Two hours earlier.
“Brother, come play with me…”
The door creaked open. Yin Ya, hugging a wooden pillar, nervously peeked after waiting with closed eyes for a long time. He saw a small ghost, about five or six years old, standing in the doorway. Its small hand on the doorframe had fingers of equal length, soft and thin like stretched dough. As the faint light from outside shone in, the ghost raised its head, revealing a face with misplaced features under damp hair.
Indeed, the features were inverted: one eye at the right eyebrow, another where the mouth should be, the mouth on the forehead, and the nose in an eye socket.
“Come in, brother. I have lots of toys,” the ghost’s mouth on its forehead grinned, dark red blood oozing from its seven orifices.
Before Yin Ya could scream again, he heard a thud beside him. Mu Zhanting had collapsed, seemingly dead on the spot.
Yin Ya cried out in despair, “Brother! You can’t fall first! The future of Chen State rests on you!”
However, Chen State’s future was already unconscious. The small ghost at the door giggled, its long, grayish-white hand coiling like a snake around Mu Zhanting’s ankle. Before Yin Ya could react, it swiftly dragged Mu Zhanting into the room.
Yin Ya was stunned.
He told himself he wasn’t close to Mu Zhanting, only considering him a friend because of Nan Yan. Convincing himself thus, he lifted his skirt and began to retreat quietly.
Suddenly, the dry well in the courtyard behind him started bubbling. Yin Ya turned to look and was terrified.
Hair began to emerge from the well, strand by strand, forming a net that quickly covered the ground. The edges reached out menacingly, trying to grab Yin Ya.
“Damn it!”
The hair moved rapidly, catching the tip of one of Yin Ya’s tails. Frightened, he turned and used a flame to cut the hair, then rushed headlong into the dark wooden house.
He crashed into a soft, cold embrace.
“How careless,” a chilly female voice poured into his ears. Yin Ya felt his blood freeze, unable to use any spiritual power. Looking up, he saw a figure as tall as the rafters standing in the darkness.
The wooden house had no lights, but this was no obstacle for high-level demon races. Yin Ya saw a ghost woman with similarly misplaced features, about ten feet tall, her long, soft limbs dragging on the ground. She used her elbows to carry him to a wooden table.
“Go play with your brother for a while. Dinner will be ready soon.”
The ghost woman turned and glided to a stove on one side of the room. Next to the stove was a wooden cradle where Mu Zhanting had been placed like a baby, his long legs dangling outside due to his height.
There was no fire under the stove, yet the ghost woman seemed to be cooking something, bubbling and simmering. She used one of her fingers to rock the cradle as if soothing a child.
Yin Ya was speechless.
At this moment, a face with misplaced features slowly rose from across the table. It was the small ghost from the door. After staring at Yin Ya for a while, seemingly finding him boring, it pulled out a bloody human hand from its hair. It looked half-eaten and was offered to Yin Ya. “Would brother like a snack?”
Perhaps due to years of forced vegetarianism and Buddhist practices, Yin Ya was handling the situation slightly better than Mu Zhanting. He took a black cloth from his storage ring and tied it around his head, covering his eyes. Finally gaining some composure, he said, “I don’t eat that. Where did you get that hand?”
“Mother sent souls to catch them. Many living people have come to the Youquan River recently,” the small ghost giggled, its mouth in the right eye socket making soft chewing sounds. “The Prison Lord brother said to let you stay at our home until the Youquan River has a new Prison Lord. Then we can all be reborn.”
“Prison Lord brother?” Yin Ya asked, suppressing his fear and full of confusion. “Is the Prison Lord the master of this place?”
The small ghost shook its head. “It’s a different Prison Lord… He’s so kind. Even though his soul fire is almost extinguished, he still wants to save us with a breath of life.”
“What does he look like?”
“His smile is so beautiful…” The small ghost covered its face with soft, thin fingers. “Much more beautiful than me. Mother says my ghost body isn’t pretty anymore, so even if I’m reborn, I won’t be pretty.”
Yin Ya looked around the wooden house again. In the cultivation world, ghosts are classified by their attack power, from weak to strong: nightmare ghosts, wandering souls, and vengeful spirits. This small ghost, disfigured and thrown into a well before death, was among the most vicious of vengeful spirits. The ghost woman was likely a ghost king, no weaker than a Huashen stage cultivator.
Seeing that the ghost mother and daughter currently had no ill intentions towards them, Yin Ya lowered his guard slightly. “Where’s your father?”
The small ghost lay on the table, its soft hands scratching the surface, leaving marks. “I haven’t seen him in a long time. Back then, my father passed the imperial examination and said he’d give us a better life, so he went to the capital.”
“Then, after a year or two… Father returned with an old man with a white beard. Everything seemed fine during the day. Father even brought us meat to eat. Mother and I had never eaten such delicious meat before, so we ate a bit more, but I threw it all up.”
“That night, I got up to relieve myself and saw my father enter with a knife. He first stabbed my mother in the chest, then cut off her nose, lips, and eyes. I cried out from under the bed, so he dragged me out too. He said I looked like mother and shouldn’t remain in his dao heart, so he slashed my face as well… At that time, mother and I weren’t dead yet. Father dragged us to the backyard.”
The small ghost pointed to the well behind them.
“He threw us into that well. Mother held me, crying at the bottom, while father threw stones at us from above… It hurt so much.”
Yin Ya was initially frightened, but as he listened, he grew increasingly angry. “Is your father still alive?”
“Yes, father said he had some rare immortal root and was taken away by the old man with the white beard to become an immortal. The old man killed mother and me too. When we woke up, we were here…”
“How long have you been here?”
The small ghost replied, “I can’t count, but mother says we’ve been here for… over a thousand years, I think.”
At this moment, the ghost woman seemed to have finished cooking. She carried a chipped bowl, slithering over on her snake-like legs, and placed it on the table.
“Eat up, it’ll help you grow and become pretty,” the ghost woman said.
The small ghost immediately reached into the bowl with its thin fingers, grabbing a wisp of mist and stuffing it into its mouth in the eye socket, devouring it ravenously.
The ghost woman looked at the pale-faced Yin Ya and said, “Why aren’t you eating? If you don’t eat, the Prison Lord will blame us for not taking good care of you.”
Yin Ya peeked through the gap in the cloth covering his eyes. He saw what looked like howling yin winds in the bowl. Seeing his hesitation, the ghost woman squeezed a few drops of blood into it.
“Eat up,” the ghost woman’s voice turned sinister.
Trembling, Yin Ya raised his hand. Just as he was about to touch the bowl of unknown substance, he suddenly withdrew his hand and stood up, exclaiming, “Madam!”
The ghost woman lowered her head, her mouth moving where her nose should have been. “This is the soul water from Youquan River that I saved. Don’t you like it?”
“No, no, no, no…” Yin Ya, with a strong survival instinct, said, “I have a way to restore your and your daughter’s faces!”
The small ghost paused mid-bite. “Mother, big brother is joking, right? We ghosts can’t change our faces, can we?”
“No,” the ghost woman, one of the oldest ghosts in this city, having lived here for over a thousand years, tilted her head to look at Yin Ya. “I believe you. Prove it to me.”
The small ghost seemed more excited, floating from under the table to Yin Ya’s front, raising its distorted face.
“Big brother, make me pretty, please.”
Looking at this face, Yin Ya swore he’d never again complain about Nan Yan’s face getting round from eating five bowls of vegetarian food. With a trembling voice, he asked, “What do you want to look like?”
The small ghost blinked and said, “Big brother’s face is beautiful, like Guanyin Bodhisattva. Mother, I can’t go to Buddhist temples anymore. I want to look like big brother.”
Yin Ya’s face was actually Nan Yan’s. He said, “Actually, this is an old woman’s face. You’re still too young…”
The small ghost’s ten noodle-like fingers instantly wrapped around Yin Ya’s hands, giving him the impression that if he refused, the small ghost would strangle him.
The small ghost whined, “But I like it. Make me look like that, big brother.”
Yin Ya: “Alright, alright, whatever you say.”
Silently apologizing, he waved his hand, activating his demon power. A misty purple light covered the small ghost’s face. In the next moment, the ghost’s features began to move, first rearranging into a child’s face, then transforming into Nan Yan’s appearance.
The small ghost danced with joy, waving its soft arms. “Mother, I’m pretty now!”
Yin Ya felt a bitter taste in his throat, thinking the small ghost looked even more terrifying now. Leaning on the table, he was glad Nan Yan wasn’t here, or she would surely kill him.
The ghost woman’s eyes gleamed with curiosity. “He’s a nightmare fox that can communicate between yin and yang. This bloodline qualifies him to command ten thousand ghosts and become one of the Prison Lords.”
Yin Ya’s mind conjured a terrifying image of himself as a King Yama, with hanged ghosts reporting official business on one side and beheaded ghosts serving tea on the other.
“Impossible. I’d rather die than become a Prison Lord.”
“Madam must be joking. How could a living person… a living demon become a Prison Lord?”
The ghost woman smiled. “It’s possible. If a living person can withstand the possession of ten thousand ghosts from a river and the nine punishments of earth ghosts, with their three souls remaining intact, such a person would be more terrifying than any ghost and naturally become the Prison Lord.”
Yin Ya thought to himself, wondering who could be so unfortunate, and asked, “After becoming the Prison Lord, can one open the gates of this ghost city?”
The ghost woman replied, “The Prison Lord is the supreme ruler within Youquan River. Whether the river flows or not is at his whim, let alone a mere ghost gate. Living people have entered Youquan River before, but none have even survived the first trial of the earth ghosts’ karmic fire… If possible, we truly hope for a new Prison Lord to rule here.”
“What about the old Prison Lord?”
The ghost woman’s features twitched, and Yin Ya sensed fear in her expression. “He was dragged to mutual destruction by a group attempting to break the heavens. Among them was a most insane person who wanted to usurp the nine prisons… If they controlled the nine prisons, their life and death would no longer be limited by lifespan. Even after death, they could reincarnate and become immortal.”
… It sounded like a shocking conspiracy he shouldn’t know about.
The ghost woman’s fingers rested on Yin Ya’s shoulder. “Although Youquan River has now become a place for human souls to reincarnate, in ancient times, it governed the world’s venomous and evil mountain forests. Your bloodline comes from the noblest demon race of antiquity, making you the most suitable among all living beings to undergo the test of the Prison Lord’s crown.”
Yin Ya said, “No, no, no. I’m lazy and afraid of pain. I definitely can’t do it. How about my brother? He’s brave, strong, and a literary genius. He’s much better than me.”
The ghost woman’s eyeballs turned to look back, her voice distant. “That child’s fortune is beyond the limits of us underworld evil ghosts. Perhaps his future destination won’t be in this realm… You’re still more suitable.”
Yin Ya struggled, “I have a sister, only twenty-three—”
Before he could finish, the sound of magical attacks came from outside the house. The ghost woman suddenly giggled, “Food has arrived.”
…
At this moment, outside the ghost house, Elder Yu held a strange insect that was squeaking towards a courtyard.
This courtyard was the most magnificent in the area, and the ghost energy seemed very weak. In just a moment, the ghost energy lock on the door collapsed, and a mix of spiritual and ghost energy gushed out from the door crack.
“Uncle Master, see if there’s a Huashen soul in this house?”
Han Leizi’s divine sense probed in, seemingly seeing something. He quickly withdrew, his eyes filled with shock and joy. “There’s a ghost in this house. It’s not a cultivator’s soul, but a mortal soul that became an evil ghost, nurtured by ghost power, devouring the remnant souls of Huashen stage cultivators… It can still be used to borrow the path to Huashen!”
Elder Yu now showed hesitation. “Friend Han, our priority should be to leave. A Huashen stage evil ghost might be beyond our ability to subdue.”
Li Mian laughed coldly. “Those from small sects are truly inexperienced. We came here to borrow the path to Huashen. How could we not be prepared? I brought my father’s corpse-subduing sickle, which can be used twice more. A mere evil ghost, empty Huashen realm without Huashen abilities, can be easily captured.”
Indeed, Tianxie Dao had deep foundations. Even after their difficult journey, they remained confident.
Han Leizi said, “I still have methods to capture it. However, we need someone to scout ahead.”
As he finished, his cold gaze shifted to Nan Yan.
Seeing this, Li Mian smiled. “That’s right. Buddhist cultivators are known for their ability to restrain ghosts and demons. Please, Venerable Nun, lead the way for us.”
Nan Yan wasn’t necessarily afraid of them. She still had the golden scabbard, and if she released its sword energy, these people would likely become corpses in an instant. However, Elder Yu seemed to know Yin Ya’s whereabouts. As she hesitated whether to use it, Ji Yang stepped forward and said:
“If she enters first and obtains some treasure or opportunity, what then? Why don’t I enter with her? What do you think, Uncle Master?”