Chapter 1408: The Mystery of the Dharma Spreader Finally Solved
A slender boy, no older than seven or eight, lay sprawled on a thatched roof, gazing up at the sky.
He heard his mother calling and tried to sit up, but lost his footing and tumbled right off the roof.
Fortunately, he landed squarely on a haystack below and escaped without a scratch.
Goudan seemed entirely unfazed. He dusted himself off, straightened his clothes, and trotted home.
At the dinner table, his mother heaped food onto his plate, chiding him all the while. "Were you at the east end of the village again? I told you to stay away from that madman!"
Goudan devoured his food, replying nonchalantly, "I think Mad Uncle is a nice guy. He's not nearly as scary as you all make him out to be."
Goudan's father, a man of few words who had been silent since the meal began, slammed his chopsticks down and slapped the boy across the back of the head.
"You don't know a damn thing!" he roared. "Do you have any idea what happened to the others in the village who defied the warnings? I told you to stay away from him, and that's final!"
Under his father's iron rule, Goudan didn't dare argue back. But he was still defiant inside, sullenly burying his face in his bowl.
But whenever the opportunity arose, he would sneak away with some tasty treats to see him.
"Mad Uncle" was Goudan's own name for the man. The other villagers simply called him "the lunatic."
He was a villager, orphaned at a young age and raised by the community. He'd been normal enough as a boy, but as he reached middle age, he grew increasingly eccentric.
He was often heard muttering strange phrases.
Things like, "I've seen so many of me," or "I'm not me at all." Sometimes he'd even point a trembling finger at a fellow villager, his face a mask of terror, and shriek, "But you're already dead, aren't you?"
And nine times out of ten, the villagers he seemed to curse in this way would indeed drop dead shortly thereafter.
Immortals and gods were real in this world, and the villagers became convinced the madman was touched by some profound, mysterious power. To avoid bringing disaster upon themselves, they decided to band together and drive him out.
But something in the village seemed to hold a powerful grip on him. When he sensed the villagers' hostility, he suddenly flew into a rage and attacked them.
Goudan didn't know exactly how many people died that day. He only knew that from then on, the villagers gave the madman a wide berth, treating him with a mixture of fear and distance.
Only a fearless youngster like Goudan would dare to go near him.
The man spent his days in his dilapidated ancestral home, a dark and gloomy place that never saw the sun. He would huddle in a corner, endlessly whispering the same words over and over.
Goudan had first stumbled into the house by accident while playing hide-and-seek with his friends, and the eerie, terrifying atmosphere had given him a fright.
But when he heard the man's mumbling, he found himself utterly captivated. He couldn't understand the syllables, couldn't grasp their meaning, but he was drawn to the sound nonetheless.
He only left, reluctantly, when the rising chorus of his friends' calls from outside became too loud to ignore. From that day on, whenever his mind drifted, the madman's whispers would echo in his ears.
Finally, one day, Goudan could no longer resist the pull. He returned to the man's little dark house.
He even brought a roast duck as a courtesy.
The aroma of the food seemed to briefly stir the man from his stupor. He stopped chanting, snatched the roast duck without a word of thanks, and began to tear into it like a starved wolf.
After he had eaten his fill, the man, now seemingly lucid, only had one thing to say: he warned Goudan to stay away from him.
Feeling cheated out of a perfectly good roast duck, Goudan wasn't about to give up so easily. He refused to leave and even pressed the man about the words he was always chanting.
At first, the man said nothing.
Then, from a ruined corner of the house, he rummaged out a pile of wooden tablets, explaining that they were ancestral plaques.
He confessed that he didn't even know what he was saying during his fits. This strange malady, he explained, had plagued his family, the Xuanyuan clan, since ancient times.
Fortunately, only one person in each generation was afflicted. As the Xuanyuan clan grew and scattered, very few of them even remembered this hereditary curse.
"Let this curse end with me," the man declared, carefully arranging the tablets on the ground in sequential order. When he reached his own place in the line, however, he set down a blank wooden plaque.
Then, as Goudan watched in stunned silence, all the tablets burst into flame without a breeze to light them, instantly turning to ash in the cramped little hut.
Goudan then asked about the villagers' mysterious deaths.
Mad Uncle offered a wan smile. "Their deaths were fated. What has it to do with me? The cock crows and the sun rises. Does that mean the rooster's call brings forth the dawn?"
"Goudan, you have to understand," he continued, "everything in this world has already happened countless times. What we're living now is just another rehearsal. Take you, for instance..."
Mad Uncle's eyes locked onto Goudan, and his expression slowly twisted into one of absolute terror. The fear seemed to trigger another fit of madness. Just before he lost his senses completely, he flung Goudan out the door.
From that day forward, Goudan was convinced that Mad Uncle was hiding a great secret.
He was too young to understand the man's words, but he felt certain the secret had something to do with the immortals of legend.
Driven by this belief, he went to great lengths to pry his uncle's real name from his father.
Xuanyuan Sheng.
Even though everyone in the village shared the surname Xuanyuan, Goudan thought Mad Uncle's name was especially fine.
In the days that followed, Xuanyuan Sheng's madness worsened. Soon, even Goudan's offerings of food could no longer soothe him.
Goudan could only climb onto the roof, close his eyes, and listen to the increasingly strange sounds drifting up from below.
To an outsider, the man's chanting would have sounded deeply unsettling, but to Goudan, it was a lullaby. He always slept soundly listening to it.
These days continued until the year Goudan turned nine.
One night, an earth-shattering explosion ripped through the village. The startled villagers, woken from their sleep, realized the blast had come from Xuanyuan Sheng's house.
By the time they rushed over, the house had been completely obliterated, razed to the ground for reasons unknown.
Mad Uncle's death caused little stir. To most of the Xuanyuan clan, the disappearance of a menace like Xuanyuan Sheng was a blessing.
Only Goudan was heartbroken. When no one was looking, he snuck back to the site and searched through the rubble. All he found was a single charred fragment of an ancestral tablet.
The wooden fragment was burnt, leaving only a single corner intact. Goudan couldn't read, so he took it to one of the literate village elders, who told him the character was "Hong."
"Xuanyuan Hong."
Goudan had an excellent memory. He vaguely recalled Mad Uncle placing that very tablet with great solemnity at the head of the line.
Realizing it was an ancestral plaque, Goudan didn't dare keep it.
After kneeling and bowing respectfully, he set the fragment alight, burning it until nothing but ash remained.
Xuanyuan Village had always been a peaceful, isolated place.
After Xuanyuan Sheng died, life in the village returned to its usual tranquility. Goudan grew up, and the villagers stopped calling him by his childhood nickname.
Instead, they began to use his proper name: Xuanyuan Tuo.
Xuanyuan Tuo's life followed the same path as every other man in the village.
He sowed, he farmed, he harvested. He married a wife and had a son.
Only in his quiet moments did the memory of Mad Uncle's whispers drift back into his thoughts.
Time passed, but the mysterious cadence of those words remained etched in his memory, never fading.
As Xuanyuan Tuo aged, it seemed his life's course was set in stone.
Until the year he turned fifty.
That year, his son died of illness. His wife, unable to bear the grief of outliving her child, followed him to the grave not long after.
In less than six months, Xuanyuan Tuo lost the two people he loved most. The pain was unbearable.
He saw no reason to go on living and often thought of ending his own life.
But at the critical moment, that mysterious rhythm from his childhood would always echo in his mind, chasing away the dark thoughts.
Xuanyuan Tuo sat in a stupor for days, but slowly, his grief began to subside.
He had no desire to remarry or start another family.
Instead, a different idea sparked within him—a tiny flame that quickly grew into an unstoppable wildfire.
Having watched his loved ones die, Xuanyuan Tuo had come to understand just how fragile life was.
He was over fifty himself, and the thought that he too would soon follow them into death filled him with a profound terror.
He sat for two more days without food or water.
Then, Xuanyuan Tuo made a decision: he would cultivate, and seek immortality!
For a farmer nearing fifty, the idea of seeking the Dao and pursuing immortality was an utter absurdity.
Xuanyuan Tuo knew how ludicrous it sounded.
So he told no one, simply packing his belongings in silence and leaving Xuanyuan Village behind.
Alone, he set out on the path of an immortal seeker.
Fortunately, in this age, the way of the immortal flourished. Cultivators were not recluses; one could occasionally glimpse them soaring through the skies above almost any major town.
After enduring endless ridicule, Xuanyuan Tuo finally learned the location of the nearest immortal sect.
The Guiyuan Sect!
After an arduous journey, he finally reached the gates of the Guiyuan Sect. To his surprise, hundreds of other hopefuls were gathered there. Most, however, were young children with retinues of servants. An old man with one foot already in the grave was a unique sight.
After making some inquiries, Xuanyuan Tuo learned that they were all waiting outside because it was not yet time for the sect's disciple recruitment. The sect's protective array was active, shrouding the mountains and barring any mortal from entering the sacred grounds.
He asked when the next recruitment ceremony would be, only to be told it was three years away.
He considered waiting outside the gates with the others, but for some reason, the protective array that everyone else regarded with such terror didn't seem particularly frightening to him.
An audacious impulse seized him, and the ever-daring Xuanyuan Tuo decided to take a chance.
And just as he'd suspected, he encountered no resistance at all. In a daze, he simply walked through the barrier and found himself standing before the main gates of the Guiyuan Sect.
Overjoyed at meeting an immortal master, he declared his wish to join the sect, only to be met with heartless ridicule.
Fortunately, just as he was about to be thrown out, an immortal master surnamed Xu took pity on him. He gave Xuanyuan Tuo an introductory cultivation manual and promised that if he could cultivate a trace of spiritual energy within a year, he could return.
He hadn't officially joined the sect, but he had obtained a cultivation manual, which was more than he could have hoped for.
Xuanyuan Tuo tucked the book away safely, bypassed the crowd still waiting at the gates, and for the sake of caution, traveled a great distance to a town far from the sect.
Xuanyuan Tuo was illiterate, so to learn the technique, he seized every opportunity on his journey to ask others for help.
Despite his age, his mind was still sharp. By the time he reached his destination, he could recognize most of the characters in the manual.
With no master to guide him, Xuanyuan Tuo had to puzzle it out on his own.
But immortal arts were profound, and even an introductory manual was not something an old, unworldly farmer could master on his own.
What's more, he was already fifty, long past the ideal age to begin cultivating.
On top of all that, he still had to work during the day just to make ends meet...
In the blink of an eye, the year was nearly over, and Xuanyuan Tuo, for all his efforts, had gained nothing.
"Even if I managed to cultivate spiritual energy now, I wouldn't make it back in time," he thought.
Despair washed over him.
"Cultivation... for an ordinary man like me... it's just too hard."
He suddenly recalled the young immortal master he'd seen in the city a few days before, a youth barely out of his teens, already soaring freely on the wind.
How cruel the heavens were!
Despair, envy, terror...
Xuanyuan Tuo collapsed to the ground, staring up at the heavens.
"Why can't everyone in the world cultivate?" he raged.
"Why do these limits exist?"
"Damn this wretched sky!"
Such curses were common enough; they were uttered day and night in every corner of the world.
But as Xuanyuan Tuo cursed, the familiar, whispering chant of Mad Uncle Xuanyuan Sheng echoed in his ears once more.
This time, however, it didn't fade.
It repeated, again and again, until it completely consumed his thoughts.
In a trance, Xuanyuan Tuo found himself back in his childhood.
He was in the gloomy little house again. Mad Uncle stood among the ancestral tablets of the Xuanyuan clan, his face a mask of fury.
"It's back!" the man roared. "It can't be burned away! A ghost that won't be laid to rest!"
"Then we'll all die together!"
A great fire suddenly erupted from Xuanyuan Sheng's body.
He charged into the forest of grim, standing tablets.
The eerie flames spread from his body, leaping onto the wooden plaques.
As Xuanyuan Sheng's maniacal laughter filled the air, the fire devoured everything.
In the end, only a single corner of the tablet inscribed with the name "Xuanyuan Hong" survived.
The very one he had found!
[Xuanyuan Hong]!
The three characters appeared in his mind like a phantom, their gilded forms slowly weeping drops of blood.
Then they exploded.
The shock sent Xuanyuan Tuo into darkness.
When he awoke, he stared blankly at the sky. He then looked at himself in a mirror.
Something was different.
When he looked again at the introductory manual from the Guiyuan Sect, he found it laughably simple.
In fact...
...it was almost too simplistic.
He was no longer in any hurry to master the technique and return to the Guiyuan Sect.
Instead, his mind returned to the question that had plagued him before.
"Why can't everyone in the world cultivate?"
He knew, of course, that nature created all things with their own unique qualities, that every person was different.
But was there not some way to allow everyone to cultivate, to ignore the chasm of talent that separated them?
The constant whispering that had been his companion for so long was gone, and the silence felt strange.
In its place, however, a torrent of images began to flood his mind.
He saw visions of countless plants and animals.
He saw faces that were at once familiar and yet completely strange.
And he saw fragments of conversations whose meanings he could not grasp.
"What are your chances?" a voice asked.
"I can only do my best and leave the rest to fate."
"That doesn't sound like you."
"The disparity in our strength is too vast. I can only stake my life on this."
"Very well. Go, then. Whether it brings fortune or disaster, I cannot say."
...
Xuanyuan Tuo pressed his fingers to his temples.
He felt as if he had forgotten some mission of immense importance.
The jumble of memories did not shake his resolve.
Instead, he used the sudden flood of fragmented recollections to delve deeper into his question.
How could cultivation be made possible for all?
The images in his mind grew more numerous and more chaotic, but they slowly began to coalesce, piecing together the life of another powerful cultivator: the Heavenly Doctor.
But Xuanyuan Tuo, driven by his obsession, forced it all down for the time being.
He continued to ponder his question, his thoughts moving with mechanical precision.
He sat in his courtyard for thirty-three days without moving.
On the thirty-third day, Xuanyuan Tuo, now so emaciated that he looked like a skeleton with a thin layer of skin stretched over its bones, suddenly rose to his feet.
His eyes shone with the brilliance of stars, bright and clear.
He raised his head to the heavens and whispered.
"If I wish to become an immortal, why should I beg the heavens? If the heavens will not grant it, then I shall take it for myself!"
"To follow the heavens is to remain mortal, to defy the heavens..."
"Is to become immortal!"
Xuanyuan Tuo's stooped shoulders straightened in an instant.
Though still a mortal man, he met the gaze of the heavens as an equal.
He possessed no special aura, yet he did not seem the lesser.
He continued his low chant, "Therefore, the path of immortality is to..."
"Breathe the spirit of Heaven and Earth, and master its qi;
Borrow the marvels of Heaven and Earth, and build one's foundation;
Perceive the laws of Heaven and Earth, and refine the Golden Core;
Seize the essence of Heaven and Earth, and form the Nascent Soul;
Drain the marrow of Heaven and Earth, and attain the Spirit Transformation;
Offer the soul of Heaven and Earth, and integrate with the Dao;
Reverse the principles of Heaven and Earth, and achieve Longevity!"
His words came faster and faster, until with the final line, he collapsed in exhaustion.
But he didn't get up, simply lying on the ground, roaring with laughter.
Utterly drained, having found the Dao he sought, Xuanyuan Tuo fell into a deep sleep.
The spiritual energy of the world was drawn to him. It swirled and gathered, forming a vortex that lifted his sleeping form into the air, cradling him.
After a long while, the vision of spiritual energy pouring into his body finally faded.
Xuanyuan Tuo slowly descended back to the ground. His fifty-year-old body was completely revitalized. Though he still looked ancient, he now pulsed with boundless vigor.
An unknown amount of time passed...
The sleeping man's face contorted in a violent spasm, and his eyes snapped open.
But they were a horrifying sight—all white, with no pupils to be seen.
His voice, when he spoke, was deeper and more ancient.
"The Heavenly Dao of the Xuanhuang Realm is even more formidable than I anticipated."
"I was nearly lost completely, unable to recover my own consciousness."
"Ahem... a slight miscalculation," he rasped.
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