Chapter 163: The Spirit Artifact — Frost-Piercing Awl!
He turned the last page without realizing it. The volume was finished.
Shen Xiuhan looked from the bold, spirited brushstrokes of the early entries to the final lines — ink scrawled wild, stained with blood — and felt something catch in his chest. He fell silent.
The stone chamber was utterly still.
Water dripped from the ceiling. One drop. Then another. Striking the stone floor with a clear, hollow ring — like the restless heartbeat of one who refused to accept his end.
He raised his head and looked at the skeleton sitting in its eternal meditation. His expression was complicated.
“So the demonic art has a will of its own… it can shield itself from detection, even override the instinct to seek fortune and avoid danger. It seems the Child of Destiny is not without a counter after all.”
Shen Xiuhan sighed softly, closed the journal, and walked to the skeleton. He bowed deeply.
“Shen Xiuhan, of a later generation, pays his respects to Senior Xiao. What you have entrusted, this junior will do his utmost to fulfill. The time has come to claim this fortune… forgive the presumption.”
He had already scanned the chamber thoroughly with the Void-Gazing Eye. No hidden formations remained.
And apart from the journal on the table, the room was bare.
The answer, then, was obvious.
Everything was inside the moon-white pouch at the skeleton’s waist.
A storage treasure!
Shen Xiuhan’s eyes lit with anticipation. He stepped forward to examine it.
Only hours ago, he’d watched Zuo Muxian conjure objects from thin air and marveled with envy, wondering when he might own such a marvel.
He hadn’t expected one to fall into his hands so soon.
He reached out and lifted the pouch free.
It was feather-light. The material was unidentifiable.
He loosened the drawstring and peered inside — a pocket of folded space, roughly a zhang on each side, its contents laid out before his eyes.
There wasn’t much. Two small heaps, mostly booklets.
Shen Xiuhan drew them out and leafed through. The majority were formation manuals — diagrams and text, arcane and intricate.
He felt like he was reading clouds. A few glances and he packed them away again.
Beyond the formation texts, there were nearly ten technique manuals spanning Manifest Strength to Astral Strength.
Fist arts, palm arts, finger arts, movement arts, body-hardening methods — a complete arsenal, close to a dozen in all.
Dark-Abyss Frost-Condensing Finger. Overturning-Water Palm. Flash-Shadow Step. Ice-Serpent Triple-Fold Body. Cold-Marrow Bone-Quenching Chapter. Ice-Fiend Wave-Parting Fist…
Every cover bore neat, sharp calligraphy — clearly copied in Xiao Yan’s own hand.
But when he came to one particular manual, Shen Xiuhan’s brow arched. He pulled it out for a closer look.
“Ice-Soul Misty Rain Sword…”
Shen Xiuhan murmured, turning pages, studying each one. The further he read, the stranger his expression became.
“Isn’t this the same art as Luo Qiance’s Misty Rain Saber? After the feast I heard that his saber method was derived from the Fury-Sea School’s Astral Strength-grade supreme art, the Ice-Soul Misty Rain Saber… so how has it become a sword art?”
He puzzled over it for a while, couldn’t untangle the connection, and closed the booklet. He stowed it with the rest.
“This sword art is quite profound. Worth cultivating in the future.”
He murmured an appreciation, then continued examining the pouch’s contents.
Beyond the formation and technique manuals, the most eye-catching items were three jade boxes.
Each was carved from finest mutton-fat white jade, surfaces smooth as mirrors, edges inlaid with silver wire.
Shen Xiuhan opened the first. The contents looked faintly familiar, and his heart gave a jolt.
It was a jade disc.
Identical in shape, size, and hue to the one he’d taken from the secret compartment above the beam in Tian Erhu’s house.
That disc had led him, on Yunyi Island, to the Scripture of the Divine General’s Void-Gazing Ascendant Luminary — the divine-power method from which the Void-Gazing Eye derived.
“Could it be…”
Shen Xiuhan’s pulse quickened. He channeled a wisp of force into the disc — tentatively.
In the next instant —
SWISH!
Azure radiance erupted like a flood, pouring from the jade disc and lighting the stone cavern bright as day.
Then, thousands upon thousands of tiny characters materialized from nothing — flowing gold, hanging motionless in midair like an inverted field of stars.
Shen Xiuhan held his breath, read the opening line, and whispered:
“The Abyssal Frost-Fiend Sea-Overturning True Scripture!”
Just as he’d suspected.
Each mysterious jade disc contained a divine-power method.
And this one held the inheritance of Diaohailou’s Abyssal-Dark Peak.
His gaze blazed as he scanned the suspended golden text.
Cultivated to Full Mastery, the scripture yielded a supernatural technique called the Dark-Shore Crossing Sea — a divine power of terrifying might.
Beneath it branched two subordinate arts: the secret technique Dark-Fiend Astral Force, and the cultivation method Dark-Ice Force.
The former was an Astral Strength-grade killing art — far beyond his current reach.
The latter, however, was cultivable now — though its specific wonders would only reveal themselves upon completion.
He studied the text briefly, then returned the disc to the storage pouch and opened the second jade box.
The instant the lid rose, a wave of cold struck him in the face. He turned aside, waited a beat, then looked down.
Inside lay a single extraordinary lotus.
The flower was crystalline from petal to stem — like ice sculpted into art — each petal thin as a cicada’s wing. At its heart, a single bead of ice-blue dew clung, trembling faintly, yet never falling.
The entire plant exuded a cold, ethereal fragrance. One breath of it cleared the mind and cleansed the lungs, as though the very organs had been rinsed.
“Seems to be… a high-tier treasure medicine.”
Shen Xiuhan examined it without lingering, then quickly opened the third box.
But the moment he saw what lay inside, his expression went visibly blank.
Because the object’s shape was… exceedingly peculiar.
It was conical. The broad end was smooth and rounded, tapering to a point, with a flat ring at the very base.
Shen Xiuhan turned it over in his hands several times, and the more he looked, the more he felt…
This shape was awfully familiar.
It looked exactly like a…
A what now?
Shen Xiuhan’s face went dark. He shoved the absurd thought out of his head, crushed the mental tangent flat, and called inwardly:
‘Intelligence!’
Golden text cascaded before his eyes like a waterfall.
【Today’s Intelligence has been activated!】
【Intelligence 1: The item from the second jade box is a fifth-tier treasure medicine called the Frost-Congealing Jade-Branch Lotus — the primary ingredient for Diaohailou Abyssal-Dark Peak’s signature great pill.】
【Combined with auxiliary ingredients — three stalks of frost-gathering grass, three qian of dark-water marrow, one jin of cold-moon spring water, and one stalk of rime-frost flower — it can be refined into the Ice-Soul Astral-Condensing Pill.】
【This pill is immensely beneficial for breaking through to outer and inner Astral Strength, with doubled efficacy for practitioners who major in ice or water-element arts.】
Understanding dawned.
This fifth-tier treasure medicine had been prepared by Xiao Yan for his own Astral Strength breakthrough.
Fate had other plans. He died before he could use it, and it had lain sealed here ever since, alongside his unfulfilled wish.
For Shen Xiuhan, though, there was no need to refine and consume the pill himself.
He had Deduction. Realm-barriers could be broken through on his own — he needed only to cultivate steadily and supplement his qi-blood with ordinary pills.
A breakthrough-grade medicine like this could serve other purposes down the road.
He set the thought aside and moved to the second entry.
【Intelligence 2: The item from the third jade box is the spirit artifact Frost-Piercing Awl — forged by Diaohailou’s seventh-generation patriarch, Xiao Ling. It possesses two effects.】
【First: When wielding this spirit artifact to execute ice or water-element techniques, force condenses at the awl’s tip. Where the point aims, it can pierce protective Astral Force and hardened armor alike.】
【Second: When striking an enemy with this artifact, frost-cold Hidden Strength penetrates the body, freezing the meridians and retarding the enemy’s qi-blood and Astral Force circulation.】
“So it’s not one of Diaohailou’s four inheritance artifacts after all?”
Shen Xiuhan’s brow rose, a note of surprise in his gaze.
When he’d obtained the Sea-Overturning Pearl, the Intelligence had labeled it one of Diaohailou’s four great inheritance treasures.
At the time, he’d assumed the four main lineages each corresponded to one inheritance artifact.
Evidently not.
This seventh-generation patriarch, Xiao Ling, had simply forged his own spirit artifact.
And compared to the Sea-Overturning Pearl — versatile in escape, concealment, and cultivation support — the Frost-Piercing Awl was far more single-minded.
But that single-mindedness made it pure.
This artifact had been designed, from the moment of its creation, for one purpose: killing.
Pierce protective Astral Force.
Freeze meridian qi-blood.
Both effects existed solely for combat.
A spirit artifact built for slaughter — in any fighter’s hands — was the ultimate trump card, capable of turning the tide at the brink of death.
“Not bad.”
Shen Xiuhan nodded in silent approval and stowed the Frost-Piercing Awl, jade box and all, into the pouch.
His current cultivation was too shallow to fully drive the artifact’s power, but as his realm climbed, this weapon would prove invaluable.