The Corpse Summoning Ritual

Two days after leaving the Sand Thunder Tribe, Hao Nhien rarely stopped anywhere for long. During the day, he rode the Tieu Dao Sword across the endless dunes of the Western Wastes, and only when his spiritual power had been depleted too far would he search for a sheltered ravine or a small oasis hidden among the rocks, summon the Cosmic Ark, and enter it to regulate his breathing.

Since completing the rite at the altar, the connection between him and the Fire Qilin Jade had deepened considerably. The jade remained within his Sea of Consciousness, and whenever Hao Nhien circulated his cultivation method to recover, a portion of the pure Fire spiritual qi stored within it would flow through his meridians, making the recovery process steadier and faster than before.

Even so, the power contained within the Fire Qilin Jade was not limitless.

Whenever Hao Nhien drew out too much Fire spiritual qi in succession, the red radiance surrounding the jade would gradually dim. For it to recover fully, he still had to absorb spiritual qi from heaven and earth, refine it through his own cultivation, and allow the Fire Qilin Jade to replenish itself over time. Because of that, he never treated the jade as an inexhaustible source of spiritual power.

After each long stretch of travel, a relatively brief period of recovery inside the Cosmic Ark was enough to restore sufficient spiritual power for him to continue onward. The improvement was obvious, but it was nowhere near enough for him to disregard rest or expend his strength carelessly.

By the second night, less than half a day of sword flight remained between his current position and Tam Thành's forward camp.

A crescent moon hung low in the sky, its pale light nearly swallowed by a layer of gray clouds. Hao Nhien chose a deserted slope between two low ridges of sand and decided to rest briefly before continuing through the night.

There were no human footprints nearby, nor any trace of powerful spirit beasts. Only a few clumps of dry grass grew close to the rock face, scattered among jagged stones that had been worn down by countless years of wind and sand.

Hao Nhien landed on a relatively flat slab of rock, put away the Tieu Dao Sword, and sat cross-legged.

Two continuous days of sword flight had left both his meridians and spiritual awareness somewhat fatigued, but the long journey had also helped him grow increasingly familiar with the strength of Foundation Establishment layer four. After entering mid Foundation Establishment, the amount of spiritual power within his body had increased greatly, yet what Hao Nhien needed now was not to force his cultivation higher again. He needed to make every part of that new strength something he could use naturally.

He closed his eyes and slowly circulated his cultivation method.

The Fire Qilin Jade stirred faintly within his Sea of Consciousness. A warm current of Fire spiritual qi flowed down through his meridians and blended into the spiritual power circulating throughout his body. Hao Nhien did not draw out too much, using only the high compatibility between the jade and his Fire affinity to soothe the meridians that had been strained by prolonged sword flight.

At the same time, his sensitivity to subtle changes in the surrounding air had become sharper than before. Two days spent continuously standing on the Tieu Dao Sword and adjusting its path according to shifting currents had refined his perception of the Wind affinity even further. He made no attempt to force Wind and Fire together, instead allowing each to follow its own nature while gradually learning to control both with greater precision.

Time passed quietly.

When Hao Nhien opened his eyes again, the crescent moon had disappeared behind the clouds, leaving only a handful of scattered stars overhead. His spiritual power had recovered enough for him to continue, and the tension in his meridians had also faded.

He stood, rolled his shoulders lightly, and looked east.

If nothing delayed him, he could travel through the night and reach the forward camp before dawn fully broke.

The Tieu Dao Sword had only just flown out of his storage ring when Hao Nhien suddenly stopped.

His gaze shifted toward the foot of a low mountain in the distance. Beyond two ridges of sand, a point of fire had appeared in the darkness.

At first, the light was no larger than a bean, but it quickly grew brighter. What caught Hao Nhien's attention was not its size but the way the flame behaved in the night wind. It barely leaned beneath the gusts sweeping across the desert, and its color was noticeably darker than that of an ordinary campfire.

At least twenty or thirty figures were moving around it. Some stood along the outer perimeter as if keeping watch, while the others repeatedly carried heavy objects from several wagons toward the center.

Every movement was orderly.

Hao Nhien narrowed his eyes slightly.

If they were Lieu Thien Van's people stationed nearby, there should at least have been banners, identifying marks, or visible defensive formations. He saw none of those things. The site did not resemble a merchant caravan stopping for the night, nor did it look like a group of nomads resting by chance.

Hao Nhien withdrew the Tieu Dao Sword.

His aura immediately sank as low as he could suppress it.

The Spirit Wings opened slightly behind him, allowing him to glide close to the surface of the sand as he moved along the low ridges of stone from upwind. He did not rise high into the air, nor did he sweep the area directly with his spiritual awareness. Anyone bold enough to carry out something secret this close to the forward camp was unlikely to be ordinary, and a careless probe could expose him at once.

When he was about two hundred zhang away, Hao Nhien slowed deliberately.

He circled around a narrow rocky cleft and settled behind a large boulder standing above the surrounding sand. From there, he could look down toward the area at the foot of the mountain without revealing himself.

Dark-red firelight flickered through the night.

Hao Nhien counted more carefully and quickly determined that there were thirty-six people around the ritual site. Most wore ash-gray cloaks with hoods covering nearly all of their faces. None bore any clear markings belonging to a tribe of the Western Wastes, nor did they display the banners of Heavenly Eye or Tam Thành.

Four large wagons covered in black cloth stood farther out. The coverings were tightly bound, but whenever the wind passed through, the long rectangular shapes beneath became visible, resembling stone coffins or large containers made to hold corpses.

A cold, rancid smell drifted toward him on the wind.

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Hao Nhien frowned.

It did not smell like fresh blood. It was closer to flesh that had been kept far too long in a damp place.

At the center of the group stood a tall man in a black robe that nearly brushed the ground. He held a black bone staff, its head mounted with a small skull that Hao Nhien could not tell belonged to a human or a spirit beast. Two murky red gems had been set into the eye sockets, reflecting the firelight in a way that made them look as though they were bleeding.

The man's aura was around mid Foundation Establishment, but it fluctuated in an unusually unstable manner. At times it rose sharply, then weakened again, almost as if several different streams of power were overlapping within his body.

Besides him, Hao Nhien sensed two early Foundation Establishment cultivators stationed near the wagons. The remaining thirty-three were mostly at mid or late Qi Condensation.

Three Foundation Establishment cultivators alongside more than thirty Qi Condensation cultivators were already enough to make this force impossible to dismiss, regardless of what they intended to do.

Hao Nhien continued watching.

The gray-cloaked figures began carrying the long objects covered in black cloth into a circle almost ten zhang across. Once the coverings were removed, eight gray-black stone coffins were revealed one by one. Twisted markings resembling dead, withered roots had been carved into each coffin, their overlapping lines creating an unsettling pattern.

When the final coffin was placed into position, all thirty-six people stopped almost simultaneously.

No one gave an order.

Each person moved to a predetermined position, forming three layers around the center of the ritual. The precision of their movements made it clear that this was far from the first time they had performed it.

The man holding the staff stepped into the middle of the circle.

He raised the bone staff overhead and drove it into the sand.

A dull impact sounded.

The sand inside the ritual area trembled at once. From the point where the staff struck the ground, thin black lines spread outward and connected to each of the stone coffins.

The remaining thirty-five people dropped to one knee, clasped their hands before their chests, and lowered their heads.

The chanting began.

At first the sound was faint, but it soon grew denser. The language was unlike the common tongue of the Western Wastes and did not resemble anything Hao Nhien had heard in the Eastern Plains either. Each syllable was drawn out, rough and distorted, as if the words were being forced through a throat that had long since dried and hardened.

The fire at the center abruptly changed color.

The orange-red flames gradually darkened into deep violet, then stopped rising upward and began curling back toward the ground, as though something beneath the sand were drawing them in.

Hao Nhien sensed the surrounding spiritual qi being pulled toward the circle.

Yet the movement was entirely different from ordinary cultivation.

The moment the spiritual qi entered the region illuminated by the violet fire, it rapidly turned cold and acquired a gloomy, oppressive quality that was unpleasant even from such a distance.

Several of the lower-level cultivators inside the circle began to sway. They lifted their heads, their eyes slowly rolling white as their mouths opened and thin streams of black smoke seeped from their throats.

The smoke did not disperse into the air. Instead, it twisted around the three layers of cultivators before entering the mouths and noses of others.

One person exhaled while another drew it in.

The streams of sinister qi circulated among all thirty-six people, gradually linking the entire ritual into a single whole.

A faint chill ran across Hao Nhien's scalp.

Although he still did not understand the full mechanism, he could already tell that this was some form of sinister art involving corpses and resentment.

He focused his mind on the Tieu Dao Encyclopedia.

Records concerning forbidden arts and corpse control quickly surfaced in his memory. The method of drawing resentment, using corpses as vessels, and circulating sinister qi through multiple cultivators closely resembled a branch of Yin Soul sorcery recorded within it.

According to what Hao Nhien remembered, such rituals typically used corpses as mediums, resentment and Yin qi as fuel, then forcibly drove bodies that had already lost all vitality to continue moving under the control of the practitioner.

As he compared those records with what lay before him, the sand beneath the ritual circle began to crack.

At first there were only a few thin fissures, but they spread quickly. A darkness as dense as ink appeared inside the cracks, followed by gaunt hands slowly reaching out from beneath the sand.

Shriveled fingers clawed at the ground.

Dry joints scraped against one another with brittle cracking sounds.

A head emerged first, followed by shoulders, chest, and finally an entire body.

Rotting corpses slowly crawled out from beneath the sand.

Some were missing half their faces, others had lost an arm, and a few still wore fragments of old armor with broken arrows lodged in their chests. None of them howled or groaned. They simply moved beneath the control of the sinister qi while sand continually spilled from their decaying flesh.

Their numbers quickly rose beyond several dozen.

Most gave off a presence comparable only to early or mid Qi Condensation, but these bodies had lost all vitality and no longer knew pain or fear. Even if they posed limited danger to Foundation Establishment cultivators once fully refined, they could become extremely troublesome against ordinary soldiers on a battlefield.

Hao Nhien immediately thought of the front line ahead.

Any place where large numbers of bodies were left behind after battle would be ideal ground for this kind of sorcery.

His gaze gradually turned cold.

If the people below were merely testing a small ritual, the consequences were already disturbing enough. If they intended to bring this method onto the battlefield, the implications would be entirely different.

Hao Nhien looked again at the eight stone coffins.

Their lids were trembling in steady intervals.

The corpses crawling from the sand were probably still not the most dangerous part of the ritual.

According to the records in the Tieu Dao Encyclopedia, large-scale corpse-control rituals often kept their main vessels separate until the later stages. The eight coffins were directly connected to the formation lines and had remained sealed from the beginning, making it highly likely that whatever lay inside them was the true core of the ritual.

Hao Nhien did not act immediately.

Three Foundation Establishment cultivators, more than thirty people sustaining the ritual, dozens of corpses already raised from the sand, and eight coffins whose contents remained unknown made reckless action unnecessary and dangerous.

If he rushed down without understanding the formation, he could easily trap himself inside an encirclement he had no reason to enter.

His gaze shifted toward the black lines running across the ground.

Most of the formation patterns originated from the bone staff and connected toward the coffins, but before reaching those eight positions, every line passed through a low stone platform behind the fire.

The platform stood only about half a man's height, with a ring of dark-purple runes carved across its surface. Each time the chanting intensified, those runes brightened once.

Hao Nhien focused on the records that had surfaced from the Tieu Dao Encyclopedia.

An object known as a Blood Yin Disc closely matched the structure before him. In many sinister formations, it served as a relay point for channeling and distributing resentment. If destroyed while the ritual was still active, the entire flow of sinister qi could recoil into the cultivators maintaining the formation.

That did not mean breaking it would always be safe.

If the primary vessel was already close to awakening, the backlash could cause all the accumulated Yin qi to erupt rather than disperse.

Hao Nhien watched the eight coffins shake with increasing force.

There was little time left.

If he withdrew to report the discovery and waited for reinforcements, the ritual might already be complete by the time he returned, and the group could have disappeared entirely.

Yet he could not simply charge down while still unaware of what lay inside those coffins.

Hao Nhien tightened his hand slightly and took out a Message Talisman that Lieu Thien Van had given him earlier.

The talisman was meant for emergency communication with the forward camp.

He infused spiritual power into it and sent a short message through his intent.

“I have discovered more than thirty sinister cultivators performing a corpse-control ritual northwest of the forward camp, roughly half a day away by sword flight. There are three Foundation Establishment cultivators and eight unopened stone coffins. I will continue observing and try to delay the ritual.”

Light flashed across the talisman before quickly fading.

Hao Nhien did not know how quickly the signal would reach the forward camp from this distance, but at least the message had been sent.

He put the talisman away.

Below, the chanting had grown heavier.

One of the eight coffins shook so violently that its stone lid shifted open by a narrow gap.

Hao Nhien lowered himself behind the boulder, his gaze fixed on the three layers of cultivators sustaining the ritual.

If he wanted to break the formation without immediately causing all of the sinister qi to spiral out of control, he first needed to disrupt the people maintaining it.

And this time, he had no intention of appearing directly in front of them.