I Take Life Seriously 97. The Mysterious Gates and Hidden Armor, Part 1

Zhang Yidao kept chanting: “The seven northern stars govern the heavens with divine force. The mighty celestial general blazes with a thousandfold radiance. Above the heavens and below the earth, he severs every evil source. Riding the clouds, he rises and descends before the altar. The true breath descends, passing through water and entering mist. Transmitted through the three realms, ten thousand demons raise their fists. He slays monsters, erases all traces, and turns death back toward immortality...”

At last, this sincere and righteous recitation not only multiplied the power of his spell several times over, but, amplified and carried by the Eight Trigrams formation, it instantly triggered the information of the fifth dimension. His incantation suddenly gained the blessing of fifth-dimensional data, and in an instant it leveled up. At once, he felt as though he could pound all fourteen wood cultivators flat.

Sure enough, the wood cultivators’ spell field was retreating rapidly, as though Zhang Yidao’s incantation had encircled theirs.

The wood cultivators began to panic, even muttering in complaint, “Who would have thought Earth had someone who could work spells this damn well?”

It was obvious that the wood cultivator was no longer holding on. His fourteen avatars were each reverting to quantum state, then merging again.

“At this rate, he’s trying to run!” said the fifth-dimensional cognitive model.

“He won’t get away!” Zhang Mingjing said, and immediately began firing continuous Soul-Sucking Fist strikes at him.

By then, the wood cultivator had already recalled his fourteen avatars into one body, but not only had he failed to evade Zhang Mingjing’s Soul-Sucking Fist, he was instantly caught in the Qian trigram of Zhang Yidao’s Eight Trigrams formation, and his energy was draining away at high speed.

Trapped within the Qian trigram, the wood cultivator was being stripped of energy at a furious rate, and he could no longer split himself apart, because Zhang Yidao’s spell was suppressing him.

The wood cultivator struggled desperately, and the strange temporal code inside him was doing everything it could to divert the attacks, but after fifteen minutes he still lost half his energy.

At that point, although Zhang Mingjing did not have complete confidence, he could still find a chance to deliver a fatal blow.

But no one expected that just as Zhang Mingjing was preparing to do so, the monster with three heads like an elephant-dragon, which had already been beaten to the brink of death by our Daoist team, suddenly gathered its last breath, sprang up from the ground, and struck at the wood cultivator first.

Its three heads bit down on the wood cultivator’s head, belly, and legs, then tore him apart with all its strength. A thunderous explosion followed, and at the same time the monster itself went down as well. It was truly mutual destruction.

Zhang Mingjing and the others, including the fifth-dimensional cognitive model, were stunned by this sudden turn of events. They could hardly believe that a monster on its last breath had actually killed a wood cultivator who still possessed half his strength, and they were even more baffled by why the two would suddenly turn on each other.

In the twenty seconds before his death, the wood cultivator’s face twisted with anger and savagery. Zhang Mingjing read it and could not help blurting out in shock, “That bastard looks terrifyingly ugly when he’s angry!”

The fifth-dimensional cognitive model, however, joked, “Oh no! Didn’t you still have questions you wanted to ask him? What a pity, he’s dead now.”

“Get lost!”

...

Why did the monster launch a surprise attack on the wood cultivator and die together with him?

There was, it turned out, a detail that our Daoist team and the fifth-dimensional cognitive model did not know.

Just before the monster struck, the temporal code inside it said to the temporal code inside the wood cultivator, “Either way, we’re dead today, but this boy’s humiliation of us must be punished.”

The temporal code inside the wood cultivator agreed. So the instant the monster attacked, it simultaneously disrupted the wood cultivator’s consciousness and released energy to destroy his body; otherwise, the monster would never have succeeded.

...

As the saying goes, a worldview determines a world.

To the fifth-dimensional cognitive model, the equipment and superpowers of our Daoist team were nothing more than a way of existing as information and energy. There was nothing strange about them at all.

To Zhang Mingjing, Catherine, and Jemery, these tools and superpowers were scientific technologies beyond the laws of the three-dimensional world known to humankind.

To the Two Pets, these tools and superpowers were simply premium assets for finding a mate.

To Zhang Yidao and Xiao Nvxia, these were nothing less than the art of mystic gates and hidden formations.

...

After the battle with the wood cultivator, Zhang Yidao and Xiao Nvxia became even more diligent and eager to learn.

Zhang Yidao in particular dug out every book on Taoist arts he had collected in the past and reread them from beginning to end. For the first time in his life, he even felt that he might one day reach a summit of cultivation like the founding patriarchs themselves, and so these days he was endlessly excited, studying and researching with tireless enthusiasm.

However, his behavior was still very much driven by impatience and an urge for quick success, so it was inevitable that his inner fire would burn too strongly. Zhang Mingjing worried that he might go astray, and therefore decided to stop him.

On this matter, the fifth-dimensional cognitive model was unexpectedly tolerant of Zhang Yidao’s “going astray” through overexertion, and even advised Zhang Mingjing not to interfere.

“He’s very likely to burn himself out like this, and may even drag Xiao Nvxia into it. We’ve already suffered the bitter consequences of that before. How can we not stop him?” Zhang Mingjing complained, deeply puzzled.

“Life cannot always be bound by routine. When burnout is due, sometimes it’s better to let it happen,” the fifth-dimensional cognitive model said offhandedly. “Just as in love, you can’t always just hold hands. When the time is right, you should do what must be done.”

“Damn it, what kind of nonsense logic is that?”

“Let me put it this way. He’s putting his heart into it and pushing himself to improve. Would you really bear to interrupt him?”

“But... you said burnout was dangerous, didn’t you?”

At this, the fifth-dimensional cognitive model smiled. “What you don’t know is that your father’s effort this time has direction. It isn’t blind struggle. Though there is some impatience for quick results, it is still a hundred or a thousand times better than the aimless fumbling of others. Even if he does burn out a little, that kind of fire is probably healthy.”

“Uh... what kind of nonsense is that now? You can really turn the straight into the crooked and the crooked back into the straight. Burnout is burnout. Since when is there such a thing as healthy burnout?”

“Arguments of words have never mattered much, so don’t try to stop him. Better to watch patiently and see what new things he actually manages to develop. If he truly needs rescue, it won’t be too late for the two of us to step in then, will it?”

Zhang Mingjing fell silent for a moment. Out of absolute trust in the fifth-dimensional cognitive model, he finally replied, “Mm... all right.”

...

In fact, the fifth-dimensional cognitive model had also been studying the Bagua recently, and had discovered that although the Earlier Heaven Bagua could function as a platform linking the three-dimensional world with higher-dimensional information, it still lacked a certain harmony with the Daoist team, and even with Zhang Yidao, when it came to war against demigods.

It had run calculations for several days, observed for several days, and contemplated for several days, and finally came to understand that the reason was this: the primary function of the Earlier Heaven Bagua was to communicate the energies of heaven and earth. It was not designed entirely for the affairs of the three-dimensional world, and human warfare is, in essence, an affair of human matters. So the Earlier Heaven Bagua was not quite grounded enough.

Naturally, it then set its sights on the Later Heaven Bagua, because the sixty-four hexagrams of the Later Heaven Bagua are chiefly used to predict and handle changes in three-dimensional affairs, especially human affairs. If they could be used to fight demigods, they would be a very grounded tool indeed.

It also discovered that the sixty-four hexagrams possessed not only finer but also faster computing power than the Earlier Heaven Bagua, almost a perfect algorithm for human affairs. This made it even more certain that if the Later Heaven Bagua could be applied to combat, the Daoist team’s fighting strength would surely rise another level.

What’s more, it sensed that the demigods to come would be further optimized by the temporal code. Their combat power would likely be far stronger than those before them, and their techniques even stranger. If Zhang Yidao’s Eight Trigrams formation could be upgraded and refined into the sixty-four hexagrams, that would be ideal.

Not only that, it even began to consider whether the sixty-four-hexagram algorithm could be implanted into the team’s battle armor. That would greatly improve the armor’s combat prediction and battlefield response speed.

...If the armor were optimized according to that idea, then it would truly become a form of mystic-gate formation.

Almost at the same time as the fifth-dimensional cognitive model, Zhang Yidao also felt that the Earlier Heaven Bagua was somewhat awkward in combat, and naturally he, too, turned his attention to the Later Heaven Bagua.

What results the two of them would ultimately achieve from this research could not yet be said, but the direction of their inquiry was certainly not wrong.

The fifth-dimensional cognitive model believed that Zhang Yidao’s slight burnout during his research was not a very serious problem. It was also inspired by the Bagua, because within the power of the Bagua, fire is one kind of driving force. Sometimes research and cultivation need that kind of force, so a certain degree of burnout may not necessarily be a bad thing.

In fact, during the past two days Zhang Mingjing had also begun studying the Bagua, though he was only starting with the Earlier Heaven Bagua.

His reason for studying it was that his own cultivation had almost come to a standstill recently, while the Eight Trigrams formation had indeed displayed remarkable power in several recent battles. So he was thinking whether he could use the mysterious power of the Bagua to find a chance for a breakthrough.

This idea received the affirmation and strong support of the fifth-dimensional cognitive model.

So now, after deciding not to stop Zhang Yidao, he began sitting in meditation and pondering the Bagua.

Besides him, Catherine and Jemery had also been immersed in Bagua studies day and night. The sincerity of their research was no less than Zhang Yidao’s, only they lacked any impatience for quick success. At most, they were merely overheated, not burned out.

In the near future, the team’s artificial intelligence might also be implanted with the sixty-four-hexagram algorithm. That was one of the fifth-dimensional cognitive model’s plans, which made it clear that Bagua fever had already taken hold within the Daoist team.

...

Zhang Mingjing had not expected that after these two days of sitting in meditation and contemplating the Bagua, he would actually begin to internalize the Bagua diagrams as part of his own consciousness, and that soon he would even gain an unexpected reward.

In truth, the process of internalization had not gone very smoothly at first, because he had previously held very deep distrust and resistance toward Bagua knowledge. That mentality had already taken root in his subconscious; how could it be removed so easily?

Since it could not be removed, it was bound to interfere with his meditations on the Bagua.

By the time he had contemplated the Bagua image for the one-hundred-and-twentieth time, the holographic projection of the Earlier Heaven Bagua in his consciousness was still extremely unstable.

Sometimes, if he applied even a little too much effort, he would meditate himself into a state of burnout, and then feel the temperature of his inner world rise rapidly. In moments, it became unbearably uncomfortable; then he could no longer stay calm, and the Bagua he had finally managed to visualize would break apart into fragments.

He naturally did not give up. He worked hard to adjust his breathing, calm himself down, and quickly visualize another Bagua.

He persisted, practicing over and over, and finally, by the six-hundredth meditation, the Bagua in his consciousness suddenly became as solid as a fortress. Even violent external interference or overexertion could no longer shatter it.

...