David put all those “heretical lists” into his storage ring, and then covered, rewrote, and distorted all the orthodox Taoist scriptures in the Scripture Pavilion with the Chaos Origin.
He couldn’t make those books disappear—that would be too obvious—but he could make them “unreadable.”
Anyone who peruses these classic texts will find their contents obscure, contradictory, and impossible to study.
After doing all this, David left a line of large characters on the inner sect’s training ground.
The words were written in the primordial chaos, the gray-black ink imprinted on the silvery-white ground, so striking that it could not be ignored.
“The orthodox system is the biggest scam in the world. Hengxuan is an old liar.”
“If you want to learn real skills, come find me deep underground in the Dark River.” – David
After writing this line, David turned and ran.
He had just rushed out of the inner sect’s territory when he sensed the overwhelming pressure of order coming from behind him.
Heng Xuan arrived, leading hundreds of inspectors, like a raging silver-white torrent sweeping across the entire world.
“David! You’re asking for it!”
Heng Xuan’s voice was deafening, filled with murderous intent.
David didn’t even look back, he took off running.
As he ran, he left behind various misleading spiritual energy traces along the way using the origin of chaos—some looked like he was running east, some like he was running west, some like he was burrowing into the ground, and some like he was rising into the sky.
The traces, a mixture of real and fake, caused Hengxuan’s tracking array to repeatedly produce contradictory results.
Heng Xuan was furious at being led astray. He turned the entire territory of the Tian Shu Sect upside down, but he couldn’t even find a trace of David.
While he was busy tracking David, the imprisoned cultivators awaiting investigation in the inner sect concentration camp heard David’s message coming from beneath the underground river.
They saw the rewritten “orthodox scriptures” in the library and sensed the chaotic spiritual energy fluctuations coming from the direction of the area to be investigated.
Some people began to have doubts.
Some people have begun to secretly try to break free from the shackles of orthodoxy.
Some even took advantage of the lax guards to sneak into the underground spiritual vein passages and grope their way towards the dark river.
Three months later, when David finally shook off Heng Xuan’s pursuit and returned to the bottom of the dark river, he found that nearly a hundred cultivators had gathered on both banks of the river.
Most of them were cultivators who had escaped from the inner and outer sects of the Tian Shu Sect. Each of them bore the marks of orthodox constraints, yet each of them had a light burning in their eyes that David recognized.
That kind of light is called “unwillingness to accept defeat”.
David stood on the bank of the underground river, looking at the faces around him, and grinned: “Alright, quite a few people have come. Don’t rush, line up one by one, I’ll help you untie the chains.”
A long-suppressed cheer erupted from the bottom of the underground river.
On the ground, Heng Xuan was still leading his inspectors, chasing David’s phantom across all twenty-six heavens and earth.
He never dreamed that the scoundrel he had chased like a stray dog was now comfortably sitting at the bottom of the dark river, unshackled a group of cultivators he had turned against, preached the Dharma, and made empty promises.
The bottom of the underground river was bustling with activity.
Nearly a hundred people were crammed under the rock walls on both sides of the underground river, some standing, some squatting, and some simply sitting cross-legged on the ground.
The air was filled with the refreshing scent of the underground river spring and the smell of sweat and panting that only comes with a crowd.
Most of these people were pale and weak, with the silvery-white markings of orthodox shackles still remaining on their bodies, like scars burned by a branding iron.
But everyone’s eyes were bright, just like the light David saw when he first met Ye Qing—a light that had been suppressed for too long and was finally seeing a glimmer of hope.
“Queue up, queue up, don’t push.”
David rolled up his sleeves and stood on a large rock on the bank of the underground river, looking just like a quack doctor setting up a stall at the entrance of a vegetable market. “Come one by one, first state your name, and then make it clear which layer of shackles you are under.”
“Don’t panic, I’m very skilled at this. Taking the chain off won’t hurt.”
At the front of the line was a middle-aged man in his forties, with a burly build, but a sallow complexion and chapped lips, clearly having been tormented by the shackles of orthodoxy for many years.
He rubbed his hands together and said somewhat awkwardly, “I I am Tieshan, an outer disciple of the Tian Shu Sect awaiting investigation, and I have been placed under the third shackle.”
UmYoung Master Chen, will there be any aftereffects after removing them? I heard that forcibly removing shackles can cripple a person—”