Throughout the middle of May, Li Ling’s Soul Departure roamed by night, searching around Beauty for useful clues. Yet even after combing through her entire room and the grounds of the temporary palace, he found nothing.
Li Ling began to ponder. I have three options now: best, middling, and worst.
The best option is to go straight to my father-in-law and tell him, "That Beauty of yours looks exciting. Give her to me to play with." Knowing him, he might happily agree.
At this thought, Li Ling could not help feeling conflicted.
In a certain sense, the Mystic Xin King really was quite accommodating.
But there's absolutely no need to take that best option.
Bringing over a whole living person would be a nuisance, and it might attract the attention of the demonic path.
The middling option is to report her to the Unusual Events Bureau and reap the rewards without lifting a finger.
But the Unusual Events Bureau is already secretly wary of its informant. That could also cause unforeseen complications.
The worst option is to keep watching this woman. But when she sleeps, I float above her head; when she removes her makeup, I float behind her; when she changes, I float outside the door... Those in the know call it surveillance. Those who aren't would think I was being a pervert.
Li Ling felt that investing some time, effort, and patience to uncover a secret was reasonable, but throwing away every shred of decency was never a good thing.
Men and women should keep their distance. If she were a man, it wouldn't be so awkward... No, wouldn't it be even more awkward if she were a man?
All three options had drawbacks. Li Ling had no choice but to put his ingenuity to work and think of another approach.
He recalled the results of his surveillance over the past days and suddenly remembered that, on the fifteenth, she had prayed again and mentioned a "routine report."
In that case, either she makes contact on the fifth, fifteenth, and twenty-fifth, or she does it on the fifteenth of every month.
The Spirit-Communing Incense she has left will last at least another three months. No one should come to contact her and replenish her incense anytime soon. It looks like I'll still have to focus on when she lights it.
I'll try to trace the field the next time she does it and find the being that answers her prayers!
But replenishing her incense can serve as another possible lead. If the first fails, I can immediately fall back on the second. That way, I'll be prepared for anything.
The actual method, of course, involved Returning Soul Incense.
Li Ling decided that when Beauty summoned that being's presence again, he would light Returning Soul Incense nearby and guide a large mass of incense essence into the field!
The being had failed to notice him twice in succession, so its cultivation should not have reached the Nascent Soul level. Once he found it, he could go straight over and watch it.
Another day, Li Ling found an excuse to visit the king at the temporary palace. That night, his Soul Departure went out again and carried the things he had left in the nearby grass into the courtyard where Beauty lived.
These were the women's quarters, so the cultivators stationed at the temporary palace could not conveniently keep watch over them. That made things easier for him.
Sure enough, late on the night of the twenty-fifth, Beauty lit incense and prayed, making contact with the mysterious being far away once more.
Li Ling hurriedly lit Returning Soul Incense at the foot of the rear courtyard wall, then drove its incense essence inside.
Although the incense essence of Returning Soul Incense was difficult for souls to assimilate, it dispersed extremely quickly. In that brief moment, it had already drifted off to who knew where.
Fortunately, the entire prayer did not take long. Once Beauty stopped, he threw the burning Returning Soul Incense into a pool and crushed it, destroying the evidence.
A considerable amount of incense essence had already escaped, and its scent was everywhere. Now came the test of his innate ability.
Li Ling began searching for his target within a radius of several hundred li: a second place, apart from this temporary palace, where the incense essence was concentrated.
After making a series of comparisons, Li Ling suddenly jolted.
I really found it! To the southwest!
Fortunately, the place he sensed was only a little over a hundred li from the Royal City.
Li Ling flew along the river in that direction and soon discovered that it lay in a town upstream from Lianhe County, which he had visited before.
He recalled a map he had once seen. This place seems to be called Jiu Mouth Town?
Beneath the night sky, Jiu Mouth Town was quiet and peaceful, with no visible signs of demonic cultivators lurking there. The rotten, bloody odors Li Ling sensed were largely projections on a spiritual level. Without seeing the people themselves, he could not necessarily smell them out of thin air, so he could only enter the streets and search aimlessly.
Without a continuously burning stick of Returning Soul Incense to help him, the incense essence that had traveled through the void had dispersed, spreading through the entire town like mist. For the moment, he could not pinpoint his target.
But now that he had come this far, Li Ling was in no hurry.
He had read the Unusual Events Bureau's files and knew that demonic cultivators were patient when lying low. They generally did not move their nests without reason.
Suddenly, Li Ling caught an extremely faint odor of rotting corpses. Following it, he entered a grand household, where the smell immediately grew stronger.
This appeared to be the residence of a local wealthy gentry family. In the stillness of the night, everything was peaceful, with nothing visibly amiss. But nothing could hide from Li Ling's senses.
Soon, in a cellar in the residence's rear courtyard, he saw a scene that made his scalp prickle.
In the cramped space, only several zhang across, over a hundred corpse demons of all kinds-Human-Head Centipedes, Purple Stiffs, White Stiffs, Green Stiffs, Water Monkeys, Mountain Ogres, and more-were packed together shoulder to shoulder.
Above the cellar, in a side room on the western side of the rear courtyard, someone was working by lamplight on a young girl's corpse lying on a table.
It was easy to see that she had drowned. Her body had already begun to swell, and bruises from tight bindings marked her hands, feet, shoulder blades, waist, and abdomen. Someone had bound her with rope and thrown her into the water to drown alive.
The man busy at the table was over sixty, his hair already withered white, but his hands remained exceptionally steady. Like a craftsman absorbed in his art, he cut open the girl's chest and lungs, poured in a black oil like ink, then stitched her back up with coarse brown thread.
He used few tools, but every one was finely made. They were all magical artifacts containing a measure of spiritual power.
The black oil was equally unusual. Before long, it turned the girl's skin blue-purple, yet her stiff posture began to soften.
As a cold, sinister current spread through the surroundings, white mist like frost coated every wall in the room.
Suddenly, her wide-open eyes moved. The dead girl seemed to have come alive, her face twisting with vicious hatred.
The old man seemed accustomed to this and paid it no attention. He merely pulled a cord beside him, summoning two young disciples waiting outside.
"Carry it out and soak it in the Nineteen Corpse Jar."
"Yes!" the two young disciples answered, immediately lifting the girl together with her bamboo mat and carrying her toward another cellar.
Li Ling followed to take a look, his heart heavy beyond measure.
Hidden here were some thirty large pottery jars, each big enough to hold an adult. They were filled with murky liquid like bloody water, and the thick, accumulated stench of sour rot and blood was nauseating.
Of all the demonic sects, the Netherworld Sect is the most vile. No wonder its infamy spreads far and wide!
Filled with anger, Li Ling continued exploring this demonic den. He found three people whose deep auras were no weaker than Special Envoy Mu's. One was the old man he had just seen; another was a burly man seven feet tall, built like an iron tower, with blue-purple skin all over. He seemed to practice an evil art of Corpse-Poison Body Refinement.
His specialty should be a corpse-refining art similar to external body-hardening arts, but far more effective. Ordinary blades, and even magical artifacts, might not pierce him.
Li Ling became deeply wary of this man. His current strength was insufficient; he was suited only to surprise attacks, not dealing with someone like this.
The last person with a deep aura worth noting was a young woman with delicate, lovely features. She looked slightly younger than him, about the Ninth Princess's age.
When Li Ling found her, she was sitting cross-legged on a bed in the main building of the inner courtyard, circulating her cultivation art. Blood-colored light like cloud and mist swirled around her.
Li Ling sensed her through the window and discovered that her aura was exceptionally deep and powerful. The impression she gave was no weaker than Zhu Ming, the slovenly Daoist in late-stage Qi Refining.
What puzzled him, however, was that even after approaching, he could not smell the rotting-corpse odor unique to Corpse Immortal Sect disciples. Instead, there was an intense, peculiar fragrance, like night-blooming jasmine mixed into a bloody sweetness, that seemed capable of making the mind grow hazy.
Worried that probing too much with his spiritual sense would alert her, Li Ling used only his innate gift for identifying people by scent. He committed the character of that smell firmly to memory and thought, Could she not be a Corpse Immortal Sect disciple?
But if she isn't, why is she with these people?
Everyone in the Corpse Immortal Sect routinely refined corpses. The spiritual energy they cultivated was mostly yin and putrid in nature, and years of dealing with corpses also made it easy for their stench to cling to them. They were very easy to distinguish.
Suddenly, Li Ling remembered something. Could she belong to the Ghost Soul Sect?
The Corpse Immortal Sect and Ghost Soul Sect had always been allies. In their own words, they were inseparably close; in the eyes of immortal sect cultivators, they wallowed in the same filth, a wolf and a jackal conspiring together.
The two sects shared a common origin, and their Dao Paths were like the two poles of yin and yang, complementing each other often and rarely conflicting. Since their founding, they had been as close as honey blended with oil, even frequently intermarrying and exchanging all kinds of resources.
While the Corpse Immortal Sect might harbor grudges against the White Bone Sect or even the Yellow Springs Sect, frequently scheming against them, the friendship between these two sects' disciples amazed even orthodox sects. Within the entire camp of evil demonic cultivators, they were certainly an anomaly.
Corpse Immortal, Ghost Soul...
Li Ling suddenly realized something. Looking at the blood mist surrounding the woman, he seemed to make out vague figures deep within it, as though Yin Spirits dwelled there.
She really is from the Ghost Soul Sect!
This seems to be the Blood-Baleful Demon Cloud mentioned in the Unusual Events Bureau's files. It possesses both substantial and insubstantial aspects, corroding flesh and spirit alike!
They're practically cracking bones and sucking out the marrow!
Not only do they take mortals' lives and refine their remains into demonic creatures, they won't even spare their souls...
With a heavy heart, Li Ling continued investigating the details of this demonic stronghold. In total, he found three people suspected to be at least in middle- to late-stage Qi Refining, ten early-stage cultivators or newcomers, over a hundred and fifty demonic creatures of various kinds, and more than a hundred people who appeared to be household retainers, servants, or henchmen. There were even weapons secretly stored in the warehouse.
This was no small force. Without his ability to use soul projection and evade their eyes, ears, and senses, Li Ling could never have entered so easily or investigated so thoroughly.
What puzzled him, however, was that even after searching the entire residence, he still had not found his intended target.
Could the mysterious being I'm looking for be that woman I just saw?
She seems to practice a Ghost Soul Sect art that transforms victims' remnant souls into blood-baleful Yin Spirits for her use. It wouldn't be surprising if she also had methods involving illicit worship and offerings, or controlling yin ghosts.
Ghost cultivators existed in this world, and divine-path secret arts had already begun to sprout, though they had yet to amount to much. After all, becoming an immortal and attaining the Dao was the mainstream; aligning one's will with the heart of heaven and living freely and unfettered was the proper path.
Li Ling suspected the woman because these cultivation arts were deeply connected, their methods lending themselves to mutual adaptation and support. Yin Spirits and ghosts even frequently posed as gods, encouraging illicit worship and deceiving ignorant commoners into making offerings to them, then using their incense and fire prayer power to strengthen themselves.
His Spirit-Communing Incense seemed to have become an excellent medium for communication. They had put it to use and even developed a way to transmit messages through prayer.
While Li Ling was thinking, the woman in the main building finished cultivating. She came out and gave some instructions, and a servant immediately went to the cellar to fetch the old man.
Li Ling perked up and followed the woman to the main hall to listen to their discussion.
"Miss Lin, did you summon this old man about tomorrow's sacrificial ceremony?"
The old man arrived shortly afterward, offered a simple bow, and got straight to the point.
"That's right, Elder You. Has everything been arranged?" Miss Lin asked.
Her features were delicate and lovely, and her voice was soft and sweet. Without seeing the blood-baleful energy coiling around her and the Yin Spirits manifesting as she cultivated, it would have been hard to believe she was a demoness who seized souls and stole spirits.
Elder You said, "Rest assured. We've held it many times, and there are established procedures to follow."
At this point, he paused, then continued with unmistakable pride, "The local villagers have long been convinced that the river monsters keep eating people because the river god is angry. Even though the Mystic Xin Kingdom's court has repeatedly cracked down, private sacrifices have never ceased. By now, the Great Lin River God's legacy has endured for nearly ten thousand years."
Miss Lin smiled faintly. "The common people are ignorant. That is our opportunity."
Elder You shook his head with a rueful smile. "The common people aren't truly ignorant. The fundamental reason is that they are weak."
Miss Lin's gaze shifted slightly. "Oh?"
Elder You said, "Only the weak cling so tightly to the lifesaving straw before their eyes. Even if they occasionally show intelligence and wisdom, they still see no farther than a mouse, seeking only relief from their immediate troubles."
"We hold the power to determine fortune and calamity in the towns along the river, to grant life and take it away. Whether their belief is genuine or feigned, they must offer sacrifices. Even in the years when our predecessors withdrew from this place and could hardly attend to it, local gentry and wealthy landowners still organized ceremonies themselves, with the people's support, continuing the customs for hundreds and thousands of years so that the legacy never died."
"Those so-called orthodox cultivators aren't all-powerful, nor can they keep their eyes fixed on a locality forever. They can only let things take their course. After all, whether praying for rain or averting calamity, these are the people's needs. If they cannot meet them, they can only leave them alone. Otherwise, they would be denounced as evil demons, while we became the saviors."
The Great Lin River God, sacrifices, customs...
At these words, Li Ling's heart shook, and he suddenly remembered something.
He finally knew the true origins of the mysterious being he had seen before.
Just as Li Ling's emotions surged, Miss Lin's expression suddenly changed. "Who's there?"