Both groups fled at once. Cang Baoniang dared not delay another instant. She gathered her remaining corpse fiends and fled South toward Badou Mountain with her disciples, while Elder Hao headed east to reunite with his surviving disciples.
Cang Baoniang had only just taken flight, shooting less than a hundred li wrapped in corpse fiends, when red light suddenly flashed ahead. Witch barred her path. "Granny, where are you going?"
Then the other eight Witches appeared ahead, behind, and on either side, completely surrounding master and disciples.
Before she could react, the Witches to either side and behind opened their mouths and sucked. Eight female disciples immediately had all their vitality, qi, and blood drawn out across the distance. In an instant, they became rotten skeletons and plummeted along with their corpse staffs.
Every member of this Shroud Sect group was an orphan. Some had lost both parents as children and been picked up by their masters; others had living parents but had been abducted by their masters.
From childhood, they had been taught to practice all manner of Evil Technique: sleeping in graveyards, digging up corpses, scooping out innards, and boiling corpse oil. They had killed countless people with cruel methods. Every one of them had a heart of iron and stone and enough audacity to challenge heaven.
Yet now, watching their companions have all their essence qi, blood, and flesh sucked dry by demons from dozens of zhang away, seeing them turn into skeletons before their very eyes, they were terrified nearly to death.
Cang Baoniang cried, "Fight them to the death! Form the Heavenly Corpse Formation!"
Waving her corpse staff, she unleashed her Three Corpse Incarnations, splitting off three copies of herself. Together with her original body, there were four of her, all identical, each holding one