The girl was like a solitary bamboo in an empty valley — ethereal and pure, her temperament transcendent. Her eyes, clear as autumn waters, were clean and luminous, without the slightest trace of impurity.
"Huang'er, the more I think about it, the more I believe Old Man Qianji's divination may truly come to pass on that boy Jiang Chen."
Whenever Shun Lao spoke of Jiang Chen, his eyes lit up with keen interest, and his aged face was filled with a warm, kindly smile.
Shun Lao and Huang'er hailed from a mysterious place beyond this mundane world. They had come to the mortal realm because a legendary diviner once cast a hexagram that pointed to a clue about Huang'er's illness being hidden in this very land.
The art of divination was an ethereal and elusive thing — seemingly right yet never quite clear, profound and unfathomable.
But Old Man Qianji rarely cast hexagrams, and when he did, every prediction proved accurate without exception.
Since the old man had said that a clue about Huang'er's condition could be found in the Eastern Kingdom, even if it was nothing more than a sliver of hope, Shun Lao would not let it slip.
The path of cultivation was itself a profound and mysterious thing.
Shun Lao was the type who would rather believe than dismiss. That was precisely why he had taken Huang'er and left their homeland to come to the Eastern Kingdom — because the hexagram had promised that a clue about her illness awaited them there.
Truthfully, this prophecy seemed utterly absurd on the surface.
After all, the world Shun Lao and Huang'er came from was incomparably more powerful than these mortal kingdoms — they existed on entirely different levels. If their own world had been unable to unravel Huang'er's illness, how could a mere backwater kingdom hold the answer?
Most people would never believe it.
But Shun Lao was not most people. In the world of cultivation, the more powerful one became, the more one understood: the Heavenly Dao moves in mysterious ways, and throughout the vast fabric of destiny, strange and unexpected turns of fortune could arise at any moment.
Though this mortal kingdom was weak and insignificant, that did not mean it could not produce a clue.
Heaven's Way takes from the surplus to replenish the deficient.
In the Eastern Kingdom, Shun Lao had casually shown a few skills at the Apothecary Hall and easily secured a position as a Guest Elder. That guest status afforded him a convenient foothold in the Eastern Kingdom.
At first, Shun Lao had been deeply disappointed. After spending so much time at the Apothecary Hall, he had found absolutely nothing — not a single clue.
Until the day Jiang Zheng appeared carrying the recipe for the Divine Show Creation Pill.
The appearance of that ancient formula caught Shun Lao's attention, because even in his world, ancient pill recipes were exceedingly rare and precious. In a kingdom like this, such a thing would be encountered perhaps once in a hundred — or even a thousand — years.
Because of that ancient recipe, Shun Lao turned his gaze to Jiang Chen, pinning this slender thread of hope to the young man.
And Jiang Chen's subsequent performance only deepened his interest.
The counterattack and humiliation at Marquis Longteng's banquet, the stunning reversal during the basic assessment, the breathtaking display at the Hidden Dragon Examination, and finally the world-shaking suppression of the Long family's rebellion —
All of this had unfolded in barely a single year, all from the hands of a destitute young marquis. It was nothing short of miraculous.
When things go contrary to the norm, there must be something strange afoot.
Shun Lao, with his vast experience, saw in all of this one undeniable truth: Jiang Chen was that anomaly.
If he had merely been suspicious of Jiang Chen at first, then after spending nearly a year in the Tiangui Kingdom and witnessing Jiang Chen's meteoric rise there, Shun Lao had all but stopped doubting. The elusive clue they had been desperately searching for, he was nearly certain, resided in Jiang Chen himself.
The Evergreen Pill, the Nine Hua Jade Dew Wine — these two creations alone were enough to earn even someone of Shun Lao's caliber a grudging admiration. These formulas were things he had never heard of, even with all his knowledge.
But Jiang Chen's personal progress was even more astonishing. A young man who once could not even pass the bare minimum of the basic assessment — three-meridian True Qi — had, in just a year or two, undergone a complete metamorphosis. He had advanced directly into the Spirit Realm, and with three arrows, he had slain three martial artists of equal rank!
As for merely reaching the Spirit Realm, Shun Lao would not have been particularly impressed.
What truly stunned him was the speed of Jiang Chen's advancement — and the sheer depth of potential and boldness the young man displayed.