Chapter 305: Shrouded in Mist

In Ding Songyan’s eyes, Xie Linshi’s corpse was intact, but his ghost was nowhere to be found, just like the murdered Jiguren, Sixth Dou.

Obliterated? Could someone who severed their own heart meridians also happen to erase their own ghost? Tense and startled, Ding Songyan turned his gaze to the Sunlight beside the corpse.

The sleeve arrow gave off a faint sunlike glow. It did cause continuous damage to ghosts, but by Ding Songyan’s judgment, unless a special technique was used to trigger its hidden power, it would take at least three days to make the ghost of a perfected Dharma Realm martial artist vanish.

That meant either Xie Linshi had severed his heart meridians, died, then half-revived and used Sunlight to wipe out his own ghost, or someone had used the arrow after he died to eliminate any remnants of the latent danger... Even if Xie Linshi had held on for a little while after severing his heart meridians and used Sunlight to destroy both body and spirit, once his ghost was gone the arrow should have simply fallen, landing askew. It wouldn’t be placed so neatly... All these thoughts settled in Ding Songyan’s mind, but his face showed no change.

In his view, there was something wrong with Xie Linshi’s death!

It might not even have been death by heart meridian severance!

"Second Ding, let’s leave first." After returning the suicide note to his grandfather, Xie Fengchao turned around and said, grieved and dejected.

Ding Songyan nodded and turned toward the door.

Taking the chance that his back was to Xie Lin’an, multiple white patterns flashed across the surface of his face and vanished.

Everyone who had entered this room between Xie Linshi’s death and their arrival was a suspect, including the Xie family head, Xie Lin’an.

After covering his outward abnormalities, Ding Songyan paused, turned back to look at Xie Lin’an, and said, "Senior Xie, I just noticed something. I don’t know whether I should say it."

Xie Lin’an noticed that the double pupils in this Brightnight Sect disciple’s eyes were gone and instinctively thought of yin eyes. Whether opening the yin eyes would hide the double pupils, he did not know, since no one born with yin eyes besides this man had joined the Brightnight Sect in the past few centuries.

"What did you notice?" Xie Lin’an asked with composure.

Ding Songyan glanced at Xie Fengchao and said gravely, "Senior Xie Linshi’s ghost is gone."

"What?" Xie Fengchao blurted in a mix of shock and astonishment, so much so that he forgot about Ding Songyan’s missing double pupils.

Xie Lin’an’s eyes widened slightly and he frowned.

"You mean someone destroyed Linshi’s ghost?"

The Xie family head’s inner voice matched what he said aloud, with no thoughts like "This young man must not be left alive."

"I have no way of knowing. I’m just telling you what I see," Ding Songyan said, without embellishing. "If you have doubts, Senior, you can ask the Martial Prohibition Bureau for help."

Xie Lin’an clutched the suicide note, his expression shifting several times.

He paced two steps in silence and said to Xie Fengchao, "Fengchao, take Young Hero Ding out for now."

Xie Fengchao asked nothing more and led Ding Songyan out of the courtyard toward his own residence.

Ding Songyan noticed that Xie Lin’an called the steward who had reported the bad news into the wing room, probably to check everyone who had entered Xie Linshi’s courtyard earlier.

Back in his own study, Xie Fengchao plopped into a chair and murmured, "How did it come to this..."

"These are troubled times in the Flame Capital," Ding Songyan replied simply.

He even felt that the whole world was entering troubled times.

The emergence of the most ancient Celestial Thearch’s remains might be a symbol of it.

Ding Songyan sat down too and asked thoughtfully, "What was your third grandfather up to in recent times?"

He was rather skeptical of Xie Linshi’s purpose in colluding with the Returning Abyss Order, and since there was no investigation direction for the time being, the only option was to look for clues in what Xie Linshi had done for the Returning Abyss Order.

Xie Fengchao sucked in air through his teeth.

"My third grandfather was a perfected Dharma Realm Grandmaster who had a glimpse of the Heaven-Man Way. He wouldn’t report to me about what he was doing.

"What I do know is that before he went into seclusion to attempt his breakthrough, he visited the Fang family’s residence in the Flame Capital once, to exchange cultivation insights with the Imperial Father-in-law. After he failed to attain the Heaven-Man Realm and his body had recovered a little, he went to see him again to discuss what had gone wrong."

The Imperial Father-in-law was the father of the current Empress Fang and the youngest Supreme Master of the Fang family. He had entered the capital at the start of autumn, seemingly to deter lurking petty villains.

His name was Fang Zhenhai, nicknamed Yama’s Smile.

After Xie Linshi’s third failure, he went to visit Yama Fang, which shows he wasn’t much affected by his damaged body and mindset and still had ambition, trying to start over and forge a Heaven-Man path of his own... Was it only after talking with Fang Zhenhai that he realized abandoning his original insights and mindset was extremely hard and wouldn’t show results in less than thirty or forty years, so despair set in and he wanted to turn to the Returning Abyss? Ding Songyan mulled over Xie Fengchao’s words.

He didn’t suspect that the Heaven-Man method the Fang family had given the Xie family was flawed or incomplete.

Through his understanding these past days, he knew that with something like a Heaven-Man method, the parts that were useful to falsify were easily noticed, and the parts that wouldn’t be noticed had little effect on the cultivator even if falsified.

A Heaven-Man method mainly consisted of four parts: first, what principles it encompassed; second, how to adjust one’s martial art according to those principles; third, how to put the principles into practice and hone the mind; fourth, the insights and experience left by successive Supreme Masters who had validated their own Way with that method.

Of these, the first and second were easy to forge, but they were linked to each other. Whether principles were omitted, added, or altered, they would inevitably conflict with the martial art’s adjustments, making it easy for the cultivator to notice something amiss, and vice versa.

If one wanted the two to work in tandem, the powerhouse forging the Heaven-Man method would have to have taken that wrong path himself and still become a Supreme Master in the end, to make it seamless. But if he had taken the wrong path, he certainly couldn’t have become a Heaven-Man.

Forging the third and fourth was of little point either. Cultivators only used them as reference and wouldn’t copy them wholesale, and would adjust on their own at any sign of trouble.

While Ding Songyan was thinking, Xie Fengchao remembered what had just happened and asked, puzzled, "Why do your double pupils come and go?"

He had seen Ding Songyan spirit channel a Ghost Yu Way assassin, and back then the latter still had double pupils.

"I have a secret art that can tell whether someone is lying, but using it hides my double pupils," Ding Songyan said, having long prepared the answer.

"You..." Xie Fengchao suddenly understood. "You suspect my grandfather?"

"Not anymore," Ding Songyan answered sincerely. "Before we arrived, everyone who spent time with your third grandfather’s body is a suspect."

He hadn’t limited "spent time" with "alone," because it might have been a group effort.

Xie Fengchao’s expression shifted repeatedly, and he gritted his teeth.

"That’s right!

"Otherwise his ghost wouldn’t just vanish for no reason!"

If it couldn’t be worked out from Xie Linshi’s side, then start from the Returning Abyss Order... The Returning Abyss Order had come to the Flame Capital this time to cooperate with the Accumulated Evil Way and the Shamanism Order and meddle in the consort selection, so their purpose in colluding with Xie Linshi might lie there too... Ding Songyan looked at Xie Fengchao and asked amidst pondering,

"Does your Xie family have a candidate to recommend as a consort?"

The consort selection was a combination of recommendation and self-nomination.

Prestigious families, sects, and court officials could all recommend candidates they thought suitable, and women with ambitions of entering the harem could nominate themselves too, but they had to be vetted and screened by the authorities, to keep people of unknown origin or poor looks from becoming candidates.

Xie Fengchao blurted in astonishment, "How could we? Our Xie family is, after all, a branch of the Fang family. How could we make trouble for Her Majesty the Empress?"

"Then did the Fang family recommend anyone?" Ding Songyan pressed carefully.

If he hadn’t been so grieved, Xie Fengchao would have found Second Ding’s question quite funny.

"What father-in-law picks concubines for his son-in-law?"

It isn’t impossible if it’s meant to secure her favor... But I haven’t heard that Empress Fang is especially favored. As long as the Fang family’s several Heaven-Men are still around and on His Majesty’s side, her position is hard to shake... Ding Songyan thought for a moment and decided to start from the Returning Abyss Order’s temporary allies.

"Does your Xie family have property near Shushui Street?"

The back alley of Shushui Street was where the Shamanism Order’s deity invocation had failed.

Xie Fengchao thought carefully for a while.

"Probably not, but the family has so much property I can’t remember it all."

"Has your third grandfather been around Shushui Street in the past month or two?" Ding Songyan pressed.

"How would I know?" Xie Fengchao shook his head.

Nothing else from the Shamanism Order for now... The Accumulated Evil Way does a lot, but always with clear purposes, and none involving the Xie family... Ding Songyan thought it over carefully, and suddenly his eyes turned deep and dark.

"Did your third grandfather believe in Buddhism?"

That was another direction.

Xie Fengchao hesitated before saying, "I don’t know if it counts as believing. After his second failure to become a Heaven-Man, he read Buddhist scriptures, Daoist classics, and Confucian texts intensively, trying to draw parallels and gain insight to hone his mindset, and often discussed doctrine with Daoists and Buddhists."

In Great Zhao, the Yin-Yang Order is a branch of Daoism, the Divine Empyrean Sect and True Spirit Sect barely count too, and the only Buddhists are the Body-and-Will Heterodox Sect... Ding Songyan asked in a low voice, "Has your third grandfather been to Shilin Temple or the Yin-Yang Temple recently?"

"I don’t know." Xie Fengchao shook his head again.

He looked at Ding Songyan, puzzled.

"What are you getting at?"

"You can ask the Martial Prohibition Bureau about Shilin Temple’s recent activity," Ding Songyan said, not spelling it out, to avoid revealing that he knew too much.

He sighed helplessly to himself, Time to go hear Divine Monk Dazhi’s wonderful Dharma talk...

......

On a clear, crisp day, at Shilin Temple.

A plain Dharma platform had been set up, with rows of believers and martial artists sitting on the ground in front.

Some had come to listen to the Dharma, others hoped to use the divine monk’s talk to temper their own mindset.

At Divine Monk Dazhi’s last Dharma talk, several jianghu people had gained deep insights, grown a little in mindset, and could expect their strength to rise before long.

Ding Songyan set two prayer cushions on the ground and said with a smile to Twelfth Madam Luo beside him, "Please."

There had been no developments on the Xie Linshi matter, and the Xie family still hadn’t found who had obliterated his ghost.

"When I lived in the open, sitting on the ground wherever I was came naturally, so why bother being so fussy?" Twelfth Madam Luo chuckled. "Besides, I can use true qi to keep dirt off."

Ding Songyan smiled.

"This is more comfortable."

Twelfth Madam Luo didn’t refuse. She sat cross-legged, using her skirt to cover her embroidered shoes.

Not long after Ding Songyan sat down beside her, Divine Monk Dazhi, in a yellow monk’s robe, went onto the Dharma platform.

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