SEVERAL PEOPLE rushed over to look, pulling the body out of the brush. The corpse was badly charred; it was obvious the victim had been through a great fire. Their face was a gory mess, completely unrecognizable, but judging from their build and the snow-silk robes they wore, impervious to flame, it was very likely the corpse of a woman.
Chu Wanning raised a hand toward the body and closed his eyes. After a moment, he announced, "There's no trace of the Zhenlong Chess Formation."
"How strange," someone muttered. "Xu Shuanglin filled the whole mountain with Zhenlong chess pieces—could he really have missed this one corpse?"
"Why would a so-called forgotten corpse be left on the mountaintop like this?" another retorted.
Mo Ran walked over, carefully studying the twisted limbs. In his past life, he had been the most accomplished practitioner of the Zhenlong Chess Formation in the world; he was more familiar than anyone with the technique's limitations. He had a guess as to who this woman was, but he was looking for proof. Soon enough, he found his confirmation. Mo Ran reached down to unclasp a blackened bracelet from around the corpse's wrist. Once he wiped off the soot, pale red spiritual stones glimmered through. He handed the bracelet to Jiang Xi. "Song Qiutong."
"How did you…" Holding the bracelet, it took Jiang Xi a moment to put two and two together. "You recognize it?"
"It was my wedding gift to her," Mo Ran said simply. "Song Qiutong is a descendant of Song Xingyi. The Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts defeated the evil spirit of the phoenix, so their bloodline is the key that unlocks the forbidden area on Mount Huang."
Someone called out a question. "Xu Shuanglin killed Song Qiutong, then used her to open the gate to Mount Huang?"
Mo Ran shook his head, eyes never leaving Song Qiutong's face. What he felt wasn't quite pity; it was a complicated tangle of emotions. "No—when he brought her to the mountain, she was still alive."
"What do you mean?"
Jiang Xi heard a question he could answer; he was no doubt sick of letting a brat in his twenties steal the limelight and wanted to repair his reputation. He spoke up before Mo Ran could reply. "He needed her to issue a command to the mountain," he said flatly.
Mo Ran shot him a glance. It would be wise to let someone else speak. The more he explained, the more difficult it would become to evade suspicion. He stepped aside, letting Jiang Xi take the reins.
"A command?" someone else asked. "Song Qiutong was a delicate young woman—what kind of command would she be giving?"
"She might have been delicate, but not all of her ancestors were so useless. The evil spirit of the phoenix within Mount Huang will only obey those of the bloodline that subdued it." Jiang Xi had quickly grasped the situation. "Song Qiutong was the last living member of this bloodline."
The questioner gasped. "Huh? The Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts subdued the phoenix's evil spirit?"
"That's right."
"I've never heard that…"
"That's unsurprising," said Jiang Xi. "The four great evil mountains don't have much use besides serving as defenses. Few are aware of how to open their barriers or who can do so. Song Qiutong was a foundling before she was captured and sold at auction. She must have had no idea she could use Mount Huang as a hideout… She had probably never even heard the story about her ancestor subduing the phoenix's evil spirit."
"So… So Xu Shuanglin brought her here?"
"Most likely," Jiang Xi said. "Everyone fled for their lives when the fire broke out in Rufeng Sect. No one went back to the hall to look for a powerless woman. The only one who took notice of her was Xu Shuanglin—or whoever is working with him behind the scenes."
Nearby, Xue Zhengyong nodded pensively. "Xu Shuanglin's accomplice can open a rift in space and bring him anywhere. He would barely need to lift a finger to transport Song Qiutong too. We can guess what happened—Song Qiutong always tried to curry favor with the powerful. When he took her along, she must have seized this opportunity like a lifesaving raft and obeyed him unconditionally. They only needed to bring her to the mountain and instruct her to give a command—she wouldn't have refused."
"Why not use the Zhenlong Chess Formation to control Song Qiutong?" someone piped up.
"Because the phoenix's spirit can tell if the person commanding it is under duress," said Jiang Xi. "The blood descendant needs to be alive and speaking of their own free will. Only then will the mountain obey."
Everyone pondered this. "So what are we doing here?" another cultivator asked with rising alarm. "Haven't we just done what he wanted by stumbling upon his backstage area? Thanks to these damned vines, we can't even destroy the soul-eaters… What do we do now?"
Jiang Xi scowled, filled with disdain at the analogy Mo Ran had come up with. Still, he replied, "We'll look for the stage, and then we'll destroy Xu Shuanglin's puppets. Mo-zongshi."
Mo Ran had taken himself off to the side, listening with his arms crossed. Now he jumped slightly. "Hm? What is it?"
"Mo-zongshi, your explanations earlier were quite logical," Jiang Xi said cryptically. "Allow me to humbly ask one more thing—where do you suppose we should look for this 'stage'?"
Mo Ran hesitated. "Shall we try Jiangui?" "Try…what?"
Mo Ran cleared his throat. His palm glowed scarlet, the willow vine materializing with a flash. "This—it's called Jiangui."
Jiang Xi stared at him, at a loss.
Jiangui, like Tianwen, could interrogate living people, vengeful ghosts, and bodies left behind by their souls. There was a slight difference in technique: interrogating people and corpses involved making them physically speak, while interrogating ghosts involved communicating directly with their souls.
Song Qiutong had been dead for over a month; her souls were long gone. But as luck would have it, yin energy was abundant on Mount Huang, so her corpse hadn't yet decomposed. "Jiangui, interrogate."
In response to this command, Jiangui's leaves and tendrils shivered and lengthened into a vine that wrapped three times around Song Qiutong's body. Her corpse began to glow a dazzling red. As scarlet lit the depths of his eyes, Mo Ran ventured in a low voice, "Was Xu Shuanglin the one who brought you here?"
Song Qiutong's features, disfigured by char, didn't move. "Is it not working?" someone asked timidly.
Narrowing his eyes, Mo Ran tried again. "Was Xu Shuanglin the
one who brought you here?" No response.
"Mo-zongshi is too green after all," Jiang Xi said. "Maybe your shizun should try."
But at that moment, Song Qiutong began to move. Her motions were stiff and slow, but the shake of her head was unmistakable.
"It wasn't Xu Shuanglin?!" Xue Zhengyong exclaimed.
Mo Ran gripped Jiangui, tendons protruding from the back of his hand. "Did you get a clear look at the person who brought you here?"
After a few heartbeats of silence, Song Qiutong opened her mouth. But instead of words, what came out was a massive, slippery-coiled snake. It dropped to the ground and slithered away, hissing.
A Guyueye disciple recognized it immediately. "There was a speech-swallowing serpent in her stomach!"
Speech-swallowing serpents were non-venomous, dark creatures covered in spiritual scales. They could live in a human's innards for more than twenty years. Many sects in the upper cultivation realm used these serpents—they fed them to their shadow guards. Such guards could only speak the truth to the serpents' master. To anyone else, they must lie, or speak in a mixture of lies and truth. A word out of line and the serpent would awaken from slumber to rive their faces, break their necks, and devour their tongues.
Jiangui's red light winked out. Song Qiutong was shaking her head repeatedly, trembling from head to toe. Chunks of bloodied flesh poured from her mouth: shreds of viscera, and pieces of her tongue and throat. She could never speak another word of truth.
The crowd looked on, stricken. Someone yelled, "If she can't talk, can she write it out?"
Mo Ran knew the instant he saw the speech-swallowing serpent that the person behind this had been exceptionally thorough. But he still stepped forward to examine Song Qiutong's hands.
"How does it look?" asked Xue Zhengyong.
Mo Ran shook his head. "Her tendons have been cut. She won't be able to write anything."
Everyone fell silent. An ominous breeze whistled across the mountaintop; the forest's rustling leaves seemed to snicker, and the mournful wails of corpses filled the air, saturating the summit with a heavy dread. At last, the leader of Taobao Estate, Ma Yun, broke through the eerie stillness. "S-so we've lost the trail?"
No one answered.
Mo Ran recalled Jiangui, and Song Qiutong's body slumped to the ground. Within seconds, vines snaked out of the soil to wind around their mistress's corpse. When they covered her completely, they dragged her into the bush again as if to protect her.
Why had Xu Shuanglin and his collaborator not simply destroyed Song Qiutong's body after killing her—why had they gone to the trouble of severing her tendons and feeding her a speech-swallowing serpent?
Once he saw the vines, Mo Ran understood. Mount Huang obeyed Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts in life and death. As long as the corpse of its mistress remained on the mountain, the phoenix's evil spirit wouldn't allow anyone to destroy it or burn it to ashes.
Mo Ran didn't know what to feel. He thought of how he had died in the past life. No one had been left to tend to his remains—he had lain himself down in the coffin within that freshly dug grave. On reflection, this had been rather pointless. The rebel army that had stormed up the mountain would never have left his corpse intact. His death in the past lifetime had been even more miserable than Song Qiutong's; he hadn't even had a single vine to protect him in the end.
Some of the assembly had begun to chatter amongst themselves, frowning and debating on how to proceed. Others, such as Jiang Xi and Chu Wanning, were lost in thought with their eyes closed.
Mo Ran, too, closed his eyes, mentally sorting through what he'd seen. This ruthless approach reminded him too much of his past self— perhaps that was why he found it easy to guess what Xu Shuanglin would do next. In his mind's eye, he seemed to see Xu Shuanglin pacing barefoot in his courtyard, Farewell to Three Lifetimes, brooding over a problem: without sufficient spiritual energy, how could he control a massive army of undead cultivators?
Suddenly, an idea—the Shared-Heart Array. He could kill an equal number of commoners and yoke them to the cultivators. It was no different from making puppets dance—they would all do his bidding.
Where was the safest place to execute such a plan? One of the four great evil mountains. What if he couldn't open Mount Huang's barrier? He would bring Song Qiutong with him.
The clues linked up, one after another. Mo Ran's eyes darkened as he followed them to the end. Where would he get the commoners' bodies? He would burn Linyi to the ground.
These were only guesses, yet every piece fell into place. Flecks of light dispersed and gathered in his eyes. He felt like he was Xu Shuanglin, and Xu Shuanglin was him, standing at the summit of Mount Huang, eyes roving frantically over the sea of corpses below. The picture grew sharper and clearer—until he hit a snag.
If he were Xu Shuanglin and had accomplished all this, wouldn't he then build his stage and put on the puppet show he had been working so hard to bring to life?
Where would this stage be?
Where could he find an untold number of corpses belonging to the strongest cultivators? Where could he find protection if he weren't discovered…?
The sky, slowly brightening with the light of dawn, seemed to go dark once more. "Mount Jiao…" he mumbled.
Jiang Xi cast him a sidelong glance. "What?"
Mo Ran's face had gone pale. He looked to the east, fury burning through him. "Mount Jiao! The heroes' tomb! His stage is the heroes' tomb on Mount Jiao. Look how many commoners' corpses Xu Shuanglin obtained from the calamity in Linyi. There's no other way for him to get his hands on the same number of high-level cultivators. It has to be the heroes' tomb!"
Jiang Xi instantly picked up the thread of his thoughts. "You're saying Xu Shuanglin's puppet counterparts are the bodies buried within Rufeng Sect's heroes' tomb over the centuries?"
Mo Ran didn't bother to respond. Cursing under his breath, he flew like the wind toward the bottom of the mountain.
Xu Shuanglin was insane! Generations of Rufeng Sect's leaders were buried within that tomb, including their founder who had ascended to immortality after his death. It was one thing to use the Shared-Heart Array to control run-of-the-mill cultivators, but to use it on those corpses? If Xu Shuanglin lost control of his spiritual energy flow for even an instant, those powerful revenants would struggle free and go berserk. The backlash would swallow Xu Shuanglin, dealing him a sudden and horrible death— leaving that fearsome army of centuries of Rufeng cultivators to run amok.
It would be no less of a calamity than the Heavenly Rift to the Infinite Hells.