Chapter 107

Chapter 107

When the silver-white Scale covered my arm, all I felt was a wave of coolness.

Like a spring washing over me, it soothed the burning sting of the scorch marks.

Liu Junyan kept his hand pressed against the Scale, pouring True Qi into it without pause. His face grew paler and paler.

Behind us, from the direction of the Main Hall, the faint howling of Yin Wind began to drift over.

Too much Merit had been consumed, and the Dirty Things in the Main Hall were starting to grow restless again. Liu Junyan had to go back.

He removed his hand, and that piece of Scale seemed to embed itself into my left arm, growing there as if it had always belonged.

“Xiao Jiu, I have to go.” Liu Junyan raised a hand and stroked my cheek, his eyes filled with worry. “This seclusion may take longer than usual. Be careful in everything. Don’t force yourself to endure anything alone. If something happens, have Qingying go find Lord Xiao.”

Li Qingying nodded rapidly from the side. “Seventh Master, don’t worry. Go into seclusion and recover properly. I’ll take good care of Xiao Jiu.”

“Xiao Jiu,” Liu Junyan said at last, his tone solemn, “no matter what anyone says, you must remember this: do not touch Wangting Mountain!”

I nodded hard and promised with reddened eyes, “I know. I’ll listen to you. Everything can wait until you come out of seclusion.”

Only then did Liu Junyan feel reassured enough to prop himself up and leave.

The Rear-facing Room was a complete mess. Li Qingying and I quietly cleaned it up, our mood sinking from the initial thrill of defeating Old Lady Bai and the Evil Monk into a dull emptiness.

From the very beginning, this matter had been full of variables. Liu Junyan might not have guessed that the variable would be Old Lady Bai, but he had still made every preparation he could.

From the moment the Evil Monk first appeared, he had already decided to use the Hexagonal Palace Lantern and his own Merit to help me break through the trap.

Now that the dust had settled, every bit of this victory should have belonged to him.

But he was also the one who had been hurt the worst.

Li Qingying and I, on the other hand, had barely suffered any injuries at all.

And we had even gained a Black Cat.

By the time we finished cleaning, dawn had fully broken. Li Qingying went to make breakfast, while I stood beneath the western corridor and looked up at the Hexagonal Palace Lantern.

Bathed in the light of Merit, that Black Cat’s back injury would heal sooner or later.

Once all nine Cat Bone fragments returned to their proper places, it would eventually recover its true form as Du’e Maotan.

When that time came, would it really be willing to stay by my side and become my spirit pet?

I smiled helplessly. Probably not, right?

After breakfast, we each washed up and went to bed.

We were exhausted.

The Pawnshop would not open today. Li Qingying and I both needed a proper sleep.

I slept so deeply that the world might as well have turned upside down. Nightmares came one after another, but after I woke, I could not remember a single thing.

By then, it was already past lunchtime, probably around three in the afternoon.

I leaned against the headboard and looked toward the window, at the faint sunlight filtering through the curtains, then let out a long breath.

Without thinking, I reached out and touched the Scale on my left arm. It made me feel as though Liu Junyan had been by my side all along.

Then I saw that Water Ripple again.

I had never expected such a little thing to be so powerful. That Dragon roar had been terrifyingly forceful and penetrating.

It was just that it did not seem capable of unleashing that much power out of thin air. It needed water.

If Liu Junyan had not drawn in the moisture of the sea waves at the same time, it would not have been able to take form so smoothly.

But… what if one day it returned to the water?

No, it had originally come from Linghai!

That was its true home.

It belonged to Mother Liu. How could it possibly be ordinary?

I had underestimated it before.

Wufu Town was exceptionally quiet today.

Today should originally have been the day of Old Lady Bai’s funeral, but after such a massive upheaval, I had no idea how the Bai Family would clean up the mess, and I did not deliberately ask around.

But Old Lady Bai’s corpse had begun to rot rapidly after her Souls were taken away.
Li Qingying was afraid Old Lady Bai would rot away in the Southern Study, so she dealt with the body at once and took it out to be buried.

I kept waiting for Bai Jingmo to come knocking and demand his Grandmother’s corpse from me.

But he never did.

Bai Jingmo seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth. For a while after that, even the entire Bai Family Medical Hall kept an unusually low profile.

I didn’t know whether Old Lady Bai’s death had dealt too heavy a blow to the Bai Family Medical Hall, or whether they were quietly plotting something else.

If the enemy made no move, neither would we.

Li Qingying and I actually managed to enjoy a few peaceful days, and our energy and spirits recovered quite a bit.

For a time, it felt as if we had returned to when we first met. Each of us handled our own duties. When there was nothing else to do, we practiced martial arts together, and now and then went out for a good meal.

That lasted until a horrifying Flaying Case broke out in Wufu Town.

The victim was a girl named Chen Tao. She had just turned sixteen.

Her family was fairly well-off, and she did well in school. She was in her first year of high school in the county seat.

In late October on the lunar calendar, the school had a long break-two and a half days off.

Chen Tao’s family ran a small factory on the south side of Wufu Town. They were usually very busy, and no one had time to pick her up, so whenever school let out, she took the bus home by herself.

It had been the same for me when I was in school.

That day, school let out at noon. When Chen Tao boarded the bus home, she even spoke to her mother on the phone.

But after her parents finished their work at the factory and called her that evening to ask if she had made it home, they couldn’t reach her.

Her parents panicked immediately. At first, the couple searched everywhere on their own. They kept searching until midnight, but there was still no news at all.

Later, people who heard about it joined in to help.

But for the entire night, Chen Tao was neither found alive nor found dead.

Chen Tao’s parents called the police, but there were still no leads.

It wasn’t until three days later that a bloody female corpse floated up at the bend of the Zhu Pan River directly opposite the Pawnshop.

The entire skin had been flayed from the corpse, making her original features impossible to identify. Judging from her build, however, she did look very much like Chen Tao.

The police immediately organized people to lower hooks into the water and retrieve the body.

But there was clearly no undercurrent, yet the moment a hook touched the female corpse, she suddenly stood upright in the water, frightening everyone into cries of alarm.

A corpse standing in water was no good omen.

Several people went down one after another and tried all sorts of methods, but they simply could not bring her up.

As the sky gradually darkened, someone who knew the trade suggested they bring in a professional corpse fisher to help. Otherwise, if the female corpse remained standing in the water too long, something might change.

When Li Qingying and I heard the news, we went to take a look as well.

The moment I saw that bloody standing corpse, my first reaction was to vomit.

It was too cruel!

But once I calmed down, I realized something was wrong.

Chen Tao had been missing for three or four days. If she had been flayed and then thrown into the Zhu Pan River, she should have bloated and floated up long ago.

More than that, with her skin gone and her whole body covered in blood, she should have easily attracted fish and shrimp to feed on her.

Yet she had neither bloated nor been gnawed by fish and shrimp. Why?

Jin Wuya had once said that the Zhu Pan River flowed from west to east, then suddenly turned north at the mouth directly opposite the Pawnshop. All the yin and baleful things in the entire Zhu Pan River gathered at that one spot.

So it was not strange that the female corpse had eventually floated up there.

What was strange was her condition.

More importantly, she had died by flaying.

After I finished throwing up, my first reaction was to rush back to the Pawnshop, pass through the Rear-facing Room, and head straight for the Main Hall.

The Flaying Case was not an isolated incident in Wufu Town.

A hundred years ago, quite a few people had died in Zhao Zixun’s hands in the same horrific state.

Mei Linshuang had been one of them.

Could Chen Tao also have died at Zhao Zixun’s hands?

And the Lingchi Blade I had enshrined on the Altar Table in the Main Hall-was it still there?