"Here, have this. I'm sure its taste will suit a youngster like you;"
"Mhm;"
Old Man Wang took out a brand new bottle of wine before passing it on to Di Tanxue.
Silently gulping down one glass after another, none of them spoke for a whole incense stick worth of time.
For Di Tanxue it was his first time drinking alcohol as such he did not appear much fond of its bitter taste and yet gazing at the face reflected in the old man's eyes, he let it all flow down his throat.
What was visible in Old Man Wang's eyes was an average looking middle-aged face with hollow cheeks, sunken eye sockets and facial skin clinging tightly to the skull. In brief, it was the face of a person starving for months.
At first glance one might not notice anything strange only to be left shocked witnessing a horrifying visual the very next moment as countless blood-red maggots of minute size crawled out from underneath the facial skin, covering it completely!
Seemingly stunned at first, the maggots looked around in confusion and instinctively tried to extract themselves from the facial skin. Most did not succeed, yet the few who did soon found their bodies decomposing at an absurd rate.
Fortunately or unfortunately for them, before they could decompose completely, their bodies transformed themselves into thin tentacles of blood and returned back to the face burrowing deep and crawling inside like a cluster of earthworms.
Taking this as a signal, the remaining maggots stuck to the face crawled back inside and everything returned back to normal except that the middle-aged face was nowhere to be found as it had been replaced by a young face of a man with heroic bearing.
A few moments and a couple mouthfuls of wine more and the maggots crawled out once again, repeating the earlier process with eerie and spine-chilling similarity. Once again the face experienced a change, morphing into an old man with gentle air.
Within a short incense stick worth of time this process occurred a total of twenty times and no individual facial appearance was repeated for a single instance. Yes, this ever-changing display of horror was indeed Di Tanxue's own face.
And it was not just his face alone, his entire body beneath the cloak was part of this gory phenomenon of 'Identity Crisis'.
A monster among monstrosities; an elder among Phantoms of Past; A thousand year Pilgrim.
This was the price an insignificant ant like him needed to repay for defying death itself.
"...So, how did you figure it out?"
Having finished the bottle of wine, Di Tanxue waited for a moment and chose to break the silence first.
"Heh, how can I not when you so generously provided me with all the clues. Hahaha… your anchor, you clearly have no idea what it signifies;"
Seemingly very amused with the current situation, once Old Man Wang started laughing he could not stop for the next few breaths of time.
"You, young man, which stage is your cultivation base at? Is it second, third or… no fourth and above is out of question;"
The old man did not wait for Di Tanxue to answer as he already had an inkling in his mind.
"Second stage…. a second stage Mortal Transcendence cultivator with a fully developed anchor, talk about a monkey with a sword;
Hehehe, those so-called geniuses of the Central Continent will surely die from jealousy if they ever hear of this.
Oh Little Tian, I can't wait to break it to you. This person you've been calling your elder so affectionately is actually a second stage just like you!
Ah, I can't waste such a fun opportunity!"
The old man mumbled with a malevolent expression and a delusional smile imagining how hilarious Young Master Xu Tian's reactions would be.
This was completely opposed to the otherworldly grace he had shown back in the carriage. If the impression he gave when meditating was akin to a banished Immortal, then right now he was nothing but a drunk lunatic raving endlessly.
To have a bodyguard like this, one could not help wondering what sins Young Master Xu Tian had committed in his past life.
"How pitiful. Young Master Xu, you have my condolences;"
Di Tanxue felt truly compassionate about Young Master Xu Tian's misfortune and decided to be a bit more considerate towards him from henceforth.
He did not waste any more time with needless thoughts and recalled the old man's words from earlier. Di Tanxue obviously did not take those words at face value but they did seem to contain some truth.
It was most likely Di Tanxue's open demonstration of his anchor that enabled Old Man Wang to guess his current physical state.
How exactly did the old man do it? Di Tanxue could not say for certain, after all he was just a little second stage cultivator of the Mortal Transcendence realm and was thus an ignorant newbie compared to the old man.
All that he could do was to inspect his anchor in great detail with the hopes of finding the smallest of clues possible.
There inside his lower dantian space, suspended in the void above a large pond of blood essence was a three-section rocky pillar with eye-catching engravings adorning its upper and lower sections while the middle section had just a plain rocky surface.
This pillar was no other than Di Tanxue's anchor, the culmination and collective of everything that represented his being and his very existence.
As for the engravings on his anchor, they were the ancestral engravings that one inherited naturally and gradually in their path of cultivation depending upon their main element among many other factors.
Di Tanxue had two engraving.
The first engraving, the one on the upper section depicted a humongous feline Beast with an arrogant smile amidst shattering earth and a crumbling heavens.
The engraving gave off the impression that even if heavens or earth were to cease their existence one day, the feline Beast would still remain standing tall with an intact body and soul!
The second engraving, the one in the bottom, was of a world of soul-scorching hellfire, catastrophic rain and apocalyptic tornadoes. Within this world of disasters wandered the busy figures of a myriad of zealots, searching fervently for their site of pilgrimage.
They were on a pilgrimage of thousand years and nothing, not even death, had the qualification to stop it!
But then again, if even death was ineffective against them how can a mere anchor of a second stage Mortal Transcendence cultivator keep them confined?
If seen intently, it was possible to notice slight cracks all around these figures appearing as if they might jump out of the engraving at any moment.
Di Tanxue gazed intently at his anchor looking for anything that might appear suspicious, but in all honesty he was sure there was nothing to be found.
From the moment his anchor had newly formed nearly one month ago till now, not a day passed without him taking a look at his anchor; if there was anything to be found, he would've long since discovered it.
Letting out a sigh, Di Tanxue's gaze involuntarily shifted towards the engraving of pilgrimage in the lower section of his anchor.
Those cracks, with each passing day the cracks on the lower section of his anchor were spreading wider. If this were to continue, within a few months these pilgrims might truly break out of the engraving.
And no, not in a figurative sense but literally. They, after all, were outsiders inside Di Tanxue's body. A myriad of souls of the dead trapped within a single vessel, a single body.
They were not a true part of Di Tanxue's anchor…. Reaching this point in his thoughts, a hint of realisation formed in his mind — these pilgrims, they might have been the ones to give away his identity.
It was common knowledge that engravings on an anchor were a personal secret one couldn't see without the owner's explicit permission as such the old man would've not noticed these engravings but…
Bang!
Di Tanxue felt a soul-numbing sensation of danger course through his body as his vision instinctively returned back to reality!