I discovered a world bug.

Chapter 106 Possession

When the corpse-dissolving immortal pointed at Lin Shu, he instantly realized that something terrible had happened.

The other party can see the so-called "connection," and among everyone present, if you had to pick the person with the strongest "connection," it would undoubtedly be yourself.

He possesses and has performed various rituals; according to Xu Feng, he also carries an extremely strong affinity with the Dao.

More importantly, since one carries the "snake" within oneself, in a sense, the snake is always active. Someone who can see the "connection" is probably just like oneself, who is always active with the "binding spell," and will definitely be able to see the fluctuations of those so-called "lines"!

He saw himself.

And he wanted to do something to himself...

Lin Shu subconsciously took two steps back, while the special forces member next to him took two steps forward and shielded him without hesitation.

But such an action seems meaningless.

Because a ray of divine light suddenly appeared, bypassing the two people blocking the way, and went straight into Lin Shu's brow.

next second.

He was completely engulfed in a vast illusion.

Lin Shu felt as if she were floating in the air, witnessing this illusion from the perspective of an observer.

But strangely, he was also incredibly familiar with everything he saw.

It didn't seem like a chance encounter, but rather more like...

Guided by some force, they recall everything from the past...

This was in the summer of 1900.

Boxers, armed with knives and guns and chanting slogans like "Invulnerable to swords and guns," surged toward the Legation Quarter.

In the Zhang family's old house in Yangliuqing, Tianjin, a baby boy was born, his cries piercing the sweltering air.

His father, Zhang Yufu, named him Jingxu—meaning "to cultivate oneself through tranquility and to be humble and open-minded."

This year was destined to be turbulent for China. The artillery fire of the Eight-Nation Alliance captured Beijing, Empress Dowager Cixi fled west in panic, and the land of China was ravaged under the iron heel of the foreign powers.

The Boxer Rebellion was in full swing, with countless members constantly chanting incantations and drawing talismans, claiming to be possessed by gods, attempting to use witchcraft to fight against foreign guns and cannons, but ultimately their lives were left in ruins.

Their attempts are not necessarily true superstition.

From the perspective of Lin Shu, a latercomer, it is possible that a few people at the top of the Boxer Rebellion did indeed possess certain effective rituals.

However, such rituals were too unstable and too difficult to implement, so failure became the inevitable outcome.

At this moment, Zhang Jingxu was still in her arms when she could smell the gunpowder and blood.

The wheels of time rolled forward. In the twenty-seventh year of the Guangxu Emperor's reign, the Treaty of 1901 was signed, with an indemnity of 450 million taels of silver, and the empire was finally bled dry.

In 1911, the gunfire in Wuchang ended more than two thousand years of imperial rule, and the world changed dramatically.

The Zhang family fell into ruin amidst this series of upheavals. The father died of illness during a famine, and the mother, unable to support him, sent him to Mount Qingcheng when he was eleven years old.

Mount Qingcheng, one of the birthplaces of Taoism, is known as "the most secluded place under heaven".

Zhang Jingxu was led to the Celestial Master Cave and became a disciple of Daoist Zhiyun, the 21st generation successor of the Quanzhen Longmen School.

Since the early Qing Dynasty, Taoism had long lost the protection of the imperial court and entered a long period of decline.

After the Opium War, China was plagued by frequent wars, social unrest, and economic decline. Coupled with the impact of modern Western science, Taoism showed signs of decline.

Master Zhiyun is over seventy years old and is an anomaly among the old Taoist priests who have been forgotten by the times.

He was proficient in talismans and incantations, and was also well-versed in the art of divination and escape in the "Seven Tablets of the Cloudy Bookcase," but his greatest skill was the so-called "method of avoiding disaster and achieving longevity."

This is something passed down from our ancestor, and naturally, it must be passed down to Master Zhiyun.

On a winter night, the still-young Zhang Jingxu asked Daoist Zhiyun, "Master, why did our ancestors pursue immortality, while we can't even get enough to eat?"

Master Zhiyun could only sigh.

"The art of immortality is not for the sake of one person's longevity, but for the benefit of all living beings. However, in today's world, foreign invaders are rampant, warlords are fighting amongst themselves, and the people are suffering. The core of cultivation lies in preserving life and avoiding harm"—only by first ensuring survival and avoiding calamity can one be qualified to discuss immortality. If one cannot even care about the suffering of the people before them, how can one talk about immortality?

Zhang Jingxu didn't quite understand what he was saying.

But he remembered one thing:

To achieve longevity, one must first avoid misfortune.

If the world is turned upside down and the people suffer, then stop talking about immortality...

Time flies in the mountains, and in the blink of an eye, Zhang Jingxu was already sixteen years old.

In the early years of the Republic of China, the political situation was turbulent, with warlords controlling various regions, and wars raging continuously, causing immense suffering to the people.

In 1915, Yuan Shikai declared himself emperor, and the National Protection War broke out; in 1917, Zhang Xun attempted to restore the monarchy, and Duan Qirui came to power; in 1920, the Zhili-Anhui War broke out—the land of China was like a wrecked ship, tossed about in turbulent waves.

The Taoist temple was not spared from the turmoil. Master Zhiyun was injured while protecting the temple and passed away not long after.

Before his death, he left behind his last words.

"Jingxu, you are exceptionally talented, but staying here will ultimately limit your potential. I see you are shrouded in auspicious energy, indicating your lingering worldly ties. Go down the mountain. Only by immersing yourself in the mortal world and experiencing great joy and sorrow can you truly understand the meaning of this."

So, in 1918, Zhang Jingxu went down the mountain with a peach wood sword and a copy of the "Secret Method of the Three Reductions and Five Explanations of the Supreme Being".

After descending the mountain, he joined Liu Xiang's troops stationed in Sichuan and became a military doctor.

He was eighteen years old that year.

During the Republican era, many aspiring Taoist priests, faced with the decline of the nation and the invasion of foreign tribes, could not sit idly by and went down the mountain to join the army.

Taoism has a tradition of cultivating medicine and practicing martial arts. After descending the mountain, Taoists skilled in medicine would choose to treat the wounded, while those skilled in martial arts would fight on the battlefield.

Zhang Jingxu possessed the strengths of both approaches—he treated soldiers' wounds with acupuncture and herbal medicine while observing the battlefield with his keen eye.

While in the army, he witnessed firsthand the bloodshed and absurdity of the warlord conflicts.

The Zhili, Anhui, and Fengtian cliques, various warlords, killed each other for their own selfish interests, sacrificing only the lives of ordinary soldiers and innocent civilians.

In 1920, the Zhili-Anhui War broke out, and Zhang Jingxu's unit was ordered to go north to participate in the war. They were ambushed in Hebei Province and suffered heavy casualties.

Zhang Jingxu braved a hail of bullets to rescue the wounded. A bullet grazed his left arm, leaving a deep wound that exposed the bone.

"Is this what they call 'saving the country' during the warlord era?"

Looking at the corpses scattered all over the ground, Zhang Jingxu fell into self-doubt for the first time.

He recalled his master's teachings—preserving life and avoiding harm is the primary duty of a cultivator.

The pointless fighting before our eyes is precisely the greatest "harm".

In 1923, Zhang Jingxu, covered in wounds and carrying two boxes of ancient books, quietly retired from the army and went to Zixiao Palace on Wudang Mountain to stay temporarily.

In Wudang Mountain, he heard a legend that Wudang Taoists had also taken off their Taoist robes and put on military uniforms to join the army and serve their country during this chaotic world.

This gave Zhang Jingxu a deeper understanding of "Tao": saving the country is cultivating Tao.

The Taoist's concept of "complete life" is not about retreating to the mountains to cultivate oneself in isolation, but about enabling more people to survive—even at the cost of one's own spiritual practice...

The Marco Polo Bridge Incident occurred on July 7, 1937.

When the War of Resistance against Japan broke out in full force, Zhang Jingxu, who was far away in Qingcheng Mountain, Sichuan, did not hesitate for a moment after hearing the news.

During the War of Resistance against Japan, countless Taoist priests resolutely joined the resistance against the Japanese invaders.

Patriotic figures within the Taoist community gained a deeper understanding of the inextricable link between national prosperity and religious flourishing, and national demise and religious destruction. They resolutely raised the banner of uniting the entire nation to resist foreign aggression. Zhang Jingxu was one of them.

That autumn, Zhang Jingxu took the initiative to approach a Sichuan Army unit stationed in Chongqing and requested to join the war effort.

He was nearing forty, yet years of practice had kept him agile and his eyes sharp. Because of his expertise in Taoist medicine, he was assigned to a battlefield medical team and followed the troops eastward from Sichuan to the front lines of the War of Resistance against Japan—the Battle of Shanghai.

During the Battle of Shanghai, Zhang Jingxu's unit held its ground for three months, refusing to yield an inch of land.

The enemy's artillery fire continued day and night, and the battlefield was piled high with corpses.

Zhang Jingxu braved artillery fire as she traversed the trenches, dragging dozens of wounded soldiers from piles of corpses in a single day.

His Taoist robe was already blackened by gunpowder smoke and torn into strips, which he used as bandages on his arms...

After the Battle of Shanghai, Zhang Jingxu fought in Xuzhou, Wuhan, and Changsha, participating in almost every major battle.

In 1939, he retreated to western Hunan with his troops and set up a temporary aid station in a dilapidated mountain god temple.

Lacking medical care and medicine, he used Taoist medical skills to save people while becoming even more eager to explore the truth of the "rituals".

The ancient texts record numerous rituals for healing wounds, curing diseases, relieving pain, transferring injuries, and even bringing the dead back to life, but after trying them all, I still came up empty-handed.

He always remembered his master's teachings.

"The highest level of skill in avoiding disaster is not to escape calamity for oneself, but to help everyone in the world escape calamity."

But how can one resolve such a great calamity of heaven and earth with one's own strength?

In 1944, Zhang Jingxu was hit in the abdomen by shrapnel during a raid and was in critical condition.

In a desperate situation with no medicine or medical care, he relied on his inner strength to endure for three days and three nights until reinforcements finally arrived.

It was during this near-death experience that he deciphered the key to the "Spiritual Transformation Method" in the "Supreme Three Reversals and Five Exits Secret Method"—that on the brink of life and death, the soul and body can be temporarily separated, which is precisely the essence of the art of corpse liberation.

He still hadn't found a true way to avoid disaster, but by chance, he touched the threshold of the art of "corpse dissolution."

After the victory in the War of Resistance against Japan, Zhang Jingxu resigned from his military post and returned to Tianshi Cave in Qingcheng Mountain.

The once-grand Taoist temple had fallen into ruin after the war. He repaired the buildings alone and devoted himself to studying the "Orthodox Taoist Canon."

The historical texts collected in China.

He found in the "Taiping Yulan, Daoist Section 6" that: "The methods of corpse liberation include those who die and are reborn, those whose heads are severed and emerge from one side, and those whose bodies remain but whose bones are gone."

I also read the "Secret Secrets of Ascending to Immortality": "Those who achieve corpse liberation are those who, at the time of death, experience the pain of war, fire, or water, no different from ordinary people. Only after death can their spirit depart."

The Precious Sword Classic also records: "The corpse liberation is the refining and transformation of one's true nature, and the hidden comfort of the five elements. Even though it is the lowest level of immortality, the result is not insignificant."

In his "Baopuzi Neipian", Ge Hong listed corpse liberation as a lower grade of immortality, saying that "lower-grade people die first and then shed their skin" - that is, the so-called corpse liberation immortals.

More importantly, there is a passage in "The Seven Tablets of the Cloudy Bookcase: The Narrative of Corpse Dissection".

"Those who, though commanding the three armies, cannot be swayed by fierce winds; though traversing perilous terrain, cannot be harmed by calamities; though entering the marketplace and court, cannot be plagued by a hundred evils, need not be subject to the transformation of corpses. Those who interpret this are mostly those who are not eager for the imperial carriage and are happy to live peacefully in the mountains and forests."

—This means that a true enlightened being can be harmed by swords and spears even amidst a thousand armies, and cannot be touched even when calamities rage. Since this is the case, there is no need to use the art of corpse transformation to avoid disaster.

Zhang Jingxu closed the sutra and pondered with his eyes closed.

This seems to be the "method to avoid disaster" he was looking for.

But it seems the order is reversed.

To avoid disaster, one must first attain immortality through the Tao.

Isn't this putting the cart before the horse?

Moreover, it is easy for one person to achieve immortality, but difficult for the whole world to achieve immortality.

Even if I were to truly transcend death and become an immortal, what benefit would it bring to all living beings?

Zhang Jingxu couldn't understand this problem—it was a time of great change, and the information he had access to was far too limited...

Fortunately, now that the war is over, he finally has the opportunity to focus on his cultivation and find that ultimate answer.

So he decided to practice the art of corpse dissolution.

Perhaps after the body is dissolved, I will have a new understanding of this world and the so-called "Tao".

This will bring us one step closer to the method we desire for "avoiding disaster and preserving life".

In the autumn of 1968, Zhang Jingxu arrived at Huawu Village.

By this time, he had traveled throughout the country for more than twenty years and had mastered the essence of many magic arts and rituals.

Unfortunately, most of the rituals were not effective at that time.

He certainly didn't know the reason, but Lin Shu knew it was that "mysterious factor" had not yet fully recovered.

But Zhang Jingxu stayed.

He found a cave in the mountains behind Huawu Village, set up an array, and completed the corpse dissolution.

For him, after the dismemberment, what he experienced was a "long void".

He did not become an immortal, nor did he travel to the heavens in spirit.

I seemed to have become the mountain, the stones, the grass and trees, and everything here...

Silence, emptiness, time flashes by.

Until one day, someone set fire to the cave...

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