XUE MENG had already sprinted over to the chaotic center of the fighting. "Stop! Everybody stop!" he shouted, waving his arms frantically. "Stop fighting! It's no use!"
Even before Xue Meng arrived, some of the cultivators had begun to suspect something was wrong. On the surface, accomplished cultivators cutting down a horde of corpses with no spiritual abilities made for a heroic-looking spectacle. But those fighting grew increasingly confused— they had expected an arduous battle on the mountain, not a scene like this. Only two cultivators had sustained minor injuries, the rest not a single scratch.
As soon as they heard Xue Meng's shouts, everyone stopped and turned to look at him.
"I…" Xue Meng had never felt the weight of so many eyes on him, to say nothing of the distinguished figures and elders among the crowd.
The words caught in his throat.
"What's wrong?" Chu Wanning asked.
The sound of his shizun's voice relaxed Xue Meng enough to point toward Mo Ran battling the vines. "Mo Ran seems to know what's going on. He says there's no point fighting these corpses."
The cultivators in the crowd exchanged glances. Many of the sect leaders had high opinions of themselves; what youngster thought his words so valuable? Their expressions grew ugly. Jiang Xi spoke first, his face sullen. "Mo Ran is barely twenty and still wet behind the ears. What could he know?"
If anyone else had spoken, Xue Meng might have responded with some courtesy, but since it was Jiang Xi, his temper flared. "Maybe you were still drinking milk when you were twenty!" he cried. "That doesn't mean everyone's like you! So damn narrow-minded!"
Now he'd done it—Xue Meng had embarrassed Jiang Xi in front of the entire group. Guyueye's disciples couldn't remain silent in the face of such impertinence.
"What nonsense are you spouting!"
"Xue Meng, you'd better wash your mouth out!"
Xue Meng couldn't bear the awkwardness of everyone staring at him in silence, but now that insults were being hurled, he was in his element once more. He and Mo Ran had been squabbling for years; there was nothing he knew better than riling others up and getting riled up in turn. Shapely brows drawn low into a scowl, he snapped, "What, am I wrong? Your Jiang-zhangmen is the one who doesn't understand priorities! Look how things are going! Yet you're judging whether someone's qualified to speak based on their age?"
Jiang Xi's temper was no better than Xue Meng's. This esteemed head of the cultivation realm narrowed his eyes to verbally spar with a boy young enough to be his son. "Of course age and qualifications are related
—once you reach your father's age, you'll understand this. Etiquette comes first when you're talking to your elders."
"Oh, so even someone of Jiang-zhangmen's character counts as an elder?" Xue Meng shot back.
"Meng-er," Xue Zhengyong cut in with a frown. "That's enough.
Where's Ran-er? Take us to him."
This put an end to Xue Meng's mouthing off, so Jiang Xi had nothing left to pick at. He swept his sleeves aside and remarked, "Xue Zhengyong, you've raised your son so well."
Xue Zhengyong's face turned ashen. He looked for a moment as if he would speak, but perhaps he didn't want to offend the cultivation realm's leader. In the end, he held his tongue and hurried after the crowd.
When they reached the saddle point halfway up the mountain, they saw Mo Ran rushing toward them, black robes billowing. One sleeve was soaked in blood, and he was gripping a chess piece in his hand. Behind him, the mass of vines had been burned away; no new tendrils were snaking out of the ground for the moment.
Chu Wanning and Xue Zhengyong both paled at the sight of Mo Ran's injury. "Ran-er, are you okay?" Xue Zhengyong asked urgently. "Healers… Healers, come quick! Shi Mei! Come help out!"
Shi Mei was taken aback by Mo Ran's bloodied arm. He blanched visibly, rooted to the spot. It was Guyueye's Hanlin the Sage who stepped forward first, brushing his sleeves aside. Within seconds, Mo Ran felt the harsh sting of his wound subside. He nodded at Hua Binan. "Many thanks to the sage."
"No need for such courtesy," Hua Binan replied, his voice cool and mild. "Now tell us, what discovery does Mo-zongshi wish to relay?"
Mo Ran was deeply conflicted. If he revealed the truth of the Shared-Heart Array, many would doubt and suspect him. But he had far greater concerns—should the Zhenlong Chess Formation be deployed throughout the jianghu, neither he nor Chu Wanning would wish to see the bloody tide that followed.
"Look," Mo Ran said, opening his hand to show the crowd the black chess piece in his palm.
"A Zhenlong chess piece?" Jiang Xi said with a derisive snort. "We've known about that for months. Is this all Mo-zongshi has discovered? How else did you imagine these corpses were controlled if not the Zhenlong Chess Formation?"
Mo Ran pressed his lips together. "Not the Zhenlong chess piece— the soul-eater." He pointed out the insect on the piece to the onlookers. "Right here."
Jiang Xi stood with his hands behind his back, watching Mo Ran in impassive silence.
Xue Zhengyong stepped up to Mo Ran and scrutinized the insect carefully, but he still couldn't make sense of it after a long while. "What's the deal with this bug? Is something wrong with it?"
"There's one on every chess piece," said Mo Ran. "This Zhenlong Chess Formation is more than it seems."
Mo Ran swept his gaze over the profusion of eyes fixed upon him.
He had no illusions about the choice he made here—he would divulge everything he knew to stave off certain catastrophe. But he understood the price. The villain behind the scenes had played the cards to their advantage. If this mysterious actor was unsure whether Mo Ran had been reborn, there could be no more effective bait than the Shared-Heart Array. Mo Ran could still avoid blowing his cover—he could harden his heart and refuse to speak. In doing so, he would allow a calamity to unfold. Yet if he revealed his knowledge, his adversary would know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Emperor Taxian-jun had been reborn.
Mo Ran had no other choice. He asked carefully, "Have any of you seen a puppet show before?"
After a pause, a voice in the crowd replied. "Of course. But so what?"
"I have too," said Mo Ran, "but I was short when I was a kid, and I could never shove my way to the front. I used to stand behind the puppet theater and listen from behind the stage. The puppet shows I saw are probably different from those you've seen. You saw the story that was being told in the front of the theater, with the cloth puppets appearing on stage to chatter and bicker with each other."
"What are you trying to say?" Jiang Xi asked impatiently. "Get on with it."
"I'm afraid I can't," replied Mo Ran. "Not everyone is as sharp as Jiang-zhangmen. I want to make sure they all understand."
Jiang Xi glowered at him in silence. Mo Ran continued, "Can the puppets move by themselves on stage?"
"Of course not," answered Xue Zhengyong.
"So how do they move? It requires people crouching under the theater, controlling them with wooden sticks and strings, right?"
"Indeed."
"Very well," said Mo Ran. "I have a theory… I don't know if Xu Shuanglin thought of it this way, but it seems likely to me. The Mount Huang before us is like the backstage of the puppet theater. These revenants are the people controlling the puppets beneath the stage. They don't need any exceptional skill—they only need to raise the puppets and move."
"Continue," Jiang Xi eventually said.
"If Mount Huang is the backstage, then the real show isn't here at all, but up on the stage itself, " Mo Ran explained. "Xu Shuanglin is the leader of the puppet troupe. If he wants to give an order, who will he speak to—the puppets or their puppeteers?"
"The puppeteers behind the scenes, of course," said Xue Zhengyong.
"Right. So by this logic, the puppeteers holding the strings are on Mount Huang. Xu Shuanglin gives them his orders, and they make the puppets in their hands stand up and put on a show."
Jiang Xi narrowed his eyes. "You're saying that aside from Mount Huang, there's another place piled high with corpses—that's the stage you speak of? And the bodies on that stage are the 'puppets'?"
"Jiang-zhangmen is very astute."
"Don't flatter me," Jiang Xi replied. "What I want to know is this— your explanation sounds appealing enough, but the assumptions underpinning it are pure fantasy. Mo-zongshi, your word alone is not proof. What evidence do you have to support your claims?"
"Not much," Mo Ran admitted after a pause. "This theory only occurred to me because I came across this chess piece with a soul-eater in one of the bodies."
The black chess piece in his hand was covered in gore. Freshly removed from its corpse, the soul-eater was still alive, crawling feebly on the chess piece. Mo Ran was silent a moment, then looked up. However the person he fastened his gaze on was not Jiang Xi, but Hanlin the Sage— Hua Binan—standing behind him. "The sage ought to be quite familiar with the unique characteristics of soul-eaters."
"These insects have many characteristics. Which does Mo-zongshi wish to point out?"
"Mimicry," said Mo Ran.
"I know of this, of course," said Hua Binan. "Young soul-eaters are excellent mimics. They are linked with the insect that fathered them and will copy the male insect's every movement until they mature."
"Correct. So if I were to take the young offspring of the insect on this chess piece and put it into another body, what would happen?"
Hua Binan fell silent, his expression shifting slightly. Eventually, he answered, "Whatever this body does here, that body there would do as well."
"How could one stop this from happening?" "Only by killing the insects."
Mo Ran nodded. "Everybody, please take a step back and mind your feet. Now watch carefully."
Eyes glinting like ice, he brought his hand down, aiming for the soul-eater on the chess piece. The ground began to shake as slender vines burst from the earth and hurtled toward Mo Ran. Amid the gasps of the crowd, Mo Ran dodged the vines, withdrawing his hand that was about to strike the insect.
Breathing heavily, he stood straight once more with his hands behind his back. "You see? Mount Huang protects these soul-eaters and won't allow them to come to harm. If anyone still wants to claim it's mere coincidence that these bugs have appeared with the Zhenlong Chess Formation, or that they're decorative…then I'm afraid I have nothing more to say to you."
Silence followed. The assembled cultivators seemed to be mulling this over, trying to wrap their minds around Mo Ran's conjectures. His ideas were bold—recklessly so—but somehow, no one could find fault with them. It was a crackpot theory, but he explained it so confidently, his gaze firm and steady. As though he'd completely grasped Xu Shuanglin's thought process and was doing his utmost to lay it out before the crowd.
But this degree of confidence was disconcerting in and of itself. Everyone watching felt slightly unsettled, Chu Wanning included. He frowned, looking at Mo Ran's pale face from afar. His heart skipped a beat, a portent of he knew not what—he felt like a tiny clue had torn itself free, like he had caught a glimpse of fangs about to rip something apart.
Presented with such a complicated situation, perhaps only someone like Xue Zhengyong could get right to the point. His mind was bluff and straightforward; he didn't dwell on how Mo Ran had come up with this bizarre puppet show analogy so quickly. After following Mo Ran's reasoning to its end, he clapped a hand to his forehead. "So you're saying Xu Shuanglin isn't here at all?!"
"I don't think he is," said Mo Ran.
The Xuanji Elder's concerns were different from the rest. "We probably encountered nine or ten thousand revenants on our way up the mountain," he said, knitting his brows. "Where did he get so many corpses? The ten great sects couldn't possibly have missed it if so many people died at once."
Mo Ran sighed. "They died very recently. Have you all forgotten?" "Where did they all die?"
Meeting the crowd's blank stares, Mo Ran's answer was clipped: "Linyi."
"No way!" A voice from the crowd rose up to refute him. "The inferno in Linyi burnt everything to ash—how could there be bodies left?"
"Because there was a rift in space," said Mo Ran. "Xu Shuanglin is working with someone who knows how to create such a thing."
This time, no one argued—not because they believed him, but because the idea was too ludicrous. After a long interval, Jiang Xi said, "That's the first forbidden technique, and it's been lost for ages…"
"The first forbidden technique creates a rift in space and time," Mo Ran countered. "Not just space."
"There are thousands of bodies here—we're not talking about Xu Shuanglin passing through the rift alone," Jiang Xi said, icy. "What kind of abilities must this mysterious rift-maker have to bring thousands of people to Mount Huang before they were swallowed by the flames?"
"Jiang-zhangmen, perhaps you are looking at it from the wrong angle," Mo Ran replied. "I doubt these people were brought here alive. They were probably transported after they died, and before they turned to ashes. It would be far easier to transport corpses than living people using such a technique."
Jiang Xi was deeply irked to be receiving a younger man's suggestions. His brows drew low, but before he could speak, a pallid, slender hand pressed on his arm. Hua Binan looked at Mo Ran with a small smile. "Mo-zongshi, you speak with such confidence one might think you saw it with your own eyes. But what proof do you offer?"
Mo Ran hadn't expected a master healer such as Hanlin the Sage would be the one to step forward. He blinked in surprise. "No one could know better than Hua-zongshi whether these corpses are burned or rotten."
Hua Binan cast a glance over a pile of corpses sprawled on the ground. Their legs had been cut off, preventing them from getting up to fight. He looked back at Mo Ran and replied indifferently, "Even if they were burned, how would it prove they are from Linyi?"
Mo Ran's dark eyes fixed unfalteringly on him. "It's a mere guess. If Hua-zongshi finds it preposterous, perhaps you could propose another method by which Xu Shuanglin could have brought thousands of corpses to Mount Huang without any sect taking notice."
Hua Binan laughed lightly. "I'm not familiar with dark techniques— I'm afraid I wouldn't know."
The crowd fell quiet. These words from Hanlin the Sage cut straight to the heart of the matter. Ever since Mo Ran had begun speculating on the purpose of the adult and larval soul-eaters, many had felt a creeping unease, the hairs on the backs of their necks rising. As the saying went, it took one to know one. Most of the cultivators present were hardly naïve or innocent. They had noticed the key problem right away—
How had Mo Ran come up with such a frightening, fleshed-out theory so quickly?
He couldn't be an ally of Xu Shuanglin—otherwise, he wouldn't put these ideas out in the open. Had the apparently upright and honorable Mo- zongshi secretly dabbled in dark magic? Had he perhaps even mastered such techniques?
Hua Binan's gauze veil fluttered. "When it comes to divining Xu Shuanglin's thoughts…" He smiled. "My intuition cannot compare to Mo- zongshi's."
Words of defense sprang to Mo Ran's lips—but he realized with sudden clarity that he had no ground to stand on. He couldn't say with conviction, I'm just making a guess—I'm not familiar with dark techniques either.
A cold, clear voice cut in. "Hua-zongshi, what need is there for such insinuations?"
"Ah." Hua Binan chuckled softly. "Chu-zongshi."
Clad in robes the white of snow, Chu Wanning stood indifferent beneath the moonlight. "Everyone's positions are different, and their perspectives will naturally differ as well. The audience in their seats may see the puppet show as presented, but some can only watch from the back of the stage. Of course they would see the people kneeling behind the theater. Hua-zongshi, do you take my meaning?"
"Please forgive my ignorance," Hua Binan said with a smile.
"Mo Ran's point of view is his own," Chu Wanning said coolly. "He is my disciple. I hope you will be prudent with your words and refrain from unnecessary conjecture."
Hearing Chu Wanning express such steadfast faith in him, Mo Ran tasted bitterness in his throat. "Shizun…" he muttered.
Hua Binan looked at Chu Wanning as though he would say more, but seemed to think better of it. Still smiling, he retreated into the depths of Guyueye's contingent.
Jiang Xi had recovered from his earlier embarrassment, but his expression was still unsightly. "Whether it's true or not, let's climb to the summit before we say anymore," he said coldly.
And so the crowd ascended to the top of the mountain. There, they found nothing save for a massive spell array with spheres of red light bubbling from its center. The instant Mo Ran saw it, his heart sank, and his fingers grew numb with cold. It was the Shared-Heart Array… The only purpose of this spell was to refine resonant chess pieces and pair soul- eaters with the pawns.
The leader of Taxue Palace furrowed her brow as she examined the array diagram. "What kind of array is this? I've never seen it before. Xue- zhangmen, you've encountered many spells—do you know it?"
Xue Zhengyong walked over to take a look. "Nope," he replied, shaking his head.
Jiang Xi's deep brown eyes flickered distantly as he scrutinized the array. Extending a hand, he probed the flow of spiritual energy; he was an expert on arrays used to refine medicine. After closing his eyes for several minutes, he drew his hand back and turned to look at Mo Ran. "Do you have any other theories?"
With this, the crowd knew: Mo Ran's guesses were almost definitely correct. "I do," Mo Ran replied after some hesitation.
"Speak, then."
"This technique is based on adult insects and their offspring. It will be just as I said before—one insect is onstage, and the other is backstage. However many Zhenlong chess pieces Xu Shuanglin made here, there should be an equal number of bodies wherever he is that obey his commands in the same way." Mo Ran paused before reaching the most important point. "There's no way the bodies 'onstage' will be those of powerless commoners. They are most likely the remains of cultivators with formidable abilities."
"That's why Xu Shuanglin killed so many commoners?" Xue Meng exclaimed in alarm. "So he can have an easier time controlling those cultivators?"
"I'm afraid so."
Xue Meng glanced down at the massed corpses covering the mountain. The blood drained from his face. Whether it was because the sight was abhorrent, or because they would have to face an equal number of undead cultivators somewhere else, he couldn't say—perhaps both. Xue Meng looked somewhat faint.
"Over here!" someone suddenly shouted. "There's a body!"
The mountaintop was practically devoid of cover—there was only one small, scrubby bush. And just then, an observant cultivator had noticed a scrap of white fabric peeking out from beneath it.