Dead Man Mountain

If he hadn't already had a Yin Soldier under his command, Tang Changsheng might have considered keeping the souls of those two men and trying to refine them into Yin Soldiers... They had killed without blinking when they were alive, and the scent of blood clung to them. Fierce and baleful by nature, they were ideal material for refining Yin Soldiers!

They would surely be vicious as ghosts, too. Perhaps he could refine them straight into true Yin Soldiers.

But Tang Changsheng already had a genuine Yin Soldier. With his abilities and resources, refining even one was difficult enough. Naturally, he had no intention of taking on more.

So those two men had lost even the chance to leave their souls behind!

The General's Temple stood in a remote place, with no villages or homes nearby. The trees on the mountain were dense, and the wind and rain were fierce today.

Tang Changsheng therefore wasn't worried that the gunshots would carry far enough to alert anyone.

While the rain was still falling, Tang Changsheng hoisted the bodies onto his back, left the temple, and crossed a ridge to the other half of Yin-Yang Mountain...

It was a barren place where not a blade of grass grew. The locals called it Dead Man Mountain.

A few decades earlier, wolves had still been plentiful. Packs would often gather on that ridge and howl at the moon...

Strangely enough, not a blade of grass grew on Wild Man Mountain, and there was no prey there at all.

Yet the wolves loved appearing there. Now and then, people even spotted severed hands and feet, or other torn remains.

They belonged to corpses the wolves had dug out of graves, or to some unlucky soul they had killed and dragged up Wild Man Mountain to eat.

According to the elders, Dead Man Mountain had once been covered in corpses. There had been so many dead that the mountain took its name from them.

The wolves had grown accustomed to eating people there. Even centuries later, when no dead remained on Dead Man Mountain, they still liked dragging their prey up to it.

Of course, even that had been thirty or forty years ago. The army had long since wiped out the pack...

There were no wolves left on Dead Man Mountain to help Tang Changsheng dispose of the bodies.

But there was a cliff. It was an even better place to make bodies disappear. Once he threw them over, he wouldn't have to worry about anyone finding them!

Years ago, twenty or thirty people had jumped off that cliff in broad daylight, before countless witnesses.

The local troops had searched for three days and nights afterward, but had failed to find a single body.

With that in mind, Tang Changsheng tossed the bodies over the jagged cliff without hesitation.

Rain fell from the sky, and the air was heavy with moisture. The cliff wasn't particularly high, but from where he stood, its lower half was already lost to sight.

Tang Changsheng walked back with his mind at ease. No one knew Dead Man Mountain's secret better than the people of the General's Temple. He knew what would happen to the bodies once they went over the edge!

Back at the General's Temple, Tang Changsheng cleaned the place from top to bottom. He scraped away every trace of blood sacrifice that needed scraping and washed everything that needed washing.

Then he burned the bloodstained clothes and disposed of every tool that needed disposing of.

He worked until dark, erasing every trace before he finally let out a breath!

At this point, no one would find a thing unless genuine forensic and evidence-identification experts came in already certain of their target and searched for it specifically.

In truth, what he had done was more than enough!

As the General's Temple's power revived and it once again commanded formidable strength, that would be the best protection of all... No one, on either side of the law, would dare come knocking lightly.

Over the next few days, Tang Changsheng stayed in seclusion and trained hard every day.

Of the General's Temple lineage's five sets of techniques, four could be practiced without necessarily igniting the Heavenly Heart...

But their demands were hardly low. The Sun and Moon Body-Washing and Form-Refining required one to gather the light and vital energy of the sun and moon. And ever since the great calamity that had befallen heaven and earth,

well, that went without saying... In any case, Tang Changsheng had practiced for more than ten years without much to show for it.

The Four Symbols and Five Spirits was powerful, but it was no introductory Daoist art. It could only be practiced after internal cultivation had reached a profound level.

As for the Nine Luminaries Heavenly Heart Method, which the sect leader's line was required to master, it could only be practiced after opening the Heavenly Heart.

What was more, the Heavenly Heart was the foundation for performing every Daoist art.

So it came back to the same thing: Tang Changsheng had to keep his Heavenly Heart lit and establish his Spirit Terrace and Sea of Consciousness before he could cast spells whenever and wherever he wished.

At the very least, he had to bring the time it took to light his Heavenly Heart down to a few minutes.

If it took an hour or two to ignite, there would be no time to cast any spell when he needed one. At most, he could draw a few paper talismans in advance!

But that was not something he could accomplish in a day. In a world where spiritual energy had waned, training that way was difficult.

For now, Tang Changsheng could only draw talismans to refine his Yin Soldier!

This time, after Tang Changsheng ignited his Heavenly Heart and looked at the Yin Soldier again, it was no longer a mere mass of mist. At last, its other form appeared before him.

It was a soldier clad in ancient armor. Most striking of all was the ring-pommel saber in its hand, gleaming with a trace of dark light utterly unlike the Yin Soldier itself.

"It really is a Ghost Artifact. No doubt about it..."

There was nothing special about the Yin Soldier itself, but the Ghost Artifact made Tang Changsheng beam with delight.

The thing was even more precious than the Yin Soldier!

He could refine a Yin Soldier himself, but he had no way to make a Ghost Artifact like this.

Tang Changsheng spent a long while examining the Yin Soldier and grew more pleased the longer he looked. Even setting the Ghost Artifact aside, the black-robed Daoist had already refined the Yin Soldier to a level close to a Vicious Ghost.

In other words, although it was a Grade E Yin Soldier, it was already very close to Grade D.

That might be a rise of only one grade, but the difference in power was as vast as heaven and earth.

A Grudge Ghost could only deal with people whose lives were frail and fortunes low, and even then, it could only beguile them indirectly... It was the lowest grade of Yin Soldier.

Take this Grade E Yin Soldier before him. Without the Ghost Artifact in its hand, which could directly injure a living body, it would have had no way to harm Tang Changsheng.

But a Grade D Yin Soldier—a Vicious Ghost—was different. Even if someone was strong and sturdy, with a hardy life and flourishing fortunes, it could drain their vital energy and spirit and take their life.

The gulf between them was enormous!

Seeing that his Yin Soldier was already so close to becoming a Vicious Ghost, Tang Changsheng was delighted. It would save him a great deal of work!

The General's Temple had a complete set of methods for refining Ghost Soldiers. Supposedly, used to their fullest, they could even refine an ordinary Lonely Wandering Ghost straight into a Divine General Ghost King...

But that required his internal cultivation and magical power to transcend the mortal realm!

Tang Changsheng had only just lit his Heavenly Heart. Naturally, he was nowhere near capable of that and could perform only the first few stages of the refining art.