Gong Qi’s face was deathly white, his whole body shaking ceaselessly, tears falling like rolling beads.

Shen Qinghe stared, dumbstruck: “What happened to him?”

Lang Jiuchuan pulled Gong Qi away from the meditation cushion. She took a look at the cushion — old enough to be fraying and thoroughly saturated with yin energy — reached out and touched it, then said: “He channeled the spirit within it.”

A’Piao walked over: “He has a spirit-channeling constitution?”

A spirit-channeling constitution — something one encounters by fate, not by seeking.

“Hard to say.” Lang Jiuchuan shook her head: “Perhaps he resonated with it through empathy — that too is possible.”

She saw that Gong Qi had not yet come back to himself and summoned her Panguan brush, drew a soul-settling talisman on his forehead, then shook the Dizhong bell. The long, sustained tone of the bell gradually brought him back to stillness, and the clarity slowly returned to his eyes.

Gong Qi touched his ice-cold cheek, then glanced at the meditation cushion on the ground and swallowed hard. His voice was cold as frost: “A violation of every human bond — he killed his own son and sealed the soul within the body to refine an evil spirit. What a vicious heart.”

Shen Qinghe’s mind was buzzing. He pieced together the story as best he could from everyone’s words. Killing one’s son and sealing the soul — but he had graduated top in the palace examinations in the second rank. How was it that he could not make sense of any of this?

Gong Qi saw that neither Lang Jiuchuan nor A’Piao showed any sign of surprise and asked: “You both already knew?”

“Shopkeeper A’Piao found traces of the past on the Cong Family’s people. The corpse fiend is the old ancestor of the Cong Family’s biological son.” Lang Jiuchuan replied: “We came here looking for that person’s birth date and eight characters.”

“Birth date and eight characters?”

Lang Jiuchuan made a sound of affirmation and explained her reasoning: “This is a precaution. Time is short. Once the corpse fiend is found, it must be eliminated immediately — there can be no chance of escape. We cannot allow its yin essence soul to detach and find a womb to be reborn through. If that happens, it will be even harder to kill.”

Gong Qi looked at her with admiration: “You truly see one step ahead for every ten.”

“When the fire is already at your eyebrows, one can’t help but think further ahead. If the situation were like some folk history tale — where it simply needs a womb to be reborn through, rather than behaving like an ordinary corpse fiend — we could afford to take our time, to wear it down, and if it escapes we could continue to pursue and subdue it.” Lang Jiuchuan’s expression was grave: “The truth is, both we and they are racing for this first move.”

They needed to kill the corpse fiend and stop it from breaking free of the seal and entering the world. The old ancestor of the Cong Family, on the other side, was stalling for time until the moment was ripe.

“If we fail to land a decisive blow, we will have fallen behind.”

If the corpse fiend was found but could not be destroyed in time, it would come into the world just as she had seen in her vision.

Gong Qi pressed his lips together and asked: “Can the future truly be changed?”

Lang Jiuchuan glanced sideways at him: “Do your utmost, and leave the rest to fate.”

Regardless, the fight had to be fought!

Gong Qi turned to look at the meditation cushion and said: “This cushion ought to have been in constant use by the old ancestor of the Cong Family all along — he must have been hiding here for years, living out his days in concealment. I used the Art of Retrospection and immediately saw the scene of him killing his son and sealing the soul within. I believe this must be the obsession that has consumed him for years.”

Shen Qinghe tried his best to piece together a complete picture from everyone’s words: “Wait — this old ancestor of the Cong Family you speak of, just how old is he, and he’s still alive? The Cong Family’s old patriarch is already past seventy. I have never heard of any Cong Family member older than him.”

“That is something I find puzzling as well. Even if he has not perished, it has been nearly a hundred years since the news of his death was first reported. How can he still be alive?” Gong Qi was equally baffled.

Lang Jiuchuan said: “Have you forgotten what cultivation stage he is at? Those at Foundation Establishment can extend their lifespan. With proper cultivation and health-preservation methods, living to a hundred and fifty or even two hundred is not impossible.”

Those who attain the Dao — their years can be extended.

“But even if he is still alive, he does not have much longer.” Lang Jiuchuan fixed her eyes on the meditation cushion: “Even if he has not yet fallen, he must have suffered great damage — that is what drove him to madness and to killing his son to refine an evil spirit. Those whose cultivation regresses cannot live long. That he has survived this long at all means he must have been using some other corrupt method.”

“What method?”

Lang Jiuchuan raised her head and looked at each of them in turn: “When you entered just now, didn’t you notice how unreasonably many spirit tablets there were on the Cong Family’s ancestral shrine?”

Shen Qinghe paused. There were indeed a great many — filling an entire rack of sandalwood shelves. He had even marveled at how large and flourishing the Cong Family was. But looking at the Cong Family members now placed under house arrest outside, it seemed as though that growth had somehow stopped.

Gong Qi’s voice shook: “There is an evil technique — to extend one’s lifespan, one seizes the life force of others, concealing it entirely, and uses it to sustain one’s own continued existence.”

What?

Every hair on Shen Qinghe’s body stood up. His face went white as paper: “You’re saying that old ancestor has been siphoning the life force from his own descendants and grafting it onto himself?”

Lang Jiuchuan scanned the hidden room and said: “He has already gone mad. If he could bring himself to kill his own son, what is there he could not do? To achieve his life’s obsession, he would not care at all whether those people were his own flesh and blood.”

She moved to stand before one of the walls, noticing some carved markings there. She reached out to trace them, running her fingers along the grooves, and her brow furrowed: “Seizing life force is one thing — but given that he dared to use corrupt techniques again and again, he may well have been cultivating some dark and damaging art over all these years as well. What kind of person was that wandering Daoist he encountered back then, and what exactly did they teach him?”

“All this — just to see this yin-yang individual refined and born into the world? This is utter insanity!” Gong Qi murmured: “Simply to refine such a great demonic creature into existence, he threw human bonds to the wind, laid plans for a hundred years, and even when all is accomplished, what then? He will still die in the end.”

Lang Jiuchuan’s hand suddenly stilled. She turned around: “Yes — even if he refines such a demonic creature, he will still die. Then why remain so obsessed? Is it simply to prove his exceptional nature to the world?”

A’Piao saw her brow knitting together: “What are you thinking?”

“Something feels off.” Lang Jiuchuan moved around the hidden room as she spoke: “I actually don’t believe a corpse fiend can sow a fetus. Although folk tales and rumors speak of ghosts copulating with humans and planting ghost fetuses, those are nothing more than fantasy — ultimately formless and lifeless. They are simply yin ghost energy that causes a woman’s abdomen to swell.”

The so-called union of yin and yang — a human life must arise from the mating of yin and yang, from the merging of essence and blood to form an embryo. There is nothing void or illusory about it.

She turned around and looked at each of them in turn: “A corpse fiend has long since died — its flesh and skin long gone, its functions entirely ceased. Even with a soul sealed within the body, the sealing only restrains the soul. How could a corpse remain so lifelike, as though the person had merely fallen asleep and not died at all?”

A’Piao said: “If secret arts are used, that too is possible — and the body must be kept in a millennium-grade ice coffin to prevent it from decomposing. It would look as though the person were merely sleeping.”

“Then a corpse fiend could not have been refined that way.” Lang Jiuchuan said mildly: “An ice coffin preserves the body and secret arts sustain it — yes, the body can be kept intact. But such methods also block the five elemental energies from reaching the body, especially yin energy.”

Yin energy is what causes a corpse to undergo transformation. Over many years it would cause the appearance to become utterly unrecognizable — entirely at odds with the use of an ice coffin to preserve the body against external deterioration. So that theory was impossible.

“And furthermore — the corpse fiend I saw was indeed an emaciated, fleshless corpse. So how could such a thing cause a woman to conceive? On what basis?”

Cough, cough, cough.

Shen Qinghe was so jolted by her blunt declaration that he erupted into violent coughing.

Heavens above — are you still a young girl? What kind of words were those?

A flash of inspiration struck Gong Qi’s mind and he stared wide-eyed: “You mean — the one who planted that yin fetus was never the corpse fiend at all. It was actually…”

Lang Jiuchuan nodded. She stared at the blackened, worn meditation cushion and said: “Plans laid over a hundred years, all to stand witness to the birth of the demonic creature one has refined, and then die in tranquility? If it were me — once I’m dead, why should I care if the world floods? Rather than watching an evil creature come to life, long-lived, undying, and beyond the cycle of reincarnation — why not become that demonic creature yourself?”