Chapter 61: Chapter 61

The twentieth day after Gao Nian of the Golden Dragon Gang fell.

Dawn broke; the thick fog slowly thinned.

Shen Xiuhan steered his black-canopied boat alone, cruising across the lake.

By his count, today was already the fourth day he had stood solo night-patrol watch.

Once he had the routine figured out, it came easily enough.

Rules on the island were loose. Apart from the fixed four hours each day spent on patrol over the water, most of his time was his to use as he pleased.

Over these past few days, Shen Xiuhan had had no interest in drinking and idling with the other men on the island.

More often than not, he would find some secluded, quiet bamboo grove and silently grind through his stance art, tempering his qi-blood in solitude.

Since acquiring the 『Jade Blood Pills』, he had now swallowed three in succession.

The pills’ effects were plain to see. Now, the moment he set his stance art in motion, the qi-blood inside him surged and roiled like fierce fire meeting hot oil, boiling water turning over without cease.

This was the very sign of Full Mastery of Blood Tempering!

In a few more days, once the medicinal force of the pill he had taken the day before yesterday had been fully refined away, he could take one more and attempt the breakthrough to Bone Tempering.

But before that, there was one matter even more pressing.

He stilled the oar and let the black-canopied boat drift with the waves.

Shen Xiuhan stood at the bow, his gaze sweeping a wary circle around him. Having confirmed there was not a soul within several li, he drew a deep breath.

【Detected cultivable martial art: 『Stream-Side Elder’s Divine Power — Fragment』. Deduce?】

“…Yes!”

In that instant!

Wind stilled, waves ceased, the green waters froze to glass.

Pale-gold light blazed; countless arcane points of radiance interwove and converged, forming a golden figure that began to deduce and comprehend within Shen Xiuhan’s mind-sea.

Light and shadow dappled.

Years flowed past like a white colt glimpsed through a crack in the wall.

【Year One: Day and night you pored over the divine power fragment in a shabby room, pouring out heart and blood, yet found it impossibly abstruse — unable to make even a first step in. Knowing that working behind closed doors was ultimately futile, you shouldered your pack and set out to walk among mountains and waters, seeking to take rivers and peaks as your teachers and comprehend the true meaning of this method.】

【Year Eight: Eating in the wind and sleeping under the dew, your feet had carried you past a hundred deep rivers and cold streams. One day, you came to the edge of a small pond. Your belly growled with hunger, and you meant only to angle a couple of wild fish for a meal — but in the moment of casting the line, your whole body locked in place. For two full days you stood, heedless of the morning dew soaking your clothes or the fallen leaves settling on your shoulders, until at last — in the rippling of the water — something stirred to life in your understanding!】

【Year Nine: You ended your wanderings and returned home to enter seclusion. At last, from the fragment, you grasped the core outline of a method. Yet the method was only a rough shape, still marred by many gaps and imperfections. Undaunted, you resolved to continue your seclusion and deduce onward!】

【Year Fifteen: Through winters and summers, you poured out the last of your effort to refine and perfect the method — stripping away the dross, keeping only the essence — and formally named it 『Thousand Lakes Fishing』. This method was created expressly for angling treasures from the water. Once the method was complete, it linked to the waterways themselves. From that point on, no matter where you stood, no matter the season, with no need for a spirit-rod or common bamboo, with no need for rare bait — you had only to sit at the water’s edge, lower a thread into the depths, and all things would… come willingly to the hook!】

The light and shadow scattered; consciousness rushed back like a returning tide.

Shen Xiuhan slowly opened his eyes. Within them lay a crystalline clarity.

Fifteen years of bloom and wither — gone like a dream.

And every mystery of 『Thousand Lakes Fishing』 had been branded into his very marrow.

“Hah…”

Shen Xiuhan let out a long, slow breath; the surging qi-blood in his chest gradually settled.

He pressed two fingers together like a blade — “snap” — and cut a single reed. Then, with a flick of his finger, he drew a silk thread from the hem of his inner shirt, tied an idle knot, and fastened it to the reed’s tip.

No hook. No bait.

Just a length of silk thread tied to a broken reed stalk. If any of the old hands out on the water saw this, they’d laugh their teeth clean out.

But Shen Xiuhan’s expression was still as stone. He sat cross-legged at the bow, and his wrist gave a sudden, deft flick.

Hummm—

The qi-blood inside him instantly began to flow along the obscure, arcane pathways of 『Thousand Lakes Fishing』.

The next moment, the soft silk thread drove into the lake’s surface as straight and rigid as an armor-piercing steel needle, sending out a single ring of ripples.

There was no flash of light, no visible marvel. An invisible, intangible, profoundly mysterious resonance traveled down the submerged thread, spreading silently across the lake bed below.

Silence settled over the lake.

One breath. Three breaths. Ten breaths…

The calm surface showed nothing — not so much as a single bubble rose.

Just as Shen Xiuhan’s brow began to furrow, wondering whether something had gone wrong —

The black thread moved!

As though given life, it looped beneath the water, circled under the hull of the black-canopied boat, and — fighting straight against the rushing undercurrent — pointed due north!

“Well now!”

Shen Xiuhan stared at the sight in astonishment.

Yunshui Lake’s main current ran from north to south in a broad, powerful sweep.

On these deep, wave-tossed waters, even the most seasoned swimmer would struggle to hold his bearings beneath the surface.

And yet here, this soft silk thread had drawn taut as a bowstring underwater, pointing unerringly toward the waters to the north — stubbornly pulling at him.

“『Thousand Lakes Fishing』 truly deserves its place as the lesser method beneath a divine power — what a staggering creation!”

Shen Xiuhan marveled inwardly:

“I wonder what manner of marvel the secret art 『Dragon Gate Pulling』 — which requires Astral Strength to cultivate — might hold, let alone the divine power 『Stream-Side Elder』 itself, which cannot be touched until one enters Divine Presence…”

His thoughts had scarcely landed when his body suddenly froze, as if something had occurred to him.

Summoning the Intelligence System, Shen Xiuhan focused his gaze and looked out along the direction the black thread was pulling.

“Hssss!!”

When he saw what lay there, Shen Xiuhan drew in a sharp breath, and great waves crashed inside his heart.

“Is… is this right?”

The bearing the black silk thread had locked onto overlapped, faintly but unmistakably, with one of the pale-gold points of light.

【Intelligence ⑤: One li due north of Yunyi Island, deep beneath the lake bed, lie three joints of the 『Treasure Medicine — Jade-Hearted Lotus Root』.】

This method could detect underwater treasures from a distance!

True, it overlapped with what the System’s scan could find — but it didn’t spend a single 『Intelligence』 charge!

“Just what manner of power was Diaohailou? A method this extraordinary — one that can tilt the hand of fortune itself — cultivable below Transforming Strength! Its foundations must belong to a great pillar of the martial way. There is no chance it was some nameless nobody!”

Shen Xiuhan racked his brains to no avail. In the end, he simply seized the oar, his eyes flashing with keen light:

“Forget it! Get the treasure medicine in hand first — no use giving trouble room to grow!”

In truth, when he had first arrived on Yunyi Island, Shen Xiuhan had already scouted the surrounding waters.

The hiding place of the treasure medicine 『Jade-Hearted Lotus Root』 lay barely a li from him, squarely within Squad C’s northern patrol waters.

Compared to the location of the 『Diaohailou direct-line disciple’s』 relics, it was safer by several fold!

Because he had once pointed toward the Diaohailou disciple’s location and asked a few of the patrol guards about it.

By Hu Zhi and the others’ account, that spot was alarmingly close to ‘Dongyi Island’ — the stronghold of Chenjian Wu.

Dongyi Island was thick with bandits, with several Hidden Strength experts alone. Shen Xiuhan had no choice but to bide his time.

His arms drove the oar; the black-canopied boat shot forward like an arrow loosed from the string, cleaving the waves.

In no more than half an hour, a scattering of rocky shoals began to break the surface ahead.

This was already shallow water — jagged stones jutting skyward, hidden reefs everywhere.

Shen Xiuhan lashed the mooring line to a rock and prepared to go on foot to harvest the Jade-Hearted Lotus Root.

“Hm?”

He had taken only a few steps when his body suddenly halted, and his face grew slowly grave.

“Something isn’t right!”

Shen Xiuhan stared at the black silk thread in his hand, still under the pull of 『Thousand Lakes Fishing』.

He had assumed the method had locked onto the location of the 『Jade-Hearted Lotus Root』.

But as the distance closed, he found that the black thread at the tip of the reed was offset from the pale-gold point of light marking the 『Jade-Hearted Lotus Root』 — by roughly two palm-widths.

In other words, the thread was not pointing to the waters where the 『Jade-Hearted Lotus Root』 lay hidden.

It was pointing beneath a massive, pitch-black boulder of reef!