Situ Shankong is my third name after Situ Qin and Situ Shan. And this name, from that time on, has followed me for the rest of my life.

That night, Qin Bukong and I drank until late at night, and then we both got drunk and slept on the table until the next day. Maybe it's because I haven't been able to change roles quickly, but when I see him, I'm still a little uncomfortable. Since that day, he has always called me by my full name "Situ Shankong", and I have never called him "Master", or even "Master Qin" and "Mr. Qin", but has always called him by his first name "Qin Bukong".

This way of getting along seems like nothing, but it actually feels strange. Fortunately, Qin Bukong is not a person who is obsessed with small things, and he has never cared about this. And from that day on, for about half a month after that, we did not rush to break the last gate of the Eight Gate Formation, the Jingmen, but repeatedly studied and imagined many possible situations. During this period, the content of the conversation between Qin Bukong and me gradually increased, and he changed from the way he used to ignore me, but told me his thoughts and his coping strategies after encountering this situation in as much detail as possible.

I know that this is probably what he means by "not deliberately teaching", people's thirst for knowledge is infinite and uncontrollable, although there is still some rejection in my heart, but what he said, I can't help but secretly memorize. In addition, during this period, he personally hand-wrote a mantra of "passing the Fa", which included his name and my name, and asked me to keep it firmly in mind, because only in this way can I be regarded as having passed his Dharma lineage, otherwise, it would be useless to only remember the tricks.

It seemed to be going very slowly, and there was no opportunity for me to practice. In addition, the master once said that Qin Bukong was a master of Gu use, but during this period, Qin Bukong did not reveal any of the techniques in this regard. Whenever I asked him if the bell in his hand was a "Gu Bell", he avoided the question in a different way, as if he was deliberately not answering me.

Just studying slowly and slowly studying the breaking formation, I am still using everything that Master taught me. One night at the end of the year, Qin Bukong told me to rest early tonight, and before the fifth watch tomorrow, we will start to break the formation.

I was a little puzzled at the time, could it be that quietly, Qin Bukong had already thought of a countermeasure to break the formation? But I'm still confused! Qin Bukong said that in this Jingmen array, the main thing is blood, disaster, life and death. These aspects are the most important, so the ghosts they gather must also be related to the thorns. We have already seen blood injuries when we hurt the door, if it is such a ghost, we can deal with it, and when we chiseled the door that day, the reaction that appeared in the back also made people feel that it seemed to have little to do with blood injuries, and it should be regarded as a warning to our broken formation, which means that if we continue to do it, we may have disaster or life and death.

Qin Bukong glanced at me and said, this calamity is needless to say, maybe this array is simply a self-destructing mechanism, if we forcibly break through, it may cause the collapse of the entire formation, so that the two of us will become living fossils and be buried in the ground for a long time, the soul of the thousand-year-old witch king, don't even think about it, so this is the next policy, and we will never do this. On the contrary, it is still unknown what the specific meaning of life and death means.

I said casually, what I don't know, there are just you and me present, the so-called life and death parting, nothing more than the meaning that you and I must die. Qin Bukong was stunned for a moment, and then snorted coldly and said, maybe, but it is not a parting of life and death, I am dead, I am afraid that it is too late for you to be happy, you are dead, I have nothing to be sad and sad, how can I talk about life and death? I didn't know what to say, so I was silent.

Qin Bukong continued, after you were numbed once last time, I blessed my body with a spell, although it will still be very numb, but it is not completely unbearable. If we bless all the talisman spells once, and then we both dig the door together, we may be able to withstand it. I said, what if you resist it? Didn't you say it, this may be a mechanism, and when you dig through the door, maybe the whole thing will collapse. Qin Bukong said, even so, we can only try slowly, and when we feel that something is wrong, we will immediately stop and think of a way.

Although Qin Bukong's words sound very unreliable to me, it seems that this is the only way to go. Although I helped Qin Bukong break the formation at the beginning, it was because of my promise to my master, but now that there is only one door left, I really don't want to give up, so it is imperative to break the formation.

So I went to bed early that night, and before going to bed, I prepared all the necessary supplies that might be used the next day in advance, and of course, most of them were mainly things handed down from the master's side. I have just touched the door of Qin Bukong's craftsmanship, and it seems that it is too early to say that it is used in actual combat.

Five watches, converted into time, that is, around five o'clock in the morning, the hour corresponds to the hour. For those of us who want to enter the tunnels, it's all pitch black anyway, and there is practically no difference between day and night. As for choosing this time to enter the tunnel, Qin Bukong's explanation is that if the twelve hours of a day correspond to a person's life, the time of Mao should be the period of people's youth, that is, the time when they are most energetic and energetic. The time before the time is the time of Yin, and the time of Yin happens to be the hour of the transformation of yin and yang in the twelve hours. From the beginning of the Yin period, the yang energy rises, and when it comes to the Mao time, there is a dry hexagram, a redemption hexagram, four yang and two yin, and the yang energy is full of positive feet, and in such a state we enter the underground, and then have the blessing of various mantras, protect ourselves, and try to be foolproof.

In order to make the light more sufficient, I even brought an extra kerosene lamp, and when I got to the wall outside the gate, Qin Bukong and I each blessed all the spells that could be used as a protective body, and also blessed each other, and suddenly felt that the body was radiant and inviolable. The premise of the Breaking Gate Array is to first find the "door" of the Gate, and this gate is behind the sealed wall in front of us.

After blessing myself, I also deliberately placed a small semicircular array with rice in the range where we were standing, surrounding me and Qin Bukong in the middle. Although Qin Bukong disdains my craft, he doesn't stop it, the situation is unknown now, anyway, it's better to use it than to be in a hurry at that time. After arranging the rice array, I also sent soldiers and horses to protect the five sides of the rice array, my soldiers and horses are obviously not the opponents of the ghosts in this array, and they will suffer a lot of losses because of this, so Qin Bukong also shook the bell and let his Gu Bell Snake surround my soldiers and horses and the rice array.

In this way, the entire range we were locked in had almost become an iron bucket array, and Qin Bukong also said frankly that if even this kind of protection measure could be broken through, then we should not expect to be able to break the formation, and we would backfill this hole in the dust. He seemed to be talking casually, but he could feel that this was his last resort. We were just shooting birds and trying to be as prepared as possible, just like in the old days when we built a wall, stubbornly believing that the higher and thicker we built, the safer the city-state would be.

After everything was ready, Qin Bukong took out two candles, lit them on the left and on the right, and placed them on both sides of the wall. We all know that no matter what form a ghost takes and how powerful it becomes, its root is always the gathering of energy. The wax oil of candles was used to seal jars in ancient times, and in some areas in the north where there is a custom of underworld marriage, wax oil is even used to seal the seven orifices of the dead, which shows that wax oil has a certain blockade and isolation effect on substances such as ghosts. And the flame of the candle is very sensitive, once the surrounding airflow changes, the flame will quickly become bright and dark, for me and Qin Bukong to concentrate on digging the door, the light and shade, to a certain extent, has become one of the criteria for us to judge whether the ghost has approached or appeared.

I stood on the left, Qin Bukong stood on the right, we pressed the sharp end of the chisel against the stone wall, raised the mountain axe with our right hand, looked at each other and made a look, and smashed the axe down. The mood at that moment was indescribable, as if I was being chased by a beast, there was no way to choose except to run forward, and because I couldn't turn back, I only felt a sense of urgency similar to an itch coming from my whole back. But when the chisel went down, a little spark from the violent friction came from the stone wall, and I didn't feel anything unusual about my body.

This shows that our plan has initially succeeded, and in the excitement, Qin Bukong and I began to quickly chisel the door one after another, and after about twenty minutes, the flame of the candle still flickered faintly, and Qin Bukong said to me Don't stop, I can hold on for a while, so I increased my speed and strength again. I am young and strong, the stone wall on my side was the first to be chiseled out of a big gap, only there is a gap, the rest is like knocking stones, little by little can peel off along the edge of the gap, and Qin Bukong and I started up and down, boom, the stone wall in front of me seemed to be knocked by us to a fatal weakness, and collapsed.

The flame of the candle was disturbed by the collapse of the stone, but after a few seconds, it was calm again. This means that even the ghosts who want to harm us have given up on continuing to attack us at this moment, at least temporarily. Instead of removing the formation, one of us carried a kerosene lamp and drilled into it in front and back.

As expected, there was a door about ten meters behind the stone wall we had chiseled through. There was only a doorway, no door, and through the doorway, I could faintly see a figure standing with his back to me.