Qin Bukong and I just sat there and smoked the whole cigarette. Although Qin Bukong was still wasting tobacco this time, he was not choked again. It seems that things like tobacco are indeed people's best partners when they are upset.

Later, we burned the old wooden roots, and the eight characters on this section of the wooden roots read "Cats have nine lives, only one heart". This seems to be a strange sentence, and I don't even quite understand what the purpose of using it in Jingmen is. Qin Bukong said to me, if I didn't guess wrong, the sentence left by the person who set up the formation on this wooden root was because he felt that even if someone really broke this formation completely, the last gate would definitely be Jingmen. And leaving this sentence, the cat has nine lives and said that the first eight doors are dangerous enough to lose nine lives, and only one heart is to say that after we break the formation, we hope to maintain our original intention.

The original intention? What kind of original intention? Isn't breaking the formation and taking the soul the only original intention? Qin Bukong shrugged his shoulders and said that he didn't know either, probably because the other party knew that the general trend was gone, and hoped that we wouldn't go against the way of heaven.

When the Jingmen was opened, the Eight Gate Array was complete, and the position of the center of the formation was a cylindrical stone pillar with a size of only about three or four square meters, but a height of more than two meters. The part of the pillar near the ground is arranged around a circle of eight circular holes that go deep into the ground at equal distances. Qin Bukong gestured with the vajra peg in his hand and said, these eight holes are used to place eight vajra pegs, but we still have to bring all those vajra pegs here, and then study them carefully.

On the pillar of the stone pillar, there are still some vertical, rectangular smooth areas, counted in a circle, there are seven in total, but there are differences from the previous eight, I asked Qin Bukong if there is still one on the top of the pillar, in the soil that we have not dug up? Because this pillar is equivalent to a load-bearing function, the top and bottom are embedded in the earth and stone, respectively. Qin Bukong nodded and said that there is this possibility, but if you study it now, I am afraid it is easy to be impatient and make mistakes, so let's plan slowly, anyway, we still have more time.

On the way back, I asked Qin Bukong, how did you get this black vajra, he said that just now in the illusion, after he and Abba fought for a while, he ruthlessly used the previous vajra to "kill" Abba, and this black one fell out. His tone was light, as if he didn't want to talk more, and I also sensed that my questioning might inadvertently touch on his sadness again, and I blamed myself a little, so I kept silent.

In the following period of time, the relationship between Qin Bukong and me improved a little, it seems that there is no such nail and an eye, but it is not intimate, I think it is because he and I are deliberately keeping a distance from each other. He would still teach me things unintentionally, and unlike in the past, he would teach me not only how to memorize, but also how to sing and intolate the spells, and give me examples of how to decipher them.

I must admit that they are also teaching skills, and Qin Bukong and my master are obviously different. First of all, Qin Bukong's craftsmanship is mainly spells and witchcraft, and he doesn't seem to have any intention of teaching Gu magic to me. The biggest difference between folk magic and witchcraft and our Taoist Taoism is that it works quickly, the mantra is simple, and some mantras are some folk vernacular, plus actions and charms and other things, a combination becomes something with practical effects. The content that Master taught me in the past, although it will be very quick to use when proficient, but from unfamiliar to proficient, I must memorize some ancient sayings, at least in terms of the cost of memorization, which is higher than spells. And witchcraft is even simpler, sometimes even the spell is saved, and if you make it like this, you can achieve the effect, so Qin Bukong's craftsmanship is very fast to learn in me, a person who originally had a relatively deep metaphysical foundation.

The second difference is that the way Master taught me is mainly theory, while actual combat is the accumulation of experience. Qin Bukong would use some actual cases to ask me to dictate the method of cracking it, so as to deepen my memory, but once spells and witchcraft are abused, their counterproductive effects are much more serious than Taoism.

So in addition to studying every day, I often worked with Qin Bukong to arrange the eight collected vajra slabs according to certain rules, trying to find a combination that was most likely to open the heart of the array and take out the soul of the witch king, but I tried many ways, and in the end I still felt that I couldn't ensure that it was foolproof. So this matter was delayed for about half a month, but we didn't make any progress at all, and we didn't dare to rashly insert the vajra into it. Because another function of the Vajra was originally used to form a formation, if we make a mistake, we will not be able to set up the Eight Gate Formation again, and then break it again, I don't have so much energy to spend on this matter.

On New Year's Eve, Qin Bukong drank a lot of wine again, and I also drank a lot with him, but the difference was that we began to talk and laugh after three rounds of drinking, and he told me some anecdotes about his youth, and I told him some stories about being arrested as a feudal element in his early years, living in a mountain village, and being slept with. And that night, Ganmu joined us in the battle, and that day I found that this stupid snake had left the meat to eat, and had come to eat the beans and peanuts that we had used for wine.

When the firecrackers outside the door rang out, we realized that another year had passed. After Qin Bukong said Happy New Year to me, he went back to his room to sleep. I cleaned up the wine table, meditated on the bed for a while, and then fell into a deep sleep.

It was about three o'clock in the morning when I was woken up by a violent shaking. Confused, I was frightened, so I kicked out, but it seemed to kick someone. With an oops, I asked aloud, who was there! As a result, a man got up on the ground and said to me scoldingly, you little dog, you kick me again.

It turned out to be Qin Bukong, but I didn't understand what he was doing when he didn't sleep in the middle of the night and came to tease me. So I didn't ask angrily, what are you doing, I don't know what time it is? You don't sleep in the middle of the night, are you a thief? After saying that, I rubbed my head, I drank a little too much the first night, and now my brain is still dizzy, and my temples feel a kind of swelling pain, as if my brain is dangling in my head.

Qin Bukong turned on the light, made a "shhhh I was stunned, what the hell is it that the little couple next door is turning the clouds and rain, in and out of you and me? I said you old shameless thing, you're still so nasty when you're old...

Before he finished speaking, he was interrupted by Qin Bukong again, and he said, I felt as if something was coming from under the cave.

I was startled, and immediately turned over and got up, and quickly rushed to the inner room where Qin Bukong was sleeping. Since the hole in the ground was under his bed, when I was about to move the bed away, I was stopped by Qin Bukong, he said Are you stupid, the sound you make when you drag the bed, what if the other party hears it? I mean, who is the other party, do you mean there is someone under this cave? Qin Bukong nodded, then pointed to his bed and said, You put your ear on the bed board, the wood is sound-transmitting, so that you can hear it directly.

Only then did I realize that Qin Bukong came to me in the middle of the night to tell me this, because when he was sleeping, he was probably in a sideways position, and his ears were directly attached to the bed, so he heard a voice from below. I climbed onto the bed, endured the stench of Qin Bukong's body emitted by the dirty sheets, put my ears on the bed board, and then made the pinna fit the bed as completely as possible, then took a deep breath and began to listen carefully.

In addition to my own pounding heartbeat, I also heard the sound of an iron tool pounding on the hard stone, just like the sound made by Qin Bukong and I forcibly chiseling through the wall of the Jingmen.

Qin Bukong's bed is far from the Eight Gate Formation, if you just walk, it will take more than ten minutes, but in fact, the straight line distance is not far. It didn't sound like a big sound, but since it was night, and the underground passage itself had an echo, not to mention the sound transmission effect on the stone floor, I could hear it very clearly. It's just that if it's daytime, it's not easy to notice.

I raised my head and said to Qin Bukong, as if someone was really chiseling stones from below. Qin Bukong also said, this is too undeserved, because we have walked back and forth more than a hundred times in this passage, and there is no other entrance and exit, if there are people below, the only path is under my bed. Ask yourself, you and I are not incompetent, how can it be possible for people to sneak into it without noticing?

I nodded, I also felt strange, so I said to Qin Bukong, why don't we go and have a look? Qin Bukong said Okay, bring your Lu Ban ruler, and I will also bring Ganmu with me, let's move as lightly as possible, so as not to let the people inside notice, but it will be difficult to catch if you escape.

So I immediately went to get dressed, hung my canvas bag on my body, and changed into a pair of cloth shoes with mille-feuille soles so that I could walk quietly. I stuffed a few charms into my satchel and bumped into Lu Banchi, thinking that I had never used this trick to control the enemy, and if the people below had bad intentions, I would just give it a try today.

After preparing everything, I followed Qin Bukong and jumped into the hole in the ground one after another, in order to prevent the sound of bumping on the wall, we didn't even bring kerosene lamps, so we brought two flashlights. Familiar with the road, we soon reached the edge of the Bamen Formation with light hands, and after turning off the flashlight, the sound of chiseling stones became louder. But after touching the wall and going around, I didn't see any light.

So we thought it was strange that under this ground, we started to chisel stones without light, which was almost indistinguishable from a madman, so we felt not far from the center of the formation, and then turned on the flashlight, and carefully looked for the direction from which the sound came.

Soon, we were only about five or six meters away from the center of the formation in a straight line, and we found that the sound was coming from the stone under our feet.