The Fight

Chapter 6: The Fight

Chu Xiaotian held the Jade Pendant, wanting to see what mystery it contained. But no matter how he tried, it gave no response at all. The Jade Pendant really was just like an ordinary piece of jade. After fiddling with it for ages to no avail, Chu Xiaotian sighed and made himself another grass garment to wear. Then he lay back on the ground and gazed up at the dense forest overhead.

He had no intention of leaving anymore. He had become something half-human and half-corpse. If he went outside and turned into a zombie at night, who knew what kind of trouble he might cause? He didn't want to hurt anyone, so he could only stay in these mountains and forests and make do with harming wild beasts.

During the day, he relied on wild fruit to stave off hunger and thirst. As soon as night fell, he lost all will and became a zombie who knew nothing but drinking blood. Many beasts in this forest had suffered for it. Without realizing what was happening, they had all been drained of their blood and vital energy by him and died during the night.

Time passed quickly. In the blink of an eye, Chu Xiaotian had spent a full half month in the dense forest. The terror he had felt at first had gradually given way to acceptance, and he could now face the problems within his body with relative calm. He didn't like consuming the blood and vital energy of living creatures, but he understood perfectly well that this energy contained an extremely strong yang force. He consumed it only so that the yang force within it could suppress the Corpse Poison in his body. If he stopped consuming the blood and vital energy of living creatures, the Corpse Poison would completely consume him, until he couldn't even be a zombie anymore.

In fact, this was the main reason zombies consumed the blood and vital energy of living creatures. Of course, that energy could also increase a zombie's cultivation, and that was another reason. Just like now: after consuming the blood and vital energy of living creatures for half a month, Chu Xiaotian could clearly feel that his body had grown much stronger. He had tested it—a boulder weighing around two hundred pounds was easy for him to lift.

He could lift a boulder weighing more than two hundred pounds with one hand. Chu Xiaotian would never have dared to imagine such a thing before, yet now it had truly happened to him, leaving him with the feeling that he was living in a dream.

Repeating the same routine every day hadn't made Chu Xiaotian too sick of it yet. After all, he had no shortage of food or shelter here. Still, at times he thought of the friends and family living in the little mountain village, as well as the bodies of the ten uncles he had brought near the village. He wondered how they were doing now. Besides that, in his spare time, Chu Xiaotian spent most of his time studying the Jade Pendant around his neck. He was still unwilling to give up; he wanted to uncover its mystery and gain complete control over the Corpse Poison in his body.

But all his efforts were still in vain. The Jade Pendant showed not the slightest sign of anything unusual in his hands. It was as ordinary as could be. Instead, during this period, he had discovered something else that delighted him: the spiritual energy here.

According to his grandfather, the Corpse-Guiding Technique he cultivated was an ancient Maoshan Taoist art, and the power of its various Talisman Arts was enough to destroy heaven and earth. But where he had lived before, there had been practically no spiritual energy. The talismans they drew could only be used to guide corpses. After arriving here, however, he had suddenly discovered that the spiritual energy in this place was more than a hundred times denser than where he had lived before.

This discovery had filled him with delight. In the place where he had lived before, there had been no spiritual energy, so his Talisman Art had been practically useless. But here, with spiritual energy in abundance, Chu Xiaotian's hopes stirred again. Could the talismans he knew reach the terrifying power described in the records here? Excited by the thought, he immediately began practicing how to draw them.

The Maoshan Talisman Art was very simple, in principle: draw one symbol after another on talisman paper, and each symbol's power would produce a different effect. Chu Xiaotian naturally had no talisman paper, so he couldn't actually draw any talismans. But he could still practice drawing the symbols. Even without paper, he could at least practice their shapes.

When Chu Xiaotian was a child, his grandfather had given him a precious book called the Talisman Scripture, saying that it had been passed down through the family. It recorded the methods for drawing at least ten thousand kinds of symbols. Back then, whenever he had spare time, he often copied them. Although the symbols had been mere shapes without spiritual power to support them, Chu Xiaotian still remembered their forms and uses clearly. Of the ten thousand or more symbols in the Talisman Scripture, he could still remember at least several thousand—almost half.

To draw a symbol, one had to absorb spiritual energy from heaven and earth and infuse it into the symbol to give it great power. The Corpse-Guiding Talismans and Water-Repelling Talismans Chu Xiaotian had drawn before had relied on cinnabar to make the symbols absorb the faint, almost imperceptible spiritual energy in the world on their own. That was what gave them even a little effect. Now, with spiritual energy so abundant and no cinnabar on hand, he planned to use the most common method recorded in the Talisman Scripture: the Spirit-Drawing Talisman Method.

This method drew spiritual energy from heaven and earth through one's own body, gathered it into a symbol, and then drew the symbol on talisman paper. Talismans made with the Spirit-Drawing Talisman Method could be considered real talismans. Compared with the ones he had drawn with cinnabar and then left to absorb spiritual energy on their own, they were countless times more powerful.

Of course, this method required one to be able to draw spiritual energy from heaven and earth in the first place. In the world where almost no spiritual energy existed, Chu Xiaotian had never even tried to do that.

Now, he wanted to give it a try and see whether he could draw real talismans in a place so rich in spiritual energy. But once he actually tried, he realized that he had been far too naive.

Following the method recorded in the Talisman Scripture, he concentrated all his mental strength and tried hard to sense the spiritual energy around him. He wanted to slowly gather it at his fingertips and then draw with it. But things didn't go as he had imagined. He could sense the spiritual energy, but when he tried to control it, it simply ignored him and carried on as it pleased.

He spent the entire morning trying, but made no progress at all. Instead, the intense concentration left him feeling dazed and sleepy. Chu Xiaotian reluctantly stopped, but he didn't fall asleep right away. He sat cross-legged and began restoring his mental strength with a breathing method recorded in the Talisman Scripture.

This was a minor cultivation method, though its effect was naturally nothing like the ones described in novels, which supposedly made people's spirits soar until they could fly through the sky and do anything they pleased. It merely restored one's mental strength so that one wouldn't become too exhausted.

When night fell again, Chu Xiaotian once more succumbed to his transformation. Another five days passed, and his life continued unchanged. This quiet, boring routine was finally broken one day.

He had just spent half an hour working on symbols, then restored his mental strength through breathing exercises. He was about to look for some wild fruit to eat for breakfast when he suddenly heard the sounds of fighting from the nearby forest. He could faintly make out a woman's sharp cries and the roars of beasts.

Besides the giant rats and two-tailed foxes, the small beasts he had seen before, Chu Xiaotian knew that this forest also held giant wolves, tigers, and bears more than three meters long. In his eyes, any one of these giant beasts could tear him apart with ease. Yet whenever he awoke in the morning, he could see their bodies, drained of blood and vital energy, lying nearby or along his path.

Among the sounds of fighting now, he heard wolves howling. He knew giant wolves were out there. Without hesitation, Chu Xiaotian immediately sprinted in that direction. Finding someone and asking what this place was had always been one of the things he most wanted to do. But after learning that he turned into a zombie at night, he had given up on leaving. Now, though, someone had come here, and it was daytime, when yang energy was abundant. There would be no harm in going out to ask about the questions on his mind. After all, he had so many questions about this completely unfamiliar place. He was certain that none of what he had seen here could possibly exist in the place he had lived before—not even anywhere in the entire world of that time.

To survive in a completely unfamiliar world, the first thing one had to do was learn about it.

He snapped off a branch as thick as a bowl from a tree to use as a weapon, then hurried toward the sounds of fighting. There, in a clearing about five or six zhang across, some twenty giant wolves had surrounded a person. They were the same fiery-red giant wolves, each three meters long. Howling nonstop, they leaped again and again toward the figure in their midst.

At the center of the pack stood a young woman dressed in white, a long sword in her hand. She moved like a butterfly, flitting swiftly among the wolves so that Chu Xiaotian couldn't even make out her face. Her sword flashed with silver light as she drove back the wolves that lunged toward her. Some unlucky ones were stabbed straight in their vital spots. They twitched on the ground twice, then lay still. By the time Chu Xiaotian arrived, five giant wolves had already died at the young woman's feet, and at least seven more were wounded.