right outside his own doorstep.

Even so, Qishan was indeed an excellent place. Ever since the beginning of civilization, after the Yu Lord had performed a grand sacrifice there, emperors of later generations who considered their civil achievements and military accomplishments no weaker than those of their predecessors would all travel to Qishan to conduct their own great ceremonies.

Even the name Qishan was said to have originated from sacrifice, for its first syllable meant prayer.

The ecology of Qishan was also faintly miraculous. Strange beasts often appeared there, and ancient medicinal herbs were occasionally born.

Such strange beasts were not monsters. They were creatures that had broken through the limitations of their species. Take tigers, for example. A tiger generally lived for around twenty years, yet tigers more than forty years old had once appeared in Qishan.

As for ancient medicinal herbs, their value lay precisely in the fact that they had surpassed the natural limit of their own lifespans.

Medicinal plants had lifespans as well. It was not the case that planting one for a hundred years would make it a century-old herb, or planting one for a thousand years would turn it into a thousand-year divine medicine. If things were truly that simple, ancient medicines would not be so scarce. The people of old were not fools—would they not have established herb gardens for the sake of future generations?

Only under special natural conditions, combined with countless coincidences of wind, frost, rain, and dew, would a medicinal plant have even the slightest chance of breaking through its inherent lifespan. The entire process was nearly impossible to reproduce, for there were simply too many variables.

Although this world possessed no supernatural energies such as spiritual or primordial qi, once a medicinal plant surpassed the limit of its lifespan, certain special substances would nevertheless be produced. With the technology available today, at least, those substances could not be replicated.

When ancient medicines and ordinary herbs were tested with modern technology, their compositions were almost indistinguishable. Yet the ancient medicines possessed certain wondrous effects.

Among all such ancient medicines, those from Qishan had the purest medicinal properties.

For this reason, countless herb gatherers had entered Qishan throughout the ages. In fact, the early inhabitants of Li Family Village had made their living by gathering herbs and hunting.

The mountains and rivers were treacherous, and Qishan in particular was perilous beyond measure. Fierce beasts also roamed its depths.

When Li Qi had returned to the village a few days earlier, he had heard the villagers say that someone had discovered traces of a tiger in the mountains.

But after Li Changqing had emerged from Li Family Village, the people there no longer needed to risk their lives in exchange for a little rice money.

“Thinking back to the Yu Lord in those days...”

“What if he had been born a Sage? In the end, even he could not withstand the erosion of time...”

“And I, having encountered such an opportunity, how could I be content to become a mound of yellow earth after a little more than a century?”

Moved by the scene before him, Li Qi found himself recalling the fragments of history he had read, some true and some false.

There were too many stories about the Yu Lord. That man had possessed too much wonder, too much legend.

Yet even so, he had still been unable to defeat the passage of time.

“Still, the feng shui of Qishan truly is extraordinary. I never noticed it before, but looking at it now, I can sense a profound force flowing and surging through the land.”

“Perhaps that is why no great master has ever established a sect along Qishan’s main range. In this world, fate and feng shui are real and undeniable. If one’s destiny cannot suppress the fortunes of the land, disaster may indeed follow...”

“It is said that when King Wu once marched against Zhou, a mighty figure established a Heavenly Court upon Qishan’s ancestral mountain range. Yet within only a few decades, it vanished like smoke and dispersed like clouds.”

Li Qi thought that there were naturally advantages to enjoying the internet. One learned a little about everything. Perhaps one’s knowledge was neither extensive nor profound, but at least one was not completely ignorant.

After indulging in these thoughts for a while, Li Qi gathered his mind and continued strolling. He had not gone far when a graceful, strikingly beautiful girl approached from the opposite direction.

When she first saw him, she paid him no attention. Then she seemed to fall into thought. After studying him carefully for a few more moments, she finally said, “You’re Li... Li Qi?!”

“That’s me, Sister Weiwei. We haven’t seen each other for two years, and you’ve already forgotten me?”

Li Qi recognized her at a glance. Though she had changed considerably as well, his mind was now exceptionally sharp. He did not possess the photographic memory of someone who had entered the Dao, but after being tempered through reincarnation, his spirit had developed a subtle miraculous quality, setting him apart from ordinary people.

That was also why, despite his seemingly ordinary talent, he had encountered the demonic tribulation reserved for peerless geniuses.

The girl’s name was Xu Wei. Not everyone in Li Family Village bore the surname Li; there were outsiders as well. Of course, those families still shared blood ties with the Li clan. Most were outsiders who had married women of the Li family and then settled there.

Xu Wei was five years older than Li Qi. By now, she was nearly finished with university.

Back in the village, Xu Wei had been something like the elder-sister leader. She would take a group of children out to play and had been the dream girl of countless boys.

After all, children knew little of the world. Aside from a few unusual exceptions, most of them were drawn to beautiful older girls.

It was worth mentioning that Li Qi had once been one of them. He had been seven, while Xu Wei had been twelve. The moment he saw this beautiful older girl, he had fallen for her and solemnly declared that he would marry no one else.

He had even challenged the children in the village to a duel over the right to choose their future spouses.

Looking back, Li Qi could only admit that he had been extraordinarily brave that day: he had punched his older male cousin, kicked his younger male cousin, and even fought several of his younger uncles...

Then, after they started school, he was placed in the same class as a very beautiful girl, and successfully transferred his affections elsewhere.

Falling in love with one person after another—how genuine. Of course, that had been in the past. Now, women were nothing but an impediment to the speed of his blade.

“It’s because you grew so quickly,” Xu Wei said with a laugh, gesturing with her hands as she reminisced. “I remember that two years ago, you were only this tall, and your face was still so round and chubby...”