Path of the Sect Leader-Chapter 23: The Spirit-Gathering Array Awakens

“Fantastic!”
Joy cracked across Qi Xiu’s face like sunrise over still water. In their current straits, this news was worth a hundred spirit pills. He Yu kept delivering miracles.
His gaze settled on the tall youth currently ducking his head while the others slapped his back and crowed congratulations. Something warm and fierce swelled in Qi Xiu’s chest.
“Good lad,” he murmured, striding over. He clapped both hands on He Yu’s shoulders—broad, still carrying a trace of boyish awkwardness—and nodded until words failed him. All the grand speeches he’d prepared tangled behind his teeth. In the end only a thick, trembling “Good… good…” escaped.
“Sect Leader…” He Yu’s own eyes reddened. When he’d first chosen to follow this seemingly ordinary senior brother into the southern wastes, reluctance had gnawed at him every night. Now, seeing genuine happiness shining from the man’s face—pure, unforced, for him—he felt something inside quietly shift.
Qi Xiu really does want the best for us.
Zhang Shishi’s laugh broke the moment. “Look at you two! Come on—while the iron’s hot, let’s hold a proper Dao lecture. Celebrate in style!”
“Perfect.” Qi Xiu wiped his eyes, suddenly decisive. “Exchanging insights is what we cultivators do. We’ve been so busy surviving we forgot the heart of it. Let this be Chu Qin Sect’s very first Dao symposium. He Yu takes the seat of honor. Topic: everything he felt breaking through.”
Knowledge in the cultivation world was too vast for any one person to stumble across alone. Symposiums were sacred—someone offered their specialty as kindling, the rest argued, refined, and carried the flame higher.
He Yu’s leap from the third layer to the fourth had leaned on a hair’s-breadth opportunity, yes, but the water-dominant cavern and his natal Stone-Water constitution had clearly lit the match.
Qi Xiu himself took a lower seat. Every disciple followed suit. Silence fell as He Yu climbed the dais, cheeks still flushed.
“When I stepped into the cave…” he began, voice unsteady at first, “the pool was black ice and starlight. Above it, the thinnest veil of spirit qi refused to scatter. A single stone platform jutted from the water—just wide enough for one man. Directly overhead, the tiny bore of the future array. Something tugged at me. My natal constitution—Water Within Stone—whispered that this place was carved for me.”
He found his rhythm. Hesitation melted away. He spoke of sinking into meditation, of water and stone breathing together, of the exact moment the barrier cracked and qi flooded his meridians like spring melt.
“Chapter twelve of the Mountain-Water Profound Scripture says the Grand Dao is born between peak and pool,” he continued, voice growing surer. “I borrowed that truth. Not everyone here walks water or earth, but the feeling—the sense of heaven and earth turning together like millstones—that belongs to all of us.”
Even Zhang Shishi, highest in cultivation, listened with narrowed, approving eyes.
They talked until the sun bled across the horizon. Questions, counter-questions, laughter, sudden silences when insight struck. When Qi Xiu finally declared the symposium closed, every face glowed.
Three days later, the mountain rewarded them.
Gu Ji was sweeping the main hall when a ribbon of qi—no thicker than incense smoke—curled from the tiny bore in the floor and kissed the ceiling.
He dropped the broom and sprinted.
“Sect Leader! It’s open! The array—it’s alive!”
Doors slammed. Feet thundered. In moments every disciple ringed the bore, legs crossed, palms on knees, breathing in the newborn spirit qi.
It rose straight and proud, then met an invisible lid—the bounds of the formation etched into the stone—and pooled, thickening, until a faint haze shimmered around them like heat over summer fields.
Shen Chang finished one full circulation first. His brows knotted.
“…Something’s off.”
“Off?” someone echoed.
“It’s almost entirely earth-aspected!”
“I don’t have earth roots—this is useless to me!”
Panic rippled outward.
“Quiet!” Qi Xiu barked. His own Long Spring Art crawled through the meridians; one full cycle took ages. When he finally opened his eyes, his face was grim.
Of every ten strands of qi the array now birthed, five were thick, heavy earth. Three carried water’s cool murmur. The remaining two were a useless mishmash.
His beast root drank perhaps one tenth of what spilled forth.
The feeling was exactly like clawing to a summit only to have the ground crumble beneath him.
Zhang Shishi and the others returned at a dead run, black mist still clinging to their robes.
Explanations collided.
The truth arrived swift and merciless.
The long-dead esoteric Buddhist who’d first tampered with Black River Peak had twisted the vein in two directions:
The hall above—earth-dominant, water-secondary. Roughly equivalent to a high-grade first-tier spirit ground.
The lone stone platform in the underwater cavern—water-dominant, earth-secondary. Low-grade second-tier, but only one person could sit there at a time.
Joy and despair split the sect down the middle.
He Yu stood silent, but the naked delight in his eyes betrayed him. That cavern seat had been forged for him and him alone.
Zhang Shishi could use either, though neither was perfect.
Gu Ji, Huang He, Yu Jing—mixed roots with water or earth—would manage.
Shen Chang, Pan Rong, and Qi Xiu himself? Faces pale, hope guttering.
And Zhan Yuan…
Qi Xiu’s heart sank like a stone in deep water.
Zhan Yuan—best logistics talent they’d ever had—was hundreds of li north right now, wearing out his shoes in Soldier’s Rest Market for the sect’s future.
When he learned the mountain that was supposed to be their home offered him nothing but dust…
Qi Xiu closed his eyes and tasted bitterness sharp as iron.
Some bonds, it seemed, were never meant to withstand the turning of heaven’s wheel.