Chapter 102
Chapter 102
Soul Recall took effect.
Xie Qingling used Soul Recall on the girl who had just died.
The departed souls that had only just faded returned, one by one, to their original body.
It fitted them perfectly. It was utterly familiar.
Within moments, the girl who had shown no sign of life opened her eyes again.
Unlike a living person’s, her eyes were pitch-black and could no longer perceive light. Her limbs moved stiffly, a little like those of a marionette. Yet as she rose from the pool of blood, her muscles seemed to retain the memory of her life. She stood quietly and solemnly beside Xie Qingling, waiting for her orders.
“Pick up your weapons. Fight again, like a warrior,” Xie Qingling said.
At her words, the girl picked up her Meridian Mandarin Duck Axes and gripped them tightly.
As they spoke, a Long-Tongued Ghost rushed toward them. The girl raised her Meridian Mandarin Duck Axes and hacked straight at its head and face.
The Long-Tongued Ghost wrapped its tongue around her neck and constricted it tightly, but she felt nothing. She knew neither pain nor suffocation. She knew only to slash and chop until the Long-Tongued Ghost was destroyed completely.
“Protect me!” Xie Qingling said, then charged forward again.
Shen Huaizhou followed immediately. The dead girl stayed beside them, clearing obstacles from their path, cutting a way through, and slaying every monster and ghost that attacked them beneath her axes.
She became extraordinarily fierce, a brave and fearless warrior, because she could no longer feel pain or fear.
A monster’s teeth bit through her throat; she reached up and tore it away. A ghost’s hand pierced her abdomen; she chopped off the hand and kept charging.
Forward. Keep moving forward. Protect them. Kill every last one of these wretched monsters and ghosts.
With her frail body, the girl blocked wave after wave of attacks for Xie Qingling. Her figure was not imposing, but she was like an unbreakable shield, a thick city wall raised before them.
With her help, Xie Qingling charged forward much faster.
She was almost at the giant’s feet.
She looked at the giant, whose steps left one deep footprint after another in the ground, then at the man crouching on his shoulder. Several possible plans of attack flashed through her mind.
“Take down the leader first. Shen Huaizhou, send me up.” As she spoke, Xie Qingling slowed her steps.
Shen Huaizhou surged forward, ran ahead of her, then reached a hand back toward her.
Xie Qingling held out her hand. Shen Huaizhou caught her wrist, spun around, and used the momentum to fling her into the sky.
Her black skirt billowed in the wind and flashed past the giant’s eyes like a fluttering black butterfly.
The giant roared and reached out with his thick, fat, round hand. He meant to catch this person who had come rushing to her death, squeeze her to death, then slam her into the ground and stamp her flat, stamp her to pieces.
But…
“Veil of Darkness.”
As Shen Huaizhou spoke, the giant suddenly lost the light. Everything before him went pitch-black.
He could see nothing. It was as if an enormous skirt had covered his eyes; in his world, light and shadow no longer existed.
Xie Qingling planted one foot on the back of the giant’s hand and used it to propel herself diagonally upward again, straight at the man crouched on his shoulder.
She held both blades before her in a stance ready for defense or attack. Her black eyes fixed on the dark, skinny figure. To Xie Qingling, he was already a dead man.
“Hmph!” The dark, skinny man snorted. Then he took out a yellow talisman and slapped it straight toward her.
“By decree of the Yinshan Patriarch – Spring Wind, Transforming Rain!”
The wind around them suddenly turned biting. The air seemed to freeze, and in the next instant, powerful arrows of water shot at Xie Qingling.
They were too close. Xie Qingling could not avoid several water arrows grazing her arm and leaving scrapes. Blood spurted out at once. Wincing, she endured the pain and raised Bloodsworn to block them, but the dense barrage still halted her attack and nearly shot her out of the air.
Xie Qingling turned sideways, dodging three water arrows that flew straight at her. By then, the talisman’s power was almost spent.
At that moment, the dark, skinny man took out three long, thick silver needles and drove them hard into the crown of the giant’s head.
The giant gave a great cry. Then the darkness receded from his eyes, and light returned.
Those three needles had forcibly broken Shen Huaizhou’s illusion.
[Combining Maoshan Taoist Arts with witchcraft, the Yinshan School grew out of Taoism yet walks its own path. Its practitioners sleep in the wilderness by lonely graves and cultivate the ghostly arts. Through techniques such as beguiling, harmonizing souls, driving souls, and locking souls, they marshal their forces and compel the dead to serve them.]
[Yellow talismans and black ink, never cinnabar. The Yinshan School worships the Lord of Yinshan, commands hosts of ghosts, captures and binds souls, and practices the ghostly arts far and wide.]
[Now the Yinshan School, which stands between good and evil, has produced a renegade disciple. He has plunged the founding master’s Five-Calamity Needles into a mass of sinful, rotten flesh. The Five-Calamity Needles, once used to heal the sick and save the suffering, have become their wicked ritual implement, encrusted with bloody rust.]
Seeing Xie Qingling right under his nose, so close, the giant was delighted. He reached his enormous round hand toward her.
Xie Qingling caught the movement out of the corner of her eye and immediately dropped straight down, avoiding his grasp.
She landed beside his feet and rolled along the ground, driving Bloodsworn into his ankle as she did – though the giant was tall, huge, and covered in fat, no matter how big he was, his ankle joints had no muscle to protect them.
At the ankle, there was only fascia and ligament.
That was why ankles were so easily strained or sprained.
Xie Qingling’s blade pierced the giant’s ankle with ease. Then she slashed hard, and Bloodsworn opened an enormous wound, exposing the white bone inside.
Without his ankle joint holding him steady, the giant lost his balance and toppled backward.
His body, over five meters tall, tipped sideways. He could no longer stand properly.
The man on his shoulder cursed in exasperation. “Useless!”
He took out the Five-Calamity Needles again, intending to stimulate the giant further. But with the ankle ligaments gone, no amount of stimulation could make someone whose foot could no longer be held in place stand again.
Seeing Xie Qingling step onto the giant’s knee and prepare to charge up once more, the man on his shoulder made a swift decision. Abandoning the giant as his mount, he leaped away.
Xie Qingling lunged at empty air and could only land on the ground again.
Shen Huaizhou took two throwing knives from his sleeve and sent them straight into the giant’s eyes, once more robbing him completely of sight.
The giant fell back into darkness. He could see nothing.
The pain was so terrible that he wanted to gouge out his eyes, if only to escape the agony and the darkness that blinded him.
At this, Xie Qingling temporarily abandoned her pursuit of the dark, skinny man and turned back to join Shen Huaizhou in killing the giant.
She sprang from the ground, jumping almost level with the giant as he lay tilted backward, braced one hand on his shoulder, and vaulted sideways over him.
Xie Qingling dodged his clumsy hands, which flailed as haphazardly as a small child’s. At the same time, she swept the blade in her left hand across, cutting his throat as she vaulted past.
Blood immediately gushed out, splattering her face and body.
The giant’s blood was green.
It looked as thick as some kind of plant sap, but smelled of the distinctive tang of blood.
Xie Qingling kicked off his shoulder, using it to push herself away, then came to stand beside Shen Huaizhou.
With a tremendous thud, the giant’s huge body collapsed limply, splashing blood across the ground.
Green blood spread everywhere.
Dead.
Xie Qingling raised a hand to wipe the filthy blood from her face, then looked toward the dark, skinny man with Bloodsworn in hand.
He stood in a tree. His small, thin body seemed to weigh almost nothing, depressing the crown only slightly.
The dark, skinny man was looking at her too.
His tiny black eyes, no bigger than beans, fixed on Xie Qingling like a jackdaw’s. It was as though she were a soft piece of rotten meat he was waiting to devour completely.
“You broke my puppet! You’ll pay me back!” the man shouted, jumping down from the tree.
He took out a black wooden box. Inside lay a white worm.
The worm lay motionless. But when the man bit his finger and dripped blood into the box, it immediately began to move, like a starving wolf catching the scent of meat.
“Gu slave, get up!” the man shouted.
At his command, the giant lying lifeless on the ground actually moved and slowly rose!
Xie Qingling and Shen Huaizhou’s expressions changed.
He had actually…
Come back from the dead.
No. Or rather, this enormous giant had never belonged among the “living” in the first place.
The giant could no longer stand, but that did not stop him from creating obstacles and trouble for Xie Qingling and Shen Huaizhou.
With both hands and feet on the ground, he crouched like a frog. Even on all fours, his huge body was still enormous.
He kicked backward with both feet and leaped forward.
His vast bulk blotted out the sky and sun, about to crush Xie Qingling and Shen Huaizhou beneath him.
“Get out of the way!” Xie Qingling shouted. Then she dropped into a low sliding kick, skimming along the ground to move her body clear of the giant’s attack.
[The Gu Witch turns the gu slave into a jar of medicine for gu insects. She feeds Grass Ghosts with her body; the gu slave feeds gu insects with his.]
[An offspring gu is raised inside the gu slave’s belly. Hearing the mother gu’s call, the offspring gu stirs again. With the Yin-Yang Mother-and-Offspring Gu, if one dies, both die; if one is harmed, both are harmed. While the gu lives, the person lives. When the gu dies, the person dies.]
So that was it.
This giant had ceased to be human long ago.
He was a vessel.
A vessel for a gu insect.
As long as the gu insect did not die, the giant would not die.
To kill the giant, they first had to kill the gu insect.
The offspring gu was inside the giant, while the mother gu was with the dark, skinny man.
“Shen Huaizhou, this big one is yours!” Xie Qingling called. “He’s a vessel for a gu insect. Find it and kill it, and he’ll die too.”
“Understood!” Shen Huaizhou answered in a low voice. He fought by keeping the giant chasing after him, throwing knives to control its direction and maintaining his distance. While keeping himself safe, he also kept the giant from running wild and hurting anyone else.
Even as she spoke, Xie Qingling lowered her head and charged forward.
The big one was Shen Huaizhou’s. That meant the dark, skinny man was hers to deal with.
Xie Qingling dodged the monsters and ghosts that tried to rush her, closing the distance to the dark, skinny man.
“Illusion!” she shouted.
Shen Huaizhou immediately held out his hand. “Flowers in a Mirror, Moon on the Water…”
As he spoke, the Xie Qingling charging forward suddenly became five, six, seven Xie Qinglings in the dark, skinny man’s eyes.
Every one was identical. Every one wore a long black dress.