Unable to raise his cultivation for the time being, Ye Xuan could only calm his mind and focus on comprehending Arrays.
He closed his eyes, his mind overflowing with Array Patterns. These patterns materialized within his Sea of Consciousness, filling its clear expanse with swirling, constantly shifting runes. Ye Xuan seemed lost in deep thought. He remained in this state of contemplation for three days and three nights.
"Sigh, still no inspiration," he thought. "Advancing to a higher rank as an Array Master is truly too difficult. The more anxious I get, the more my mind becomes a tangled mess."
Ye Xuan let out a heavy sigh. "Forget it. I’ll take a short break, then I should head back."
Lying on the edge of the cliff with a blade of grass hanging from his mouth, Ye Xuan stared at the vast, boundless sky. It wasn’t until the sun began to set that he finally stood up. He patted the dirt off his calves and was just about to leave when his body suddenly trembled.
He looked up at the sky once more. Blue skies, white clouds rolling and unfurling. Looking up, he realized how utterly insignificant he was, no different from a mere speck of dust.
Yet, when he looked down, he was the one looking over the world. The towering, ancient trees below were no larger than a finger from his vantage point.
The sensation was completely different, diametrically opposed to what he had just felt. It was a towering sense of grandeur, the feeling of standing at the absolute peak and watching all other mountains shrink beneath his feet. This massive sense of contrast...
"Hmm?" he thought.
Ye Xuan’s eyes suddenly lit up. He had caught onto something!
Standing in the exact same spot gave him two entirely different feelings depending on whether he looked up or down. What about Array Patterns, then? If the same pattern was rotated upwards or downwards, wouldn’t its effects change completely?
The dense, overlapping Array Patterns reappeared in Ye Xuan’s Sea of Consciousness, beginning to transform rapidly. Not long after, he crouched down and began carving patterns into the earth.
Soon, a complete Array was etched into the dirt. After he tossed down a few Array Banners, the Array activated. Ye Xuan picked up a large rock from the ground and threw it straight into the formation.
In an instant, thousands of blades manifested out of thin air. The massive boulder was reduced to fine powder in the blink of an eye.
He had succeeded. It was a rank-four Killing Array. Ye Xuan had officially advanced to become a rank-four Array Master.
"HAHAHA! I actually broke through!" Ye Xuan laughed heartily, feeling entirely refreshed.
Cultivating Arrays truly relied on a fleeting flash of Spiritual Light. As long as one had enough of this Spiritual Light, it was infinitely faster than meticulously tracing high-level Arrays stroke by stroke. Once you reached true enlightenment, any Array would come as easily as breathing.
On the other hand, copying an Array by rote sounded simple, but if one didn’t understand its underlying profoundness, every single stroke was prone to error. A single rune being a centimeter too long or a centimeter too short could result in a complete failure to activate the Array! This was the greatest hurdle other Array Masters faced when trying to comprehend formations. Mechanical copying was never that easy.
Some powerful Arrays were absurdly massive. If one didn’t understand the fundamental principles and merely relied on copying, how long would it take to memorize the entire thing?
At this moment, Ye Xuan finally realized just how terrifying Array Fool’s theory truly was! As long as one mastered the absolute basics, they could use those fundamentals to construct a peerless Grand Array.
"Alright, time to head back," he murmured. "The new home should be finished by now. I need a good night’s sleep."
It had been a very long time since Ye Xuan last slept, and his mind was incredibly exhausted.
Returning to the front of the mountain, Ye Xuan walked straight into the largest bamboo house. This was the residence the Ye Family had built specifically for him. As the Patriarch, his quarters naturally had to be the most spacious, even if he was the only one living there.
The moment he stepped inside, Ye Xuan crashed onto the bed and fell fast asleep. He slept for three whole days and nights, ultimately woken up by the whining of Blood Princess.
"Master, I’m hungry! Stop sleeping, I’m so hungry," she complained.
Only then did Ye Xuan drag himself up to feed her his blood. Watching Blood Princess gulp down his blood as if it were plain water, he couldn’t help but ask, "Blood Princess, when will you be able to advance to the next rank?"
"I don’t know."
"Then in the past, were there any signs or omens before you broke through?"
"I don’t know. I just took a nap, and when I woke up, I felt like I had gotten stronger."
Ye Xuan rubbed his temples.
"Getting stronger just by sleeping?" he thought.
If word of this got out, millions of Cultivators would go absolutely insane with envy. Damn it, if lying flat and taking a nap was all it took to grow stronger, no Cultivator in the world would ever bother putting in any hard work.
"Alright, pretend I didn’t ask."
Having finished feeding her, he was just about to summon her back when Blood Princess spoke up. "Master, don’t put me away, okay? Your family already knows about me anyway, and there’s no risk of me getting lost here. I want to go play around."
"Fair enough. Go ahead."
"Yay! You’re the best, Master! Oh, right, Master, this Scroll of mine has been acting a little weird lately," Blood Princess said, pulling the Scroll from her robes.
"Weird how?"
"It’s warm. Almost hot."
"Hmm?"
Ye Xuan took the item and felt it with his hand. To his surprise, the Scroll was indeed radiating heat.
This was incredibly bizarre. Blood Princess’s entire body was always ice-cold, yet the Scroll she carried actually had a temperature?
He unrolled the Scroll and examined the landscape painting on it once more. There didn’t seem to be anything out of the ordinary about the ink wash mountains and rivers.
"Blood Princess, leave this Scroll with me for now," he said.
"Okay! It’s getting too hot anyway, and I hate things that are warm. I’m going out to play now, Master!"
"Go on."
Ye Xuan stretched lazily and stepped out of the bamboo house.
Today, the Ye Family was no longer divided into main and branch courtyards. Everyone lived together in the same communal area. Ye Xuan’s bamboo house sat in the very center, making it look like the moon surrounded by a sky full of stars.
"Young Master, are you planning to go out?" Hua’s voice suddenly rang out.
"I was indeed thinking of going out. This place is great, but we have almost no contact with the outside world. I have no idea what the current situation is out there, or if the City Lords of the One-Star Cities are still searching for me."
"Young Master, how about I go out and gather some intelligence?"
"You?"
"Yes. I can swap my mask for a bamboo hat with a veil. That way, no one will recognize my identity, and I’ll be perfectly safe."
"That works. Go see what the situation is."
"I’ll be taking my leave then, Young Master."
Hua turned and walked down the stone steps one by one. The stairway snaked downwards like a long dragon, spiraling all the way from the summit to the foot of the mountain.
This Big Mountain was truly easy to defend and incredibly difficult to attack. Unless one could fly, scaling the mountain was a near-impossible task.
"Sigh... Since there’s nothing else to do, I might as well continue comprehending Arrays," Ye Xuan muttered to himself, heading back to the rear cliff to resume his study.
The rest of the Ye Family was also in deep, rigorous seclusion. After the siege by a million Cultivators, every single one of them had made raising their cultivation their utmost priority. They were visibly more frantic and ruthless when assaulting their Hidden Veins than ever before.
In the past, they would stop as soon as the pain became unbearable, choosing to try again next time. Now, however, unless they physically couldn’t hold on any longer—unless they were on the verge of fainting—they refused to give up. Only after experiencing true despair and agony would people be driven to push past their limits.
Time flowed on. Seventeen days had passed since the fifty Sub-City Lords first set out.
Ye Xuan’s name was now the talk of the entire realm. His fame hadn’t faded in the slightest; instead, every Cultivator in the region was hanging onto his every move.
"It’s been seventeen days! Is Ye Xuan still alive? There hasn’t been any news confirming his death."
"No news is the best news! It means Ye Xuan is definitely still breathing. If he was dead, whichever city managed to kill him would have announced it to the whole world by now."