Rewards

"Ah!"

The female corpse entered the Corpse Incineration Furnace and let out a shrill scream.

She realized she had been tricked and fought desperately.

But the Corpse Incineration Furnace was no ordinary furnace. Clusters of flames were like invisible chains of iron law, keeping the female corpse from breaking free no matter how hard she struggled.

Before long, she fell silent.

She merged with the flames, and scenes from her life blossomed forth.

The female corpse was clearly no ordinary person. Li Ye was intensely curious about her identity.

At that moment, he stared unblinkingly at the fragments that drifted out.

The girl had been born into a family of cultivators. She had enjoyed fine clothes and good food, received an excellent upbringing, and possessed extraordinary cultivation talent.

She was a proud daughter of her generation.

The woman's life had been simple and pure.

But she had an older sister, three years her senior, who had fallen in love with a handsome young man from another region two years ago.

Their families were not of equal standing, so her family had strongly opposed the match.

Seeing her sister so gloomy, the girl suggested that the two elope.

And so, they eloped.

Not long afterward, her family received a ransom letter.

It demanded the family's ancestral Spirit Ginseng in exchange for their release.

The kidnapper was the man her sister had fallen in love with.

But the letter bore the mark of the demonic path.

They sent the Spirit Ginseng, but her sister never came back.

She was dead.

She had died a horrible death at the hands of someone from the demonic path.

Grief-stricken, the girl believed she had caused her sister's death.

So she began a frenzied campaign of revenge against those of the demonic path, searching for the heartless bastard who had killed her sister.

In the end, he showed himself—but he had laid a trap.

Several great masters of the demonic path appeared at once and surrounded the girl alone.

In the end, both sides perished together.

"No wonder she said there isn't a single good man. Looks like once Corpse Cultivators gain sentience, they inherit some of the memories in the woman's body."

Li Ye suddenly understood.

After watching the girl's life, he felt an inexplicable sense of loss.

She had been a cultivation genius with a bright future ahead of her.

What a pity...

Li Ye gained a deeper understanding of the cruelty of this world.

Buzz!

A stream of white mist rushed out, burrowed into Li Ye's body, and then seeped into his organs and every limb and bone.

The next moment, his body rang with a series of sharp crackles. His skin, muscles, bones, sinews, and more were all tempered at once.

Boom!

A faint rumble sounded within Li Ye, and he entered the fourth layer of the Body Tempering Realm.

The white mist did not disappear. It continued tempering him.

A moment later, another soft crack rang through Li Ye's body, and he broke through to the fifth layer of the Body Tempering Realm.

"Two layers, huh?"

Li Ye was very dissatisfied.

The woman had been a Corpse Cultivator!

And she had only given him two layers of Body Tempering cultivation.

As he was grumbling, he noticed a passage of scripture had somehow appeared in his mind.

It seemed to be the Corpse Suppressing Incantation.

But it had grown longer—an entire eighty-one characters.

Corpse Suppressing Incantation: Recite this within one breath to inflict effective damage on a corpse.

"An enhanced version?"

Li Ye was thrilled.

What mattered most in the Corpse Incineration Room?

Of course, staying alive.

He currently had only the pitiful cultivation of the fifth layer of the Body Tempering Realm. Running into some particularly evil corpse would still be a huge problem.

Now that he had this enhanced Corpse Suppressing Incantation, his chances of surviving would greatly increase.

That was far more valuable than two layers of Body Tempering cultivation.

A wave of killing intent swept in, and the door opened.

The Black-Clad Academicians stood there, dumbfounded.

Li Ye was sitting leisurely on the floor, picking his ear.

He had survived?

The knives in the Black-Clad Academicians' hands froze in midair, and their mouths gaped wide.

The usually cold-faced leader looked momentarily dazed. "...You're all right?"

Li Ye stood up, patted his backside, then ostentatiously swept a hand through his messy long hair. He clasped his hands to the crowd and began gesticulating wildly.

"Before you knew it, I'd entered the room, and the snow-white Corpse Wrapping Cloth came floating up."

"Before the corpse could rise, I leaped into the air and hit it with a thousand-pound drop."

"Then came a left hook, and I had it crawling all over the floor. I followed with a sweep kick and knocked the female corpse down a second time..."

The more Li Ye talked, the more worked up he became. Spit flew as he kept gesturing with his hands.

Before long, he had grabbed a copper basin, a wooden bucket, and whatever else was in the room, and started swinging them around.

"Supreme Lord Lao, heed my command! Five Guardian Deities, Four Heavenly Kings, obey my decree and seize that Fierce Corpse..."

Li Ye made an orchid-finger gesture and shouted as if he were performing onstage. His antics left the Black-Clad Academicians staring at each other.

"Boss, do you think he's gone crazy?"

"I think he's traumatized."

The men spoke among themselves.

The leader twitched his nose and frowned. "What a strong smell of alcohol..."

So he still wasn't sober.

As soon as the words fell, Li Ye thumped to the floor and fell asleep.

"Get someone in here to collect the ashes. The family's waiting outside."

The leader spoke helplessly.

"The first man to survive after eating roast chicken. Interesting."

"Give him a bun tomorrow. I'll pay for it."

Before leaving, the leader gave the order and tossed down the day's wages.

"Fake liquor!"

The next day, Li Ye opened his eyes on the floor of the Corpse Incineration Room and got to eat a bun.

It was filled with beef and scallions, and it was delicious.

There was no difficult task or anything of the sort. It was simply a reward for how he had acted the previous day.

So Li Ye ate it without a care.

When night fell, the Black-Clad Academicians streamed in.

Sure enough, the leader was curious and asked again about what had happened the night before.

Because, in his eyes, that corpse had been no ordinary one.

Li Ye said he couldn't remember. He vaguely recalled a beautiful young woman, whom he had supposedly punched into the Corpse Incineration Furnace in a few blows.

The leader shook his head and asked no more.

To him, it was a trivial matter.

For several days afterward, Li Ye didn't encounter another Corpse Transformation, and life remained peaceful.

The rewards ranged from a few days' worth to a month's worth of Body Tempering cultivation.

One morning, Zhou Bao came to find Li Ye with some bad news.

Liu Sanshou was dead.

He was the scrawny man with a once-useless talent for picking pockets, who would always grin at people with his slightly yellow teeth.

A corpse had risen the previous night, and Liu Sanshou had died on the spot.

The Fierce Corpse had been subdued by the Black-Clad Academicians, then dealt with by a Reserve Corpse Incinerator.

Note: Black-Clad Academicians do not burn corpses, even when they have subdued them.

Li Ye carried the half flask of Daughter's Red he'd left over last time and went to Liu Sanshou's grave.

He burned incense and paper offerings with Zhou Bao and paid his respects.

"...The emperor is young, and treacherous ministers hold power."

"The Great Gan Dynasty grows weaker by the day?"

"When will this troubled age ever end?"

Zhou Bao couldn't help grumbling.

Of the thirteen Corpse Incinerators who'd been there that morning more than ten days ago, only he and Li Ye remained.

"If we stay in this place, we'll die sooner or later."

Zhou Bao cursed and grumbled, deeply frustrated. But if he didn't stay here, where else could he go?

Li Ye thought for a moment, then took a small coarse-cloth pouch from his robes.

It was packed full of copper coins. He tossed the money pouch to Zhou Bao, who stared at him in bewilderment.

"You'll never manage to master your incantation. Go down the mountain and find some other work."

Li Ye patted Zhou Bao on the shoulder, offering him some encouragement.

The Corpse Refining Courtyard didn't "hold" its Corpse Incinerators against their will. They were free to quit and leave.

"Brother Li Bai, you haven't spent a single coin."

"I can't take it. I feel like I'm close to mastering the Corpse Suppressing Incantation. I can hold out a few more days."

Zhou Bao weighed Li Ye's pouch in his hand and firmly refused.

The daily wage at the Corpse Refining Courtyard was twenty coins, which was fairly decent in these disorderly times.

If pork was available, that could buy three taels of meat. If flour was available, it could buy a pound.

Li Ye had been eating steamed corn buns every day and hadn't spent a single coin.

There were five hundred and fifty-five coins in all—a considerable sum.

He tried to persuade Zhou Bao a couple more times, but Zhou Bao refused no matter what and insisted he would master the Corpse Suppressing Incantation.

Seeing this, Li Ye didn't press him.

Suddenly, Zhou Bao said, "Brother Li Bai, have you heard?"

"That famous Night Roaming God has come to our area. The Divine Concealment Sect and the local authorities have all mobilized."

Night Roaming God? What was that?

Li Ye was puzzled.

The Night Roaming God was a person—or, more precisely, a thief.

He only operated at night, stealing everything from chickens and ducks, to gold and silver treasures, to the resources and cultivation methods of entire sects. He had never failed to take anything he set his eyes on.

People called him the Night Roaming God!

"They say he has a pair of divine legs, an extraordinary gift, and peerless movement skills."

"One night he was committing a crime in Gui City, and by the next morning he'd appeared in Liang City, a thousand miles away. Isn't that miraculous?"

Zhou Bao spoke with a face full of admiration.

Travel a thousand miles overnight? Li Ye was astonished.

That really was godlike.

Faster than the high-speed rail in his previous life.

No, he might have traveled more than a thousand miles in just half a night.

After all, he did his stealing in the middle of the night.

"He went to the prefect's residence a few days ago, and then a lot of the prefect's treasured possessions vanished without a trace."

"Tsk, tsk. The prefect is a notorious corrupt official. I wonder what treasures the Night Roaming God stole to make that dog of an official so furious."

Zhou Bao was intensely curious.

That afternoon, a blood-soaked corpse was carried into the Corpse Refining Courtyard...