Chapter 19

The solid wood railing of the chamber of commerce was directly snapped in half under her harpoon, and wood splinters even burst into the mouth of Cui Jiuyang, who was looking up from below.

Cui Jiuyang spat and spat, looking down at his hand, how arrogant, Shengdelong used sandalwood for its railings!

Looking up again, how arrogant, a sandalwood railing could suffer a comminuted fracture!

Seeing Ninth Lady with her slender arms and legs by day, speaking softly and gently, he had thought she was a shrinking violet, but he never expected she was a merciless terror.

Cui Jiuyang could not even help worrying about the man in black upstairs...

At this moment he felt that having the other man in black sat upon by Mama Liu was not necessarily a bad thing.

There was little suspense upstairs, and the outcome of the battle there depended solely on whether the man in black had a hard enough life.

Downstairs, Meng Da's side was rather perilous; that man in black had quite decent combat skills, only a little inferior to Meng Da, yet he managed to suppress Meng Da.

Even a competitor like Cui Jiuyang, whose martial arts training was limited to the second set of elementary school broadcast gymnastics, could tell that the man in black on the opposite side did not fear pain, and perhaps even somewhat did not fear death.

Meng Da's iron fists striking him produced only impact without pain response, and he did not even deliberately protect areas like his heart and ribs.

When he landed a punch on Meng Da, although Meng Da also tried his best to appear unaffected, judging from his clenched teeth, it must have hurt quite a bit.

However, the guards residing here in the chamber of commerce had also gotten up, shouting as they rushed this way, and the glare of torches even lit up outside; the man in black would surely be caught with no way to escape.

To avoid confusion from the crowd, Cui Jiuyang stuck the feather duster behind his head, holding one palm vertical in front while using two fingers of the other hand as a brush, and wrote a Thunder Technique on his palm with silver-hook, iron-glyph strokes!

Just as he held his palm horizontally, poised to fling the Thunder Technique out, he hurriedly pulled it back.

He almost forgot, this move hadn't been mastered yet~

He scratched and doodled on the original incantation, altering a few strokes.

Like this... even without reaching the ultimate extreme, he could still cast the spell!

The Thunder Technique... didn't necessarily have to be thunder.

Just throwing a flash would do, too!

He extended both palms flat out and shouted, "Everyone, close your eyes!"

The next moment, it grew bright as day.

Chapter 25: Dead Men

Who said throwing a flash didn't count as thunder?

Blinded by the flash, the man in black stood in place, unmoving.

Lacking trust in Cui Jiuyang, Meng Da also failed to keep his eyes closed and was frantically rubbing them nearby.

Spirit Medium Wei thought Cui Jiuyang was about to use some Cui Family secret technique that shouldn't be watched, so she obediently closed her eyes as told.

Mama Liu, however, was a half-beat slow in reacting and wasn't flashed, because she was lowering her head and left-and-righting heavy slaps across the face of the man in black beneath her backside.

Cui Jiuyang picked up a bronze galloping-horse ornament, skirted behind the man in black, gathered all his strength, swung it around, and smashed it against the latter's head.

The man in black collapsed to the ground on the spot and stopped moving.

"Pfft, don't take scholars for lacking combat capability." He pulled out the feather duster tucked behind his neck and flicked open the mask of the man in black.

Eyelids purplish, complexion ghostly pale, lips tinged with blue... he died quite peacefully.

And it looked like... he had been dead for at least three days.

While everyone stood frozen in place, a battered man in black plummeted from the sky, slamming heavily onto the ground with a bang, blood gradually spreading out from beneath him along the carpet's patterns.

The fierce ghost poked its head out from the broken railing upstairs, its blue face and sharp fangs exceptionally ferocious: "Little brat, you run pretty fast! Are you going to run this time?!"

Looking at Ninth Lady's terrifying appearance, Cui Jiuyang turned his head and said, "Granny Wei, the two of you share a room, right."

Granny Wei replied, "That's right."

"You didn't cast any strange curses on Ninth Lady, did you..."

"No, truly no."

Mama Liu also stood up from the man in black beneath her backside.

Meng Da walked over to Mama Liu's side and cupped his fists in salute: "I must thank Mama Liu for stepping in."

Mama Liu gave a noncommittal response, while Meng Da lifted the mask of the man in black at his feet, pried open an eyelid, and felt the neck: "No... this one has also been dead for several days."

The others walked over to check the one who had fallen from the second floor, and needless to say, he was already long dead as well.

At that moment, a young man among the surrounding guards pointed at the man in black knocked flat by Cui Jiuyang's bronze horse and suddenly cried out: "Hey! Isn't this Little Black Dog!"

Several other guards also recognized the remaining two men in black lying on the ground: "That one is Old Seven!"

"The one who fell from above is He Er!"

"Brother Meng, how come all of them... all of them are crewmen from the ship that sank a few days ago?!"

That sunken ship?

Fifth Master had previously said that everyone on that ship had drowned... It seemed these three men in black were among them.

With so many crewmen and laborers in Shengdelong, Meng Da did not recognize them all. After having a few guards who did recognize them examine the bodies closely, he told the constantly whispering guards to go out and stand guard, forbidding anyone from entering or leaving the chamber of commerce clubhouse.

"Mr. Cui, they are indeed crewmen from that ship. After the ship sank, the skippers and crewmen salvaged more than half of them, but some remained unaccounted for. At the time, we thought they had been swept away by passing vessels, but I never expected..."

Although young, Meng Da handled matters with mature composure. After speaking with Cui Jiuyang about this, he said not a single extra word and went to arrange the night watch shifts for tonight.

Cui Jiuyang looked at the three fallen corpses, a sliver of inspiration seeming to flash across his mind, yet it vanished in a split second without him catching anything.

He stood there in a daze, racking his brain.

Drowned dead men...

A sunken ship.

Dead men that move...

Fighting...

He kicked one of them again with his foot.

The skin was soft, and the flesh wasn't taut either...

Not like a zombie.

...Zombies weren't afraid of light, and they tracked people by scent...

A water-ghost corpse?

That wasn't right either; water-ghost corpses stopped moving once they came ashore.

A sunken ship...

A sunken ship...

Fire Armored Beetles... Right, Fire Armored Beetles!

His mind suddenly cleared, and he cried out anxiously: "Meng Da! Meng Da! Don't let those guards go outside just now! There's an outsider among them!"

Though he didn't understand, Meng Da learned his lesson quickly.

Earlier, he hadn't listened to Cui Jiuyang's instruction to close his eyes and had almost been flashed blind, so this time he decisively decided: "Hey, lads, get back here!"

As those words fell, the guards walking toward the entrance of the central hall all turned their heads back, except for a tall, thin, inconspicuous figure on the very edge who bolted out with a swish.

Seeing it clearly, Meng Da shouted at the top of his lungs: "That's Yang Jing, go after him!"

Curious about why Yang Jing was running, the guards heard Chief Meng's order and turned back to give chase.

When Cui Jiuyang connected the moving corpses with Fire Armored Beetles, he remembered that besides zombies or Jiangxi corpse-driving, there was another art that could make corpses move freely.

Gu Sorcery.

Within Gu Sorcery, there was a Walking Corpse Gu, which allowed Gu insects to cling to a corpse's spine and manipulate the corpse into walking.

However, this kind of Walking Corpse Gu was limited to merely making a corpse move. If one wanted the corpse to operate flexibly and even fight with people... that could only be the Puppet Gu.

The Gu insects for the Puppet Gu required slender worms capable of limb regeneration, achieving the purpose of manipulating the corpse by letting them enter the entire meridian system.

Yet this type of Gu had one drawback: the Gu sorcerer could not let the Gu insects leave their line of sight, otherwise they would lose connection and become unable to manipulate them.

When the flash Thunder Technique had been cast just now, the man in black instantly stopped moving; it wasn't because he had been blinded by the flashbang, but because the Gu sorcerer hiding in the dark to manipulate the corpse had been flashed!

Figuring out this crucial link and connecting it to the noisy departure of the group of guards just a moment ago, Cui Jiuyang figured that must have been the best opportunity for the Gu sorcerer to escape!

Still, he hadn't expected the Gu sorcerer to also possess the art of disguise, actually impersonating a guard directly. Truly, he was bold beyond measure.

Seeing the crowd set off in pursuit, and with no way of knowing whether they could catch the man, Cui Jiuyang didn't let anyone touch the three corpses on the ground, lest there be other Gu insects acting as traps, which would only spell trouble later on.

This matter could only be left to Granny Wei to handle.

Her Gray Family Immortal might not be suited for everything, but dealing with a mere bug was a task she could accomplish effortlessly.

Granny Wei made no elaborate movements, merely standing beside the corpses and releasing faint black Qi from her hands. This black Qi drifted and wafted into the nostrils of the corpses, and before long, three snow-white Gu insects crawled out from the corpses' nostrils.

The Gu insects looked sinister at a glance, their nearly transparent white bodies housing countless black, slender, fleshy whiskers.

When they were inside the corpses' trunks, these fleshy whiskers penetrated deep into the human meridians, continuously receiving manipulation from the Gu sorcerer to make the corpses dodge, leap, and fight with people.

Granny Wei drew a porcelain bottle from her bosom, cautiously opened the stopper, and dropped three drips onto the three Gu insects. After a burst of bluish smoke, the Gu insects left behind nothing but a puddle of thick liquid.

Spirit Medium Wei said, "That settles it, these people can be buried now. What a sin, not letting them rest in peace even after death."

When everything was finished, Cui Jiuyang realized: why hadn't Ninth Lady come down from the second floor yet?

He went upstairs to search, and upon stepping off the stairs and entering the second-floor corridor, he saw a fierce ghost sitting on the floor against the wall, its head lowered and motionless.

"Ninth Lady! What's wrong with you!" Hurrying over, Cui Jiuyang gently patted her shoulder twice.

Yielding to the force of his pat, Ninth Lady toppled onto the ground, her chest rising and falling steadily, her breathing even... Was she actually asleep...?

Finding it somewhat strange, Cui Jiuyang wondered why she would find a place to lie down and sleep right after finishing a fight.

He called out a few times and reached out to remove Ninth Lady's Nuo Mask.

As the Nuo Mask shifted, Ninth Lady was also roused from her slumber. Her willow eyebrows stood erect, and her gaze was sharp with killing intent: "What are you doing?"

As she spoke, the pungent scent of alcohol wafted out, and one could tell at a single sniff that she had drunk plenty.

Huh, in the daytime her features were gentle, soft, and delicate, not at all looking like someone who would drink alcohol.