“Stop right there…”
Li Zuoquan’s words made me freeze. I hadn’t found the so-called Kan position yet. I was skilled in Yin Gua techniques, and although I had dabbled in Bagua, I generally treated it as idle reading, never studying it carefully.
Mastering Bagua is easy to learn but difficult to perfect. I had only grasped a rough outline, and finding the so-called Kan position wouldn’t happen in a moment. If I stepped into a death ‘gate’ by mistake, I wouldn’t even have a place to cry.
I raised my hands high, feigning innocence, while secretly searching for the Kan position.
The full name of Bagua should be the Fuxi Innate Sixty-Four Hexagrams. The Innate Fuxi Eight Trigrams Array was created by Emperor Fuxi, one of the Three Sovereigns. Because it could discern the yin and yang of heaven and earth and deduce all things in the world, it was greatly reduced by Fuxi to thirty-two hexagrams when it was passed down.
Despite this, during the great battle between the Yellow Emperor and Chi You, the thirty-two hexagrams helped the Yellow Emperor slay Chi You on the battlefield, dismember him, and suppress him with the array, preventing his resurrection.
Later, when the Yellow Emperor passed it down, he felt that the thirty-two acquired hexagrams were too heaven-defying, so he reduced them to the Innate Eight Trigrams. Even so, it benefited future generations immensely, still possessing the power to alter one’s destiny.
It wasn’t until the Three Kingdoms period that Zhuge Liang, using the momentum of the Innate Eight Trigrams, deduced the Acquired Eight Trigrams, which is the Bagua array diagram, allowing it to be passed down to the world. Bagua is simple to learn but difficult to master.
As the saying goes, you regret not studying when the time comes to use it. I felt that way now. Why had I only studied Yin Gua? Why hadn’t I studied Bagua more back then? I regretted it!
Strange, I’d been thinking for quite some time, but why hadn’t Li Zuoquan caught up yet?
The main gate was only tens of meters from the throne. With his strength, he could reach it in the blink of an eye. Since he called out for me to stop, several breaths must have passed, yet he hadn’t flown to me.
I cautiously looked back.
*Pfft—*
“What are you doing? Are you performing a stunt?”
Li Zuoquan was incredibly comical at this moment. His body was spread out like a character, and he was still at the main gate, striking a pose as if flying. He looked like a skydiver or a gliders athlete on television.
But his face showed a look of anxiety, and his gaze towards me was as if he wanted to devour me. However, the distance between us hadn’t shortened; instead, it remained at tens of meters.
I saw his mouth move several times, but no sound came out. Just as I was about to ask what he was saying, his voice reached my ears.
“Song Qingyun, you little turtle egg, how dare you play tricks on me? When I catch you, I’ll skin you alive and make a human skin lantern.”
Although I hadn’t attended school, I had watched some science programs on television. The speed of sound is over three hundred meters per second. According to that, I should have heard him as soon as he spoke.
But there was a delay of two to three seconds between him opening his mouth and me hearing his voice. This indicated that the distance between us should be quite far.
If I still couldn’t see that this pavilion had a problem, then I truly deserved to be killed by Li Zuoquan.
Under the illumination of the candelabra, the white mist gradually receded. The entire room was covered with patterns of Qian and Kun Eight Trigrams. The position I saw was exactly the Kan position the old man in the illusion had told me about.
“Isn’t this the Sheng Men mentioned by the old man in the illusion? Could he really be Yuan Tiangang?”
I was so shocked that I couldn’t speak. It was said that Yuan Tiangang possessed divine abilities and could predict events five hundred years before and after. However, the Tang Dynasty was over a thousand years ago. It might be possible for him to predict that I would enter the True Dragon Tomb, but to predict that I wouldn’t get lost in the Bagua array was a bit too much.
Even if a god descended to earth, they wouldn’t be so accurate, would they? Moreover, he used the Bagua to seal Li Zuoquan outside the door. If I hadn’t experienced it myself, I would have thought I was dreaming.
Knowing that it was the Bagua at work, the heavy ‘stone’ in my heart finally landed. Since Old Yuan wanted to save my life, no matter how much Li Zuoquan struggled, he couldn’t break free from Old Yuan’s restraint.
If we compared the two of them, Li Zuoquan was an insignificant mosquito, while Old Yuan was a flood dragon soaring in the sky. There was no comparison between them.
“Old man, you’re so capable, aren’t you? Why are you crawling like a turtle at the door? Crawl towards me!”
Seeing Li Zuoquan’s comical movements, I couldn’t help but mock him, and at the same time, I prepared to get closer to humiliate him further.
I took seven or eight steps forward.
Huh?
What’s going on?
Looking at the raised Kan hexagram pattern under my feet, I was stunned. I realized I was walking in place, but I had clearly taken seven or eight steps forward just now, so I couldn’t be mistaken.
To verify my guess, I took another step, then another. After stepping out of the Kan hexagram position, as I was about to take the third step, I felt my feet shake, and I reappeared in the Kan hexagram position.
Now I understood. It wasn’t that I wasn’t moving forward, but that the Bagua had teleported me back to the Kan position.
“Haha, kid, you gloated, but now you’re also trapped by the array?”
I didn’t respond to Li Zuoquan’s taunts because I thought of a problem: how to solve the issue of food and drink.
Li Zuoquan would be fine. He was a Yin soul, an old ghost, and could live for hundreds of years without eating or drinking. But I couldn’t! I could last seven days without food, but I would die of thirst in three days without water.
There was no food on me at all, and only half a bottle of water left in my bag, which was barely enough for a sip.
“Kid, stop standing there like an idiot. Let’s chat for a while and see how many days you can survive trapped here. Three days? Or seven days…”
Facing Li Zuoquan, whose eyelashes were hollow, I really didn’t have the mood to banter with him. After all, figuring out how to leave this place was more important than bantering.
With my abilities, it was harder than climbing to heaven to break this Bagua confinement array. So, the only thing I could do was to try my best to recall my conversation with the old man and see if there was anything I had overlooked.
“One must walk the Kun three, turn to the Qian two, position oneself in the Kan west three, and in the northeast position to survive…”
This was the last sentence the old man in the illusion said to me. According to this sentence, I needed to first walk the Kun three positions, then turn to the Qian position… and finally reach the Kan northeast position.
However, after entering this hall, I didn’t see the mentioned Bagua positions. Instead, I directly arrived at the Kan west position. To be honest, I walked through the mist, and somehow stumbled my way here, without even seeing any Bagua.
If it weren’t for the candlelight dispelling the white mist, I wouldn’t have seen the Bagua patterns carved with gold lines on the ground.
Gold lines?
How could I forget about this detail?