A broken, mangled corpse was laid before the gathered group. The hollow eye sockets, stripped of their eyeballs, the split-open abdominal cavity, the fractured bones and drained blood — those empty voids stared silently back at them all, bearing wordless testament to everything she had endured.

Boom!

Every shred of self-reproach, pain, guilt, and towering rage erupted in that single instant.

“Aaargh—!” A shriek of absolute anguish tore from Fourth Master Rong’s throat — a howl saturated with boundless pain, fury, remorse, and the urge to destroy everything. The malevolent energy he had been suppressing could no longer be contained. It surged out from every inch of him, transmuting into black killing energy that lashed outward in all directions without discrimination.

Gong Tinglan reacted with incredible speed. He grabbed both Sande and Lang Jiuchuan’s uninhabited physical body — the one that had not yet been re-entered — and in an instant, using his body-displacement technique, he vanished from the radius of destruction.

Fourth Master Rong, like a mother beast robbed of her cubs, lost all control in his frenzy. He slammed into the decorative rockery and everything else within reach that could be reduced to rubble. Debris flew in all directions, leaving ruin in his wake. The killing energy blazed like fire, incinerating the surrounding wild grass into withered ash, then grinding even that to powder, which scattered on the wind.

“Xi — Yun—!” He forced the names out through clenched teeth, his scarlet eyes seething with bottomless hatred.

“Master!” Sande stared at Fourth Master Rong raging in the near distance, his own eyes red-rimmed. He was deeply worried. He glanced toward Lang Jiuchuan, who had already returned to her body, his gaze raw with grief — yet he dared not open his mouth to beg for anything.

Having seen the manner in which this young mistress had died, how could he bear to say anything else?

Gong Tinglan, although he had known that Lang Jiuchuan was a soul inhabiting a borrowed body, had taken her slight and slender frame simply as the natural state of things. He had never imagined that this physical body had met such a wretched end — how had it come to this?

No wonder she had been so desperate to accumulate merit. Merit was the most effective means of stitching together a damaged physical body and striving toward rebirth through the flames of ruin.

And then there was Xi Yun — that Fourth Madam of the Rong Family. Because she was the young master’s mother, she had always been imperious and insufferably proud. Yet inside that beautiful and distinguished body beat the heart of a viper.

Sure enough, the more beautiful a woman, the more lethal her poison. Women truly could not be trusted — at any moment they could corrupt a man’s cultivation heart and drag everyone down with them.

Fourth Master Rong was the cautionary tale right before his eyes.

Gong Tinglan quietly filed that warning away.

Lang Jiuchuan watched Fourth Master Rong’s descent into madness with an expression unmoved as still water. How could he not go mad? His nearest and dearest had died in such misery — it would be far stranger if he didn’t.

Seeing him wrapped entirely in black energy, Lang Jiuchuan rang the Dizhong bell — once, then twice. The bell’s toll rang out with a sorrowful resonance, yet its sound was perfectly calibrated to quiet even the most frenzied of hearts.

Fourth Master Rong collapsed to his knees, his ten fingers plunged into the earth, tears of blood streaming down ceaselessly as infinite regret crashed over him like a tide.

He hated the head of the Rong Family for his ruthless indifference — sacrificing everything for the clan’s interests, so cold-blooded that even blood kin could be discarded without a second thought. He hated Xi Yun for her viciousness and cunning. In her failed attempt to harm Lang Jiuchuan, she had turned instead and tortured his daughter to death to vent her spite.

She had resented him for their marriage in name only — but was that his doing? Why had she never reflected on what had happened on their wedding night? She had been innocent, and the clan head had succumbed to a demonic obsession beyond his control, yet none of that could conceal the transgression that had occurred. Their relationship was rotten from its very foundation.

This marriage had been a transaction from the beginning. After what had happened that night, how could he ever touch his own father’s woman?

The most absurd part of all was that it had taken only once, and from it had come that wretched child, Rong Huanxuan. They had registered that child under his name. Was that not already enough?

Yes, he bore his own fault in this. But she should have directed her rage at him — not at someone who had no part in it. She herself was a mother with a beloved daughter. How had she found it in her to do what she did?

What Fourth Master Rong hated most was himself. He hated his own impotence and moral decay, hated that he had even managed to forget what he and Ren Yao had shared. Yes, someone had sealed those memories with a technique — but if his soul had been strong enough, if his love had been deep enough, how could he have been deceived for so many years? He had never known Ren Yao’s anguish and despair. He hadn’t even known his own daughter had died abandoned and far from home.

He hated most of all that filthy, corrupt, loveless, scheming Rong Family. Its very existence had consumed his entire life — and now it had consumed both the woman he loved and his daughter.

“Heh… heh…” Fourth Master Rong’s throat rattled with a ragged, labored wheeze. His eyes locked rigidly onto the rubble before him.

How absurd. He had thought of himself as nothing more than a gleeful bystander, quietly waiting to watch the Rong Family become a laughingstock and crumble at last. Instead, this sudden, cruelly absolute truth had dragged him bodily into the depths of hell.

The Rong Family. Rong Yiming. Xi Yun. He, Ren Qingcang, would not rest until he had destroyed them all.

Fourth Master Rong bit open his finger and used his essence blood to draw a talisman in the air — stroke by stroke — then cut off his hair, carved away his flesh, and offered up his very soul as a sacrifice to sever his blood ties.

From this day forward, he was no longer Rong Qingcang. If he bore any surname at all, it would be Ren.

A blood talisman blazed into existence in the air, then vanished swiftly into the heavens.

“The Heavenly Dao Severance Talisman!” Gong Tinglan’s expression shifted subtly.

Lang Jiuchuan finally regarded Fourth Master Rong with full attention — or perhaps she ought now to call him by his Daoist title, Wu Youzi.

With the Heavenly Dao as witness and his soul as sacrifice, he had utterly severed every blood connection to the Rong Family. No bloodline link remained between them. And simultaneously, he could never again carry a descendant bearing the Rong blood.

He had offered his soul to Heaven. When the appointed hour came, Heaven itself would claim what was owed. If he had accumulated great merit, reincarnation might still await him. If not, he would be extinguished in the fabric of heaven and earth — no place left for him anywhere.

The moment the Severance Talisman manifested, Wu Youzi’s hair visibly turned white, strand by strand, until not a single thread of black remained. Yet his eyes burned with a brilliance that could stop a person cold.

Lang Jiuchuan walked up to him with measured steps. He raised his head, and his gaze gathered into a light at once manic and terrifying. He said, “You have made the Rong Family stumble one blow after another — was that for the sake of karma owed to the soul inhabiting my daughter’s body, or was it personal vendetta?”

“Both,” said Lang Jiuchuan.

She summoned the Xiaojiu Pagoda and released from it the soul of Zhengyang Zi, who had been beaten into a pitiable state, and said, “Go ahead and tell Fourth Master everything that happened to this body.”

Zhengyang Zi looked over, met Wu Youzi’s gaze, and felt as though he had been branded with a Panguan’s seal. Trembling from head to toe, he recounted everything in brief, factual terms.

Whose deceased family member was unable to pass on to the underworld for reincarnation, unable even to have their soul scattered into oblivion — yet managed to afflict him, Zhengyang Zi?

He truly, sincerely wanted to die completely.

“Fellow Daoists, for the sake of our shared path, I have already turned over a new leaf — please, just let me be reincarnated. Or scatter me entirely, I don’t care!” Zhengyang Zi pleaded desperately. Please, stop tormenting him!

Lang Jiuchuan put him away again. Wanting to die? It wasn’t his time yet. She then proceeded to recount the details of the substitution.

Gong Tinglan listened from the side, his expression growing heavy. “So what happened was — the Rong clan head switched his granddaughter for Madam Cui’s biological daughter. Years later, when Rong Huanxuan’s cultivation roots were shattered, he killed the child to harvest her sinews and repair his own cultivation foundation. But — if this body possessed such extraordinary cultivation roots, why not simply bring her back? How did it come to this?”

“Naturally, because blood is not equal.” Lang Jiuchuan said with a derisive scoff. “A daughter he raised with his own hands from the very beginning — how could she possibly be compared to a granddaughter left to grow up on a farm estate, whom he felt no affection for whatsoever?”

The storm in Wu Youzi’s eyes grew darker still. So that was it. No wonder the Rong clan head had been so agitated during that period. But in the end, for all his scheming, he had drawn water with a bamboo basket — nothing to show for it.

Ha. Ha ha ha. Divine retribution. True divine retribution. But it still wasn’t enough.

Wu Youzi looked at Lang Jiuchuan, each word dropping like frost: “Whatever you intend to do to the Rong Family — count me in.”