Grayish mist drifted slowly through the valley, twisting the entire village into an unknown, deathly silence.
In the distance, firelight warped within the thick 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 black pupils.
The once-blurry distant view abruptly drew closer.
Beside him, Kamo Chitsubaki raised a hand and lightly brushed beneath her eyelid.
The blood within her body instantly accelerated, and a faint crimson gleam flashed through her eyes.
By precisely controlling the blood flow through the tiny vessels in her eyes, she multiplied her retina's ability to capture light for a short time.
"Hey." Kamo Chitsubaki stared ahead and asked in a low voice without turning around,
"What did those eyes of yours see in there?"
Lu Ping gripped the Piercing Ox Horn Bow, his gaze passing through layers of dense fog and settling 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 perfectly clear in his eyes.
"I saw the words on the sign at the village entrance." Lu Ping's tone was calm. "It says 'Snakebone Village.'"
At those words, Kamo Chitsubaki visibly paused.
From her perspective, aside from the rolling gray mist, she could only barely make out the distorted outline of a village gate ahead.
As for the details beyond it, let alone the writing farther inside, everything was completely blurred by the fog.
Even after enhancing her sight with the Kamo Clan's secret technique, she still could not match this boy's powers of observation.
"Snakebone Village?" Kamo Chitsubaki narrowed her eyes slightly, concealing the shock within them.
"While information about the Three Great Families' techniques isn't completely public, everyone has a general idea. I've never heard of the Zenin Clan's Ten Shadows Technique having a move that could enhance a sorcerer's own eyesight."
Traditionally, the Ten Shadows Technique's strength lay in the versatility of its shikigami and the uniqueness of Shadow Space.
Throughout history, every Ten Shadows user had relied on powerful shikigami to overwhelm the battlefield. Very few had been able to channel a shikigami's power back into their own physical organs.
The mountain wind blew against Lu Ping, making his Jujutsu High uniform rustle softly.
He did not turn around. He merely withdrew his gaze.
"The Ten Shadows Technique is, in the end, merely a framework summarized by those who came before."
Lu Ping's voice drifted through the wind, yet it carried an unquestionable steadiness.
"Perhaps those extraordinarily gifted ancestors limited themselves within that framework the moment they obtained this power."
Kamo Chitsubaki raised an eyebrow but did not interrupt him.
"For sorcerers, a technique is the lens through which we see the world." Lu Ping raised his right hand, his long fingers brushing over the rough grain of the bow.
"A technique provides an understanding of the world and dictates the methods by which we explore power. But it seems everyone has gotten one thing wrong—"
"What is powerful has always been the sorcerer, not the technique."
Lu Ping's simple conclusion landed with undeniable force.
Kamo Chitsubaki stared at Lu Ping. After a moment, she suddenly gave a quiet laugh. "Understanding the world through your own technique..."
She tucked a strand of hair hanging over her forehead behind her ear, a proud look appearing on her valiant face.
"You really dare to say that, Zenin Clan's 'future clan head'... But it does suit your style."
Lu Ping's expression remained unchanged. Her praise did not stir the slightest emotion in him.
In truth, the reason he had been able to see so far had nothing to do with any hidden development of the Ten Shadows Technique.
The extent of his enhanced vision depended entirely on how much Three Corpses Manipulation had converted the negative emotions within the area.
This was the site of a village massacre that had just taken place, accompanied by some unknown and evil sacrificial ritual.
Dozens of villagers had died in extreme terror and despair. The negative emotions they released had accumulated and fermented madly here, reaching an unprecedented and horrifying density.
This resentment, so intense it was nearly solid, far surpassed what he had encountered during the curse user attack at Hoshimi Shrine.
At the shrine, only some of the paper dolls carrying old resentments had been destroyed, not all of them.
Moreover, there had been living people at the scene then. Those lurking curse users might still have retained some pity for their own kind or some fear of Jujutsu High, so they had not carried out a slaughter without limits.
As a result, although the negative emotions from the shrine battle had been chaotic, their purity had not been high.
But now, what circled above Snakebone Village was the pure, untainted venomous hatred 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 firmly trapped him at the peak of Grade 2 Sorcerer, barring his path toward Grade 1, had begun to loosen faintly at this moment.
Sensing its host's state of mind, the Three Corpses within him fell completely into a frenzy.
But this time, Lu Ping did not let them violently devour everything as they had before.
With his mind highly focused, he consciously guided the flow of cursed energy within his body and interfered with the Three Corpses' operational efficiency.
A Daoist scripture said: It endures without cease, and its use never exhausts it.
Flowing water does not vie to be first; it strives to flow without end.
The violent negative emotions, once like raging waves, transformed under Lu Ping's deliberate suppression into a fine, continuous, and immensely vast stream 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.
Such refined control over the core of his technique marked another great step forward in his spiritual realm.
Yet the price of this explosive growth in power was an extreme burden on his mind.
Because his body was filled with such concentrated negative emotions, the instant Lu Ping closed his eyes to regulate his breathing, the horrific scenes of the villagers' deaths inevitably surfaced in his mind.
It was pain and despair so vivid that it was almost as though he had experienced it himself.
Pulled apart by invisible power, the villagers' limbs had been forcibly torn away inch by inch.
The screams of flesh ripping and bones shattering echoed endlessly beside his ears.
Most terrifying of all, these ordinary people had not died immediately as their limbs were stripped away. Their consciousnesses had remained absolutely clear.
They could only stare wide-eyed in despair as their bodies were treated as sacrifices and piled up in blood within this sealed-off village.
They shouted and begged for help until they no longer even had the strength to scream.
In their powerless resistance, they watched helplessly as their life drained away with their warm blood, until they finally sank into eternal darkness.
Now, this inhuman ritual seemed to have been declared complete.
Lu Ping opened his eyes and looked at the blazing ruins ahead.
Judging from the residual traces of cursed energy at the scene, the timing had been calculated with terrifying precision.
The mastermind had most likely delayed things on purpose, ensuring that the sacrificial ritual reached its final stage just as Suguru Geto arrived in the village.
The ruined walls in the distance and the devastation scattered across the ground all testified to a world-shaking battle that had taken place here not long ago.
But the cruel reality lay before them.
The villagers had all been slaughtered, and the sacrifice had succeeded.
Meanwhile, Suguru Geto, the powerful Grade 1 Sorcerer, was still missing.
Two completely opposing emotions continually intertwined and collided within Lu Ping.
The surging cursed energy gave him absolute control over his body, while the despair of the dead made his gaze increasingly cold and piercing.
After witnessing the tragedy at the village entrance, Lu Ping and Kamo Chitsubaki did not lose their heads and rashly enter the village at once.
On an eerie battlefield where the situation was unclear, blindly charging ahead was the stupidest choice.
"I'll set up the surroundings first, so that when we start fighting, the commotion here won't be noticed by ordinary people outside."
Kamo Chitsubaki quickly walked toward an open patch of ground.
Her hands rapidly formed a series of complex seals as she chanted under her breath:
"From darkness, emerge. Darker than darkness. Let the impure remnants be purified."
As the final incantation fell, strands of ink-black liquid appeared from thin air and rapidly spread across the sky, forming an enormous black canopy that enveloped several kilometers around them.
The Curtain had been reestablished around 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 serpent at the village entrance.
As one of the current elites of Blood Manipulation, she possessed an almost instinctive intuition for the flow and vitality of blood.
However, after only three seconds, Kamo Chitsubaki's expression became extremely grim.
"Something's wrong." Kamo Chitsubaki rose to her feet, staring at the severed limbs strewn across the ground with a furrowed brow.
"Though these villagers died horribly, 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 looked toward the deepest part of the village, crimson light flashing violently in her eyes.
"In my perception, an enormous blood signature is gathering in the center of the village right now. It's like a lake formed of blood is flowing there."
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 merely used this place as a slaughterhouse to collect materials."
"The blood pool deep inside the village is the true core."
Kamo Chitsubaki stared at the distant firelight and spoke each word deliberately. "That living sacrifice ritual... is probably still continuing!"
At that moment, the dense fog seemed to become even thicker as it began to spread toward the two of them.
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