Soul-Refining in a Malevolent Formation

Zhou Yi met the bride.

Women in mountain villages were not bound by so many rules. They worked in the fields too, and frequent visits had long since made them familiar with one another.

Second Sister had a dark, thin face and sturdy limbs. She wore a brand-new hemp skirt, with a short strip of red silk tied in her hair.

Seeing Zhou Yi, she greeted him happily.

"Yi, hurry up and find yourself a wife. Bring her to meet your sister when you do."

"I certainly will if I get the chance. I bought this hairpin in the Capital. It's a gift for you, Second Sister..."

Zhou Yi smiled. "Brother-in-law, don't be jealous. Second Sister and I are just like blood siblings."

His brother-in-law was a hunter with an easygoing disposition. "Haha, what are you saying, Yi? Pick any girl from the Capital and she'd be prettier than her."

"Oh, get out of here-"

Second Sister took the hairpin and tucked it into the red silk, where it glittered under the lamplight.

Zhou Yi took out a jade bracelet next. It was translucent and flawless; anyone could tell it was worth a fortune.

"Sister-in-law, I couldn't be there to congratulate you when you married my elder brother. Please accept this bracelet as my apology."

"Thank you, Brother."

His sister-in-law slipped on the bracelet, unable to hide the delight on her face.

A hairpin and a bracelet-both were treasures the village had never seen before.

The wedding feast grew livelier still. Everyone came over to drink with Zhou Yi, pouring cup after cup down his throat.

Zhou Yi's eyes gradually grew unfocused. Finally, he slumped over the table, seemingly drunk.

"Yi's had too much. Hurry and help him home."

"He only just got back, and he's already drunk so much."

"Haha, Auntie, your second boy's made something of himself. He's an official in the Capital..."

"He's bought a house in the Capital. Don't forget to come back and visit."

"Old Zhou's got an easy life ahead of him!"

Congratulations, drinking, finger-guessing games, laughter, and the clatter of tables and chairs faded farther and farther from his ears.

His elder and younger brothers supported Zhou Yi between them and took him home, to the room he shared with his younger brother.

He fell onto the bed and went straight to sleep.

At midnight.

A burst of commotion, seemingly distant yet close, reached Zhou Yi's ears.

His eyes snapped open, without the slightest trace of drunkenness.

His third brother, who had been sleeping on the floor, was gone.

Zhou Yi's figure flashed, turning into a streak of escaping light. The shouting and curses came from Ninth Grandpa's courtyard.

He arrived in an instant and saw a large crowd holding torches, shouting around a pitch-black shadow.

Most of what they said amounted to "Stop making trouble," "Go back inside, go back inside," "Snap out of it," and "Today's the day you visit your family after the wedding"...

The shadow stood nearly twenty feet tall, like ink splashed onto a wall and roughly smeared into limbs and a head, barely recognizable as a human shape.

Its eyes were blood-red, its face blue and fanged, with a glittering hairpin atop its head.

Seemingly irritated by the noise, the shadow let out a piercing shriek and reached its black claws toward someone in the crowd.

Swift as thunder, those claws needed only one slash to tear a person in two.

Hidden in the darkness, Zhou Yi knitted his brows and sent a strand of magical power onto the shadow's head.

The hairpin Dharma Artifact shone with golden light. The black shadow shrieked in agony, its form melting and shrinking until it vanished into nothingness.

Seeing the shadow disappear, the people looked bewildered. They searched like headless flies, then returned to their homes to sleep when they found nothing, as though nothing had happened.

Zhou Yi's expression shifted uncertainly. His figure flashed, and he landed inside the Zhou Ancestral Hall.

The hall was pitch-black, but seeing in the dark was effortless for Zhou Yi. A bulky, awkward figure knelt on a prayer cushion.

"Sister-in-law, why?"

The heavyset figure abruptly turned. It was his elder brother's wife, but her face was now rotten and twisted, exposing half a skull, without a trace of a mother's kindness.

"Brother, you're alive. Why did you come back to the village...?"

His sister-in-law's mouth opened and closed, her voice low and icy. "Turn around and leave now. Pretend you never came."

"Then why... did you send me a message?"

With a thought from Zhou Yi, the artifact on his sister-in-law's wrist flickered with golden light.

A Message-Sending Jade Slip fell to the floor.

Zhou Yi demanded again, "Why?"

"There is no why-Roar!"

His sister-in-law shrieked. Her hands turned into sharp claws and lunged toward Zhou Yi.

Zhou Yi closed his eyes, and a bolt of lightning shot out.

Thunder arts were supremely yang and unyielding. Before the bolt even struck, yin qi steamed from his sister-in-law's body, leaving her ghostly form on the verge of collapse.

Just as the lightning was about to blast her apart, it vanished.

The jade bracelet Dharma Artifact suddenly enlarged, clamping around his sister-in-law's neck and pinning her in place.

Roar!

His sister-in-law tried to struggle free, but the jade bracelet felt as heavy as a thousand pounds. She could not budge it.

"Let me go! Let me go... Brother, please... he took my child... his soul had only just formed..."

His sister-in-law shrieked incoherently, "They're all dead anyway... what does it matter if they die again... he's your own nephew..."

Zhou Yi sighed. "Making deals with a devil and hoping for a lucky escape will only drag you deeper!"

He sealed his sister-in-law with a flash of spiritual light, then turned and left the ancestral hall.

The morning sun rose.

Purple qi came from the east, and golden light burst forth.

Waking from sleep, Zhou Yi found himself lying atop a grave mound.

Desolate haze and tangled weeds surrounded him, without a soul in sight.

Around him lay the ruins of Zhou Family Village. Where the ancestral hall had once stood, there was now an enormous grave mound.

The night's events seemed like a dream, a bubble destined to burst.

The chestnut horse snorted, sniffing the plants scattered across the ground, but dared not eat them.

Zhou Yi rose and bowed three times to the grave mound, murmuring to himself.

"Rather than suffer the torment of killing intent here day and night, existing neither alive nor dead, you should enter the underworld sooner and be reborn as human beings."

He summoned a great bank of dark clouds to block the sunlight. Blood flowed from his fingertip as he cast the Bloodline Soul-Summoning Art.

This spell came from a Ghost Dao cultivator. Through karmic and bloodline ties, it could summon the souls of relatives out of the bondage of evil cultivators.

Unorthodox paths understood other crooked paths best, whether in cultivation or in countering them.

A middle-aged ghost emerged from the grave. A blade had sliced open his chest, which was stitched together with black threads of baleful intent. He was Zhou Yi's father.

At first, his father was dazed and vacant. As the cold wind blew over him, his eyes gradually cleared.

"Is this... morning?"

Then he let out a string of ghostly cries. "Heh heh heh, I'm free..."

"Father, wake up!"

Zhou Yi's voice boomed like thunder, carrying a Daoist mantra that roused his father from his growing madness.

This grave mound was a special ghost-refining formation. It continuously gathered qi of earth sha and fused it with the yin qi and resentment inside the ghosts.

A baleful soul refined over several years would emerge as a century-old fierce ghost, comparable to the middle third grade.

His father had already been deeply corrupted by resentful, baleful qi, and his mind leaned toward chaos and madness.

"Second Son? Did you get me out?"

Struggle flickered in his father's eyes, along with repeated flashes of black light, as he restrained the instinctive thirst for blood and slaughter rising from his heart.

"Yes, Father. You've been dead for ten years, trapped in a Soul-Refining Formation all this time."

Zhou Yi explained, "I summoned you to ask what happened back then. Was it a natural disaster or a man-made calamity? Why didn't you enter the underworld after death?"

"Back then..."

His father's once-clear eyes instantly turned pitch-black, and thick, resentful, baleful qi became black smoke.

"Om!"

Zhou Yi uttered a Buddhist School mantra, and a Wooden Fish appeared in his hand.

Knock, knock, knock...

Buddhist light manifested, slowly soothing his father's resentment.

His rewards for slaying demons included not only Divine Abilities of the Daoist Order, but also some Buddhist School spells.

The Buddhist School excelled at calming hearts, making its arts ideal for this moment.

With Zhou Yi's strength, even forcibly reading his father's memories would have been effortless. Yet out of respect for his elder, many methods were difficult to employ.

"Back then... war came upon us... rebels passed through the village and forcibly requisitioned grain. They also wanted to conscript the able-bodied men..."

His father's voice was hoarse. Doing his utmost to suppress his resentment, he slowly continued, "How could we agree? If one person joined the rebels, the whole village would become traitors... the rebel commander ordered everyone in the village slaughtered, and we became homeless ghosts..."

"As for why we didn't enter the underworld, I don't know."

His father recalled it in fragments. Ever since becoming ghosts, they had been endlessly reliving the day before the rebels massacred the village.

Cycle after cycle, the end returning to the beginning.

Over time, when a ghost could no longer endure the resentful, baleful qi, they would lose their reason and become a fierce wraith.

Fear flashed through his father's eyes. "...Every so often, someone seemed to come and take the fierce ghosts away. They never came back..."

After death, the ghosts of Zhou Family Village had mostly remained in a confused state. Had Zhou Yi not told him, his father would not even have known he had been dead for ten years.

Zhou Yi said, "Rest assured, Father. I'll find the one responsible and avenge you!"

"Hiss-"

His father's mouth twitched. At the mention of vengeance, even the Buddhist light could barely suppress his resentful, baleful qi.

The black threads of resentful, baleful qi inside his soul rapidly multiplied. Once they covered his entire body, he would become a fierce wraith completely.

"Yi, don't talk about... vengeance! Hiss-"

His father barely held on to a shred of lucidity. "I'm already dead. Just take care of yourself. Go, quickly. Don't worry about me!"

His father had spent his whole life as a commoner, always meekly enduring whatever came his way. Even if he became a fierce ghost and was beaten to death, he would not wish to implicate his son.

"Say no more, Father."

Zhou Yi said, "This formation has alarms. To keep the evil cultivator from fleeing ahead of time, I'll send you back first. Once everything is over, I'll break the formation and guide you into the underworld."

With a wave of his hand, he sent his father's soul back into the grave, then turned into a streak of escaping light and flew toward Hengyang.

Zhou Family Village fell under Hengyang County's jurisdiction. How could anything that happened there, great or small, escape the City God and the earth gods?

For ten years, thousands of souls had been unable to enter the underworld after death.

If Hengyang's City God dared claim ignorance, he was surely one of the culprits!