The bell’s resonance rolled outward like a wave, shattering all the fire arrows aimed at the villagers into dust. When Lang Jiuchuan saw those who were already burning and screaming, she hurled the bone-bell forward.
“Water Spirit — extinguish the fires.”
The Water Spirit burst forth from the bone-bell. Rather than drawing on its own elemental water, it swept up the snow falling thick from the sky, compressed it into a mass of packed snow, and smashed it onto the blazing people — as it struck, the snow melted into water.
Splash.
Cascading snow-water doused each and every burning person in an instant.
Jiangche dropped down outside the low earthen-wall talisman formation that had confined the villagers, threw back its head, and roared — the tiger’s cry was so powerful that the snowflakes were shattered into pellets that scattered in every direction, and not a few people felt their eardrums stab with pain as their qi and blood surged violently upward.
The ferocious killing energy struck the charging living dead into stillness. Eyes still blazing red, they fixed their gaze upon the snow-white white tiger, regarding it with wariness and dread. Yet when they caught sight of the soldiers beyond the talisman formation, their throats worked with a convulsive swallowing motion, and their lips twitched — those razor-sharp teeth flickered with an eerie light, and their eyes burned ever more intensely red.
They craved blood.
The change had come in a single instant.
Everyone was caught completely off guard, staring in shocked alarm at the person and tiger that had appeared from nowhere.
Daoist Zhishang looked at Lang Jiuchuan standing beside Jiangche, and in some inexplicable way a faint sense of aggrieved relief swelled within him.
It felt as though the person who would support them had arrived.
The feeling was strange. He was clearly many years her senior. Was it because strength determined hierarchy here?
He drew a deep breath, stepped forward, and clasped his hands in the Daoist salute: “Fellow Daoist Lang.”
Lang Jiuchuan dipped her head and returned the courtesy, then looked back at the gathered living dead, taking in the dense yin energy radiating from their bodies. Her lips pressed into a thin line.
“Fellow Daoist Lang, you’ve come at just the right moment — look at what this corpse poison has done to them. Can it be cured?” Daoist Zhishang said gravely: “If there is no medicine, we may be able to stop them once, but likely not a second time. The extinguished torches will be relit.”
Lang Jiuchuan shook her head: “I came from Wu Jing. There are infected people in Wu Jing as well. There is as yet no antidote — only partial relief is possible. But that doesn’t mean there’s no hope. If they are burned to ashes, then all hope is gone entirely.”
Barely had she finished speaking when a challenging voice came from behind: “Who are you, and how dare you defy an imperial edict?”
Lang Jiuchuan turned her head toward the eunuch who had challenged her: “Lang Jiuchuan of the Lang Family. Daoist title: Qingyi. I am a cultivator of the Dao.”
“No matter who you are, you obstruct the imperial will — do you intend to side with these corpse-evil beings?” The eunuch’s voice rose to a shrill pitch: “Those who side with the corpse-evil are considered their kind. They will be executed on the spot without question.”
“They have only been poisoned and are not yet truly dead. With an antidote, they can fully recover.” Lang Jiuchuan said evenly: “This is a corpse poison plague with a terrifying mode of transmission. Has His Majesty dispatched anyone to come here and treat this plague? If not — simply burning them all alive is treating lives as utterly worthless without distinction. His Majesty has a taste for killing, and that is hardly an admirable reputation to cultivate. Or perhaps this is your own initiative, falsely invoking the imperial edict to burn the innocent — do you wish to press the name of a tyrant onto the new Emperor’s head?”
Striking at the heart through the mind!
The eunuch’s complexion shifted: “Insolence! Stop your sophistry. This is an edict issued by His Majesty — how could it be forged?”
He produced a brightly colored imperial edict and said furiously: “How can those beings still be called human? They are clearly corpse-evil. If you insist on protecting them and they escape, you are the one truly casting the innocent into the abyss of suffering — can you bear that weight?”
“As long as I am here, they will not leave this formation!” Even as the words left her lips, the tip of her foot touched the ground and she soared into the air. Her talisman brush materialized in her hand, Daoist resonance condensing at its tip. Rapid strokes across the empty air traced out several golden-light talismans that fell into the four cardinal positions, forming a ring.
Then her hands flew through a rapid and intricate series of hand signs, her feet walking the Seven Stars astral-stepping pattern. When the final hand sign was driven in, she stamped her foot down hard.
A resonant hum.
An invisible, transparent barrier descended upon that ring, enclosing all the living dead within it. Even the snowflakes drifting down from above parted around it, unable to fall inside the circle.
Those watching saw it clearly, and their eyes filled with awe.
Daoist Zhishang stared at the invisible barrier in a moment of stunned wonder, then turned to look at Lang Jiuchuan — his gaze held both admiration and shame, for the ignorance and the self-righteous stubbornness he had shown that day.
A person who truly holds all living souls in their heart — even if they came to inhabit that body through unconventional means, even if they carry a somewhat ominous edge — what of it?
Lang Jiuchuan withdrew her stance, then turned to look at the eunuch whose face had blanched, and the general beside him: “Is this sufficient?”
The eunuch’s lips trembled.
He looked toward the living dead. Someone attempted to walk out of the barrier, but appeared to be blocked by something invisible and was flung back. Beyond that, wherever their bodies made contact with it, wisps of smoke began to sizzle up from them — they howled in anguish.
That was the orthodox vital energy of the talisman formation searing the yin-energy from their bodies, which rose up as greenish smoke.
Such a display of force — no one dared to approach. Only despair showed on the faces within.
The general, seeing this, stepped forward and said gravely: “Young Daoist, we are only acting in accordance with our orders. We have no desire to slaughter the innocent.”
“I understand. But since they can be contained, give them a chance to live first. If there is truly no antidote, I will not allow them to harm the innocent.” Lang Jiuchuan lifted her eyes, calm and measured: “If there is no antidote, then this is a catastrophe for all living souls — because they are not the only ones who have been infected. The true source of the corpse wraiths has yet to be caught and destroyed. How many more it has harmed, and to what extent the infection has spread, is still unknown. When that time comes — how many people do you think you can kill? Among those who need to be killed, might some be your own kin? Can you guarantee that there is no one in your immediate circle who has been infected but whose symptoms have not yet manifested?”
Every face present went deathly pale.
Her meaning could not have been clearer: this corpse poison plague had already spread. They could never kill fast enough to stop it.
“Killing with killing as the remedy is, in the end, the most inferior of strategies. This chance to live — I am not only pleading for them. I am pleading for you, and for every last person among the common folk!” Lang Jiuchuan said: “If you insist on standing in the way, we practitioners of the Dao can simply retreat deep into the mountains and wash our hands of it all. In any case, the ones who die will certainly never be us.”
As she spoke, she walked into the encirclement, going directly among the living dead.
What was extraordinary was this: at every place she passed — within easy arm’s reach — those living dead, despite being right there, shrank back in fear and would not approach. They recoiled from her, scrambling backward in alarm.
The onlookers drew sharp, collective breaths.
Jiangche lazily flicked its tail and gave a low, contemptuous huff. Daring to come near her? Hardly. During her nirvana, she had been tempered by heavenly lightning — the meridians within her body had been expanded by that power of thunder and lightning, and remnants of it still dwelled within her. She was as orthodox and upright as anything in this world.
She had also absorbed the thread of phoenix-destiny purple energy from Wen Yue’s daughter. Since ancient times, that represented the Vermilion Bird — embodiment of flame. Combined and fused with the dragon’s breath from her nirvana, she now carried both the fire of heavenly thunder and the fire of nirvanic rebirth, merged and intertwined. With an aura like that — how could it be anything other than supremely upright, and how could yin-cursed beings not be terrified of it?
The living dead were still human, but they had been infected with the most extreme yin-cold corpse poison. Yin energy clung to their bodies — naturally they feared an orthodox aura. They feared death.
Above all, Lang Jiuchuan had not restrained her own aura in the slightest, and that deterrent force radiated outward invisibly, projecting an immense and formless power of intimidation.
Lang Jiuchuan turned around, hands clasped behind her back, and looked at the eunuch and the others from where she stood, chin lifted slightly, entirely unhurried: “Stop me, or don’t. Make your decision.”
The eunuch: “…”