Yunqi considered for a moment, then took out a jade slip. It was the parting gift Master Sukong had given him, with five words engraved on it:
"Green Beetle Life-Transformation Scripture."
It detailed methods for finding, identifying, nourishing, and commanding corpses.
Yunqi first looked through the section on finding corpses. There was no immediate hurry to find a Master of the Lung Palace, but familiarizing himself with it now would let him keep an eye out on his future travels.
His teacher had bestowed this One-Horned Rhinoceros Golden Beetle upon him. Its elemental affinity matched his, and it was a rare insect corpse whose ancestors had even produced an immortal.
Yet Yunqi had no intention of simply using this one.
However he looked at it, he felt an insect corpse was not his ideal choice. How should he put it?
It always seemed a little petty and small-time.
All this insect's abilities lay in commanding other dead creatures. On its own, aside from its evasion arts and strength, there was little worth mentioning. To put it plainly, it lacked a certain blazing majesty.
Though Xin Metal was his preferred element, the lungs ruled the west and governed slaughter. Even if their affinity was yin, they still ought to embody unstoppable sharpness and an arrogance that soared above the clouds. Taken a step further, they should possess the aloof pride of defeating the orthodox through the unorthodox, of extinguishing yang through yin!
As for this insect corpse, the sensible course was to nourish it first, then have it find him an excellent corpse.
The corpse-finding section stated that corpses belonged to yin, corresponding among the five elements to yi wood, ding fire, ji earth, xin metal, and gui water.
Water must never be chosen. Water was already yin among the five elements, and gui water represented its utmost extreme. Add a dead corpse to that, and with such overwhelming yin, a corpse creature would be difficult to create. If one did form, it would become a great fiend, an evil corpse or a demonic corpse. Such things must never be nourished and must be destroyed on sight.
The jade slip specifically mentioned a demonic corpse named Gu Chen who had appeared several hundred years ago. True Person Long Eyebrow, the founding patriarch of Emei, had suppressed him within underground baleful fire, and he remained trapped there to this day.
Yi wood produced living corpses. Since corpses belonged to earth, and earth gave birth to wood, vitality gestated within their deathly energy, creating living corpses. Once accomplished in cultivation, living corpses were no different from ordinary people, with fair skin and supple joints. They lacked only a heartbeat and body warmth.
Glamorous Corpse Cui Ying, hailed as a peerless beauty in the mortal world and indistinguishable from a living person, was a Yi Wood Corpse.
Ding fire produced vicious corpses, whose appearance brought great droughts. The ancient Drought Demon had been a ding fire corpse. There was also a ding fire corpse in the present cultivation world, known as Red Corpse Wu Lao. However, he presumably feared being eradicated by the orthodox path, so he rarely revealed his whereabouts.
The earth embodied the receptive; its profound virtue bore all things and nurtured life. Most corpse creatures beneath heaven belonged to ji earth-the commonly known zombies.
Above zombies, however, when ji earth reached its ultimate extreme, there was another kind of corpse, called an emperor corpse. One could only form when an emperor was buried in a dragon lair and the dragon vein subsequently withered. In the "Green Beetle Scripture," such an emperor corpse was merely conjecture, with no actual name recorded. Perhaps none had ever appeared.
Xin metal produced extraordinary corpses. Metal was the essence of earth, formed through transformation and born of the extraordinary. Such corpses could only be nurtured by exhausting the possibilities of change. As for their abilities, those truly depended on heaven's decree. Ordinary ones were no different from common zombies, save for tougher skin and flesh, and were called Golden-Armored Corpses. At the highest extreme, they could become Corpse Immortals.
The One-Horned Rhinoceros Golden Beetle in his hand, for example, looked vividly alive, resisted decay and rot, and had a substance like gold and jade. It ranked among the finest of xin metal corpses. With proper nourishment, it might well have a chance to awaken its spiritual intelligence.
The book also said:
Gui water lay in the northeast, submerged in lakes and marshes;
Yi wood lay in the southeast, hidden among tree roots;
Ding fire lay in the southwest, buried in fire caverns;
Xin metal lay in the northwest, concealed within metal and stone;
Ji earth lay in every direction, beneath the ground.
In other words, he might have to make a trip to the northwest before opening his Lung Palace.
"Grr-"
The dog guarding the entrance suddenly stood up and gave a low warning growl.
Yunqi put away the jade slip, extinguished the fire, and set his thoughts aside for the moment. In one swift stride, he reached the cave entrance and stared intently in one direction.
"Toad, let's see where you can run today!"
A fierce shout came from afar.
Hearing it, Yunqi was left speechless. Why did he keep running into scenes like this?
Judging by the voices, though, the pursuers this time seemed fiercer, while the fugitive barely spoke.
Before long, "Toad" burst into Yunqi's view.
Amid the heavy snow, the man's green robe stood out conspicuously. No wonder they called him Toad.
He did not even have a cloud mount and was fleeing on foot. He must have enhanced himself with something like a swift-travel talisman, however, because he ran quite fast, crossing the snow without leaving a trace. His face and clothes were covered in blood, and he looked utterly bedraggled.
Whoosh! Whoosh!
Two sounds of something slicing through the air came from behind Toad.
Yunqi raised an eyebrow. Those were the sounds of Talisman Arrows.
Toad twisted aside. One Talisman Arrow struck the ground in front of him and turned into a cloud of poisonous mist, blocking his escape.
The second Talisman Arrow was intercepted by something like a pebble that the fugitive hurled out. It exploded into a fireball in midair, and the wave of flame caught him as well, burning away several locks of hair and leaving him looking even more wretched.
At that moment, his pursuers also entered Yunqi's view. There were two of them.
Their clothing actually looked somewhat familiar to Yunqi, resembling Miao attire, though their blazing-red hair was rather strange.
One was older and the other younger. The younger was around twenty, with a burly build and fluffy short hair like a bird's nest. The older was around forty, short and thin, with shoulder-length hair.
"Why aren't you running anymore? Run out of magical power, have you? Now you want to fight for your life?"
The one with the bristling hair spoke.
Now that the man they called Toad had stopped fleeing, the two of them instead stood well back, not daring to approach.
They were far smarter than that young hero from the Golden Aspect Sect.
Toad looked fairly young, probably not yet thirty, but he had a savage face. Looking closely at his hands, Yunqi saw that three of his ten fingers were missing.
"Just you two rotten-headed snakes? If you hadn't ganged up on me, would your grandpa here have needed to run?!"
In the heavy snow, one man in a filthy green robe and two with ostentatious red hair hurled insults at one another. Yunqi could not make sense of it. Why did they all look like fiends? This was not nearly as easy to judge as Young Hero Jiang Nanjing and the Thin Daoist.
With the situation unclear, Yunqi naturally stayed put, hiding in the cave with his aura restrained and his breathing hushed. The dog needed no reminder; not even a breath could be heard from him.
"Your grandpa's right here! Do you rotten-headed snakes dare come closer? You've fired thirteen Talisman Arrows along the way. Got any left? If your Redwood Ridge is that rich, why shouldn't I just accept death right here?!"
Toad shouted loudly. Now that he had stopped, he actually seemed more imposing than when he had been running.
The two rotten-headed snakes were even more relaxed now. They merely kept their eyes fixed on Toad, maintaining a distance that allowed them to advance and attack or retreat and defend.
"Yes, yes, you're formidable. You're the most formidable of all. We were just wondering-your patriarch summoned this blizzard, but did his venerable self ever imagine his own descendants would freeze to death in it? Oh, perhaps he wouldn't care!
"Hahahaha!"
The two rotten-headed snakes laughed wildly.
While the Daoist in the cave was still reeling at the revelation that this blizzard had been summoned by human power, he also began to suspect who they were. One side wore green robes, the other had red hair, and here in the forests of the Southern Wastes, they were as irreconcilable as fire and water. They had also just mentioned Redwood Ridge.
Weren't those Redwood Ridge and Hundred Barbarian Mountain?
Were the disciples and descendants of these two factions really so fond of following their patriarchs' tastes? Did even their clothing and appearance have to match so closely?
Time passed, and in the end, Toad was the first to lose patience.
Under Yunqi's rather startled gaze, he bit down on one of his few remaining fingers.
1. Here's the first chapter. The second will come a little later.
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