Chapter 281
Chapter 281
The Ninth Concubine had brought up the Qiongqi.
Seventh Master and I had indeed seen it. We had found it beneath the bed in the Ninth Concubine’s bedroom.
At the time, Seventh Master had said that the Qiongqi was used to destroy the Luo Mansion’s Feng Shui.
“The Qiongqi governs slaughter and Fright and Strange Afflictions, and it can also destroy Feng Shui.”
Anning lowered her head again as the Ninth Concubine’s voice emerged from her mouth. “But an ordinary Qiongqi carving could never exert such a powerful effect.”
“I wonder if you’ve ever heard of the White Lotus Arts.”
I nodded and told her I had.
The White Lotus Arts were the predecessor of the Red Lotus Arts. Later, under the leadership of a corrupt man, the White Lotus Fa Sect began harming people. The righteous members broke away and founded the Red Lotus Fa Sect, which had opposed the White Lotus ever since.
“That’s right. You know the history quite well.”
Anning nodded. “The leader who first led the White Lotus Fa Sect astray was named Guo Ying. Guo Ying was seduced by an evil cult and led the White Lotus Fa Sect down a path of no return. That evil cult worshiped an Evil Buddha, and my cousin Xu Changming once joined it as well.”
My eyes widened and my heart began to pound.
An evil cult that worshiped an Evil Buddha… Was that not the Organization behind Lv Zhengxian?
The once-renowned White Lotus Fa Sect had actually been led astray by that Organization.
“Once the White Lotus Fa Sect abandoned the righteous path, it stopped studying proper arts and began researching all manner of evil techniques. Through my cousin Xu Changming, I contacted members of the White Lotus Fa Sect and purchased a Qiongqi.”
“That Qiongqi had been refined through evil arts. It… was not an object. It was alive.”
Alive?
I flinched. How could a Qiongqi possibly be alive?
Had those practitioners of evil arts somehow captured a living Qiongqi?
Even if the Celestial Master himself had returned to the world, he would not have been capable of that!
The Ninth Concubine said, “Evil arts are called evil because they violate human nature and achieve their ends by tormenting living beings.”
“The White Lotus Fa Sect provoked public outrage because its members used living people to refine evil arts. To make their victims’ resentment as powerful as possible after death, they tortured them to death in utterly inhuman ways. In short, the greater the resentment, the more harm that Qiongqi could inflict.”
My hair stood on end as I listened. I could hardly believe anyone would sacrifice living people merely to practice evil arts.
Those were human lives!
Understanding dawned on me. “There’s a deeply resentful spirit inside that Qiongqi, and it was the one affecting the Luo Mansion’s Feng Shui?”
The Ninth Concubine nodded. “Once hatred takes over a person’s heart, there is nothing they will not do. I bought that Qiongqi for the sake of my revenge, but to make the resentful spirit inside obey me, I had to feed it my own vital essence and blood.”
“Afterward, the Feng Shui of the Luo Mansion was ruined. It became like a pool of stagnant water, and the entire estate turned into an Inauspicious Land. Under the influence of the Qiongqi, everyone began suffering from mental confusion, but Luo Baichuan was affected most deeply.”
“Luo Baichuan was lecherous by nature and possessed no will of his own. He soon descended into madness…”
At this point, the Ninth Concubine suddenly stopped speaking.
Perhaps the events had happened so long ago that she needed a moment to recall them.
I used the pause to sort through everything she had just told me.
When the Ninth Concubine faked her death, she had told Master Luo to revive her on New Year’s Eve. She had probably needed the intervening time to complete her plan for revenge.
The first half of her revenge plan had been to use the resentful spirit inside the Qiongqi to destroy the Luo Mansion’s Feng Shui and destabilize the minds of everyone who lived there. Otherwise, would Master Luo, while in a clear state of mind, really have followed the Ninth Concubine’s instructions and killed all his other concubines just to bring her back?
It was possible, of course, but only possible. There was no guarantee that he would actually do it.
He might have favored the Ninth Concubine, but the others were still his wives. As the saying went, even one day as husband and wife forged a hundred days of affection. Even if he did not love his other concubines, surely he would not go so far as to sacrifice them all.
That meant he might have wavered while the Ninth Concubine lay in her feigned death.
But if an outside force ruined the Feng Shui and turned the Luo Mansion’s energy field into a closed and overwhelmingly negative one, then it would inevitably affect a person’s state of mind. This was what we often called Fright and Strange Afflictions.
Fright and Strange Afflictions did not refer only to seeing unclean things. The term could also describe abnormalities or sudden changes in a person’s mental state and behavior.
Under the influence of that negative field, combined with the groundwork the Ninth Concubine had laid before faking her death, Master Luo would keep telling himself that he had to revive her, that he absolutely had to bring her back.
His state of mind would resemble that of a compulsive gambler. No matter how much gamblers lost, they always believed they would win it all back on the next bet. So they kept betting and losing, and even after losing everything they owned, they would still believe the next wager would recover it all.
Master Luo was the same. Under the dual influence of his own obsession and the energy field, his mental state had unquestionably become abnormal. Otherwise, he would never have hacked every one of his concubines to death with his own hands before hanging himself.
Of everything the Ninth Concubine had said, the resentful spirit inside the Qiongqi concerned me most.
I wondered whether the terrifying thing I had seen before Seventh Master and I entered the Ghost Wall had been that very spirit…
That thing… I could not even describe it. Even now, the mere memory of its appearance made my scalp prickle and filled my heart with inexplicable fear and unease.
The Ninth Concubine had ultimately succeeded in her revenge, yet she had failed to revive the Seventh Concubine. Could that resentful spirit have interfered with that as well?
I knew the Ninth Concubine would continue. After telling me so much, she was bound to reveal the whole truth.
But after I waited for what felt like forever, she still did not speak. I almost thought she had already left Anning’s body.
“Immortal Maiden Xu, could you please continue…” I called.
She slowly raised her head and stared straight at me with her pupil-less eyes.
She was still there, but instead of continuing her story, she asked an abrupt and seemingly unrelated question.
“Do you know how I died?”
“What?”
I froze, unable to react for a moment.
But I quickly sensed that something was wrong. The Ninth Concubine would either continue the story or refuse to speak. Why would she suddenly change the subject?
Then I saw her move her head slightly.
I went rigid, every hair on my body rising at once.
The Ninth Concubine was warning me that someone else was hiding inside the house…
And that person was concealed in one of the rooms on the second floor.
I drew a deep breath, charged at the room, and seized the door handle with both hands. Then I looked back and shouted at Anning.
“Anning! Wake up!”
“Run!”