"This pressure... it's from an immortal! No, even an immortal wouldn't have such a terrifying force..." Hu Shuo felt a sense of fear deep in his heart. He tried to turn around, but found that his body seemed to be out of his control, unable to move no matter how hard he tried.
Ding Yan walked slowly in from outside.
The aura of a wandering immortal was released without any concealment.
In the void, transparent traces of breath emanated from the minds of the surrounding bandits and gathered in Ding Yan's palm. As he closed his fingers, he crushed the breath. Fragmented images flashed through Ding Yan's mind. Soul-sensing technique!
"Ancestral house?" Ding Yan's eyes flashed.
Through the soul-sensing technique, Ding Yan had learned everything that had happened before, including the mysterious contents of the ancestral house. According to Hu Shuo's memory, the contents of the ancestral house should be an ancient map, possibly a treasure map.
In order to collect these ancient maps, it seemed that many important figures from the mortal world had entered. Many countries in the vicinity were searching for these kinds of ancient maps, and Hu Shuo and his group were just a small part of them.
"Who... who are you?!" Guo Er trembled.
Among the crowd, he was the only one who had seen Ding Yan's face clearly, because from the moment he was kicked away by Hu Shuo, he had been pretending to be dead on the ground. When Ding Yan entered, he was temporarily ignored, which allowed him to regain the strength to speak.
Ding Yan didn't pay attention to him, but looked up at the old man outside the ancestral house.
"I am Ding Yan, an extraordinary disciple," Ding Yan said.
The old man nodded, "I know."
"You know me?" Ding Yan was puzzled.
The old man had never left the mortal world, so it was incredible for Ding Yan to think that a mortal who had never left the mortal world would know him.
"Not that I know you, but I know you were coming. Follow me inside, and you'll understand when you get in." The old man shook his head, turned and walked towards the inner room.
Ding Yan fell silent. It turned out that the last sentence "come with me" was not addressed to Hu Shuo, but to him, who was about to appear.
"In that case, I'll go in and take a look," Ding Yan decided.
He had come here to see if Mo Jianiu's relatives were here, a way of commemorating the memories of the past. His appearance was only due to meeting Hu Shuo and his group.
He stepped up the stairs, heading towards the ancestral house. As Ding Yan walked past, a gray aura appeared on the bodies of Hu Shuo and the others. Gradually, the gray aura spread all over their bodies, and their skin color changed rapidly to the naked eye...
"My hand!!"
"What's going on? I can't move my feet!"
"There's a monster!"
"I don't want to die..."
The petrification technique, with Ding Yan's abilities, didn't even require a spell to deal with ordinary people like Hu Shuo. A simple thought was enough.
"Young people, sigh..." The old man seemed to sense something outside, stopped, turned around, as if wanting to say something, but ultimately just sighed and turned back, walking towards the inner room.
Ding Yan remained silent, following the old man's steady pace towards the mysterious ancestral house.
As for Hu Shuo and the others, through soul-sensing technique, Ding Yan knew clearly that these people each had at least ten lives in their hands. Someone like Hu Shuo had committed countless atrocities, so from the beginning, Ding Yan had no intention of letting them go.
For such people, there was no room for compassion!
…
The ancestral house was the forbidden place of Mo's village. Apart from each village head, no one knew what was inside the ancestral house.
After passing through that door, Ding Yan discovered that there was a long narrow passage behind it, with stone walls on both sides, cold to the touch. Every dozen steps or so, there was a luminous stone embedded in the wall. The cost of these luminous stones was extremely low, even commoners could afford them.
"We're here."
After about the time it takes to drink a cup of tea, the old man finally stopped.
It was a simple stone room, filled with all kinds of clutter. In the corner, there was a cushion, which seemed to be the resting place of the old man. Looking up, there were four carved portraits on the stone walls.
The content of the portraits was very simple, depicting an old Daoist sitting and meditating under a Bodhi tree. However, upon closer inspection, there were some differences.
The Daoist in the first carving seemed very cheerful. The one in the second carving seemed angry. The third one appeared to be in sorrow, and the fourth had a happy expression.
Joy, anger, sorrow, and happiness!
The four carvings represented four emotions!
Ding Yan walked over and looked at the figures in the carvings. The dress of the Daoists was very simple, in Daoist robes, with long hair and long beard, sitting under the Bodhi tree, as if in enlightenment or a spiritual journey.
After observing for a while, when Ding Yan looked at the face of the Daoist closely, he couldn't help but feel a hint of surprise. "How is it him!"
The Daoist in the stone carving was the resurrected stone figure Ding Yan had seen in Dayan Mountain not long ago!
The old man, who was rummaging for something among the clutter, heard the voice, raised his head in confusion and asked, "You know the stone Daoist?"
"The stone Daoist?" Ding Yan asked.
For this mysterious stone Daoist, Ding Yan's doubts only grew.
"No one remembers the name of this person, it's only through some remaining ancient records that he's referred to as the stone Daoist. I only know this from the oral tradition passed down by my ancestors," the old man said, then lowered his head to search for something again.
Ding Yan fell silent. There was a flash of purple in his eyes. He carefully scanned the moment on the stone wall, wanting to remember the contents. His intuition told him that these stone carvings definitely held some other significance. Strangely, after he looked away from the stone carvings, he found that his mind was completely blank when he tried to recall their contents. He had not retained a single bit of information about the carvings.
"It's definitely strange," Ding Yan said.
He waved his sleeve and took out a piece of jade. He imprinted a thread of consciousness, which merged into the jade, then another thread of elemental power directed towards the stone carvings on the wall.
Upon contact with the elemental power, there was a dazzling light emitted from the carvings on the wall. A mysterious emotion sprouted in Ding Yan's heart, seeming like joy, sorrow, and anger. However, this feeling lasted for an extremely brief moment. When Ding Yan came back to his senses, the feeling had completely disappeared, as if it had never appeared in the first place.
He looked down at the jade in his hand, and found the color of the jade had turned deep brown and, upon inspecting it with divine sense, discovered that it had formed a miniature space within.
Within the space, four paintings floated. It was the same as the four emotions depicted on the wall.
"Could it be that this is also a form of Dao art?" Ding Yan pondered as he scrutinized the jade in his hand.
Just then, the old man exclaimed, "I found it!" as he retrieved a brocade box from the clutter. With great care, he wiped off the dust from the box and then took out an ancient map from the bottom of the box, spreading it open.
Looking at the end of the ancient map, a clear line of small characters was written.
"Chu, in the year of Zhao's demise, in the eighth month of the Yuan Dynasty, a Taoist of the Ding clan entered the village, resolved a crisis, and later generations can take this box as a gift..."