Chapter 086: The Cursed Body, the Malignant Form, the Wretched Soul and Spirit

Would it do me any good?

If I am honest with myself, I have always been a man who knows the value of timing and would never waste effort on anything that brought me no benefit.

So now, just as he said it, I believed him.

I slid the baton at my waist into place and extended both hands, holding out the child. “That makes sense. I won’t ask anymore. Come and take him.”

My gesture left the man stunned, and whatever he had been about to say was swallowed back down.

“What kind of game are you playing?”

I shrugged. “A person ought to be more sincere and less scheming. If you want him, I’ll give him to you. What’s the problem?”

The man burst into laughter. “I’ll be damned if you had the nerve to lie to me.”

He walked up to me and reached out for the child.

I let go, and the child was taken into his arms.

“Haha! You really are far more sensible than Jiang Shan!”

He threw back his head and laughed. He had never dreamed that getting the child would be so effortless.

But at that very moment, I began to stretch, loosening my limbs as though nothing in the world was worth my concern.

I propped one leg on a wooden rack and began to press it, saying carelessly, “You must be Wang Sheng.”

“Even though you’ve aged, the same old face is still there.”

From the moment I saw him, I had already made a judgment about who he was.

The reason I asked his name was simply to test him.

And from the smugness in his reply, together with his face, I was certain: he was Wang Sheng.

I switched legs and pointed at the scarf around his neck. “What, did the body-stitching job go so badly that you have to wear a scarf in this heat to hide the shame?”

I lowered my leg and rolled my shoulders, continuing, “How was it? When you first got into this line of work, were you shocked that even after your head had been cut off, you were still alive and kicking, just like any ordinary person?”

“Right—and you could even learn a few spells!”

Once I had finished stretching, I took a pack of cigarettes from my pocket, drew one out, and slowly lit it between my lips. “From the way you speak, it sounds like you’ve dealt with my grandfather before. You were the one who ran away fast, weren’t you? Otherwise you wouldn’t still be standing here talking to me.”

Wang Sheng was just about to speak when I raised a hand to stop him and said, “By the way, did the one who turned you into this tell you what you are now?”

I bared my teeth in a grin and looked at the uncertain expression on Wang Sheng’s face.

“I don’t know how they explained it to you, but I can tell you plainly: in my understanding, what you are now—a thing that is neither man nor ghost nor corpse—is called a corpse hound.”

“In other words, you are a corpse, and also a human, and at the same time a loyal dog.”

“And don’t bother denying it. You came here alone to take the child, didn’t you? That was your master’s command.”

“You—!”

Wang Sheng’s eyes widened as he glared at me, his face twisted with fury. “You brat, how dare you spout such arrogance! I’ll tear you apart with my bare hands!”

He wasted no more words. After shouting, he lunged at me at once.

I had underestimated this corpse hound. Even with the child still in his arms, it did not slow him down in the slightest.

He was fast. In the blink of an eye, he was already in front of me.

Fortunately, I ducked in time, or his hands would have closed around my throat.

Seeing he had missed, Wang Sheng immediately lowered his head to look at me. At the same time, he opened his mouth wide, and a blast of dark, baleful energy shot toward me from between his teeth.

I flipped aside and avoided it. Where I had stood a moment before, the ground was struck and instantly coated with a thick layer of frost.

A corpse hound truly lived up to its reputation. It seemed the Golden Cicada Society had made a tremendous investment indeed.

To refine a corpse hound like Wang Sheng was no easier than creating a vengeful newborn spirit.

A head steeped in resentment, a body born of extreme ferocity and wickedness, with malice as the soul—only then could a corpse hound be made.

To put it plainly, forging a corpse hound required a skull filled with deep grievance and the body of a person of great cruelty and evil.

The two were stitched together with a thread soaked in poisonous blood from forty-nine different toxins.

Then this new corpse was placed into an ice coffin—a coffin literally made of ice.

It was left there for three days, allowing the chill to seep fully through the body. Then a secret method was used to awaken the lingering malice within the head.

After that, it had to be fed daily with the caster’s blood. Only after a full hundred days would the corpse hound take shape.

It knew no pain, no hunger, and was utterly loyal to its master.

But the existence of a corpse hound ran against the natural order.

Heaven’s laws were fair: a corpse hound could live only seven days.

Once those seven days passed, the body would wither and be spent, and the caster would pay for it with ten years of his own life.

My grandfather had once told me that nothing in this world was absolute, and the same went for sustaining a corpse hound.

It was not impossible to make one endure indefinitely. On the seventh day, the corpse hound merely needed to be soaked in a blood bath for three hours. Once the blood had been fully absorbed, it could survive another seven days.

From the moment Wang Sheng lost his head until now, at least decades had passed, and yet his appearance had aged with the years just like that of a living man.

A blood bath every seven days—I drew a sharp breath. Just how much blood had to be spilled to keep a thing like this alive?

“Where do you think you’re going?”

Wang Sheng’s eyes were wide, and the killing intent rolling off him made even me shiver uncontrollably.

I only felt the temperature around me plunge at once. The window that had been open was suddenly coated in a thin film of ice.

Centered on Wang Sheng, the entire room froze rapidly, everything within it sealed in ice as if time itself had been arrested.

Just as the frost was about to spread to my feet, I immediately pulled a dispelling talisman from my pocket.

“Dispelling Talisman! By command, break!”

Holding the talisman between two fingers, I flicked my wrist lightly, and with a soft pop it burst into a sheet of talismanic fire.

I caught the fire in my hand and slammed my palm down onto the floor. “Scatter!”

The talismanic flame spread in an instant, taking the surrounding frost as fuel and racing outward.

Within two breaths, every trace of ice in the room had been melted away.

But the instant the flame touched corpse hound Wang Sheng, it snuffed itself out.

A faster update for My Undertaker Years, by the great author Southern Story. To make sure you can find the latest chapter next time, please save the bookmark. Chapter 86: A head steeped in resentment, a body born of ferocity, malice as the soul. Free reading.