Chapter 96: The Hidden Secret of the Fishing Village

A year had passed.

By then, the capital of Red Province had become utterly unrecognizable from what it had once been. Ordinary folk might still deceive themselves, clinging to the comfortable belief that if a matter did not concern them, they need not lift a finger.

In their hearts, no matter what befell the people of Li Province or Luo Province, the imperial capital would never be troubled.

After all, if even the capital fell, then the thousand-year legacy of the Great Yue Dynasty would be undone in an instant.

The Emperor would never permit such a thing.

Little did they know that the very one who wished them dead was the Emperor high above them.

In contrast, the cultivators were all cautious. Only the immortal clans rooted here remained.

Loose cultivators had nearly all fled.

The small clans moved if they could. If they could not, they hurried to attach themselves to a golden core clan, gathering strength only to earn a chance at self-preservation.

Even Skywatch Tower had become sparsely attended, its gates standing open to little more than the wind.

The Four-Color Guards were, in name, each commanded by their own elders; and those elders, in turn, were all dependent on the lords of the three branches, taking orders and doing as they were told.

A storm was coming.

...

In the red-light quarter.

That good-for-nothing, Liu Yun, remained stuck at the early stage of Spirit Refinement. For a wastrel like him, his elders had no need to discuss great matters with him at all.

He was like a patron with his ears stuffed shut, living entirely within his own little world.

Thanks to Cao Chengyu, he had managed to get entangled with that former poetry courtesan, and ever since then he had been drinking and carousing night after night, so content that he scarcely remembered home. The only pity was that he had to share the same road with the man surnamed Luo.

Truly, a drop of water could form a golden core; swallow the Mystic Pearl, and one would join the ranks of immortals.

The mystery within that saying could only be understood, never spoken aloud.

As the old saying went: heaven and earth are vast, and man and woman are born without stain; stain is born from the human heart.

This was Liu Yun's lifelong creed.

That day, after wringing the last little nourishment from his meager reserves and swallowing a tonic pill to fortify his foundations, he swayed along the alleyways of the capital by night.

As he walked, he even sniffed beneath his own armpit, sighing with satisfaction.

"A man ought to be like this..."

"Don't move!"

From the shadows, a tall figure seized his neck with one arm, and the flow of spiritual power within his body was cut off at once by an even fiercer force.

"Mercy, hero! Mercy!"

Liu Yun sobered instantly, his voice breaking with tears.

"My... my storage pouch is hidden behind my underwear, and there are two temporary storage talismans taped to the soles of my feet. I didn't see you... take it all... take it all!"

Cao Chengyu wore a strange expression.

This friend truly cherished his own life.

Still, he had no wish to make things difficult for Liu Yun. The great quantity of green jade spirit rice he had once been given in tribute had helped him considerably.

Right now, Great Yue was nothing but a mud pit. Whoever stepped into it would, if not killed outright, come away minus a layer of skin.

So it was better not to reveal his identity at all. Letting Liu Yun remain a nameless passerby who knew nothing was for the best.

Cao Chengyu took out a letter and a poisonous plant, one of the main ingredients he had once used to refine the Human Poison Pill, and used them as a token.

He pressed them into Liu Yun's hands and said in a low, hoarse voice, "Listen well, boy. Deliver these to Deacon Luo Yuzhu at Skywatch Tower. Otherwise... heh heh!"

"I know where you live. You understand."

As soon as the words fell, his figure dissolved into a wisp of cloud and vanished. Liu Yun stared at the items in his hands, on the verge of tears, not even daring to cry out loud.

He stuffed the things into his chest and staggered away.

In the shadows, seeing that Liu Yun had been sensible, Cao Chengyu left as well.

He still bore Skywatch Tower's warrant for his arrest, so it was not convenient to swagger openly to Spring Blossom Studio in search of Luo Yuzhu.

Nor would it do to meet in secret within the capital itself. There were too many golden core experts here; if he and Luo Yuzhu so much as started a fight, it would be over in no time.

The best method was to send a letter and arrange to meet outside the city. When he had first departed, his relationship with Luo Yuzhu could hardly be called good.

And Liu Yun, being a White Guard of Skywatch Tower, was the perfect messenger.

Since the matter went smoothly, Cao Chengyu quietly slipped out of the city.

The appointed meeting place was the one spot where he had once lingered during a mission.

A tributary of the Wraith Grand Canal that led into the capital.

That strange little fishing village filled with wandering spirits.

Even now he still found it odd: like a ghost, yet not a ghost; possessing reason, yet not belonging among ghost immortals.

And it had been unusually friendly toward him.

Choosing this place to meet Luo Yuzhu was also a way to investigate everything thoroughly.

Sending the letter through Liu Yun would take time. In the meantime, Cao Chengyu wanted to find out exactly what had happened back then.

To come to this ruined fishing village, with its withered weeds and desolate air, at night, while his old memories still lay heavy in his heart, was enough to stir a measure of unease and suspicion.

Man's fear of the unknown is something carved forever into the depths of the soul.

When Cao Chengyu arrived, the night had not yet ended, and dawn had not yet broken.

His cultivation was different now; he moved far faster than he had in those days, and there was a little more confidence in his heart as well.

The scattered human bones strewn about everywhere seemed to proclaim that no one had come here in a long while.

Even the dust on the houses had gathered more thickly.

Cao Chengyu descended into the center of the fishing village and released his divine sense, scanning and comparing inch by inch.

And indeed, he found traces.

The arrangement of the houses, the places where the trees had grown, all bore the marks of the Yin-Yang Reversal Formation.

Even on a broken roof tile, he found the pattern of the reversal array.

It was confirmed.

This was absolutely the Emperor's handiwork.

The question was: since the Yin-Yang Reversal Formation had once been set up here, why had it been activated so early, only to be abandoned in such a perfunctory way?

And how had those intelligent ghostly beings, transformed from ordinary mortals, come into existence?

As he continued his search, Cao Chengyu found even more clues.

And, most importantly, he found the site of the living stake.

Compared with the Yin Bridge's living stake he had seen before, the one standing here was the fishing village's ancestral shrine. Inside it, the largest support pillar was almost entirely made of flesh and blood, with only an outer coating of stone paste and a wooden covering. To the naked eye, there was no sign of anything amiss at all.

But once his divine sense swept across it, that skeleton, that flesh and blood...

There was no way such a massive living stake could have been made without thirty or fifty people.

It was brutal beyond measure, utterly inhuman.

Even Cao Chengyu could smell the bloody stench left behind by the distortions of space and time.

Rubbing his faintly aching brow, he let his divine sense continue downward.

Unexpectedly, beneath the living stake there were no living corpses at all, but rather an empty underground chamber.

Inside stood over a hundred jars, each sealed at the mouth with suppressive ghost talismans, resembling the spirit jars used by yin soldiers to raise ghosts.

The floor itself was inscribed with the most complex and important pattern in the Yin-Yang Reversal Formation: the yin-yang inversion array.

Unfortunately, it had been deliberately damaged. The core had been erased, and what remained of the pattern seemed more like a decoy.

One could only see traces of the reversal formation, nothing more, without any true yin-yang inversion to speak of.

Cao Chengyu could tell, because he had once encountered the complete formation in Longmen Town. Reconstructing it in reverse was not difficult.

Since he had found something, he naturally had to go down and take a look.

But there was no entrance to the underground chamber at all.

Closing his eyes, Cao Chengyu searched through the many arts and spells he had accumulated within himself.

Soon he found, among the techniques he had recently memorized from the Five Elements Sect, a low-grade spell called Wall-Piercing.

Its difficulty was not high, and it allowed one to pass through walls and earth, but it was easily hindered by spiritual power and was of little practical use.

He had exchanged for it solely to accumulate theoretical knowledge, as preparation for developing an earth-escape technique in the future.

He had not expected to make use of it so soon.