Chapter 329
Chapter 329
Leqing Town held a grand funeral.
Squire Xie’s household was probably the wealthiest in Leqing Town, and today was the day his only daughter would be laid to rest.
Miss Xie had been frail from birth. In the end, she did not survive the winter of her eighth year.
Squire Xie was a great philanthropist in town. With his only daughter being laid to rest, the townspeople came of their own accord to see Miss Xie off on her final journey.
They watched the Xie Family carry an enormous coffin slowly toward the entrance to town.
“Why is the coffin so large?”
One of the townspeople asked in surprise.
“Perhaps Squire Xie placed a great many burial goods inside for Miss Xie.”
Another townsperson offered the guess.
Amid their discussion, a commotion arose ahead.
“Squire Xie is bringing Miss Xie’s coffin back!”
The townspeople were shocked to hear this.
Was she not about to be buried? Why were they bringing the coffin back?
The townspeople surged forward.
Yet after taking only a few steps, they stopped.
A wind sprang up from nowhere, so fierce that everything in the street was swept into the air. The townspeople were blown this way and that, and some of the smaller ones were knocked straight to the ground.
Amid the chaos, someone looked up. To their horror, they discovered a black vortex hanging overhead. Gust after gust poured from it, lifting Miss Xie’s coffin into the air until it became lodged in the mouth of the vortex.
The wind gradually subsided.
But the townspeople found no relief.
No one knew who started first. One person’s expression abruptly turned numb. Then he turned, bit the person beside him, and began gnawing at their flesh and blood.
It was a sickening massacre.
Every townsperson seemed to lose all reason and began attacking those around them. The coffin hung in midair, seemingly shrouding the entire town beneath it. Whenever someone died, the blood energy from that townsperson seemed to be drawn away and transferred into the coffin.
Squire Xie stood at the entrance to town.
He watched everything with desperate urgency in his eyes.
“My girl, Father will bring you back to life. I promise.”
The killing in town continued, and Squire Xie’s eyes grew brighter and brighter. “Soon. Soon. My girl, you’ll be alive again very soon.”
In his younger years, Squire Xie had been a Daoist priest. He had studied mystic arts and knew several unorthodox formations.
Later, he met his wife and fell in love. He took off his Daoist robes, married, and had a child. Perhaps, however, he had committed too many evil deeds in his early years, and the retribution fell upon his daughter.
Miss Xie was frail from birth, while Squire Xie’s wife died in difficult labor on the day she gave birth.
Squire Xie could not accept any of it.
After Miss Xie died, Squire Xie went mad.
He remembered a bloody and evil formation that could bring the dead back to life. The price was countless lives. The more people who died and the more blood energy it absorbed, the stronger the resurrected body would become. Squire Xie set his sights on every resident of Leqing Town.
He laid out the formation across Leqing Town. As long as he placed his daughter at its core and activated it, she would return once more.
The slaughter, the spilled blood, and the bodies torn apart by teeth and hands were all hope for his daughter’s resurrection.
For Leqing Town, it was a day without light. Every townsperson died within that formation.
Miss Xie slowly absorbed the townspeople’s blood energy. She was about to revive and return with tremendous power.
Just as Squire Xie was nearing success, a Daoist priest arrived from outside the town.
“Evil is at work here,” the Daoist priest said grimly. He immediately summoned his ritual implement and sent it hurtling straight toward the coffin at the formation’s core.
The Daoist priest was no weakling. His strike hit its target, knocking the coffin straight to the ground. The blood energy spiraling upward dispersed completely, and at the very last moment, the resurrection formation failed.
Squire Xie’s eyes widened in fury.
He hated the Daoist priest, but reviving his daughter was more important right now.
Squire Xie brought out his treasure: a bead.
The bead looked utterly ordinary, yet once he channeled his power into it, it drew the whole of Leqing Town inside. Every person and every object in town was swallowed by the bead.
The Daoist priest’s expression changed drastically. He immediately tried to stop him, but Squire Xie used his own body as a shield and blocked the priest. In the end, the Daoist had time only to cast two of his treasures into Leqing Town.
A small piece of peach wood, and a stone.
They too were drawn into the bead.
Within the bead, Leqing Town survived in another form.
Squire Xie had spent too much of his power creating the formation and was no longer a match for the Daoist priest. In the end, he could only hurl the bead toward some unknown distant place. Then, using blood from his heart, he sent his final instructions into the bead before sacrificing his life to hold back the Daoist priest.
Miss Xie did not return to life, but she became a ghost.
Leqing Town inside the bead was exceptionally well suited for ghosts.
She was not the only one. Every resident of Leqing Town became a ghost as well.
Miss Xie lay inside the coffin, which fell straight into her bedchamber. Just as she tried to climb out, a piece of peach wood dropped down. The moment it entered the ground, it transformed into a Sibuxiang. At the same time, Miss Xie discovered that the peach wood restrained her. She felt her power fading, and worse still, her memories began to descend into chaos.
She refused to accept it.
Before losing consciousness completely, Miss Xie sent the heart’s blood Squire Xie had left behind, along with a strand of her own hair, out of the room.
At the same time, the stone landed on the stone lion outside the Xie Family’s gates. It instantly transformed into a Sibuxiang and replaced the lion, while the ghosts throughout the town vanished without a trace.
Leqing Town seemed to sink into peace, utterly devoid of human presence.
Yet amid the silence, a red shadow wound itself around a strand of hair and circled the Xie Residence. Over time, it took the form of a young woman.
She was Miss Xie, yet she was not Miss Xie.
She appeared fifteen or sixteen years old, the very image of what the real Miss Xie would have looked like after growing up.
Perhaps this was Squire Xie’s hope made manifest.
She heard the instructions Squire Xie had left behind.
“My girl, you need the blood energy of forty-two more people before you can be revived.”
“Your power is insufficient, so you cannot absorb the blood energy of innocent people without cause. You must use a medium to connect yourself to the sacrifices.”
“If anyone tries to stop you, sacrifice the blood energy of every resident in town to amplify the formation Father left behind and wield its power for yourself.”
“My girl, Father was useless. I failed at the final step.”
“…”
No one knew how much more time passed. The stone statue and wooden carving gradually began to change. Once complete Sibuxiang, each slowly lost an arm.
The young woman formed from the strand of black hair came to believe that she was Miss Xie. She began gathering the ghosts of the townspeople and sent them to the scholar tree grove to recuperate.
After recovering, the ghosts grew stronger. One night, they left the scholar tree grove and went to the corpse-strewn street. There, they found their bodies, which had already fallen apart. They pieced the bodies back together and attached their ghosts to them once more.
Many years later, the bead finally drew in an outsider.
But Miss Xie discovered that the stone statue left behind by the Daoist priest restrained the town’s ghosts, preventing them from harming the newcomer.
Miss Xie then remembered the words Squire Xie had left behind.
She began making all the ghosts in town sacrifice their own bodies and what little blood energy remained within them, amplifying the formation’s power and weakening the restraint the Daoist priest had left behind.
Gradually, the Sibuxiang lost its other arm, then its legs, then its antlers… Meanwhile, an area finally emerged within the courtyard of the Xie Residence where the town’s ghosts were no longer restricted by day or night.
Given enough time, neither daylight nor the boundaries of that area would restrict their movements any longer.
And Miss Xie’s plan proved very successful.
Through one wedding after another, she designated outsiders as future husbands and used that status to connect them to the real Miss Xie, allowing them to be sacrificed.
The real Miss Xie, asleep inside the coffin, regained consciousness.
But she had lost her memories and disappeared to an unknown location.
That did not matter.
Soon, they would have all forty-two people, and the real Miss Xie would return.