Chronicles of Heaven's Chosen - Chapter 35

“Only me?”

—Yes.

“How long have you been trapped here?”

Yuan Yao was in no hurry now. She found a large rock on the lakebed and sat down.

—I don’t remember. Several hundred years, perhaps.

Surprise flickered across her face. Her thoughts immediately turned to Nie Lie, the master of this secret-treasure realm.

If Senior Nie Lie had sealed the object here, might one of his legacy keys contain a way to release it?

With that thought, she took the six green legacy keys from her storage space and slowly closed her fingers around them.

Then she raised her head and fixed the oval object, bound beneath countless chains, with a level gaze.

“If I can’t break your seal today, I will leave. Once I become stronger, I’ll return and free you.”

The unidentified object immediately conveyed its displeasure.

“You don’t get to say no.” Yuan Yao’s voice was calm. “If I decide to leave, you can’t stop me. Besides, I only have a few days left to live. I won’t waste them here.”

“And I don’t owe you anything.”

The unidentified object’s arrogance promptly faded.

Yuan Yao had always possessed unusually sharp instincts. She knew how to pursue advantage and avoid danger.

She was no fool.

The unidentified object held no killing intent toward her. If anything, it seemed faintly drawn to her. It must have been one of Senior Nie Lie’s most important secret treasures; otherwise, he would never have used so many Saint-grade binding chains and three Saint-grade talismans to seal it.

Nie Lie had obtained it, yet had also locked it away.

Her guess was that the object had refused to submit to him. Unable to truly claim it but unwilling to give it up, he had chosen to imprison it instead.

“I’m going to study this legacy opportunity now. Don’t disturb me,” Yuan Yao said.

She did not dare leave the lakebed yet. If Xie Yan recovered from his shock and decided to make her suffer, he could easily leave her wishing for death.

The thought only strengthened her desire to grow stronger.

The unidentified object obediently fell silent.

Yuan Yao lowered her gaze to the six legacy keys. Trusting her instincts, she selected one, then sent her spiritual consciousness into it.

In an instant—

A dazzling white light flashed before her. A tremendous force seized her spiritual consciousness and pulled it through an empty passage into an endless white expanse.

There were no objects. No boundaries. Nothing but pure, unbroken white.

Suddenly, countless motes of light streaked toward her like meteors.

Agony lanced through Yuan Yao’s mind, as though innumerable fine needles had pierced her consciousness all at once.

The motes rapidly converged under the guidance of some unseen force, transforming into book after book of sword arts and cultivation techniques. They circled within her sea of consciousness, every volume exuding an ancient, mysterious aura.

Slightly startled, Yuan Yao’s spiritual form lifted one hand.

The moment her fingertips brushed one of the manuals, all the books began trembling like a startled swarm of bees.

Then they started crashing into one another.

They were fighting.

Yuan Yao stared. One book after another was knocked from the contest and dissolved back into motes of light.

In the end, only five manuals remained. All the others had become quiet specks drifting through the surrounding emptiness.

Yuan Yao studied the five surviving volumes.

The *Heaven-and-Earth Formation Diagram*, a manual devoted to formations.

The *Nirvana Sword Manual*, a manual devoted to swordsmanship.

The *Sacred Record of Sun and Moon*, a manual devoted to spellcraft.

The *Heavenly Fire Rebirth Scroll*, another manual devoted to spellcraft.

And the *True Scripture of Immortal Cultivation*, a manual devoted to inner cultivation.

If her guess was correct, all five were high-rank cultivation techniques.

Yuan Yao knew little about techniques of that level. She only knew that the Xiaoyao Sword Art she had practiced since childhood was a mere middle-rank combat art.

Even so, only inner disciples of the Xiaoyao Sect were allowed to study it.

A thought came to her, and she murmured, “The Heaven-and-Earth Formation Diagram…”

The instant the words left her lips, the book floated across the air and stopped before her.

She reached out and caught it.

Eagerly, she began flipping through its pages, searching for a formation diagram that might show her how to undo the unidentified object’s seal.

But when she opened the book with such high hopes, she found she could not understand its intricate diagrams or written explanations at all.

Her brows drew together.

She went through more than a dozen pages and still could not make sense of the formations.

Left with no other choice, Yuan Yao returned to the first page and resolved to study the *Heaven-and-Earth Formation Diagram* properly from the beginning.

She drew a deep breath, quieted her mind, and examined every diagram and line of text.

Yet even after a long period of intense concentration, her understanding remained frustratingly incomplete.

Neither her Master nor any of her senior brothers and sisters were formation masters. Yuan Yao herself had deliberately suppressed her interest in cultivation ever since childhood. Before today, she had barely encountered the principles behind formations.

Even the high-rank formation compass she had used before required little more than feeding spiritual power into it and casting a few simple spells to trigger its barrier. She understood almost nothing of how formations were designed or constructed.

Still, Yuan Yao refused to give up.

She continued studying.

“The Spirit-Gathering Formation uses spirit stones as its guide. Set the formation through the heaven point, earth point, yin point, yang point, the position of heaven and earth, and the reversed Eight Trigrams position…”

As she read, Yuan Yao used the diagrams to teach herself how to recognize the positions within a formation and locate its nexus.

Anyone watching would have been stunned by her method.

Others learned the fundamentals first, then used them to deduce a formation’s structure. Yuan Yao was doing the reverse: she was deriving the fundamental principles from a completed structure.

It was the difference between following a recipe to cook a dish and tasting the finished dish to reconstruct the recipe.

Yuan Yao had no idea how astonishing her approach was.

As time passed, she gradually worked out the basic principles of formations—and began to enjoy herself.

She wanted to try one.

Her awareness withdrew from her sea of consciousness. When she opened her eyes, excitement shone in them.

The unidentified object sensed her “awakening” and was just about to resonate with her when she pulled more than a dozen low-grade spirit stones from her storage space.

“In a Spirit-Gathering Formation, the center is the gathering position, the four directions are the condensation positions, and the six points form the array.”

“Water and wood energies serve as support…”

Yuan Yao swiftly arranged the spirit stones. Following the method illustrated in the book, she condensed water and wood elemental energies into a hand seal.

“Spirit-Gathering Formation, arise!”