Chapter 145

The man surnamed Xie on the main platform began waving the command flag in his hand.

Strands of black qi kept rising from below, gathering into the black vortex and making it larger and denser.

Li Zhuiyuan noticed that the man surnamed Xie was not casting a spell. He was only guiding it.

The curse cloud overhead had nothing to do with him in essence.

Perhaps because the curse power on the people around him was being drawn out and gathered upward, they temporarily became a little less “unseeable.”

At the very least, when Li Zhuiyuan deliberately turned his head and his gaze nearly took in the person seated to his side, the intense warning in his heart did not arise, and his eyelids no longer twitched.

Though it was still dangerous, Li Zhuiyuan kept turning his head and looked at that person.

For the first time, he saw him clearly.

He wore a black robe and looked to be nearing forty. Even though his face was pale as snow, it still could not hide the resolute lines of his features.

He was clearly someone who had died long ago, yet he still radiated uprightness.

It felt deeply out of place, and yet it truly existed.

Because this man, centuries ago, had come here in a blaze of righteous fervor, shouting slogans, to suppress the General and avert a catastrophe.

A person like that, even after death, could still command respect.

At that moment, his eyelids were lowered, and his hands were forming seals.

He...

was casting a spell.

Li Zhuiyuan shifted his gaze away and openly looked at the others.

The people present were dressed mostly in four colors, representing the four families of the Old Heavenly Gate.

They were the elite of that generation of the Old Heavenly Gate’s four families. Otherwise, they would never have been chosen to fight alongside the Dragon King.

Xiong Shan and the others had once investigated the story of that year, and through Lihua, Li Zhuiyuan had also pieced together the general outline of what happened back then.

All he knew was that after that battle, that “important figure,” the Dragon King of the Qin Clan, vanished from the jianghu.

Li Zhuiyuan suspected that Dragon King of the Qin Clan was Qin Kan, because Qin Kan also happened to be from the Yuan dynasty.

If it were another family’s genealogy, that would have settled it.

For example, in the Yin Clan genealogy, whenever it spoke of ancestral glory, there was no need for thought or doubt at all. Turn to the first page, and it would definitely be the work of Yin Changsheng.

But the Qin Clan was different. They had produced too many Dragon Kings. Even though the Yuan dynasty was short-lived, there was no guarantee the Qin Clan had not produced more than one generation of Dragon King during that time.

As for why that Dragon King of the Qin Clan disappeared afterward, whether he was too badly wounded in that battle to appear again, whether he had grown weary of the jianghu and chosen to retire, or whether the next generation in the family was about to emerge and he could finally rest, there was no way to know.

But when the Dragon King made his move, he brought the Old Heavenly Gate’s four families with him. And when they sealed the General, he even had Xie Niudao offer his own blood relatives as sacrifice to complete the seal on the General.

That alone was enough to show just how difficult the General had been to deal with back then.

Sometimes it was not a matter of being unable to defeat something. Some malevolent spirits were simply truly hard to kill.

In short, that battle had been brutal. Just by counting the number of people seated here, one could tell that nearly all the backbone of the four great corpse retriever families had fallen in this place.

And now, everyone present was doing exactly the same thing.

All of them were forming seals. All of them were casting spells.

Those wisps of curse power were gathering upward in precisely this way.

At first, Li Zhuiyuan had suspected that the man surnamed Xie had turned them into puppets.

But Li Zhuiyuan quickly dismissed that guess.

If the man surnamed Xie were truly that capable, he would not still be holed up here.

He would have gone out and sought revenge on those three families himself long ago.

So they were not puppets, or at least not under the control of the man surnamed Xie.

Next, Li Zhuiyuan began observing whether they possessed self-awareness.

The environment here was very similar to the one he had once seen with Cat-faced Granny.

Cat-faced Granny had once used the paper effigies, tables, chairs, pots, and bowls on Taigong’s first floor to set up a birthday banquet.

Only, no matter what, this was still the General, someone who had once drawn the Dragon King himself to come suppress him. Comparing him to a village corpse demon that had only recently taken shape was simply too insulting to the General.

This place was, in fact, the General’s own “miasma.” Here, using the resentment of himself, his burial companions, and those who had died in battle, he had created a special environment that belonged solely to him.

The maidservants, eunuchs, Yuan soldiers, and mounted riders they had seen on the way in, all those various phantoms, were in fact the General’s thralls, because they existed by relying on him.

But that did not mean all thralls were under absolute control.

Take Little Oriole from back home, for example. Xiao Yingying, who was now working at Taigong’s house, was actually the thrall of the one beneath the peach tree, but Little Oriole’s style of doing things was completely independent.

So did these people here, the ones forming seals and casting spells, possess autonomy?

Li Zhuiyuan was in the banquet hall right now and had no idea that outside, Zhuangzhuang, acting as the Dragon King, had already bribed the eunuch and smoothed everything over.

If he had known, he would have been able to confirm that the thralls here, these “people,” all retained a portion of self-awareness and were not puppets controlled by the General.

Li Zhuiyuan could only analyze it from the General’s state. For a General who was already nearing his end, putting on a shadow play for himself at a time like this seemed rather meaningless.

Then, while the man surnamed Xie on the main platform turned to face another direction, Li Zhuiyuan shoved aside the scarecrow beside him, raised a hand, and waved at the person next to him. Although the man continued casting his spell, his eyes beneath lowered lids actually flicked toward Li Zhuiyuan.

He had self-awareness.

Li Zhuiyuan pushed the scarecrow aside again and looked around.

All around him, while continuing to cast their spells, everyone gave him a slight glance.

They all had self-awareness.

Li Zhuiyuan hugged the scarecrow again, shock showing in his eyes. They knew what they were doing.

These ancestors of the Old Heavenly Gate’s four families, especially the ones from those three families who had died suppressing the General, were acting with full self-awareness...

and they were casting spells

on their descendants of the present age.

They had once fought side by side here. When Xie Niudao made the decision to sacrifice his family’s future in order to complete the seal on the General, they had sworn an oath together: the families would watch over one another and share life and death alike.

It was a guarantee given to Xie Niudao, so that the family that had made the greatest sacrifice would not utterly decline in later years.

But how much power did an ancestor’s oath really have over later descendants?

The effect of an oath largely depended on the people involved.

And the facts indeed bore that out. After that battle, the surviving members of Xie Niudao’s family moved to Peach Blossom Village and guarded the General’s tomb generation after generation.

The Ming and Qing eras should have been the golden age for corpse retrievers, yet the other three families forcibly suppressed them.

According to the man surnamed Xie, when the General turned over again in the late Qing and the three families gathered in Peach Blossom Village once more to seal him, there was likely another story behind it.

Most likely, those three families had come intending to wipe out the household and take everything.

First, because Xie Niudao’s family occupied the General’s tomb, they suspected the Xie family had gained benefits from it. Second, because Xie Niudao’s family truly possessed family secret arts that made the other three families covet them, such as the curse techniques being used now.

In any case, after that late Qing battle, Xie Niudao’s line became sparse and nearly lost its heirs entirely.

And those members of the three families who had taken part in that battle and returned all kept silent about what had happened.

After learning what their descendants had done in later generations, the ancestors of those three families here made a choice and took real action.

Since the ancestors’ oath could not restrain their descendants, then they would use curses.

The debt owed to the Xie family, they would repay. This family affair, they would clean up themselves.

Li Zhuiyuan found the scene absurd, and within that absurdity there was also a deep sadness.

He had grown used to the atmosphere of deception and calculation between the dead and the living, grown used to everyone scheming and exploiting human weakness, and now, suddenly confronted with something so pure, he felt an intense discomfort.

Faced with a whole crowd of people too clean, he suddenly felt a little dirty himself.

Li Zhuiyuan raised his head again and looked at the black vortex above. A great deal had gathered there, but very little had flowed out.

Because most of the curse power had been intercepted and failed to spread outward.

Perhaps the small amount that had leaked out was what allowed the corpse retriever procession to periodically go to those three families and randomly take away one of their descendants.

A loss on that scale was enough to make the three families afraid and miserable, but it was still far from shaking their foundations.

And it was obvious that the three families were also constantly probing the rules of this place and had already begun taking targeted action.

From a professional point of view, there was only one reason the curse power was being intercepted: the General had not completely vanished yet.

Whether the General was actively stopping it did not matter. As long as he still existed, this place was still his miasma. The curse power could not break free of the environment here; at most, a thread of it could leak out.

And by now, truly far too much had accumulated.

When Li Zhuiyuan looked at the black vortex, even he felt alarmed.

If such an enormous, dense mass of curse power ever lost its restraints and fully erupted, it would not be only those three families who suffered.

Even if every member of those three families were beheaded three times over, they still could not absorb that much.

More likely, the curse power would rebound onto the spellcasters themselves. These righteous figures who had given their lives to suppress evil back then, under the effect of curse resentment, would lose all sense of self and turn into terrifying malevolent beings driven mad.

They would rush out and slaughter freely, creating an even more terrible calamity.

Li Zhuiyuan could not help looking toward the main platform, where the man surnamed Xie was still energetically waving the command flag.

He had no objection to the man wanting revenge.

But could he not do the job in such a crude way?

If Li Zhuiyuan were the one doing it, he would determine the timing of the move based on the exact moment of the General’s disappearance, so he could control the intensity properly.

Even if he were too impatient for revenge and unwilling to wait any longer, he would still find a better way to channel the curse power out instead of letting it pile up here completely, growing bigger and bigger like an inflated balloon.

At the very least, the boy would make sure those three families were nearly wiped out, leaving only a handful of small fry to live lives worse than death under the aftermath of the curse, so he could enjoy watching them in his idle moments later.

Li Zhuiyuan stared at the eye sockets of the man surnamed Xie.

Was all this because you were incapable of doing better, or because this was never what you wanted in the first place?

He was blind, but Li Zhuiyuan refused to believe he did not know just how massive a bomb he had buried, and that today he was still adding to it.

Could it be that what you wanted was total destruction?

Not only the destruction of those three families, but also the peace of this land that the ancestors had once protected through sacrifice.

Did you think that was foolish, stupid, worthless, and now you wanted to overturn everything with one vast catastrophe?

Li Zhuiyuan felt that this was the true intention of the man surnamed Xie, and it also explained the look in the General’s eyes when he looked at him.

Li Zhuiyuan looked around once more at the people still forming seals. So the General likely found it laughable and helpless as well.

He had once wanted to break free of this Triple Heaven suppression and bring disaster to the surrounding lands, a calamity that belonged to him alone, but he had been suppressed.

And now, the people who had suppressed him back then were preparing to create a new natural disaster no less terrible than he would have been.

When that new calamity would occur depended on when he himself vanished.

He himself... had somehow become the one preventing that catastrophe.

Li Zhuiyuan began lightly tapping the table with his left hand while swirling a wine cup that did not exist in reality with his right.

In the boy’s mind, the whole chain of events rapidly began to sort itself out.

His fourth wave should be meant to resolve this disaster.

From the current situation, although the General was close to disappearing, he still existed, which matched the time when the fourth wave ought to arrive.

And Xiong Shan, in fact, had misunderstood the purpose of his wave from the very beginning.

He thought the river had sent him to seal the General, and he had almost succeeded, but the problem was that in the General’s current state, if he took another sealing blow, it would likely only hasten his disappearance.

Then the powder keg here would be lit and explode at once.

In fact, perhaps his near success last time had been the General deliberately holding back.

Because it was obvious the General could see the real him through the scarecrow made by Xiong Shan.

He had even recognized the identity of Li Zhuiyuan’s inheritance.

The Chenzhou talisman disguise Xiong Shan excelled at was meaningless in the General’s eyes.

The General was dying, yes, but part of his power and knowledge remained.

From the General’s perspective, he might not actively push for it, but he did not seem to mind if this bomb went off.

He could treat it as grand fireworks for his own funeral.

He and the Dragon King and righteous figures who had once suppressed him might have shared mutual admiration and acknowledgment, but that did not mean he, a great evil being, had somehow been moved to care for all living things under heaven.

At that moment, the man surnamed Xie stopped waving the command flag, a smile on his lips.

Below, everyone stopped forming seals and casting spells as well.

Gradually, the curse vortex that had grown another size in the air began to disperse, sinking back into each person below.

They became unseeable once more, and even more unseeable than before.

Li Zhuiyuan straightened his posture. The forbidden zones in his field of vision spread across a large area again.

The man surnamed Xie vanished.

Li Zhuiyuan also ended Walking the shade at that moment.

On the main platform, he saw the man surnamed Xie standing before Yin Meng, speaking to her.

Yin Meng’s earlier Walking the shade had ended quickly, so she had not seen what the man surnamed Xie had just done.

Of course, Li Zhuiyuan suspected that even if Yin Meng had seen it, she probably would not have understood what exactly had happened.

The man surnamed Xie first recounted the family’s sufferings. Li Zhuiyuan’s hearing was excellent, so he heard the whole conversation clearly and learned that his name was Jie Shunan, a name easy enough to understand.

At the end, Jie Shunan asked Yin Meng, “Tell me, should I take revenge on them?”

Yin Meng did not answer. She only looked at him warily.

Jie Shunan smiled again, as though he had not really expected an answer. Since guests had come this time, he had merely felt like saying a few words.

These were guests invited by the General. He had no authority to deal with them, or he would anger the General. Theoretically speaking, he too was merely one of the General’s guests.

But soon, that would no longer be the case.

Jie Shunan picked up the General’s armor set, laughed loudly, and left. His actions seemed exaggerated, but considering what he was doing, they actually felt restrained.

Li Zhuiyuan sat properly in his place. Before, he had not understood and had wondered why they were unseeable. Now he understood. Looking at them was like an ordinary person staring at a powder keg about to explode. Get too close, and you could be set ablaze and reduced to ashes.

The banquet ended.

The corpse retriever procession from outside entered again and began carrying the guests away.

At this point, they really needed to worry about how to leave.

If a local corpse retriever team really came to pick him up, then once he sat on the bamboo pole, would he be taken back to their lair?

Imagining himself standing in the middle of a crowd of unseeable beings, the image truly felt unsolvable.

At that moment, Li Zhuiyuan saw a eunuch walk up to him and point at him.

Hm? Shouldn’t they send off the guests in the back first?

Then Li Zhuiyuan heard the footsteps of Tan Wenbin and Runsheng.

Behind him, they crouched down.

Li Zhuiyuan turned around with his eyes closed, first set the scarecrow onto them, then held on to Runsheng’s clothes himself.

At his side, he also heard the footsteps of Xiong Shan and Lihua, along with the child’s soft babbling.

Things seemed to be going a little too smoothly, so smoothly it felt like this eunuch had been slipped a red envelope.

Which meant it really was so. All the thralls here retained a fairly high degree of self-awareness.

“Brother Yuanhou, our planned arrangement...”

On the way down the mountain, every so often there stood a eunuch or a maidservant.

When they reached a bend in the path, Runsheng pulled out two sticks of incense, lit them, and planted them in the ground.

The maidservant and eunuch nearby immediately ran over, crouched down, and began inhaling the incense.

According to Tan Wenbin’s plan, Li Zhuiyuan seized the chance to quickly leave the procession and jump into a pit at the corner. In truth, it was a recess in the side of the cliff.

The moment Li Zhuiyuan landed, he heard something falling from above. He immediately turned and reached out, catching a swaddled infant.

Those parents really had some nerve. They truly just tossed their child down.

Still, Li Zhuiyuan also knew that Xiong Shan and Tan Wenbin had reached an agreement, because their side still needed to pick up two more people.

So Li Zhuiyuan sat there in the recess, holding the child.

After waiting a while, another person slid down from above.

It was Lin Shuyou.

“Brother Yuanhou!”

When Lin Shuyou saw Li Zhuiyuan, he was so overjoyed he nearly cried. He was just about to come over and pour out all the fear and anxiety he had endured during this time when a swaddled infant was thrown into his arms, leaving him no choice but to catch it first.

Li Zhuiyuan said, “Hold the baby for a bit.”

Lin Shuyou nodded. “Got it, understood.”

“Where’s Mengmeng?”

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