Separated by ten towering waves, the treasure ship cut through in an instant, smashing the shark corpse deep into the sea.
At the same time, Jing Qian followed right behind. In the blink of an eye, Swordfang flashed seven or eight times, cleaving the Yin Corpse's body neatly into pieces.
Without its shell to hide in, the Yin Ghost drifted free, lunging toward him.
Though formless and bodiless, little more than a strange condensation of hostile power in the sight of World's Insight, it shone with a murky aura, leaving it nowhere to hide.
Jing Qian loosed several silk threads that instantly wrapped the ghost tight. The power of his Soulweaver Pattern burst forth, tearing the ghost apart with ease.
As recorded in the Morning-Dusk, Dawn-Breaking Fate Scripture, the Soulweaver Pattern specialized in attacking spirit and consciousness. Against Yin Ghosts, it was particularly lethal. A few threads were enough to rip these horrors to shreds.
For others, the Yin Year was a time of terror and tribulation.
But for the Jing clan of Jiangzhu Isle, the Yin Year was harvest season.
By virtue of their Soulweaver inheritance, every Yin Year, the clan would send hunting parties to scour the seas, reaping the ghosts.
So it was now for Jing Qian. He prowled the waves in search of Yin Corpses.
From the remains of the shark, he dug out a piece of Yin Bone, and from the shattered ghost, a translucent Yin Pearl, both ninth-rank White-Tooth materials.
Each Yin Corpse yielded two treasures. Compared to sea beasts, the profit was doubled.
And with World's Insight guiding him, Jing Qian's hunting efficiency far surpassed any other.
His first successful hunt opened a brand-new path!
For the moment, his "sea beast friends" stepped off stage, and the spotlight passed to a far more talented cast: Yin Ghosts and Yin Corpses.
There were more of them, too.
Across the Vast Sea, every hundred li he traveled, Jing Qian found another Yin Ghost.
And half of those had already manifested Yin Corpses.
His little ship suddenly became busier than ever.
He pushed World's Insight to the limit, scouring the horizon for signs of ghosts.
Once locked on, the Dingyuan transformed into a battering ram, charging straight into its target.
This ship-from-the-sky technique was something only Jing Qian could come up with in all of Hunzhou.
With a treasure-ship used like a hammer, even without magical force, sheer physics alone crushed the ninth-rank ghosts.
Then, slipping through dimensions with Sumeru's void-walking and finishing with the soul-rending strikes of Soulweaver, Jing Qian cut them down like weeds.
For others, the Yin Year was a time of fear and dread.
For him, it was practically a paid holiday.
When the Yin Year came, Jing Qian was the only one truly celebrating New Year's!
...
By the time he neared Hunzhou Isle, his Void Realm and Fate Stele space were overflowing.
He looked at the piles of treasure crammed into every corner, almost no room to stand, and didn't even know what to think.
This unexpected bounty had shattered his worldview.
For the world at large, Yin Ghosts descended as calamity.
Their origins unknown, they appeared only during the Yin Year, devouring souls to fuel their growth.
But for Jing Qian, this Yin Year was nothing less than a feast.
There was no prey more convenient than ghosts and corpses.
If not for the raging seas making it impossible to stop, he would already have gone into seclusion aboard ship to cultivate.
He could already foresee his cultivation about to skyrocket.
At last, Hunzhou Isle appeared on the horizon. After more than half a year at sea, Jing Qian had returned safely.
Only then did he realize the true strategic genius of Hunzhou's geography.
At its core, the island rose over three thousand meters above the sea.
No matter how violently the waves crashed, the inner lands were untouchable.
And with the Hun River as its sole passage, one man could hold it against ten thousand.
No Yin Ghost or Yin Corpse from the sea could breach its defenses.
Now he understood why the people of the island endured being squeezed to raise sea-serpents, never dreaming of leaving.
Among all Fate-Islands, Hunzhou was without doubt the safest.
With a surge of power, Jing Qian drove the Dingyuan into the Hun River, beginning the three-day drift along its suspended current.
Finally, he had time to relax his nerves.
For all the joy of the harvest, ghost-hunting at sea had not been a light test on his heart.
Outwardly, he retreated into the cabin. In truth, he slipped into the Void Realm.
Inside, the space was stacked high with Yin Bones as thick as water barrels, and a carpet of peach-sized glowing Yin Pearls.
Across the journey, he had slain two hundred and seventy-three ghosts and corpses in total.
That haul yielded 273 Yin Pearls and 135 Yin Bones.
The trove was worth thousands of gold, enough to buy another eighth-rank treasure ship outright.
Yin Bones were tough as steel, excellent for forging, comparable in worth to Sea-Tooth Iron.
But Yin Pearls were even more precious, with subtler uses.
Jing Qian picked up one pearl and held it before the Tushita Furnace.
This Spirit-Treasure Pattern, having devoured several strands of Fate Fire, was changing, beginning to burn as a true Life Furnace, rooted in his Void Realm.
By now, the furnace had been burning for nearly half a year.
At first, Jing Qian had held high expectations. He thought his Life Furnace would quickly ignite, birthing his Fate Fire so he could start drawing on Pattern and soar upward on the spot.
But reality proved otherwise. The foundation of his Void Realm was far too shallow, its meager ambient qi unable to sustain the process. His Life Furnace's evolution crawled forward at a snail's pace.
Jing Qian had underestimated the difficulty. In this cultivation world, the single most precious resource was a true Life Furnace. To successfully ignite one was an ordeal of the highest order.
Across the vast seas, even finding a nexus island where qi converged was already incredibly rare. One then had to prepare a sixth-rank Violet-Eye artifact or higher as the Furnace's foundation.
Finally, a cultivator, at least in the Longevity realm, had to spend years painstakingly weaving the island's earth-veins into resonance. And even then, the newborn Furnace had to withstand the calamity of its first Yin Year without collapse before it could stabilize and truly ignite Fate Fire.
Even the mighty Hunzhou Prefecture Lords, with their immense depth of cultivation, preferred to scheme for existing Fate-Islands like Tsushima or Jiangzhu Isle, rather than try to forge one from nothing. That said everything.
The only reason Jing Qian had managed to spark the evolution of his Void Furnace was thanks to the strange synergy of his two Golden Root Patterns, along with the six strands of Fate Fire and over a hundred Blue-Blood soul flames he had stolen from Blueblood Lantern. These had been enough to light the fire.
Even so, with the Void Realm's qi far too thin, the Furnace stubbornly refused to complete its birth.
That was until Jing Qian acquired his trove of Yin Pearls.
These unique treasures, born only from Yin Ghosts, carried a singular property: when fed into a Life Furnace, they accelerated the gestation of Fate Fire.
The moment he held one before the long-closed Tushita Furnace, the sealed lid cracked open slightly.
And a pitch-black cat's paw slipped out, snatched the pearl, and pulled it in.
At once, the Furnace's inner fire surged stronger.
Seeing this, Jing Qian's eyes lit up. He hurriedly offered pearl after pearl.
The black paw worked tirelessly, plucking each Yin Pearl from his hand until all were consumed.
The change was immediate: Jing Qian could clearly sense his Life Furnace evolving, its birth hastened to the brink of completion.
Though still not fully ignited, it was now only a step away.
That settled it. After a short rest, he would set out to sea again. Yin Ghosts were endless in number, more than enough to supply the pearls needed to finally kindle his Life Furnace.
...
When he was finished tidying, his divine sense shifted, returning once more to the Fate Stele space.
What he saw there shocked him.
The two hundred Yin Ghosts he had slain had all left behind spiritual phantoms. Now they crowded outside the safety zone in a dense mass.
Though they were still faint and formless, when so many ghostly silhouettes pressed against the barrier, staring inward at him, the sight was enough to raise goosebumps.
Yet he reminded himself: these were his loyal "ghost brothers," delivering their souls as food to him even after death. That thought filled him with excitement.
Seating himself calmly before the Stele, Jing Qian unfurled thirty-six threads of pure white silk, casting them out toward the horde.
The Soulweaver Pattern fully revealed its true nature.
The spectral phantoms were sliced apart like cheese under a heated wire, unraveling layer by layer.
Jing Qian could not even keep count. He only knew he was mowing them down in waves.
An ocean of Life Essence poured into his spirit, accompanied by countless fragments of memory.
These memories took a bizarre form, each one a talismanic seal, a character of dark script brimming with ghostly qi.
He recognized none of them, but that hardly mattered. World's Insight awakened, absorbing every seal whole.
At once, the Pattern shuddered within him, as if on the verge of some profound transformation.
Still, Jing Qian's hands did not slow. His threads continued cutting, wringing every drop of essence and memory from the ghosts.
A full day and night passed before the last phantom was shredded.
In total, he had harvested more than fifteen hundred talisman-seals.
After removing duplicates, 1,024 unique characters remained absorbed and refined by World's Insight.
Another day and night of rumbling upheaval followed. Then, at last, a strange new Dao-rhyme emerged, searing itself into his mind.
The message stunned him:
"Blood River: Dao Book of the Pitiless Abyss!"
"Flawed may be deduced and remade."
A Dao Book?
Jing Qian was floored.
That the Yin Ghosts, born only in the Yin Year, carried within them an actual Dao Book, this was beyond anything he had imagined.
He was no longer a novice. He knew well the hierarchy of cultivation inheritances.
The Jing clan's own Morning-Dusk, Dawn-Breaking Fate Scripture, along with the half-stolen Pine-Ring Life Scripture, were the lowest-tier mere Scriptures.
Such scriptures could only guide a cultivator up to the seventh rank Longevity realm, offering a few Pattern refinements and the methods to condense their matching manifestations.
If a scripture included secrets of refining Life Pattern itself to step into Longevity, it was already considered a "premium" text.
Above scriptures lay Life Registers, like Tsushima Isle's secret Hundred Ghosts Night Procession Register.
That level of inheritance contained vast high-level knowledge: forging Spiritual Constructs, kindling Life Furnaces, refining Fiendish Qi, even drawing down the influence of the stars.
A Life Register could carry a cultivator from Longevity all the way through Spirit-Suppression, Earth-Fiend, and even to the fabled Star-Seizer stage.
In Jing Qian's original plan, acquiring such a Register had always been one of his greatest priorities.
But he had never imagined he would obtain a Dao Book in such a way.
It was said that above the Life Registers lay an even higher class of inheritance, called the Dao Books, true scriptures of the Great Dao, carrying world-piercing power.
Among the top three realms of the Ninth Rank, only those who cultivated Dao Books could glimpse their thresholds.
Yet in all of Jing Qian's memories, these had been nothing more than rumors and hearsay. He had never even heard the name of a single Dao Book.
Until now. By slaughtering the Yin Ghosts and stripping their souls, he had drawn from their memories a transmission: the Dao Book of the Blood River and the Pitiless Abyss.
For such a text to be scattered into the world during the calamity of a Yin Year, it was certain that unspeakable karmic weight lurked behind it.
He tried to absorb the transmission. But the mere 1,024 talismanic seals contained within it already embraced a vast sea of cultivation secrets. Even with the help of World's Insight, he could not digest such an ocean of knowledge in a short time.
But that was fine. He did not need to practice the Blood River Dao Book just yet.
World's Insight had already warned him: the text was flawed.
Naturally, he would wait until the defects were analyzed and purged before attempting true cultivation.
So he set World's Insight to work.
Instantly, vast quantities of knowledge swirled within the Pattern, decomposing and recombining of their own accord.
This was the power of World's Insight unleashed at last.
This peculiar Pattern, born to test every truth under heaven, had finally found its perfect battlefield.
Jing Qian's thick reserves of Life Essence were devoured in torrents as the 1,500 characters he had harvested unraveled, dissolved, and were slowly rebuilt.
All impurities and extraneous fragments were cast aside. Only the purest, most pristine cultivation methods were retained.
What emerged from this refinement would be the Dao Book's true form.
Jing Qian cared deeply about the result. Either the evolution of his Life Furnace or the refinement of this Dao Book, if either broke through, it would mark a true transformation in his path.
The prospect filled him with anticipation.
With a flicker of his figure, he returned to the deck of the Dingyuan, standing tall at the bow.
The cavern-harbor lay just ahead; he was about to return to the island. He still had business to settle at the market.
By now, his tower should be nearly finished. With the harbor's unique position, such coveted housing stock would surely rake in mountains of gold and silver.
He had already decided: no matter how much he earned, he would convert it all into fine metals to fuel the reforging of his Sword-Fang.
He needed little else. But quality metals, those that the sea demons and Yin Ghosts could not provide, were essential. His hoarded coin would serve best when melted into strength.
For Jing Qian, money was the most useless of things. Only when transmuted into power was it real.
Before long, he guided the ship into the cavern harbor.
The once-bustling docks had changed completely.
At the mouth of the Hun River, two massive warships loomed side by side: the Hunyi and the Hunliang, both seventh-rank flagships of the navy. Together they guarded Hunzhou Island's only gateway, standing watch against any intrusion of Yin Ghosts or Yin Corpses.
Under their eyes, Jing Qian sailed into the dammed lake.
All other vessels lay at anchor, crews already resigned to a year of forced idleness.
On the piers above, three squads of armored cultivator-soldiers stood guard, each led by a perfected Dragon-Elephant with two dozen Fatebinding subordinates. This was the Prefecture's military arm, its core strength.
Jing Qian wasted no time, steering for the leftmost pier.
A voice transmission came from the shore:
"Is that the Jing clan's Dingyuan returning to port?"
"Yes."
"Voyaging in a Yin Year is no easy task. Well done, Captain Jing. Please moor at once and return ashore to rest. During the Yin Year, no idlers are permitted at the docks. Your cooperation is required."
"Of course. I'll comply."
With that brief exchange, he was waved through.
He guided the Dingyuan into a more worn-down pier, the Jing clan's own, a legacy berth from his family's merchant fleet.
Once he anchored the ship, he finally stepped ashore.
After so long battling storms, setting foot on solid ground brought its own strange comfort.
Just then, three wretched figures shuffled toward him, looking as though they'd been bullied and beaten down.
Jing Qian frowned in surprise. They were the three clerks from the Jing clan's main shop, the ones whose lives he had spared.
"What are you doing here?" he demanded. "Why aren't you at the shop?"
The leader stammered,
"Y-Young Master… the three of us were assigned to guard the clan's pier."
"Assigned? By who?"
His expression chilled.
"By the lords in our new tower, Young Master. The tower is finished at sixty-seven stories high. Before you even returned, it was already filled. All the major shops, the Prefecture's stewards, even the heirs of several Fate-Islands and city lords from the lowlands, each have claimed a floor.
"As for us… We were too lowly to matter, so we were sent here to watch the pier."
Jing Qian gave a sharp, mirthless laugh.
So. They had dropped all pretense, not even bothering with a fig leaf.
It was said wealth moved men's hearts. A single franchise license had already been bait enough.
And now, with a tower erected, he had drawn every ghost and snake to his door.
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