Immortal Tomb

Li Fan fed stinky tofu to the Kun perched on his shoulder as he hurried to the market. By the time he arrived, Daotong and Xuanbao were already packing up their stall.

When Chen Daotong saw him, he breathed a sigh of relief and put away the golden bell. "Junior Brother Qingyue, are you all right? We were just about to go look for you."

"Sorry for the trouble, Senior Brother." Li Fan split the stinky tofu into two skewers for them. "You're leaving already? How much did you make today?"

Xuanbao scowled, took a skewer of tofu, and bit into it. "Don't ask. We'd just opened when some rogue cultivator—I don't know where he came from—started a fight and unleashed a huge swarm of sword dragons. It scared everyone off and ruined our business."

Li Fan chewed on his stinky tofu without replying. That was true enough. The sword winds had just ripped the roof off the Dragon Gate Inn and caused a huge commotion. No wonder the people at the market hadn't dared stay outside for long and had all scattered.

Chen Daotong glanced at the street on the other side. Cavalry rode back and forth, raising clouds of dust. He chewed his tofu and said, "This is a heavily garrisoned frontier town. There's fighting every day. Call it bad luck. Now that we're all here, let's go find Senior Brother."

Seeing that the others had no objections, Chen Daotong released a light boat. The three of them climbed aboard and flew out of town.

Li Fan peered down over the side of the boat. Around the wreckage of the Dragon Gate Inn, whose roof had been torn off, squads of border troops armed with spears and armor were rushing to the scene.

They searched the streets and alleys in groups of hundreds, with crossbows and spears at the ready. Outside the inn, they formed layer upon layer of cordons, sealing off the area completely. At the front, they advanced cautiously in ranks, shields braced and spears leveled. The eunuch must have sent guards to the nearby garrison for reinforcements as soon as he'd left the inn.

Li Fan broke into a cold sweat and cursed the dead eunuch under his breath. The bastard had planned things so thoroughly. Good thing Li Fan had been quick-witted and escaped through the secret passage in time. Fine, he'd remember this trick. Sooner or later, he'd settle the score with that eunuch.

Daotong and Xuanbao had seen plenty of this sort of thing, so they weren't particularly concerned about the troop movements. They piloted the flying boat above the clouds, lit a yellow talisman, and tossed it into the brazier at the bow. Bright blue flames and white smoke billowed up like a signal flare.

Li Fan examined it with his Divine Sense and saw that the light was even more conspicuous, like a little sun.

Sure enough, Senior Brother Lu had received the signal. Before long, a wooden kite glided over from the horizon, speaking as it flew.

"Follow me, Junior Brothers. I've found something interesting."

The three of them readily agreed and followed the wooden kite northwest. After flying for about a hundred li, the kite dipped beneath the clouds and led them down into a range of deep mountains.

The area was full of barren mountains and strange rocks, desolate peaks and sheer cliffs. Two mountain ranges crossed at right angles, one running northwest and the other southwest, with valleys connecting them. The northern range had gentle southern slopes and precipitous northern ones. In the south, isolated peaks were riddled with caves, and the mountains themselves were crumbling. Even Li Fan, who knew nothing about feng shui, could tell at a glance that the place felt ominous. A sweep of his Divine Sense revealed almost no spiritual energy at all, only a distinctly sinister atmosphere.

The wooden kite flew into the valley where the two mountain ranges met and settled on Lu Yu's shoulder. He was standing motionless before a tunnel, eyes closed as he examined it.

The three of them flew over and paid their respects. "Senior Brother Lu."

Lu Yu opened his eyes and nodded to them. Pointing at what looked like a partially collapsed tunnel in front of him, he said, "There's an immortal's tomb down there."

"An immortal's tomb?" This time, it wasn't Li Fan who asked. It was Yuan Xuanbao. "In a place like this?"

Senior Brother Lu nodded. "I sensed baleful energy earlier and came to investigate. That's when I found that someone had broken into the tomb.

"There are ten kinds of places where one should never bury the dead in the mountains, and this place violates how many of them? Even I find it strange. I used my Divine Sense to investigate earlier, and my guess is that the tomb belongs to a rogue cultivator who practiced the Divine Dao. He was probably killed by an enemy, who feared the cultivator might undergo death-transformation and chose this particularly evil feng shui formation to suppress him in a naturally baleful grave."

Then he turned to the three disciples with a broad smile. "That's why I called you over. Someone only recently broke into this tomb. Do you want to go down and scavenge?"

Li Fan: "..."

Yuan Xuanbao was delighted. "Thank you for giving us this opportunity, Senior Brother."

Chen Daotong smiled and saluted with clasped hands. "Thank you, Senior Brother."

The Profound Heaven Sword Intent remarked, "Hey, this senior brother of yours seems like a decent fellow."

What?!

"Uh... Senior Brother, isn't this a little inappropriate?" Li Fan was so stunned he could hardly speak. They were a bunch of Daoists, for heaven's sake. They didn't even spare the dead, buried underground for who knew how many years—and they were as excited as if they were going on a spring outing. It sounded downright shameless...

Seeing Li Fan's horrified expression, Senior Brother Lu burst out laughing. "Don't misunderstand, Qingyue. I'm not telling you to rob a tomb. You're going down to collect baleful energy."

"Collect baleful energy?"

Senior Brother Lu explained, "You should know that spiritual energy is the source of Taiji, and the Five Elements' spiritual energies were born from Taiji. They are the foundation of the Immortal Dao.

"But the heavens and earth contain more than just Postnatal spiritual energy. Innate energy began with the Primordial Beginning, and what you need to cultivate the Tai Su Dao Body nowadays isn't Taiji spiritual energy, but what's known as Tai Su baleful energy.

"This baleful energy isn't among the Taiji Five Elements. So even when you illuminate it with the Five-Colored Divine Light, all you see is a pitch-black darkness, and you can't discern its true essence. It's also incompatible with the Five Elements Immortal Dao. If an Immortal Dao body or a magical treasure gets contaminated by it, it can be defiled beyond repair or even reduced to tribulation ash. If ordinary people or beasts are contaminated, they can turn into baleful corpses or ferocious beasts. Even immortals who come into contact with it suffer a severe loss of strength and have to expend a great deal of true energy to force it out. That's why, back in the days of the Postnatal Immortal Dao, every sect treated baleful energy like a deadly flood and avoided it at all costs.

"But times have changed. Now that the False Moon hangs in the sky and the Heavenly Dao has changed, our sect has proper methods for condensing a Tai Su Dao Body from baleful energy once you reach the Nascent Soul stage. Even at the Golden Core Stage, there are unorthodox methods for using baleful energy to refine magical treasures.

"However, baleful energy isn't part of the Taiji cosmic cycle. Usually, you can only obtain it through Moon Worship cultivation, which is truly dangerous. Otherwise, you can look for sinister objects contaminated by baleful energy in places with evil feng shui like this and collect it from them. Take this tomb: it's in a desolate place, surrounded by barren mountains and foul waters. Sooner or later, it'll spawn a monster that wreaks havoc on the region. Since we've come across it, we might as well collect its baleful energy. That way, we'll prevent future calamities. Why not?"

Chen Daotong added, "Which of the Real Persons doesn't need baleful energy to forge their bodies? It's priceless and always in demand. Even if you don't need it yourself, you can collect some and trade it for all kinds of rare treasures and miraculous pills. It's a sure profit. Even baleful corpses and ferocious beasts infected with baleful energy can be refined into corpse soldiers with magical bodies. The imperial court often buys them to guard its estates."

"I see..."

So baleful corpses were worth that much. No wonder the eunuch had been willing to kill for one. So when Li Fan had gone all out and blown that zombie to pieces, he'd actually missed out on a fortune?

Yuan Xuanbao took out a yellow talisman folded into a triangle and a white-glazed Jade Pure Bottle, then handed them to Li Fan. "Hold this talisman under your tongue to keep baleful energy from invading your body. Activate the bottle, and it'll absorb the baleful energy around you."

Li Fan stared at the talisman and jade bottle in his hands, speechless. If those martial artists at the inn hadn't rushed into a fight and had just talked things through, couldn't they all have escaped through the secret passage?

And if people weren't so quick to draw their blades and start fighting, but took a moment to calm down and reason things out, then even if Li Fan hadn't had a solution right away, he was still a cultivator from Ink Bamboo Mountain, wasn't he? He could have just stepped outside and walked to the market, where he would have run into Chen Daotong and Yuan Xuanbao at their stall. How had so many people ended up fighting to the death in the blink of an eye?

Sigh. In times like these, human life was cheap. Anyone who ventured into the jianghu to become a soldier or bandit was bound to die beneath a flurry of blades sooner or later. When it came down to it, what fate was there to speak of? They'd brought it on themselves...

"All right, go down and collect the baleful energy. I'll stay up here and watch the dragons. Oh, there seems to be a baleful corpse forming below, but it's sealed inside a coffin. It's nothing much. Just be careful." Senior Brother Lu waved them off and flew away to tend to the dragons.

So the three of them went down into the tomb together.

Xuanbao and Daotong walked in front, each taking out a weapon to protect themselves. Li Fan followed behind them, holding the Pure Jade Bottle and using it to absorb the baleful energy.

He could clearly see wisps of black smoke being sucked into the mouth of the bottle. Li Fan had seen this sort of thing many times before. When he'd performed Moon Worship cultivation, for instance, the black fog and wind had been far more overwhelming. Compared to that, the energy in this tomb was nothing. It was like vacuuming up dust: every last speck of baleful energy from the nooks and crannies was being sucked into the bottle.

"Look, there's blood here. It's still fresh." Yuan Xuanbao pointed around the walls of the tomb passage with the iron claw in his hand. "Someone came into the tomb recently and triggered a trap farther in, getting hurt by a hidden weapon.

"If you're infected by baleful energy under ordinary circumstances, drinking some talisman water and taking a few pills is enough to cure you. But once there's blood involved, it's hard to predict how quickly the baleful energy will spread. I'd say there's a good chance someone got infected and turned into a baleful corpse during the fight in town."

Li Fan nodded silently. You're right.

Chen Daotong lit a fire striker and examined the tomb's design, as well as the burial goods and weapons. "This looks like a fief lord's tomb... That would explain it. Ordinary rogue cultivators wouldn't build a cave dwelling in a desolate place like this. And if an enemy killed him, they'd have dismembered him, boiled him for medicine, or refined him into pills. Why bother burying him intact?

"So I think the tomb belongs to a fief lord who cultivated the Divine Dao. He probably lost a political struggle. Since he was a relative of the royal Wang Family, they at least left him whole and buried him here, suppressing him so he couldn't cause trouble again."

Yuan Xuanbao walked in front by himself, waving the iron claw in his hand as he pointed things out. He even managed to break through the occasional trap as it activated. Pointing to the footprints on the ground, he said, "Two groups came in, one after the other. The first group left neat footprints, so they clearly knew the layout of the tomb and didn't trigger any traps. They seem to have taken something from a box that had been sitting in the corner, then left straight away. I'd guess they were from the imperial court.

"The second group left a messier trail. Probably tomb robbers who came in hoping to fish in troubled waters. They got caught by a trap at the entrance, were injured, and hurried back out."

Li Fan was speechless. Maybe. Probably. More or less. They were all right...

Chen Daotong stopped in front of the inner chamber of the underground palace. "The tomb owner's resting chamber is just ahead. Looks like whatever was suppressing him has been taken away, and he's already begun transforming.

"Since he was a fief lord, we shouldn't disturb him. Let's collect the baleful energy here. Without it to sustain him, he won't be able to transform into a corpse and break out of his seal to cause trouble."

The three of them took out their Jade Pure Bottles and activated them outside the chamber, collecting the baleful energy.

Thick black smoke poured through the cracks in the door as if there were a fire on the other side. The billowing clouds gathered into streams and writhed like poisonous black dragons and pythons as they burrowed into the mouths of the bottles.

As they collected more and more baleful energy, Li Fan could faintly hear footsteps from the chamber, along with hoarse growls and the thud of a palm striking the iron door. The tomb's owner was probably furious that they were sucking away its baleful energy.

But no matter how furious it got, all it could do was rage helplessly behind the tomb door. It wasn't anywhere near powerful enough to break free. They were cutting off its source of power, taking all its baleful energy. At most, it would be a dried-up corpse, stuck lying in its coffin. What trouble could it cause?

Honestly, collecting baleful energy in a tomb with a zombie next door pounding on the door and roaring was pretty creepy.

But Xuanbao and Chen Daotong were completely unfazed. They chatted about what kinds of miscellaneous goods they should bring back to Ink Bamboo Mountain next time to make a little more money. It was as if the thing pounding and roaring nearby wasn't a baleful corpse capable of flying through the air with a copper head and iron arms, but a vicious dog on a chain, barking helplessly.

What was this? The baleful corpse that had slaughtered a whole crowd at the inn in an instant had so little clout in the eyes of Daoists?

The Profound Heaven Sword Intent remarked, "Host, don't get hung up on it. A stray dog off its leash is obviously more dangerous than a tiger in a cage. More to the point, don't let a stray dog bite you. I once had a favored disciple at the Foundation Establishment stage who was bitten while teasing a dog. He later died from the poison. I suspect a spy from another sect had smeared poison on its fangs. Host, take this as a warning."

Ah, that was probably just rabies... But I get what you mean... Still, no wonder the Sword Intent had taken a liking to him. He must have been exceptionally talented, right? And he still managed to get himself killed like that...

Wait a minute! You two were chatting such nonsense that I couldn't even get into the tense atmosphere of exploring a tomb and fighting through a dungeon, damn it!

In the end, Li Fan still didn't get to experience the story of challenging a dungeon and fighting a zombie king.

They stood at the entrance of the tomb for three full incense sticks, and the baleful energy in the resting chamber was completely collected. Not a trace remained.

The roars and pounding from behind the door had stopped long ago. The so-called baleful corpse, the immortal zombie, had probably been drained dry by the three bottles.

Yuan Xuanbao sealed the bottle's mouth with a talisman, then weighed it in his hand. "Not bad, at least a jin. We've made a profit."

Li Fan sighed. The zombie king Jiang Chen wasn't worth much in this world. They'd sucked him dry, and he still hadn't managed to make a comeback. "Senior Brother, about how much is one bottle worth?"

"Who would trade it for money? If you insisted, it'd have to be at least a hundred thousand strings of Divine Astral Coins, right? One bottle of baleful energy is enough to infect more than a hundred people and turn them into corpse soldiers!" Yuan Xuanbao sneered. "Qingyue, be careful not to spill any of this into the Human Dao. Don't think that just because we're collecting it here so easily and safely, it's harmless. It's only because the thing inside can't break through the barrier.

"Once infected, a baleful corpse's strength can increase fiftyfold. Even a corpse soldier in the early stages is extraordinarily powerful. If a corpse plague breaks out and people start turning, a lot of them will die."

Yes, he had already seen firsthand how dangerous baleful corpses were, the killing they could cause in an instant, and the disaster they could unleash in the Human Dao if they got out. The sight had been shocking, and the memory remained fresh.

Li Fan nodded gravely. "Thank you for the lesson, Senior Brother. I'll remember."

Chen Daotong smiled. "Good. As long as you understand how serious this is. The tomb was built in such a strange place, apparently to accumulate all that baleful energy for the corpse king inside. I suspect there's some other scheme at work, too. We happened to come across it and were able to prevent a massacre in advance, which is fortunate, but that only treats the symptoms.

"When we return to the mountain, we'll report this to the temple master and ask a great cultivator to investigate. It would be best to get rid of this evil tomb as soon as possible."

Li Fan and Yuan Xuanbao naturally agreed. The three of them put away their Jade Pure Bottles and retraced their steps.

As soon as they emerged from the tomb, Chen Daotong was about to release the flying boat when he suddenly stopped. He and Yuan Xuanbao turned toward the sky and saluted with clasped hands. "Senior Brother."

Li Fan looked up and saw a golden-maned, blue-eyed Suanni striding through the air toward them. Its mouth gaped and its eyes bulged, with tusks bared and ears upright. Three bells hung around its neck, and its back was covered in curling blue and red mane. As it ran through the sky on clouds and smoke, it shone brilliantly, breathtakingly handsome.

The Suanni shook its golden mane, descended from the clouds, and crouched down with its furry paws on the ground. A Daoist sat astride its back: phoenix eyes, delicate willow-leaf brows, a fair face without a beard, and purple immortal robes. Two golden-red flames waved behind his crown, while a vermilion mark between his brows looked like a tiny flame, drifting up and down within the space between his eyes.

Judging by his appearance alone, he was certainly a True Cultivator of the Lou Guan Dao, and at least at the Golden Core Stage.

"Junior Brothers." The Daoist narrowed his eyes and gave them a smile that didn't reach them. Keeping his hands tucked into his wide sleeves, he gave a slight salute. "I heard there was a baleful corpse causing trouble here. Have you dealt with it?"

Chen Daotong and Yuan Xuanbao fell silent and exchanged a discreet glance. They had clearly sensed that the newcomer meant trouble.

If even they could sense it, what about the Profound Heaven Sword Intent, with its paranoid delusions of persecution?

The Profound Heaven Sword Intent declared, "Host, hurry and sacrifice your sword to kill him!"

Unfortunately, they were still a step too slow.

The Daoist smiled and nodded. "So you have."

Then he opened his mouth and spat. The red mark between his brows dropped onto his tongue and rolled once, turning into a red pill.

The pill bounced once, leapt into the air, and left a streak of rainbow light as it spun around Chen Daotong's neck. The boy's head fell to the ground.