First Entry into the Ethereal Void 101. Origins of Lineage

At the moment when Old Fifth He was filled with doubt and alarm, Black Ox suddenly let out a stammering cry of terror, and cold sweat immediately broke out all over He’s body as well.

Yet he was unwilling to abandon this chance to make a fortune. He patted his chest, gripped the handle of his hoe with both hands, and shouted, “Don’t be afraid, Black Ox! I don’t care whether it’s a living ghost or a dead one—I’ll kill the bastard with one blow of my hoe!”

He forced himself to remain calm and looked ahead. Sure enough, a dark figure stood before them. He tightened his grip on the hoe, coughed once, and tried to walk toward Black Ox.

But his legs refused to obey him. They seemed to have taken root in the ground, and he could not lift them at all.

The dark figure drifted slowly toward them like a ghost.

When Old Fifth He saw that it moved without making the slightest sound, he became utterly convinced that it was a ghost. He immediately threw away his hoe, rushed forward a few steps, seized Black Ox by the hand, and turned to flee.

After they had run some twenty or thirty feet, He suddenly raised his head—and was horrified to find another dark figure blocking their path.

By then, the legs of both men felt as though they had been bound with lead weighing a thousand pounds. They could no longer move. Their knees gave way, their heads spun, and they collapsed onto the ground.

As the saying goes, when ghosts frighten people, they may not necessarily frighten them to death; but when people frighten people, they truly can. No matter how bold Old Fifth He usually was, even he could not help losing his nerve in such a terrifying place.

Seeing that the two men had been frightened unconscious by his display of lightness kung fu, Li Hao noticed that foam kept spilling from their mouths and realized that they would not awaken anytime soon. He then sprang to the place where they had been digging and looked down at the corpse. He could not determine who the dead person had been.

But when he saw the gold bracelet on the corpse’s wrist, he guessed that she might have been his mother’s personal maid. A surge of grief rose in his heart. Gazing upon the woman’s horribly mutilated body, he could not keep the tears from his eyes.

Suddenly, an evening wind swept past and made him shiver. Only then did he wipe away his tears, force down his sorrow, and think to himself:

“These men and women, servants of my family, were burned to death and buried beneath the rubble. Once the wind and rain have exposed their corpses and bones, their fate will become even more wretched. They have already died tragically enough. If I allow their bodies to lie exposed, would that not be even more cruel? I might as well uncover all of them and bury them together.”

He raised his eyes and studied the direction of the wind. It was only a light northwesterly breeze. At once, his body blurred as he leaped to the northwest corner. Gathering his Heaven-Shaking Earth-Turning Palm energy, he repeatedly pushed both palms gently toward the ruins.

The bricks, earth, and debris suddenly rose into the air, rolling and spiraling upward. As the swirling column widened, it resembled a gigantic tower slowly ascending into the heavens.

Higher and higher it climbed. In moments, the earth and dust it had swept up were carried into the clouds, then scattered far away across the land.

Li Hao abruptly withdrew his palms and surveyed the scene. The debris had been swept away evenly by his palm wind, revealing all the corpses buried beneath it.

He counted thirty-two bodies in all, but could no longer tell whether they had been men or women, young or old. Every one of them was blackened like charcoal.

“If I bury them here, this place will become a graveyard. If I can one day regain my original appearance and return to rebuild my home, how could I move the graves then? It would be better to bury them in that bamboo grove nearby. If I am fortunate enough to recover my true identity, I can move them somewhere else afterward.”

Once he had made up his mind, he suddenly sprang into the air and landed beside the bamboo grove with a whoosh. Gathering his Heaven-Shaking Earth-Turning Palm power, he struck the ground four times with tremendous force. The soil spiraled outward in all directions.

At the center of the strikes, a pit seven or eight feet deep appeared.

After using his palm force to create the pit, Li Hao turned back. But when he saw the many corpses, he could not help frowning.

“How am I supposed to carry so many bodies over there for burial?”

An idea suddenly occurred to him. He once again secretly summoned his palm power and gently pushed toward the corpses lying across the ground.

The bodies immediately rose into the air and flew straight into the deep pit.

In the space of a few moments, all twenty-two corpses had been sent into the pit by his palm force.

He then waved his hands and shook the surrounding earth loose, burying the bodies beneath it.

“Though the corpses are buried, there may still be people reckless enough to come and dig them up. I must think of some way to make the villagers afraid to disturb even a blade of grass or a leaf here.”

After pondering for a while, he suddenly remembered the pair of enormous stones supporting the curved flagpoles in the square before the Three-Family Ancestral Hall. He could borrow one for his purpose. With that, he immediately rushed toward the ancestral hall.

As he passed Old Fifth He and Black Ox, he noticed He’s body twitch faintly.

Afraid that the two men might awaken and escape, Li Hao raised his right foot and lightly tapped the fainting points behind their knees with his toes.

The Li family compound was only three miles from the Three-Family Ancestral Hall, so he arrived at its entrance in no time.

He looked inside. The hall was silent and deserted, without the slightest sound.

The pair of huge flagpole stones still stood in the square. Each was seven or eight feet tall, roughly two feet wide, and more than two feet thick.

With a single stride, he leaped before one of them, wrapped both arms around it, and heaved upward with all his strength. To his surprise, he pulled the enormous stone completely out of the ground.

Taking advantage of its momentum, Li Hao hoisted the stone onto his back and took a few experimental steps. Though it was extremely heavy, he found that he could manage it.

He then strode back toward home with the stone on his back.

Halfway there, he saw a burly man approaching. The man carried a pine-resin torch in his left hand, a shovel in his right, and a fish basket hanging at an angle from one arm.

Li Hao wanted to avoid him, but with a stone weighing more than a thousand pounds on his back, he had no time to dodge. He could only continue straight toward him.

The burly man with the resin torch was on his way to the rice paddies to catch loaches.

He suddenly looked up and saw a strange figure carrying a huge stone toward him.

Greatly alarmed, he dropped the torch and shovel, turned, and ran while shouting, “The Hanged Ghost! The Hanged Ghost!”

The fisherman had often heard stories that a hanged ghost carried a rope and a roof beam, and came out at night in search of someone to take its place.

Hearing the man’s cries, Li Hao could not help laughing inwardly. Carrying the massive stone, he continued toward the burned remains of his family home.

When he reached the open ground before the compound, he straightened his body and unloaded the stone pillar. As it struck the ground, it sank deeply into the mud.

He seized it with both hands and twisted it downward several times. The stone sank more than a foot deeper into the earth.

When he released it, the pillar had not fallen, but it was still unstable. He let out a quiet breath, straightened the stone, and leaped onto its top. Then he employed the tremendous force of the Thousand-Pound Drop, sinking his body downward.

He felt the pillar slowly descend into the earth. Looking down, he saw that it had already been buried four or five feet deep. He shifted his weight and found it as steady as Mount Tai. Only then did he leap down.

He immediately removed his glove, concentrated his inner power in the fingers of his right hand, and used his Great Strength Divine Finger technique to carve these words into the stone:

“Before the throne of the Bodhisattva Guanyin stands the Divine Vajra of Great Strength, who has received the command to guard this place. Villagers and all others are forbidden to intrude. Those who disobey shall be put to death. As a warning to first offenders, the ears of Old Fifth He and his companions have each been cut off.”

After finishing the inscription, Li Hao read it over from beginning to end. Only then did he turn and walk toward Old Fifth He and Black Ox.

The two men were still foaming at the mouth. Li Hao suddenly lifted his foot and kicked Old Fifth He in the Sea of Vitality point. He heard He give a faint groan and begin to regain consciousness. Just as he tried to rise, a sudden searing pain struck his ear, and he fainted again.

With a casual movement of his hand, Li Hao sliced off the ears of both men.

Old Fifth He and Black Ox were not discovered until dawn the following day, by which time they were barely alive.

After enduring that fright and losing one ear apiece, the two men needed half a month of rest before they recovered. From then on, they never again entertained evil thoughts.

Whenever they recalled the terrifying events of that night, lingering fear still gripped them. Most country people were already prone to superstition, and after the two men embellished the tale with vivid descriptions, no one dared entertain the idea of digging in that place. The more timid villagers would not even pass by it in broad daylight.

Within a radius of more than ten miles around Three-Family Village lived no fewer than two or three thousand households. There were certainly some who did not believe in ghosts, but the affair was so strange, and the rumors so numerous, that even they could not help believing.

The enormous flagpole stones before the Three-Family Ancestral Hall could not have been moved even a single step by dozens of strong young men. Yet, without anyone seeing or hearing a thing, one of them had been transported overnight to the square before the Li family home and erected there, complete with a terrifying warning carved into it. If not an immortal, then who could have moved such a stone pillar?

Meanwhile, Li Hao returned home filled with boundless joy, hoping to secretly look in on his parents. He had never imagined that he would find his family struck by such a devastating calamity. After erecting the flagpole stone and carving the warning upon it, he could not stop his tears from flowing.

He raised his head and looked around. The moonlight was dim, and the surroundings seemed all the more desolate. Just as he was about to leave, he suddenly heard the shrill, mournful cry of a night owl.

Li Hao could not help releasing a low, grief-stricken howl of his own. Dragging his heavy feet, he swayed unsteadily before disappearing into the night mist.

He had been born to a scholarly family and possessed extraordinary intelligence. By the age of ten, he had read widely in the classics. Kind by nature, he might not even have been able to bring himself to kill a chicken had the Fat Arhat not persecuted him and forced him to hide his true face from the world.

After destroying the haunted residence, he had been moved by the chivalrous compassion of the Heroine Jieyuhua and by her selfless willingness to save others. Deeply remorseful over the many lives he had taken at the Dharma Gate Temple, he had intended to return to Netherworld Peak and endure his regrets for the rest of his life, never again setting foot in the martial world.

But this journey home to visit his parents had revealed such a horrifying tragedy that the rage in his heart blazed anew. His hatred for the martial world and his desire for vengeance became more intense than ever.

Eight or nine years earlier, Miaoyu, abbess of the Nine-Palace Convent atop Thunderhead Mountain’s Netherworld Peak, had traveled throughout the land. At the Rear Nunnery of Li Nantian, she encountered a highway robber who had brought along a humanlike ape. The creature crouched in a corner of the hall, weeping without cease.

After completing her evening prayers, Miaoyu noticed that the ape possessed human toes. When she looked more closely, the creature immediately knelt before her and used one finger to write five words in the dirt:

“Holy Nun, please save me.”

Though Miaoyu was a nun of profound spiritual cultivation, she had never witnessed the strange spectacle of an ape that could write.

She stared at the five characters in the earth. The strokes were as sharp as knife cuts, yet neat, vigorous, and full of spirit. No one but a well-educated scholar could have produced such calligraphy. No matter how intelligent an ape might be, and no matter how skillfully it was trained, how could it possibly learn to write such beautiful characters?

While Miaoyu was lost in thought, the highway robber suddenly leaped forward and attacked her.

Had the robber not attacked, Miaoyu might have pondered for a long time without understanding why the ape could write. But the instant he struck, she realized that the ape had once been human, and that the ape skin covering its body had been forced upon it by human hands. As a nun who had devoted herself to the path of cultivation, Miaoyu could not stand by and refuse to save it.