Chapter Eighty-Five: The Beheading Cliff

Gu Wen had already studied it before. The tortoise shell, no larger than a palm, bore more than a hundred and eighty seal-script characters carved into its surface. Their strokes were even, the writing clear, yet none of the characters were real. Each one seemed to be a composite of several others, half-recognizable and wholly unreadable.

Now, the white glow from within the shell illuminated the writing, and the characters rose a foot into the air as though suspended by unseen hands, taking on a remarkable sense of depth.

As each character turned on its own axis, Gu Wen understood the meaning. Rendered into plain language, it was this:

When Master Xuanzang returned from obtaining the scriptures, his greatest gain was that he had accurately traced the dwelling place of the demon maiden Rakshasa, laying the foundation for her destruction. The lands, customs, scriptures, and scrolls described in The Record of the Western Regions of the Great Tang were nothing more than a screen to mislead the eye. He had traveled for ten years, and all those who accompanied him to subdue the demon had been reduced to bones; only the master survived. From this, one could see how formidable the demon maiden truly was. Her origin could not be verified, but it could at least be traced back to the time when Pangu split heaven and earth and Nüwa smelted stone to mend the sky. In ancient times, where there were the sage figures Nüwa, Shennong, Fuxi, Emperor Yan, the Yellow Emperor, King Yao, King Shun, and King Yu, there were surely also calamity-makers such as Gonggong, Zhurong, and Chiyou. The demon maiden was likely formed then, gathering into shape the spirit-light of the mountains and great peaks, and has remained a threat ever since. When King Yu controlled the waters of the Nine Provinces, to eliminate the flooding he cut channels from Kunlun all the way to the Eastern Sea, and thus came the Yangtze, the Yellow River, and countless other streams of the Chinese land. Moreover, King Yu led from the front, drilling a passage at the very center of the Nine Provinces straight down into the earth, venting the excess water within. In this way, by drawing water outward and allowing it to seep inward, he finally put an end to the flood that had threatened to swallow the continent. The Nine Provinces’ passage is the legendary earth vein. Thus, there are nine earth veins across the world. Of those nine, due to shifts in the crust, human extraction, and other such causes, only one remains where eight have been lost, and it lies within the Tibetan lands. The Rakshasa demon maiden found by the master was hiding within that earth vein...

The theory of earth veins was mentioned many times by the German geographer and biologist Deguman during the Second World War, and he went to great lengths to persuade the explorers of the Axis powers of that evil era to search for that place in Tibet. Deguman said that the earth veins contained the energy of the entire world, and if one could seize it for one’s own use, one would surely become invincible under heaven.

In theory, the most brilliant minds in the world are like waves suddenly rising on a river in the dead of night, unnoticed, unremembered, and unlamented.