Chapter 172

Chapter 172

“Damn it! After all that, the bastard still got away.”

I roared in anger and helplessness, swinging my fist fiercely.

All I struck was empty air.

Splash!

Water churned in the river beside me, and Li Miao’s head emerged.

He slowly swam back to shore, drenched from head to toe, his expression exhausted.

“Sorry, Young Mr. Wu. I couldn’t catch that sinister monk and the rogue occultist. Some kind of art must have been cast on that wooden boat, which was why it moved so fast. And I had nearly exhausted all my strength.”

I immediately reached out and pulled Li Miao from the water.

At the same time, I shook my head and said,

“Brother Li, please don’t say that. This was my personal affair to begin with, yet you risked your life beside me fighting that rogue occultist. You even jumped into the river to chase their boat. I’m incredibly grateful!”

I wasn’t the kind of person who failed to appreciate kindness.

From beginning to end, Li Miao had genuinely put everything he had into helping me.

How could I possibly blame him?

No one could have predicted that a sinister monk would suddenly appear at the final moment and actually rescue the rogue occultist!

“Come on, Brother Li. Let’s hurry back and check on those men who helped us.”

The five helpers Yao Tianlin had arranged for me had done everything they could.

Even though they knew our opponent was no ordinary person, they never backed down.

They had swarmed the already gravely wounded rogue occultist, shocking and beating him until he barely had half a life left… They were heroes of the battle too!

Li Miao and I returned to the edge of the sorghum field.

The five young men had just struggled to their feet. Lingering fear remained on their faces, and they still looked badly shaken.

Their leader was named Huang Jun. He was the bravest and the best fighter among them.

When he saw me return, he came forward to meet me.

“Young Mr. Wu, did you two manage to kill the rogue occultist?”

I shook my head.

“Unfortunately, he still escaped. But he’s basically half-dead. He probably won’t be able to harm anyone for at least six months, perhaps even a year.”

That at least counted as good news.

I had gained an even deeper understanding of the power of the ritual blade Master gave me!

The slash I landed across the rogue occultist’s chest was certainly no ordinary wound.

It would cause him tremendous suffering!

By comparison, Huang Jun and the others shocking him nearly to death and Li Miao piercing straight through his thigh were relatively minor.

I smiled, cupped my hands to Huang Jun and the others, and said,

“We only managed to wound the rogue occultist so severely because of your help. This isn’t a convenient time, but once we get back, I’ll be sure to send you some compensation for your trouble through Uncle Yao.”

I had never been stingy toward those who helped me.

Over the past six months, I had earned a fair amount of money helping Old Cao carry coffins…

I had given some to my parents, set aside some for my daily meals, and saved the rest.

Yao Tianlin would certainly reward them for coming to help.

But as the person directly involved, I naturally needed to show my appreciation too.

Huang Jun’s face lit up, and he thanked me again.

Everyone liked money.

The seven of us returned from the riverside fields to River Street, said our goodbyes, and parted ways.

The five men supported one another as they walked back to the place they shared, while Li Miao and I headed to the coffin shop.

…

When Old Cao saw us return, he smiled and asked how things had gone.

“Sigh. The man escaped at the final moment! If I’d known, I really should have asked you to come help, Old Cao. I kept trying not to trouble you, but that man was already connected to all of us…”

I spoke gloomily.

My nether covenant with Zhou Min had originally been my affair alone, so I wanted Old Cao and Yuan Fei to avoid taking on any karmic debt from it.

But when I thought about the close relationship I now shared with Old Cao and the others, that reasoning wasn’t entirely sound!

As the closest of friends, our lives were already intimately connected, and our karmic debts inevitably affected one another.

Why keep agonizing over it?

Besides, this was the same rogue occultist we had fought together before.

I gave Old Cao a detailed account of everything that had happened beside the river, from beginning to end, while Li Miao filled in a few details.

After listening, Old Cao shook his head and sighed.

“It truly is a shame! Who knows how many evil deeds such a powerful rogue occultist has committed or how many people he has harmed? If we had killed him in one stroke, your nether pact would have been fully completed, Xiao Wu. We would also have eliminated a menace to the people and earned karmic merit ourselves.”

We would have killed three birds with one stone!

“Exactly.”

I gave a bitter smile and shrugged.
The matter was over, and the outcome was already set. There was no point repeatedly beating my chest and regretting it. I had never been indecisive.

Besides, I had a feeling this rogue occultist would become entangled with us again in the future.

When we encountered him then, we would deliver the fatal blow and kill him for good!

Wang Hu had been floating quietly nearby, listening while Li Miao and I finished speaking with Old Cao. Only then did he drift closer with a smile.

“Everyone, are you hungry? I can make you some noodles.”

The moment Wang Hu mentioned his noodles, all three of us suddenly felt hungry!

I answered at once.

“Yes! Uncle Hu’s cooking is excellent. Make those wok-seared tender pork noodles again.”

Wang Hu smiled and nodded.

“All right, no problem. Whatever you say, Young Mr. Wu!”

…

Twenty minutes later, Old Cao, Li Miao, and I sat together with enormous bowls in our hands, noisily slurping noodles.

As people from Yu City, we loved our local Yu City noodles. They were delicious and would later become famous throughout the country.

But they were far too numbing and spicy.

For a late-night snack, something lighter was better.

That made traditional wok-seared tender pork noodles the perfect choice. The pork slices were tender and silky, the noodles delicious, the aroma irresistible, and the broth soothing to the stomach.

Practitioners generally had enormous appetites.

Those who had already cultivated qi could eat nearly two or three times as much as an ordinary person of the same build!

According to Master, from a biological perspective, the qi we cultivated could be considered a form of bioenergy.

And since it was energy, it needed a source!

Most came from absorbing and transforming the spiritual energy of heaven and earth, while a smaller portion came directly from food.

Naturally, we needed to eat more than ordinary people!

This wasn’t limited to those of us who cultivated magical arts. The martial artists among the eclectic arts were even more outrageous.

Unlike us, who drew most of our power from the spiritual energy of heaven and earth, martial artists obtained all their energy from food…

Master once told me about the grandmasters of Chinese martial arts during the Republican era, whose skill had reached unimaginable levels.

People such as Dong Haichuan, Sun Lutang, Yang Luchan, and Guo Yunshen could go an entire week without eating, yet could also devour a whole ox in a single meal!

A single punch from them carried over a thousand jin of force.

It was simply inconceivable.

Their muscles, fascia, bones, marrow, and the rest of their bodies had been trained to an unbelievable degree, allowing them to store more than ten times the nutrients an ordinary person could.

Although they were less famous than Wong Fei-hung or Huo Yuanjia, their martial arts were even more accomplished.

Such martial arts grandmasters possessed no qi, knew no magical arts, and cultivated only their bodies and combat skills.

Yet according to legend, even the eminent leaders of Longhu Mountain and the Maoshan Sect treated them as equals.

Another story claimed that the Taiji grandmaster Yang Luchan once encountered a group of rogue occultists terrorizing the local people while traveling to the capital. They planned to kill more than a hundred residents of an entire village and use them to refine an evil ritual implement!

Yang Luchan immediately intervened and fought the entire group.

At first, the rogue occultists thought he was merely an ordinary man. Even if he knew some martial arts, they assumed he was nothing more than one of the disdained “martial brutes” of the eclectic arts.

Never did they imagine that Yang Luchan’s martial arts had reached such terrifying heights.

Their ritual implements were completely useless against him, and a single roar from him actually scattered many of their magical arts.

As for Yang Luchan, each punch or kick killed one of them.

After annihilating the entire group of rogue occultists, he simply continued on to the capital…

When Master told me these stories, she wanted me to take martial arts seriously, practice diligently, and keep them from falling too far behind my talisman arts, feng shui, and household familiar arts.

Martial arts were extremely useful!

But back to the matter at hand.

After the three of us finished Wang Hu’s wok-seared tender pork noodles, we wiped our mouths in satisfaction.

Then we returned to discussing the rogue occultist and sinister monk. We wanted to ask the well-traveled Old Cao whether he knew anything about the monk’s origins.

Old Cao only smiled bitterly and said the branches and traditions among folk arcane lineages were as numerous as the hairs on an ox!

Sometimes, any sufficiently capable practitioner could establish a folk arcane lineage of his own and pass it down to disciples. There was no way to know every one of them in detail…

Only the famous great sects possessed truly clear and well-documented traditions.

But their members had always thought very highly of themselves. Most cultivated in mountain Daoist temples or Buddhist monasteries, rarely venturing into the world or interacting with folk arcane lineages like ours.

“Wait!”

Realization suddenly struck me. I shot to my feet and slapped my thigh hard.

“That’s right! We may not have killed the rogue occultist, but we wounded him severely. He’s basically half-dead and won’t recover for a long time.”
“Especially tonight. He must be at his weakest right now. No matter what tricks he arranged beforehand, their defenses should be at their lowest.”

Before I could finish, Li Miao understood too.

He picked up where I left off.

“That’s right! The rogue occultist killed the yin-born woman Zhou Min, sank her beneath the Chuan River, and used evil arts to rapidly transform her into a powerful vicious corpse. When we attempted corpse retrieval last time, we triggered the defenses and failed. But with the rogue occultist half-dead, every defensive measure he laid down has probably weakened to almost nothing.”

“Let’s go! We’ll retrieve her corpse right now. I’m eighty percent certain we can bring Zhou Min’s body up from the riverbed.”

Li Miao looked excited as our gazes met.

Old Cao laughed heartily and said he would come along.

This time, I didn’t refuse. I accepted his help.

“Horses, come!”

Old Cao cast an art and summoned two paper horses from upstairs. They were familiar friends–no, wait, familiar horses.

Whenever we went out to handle business at night, we rode those two.

Making a paper horse of this quality was probably extremely troublesome and difficult for Old Cao. That was likely why he had always kept only two instead of adding more.

After Old Cao instructed Wang Hu to watch the coffin shop, we mounted the horses and clattered toward the banks of the Chuan River in the remote countryside north of town…

This time, Li Miao wanted to succeed in one attempt instead of going back and forth again. He first rode home and brought Heizi along.

Three men, one dog, and two paper horses stood on the bank of the Chuan River.

The cold river wind blew into our faces, carrying the distinctive fishy scent of a great river–a smell that wasn’t actually unpleasant.

Heizi kept turning its head to look at me.

I understood what it meant and hurriedly explained,

“Well, I said I’d bring you meat every time I visited you at home. Tonight doesn’t count. I didn’t go to your house to see you. We just happened to meet here by the river.”

The big black dog clearly understood me. It actually rolled its eyes, lowered its head, and released a deep growl from its throat.

It seemed to be saying, “You sure have plenty of excuses!”

Old Cao and Li Miao couldn’t help smiling.

“All right, everyone aboard!”

Li Miao waved a large hand toward his small wooden corpse-retrieval boat tied beside the little dock.

Naturally, we left the paper horses onshore. The three of us and the dog boarded the boat.

I pulled several of Zhou Min’s belongings from my pocket. When I visited her home, I had secretly taken quite a few useless items back to the coffin shop, thinking we might need to use them frequently.

“Brother Li, here.”

I handed Li Miao a large piece of cloth cut from one of Zhou Min’s coats.

After accepting it, he murmured an incantation and tossed it onto the river.

Defying the rushing current, the scrap of cloth actually traveled upstream!

Li Miao’s eyes lit up.

“This might work!”

He immediately planted his bamboo pole and propelled the wooden boat upstream against the current as well.

Ordinary people would have been astonished by such a miraculous sight. With no mechanical power and relying entirely on human strength to pole and row, a boat should have found it nearly impossible to travel against the current!

After we traveled less than a hundred meters upstream, the scrap of cloth stopped above a certain patch of water.

It spun in a circle, then a whirlpool sucked it under.

“This is the place!”

Li Miao spoke with certainty.

His expression became supremely confident. He firmly believed he could retrieve Zhou Min’s corpse tonight.

He removed his shirt, revealing a lean, powerfully muscled body.

“I’m going down to bring her up! Boss Cao, Young Mr. Wu, keep watch for me. There probably won’t be a problem, but we should still be careful.”

I nodded.

“All right. Don’t worry, Brother Li!”

Li Miao tied the black-dog-hair rope around his waist, then clenched a dagger between his teeth.

Splash!

He jumped into the frigid nighttime waters of the Chuan River.

Old Cao, Heizi, and I waited aboard the boat.

Remarkably, the little wooden boat had no anchor or anything else holding it in place. It simply bobbed amid the Chuan River’s rushing current, swaying gently without drifting away.

It seemed this was another secret technique unique to corpse retrievers.

After roughly three to five minutes, I felt the rope in my hands tug toward the water three times in a steady rhythm.

Delight surged through me, and Old Cao and I began pulling the rope up with all our strength.

That signal meant everything had gone smoothly!

Soon, water churned at the surface.

Then black hair, like strands of riverweed, spread across the water.

A deathly pale woman’s face emerged at the surface…