A Will Eternal — Cultural Dictionary, Chapters 181–190
What this is: A cultural dictionary for A Will Eternal (一念永恒). Each entry explains an in-world term — a cultivation mechanic, an institution, a social custom, a title, or a cultural reference — and how it works in the world the author built. This is a reference for readers, translators, and worldbuilding enthusiasts; it is not a novel summary or plot recap.
How to use it: Find the term you want (the Chinese characters and pinyin are shown in each heading), read the explanation, and follow the Related terms line to find connected concepts. Entries are grouped in reading order so the dictionary doubles as an unfolding guide to the world.
宗门历练 (ZŌNGMÉN LÌLIÀN) — Sect Training-Excursion
Category: Institution / coming-of-age custom
历练 — “training, tempering, going out into the world” — is the standard xianxia mechanism for getting a sheltered disciple out of the house, and this arc shows the comedy version: a sect that weaponizes its own doctrine to get rid of a nuisance.
The doctrine, stated properly. 郑远东’s pitch is not cynical on its face and is actually the genre’s moral core: 修士这一生，修行只是一方面，还需要一些历练，没有经过打磨，就算是仙铁也难成锐利的仙剑 — “for a cultivator, cultivation is only one part of the life; there must also be tempering. Without polishing, even immortal iron cannot become a keen immortal sword.” The sword metaphor is nearly universal in the genre; here it is used sincerely, then immediately looted for laughs.
The safety envelope. Note that the excursion is bounded by design: 不可离开东林洲，东林洲很大，所有区域，你都可以去 — “you may not leave the Eastern Forest Continent; the continent is very large, you may go anywhere within it.” This is how a sect actually manages the risk: not by assigning escorts but by drawing a map boundary. Within the continent, threat levels are known and survivable (危险的程度就会锐减); outside it, the sect has no information.
The going-away package. A departing disciple receives a going-away grant (送行) combining the two currencies:
| Component | Detail |
|---|---|
| Spirit stones | A substantial sum |
| Pills | A substantial supply |
| Life-protecting treasures | Selected personally by the sect head from the sect vault (我特许为你打开宝库，让你挑选) |
The vault-opening is the significant part: 郑远东 authorizes it in one breath, which tells the reader how badly he wants 白小纯 gone. The formal vocabulary of the whole transaction stays warm — 慈祥 (“kindly”) face, hand on the shoulder, 师兄支持你 (“your senior brother supports you”).
The farewell as farce. The arc’s best structural joke is that 白小纯’s request to leave is processed in half a day — he mentions it in the morning, and by noon 一切手续，一切准备…用最快的速度，全部处理完了 (“all formalities and preparations were completed at the fastest possible speed”). The gate scene has the sect head, six peak-heads, and crowds of elders and inner disciples assembled in a display of grief; then the instant he is out of sight, 目中的难舍刹那就被喜悦代替 (“the reluctance in their eyes was instantly replaced by joy”), and the sect breaks out drums and gongs — the same 锣鼓 they used for an earlier celebration. Two banks of the sect compete in celebration.
The counter-joke. 白小纯, walking away, delivers the perfect line: 他们还是舍不得我啊，诸位道友，不要想念我，我很快就回来了！ — “they still can’t bear to part with me. Fellow Daoists, do not miss me — I will be back very soon!” He genuinely believes it. The novel’s humor here is a matched pair of misreadings: the sect reads his departure as liberation; he reads it as their loss.
Why the trope matters for the plot. The excursion is the cover for the next arc’s real content. Because the sect head’s four-revelation lecture established 空河院’s vacant seat and the four-way war, “going out to train” is a legitimate, expected, unsupervised absence — which is precisely what an infiltration needs. The genre’s coming-of-age ritual is also the genre’s best alibi.
Related terms: 卧底, 传送与归宗, 东林洲, 准传承序列, 四宗与溪字之秘
天雷洗药大法 (TIĀNLÉI XǏ YÀO DÀFǍ) — The Heavenly-Thunder Herb-Washing Method
Category: Alchemy technique / signature art
天雷洗药大法 — “the great method of washing herbs with heavenly thunder” — is 白小纯’s signature alchemy technique, and in this arc it produces the second sect-wide ecological disaster, which is worth documenting for what it reveals about scaling laws.
What it is. An alchemical method that refines herbs using actual struck lightning — 钟道山上天雷滚滚，一道道闪电轰轰落下 (“on Bone-Path Mountain the thunder rolled and bolt after bolt came crashing down”). It was flagged by 李青候 as the thing 白小纯 would be able to attempt after Foundation Establishment (自己筑基之后就可以尝试用天雷洗药大法), so it is a stage-gated technique — the reason to attempt it now is precisely his new cultivation level.
The side effects, itemized. The method has a consistent and hilarious symptom complex, and the novel has been building it since the Qi-Condensation era:
| Symptom | Description |
|---|---|
| Rolling thunder over the mountain | Lightning strikes repeatedly; alarms every Foundation Establishment elder on 种道山 |
| Black smoke | Continual columns of smoke rise from his cave dwelling |
| Acid rain | The signature: 传说中恐怖的酸雨，降临了 — the legendary terrifying acid rain |
| Dissolving clothing | Anyone caught in it has their clothes melt in moments (身上的衣服顷刻融化) |
| Sect-wide panic | Two banks of disciples flee screaming |
The scaling law (the genuinely interesting bit). The novel is precise about why this round is worse than the Qi-Condensation rounds: 因白小纯这一次炼制的是四阶丹药，远非三阶可比，使得他在淬炼时，酸雨的范围更大 — “because this time he was refining fourth-tier pills, incomparable to third-tier, the acid rain’s range was larger.” The radius expands to cover all seven peaks of both banks (覆盖了整个南北七座山峰). So the disasters do not merely repeat — they magnify with the tier of the pill. A protagonist who becomes a better alchemist becomes a proportionally larger hazard. This is a genuinely well-engineered comedic escalation, and readers who track it will notice the novel occasionally uses environmental damage as a progress meter.
The asymmetry of familiarity. The South Bank, having survived earlier rounds, is prepared: 好在南岸有过经历，在看到酸雨的一瞬，有所准备，所以虽引起了哗然，但却可控 (“the South Bank had experience; the instant they saw the acid rain they were ready, so though there was uproar it was controllable”). The North Bank, which has never seen this, 全部疯狂 (goes completely mad). The novel’s rule is that information about the protagonist spreads faster than the protagonist does — and by the end of the arc, 白小纯’s past is common knowledge sect-wide, a chain of stories that grows with each retelling:
白师叔居然干出过这种事？我不相信！ / 天啊，这是真的？
The social consequence: privilege caps retaliation. The novel states the dynamic outright, and it is the most realistic line of the passage: 若是换了白小纯没有筑基，那么这一刻，一定是南北两岸所有弟子，全部拿着石头杀过去 (“had 白小纯 not yet achieved Foundation Establishment, every disciple of both banks would have grabbed stones and charged him”). Instead, disciples look at each other in impotent fury, because 白小纯已经不是以前的白小纯了 — he is a Heavenly-Dao Foundation cultivator, a quasi-succession candidate, an elder. Other elders cannot discipline him; peak-heads have no authority over him; the peak-heads can only go and argue with the sect head, who can only smile bitterly. The one person who can control him, 李青候, is in seclusion attempting Golden Core. The novel thus sets up a comic governance vacuum: rank protects the protected, and the only authority capable of restraint has a prior engagement.
The alchemy ceiling. The arc also documents the technique’s limit honestly: 四阶丹药不断地失败，没有一次成功 (“fourth-tier pills kept failing, not once a success”). 白小纯’s own diagnosis is a good piece of craft worldbuilding:
是我的药道造诣不够，强行去炼也无法成功，想要炼制出四阶丹药，需要我本身药道的造诣提升。
“It’s that my Dao of medicine is insufficient; forcing it cannot succeed. To refine fourth-tier pills, my own attainment in the Dao of medicine must rise.”
And then the shape of the gap, phrased as a document problem:
取出寒门药卷，可无论怎么去看，都看不懂，那种感觉，如同是那些字他都认识，可组合在一起，却看不明白了。……如果把我的药道造诣看成是初阶，那么这寒门药卷，就是高阶……这中间，缺少了一段承上启下的药道知识啊。
“He took out the Cold-Gate Pharmacopoeia, but no matter how he looked he could not understand it — as if he recognized every character, but together they made no sense. …If my attainment is the entry grade, then this Cold-Gate Pharmacopoeia is the high grade… what’s missing is a bridge segment of pharmaceutical knowledge.”
The “missing bridging text” (承上启下) problem is a recurring and satisfying structure in cultivation novels worth flagging: advancement requires not just more power but a missing middle document, and the middle is always held by someone. Here 白小纯’s answer would have been 李青候 — who is, again, in seclusion. So the alchemy storyline is deliberately stalled at the arc’s midpoint and parked until the protagonist can find another teacher.
Related terms: 寒门药卷, 不死金刚卷, 元磁与元磁珠, 炼丹, 洞府
驭人大法 (YÙ RÉN DÀFǍ) — The Art of Commanding People
Category: Divine ability / research goal
驭人大法 — “the great art of commanding people” — is 白小纯’s long-running obsession: the ability to direct other cultivators against their will. It appears across many earlier arcs as an aspiration; this arc is where it turns into an actual (and catastrophically misguided) research program.
The aspiration’s origin. The novel has repeatedly tied 白小纯’s desire to a ladder:
| Stage | Method | Range |
|---|---|---|
| Qi Condensation | 驭力 — commands force with qi | Direct, local |
| Foundation Establishment (紫气通天诀) | 驭 with the eye — 目光所去，万物皆驭 | Where the gaze goes, all is commanded |
| The dream | 驭人 — commands people | Total control |
And note how the novel frames his discovery of the eye-based rung: 这不就是我所追求的……驭人大法的境界么！ (“isn’t this exactly the realm of the art of commanding people I’ve been chasing!”). The Dharma Eye and the human-commanding art are presented as the same technique at different targets — one commands matter, the other commands will.
The theoretical break (his actual insight). 白小纯’s first real step is purely conceptual, and it is admirably written as a research leap:
驭人大法，没必要一定要完全操控对方，我可以通过一些其他的方法来代替啊，比如……我操控对方的衣服，进而操控对方的身体！
而这一切，除了驭力外，元磁的斥力引力，也可以起到很大的作用啊。
“There’s no need for the art of commanding people to fully control the target — I can substitute other methods! For example: I command the target’s clothes, and through them, their body! And for all of this, besides force-commanding, the repulsion and attraction of yuan-magnetism can play a major role!”
What he is doing is substituting a proxy target: rather than mastering the impossible (command a cultivator’s will), he attacks the interface between will and body — the clothing, a thin and mechanically simple layer. This is genuinely how engineering works, and the novel means for the reader to find it clever.
Why clothes fail (the physics of the failure). The experiment (see 元磁珠容器) reveals the flaw, and 白小纯 articulates it:
我操控衣服的思路是错的，衣服脆弱，不堪承受，除非是宝衣！真正的驭人大法，是去操控对方身体内的某些组织……比如操控皮肤，操控血肉，操控骨头，进而最终……完美驭人！
“My approach of controlling clothes is wrong — clothes are fragile, they cannot bear the load; unless they’re treasure garments! The true art of commanding people controls tissue inside the target’s body… skin, flesh, bone — and thereby, at last, perfect command.”
The stated power requirement: 驭力 (yù lì). The whole scheme bottlenecks on a resource the novel names explicitly: 驭力 — “command-force,” defined as what you get when you 将灵力通过紫气通天诀，改变波动，融入自己的意志 — “pass spiritual force through the Purple-Qi Heaven-Piercing Art, change its frequency, and infuse your own will into it.” Note the three-step recipe; it is one of the novel’s few fully specified force-transformations:
“`
灵力 (spiritual force)
→ 紫气通天诀 (re-tunes the waveform)
→ 融入意志 (will infused)
= 驭力 (command-force)
“`
So the art is not a different energy; it is spiritual energy carrying an imprint of the user’s intent. That is why it can affect other people at all — it is the mechanism by which will is exported.
Why he cannot cast it yet, and his workaround. 可我现在修为还不够，这需要庞大的驭力作为基础……我需要一个物品，一个可以容纳驭力的物品！ (“my cultivation is not enough; this requires an enormous base of command-force… I need an object, an object that can contain command-force!”) This is the direct motivation for the containment bead. The pattern — insufficient personal resource → build a battery — is the arc’s single most characteristic 白小纯 move, and it is the same pattern behind his pill research, his treasure hoarding, and his doomed attempts at everything else.
The aesthetic of the result. When the loaded bead finally leaks at rest, the novel describes its aura in three beats: within ten zhang everything floats (一切物品竟都漂浮起来), stones rise off the cave walls, and there is a constant clicking sound (发出咔咔的声音). The intended function is commanding people; the realized function is a ten-zhang field of flying gravel and destruction of garments. The gap between design intent and field performance is the whole joke — and the cause is diagnosed precisely in-text: 碎裂衣服的不是白小纯的力量，而是被影响的人，自身修为的震荡造成 (“it was not 白小纯’s own power that shattered the clothes, but the violent instability of the affected party’s own cultivation“). His field does not cut; it destabilizes, and the victim’s own qi does the cutting.
The vision for later. 白小纯’s own program for the future is stated and left as a to-do: 可却无法将蕴含在内的斥力引力单独剥离出来，未来若能做到，那么自己就可以触摸元磁之力 (“he cannot yet separate the repulsion from the attraction; if in the future he can, then he may touch the power of yuan-magnetism”). The same sentence describes the unlock for both the yuan-magnetism system and the human-commanding art. They are, in the novel’s design, the same problem.
Related terms: 元磁与元磁珠, 紫气通天诀, 通天法眼, 元磁珠容器, 不死长生功
元磁珠容器 (YUÁN CÍ ZHŪ RÓNGQÌ) — The Yuan-Magnet Bead Vessel
Category: Artifact / apparatus
元磁珠容器 — “the yuan-magnet bead vessel” — is the arc’s most instructive piece of amateur engineering: an apparatus 白小纯 builds to store a force he cannot yet wield, and it is the cause of the sect-wide clothing catastrophe. It deserves an entry because its design is correct and its deployment is catastrophic — an unusually realistic combination.
The design. The vessel is a sphere formed from a single thread drawn out of the 元磁翅 (yuan-magnet wing) he wears on his back. That thread contains both poles at once — 既相互排斥，又相互吸引的奇异之力 (“a strange force that mutually repels and mutually attracts”) — and it self-balances:
这珠子似乎又两股气息组成，相互排斥，又相互吸引，达到了平衡，形成了循环，化作了容器。
“The bead seems composed of two auras, mutually repelling and attracting, reaching equilibrium, forming a cycle, becoming a container.”
The architecture is a genuine insight, and the novel should get credit for it. The bead is not a solid object holding force like a bucket. It is a self-sustaining loop: two opposing forces trap each other, and their deadlock creates a stable volume of “not-force” in the middle that can hold things. 白小纯’s own description is: 具备某种平衡，如同一个循环，形成了容器 (“it possesses a certain equilibrium, like a cycle — it forms a container”). Readers who know physics will recognize this as a magnetic bottle; readers who don’t should note simply that the opposition is load-bearing. The forces are not the contents — they are the wall.
The filling process, with timings. The loading is slow and costly, and the novel gives a schedule:
| Phase | Duration | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Design + verification | ~1 day | Confirms the loop holds |
| Initial charging | ~1 month | Command-force load becomes 近乎恐怖 (“nearly terrifying”) |
| Deliberate over-charging | ~3 more months | Load becomes 恐怖无边 (“boundlessly terrifying”); leaks into the surrounding void |
And the visible symptoms of a full vessel:
- The bead does not change size — it stays the size of a marble while holding months of investment.
- It distorts the surrounding void (使得虚无越发扭曲).
- Within ten zhang, all objects levitate and emit clicking sounds (发出咔咔的声音).
- Even the cave walls shed floating stones (洞府的墙壁，也都有无数石子漂浮).
Why the over-charge is the fatal decision. 白小纯 explicitly second-guesses himself and then ignores his own instinct: 正要去实验一番，白小纯忽然脚步一顿，想了想后，还是觉得不稳妥。不行，我要再多融入一些驭力进去！ (“Just as he was about to go test it, he paused, thought it over, and felt it still wasn’t safe. No — I should infuse even more command-force!”) Three more months of loading. The novel is precise about the causal chain: the disaster is not caused by a design flaw but by the designer’s refusal to accept a safety margin.
The failure mode. The vessel does not explode. It leaks a passive field, and it does so only while carried:
- At rest, nothing happens.
- The instant 白小纯 moves through a crowd, everyone within ten zhang has their clothes disintegrate (他所过之处，这一条长线外，四周十丈范围，所有筑基修士，全部猛的睁大了眼，他们的衣服，在这一瞬，竟全部碎裂).
- The effect follows him like a moving corridor — the novel calls it 这一条长线 (“this one long line”). People who try to approach to complain get stripped again (但凡靠近他十丈内，衣服会再次碎裂).
- 白小纯 himself is unaffected (十丈范围内，只有白小纯如常).
The mechanism of the damage (crucial and elegant). 这不是白小纯有多么厉害的修为，而是他的那珠子诡异，碎裂衣服的不是白小纯的力量，而是被影响的人，自身修为的震荡造成 — “it is not that 白小纯’s cultivation is so formidable; it is that the bead is uncanny. What shatters the clothes is not his power but the oscillation of the affected party’s own cultivation.” This has three consequences worth recording:
- It cannot be blocked by being stronger. The stronger the victim, the more violent their cultivation’s instability — which is why it works on supreme elders.
- It is not an attack, so it triggers no defensive response. Nobody’s shield goes up because nothing is aimed at them; the field simply re-tunes whatever qi is already there.
- It cannot be escaped by suppressing your cultivation either. The novel notes the futile pattern explicitly: 赶紧压制，可越压制，碎裂的越快 (“they hurried to suppress it, but the harder they suppressed, the faster it shattered”) — because the suppression is the oscillation.
So the apparatus is, functionally, a qi-instability projector with no selectivity and no off switch. It is perfect for what it was built to be (a pre-loaded battery for a future art) and useless for anything else — except stripping an entire sect.
The arc’s culminating scene. Because the sect head has summoned all Foundation Establishment cultivators to the main hall, 白小纯’s corridor crosses the largest possible crowd, and then 郑远东 himself walks out of the hall with several supreme elders — straight into the ten-zhang field. Every one of them is stripped, including the supreme elders. The novel’s own framing: 随着掌门与这几个太上长老，露出了肉身，四周瞬间……一片死寂 (“as the sect head and the supreme elders were left in their bare bodies, the surroundings instantly fell into dead silence”). And the vessel is ultimately confiscated — carefully, by an elder who takes care to keep his own robes intact (被另外一个太上长老小心谨慎下，维持衣衫不碎裂，将其收起). 白小纯’s grievance about the confiscation is delivered with perfect pettiness: 太过分了，还把我的珠子都拿走了，都没还给我……
Related terms: 驭人大法, 元磁与元磁珠, 太上长老, 掌门, 不死长生功
卧底 (WÒDǏ) — The Undercover Agent
Category: Spycraft / plot device
卧底 — “undercover, sleeper agent” — is the term 白小纯 uses to describe himself as he walks away from his own sect, and it marks the novel’s transition into its second volume (第一卷终。第二卷：夜葬传说！ — “Volume One ends. Volume Two: The Legend of Night Burial — setting sail!”).
The declaration. The line that closes the volume is 白小纯 at his most self-satisfied:
血溪宗，我白小纯来了，这一次对不起了，我是卧底！
“Blood Creek Sect — I, Bai Xiaochun, have come. My apologies this time: I’m an undercover agent!“
The humor is structural. 卧底 is an institutional word — it belongs to intelligence services, not to boys on a walking trip. 白小纯 adopts it as a title, announces it to an empty road, and takes evident pride in it. Nobody hears him. That is the joke, and it is also characterization: he needs the role to be recognized even when the audience is nobody.
Why “undercover” is the right frame for this world. The novel has established a genuine agent apparatus across the last several arcs, so 白小纯’s infiltration is not out of place — it is him joining an existing industry:
| Agent / operation | Side | Method |
|---|---|---|
| 落陈家族 | armed by a rival creek sect | Proxy rebellion, suppressed quietly |
| 杜凌菲 | ambiguous; likely left voluntarily | Near a Heavenly-Dao prodigy for years |
| 夜葬 | planted by a remote, near-impotent power | Mask + soul-seal + a mission |
| 林墓 (丹溪宗) | planted Dao-seeds in his own sect’s disciples | Internal cultivation parasitism |
| 白小纯 | self-deployed into 血溪宗 | Stolen mask, stolen identity, stolen mission |
The novel’s one-liner for the whole system is the sect head’s 养鱼 (“fish-farming”), and 白小纯 is now a fish farming himself. Note the layers: he is an agent of his own sect, operating under a cover provided by a third power, pursuing the third power’s objective, for his own private reason (longevity). He is a spy with three masters and one motive, which is why the novel can keep him sympathetic while he lies to everybody.
The operational requirements, itemized. The mission depends on several things the prior arc set up, and they are worth listing as a checklist:
- The mask — undetectable below the Mahayana realm; changes flesh, not appearance; hides both cultivation base and technique.
- A resurrected identity — 夜葬 was an inner-sect disciple who had been away in a secret realm, so a late return is normal and expected (a mechanism the novel carefully pre-loads: 必定有一部分弟子，选择隐藏疗伤，直至伤势痊愈，才会回宗).
- The pill — the key to the door, brewed from the one ingredient the mysterious sect lacked.
- The objective — the 永恒不灭之物 beneath the 中峰 great elder’s cave dwelling.
- A patient plan — the ladder 白小纯 sets for himself is explicit and correct: enter → Foundation Establishment → choose 中峰 → become 护法 → rise to 中峰 great elder → reach the place under the great elder’s dwelling.
The cost of the cover. The novel is careful to make the disguise expensive in ways that matter:
- He must show a lower cultivation than he has. He can only display 凡道筑基 (mortal-path Foundation Establishment), never 地脉 (earth-vein), because earth-vein Foundation is rare enough that the relic-world survivors would have noticed. So he is permanently under-equipped to defend himself.
- He inherits a body’s obligations. 夜葬 has a history — including creditors, enemies, and (see 夜葬’s Entanglements) a string of romantic entanglements entered into for pills. 白小纯 must live inside all of it.
- *He must cultivate in character.* He deliberately practices a savage, cold facial expression and a chilling laugh until it becomes natural (精心的改变下，一笑起来，就阴冷无比).
The genre function. Infiltration arcs are the standard mechanism by which a cultivation novel shows an enemy institution from the inside without the protagonist having to actually join it. The design contract is that the reader learns the enemy’s rules from within, and the tension comes from the protagonist’s cover degrading. This novel honors the contract: the following ten chapters are, essentially, an anthropological report on 血溪宗, delivered while 白小纯 sweats.
Related terms: 面具, 夜葬, 永恒不灭之物, 养鱼, 血溪宗, 传承与隐藏传承
血祖巨手 (XUÈ ZǓ JÙ SHǑU) — The Blood Ancestor’s Giant Hand
Category: Geography / cosmological artifact
血祖巨手 — “the Blood Ancestor’s giant hand” — is the single most visually arresting piece of worldbuilding in the arc, and functionally, it is the 血溪宗’s entire sect headquarters. The novel’s description deserves unpacking carefully because every feature of the sect’s social structure is a feature of this hand.
What it is. A colossal blood-colored hand, extended out of the Heaven-Piercing River, as if grasping at the sky:
一只从通天河内，伸出的庞大无比的血手，这只手似要抓向苍穹，庞大的无法形容，因为那五个手指，每一个手指，赫然就是一座巨大的山峰，每一个山峰，都堪比种道山的大小。
“A boundless blood-colored hand reaching out of the Heaven-Piercing River, as if to grasp at the vault of heaven — its size beyond describing, for each of its five fingers is a vast mountain peak, every peak comparable in size to Bone-Path Mountain.”
The thumb is veiled in a blood-mist and cannot be seen clearly (被一片血雾遮盖，看不清晰). The whole hand has long since dried out — 早已风干，充满了尘埃与碎石 — so from close up it reads as five tilted giant peaks; only from a distance does one see the hand and the forearm.
The origin story implied. The novel reads the posture correctly and lets the reader do the arithmetic: 这是由一个身体庞大的惊天动地的巨人，在这通天河内，临死前伸出了手，似带着强烈的不甘与怨气，欲撕开苍穹 — “a giant of world-shaking size, in the Heaven-Piercing River, reaching out a hand at the moment of death, carrying fierce unwillingness and resentment, trying to tear open the vault of heaven.” But the hand froze mid-reach (伸出时，不知什么原因固化了), and though the body died, the will remained, holding the hand up (意志似还在，支撑着这只手不落下), so that over the ages it became a mountain.
The internal anatomy — and this is where the arc’s best twist lives. 白小纯, walking onto the hand, discovers its structure by feel rather than sight:
| Layer of the hand | What it corresponds to |
|---|---|
| The skin forming the ground surface | The giant’s 不死皮 (Undying Skin) |
| The soil visible through cracks in the skin | His 不死肉 (Undying Flesh) |
| The bone deeper, unseen | His 不死骨 (Undying Bone) |
| The blood-colored waterfalls on the finger-peaks | The highest state of the 不死卷: 不死血 (Undying Blood) |
Because — and this is the revelation — the giant practiced 白小纯’s own art:
这只大手……居然修炼的是……不死长生功！
“This giant hand… actually cultivated… the Undying-Longevity Art!”
The confirmation mechanism. 白小纯 does not guess this from a plaque. It happens to him: 他体内不死长生功，竟自行运转，传递出一股强烈的渴望 (“his own Undying-Longevity Art began circulating on its own, sending out a fierce craving”), and the hand answers with 一股更为磅礴的召唤！这召唤里，带着前所未有的亲切 — “a mightier summons, bearing an unprecedented familiarity.” The word is 同脉 (“same lineage”), and it is the mechanism of a bloodline handing over to a bloodline. His own conclusion, arrived at carefully:
只有具备了不死金皮，且突破了生命第一层桎梏，两者都具备之人，才可以在靠近这大手时，感受到那股来自同脉的召唤。
“Only someone who has both perfected the Undying Golden Skin and broken through the first life-shackle can, on approaching this hand, feel the summons of the same lineage.”
Two independent conditions are required. That structure is the novel’s way of promising that the protagonist’s exact, unusually specific achievement path is the key to this particular lock — and it retroactively explains why 白小纯, alone in a sect full of blood cultivators, is favored by the building.
The consequence: the sect is a derived curriculum. 白小纯’s deduction about the whole institution is the entry’s payoff:
这整个血溪宗，就是建立在一个修行了不死长生功的巨人手臂上，而他们修行的功法，这么来看，分明就是……被一代代血溪宗的先人，通过这只大手创造出来的功法……而这功法的本源，就是我修炼的……不死长生功！
“The entire Blood Creek Sect stands on the arm of a giant who cultivated the Undying-Longevity Art; and their own arts, seen this way, are plainly arts created by generations of Blood Creek ancestors through this hand… and the source of those arts is the Undying-Longevity Art that I cultivate!”
This is a spectacular piece of structural retrofitting. It converts the enemy sect’s entire identity — blood cultivation, blood weapons, blood pills, blood physique — into a folk-derived variant of the protagonist’s lineage, and it explains a whole list of earlier eerie moments in a single stroke:
- Why the blood sphere 宋缺 used at the relic world struck 白小纯 as eerily familiar (that sphere was 不死血, the art’s highest tier, which 宋缺 can only barely use after Foundation Establishment).
- Why so many Blood Creek disciples felt familiar to him in the relic world.
- Why 白小纯’s body soaks up blood-qi as substitute yuan-force (see 修行宝地).
The practical dividend. Because the ground beneath him is literally 不死皮, the sect’s terrain is a cultivation accelerant for exactly one person in it. 白小纯 spends the arc delighted by this: he touches the ground 如同触摸这巨手的不死皮 (“as if touching the giant hand’s Undying Skin”) and calls the whole sect 自己的圣地 (“my holy land”). The enemy’s holy site is his cheat.
The naming, which repays a whole cosmology. The sect calls the giant 血祖 — the Blood Ancestor. So the etymology of the entire sect’s naming (血溪宗 = the Creek Sect of Blood) traces to a dead god-in-the-river, and the sect’s ancestral shrine is his forearm. Readers should hold this against the wider cosmology: the 通天海 islands, the fallen 空河院, 白小纯’s 长生. The novel is building a model in which the great powers of the world are corpses and their leftovers — a model it will return to.
Related terms: 血溪宗, 不死长生功, 不死皮, 修行宝地, 血祖传承, 通天道
血溪宗 (XUÈ XĪ ZŌNG) — The Blood Creek Sect
Category: Institution / faction
血溪宗 — the Blood Creek Sect — is the antagonist institution of the arc and the novel’s most thoroughly described enemy sect. This entry catalogs its structure, because the novel’s design principle here is that the sect’s hierarchy is a physical map of the giant hand.
Rank vs. location. The two are the same thing:
| Rank | Where they live | Where on the hand |
|---|---|---|
| Mortal servants (杂役) | Ground level, outside the hand | 只能在这手臂下的地面 — the ground below the arm; the largest population, ring after ring of buildings |
| Outer-sect disciples (外门弟子) | On the forearm | 可以居住在这只手的手臂上 — the largest area of the arm |
| Inner-sect disciples (内门弟子) | On the back of the hand | 才有资格居住在手背上 — requires an inner-sect credential; trespass is punished by flogging or amputation |
| 护法 (Protector) | Lower finger segments (下指) | 凡道筑基 (mortal-path Foundation Establishment) |
| 长老 (Elder) | Lower finger segments (下指) | 地脉筑基 (earth-vein Foundation Establishment) |
| 大长老 (Great Elder) | Upper finger segments (上指) | One per peak; status comparable to a 灵溪宗 peak-head |
| 血子 (Blood-Prince) | Fingertips (指尖) | One per peak, maximum four in all of history; 与掌门平起平坐, and the peak’s great elder must obey them |
| 血擘 (Blood-Thumb) | The thumb (大拇指) | Former 血子 who attained Golden Core; ranked above supreme elders, below ancestors |
| 老祖 (Ancestors) | The thumb (大拇指) | Golden Core and above, on the forbidden thumb |
| 掌门 (Sect head) | Base of the thumb | 如同门户镇守大拇指 — guards the thumb’s gate |
The five peaks and their specialities. This is the most immediately useful table for readers, because it explains Blood Creek combat styles for the rest of the novel:
| Finger | Peak name | Speciality |
|---|---|---|
| Thumb | 祖峰 (Ancestral Peak) | Forbidden; ancestors, supreme elders, 血擘 |
| Index | 尸峰 (Corpse Peak) | 炼尸 — corpse refinement |
| Middle | 中峰 (Middle Peak) | 血剑 — blood swords |
| Ring | 无名峰 (Nameless Peak) | 炼魔头 — refining “demon-heads” / malevolent spirits |
| Little | 少泽峰 (Little Marsh Peak) | 魔血炼体 — demon-blood body tempering |
The naming convention with its deliberate hole. Note that 无名峰 — “Nameless Peak” — is the ring finger, and that the novel never explains why it is nameless. It is placed among four named peaks, and the reader should suspect the gap is meaningful. Readers of the wider novel will recognize this as a pattern: missing names in this world are load-bearing.
The art’s source: 灵血 (spirit-blood). Blood Creek’s entire curriculum rests on a single conversion. The great hand draws water from the Heaven-Piercing River and transforms it; where the arm is broken the golden river water overflows as red (原本金色的河水，成为了红色), and that red is the sect’s foundational resource:
而这红色，也正是灵溪宗修行的根本。”灵血！”
“And this red is precisely the foundation of [Blood Creek’s] cultivation. Spirit-blood!” (The text’s slip — writing 灵溪宗 where 血溪宗 is meant — is a nice illustration of how close the two sects’ structures are: same river, same water, different conversion.)
Compare the ledger across the four creek sects: 灵溪宗 uses the river for a miscellany of beast/sword/spirit lineages; 血溪宗 converts it to spirit-blood; 玄溪宗 uses it for a second spirit-body and artifact-forging; 丹溪宗 uses it chiefly for pills. Four sects, one river, four industries.
The missing institution: no succession line. 血溪宗 does not have a 传承序列. In its place it has 血子 and, above them, the rumor of 血魔. This is a substantial structural difference from 灵溪宗 and the novel flags it (相似的是也有杂役，外门弟子，内门弟子，可不一样的，是血溪宗没有传承序列，有的是血子). The implication: Blood Creek is organized around individual violent ascent rather than a managed queue — which is consistent with everything else about it.
The social order: controlled savagery. The sect’s two most important rules are:
- Disciples are encouraged to fight (鼓励弟子内斗) — and lethal violence is, nominally, forbidden.
- The ban on killing is strictly enforced by hidden adjudication. 白小纯 witnesses a public killing; no public outcry follows, but 暗地里，那杀人的弟子，已被处决 (“secretly, the disciple who killed was already executed”).
His own formulation for the resulting system is the best one in the arc: 如同养蛊 — “like raising gu.” (Gu is the traditional Chinese practice of sealing many venomous creatures in one vessel and keeping whichever survives.) The sect permits competition up to the point where it produces a winner, then prunes the winner’s excesses. Savagery is the sorting mechanism; the prohibition of death is the quota; and behind both sits a hidden executioner. The novel notes that the practical effect is 等阶森严 (“strict ranks”) growing out of apparent chaos — and that even savagery has an order that 白小纯 does not yet understand (存在了白小纯所不理解的规则).
The danger of the culture, from the protagonist’s perspective. 白小纯’s experience inside is a catalogue: he watches four or five fights on his first walk, sees a disciple beaten until he vomits internal organs (内脏碎块都吐了出来), and observes that bystanders 目光闪动，似随时可以出手掠夺 (their eyes flicker as if ready to rob at any moment). His assessment — 还是我灵溪宗好啊，大家其乐融融，一片美好 / 这里实在太危险了，一言不和就大打出手 — is affectionate slander of his own sect and perfectly accurate about this one.
The counter-surveillance: the sect’s protective array. Entry into the hand is gated by a blood-colored ripple array (一股血色的波动…形成了阵法) which, on contact with a non-member, checks identity. 白小纯 passes it only because the mask makes him 夜葬 in flesh, not merely in appearance — 微微闪烁了几下，就消失无影. This is a well-designed test for the mask’s value: the sect’s security apparatus is exactly the kind of obstacle the mask was built to defeat.
Related terms: 血祖巨手, 血子, 血擘与血魔, 护法与长老, 中峰, 尸峰, 灵血, 养鱼
血子 (XUÈ ZǏ) — Blood-Prince
Category: Title / institutional rank
血子 — literally “blood son/child,” best rendered Blood-Prince — is the Blood Creek Sect’s answer to a succession line, and the title every disciple of the sect dreams of.
The rules. The novel gives them in a block, and each clause is worth keeping:
| Rule | Detail |
|---|---|
| One per peak | 一个山峰一位 — one Blood-Prince per finger-peak |
| Maximum four in existence | 历代血子最多只有四位 — no Blood-Prince for the thumb (the ancestral peak, which houses ancestors instead) |
| Residence | The fingertips (指尖) — the highest physical point of each peak |
| Status | 与掌门平起平坐，所在山峰的大长老也要听命 — co-equal with the sect head; the peak’s great elder must obey |
| How it is won | By obtaining a 血晶 (blood-crystal) |
| Where blood-crystals are | 血溪宗圣手山所在的通天河下血祖体内 — inside the Blood Ancestor’s body, in the river beneath the sect’s holy-finger mountain |
The acquisition mechanism is the most important thing about the title. A Blood-Prince is not appointed by the sect, promoted by a superior, or chosen in a legitimized competition like 灵溪宗’s legacy selection. He is whoever goes into the river, into the corpse of the god the sect is built on, and comes back with a blood-crystal. The title is therefore a proof-of-work, and this is the structural heart of Blood Creek’s culture: rank here is not conferred, it is seized, and the qualification is a physical object taken from a dead giant’s interior. Everything about the sect’s savagery follows from this.
The competition as a spectacle. The novel frames it as an ongoing contest with visible contenders, which is how the reader learns who matters:
- 中峰 is the only peak without a Blood-Prince (唯独中峰没有) — a conspicuous vacancy.
- 血梅少主 is a contender for 中峰’s seat — 传闻也是中峰内定的长老，更是争夺中峰血子身份的有力竞争者.
- So is the 中峰 great elder, 宋君婉 — and the novel states outright that the two of them will contest the seat against each other (二人争夺血子身份).
- 宋缺 had the theoretical standing (若能天道筑基，也有这个资格) but fell short of it in the relic world, and 宋家 will not let him fight his own aunt over it.
So the arc’s central political situation is a two-way succession fight inside 中峰, between a young nine-tide prodigy with an ancestor for a father and a powerful great elder with a family behind her — with 白小纯 intending to become that great elder’s subordinate, and eventually to be the great elder.
The rumor above it: 血魔. 夜葬 whispers a chain of titles that is worth recording as one of the novel’s best pieces of mythic escalation:
传说中，老祖之上，还有血魔！
“Legend says: above the ancestors, there is the Blood Demon!”
The details: aside from the ancestral peak, on any of the other four fingers, whoever obtains a blood-crystal becomes a Blood-Prince. But within the Blood Ancestor’s body in the river — the same place crystals form — there is said to be a mysterious inheritance (藏着一个神秘的传承), and 谁能获得此传承，谁就是血魔。将带领血溪宗，开创一个奇迹 — “whoever obtains that inheritance is the Blood Demon, and will lead Blood Creek Sect to a miracle.”
How the novel wants the reader to weigh it. 夜葬 himself dismisses it (只是传说而已…宗门内有不少人，都觉得这个传说根本就不成立), and the novel immediately undercuts his skepticism:
换了别人或许觉得这个是传说，可白小纯这里却不这么认为，他隐隐觉得，血溪宗所称呼血祖的这个通天河下的巨人，或许……真的体内藏着一份非凡的传承。
“Anyone else might take it as legend, but 白小纯 did not. He had a vague sense that this giant in the river, whom Blood Creek called the Blood Ancestor, might… truly hold an extraordinary inheritance inside his body.”
The reader, who has just watched the same giant’s art respond to 白小纯 as kin, has every reason to agree. The novel has now positioned three separate hidden inheritances in a rising line — 灵溪宗’s hidden legacy (obtained), the 永恒不灭之物 (pending), and the Blood Ancestor’s interior (rumored) — and made the protagonist the only person who can plausibly reach all three.
Related terms: 血祖巨手, 血擘与血魔, 血溪宗, 护法与长老, 传承与隐藏传承, 血梅少主
护法与长老 (HÙFǍ YǓ ZHǍNG LǍO) — Protector and Elder
Category: Title / institutional rank
护法 and 长老 — “Protector” and “Elder” — are Blood Creek’s two Foundation Establishment ranks, and their distinction is one of the novel’s cleanest pieces of institutional design: the sect sorts its own people by which road they took to Foundation Establishment.
The rule.
| Rank | Requirement | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 护法 (Protector) | 凡道筑基 — mortal-path Foundation Establishment | The ordinary road: use a 筑基丹 (foundation pill) to break through |
| 长老 (Elder) | 地脉筑基 — earth-vein Foundation Establishment | The extraordinary road: open the earth-vein tides |
Why this is a genuinely good piece of worldbuilding. Because 灵溪宗’s equivalent distinction is informal — a strong Foundation Establishment cultivator is respected, a weak one is not — while Blood Creek has hard-coded the quality of your breakthrough into your permanent rank. Your ceiling is decided at the moment of breakthrough and never revisited. The consequences ripple through everything:
- It ossifies the hierarchy. An earth-vein cultivator is an elder for life, regardless of later achievement; a mortal-path cultivator is a protector for life. There is no route from one to the other.
- It makes the foundation pills scarce and fought over by design. If a pill permanently caps you at a lesser rank, the sect has every incentive to ration it — which is exactly what the following arc’s Foundation Establishment trial (试炼) is about: a limited number of pills, contested in a killing ground among “failures.”
- It creates the “failures” as a social class. The disciples who could not open earth-veins in the three holy lands (三大筑基圣地) are a resentful stratum caught 处于筑基与内门弟子之间 (“between Foundation Establishment and inner disciple”), and the novel gives them a name — the novel calls them 这些陨剑世界内的失败者 (“these failures from the Fallen-Sword world”). They form factions, trade information, and plan to gang up on the loners.
The extra-step wrinkle: 护法’s ambiguity. The hierarchy places protectors below elders among the finger-segments, but they are still Foundation Establishment cultivators with the power to bully an inner disciple casually — 有一个筑基修士，似觉得白小纯挡住了路，临近时袖子一甩，一股大力化作狂风 (“a Foundation Establishment cultivator, seeming to think 白小纯 was in his way, flicked his sleeve as he passed and a great force became a gale”). The novel uses this to calibrate the “in-character” subservience 白小纯 must perform: he takes the blow, fakes being knocked back, and forces a thread of blood from the corner of his mouth (立刻装出被着狂风推开的样子，还逼出了一丝鲜血从嘴角溢出). A disguise that costs no humiliation is not a disguise.
The strategic point for 白小纯’s mission. Because he can only afford to display 凡道筑基, he enters the sect’s ladder at the lower rung — 护法, not 长老 — which means his cover caps him a full tier below where his real cultivation would put him. His plan therefore requires an extra promotion step he would otherwise have skipped: 筑基是第一步，选择中峰，成为护法是第二步，可惜我在这血溪宗，只能摆出凡道筑基，难以露出地脉筑基，否则的话，就可以成为长老 (“Foundation Establishment is step one; choosing Middle Peak and becoming a Protector is step two — a pity I can only show mortal-path Foundation Establishment here, not earth-vein; otherwise I could become an Elder“). His target is three promotions away, and the cover adds one of them.
The list of the sect’s ranks in one line, for reference:
“`
杂役 → 外门弟子 → 内门弟子 → 护法(凡道筑基) / 长老(地脉筑基)
→ 大长老 (one per peak, upper finger)
→ 血子 (fingertip, one per peak, max four)
→ 血擘 (former 血子, Golden Core, thumb)
→ 老祖 (ancestor, thumb)
“`
with the 掌门 governing the whole sect from the base of the thumb, 如同门户镇守大拇指 (“like a gate guarding the thumb”).
Related terms: 血溪宗, 血子, 筑基丹与凡道筑基, 地脉筑基, 卧底, 尸峰有赏
筑基丹与凡道筑基 (ZHÙJĪ DĀN YǓ FÁNDÀO ZHÙJĪ) — The Foundation Pill and Mortal-Path Foundation Establishment
Category: Cultivation mechanic / institutional economy
筑基丹 — “foundation pill” — is the drug that enables the ordinary road to Foundation Establishment, and this arc converts it from a training detail into a scarce political resource that people kill over.
The two roads, restated. Building on the earlier cosmology:
| Road | Requirement | Result | Rank (Blood Creek) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 地脉筑基 (earth-vein) | Must draw from a Foundation Establishment holy land (筑基圣地) and open the earth-vein tides | Far stronger; 潮汐 count measures quality | 长老 |
| 凡道筑基 (mortal-path) | Take a 筑基丹 — a pill | Weaker; the fallback route | 护法 |
Why the pill is expensive in Blood Creek specifically. The novel is blunt: 可凡道筑基所修的筑基丹，对于血溪宗而言，想要获取，需要付出惨烈的代价 (“as for the foundation pill used for mortal-path Foundation Establishment — for Blood Creek Sect, obtaining it requires paying a savage price“). Note the design logic. In a sect whose whole economy is blood, force, and internal predation, a pill is alien — it is a product of patience and labor, of the pharmacist’s craft, in a culture that has neither. So the pill must be bought at a price that reflects its scarcity in a market that doesn’t make it.
The trial (试炼) as an institution. The sect’s answer to a surplus of failures is the standard xianxia solution: a limited allocation contested in a bounded arena. The novel lays out the design precisely:
- There will be one more chance — 再给一次机会 (another chance at a Foundation Establishment opportunity).
- The pills are few — 筑基丹不会太多.
- The mechanism is a trial in a designated trial-ground (在一处试炼之地内，争夺筑基丹), i.e. a battle royale over the allocation.
- But there is a prerequisite: 并不是所有失败者都具备试炼资格，需要在试炼前，完成一次宗门指定的任务 (“not every failure qualifies; each must first complete a task assigned by the sect“).
- And the assigned tasks are individually chosen — 每个人的任务不同 (each person’s task is different).
That last clause is the important one. Individual, unrefusable, and varied tasks are how the sect turns a competition into a screening mechanism — and how the novel supplies 白小纯 with his own task, which is the encounter around which the rest of the arc is built (see 养尸坊).
The failures’ coalition (联盟). The novel gives a good account of how the losers organize, and it is politically believable:
- They form alliances to improve survival odds (赵无常 comes to recruit 白小纯 for exactly this reason, and his reasoning is stated: 他这一方多一个人，总是好的).
- They form a common grievance bloc against the winners, venting against 林墓 (who plundered their earth-vein qi to ascend himself) and against 白小纯 (the relic-world butcher).
- They plan a two-stage strategy: combine to eliminate the outsiders first, then divide the pills internally (我们要联手灭了其他人，再内部分配筑基丹).
The pill’s real meaning in this world. Note that the whole trial is, per the novel’s own summary, an allocation of the right to be permanently second-class. The failures fight for pills so that they may be locked into the 护法 rank forever. Nobody in the room says this. It is the arc’s quietest piece of bleakness, and the novel trusts the reader to notice.
The 金丹果 comparison. For scale of stakes, the novel mentions the sect’s bounty for 白小纯’s head: 谁若能斩下白小纯的首级，将会被直接赐予至宝，立下大功，更是送一枚金丹果 — “whoever cuts off 白小纯’s head is directly granted a supreme treasure, credited with great merit, and given a Golden-Core Fruit.” 金丹果 is a fruit that increases the odds of forming a Golden Core — the next bottleneck after Foundation Establishment. So the sect head prices the protagonist’s life at one of the most valuable consumables in the world. 白小纯’s reaction, delivered while he is sitting in that very room undercover, is perfect: 金丹果？可以增加结丹几率之物，这血溪宗太狠了！！
Related terms: 护法与长老, 地脉筑基, 天骄名单, 卧底, 尸峰有赏
修行宝地 (XIŪXÍNG BǍODÌ) — Cultivation Treasure-Ground
Category: Cultivation mechanic / geography
修行宝地 — “cultivation treasure-ground” — is the term for a location whose environment itself accelerates a particular practice. In this arc it produces the single funniest and most elegant payoff of the hand’s revealed nature.
The general principle. A treasure-ground works by substituting a resource. The novel states the mechanism for 白小纯’s case plainly: practicing the Undying Vajra outside the sect drains 元力 (yuan-force) so severely that his body visibly withers (身体就肉眼可见的急速枯萎). Inside Blood Creek, the arithmetic changes:
随着修行，从下方的地面上，有阵阵血气升起，顺着他的身体钻入体内后，居然代替了元气，使得不死金刚卷，不但运转加快，消耗更是被血气代替。
“As he cultivated, waves of blood-qi rose from the ground below, entered his body through his feet, and took the place of yuan-force — so that the Undying Vajra Scroll not only circulated faster, but its consumption was replaced by blood-qi.”
Why this is possible for him and nobody else. Two conditions must hold:
- The ground must supply the substitute. It does — because the sect’s floor is the Blood Ancestor’s 不死皮, and blood-qi is what that corpse still produces (the finger-peaks have literal blood waterfalls, and the arm’s breaks spill converted river water).
- The cultivator’s art must accept that substitute. It does — because the giant practiced the same art. The blood-qi is not a generic resource; it is the correct fuel for this particular technique, which is why the substitution works at all.
So the treasure-ground is not a place that happens to be rich. It is a place matched to the practitioner — and the match is a consequence of the lineage relationship between the corpse and the protagonist. The novel is careful about this: elsewhere the same blood-qi would be poison or irrelevant.
The measured progress, which functions as a clock. 白小纯’s gains are quantified in the art’s own units, and the numbers are worth recording because they establish his rate:
| State | Body-strength |
|---|---|
| Baseline (post-Foundation Establishment) | ≈ 1 primeval giant elephant (一象之力) |
| After a few days on the back of the hand | 快要接近两尊远古巨象 — approaching two elephant-forces |
| Target for tier 1 | Ten elephant-forces → 蛮鬼身 (Savage-Ghost Body) |
His extrapolation is stated as a hypothesis he cannot yet test: 而且这还是在手背的地方，如果去了手指，想必速度会更快一些 (“and this is only the back of the hand; on the fingers it must be faster”). He then connects it to the blood waterfalls — 想着若自己能在那血瀑布下修行，一定速度暴增 (“if I could cultivate beneath that blood waterfall, the speed would surely explode”). So the novel establishes a spatial gradient of cultivation speed across the hand, giving future arcs a built-in escalation mechanism: higher on the hand, faster.
The prose about the corpse is the payoff. 白小纯’s meditation on why the giant died is one of the novel’s better philosophical asides:
不死长生功的确非凡，这巨人一定是没有修炼到巅峰，所以才会死亡，可就算是这样，他的肉身在不知过去多少年后，还都没有腐烂，更是衍变成为了一个宗派的山门。由此可见，不死长生功，的确非凡！
“The Undying-Longevity Art is truly extraordinary. This giant surely had not cultivated to the peak — that is why he died. Yet even so, his flesh and blood, after who knows how many years, have not rotted, and have even evolved into a sect’s mountain gate. From this one may see: the Undying-Longevity Art is truly extraordinary!”
This does double duty. It is a progress incentive (look what the art can do), and it is a warning the protagonist does not register (the giant died anyway). The reader should file the death away; the novel has planted the theme that the art’s promise is not the same as survival.
The secondary dividend: a place to practice in peace. 白小纯 notices that treasure-grounds solve his social problem too: 血溪宗弟子之间很少沟通，白小纯在这尸洞内两个多月，从来没一个人进来 (“Blood Creek disciples rarely talk to each other; 白小纯 spent over two months in the corpse cave and not one person ever came in“). In a sect where everyone is watching everyone, the ideal workshop is the one nobody wants to visit. The 养尸坊 — a rentable, private, blood-fed facility — is the perfect base for an alchemist, and the novel’s plot machinery is honest about that being a coincidence.
Related terms: 血祖巨手, 不死长生功, 不死金刚卷, 养尸坊, 卧底, 元力
养尸坊 (YǍNG SHĪ FĀNG) — The Corpse-Farming Workshop
Category: Institution / craft practice
养尸坊 — “corpse-farming workshop,” or corpse-raising yard — is a Blood Creek institution on 尸峰 (Corpse Peak), and it is the setting for the arc’s longest and most chaotic sequence. It deserves a full entry because the novel builds a complete zombie-craft economy here.
The physical plant. A tall circular building, black throughout, with black smoke rising ceaselessly and an evil aura bleeding into the sky (那黑烟内透出邪恶的气息，融入苍穹). Multiple entrances, and a stream of inner-sect disciples coming and going — 每个人都神色阴沉，面色苍白，似常年不见阳光 (“every one grim-faced and pale, as though they never saw sunlight”). Note that these disciples are volunteers: 与白小纯不一样，他们都是主动接的宗门任务，来此养尸的同时，也在修行与学习 (“unlike 白小纯 they took the task voluntarily, and cultivate and study while farming corpses here”).
The business model: private ownership of sect facilities. This is the arc’s most interesting institutional detail. The workshop 白小纯 works in is leased — bought for a term from the sect by 许小山, who complains about it at length:
你们知道这养尸坊，老子花了多大的代价，才从宗门买来的么！ / 这养尸坊，是老子的，老子全部家当都砸进去了，若是这几年收不回本钱，不够去买符箓的，我让你们好看！
“Do you know what a price I paid to buy this corpse-farming workshop from the sect! …This workshop is mine. I threw my entire fortune into it. If I can’t recoup the cost in a few years — if I can’t afford talismans — I’ll make you pay!”
So Blood Creek privatizes its own production facilities: a cultivator buys a workshop, rents it out to task-assigned disciples, and profits. 许小山’s stated motive for the whole venture is to fund his talisman purchases. And the peak’s great elder makes a personal visit to press him on the fee — 他包下这养尸坊一年的费用问题 — with the threat stated plainly: 就算你身后有老祖，我也定要拿你问责 (“even if you have an ancestor behind you, I will hold you to account”).
This is remarkably modern and it tells the reader a lot: Blood Creek is violent, but its internal economy is monetized and contractual, and even a great elder’s authority runs through ledgers.
The craft ladder. 许小山’s briefing gives the full zombie progression, and it is a mythological hierarchy worth memorizing:
| Tier (low→high) | Name | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| — | 凡品 (mortal grade) | Starting state |
| 1 | 白僵 (white zombie) | Grows white fur/hair — this is the state ‘s task requires |
| 2 | 黑僵 (black zombie) | |
| 3 | 飞尸 (flying corpse) | |
| 4 | 不化骨 (undecaying bone) | |
| 5 | 犼 (hǒu) | The apex beast-class |
The production method. 白小纯’s task briefing states it exactly, and note that the technique is a stimulus, not a construction:
- Work in a sealed chamber with nine oil lamps and a blood pool (a circular chamber with a blood-colored pool at the center, nine lamps burning dim light).
- Apply cultivation power to catalyze the blood pool (依靠修为，去催化血池) so the corpse absorbs it without being damaged — the timing call 个中分寸，你要把握好 (“you must judge the measure correctly”) is the whole skill.
- Baseline duration: 速度快的话，估计有个一年半载就可以结束 (“if you’re quick, a year or half a year”).
Accelerants. Two are named, and their pricing is the arc’s plot:
| Accelerant | Effect |
|---|---|
| 香药 (incense-drug) — a burnable pill of smoke, not a swallowed pill | Absorbed as smoke; speeds evolution |
| 九幽血丹 (Nine-Nether Blood Pill) — legendary | 只需一枚，就可让这尸体在十天内，直接进化成为堪比老祖的不化骨 — one pill takes a corpse to ancestor-comparable 不化骨 in ten days |
Why the accelerant route is credible for 白小纯 specifically. 许小山 points it out himself, and it is the setup for everything that follows: I recall you can brew pills? — 我想起来了，你似乎也会炼药是吧，可以试试. The novel also has 白小纯 notice an economic oddity that makes the route cheap: 白小纯发现这些药草的价格都偏低。似乎血溪宗也在鼓励弟子去炼药，可显然效果并不好 (“he found these herbs priced low — the sect evidently encourages disciples to brew pills, but with poor results”). The reason is given and is very much in character for the sect: 对于每天处于提防与争斗的血溪宗弟子而言，炼药耗费精力与时间，更耗费资源，有这个功夫，不如去抢 (“for disciples daily occupied with guarding and fighting, brewing consumes energy, time, and resources; with that effort, better to go rob someone“). So the pill market is artificially cheap because the labor market is violent. 白小纯’s competitive advantage in Blood Creek is, precisely, that he is not violent.
The naming-with-a-badge. The novel notes a detail about the corpses that is quietly important: the corpse in 白小纯’s pool has a plum-blossom brand (梅花印记) on its brow, marking it as killed personally by 血梅 (Blood Plum). 许小山 remarks on it: 此人死在血梅那娘们的手中，能被血梅亲手灭杀，想来生前修为不俗 (“this one died at the hands of that Blood Plum woman; to be killed by her own hand, he must have been no ordinary cultivator”). So a corpse’s provenance carries a rank signal too, and corpse-farming is partly a trade in the aftermath of the sect’s celebrity killings.
The relevant thematic joke. 白小纯’s own summary of his career, delivered with total sincerity: 老夫白小纯，一生曲折，灵溪宗里养过兽，血溪宗内炼过丹！ (“Old Bai Xiaochun, a life of twists and turns: raised beasts in the Spirit Creek Sect, brewed pills in the Blood Creek Sect!”). The line is a genuine resume of the novel’s first two volumes, and it only works because he keeps being useful in exactly the way his hosts find embarrassing.
Related terms: 尸峰, 香药, 炼尸阶与绿毛尸, 修行宝地, 血溪宗, 炼丹
香药 (XIĀNG YÀO) — Incense-Drug
Category: Alchemy category
香药 — “incense-drug,” a burnable medicinal compound — is a distinct alchemical product category, and the novel uses it to illustrate that alchemy is a format, not a substance.
What distinguishes it from a pill. A normal 丹药 is ingested; a 香药 is burned and inhaled as smoke (燃烧后散出的烟雾，融入尸体内，使之融合，加速进化 — “its smoke, released on burning, merges into the corpse, fusing with it, accelerating evolution”). Its target is not a body that can swallow — it is a corpse in a pool, or, in the novel’s broader idiom, an environment or a non-responsive subject.
Why the format matters for the plot. Because its delivery is smoke, a 香药 can be applied to things that cannot take pills, and because its delivery is smoke, the operator must not inhale it. 白小纯’s handling is carefully staged for comedy and for the plot:
- He burns the compound and throws it onto the corpse by main force (体内灵力直接散出，融入香块内，化作无形之火).
- Then he flees the chamber immediately: 他可不敢留在这里，万一不小心吸了一口香药，白小纯担心会出大事 (“he did not dare stay; if he accidentally inhaled a mouthful he feared disaster”) — and spends a full day outside before daring to return.
- On the second application he stays and watches from a distance, and the resulting roars are described as not human — 更像是某种厉鬼凶煞，声音竟可以穿透心神，直落灵魂 (“more like some fierce ghost or baleful spirit; the sound pierced the mind and fell straight to the soul”).
The material culture. The novel supplies the ingredients side: 伴尸花 (“corpse-companion flower”) and 腐根草 (“rot-root grass”) are named as 促进尸体晋升的药草 (“herbs that promote a corpse’s ascension”). The reader gets a small but consistent necromantic pharmacopoeia — plants that grow on the dead and that accelerate the dead.
The result, which is the arc’s running gag. 白小纯’s incense-drug does not work as specified, but it works spectacularly, and the escalation is worth tabulating both for the humor and for the eventual plot point:
| Iteration | Fur color | Attainment-markers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Red (红毛) | Three-inch fur; long claws; the corpse’s eyes open on its own and it half-rises |
| 2 | Purple (紫毛) | Denser aura; the blood pool drops by more than half |
| 3 | Pink → Orange → Blue | Blue fur a full chi long; sharper claws; two protruding fangs; skin color shifts with the fur |
| 4 (final) | Green (绿毛) | Catastrophic — see 炼尸阶与绿毛尸 |
The comedic engine is a specification mismatch. 白小纯’s fixation is on the color — the task says white, so he iterates on fur color and never questions anything else — while the corpse is incrementally becoming something far more dangerous than a white zombie. The novel’s summary of his state of mind is precise: 不管这尸体强弱，反正任务的要求，就是长出白毛 (“never mind whether the corpse is strong or weak; the task’s requirement is to grow white fur“). And when it goes wrong: 我就不信了！ (“I refuse to believe it!”) — followed by him emptying most of his storage pouch into the cauldron out of sheer stubbornness. This is losing an argument with a zombie, as a comic set-piece.
The professional context the novel keeps insisting on. Note that this whole disaster is the work of a third-tier pharmacist performing at capacity: 白小纯如今的药道造诣，在炼制三阶灵药时，已做到了游刃有余 (“his attainment in the Dao of medicine was now more than equal to third-tier herbs”). The novel is consistent about the tier system: mastery of a tier means you can do it reliably — and reliability, in 白小纯’s case, means the effects are now the problem instead of the failures. His disasters scale with his skill. The acid rain happened at third tier; the green fur happens at third tier too; fourth tier remains out of reach for want of bridging knowledge.
Related terms: 养尸坊, 炼尸阶与绿毛尸, 天雷洗药大法, 寒门药卷, 尸峰
炼尸阶与绿毛尸 (LIÀN SHĪ JIĒ YǓ Lǜ MÁO SHĪ) — The Corpse Ladder and the Green-Furred Corpse
Category: Craft mechanic / incident
炼尸阶 — the corpse-refinement ladder — is the ordered progression from 凡品 to 犼. 绿毛尸 — the green-furred corpse — is the error state that 白小纯’s incense-drug produces, and the arc’s most vivid set-piece.
The four-color failure, extended. His fur-color iterations (red → purple → pink → orange → blue) all remain within the realm of “a furred corpse that is stronger than it should be.” The final application produces something categorically different. The sequence:
- He burns his last, most concentrated incense — a nail-sized white block that he brewed with his own blood as an additive (为了炼这一炉香药，他都不惜给自己放血了，期待自己的血引动这灵溪宗的大手的血气 — “he even drew his own blood, hoping it would stir the blood-qi of the great hand“), aiming to exploit the corpse-hand’s lineage resonance.
- Dense white mist erupts; the corpse’s roar carries a note of ecstasy (透出一股狂喜).
- The mist thins — and 白小纯 sees green threads (一道道绿色的细丝) wriggling outward, in enormous number. Some merely touch a wall and bore straight into it.
- His third eye opens on instinct, and what he sees is not a corpse and a pool but a vast, indescribable tangle of green hair — 一团庞大的，难以形容的……绿色毛发组成的丝团. The pool is gone. The corpse is gone.
- The threads are boring radially outward in every direction, 不知蔓延到了什么地方 (“to wherever, no one knows”).
The catastrophe, itemized. The novel then documents the workshop-wide runaway in full, and it is the arc’s best sequence of escalating consequences:
| Victim | Effect |
|---|---|
| The corpse pools | 上千尸洞 — a thousand corpse chambers flood with green threads |
| Other disciples’ corpses | 几乎全部都被绿丝钻入体内 — nearly all are invaded; even those already furred turn green |
| The workshop structure | Massive collapse of chamber walls (大量的尸洞坍塌); an 惊天动地的轰鸣巨响 |
| The earth and grounds | Threads that go into the ground cannot go deep, return to the surface and erupt outward |
| All vegetation | 树木上，居然也都长出了绿毛 — trees grow green fur |
| Inanimate objects | 还有石头，阁楼，花草 — stones, pavilions, flowers are furred |
The novel’s summary image: 这四周的一切，此刻彻底的变成了绿毛的天地 (“the entire surroundings had become a world of green fur”), and the escaping disciples’ summary is 触目惊心 (“shocking to the eye”).
The creature that results is a new thing, not a rung on the ladder. The ladder above 凡品 is 白僵 → 黑僵 → 飞尸 → 不化骨 → 犼. Green is not on it, and nobody in the sect has seen it — 假夜葬也说不出所以然，从未见过这样的僵尸. The novel never assigns it a tier, which is deliberate: 白小纯 has accidentally bred a specimen of a class the taxonomy does not contain. The evidence for its nature accumulates in later chapters: it controls other corpses (各尸洞内那些弟子的炼尸…竟从它们的身上，也有绿毛出现), it protects 白小纯 of its own initiative, and its threads function as an extended nervous system — the hair is the creature, spread across the workshop’s entire footprint.
The system-wide truth the incident exposes. Three properties are established and they matter beyond this arc:
- The green fur is communicable. Threads transfer from corpse to corpse, and a transfer overrides an existing tier’s color (即便是那些本身已长出白毛的炼尸，也都通体一震，毛发瞬间被改变，成为了绿色).
- It works on non-corpses. Trees, stone, pavilions — the threads invade whatever is at hand. So the creature is not a corpse-reviver; it is an infiltrating medium that uses corpses as its most compatible host.
- Its economics are visible in the ledger. The novel shows the disaster from 许小山’s balance sheet before showing it on the ground: 炼尸秘血的消耗…一下子少了总量的三成 (“the consumption of corpse-refining secret blood… dropped by thirty percent of the total at once”), and by the time 许小山 reaches the blood reservoir, it is 彻底空了 (“completely empty“) — 所有的秘血，都顺着一个通道涌去…该死的，是夜葬！ So the creature’s appetite drains the workshop’s shared resource pool entirely, and the blame trail is a single pipe leading to 白小纯’s chamber.
Why “his own blood” is the likely mechanism. The novel plants the causal hint and never spells it out: 他甚至不惜给自己放血了，配合血溪宗的药草 (“he even drew his own blood, mixing it with Blood Creek’s herbs”). Given that the corpse-hand responds to 白小纯 as kin (see 血祖巨手), and that he is the only person whose body both senses and feeds the hand’s blood-qi, the most natural reading is that the incense was aimed at a corpse whose lineage matched his own, and it worked far too well. His blood plus the hand’s blood-qi plus a corpse already bearing a Blood Plum’s mark is a combination the sect has never tested, because only one person in the sect is a tissue-match for the floor.
The naming joke to keep. 许小山’s reaction, and everyone else’s, is to demand who did this. 白小纯’s response is to invent a culprit and indict himself as a victim:
这是什么东西，该死的，是谁，是谁弄的，我的炼尸啊，我辛苦了半年的炼尸啊。
“What is this thing? Damn it, who — who did this? My corpse! My corpse that I worked half a year on!” Delivered 悲愤欲绝 (“with grief and indignation beyond endurance”) — and it works, because 白小纯 has spent six months in that chamber without a single visitor, and can therefore claim to be the only victim with no alibi but his own story. His disguise is maintained by the fact that nobody can imagine a person being this unlucky on purpose.
Related terms: 养尸坊, 香药, 血祖巨手, 尸峰, 卧底, 许小山
假丹 (JIǍ DĀN) — Pseudo-Core
Category: Cultivation realm / quantified bottleneck
假丹 — “pseudo-core,” also 假丹境 — is the sub-realm immediately below 金丹 (Golden Core), and this arc gives it two useful pieces of texture.
Position on the ladder. Pseudo-core is the state a Foundation Establishment cultivator enters when they have completed the highest Foundation Establishment layer and are one step short of forming a core: 虽不是金丹，可却是筑基巅峰，已然进入到了假丹境界，距离结丹，只差一丝 (“not yet Golden Core, but the peak of Foundation Establishment, having entered the pseudo-core realm — a hair short of core formation”). Note the composition of the phrase: 假 (false) + 丹 (core) — the core exists but is not real yet.
Why pseudo-core matters mechanically. It appears in two different systems in this arc, which is worth noting because it shows the author is using one concept consistently:
- As a cultivation stage — the description above, used for senior elders: the 尸峰 great elder’s rank is 筑基巅峰/假丹.
- As the fourth layer of 紫气通天诀 — the art’s layer structure maps to 筑基初中后 plus 假丹境, so the technique’s own progression assumes the practitioner will reach pseudo-core. Hence its final layer’s demand: one cauldron (一鼎) of Heaven-Piercing River water — the largest unit in the escalating ladder (一滴 → 一盅 → 一石 → 一鼎).
So pseudo-core is the target state of the art 白小纯 has just acquired, and the point at which its resource hunger peaks.
The hard probabilistic wall above it. The novel is explicit that 金丹 is not a guaranteed next step, and this is why the insight-realm decision matters: 至于金丹……没有人敢说自己一定可以金丹成功，即便是白小纯天道筑基，也只是几率极大而已。所以等金丹后再去秘境……不现实 (“as for Golden Core — nobody dares claim they are certain to succeed; even for 白小纯 with his Heavenly-Dao Foundation, it is only a very high probability. So to wait until Golden Core before entering the secret realm… is unrealistic.”)
The takeaway for readers tracking power: the ladder in this world has a probabilistic gate, not a merit gate, between Foundation Establishment and Golden Core. Wealthy, talented, well-connected cultivators still fail. This is why:
- 金丹果 (Golden-Core Fruit) — a fruit that raises the odds of core formation — is such an enormous prize, and why the sect prices 白小纯’s head at one.
- Pseudo-core elders are respected but pitiable, having arrived one hair short and stuck there; the 尸峰 great elder is introduced as exactly this, a man whose 真正年纪 does not match his appearance (his vitality belies his age) and who is nearly there forever.
- The distribution of power is stable. Because the top gate is probabilistic, a sect cannot produce core-formers on demand, so the same generation of pseudo-core elders persists as the ceiling for a very long time. Institutional power ossifies around whoever got lucky.
Related terms: 紫气通天诀, 秘境感悟, 护法与长老, 血溪宗, 传承序列
太上长老 (TÀISHÀNG ZHǍNG LǍO) — Supreme Elder
Category: Title / institutional rank
太上长老 — “Supreme Elder,” rendered variously as Grand Elder or Supreme Patriarch — is the highest non-ancestral office in 灵溪宗, and this arc crystallizes what it means through three separate scenes.
The definition, by contrast. 郑远东’s own account of his future is the sharpest statement of what the office is:
他自己是没有可能成为传承序列的了，太上长老，是他的未来所在。
“There was no possibility of his becoming succession-line himself; Supreme Elder was where his future lay.”
So: succession line = the future leadership; supreme elder = the ceiling for those who are powerful and useful but will never be the heir. The office is a terminal rank, not a step. That single sentence repositions every supreme elder in the novel as a person who, at some point, was passed over — or who chose institutional permanence over dynastic ambition.
Their power as experienced by the protagonist.
| Scene | Demonstration |
|---|---|
| Monitoring the legacy selection | The five 灵溪宗 ancestors watch 白小纯’s selection and would have intervened with thought-transmissions had the hidden legacy not appeared first (必要的时候，他们会降下神念，指点白小纯对于功法的选择) |
| Guarding the insight realm | A single glance from the guardian supreme elder puts pressure on 白小纯 like facing a Foundation Establishment expert as a Qi Condensation novice (如同当年凝气时看到筑基强者一样) |
| Recruiting juniors | A supreme elder personally takes 侯云飞 as a disciple (被一位太上长老，亲自收为弟子) |
| Subduing 白小纯 | Several arrive, bind him with a purple rope out of the void, seize the bead, and kick him — repeatedly and with evident enjoyment |
Their place in the cosmology. Supreme elders, along with ancestors, are the people who know: they monitor the secret sites, they possess technique knowledge the sect withholds, and they are the ones who act on the sect’s behalf personally where a sect’s formal resources cannot go (drawing Heaven-Piercing River water as a prize, for instance — 宗门内几个老祖，每隔一段时间出手摄取而来). They are less a rank than a standing cabinet of reliable adults.
The collision with 白小纯 and why it is funny rather than fatal. The clothing catastrophe strips supreme elders, and the novel’s comedy depends on the fact that this is a status violation with no proportionate remedy. The supreme elders cannot simply execute the boy: he is a Heavenly-Dao Foundation cultivator and a quasi-succession candidate, and — worse — the cause was a piece of accidental research equipment rather than intent. So the punishment is calibrated to humiliation: a razor-thin purple rope binding, a confiscation, a kick to the backside (向着白小纯的屁股，踢了一脚), and three months of sweeping. Their own commentary is 小兔崽子，你要造反啊！ (“You little brat — are you trying to rebel?”) — delivered by men who are, visibly, more amused than enraged.
Note the rank below them: 血擘. In Blood Creek’s system, the corresponding “kept” rank is different: supreme elders there are superseded by 血擘 (Blood-Thumbs) — former Blood-Princes who attained Golden Core — who rank above supreme elders and below ancestors (成为在地位上，凌驾于太上长老之上，老祖之下的惊人之辈). So 灵溪宗 keeps its elite above the succession battle in a static cabinet; 血溪宗 lets its risen stars outrank the cabinet. That contrast is one of the novel’s clearest signals that the two sects have genuinely different political genetics.
Related terms: 血擘与血魔, 传承序列, 准传承序列, 血溪宗, 元磁珠容器, 秘境感悟
许小山 (XǓ XIǍOSHĀN) — Xu Xiaoshan
Category: Character / recurring antagonist-foil
许小山 is a Blood Creek disciple, a survivor of the relic world, and the sole proprietor of the corpse-farming workshop in which the arc’s central disaster occurs. He is worth an entry because he embodies the sect’s entry-level predatory economics, and because the novel uses him as a measuring stick for how much 白小纯 has changed.
The professional profile. He is a 地脉筑基 (earth-vein) cultivator — hence a legitimate 长老, and hence entitled to command protectors. He owns a workshop, he has three cold-faced retainers (身后跟着三个冷酷的随从), and he has bought an income stream with his entire capital:
这养尸坊，是老子的，老子全部家当都砸进去了，若是这几年收不回本钱，不够去买符箓的，我让你们好看！
“This workshop is mine. I threw my whole fortune in. If I can’t recoup it in a few years — can’t afford talismans — I’ll make you pay!”
The mention that his motive is to buy talismans places him precisely: he is not a cultivator of great personal power, he is a small businessman whose fixed costs are combat consumables. He needs cash flow to buy survival.
His behavior as a merchant of corpses. His introduction is a scolding — disciples have ruined one of his corpses (你们居然毁了我的一具炼尸), and his threat is characteristically literal: 若修补不好，老子把你们当成尸体炼了 (“if you can’t fix it, I’ll refine you as corpses“). He is also under pressure from above: the 尸峰 great elder visits his quarters in person to press him on the annual fee he owes (包下这养尸坊一年的费用问题), with the explicit warning 就算你身后有老祖，我也定要拿你问责.
So 许小山’s whole existence in this arc is a small man squeezed between a mortgage and a creditor, which is a surprisingly realistic portrait inside a sect of blood cultivators — and it is the novel’s model of the sect: savagery at the bottom, bookkeeping all the way up.
The relic-world history that makes him interesting. He recognizes 白小纯 (as 夜葬) from the relic world, and mentions having fought alongside him there. His attitude toward 白小纯 — the real 白小纯, in 灵溪宗 — is one of the arc’s best small notes:
想到陨剑深渊的一幕幕，他如今还是复杂，对于灵溪宗的白小纯，他心中也有佩服，尤其是想到自己与白小纯相互坑杀的一幕，更是感慨。 / 那个家伙，如今在灵溪宗内，一定是被当成了宝贝。
“Thinking of scene after scene in the Fallen-Sword Abyss, he still felt torn. For Spirit Creek’s 白小纯 he felt a certain admiration — remembering how the two of them had tried to kill each other and how 白小纯 had outmaneuvered him, he was quite wistful. …That fellow is surely being treasured like a jewel back in Spirit Creek Sect.”
This is a genuine fraternal rivalry, delivered to the man’s face without either party recognizing the irony. The novel’s use of it is sharp: 许小山, being magnanimous to a disguised enemy about a man he admires, is at his most sympathetic — while simultaneously deploying his authority over that same man. And note the invitation: 看在陨剑深渊内你和我一起战过的份上，我来指点你养尸 (“for the sake of having fought alongside you in the Fallen-Sword Abyss, I’ll teach you corpse-farming”). The professional courtesy is real.
His function as a foil. 许小山 was, in the relic world, the disciple who controlled corpses — the signature 尸峰 skill. He is now, in the sect, the man who rents the means of doing so. The novel declines to comment, but the pairing is there: the esoteric art has become a franchise, and its most visible practitioner is the franchisee.
The arc’s ending for him. He is the one who investigates the blood-reservoir drain (he notices 比以往要大了一些), the one who follows the blame trail down a single pipe (该死的，是夜葬！), and the one who nearly kills 白小纯 — an unarmed mortal-path protector versus an earth-vein elder, a death sentence the novel makes explicit (凭着夜葬显露出的实力，在这一击下，必死无疑). He is saved only by the green-furred creature’s intervention (绿毛护主). So the arc’s antagonist for its first half becomes, structurally, the person whose investigation forces the creature to reveal itself.
Related terms: 养尸坊, 炼尸阶与绿毛尸, 修行宝地, 血溪宗, 卧底, 尸峰
赵无常与魂血为奴 (ZHÀO WÚCHÁNG YǓ HÚN XUÈ WÉI NÚ) — Zhao Wuchang and the Soul-Blood Bond
Category: Character / institution of indenture
赵无常 is one of the relic world’s surviving “failures,” and his entry into the plot is entirely transactional: he comes to recruit 白小纯 for a coalition of losers. His own situation becomes the vehicle by which the novel introduces the 血溪宗’s system of soul-binding indenture.
The recruiter. His pitch is rendered with the novel’s usual clarity about motive:
也没什么特别重要的事情，不过是我们这些陨剑世界内的失败者，彼此的一个聚会，交换一些信息，商讨如何凡道筑基，夜师弟既也归来，赵某琢磨着，要招呼你一声。
“Nothing very important — just a gathering of us failures from the Fallen-Sword world, to exchange information and discuss how to reach mortal-path Foundation Establishment. Since you’re back too, junior brother Ye, I thought I’d call on you.”
And his internal reasoning is given plainly, which is the charming part: 他这一方多一个人，总是好的 (“one more person on his side is always better”). He is a faction-builder with no ideology whatsoever, and after getting 白小纯’s assent he keeps a polite distance the whole walk over — 二人都保持一定的距离，不痛不痒的交谈 (“both kept a certain distance, conversing inconsequentially”). The novel’s portrait of a weak cultivator’s cautious sociability is precise and funny.
His appearance, as a piece of characterization. 白小纯’s read of him: 面色苍白，可目内却藏着狠辣，站在那里时，整个人如同一条随时可以噬人的凶狼 (“pale-faced, but with viciousness hidden in his eyes; standing there he was like a savage wolf ready to bite at any moment”). And his declaration at the meeting — 白小纯，我赵无常与他势不两立！ with clenched fists and bulging veins — is a wolf’s performance for an audience.
The pivotal detail: a soul-blood indenture. The novel mentions, in passing, the price he pays for power in a way that reveals an entire institution. 赵无常’s arrangement is described as a 为奴一甲子 — “servitude for one sixty-year cycle (甲子)” — made binding by 魂血 (soul-blood). This is the Blood Creek version of a contract, and it has three features worth isolating:
- It is enforceable at the level of the soul. 魂血 is not a signature; it is a substance taken from the soul, which means the bond cannot be escaped by fleeing, hiding, or changing one’s appearance. This is precisely the same technology the mysterious sect used on 夜葬 (魂禁, a soul-seal), so the reader should note that soul-level oaths are a standard instrument in this world, not a rare exotic.
- It is denominated in decades. 一甲子 = sixty years, the traditional Chinese sexagenary cycle. Cultivation futures are long, so servitude is sold in generational blocks.
- It buys power. The novel’s framing places it among the ways a weak cultivator raises his ceiling — the same logic as 夜葬 trading companionship for pills, and the same logic as the failures fighting for foundation pills they know will cap them.
The theme the pair of characters forms. 赵无常 and 夜葬 are two portraits of the same problem, drawn with different strokes:
| 夜葬 | 赵无常 | |
|---|---|---|
| Asset sought | A place in a holy land, by any humiliation | Power, through soul-blood servitude |
| Binding instrument | 魂禁 (soul-seal) imposed by a patron | 魂血 (soul-blood) given for a term |
| Time scale | An indefinite assignment | 一甲子, sixty years |
| Result | Caught, boxed, and impersonated by the protagonist | A faction leader with no independent standing |
| Narrator’s stance | Pity, laced with contempt | Pity, laced with wariness |
白小纯’s position, for contrast. He is the third case: someone who also accepts a long, humiliating, dangerous undertaking — a year indoors farming corpses, months of servile disguise, deliberate displays of lower rank — but who pays in time and dignity only, without ever surrendering his soul. The novel is quietly making a moral distinction here, and it is the same distinction it has been making since the relic world: the protagonist’s advantage is that he is never for sale. He may be a liar, a coward, and a thief; he is never a servant.
Related terms: 夜葬, 卧底, 血溪宗, 筑基丹与凡道筑基, 养鱼, 尸峰有赏