Path of the Sect Leader-Chapter 16: The Ruined Temple’s Hidden Spirit Array

Qi Xiu first circulated a full heavenly cycle, bringing body and mind to perfect stillness. Only then did he raise the jade slip to his brow and sink his divine sense inside.
One-time-use slips like this carried either priceless inheritances or deadly secrets. With his meager cultivation, a single careless surge could fry his sea of consciousness. He proceeded with the caution of a man defusing a thunder talisman.
Information flooded in, vast, dense, impossible to skim. An hour and a half later his spiritual threads snapped loose from exhaustion. The slip crumbled into motes of light and vanished.
Joy and dread warred in his chest.
Joy: this forsaken rock did possess a spirit vein after all. Chuqin Sect would not suffocate.
Dread: Black River sat at the crossroads of too many knives.
The slip laid everything bare.
Black River was indeed Southern Chu Gate’s eastern gate, but not in the way Qi Xiu had dreamed. Southern Chu did not want a loyal watchdog; they wanted a disposable buffer.
Two thorns had been stabbing the sect for decades.
First thorn: geography.
Black River formed a long, thin scar running north-south, a crooked number “1”. Southern Chu Gate lay to its west, Beast Taming Sect’s southern enclave to its east. The border was laughably small, yet etiquette became a nightmare.
Beast Taming Sect, a superpower that could trade blows with Qi Yun, ruled through contracted spirit beasts. Their enclaves were guarded by a single late Golden Core elder paired with a spirit beast equivalent to an early Nascent Soul human. Arrogance came baked into their bones.
Whenever Southern Chu sent a Foundation Establishment envoy, Beast Taming greeted them with a Qi Refinement disciple, as if to say: “Your master is only worth our servant.”
When Beast Taming sent their own Foundation cultivator riding a Golden Core beast, Southern Chu agonized: send their own Golden Core and look like they were bowing; send a Foundation and risk offense. Every exchange was humiliation.
Solution? Shove a powerless sect into the gap so the two giants no longer shared a border. Out of sight, out of mind.
Second thorn: air traffic.
North of Black River lay Qi Yun territory. South lay the Death Swamp and, beyond it, the tantric sects of White Mountain. To avoid Beast Taming’s territorial murder-birds, travelers from both directions cut across Southern Chu airspace. Orthodox Qi Yun disciples were polite enough, but White Mountain sent every stripe of rogue, bandit, and smiling killer. Robberies, duels, corpses raining on rice fields, Southern Chu spent half its time cleaning up other people’s blood.
Once Black River Peak officially belonged to Chuqin Sect, Southern Chu could simply ban overflight and funnel every passer-by down the single remaining corridor, past ten Qi Refinement ants who had zero backing to complain.
We are meat shields wearing sect robes, Qi Xiu thought, laughing without humor.
He stepped out of the side chamber.
Disciples worked in quiet harmony: Zhang Shishi flicking cleansing talismans like autumn leaves, Gu Ji and Qin Weiyu on hands and knees scrubbing the floor until their robes were grey, Zhan Yuan directing He Yu and the others in the future store-room. No one slacked. No one grumbled. Servants had done this work on old Mount Chuqin; now the sect’s last sons did it themselves.
The sight stabbed Qi Xiu deeper than any insult.
Zhang Shishi approached. “Food and water are almost gone. Bedding too. We’ll be sleeping on stone tonight.”
Qi Xiu waved the worry away and strode to the hall’s exact center.
There, beneath centuries of dust, lay a circular mandala of colored stones, tantric wheel pattern, beautiful and useless-looking. In truth it was the eye of a hidden spirit-gathering array.
He knelt, fingers searching. At the very center: a thumb-sized hole, sealed with petrified mud.
According to the slip, that hole once plunged straight through the mountain to a hidden underground pool at the peak’s roots. Clear the blockage and the array would awaken, drawing the pool’s faint spirit vein upward to flood the temple floor with usable qi. Why or how the long-dead tantric monk had achieved this, the Chu Clan did not know; only that it worked.
The pool itself lay deep in the black miasma; no one could linger long enough to exploit it directly. But the temple array? That they could use.
“Palm Leader! Look what I found!” Gu Ji bounded over, proudly holding up a scrap of pink silk, clearly feminine undergarments, complete with suspicious stains.
Qi Xiu choked, snatched it, and ordered the boy to burn it without explanation.
When everyone gathered, he revealed the array’s secret, but only that an array existed, not where the qi would come from.
“As soon as the channel is opened, spirit qi will leak,” he warned. “Until we can contain it, not a word to outsiders. Understand?”
Nods all around, eyes shining with sudden hope.
Zhang Shishi: “Then let’s buy a proper mountain-protecting formation right now. The sooner the peak is sealed, the sooner we can breathe.”
Qi Xiu’s purse wept in advance. A small array they could afford. A large one that swallowed the entire mountain and the hidden pool below? That would empty their coffers twice over.
Unless he cashed in the red array disk Qin Siyan had shoved into his hands, traded with the newly formed Flowing Blossom Sect that had devoured their old enemies, then maybe…
He shook his head. “Not yet. First I visit the local Chu overseer.”
The jade slip’s map showed the nearest market town and the Foundation Establishment cultivator stationed there: Chu Youmin. The slip never stated it outright, but every line implied Chuqin Sect would answer to this man from now on.
First courtesy call, first leash.
Qi Xiu handed Zhan Yuan three Spirit Bamboo Paper Kites and a pouch of mortal gold and silver. “Take two others. Find the nearest mortal village. Buy rice, water, bedding, pots, whatever we need to survive the week.”
To Zhang Shishi: “Guard the peak. No one touches that hole until I return.”
Then he stepped into the sleek lines of the Wind Array Spirit Boat, fed it a low-grade spirit stone, and shot northeast toward whatever future waited.
Behind him, nine silhouettes stood on the barren summit and watched their sect leader vanish into the poison sky.