The Technique Is the World

Grayish fog drifted slowly through the valley, engulfing the entire village in an unknown, deathly silence.

In the distance, firelight warped within the dense fog as two figures walked toward it.

Lu Ping narrowed his eyes slightly. When he opened them again, a dark ring of afterimages slowly spread through the depths of his pitch-black pupils.

The previously blurred distant view abruptly drew closer.

Beside him, Kamo Chitsubaki raised a hand and lightly brushed beneath her eyelid.

The blood within her body instantly began circulating faster, and a faint red gleam flashed through her eyes.

By precisely controlling the blood flow through the tiny vessels in her eyes, she temporarily multiplied her retina's ability to capture light.

"Hey." Kamo Chitsubaki stared ahead and asked in a low voice without turning her head.

"Can those eyes of yours see what's going on inside?"

Lu Ping held the Piercing Ox Horn Bow as his gaze pierced through layer upon layer of thick fog, landing on the battered wooden sign at the village entrance.

The writing on it had been weathered by wind and rain, but the mottled ink marks were crystal clear in his eyes.

"I can see the words on the sign at the entrance," Lu Ping said evenly. "It says 'Snakebone Village.'"

At those words, Kamo Chitsubaki visibly paused.

From her perspective, all she could see ahead was rolling gray fog and the faint, distorted outline of a village gate.

As for the details beyond it, let alone the writing farther in, everything was completely blurred by the dense fog.

She had enhanced her vision with the Kamo Clan's secret technique, yet it still could not compare to this boy's perception.

"Snakebone Village?" Kamo Chitsubaki narrowed her eyes slightly, concealing the shock within them.

"The Three Great Families' information on one another's techniques may not be fully public, but everyone has a general idea. I've never heard of the Zenin Clan's Ten Shadows Technique having any move that could enhance a sorcerer's own eyesight."

Traditionally, the Ten Shadows Technique was known for the versatility of its shikigami and the unique properties of its Shadow Space.

Throughout history, every wielder of the Ten Shadows Technique had relied on powerful shikigami to dominate the battlefield. Few had ever been able to channel a shikigami's power back into their own physical organs.

Facing the mountain wind, Lu Ping's Jujutsu High uniform fluttered softly.

He did not turn around, merely withdrawing his gaze with indifference.

"The Ten Shadows Technique is, in the end, nothing more than a framework summarized by those who came before."

Lu Ping's voice seemed to drift in the wind, yet it carried an unquestionable steadiness.

"Perhaps those extraordinarily gifted ancestors of ours limited themselves to that framework the moment they obtained this power."

Kamo Chitsubaki raised an eyebrow but did not interrupt him.

"For sorcerers, a technique is the eye through which we view the world." Lu Ping raised his right hand, his long fingers brushing over the bow's rough grain.

"A technique gives us a way to understand the world, and it also dictates how we explore power. But it seems everyone has gotten one thing wrong—"

"The one who is powerful is always the sorcerer, not the technique."

Lu Ping's simple conclusion landed with force.

Kamo Chitsubaki stared at him. After a moment, she suddenly gave a quiet laugh. "Understanding the world through your own technique..."

She tucked a strand of long hair hanging over her forehead behind her ear, a proud look appearing on her valiant face.

"You really dare to say that, 'future head' of the Zenin Clan... Still, it does suit your style."

Lu Ping's expression remained unchanged, and her praise did not stir the slightest emotional reaction in him.

In truth, the reason he could see so far had nothing to do with some hidden development of the Ten Shadows Technique.

The extent of his enhanced vision depended entirely on how much Three Corpses Manipulation could convert the negative emotions in the surrounding area.

This was the site of a massacre that had just wiped out an entire village, accompanied by some unknown and wicked sacrificial ritual.

Dozens of villagers had died in extreme terror and despair. The negative emotions they released had piled up and fermented here madly, reaching an unprecedented and horrifying concentration.

This resentment, so intense it had nearly condensed into substance, was far more overwhelming than when he had encountered the curse user attack at Hoshimi Shrine.

At the shrine, only some of the paper effigies carrying old resentment had been destroyed, not all of them.

Moreover, there had been living people at the scene then. Those lurking curse users might have retained a trace of compassion for their own kind, or perhaps they had feared Jujutsu High, so they had not carried out an utterly indiscriminate slaughter.

Thus, although the negative emotions from that battle at the shrine had been chaotic, they had not been particularly pure.

But now, what circled above Snakebone Village was the pure, unadulterated venomous resentment of the dead.

Lu Ping could clearly feel that his body was in an unprecedentedly light state.

Every cell in his body seemed to be greedily breathing. The solid shackle that had held him firmly at the peak of Grade 2 Sorcerer, barring his path to Grade 1, now seemed to be loosening faintly.

Sensing their host's state of mind, the Three Corpses within him fell completely into a frenzy.

But this time, Lu Ping did not allow them to violently devour everything whole as they had before.

With his mind intensely focused, he consciously began guiding the flow of cursed energy within his body and intervening in the Three Corpses' operational efficiency.

The Daoist scriptures said: "Ever-present, ever-continuing; used without exhaustion."

Flowing water does not compete to be first; it strives to flow without end.

The originally raging negative emotions, like a violent tidal wave, were deliberately suppressed by Lu Ping and transformed into a fine, enduring, and immensely vast source of pure energy.

Like an endless drizzle, it seeped continuously through the meridians of his entire body and into his limbs and bones, pushing his total cursed energy to a new peak.

This precise control over the core of his technique marked another great step forward in his spiritual cultivation.

However, the price of this explosive growth in power was an extreme burden on his mind.

Because his body was filled with such dense negative emotions, the moment Lu Ping closed his eyes to regulate his breathing, the villagers' horrific final moments inevitably surfaced in his mind.

It was a pain and despair so vivid that it was almost as though he had experienced it himself.

Pulled apart by invisible forces, the villagers' limbs had been forcibly torn away inch by inch.

The screams of flesh tearing and bones shattering echoed endlessly in his ears.

Most terrifying of all, these ordinary people had not died immediately as their limbs were stripped away. Their minds had remained completely lucid.

All they could do was stare wide-eyed in despair as their bodies were treated as sacrifices and piled up in bloody heaps within this sealed village.

They screamed and begged for help until they no longer even had the strength to cry out.

In their futile resistance, they watched helplessly as their life drained away with their warm blood, before they finally sank into eternal darkness.

Now, this inhuman ritual appeared to have reached its completion.

Lu Ping opened his eyes and looked at the blazing ruins ahead.

Judging from the residual cursed energy left at the scene, the timing had been calculated with terrifying precision.

The mastermind was highly likely to have deliberately delayed things, ensuring that at the exact moment Suguru Geto arrived in the village, the sacrificial ritual would reach its final stage just before completion.

The ruined walls, collapsed structures, and devastation scattered everywhere all proclaimed that a world-shaking battle had taken place here not long ago.

But the cruel reality stood before them.

The villagers had already been slaughtered, and the sacrifice had succeeded.

And Suguru Geto, the powerful Grade 1 Sorcerer, was still missing.

Two completely opposing emotions continuously intertwined and collided within Lu Ping.

The surging cursed energy gave him absolute control over his body, while the dead's despair made his gaze increasingly cold and piercing.

Having witnessed the tragedy at the village entrance, Lu Ping and Kamo Chitsubaki did not lose their heads and recklessly enter the village at once.

On an eerie battlefield where the situation remained unclear, blindly charging in was the stupidest choice.

"I'll set up the surrounding area first, so that when we start fighting later, the people outside won't notice what happens here."

Kamo Chitsubaki strode toward an open patch of ground to the side.

Her hands rapidly formed a series of complex seals as she chanted under her breath.

"From darkness, darkness is born. In darkness, grow darker still. Let all impurity be cleansed away."

As the final incantation fell, streams of ink-black liquid appeared from thin air and rapidly spread through the sky, forming a massive black canopy that enveloped several kilometers around them.

The Curtain had been established once more around the outskirts of Snakebone Village.

After finishing, Kamo Chitsubaki returned to Lu Ping's side.

She crouched down and extended her right hand into the air, sensing the area above the enormous flesh-and-blood snake at the village entrance.

As one of the Kamo Clan's current elites in Crimson Blood Manipulation, she possessed an almost instinctive sense for the flow and vitality of blood.

Yet after only three seconds, Kamo Chitsubaki's expression turned extremely grim.

"Something's wrong." Kamo Chitsubaki rose to her feet, frowning as she looked at the severed limbs scattered across the ground.

"The villagers died horribly, but the amount of blood on the ground is completely wrong. At least half the blood in these bodies is missing. Before they died, someone used some method to drain nearly all the blood from their bodies."

Lu Ping turned to look at her.

Kamo Chitsubaki turned toward the deepest part of the village, the red gleam in her eyes flickering violently.

"In my senses, an enormous blood presence is gathering in the center of the village. It's like a lake formed entirely from blood is flowing at its heart."

She gritted her teeth, and an unprecedented gravity entered her voice.

"Damn it. The pile of corpses at the village entrance isn't the end of the ritual at all. Those lunatics only used this place as a slaughterhouse to gather materials."

"The blood pool deep within the village is the true core."

Kamo Chitsubaki stared at the distant firelight and said each word slowly. "That living sacrifice ritual... is probably still ongoing!"

At that moment, the dense fog seemed to grow even thicker as it began spreading toward the two of them.