Chapter 117.2

As Yin Meng passed by Li Zhuiyuan, she heard the boy instruct her, “Loosen it a bit.” Yin Meng nodded.

The group arrived at the riverbank. The fog over the river was still thick.

This was the result of the formation’s influence. If ordinary people entered on their own, they would become lost.

Because there were still six unconscious college students, everyone except Li Zhuiyuan went nearby to look for branches and bundles of grass to add buoyancy to the boards.

Just then, Zeng Yinyin suddenly broke free from the rope around her body and charged toward the river without a second thought.

Li Zhuiyuan simply sat there, watching as Zeng Yinyin ran past him and leaped into the river.

At first, as she waded through the water, she kept glancing back to see whether anyone was chasing her.

Gradually, the fog blocked her view behind her. When she looked forward again, she realized she could no longer see the opposite bank either.

She began relying on her earlier sense of direction and kept moving forward, but no matter how long she walked, there was still water all around her. It was not deep, only up to her chest, but the riverbank seemed impossibly far away.

She began shouting, “Idiot! Idiot! Idiot!”

No one answered. No one appeared.

Probably...

Only an idiot would keep bothering with her.

“She ran away!”

Zeng Yinyin’s escape drew nothing more than a startled cry from Zheng Jiayi alone.

But after she cried out, she realized that everyone else was still busy with what they were doing. Not a single person reacted.

Once the simple raft was ready, Li Zhuiyuan took out his compass and prepared to lead the group himself.

But just as they entered the water, he saw the figure of the Corpse Retriever appear in the fog.

The Corpse Retriever waved happily, hopping around in the water and splashing it everywhere.

Li Zhuiyuan put away the compass and said, “Let’s go. The Corpse Retriever will lead the way.”

They crossed the river and headed back.

As they walked, Li Zhuiyuan realized this was not the path they had taken before.

Still, seeing the Corpse Retriever running about, picking wildflowers by the roadside and sticking them onto his own head, Li Zhuiyuan said nothing and simply continued following him.

The mountain path was difficult, with rocks everywhere and slopes at every turn. The six college students being dragged along on the boards were now all bruised and battered.

The other minor scrapes were one thing, but every so often someone would bang their nose against the board or the back of another student’s head and start bleeding, forcing Tan Wenbin to stop the bleeding for them.

As Binbin rolled up bits of paper, he grumbled, “Be good and listen. Next time, just go exploring in a park instead of running all over the place.”

After stopping the bleeding, Tan Wenbin could not help sighing, “College students these days really are in terrible shape.”

To show off his “kindness,” Yuxuzi had long since released his control over them, and the little fish had all left their bodies. Yet even now, all six of them were still unconscious.

That left Binbin, who was used to taking Runsheng and Lin Shuyou to the infirmary, feeling deeply out of sorts.

Ahead of them appeared three small hills standing side by side.

Zheng Jiayi pointed excitedly and said, “My family’s ancestral graves are over there, on the hill to the far left!”

Li Zhuiyuan asked, “Whose are the other two?”

Zheng Jiayi thought for a moment, then answered, “The middle one belongs to the Xue family, and the one on the right belongs to the Zeng family.”

Li Zhuiyuan nodded. It seemed that with the complete destruction of the big fish and Yuxuzi, the formation in Min’an Town had stopped operating and everything had returned to normal.

Wearing a flower crown on his head, the Corpse Retriever gestured animatedly in front of Li Zhuiyuan.

Li Zhuiyuan understood what he meant, but the boy still beckoned him over.

The Corpse Retriever obediently bent down and brought his face close to the boy.

Looking into his eyes, Li Zhuiyuan asked curiously, “Who exactly are you?”

The Corpse Retriever straightened up and waved his arms around as he cried, “I’m the Corpse Retriever! The Corpse Retriever! The Corpse Retriever!”

Li Zhuiyuan shook his head. “No, you’re not.”

The Corpse Retriever froze for a moment, then started hopping in place again as he shouted, “I’m the village guardian! The village guardian! The village guardian!”

Li Zhuiyuan did not press further and instead instructed:

“Mengmeng, you and Zheng Jiayi go to her family’s ancestral graves.

Binbin-ge, Runsheng-ge, you two go to the Zeng family’s ancestral graves.

Take incense and Yellow Paper with you. Offer your respects.”

The four of them each took what they needed and headed toward the two hills separately.

Li Zhuiyuan, meanwhile, prepared to walk toward the middle hill, the Xue family’s ancestral graves.

The Corpse Retriever bounced along after him.

Li Zhuiyuan stopped, turned around to look at him, and pointed at the six still-unconscious college students lying on the boards.

“You stay here and watch them.”

The Corpse Retriever looked aggrieved.

Then he quickly ran over to the boards, tiptoed into the middle of the six people, stuck out his butt, and—

“Pfffft~~~~!”

From a distance, Li Zhuiyuan watched the hair of all six college students get blown upward.

That really was one useful fart.

All six of them actually opened their eyes, then slowly sat up one after another, using clear yet bewildered eyes to look around at their surroundings.

Li Zhuiyuan turned and headed toward the hill, and the Corpse Retriever followed him after all.

Because Xue Dad had visited the grave not long ago, the weeds here had already been cleared away.

The ancestral graves rose from low to high, with the higher generations placed higher up, very much like the arrangement of offerings on an altar table.

Generally speaking, when descendants came to pay respects, they only needed to do so from the lowest point.

Li Zhuiyuan passed the other graves and continued upward until he reached the tombstone at the very top.

The tombstone was old and clearly had some history behind it, though the writing on it had probably been retraced with paint by descendants every few decades.

The disciples of the three surnames had followed their master here, and later, in order to suppress the demon, they concealed their identities and lived here in obscurity.

So their family graveyards all began with them.

Liangliang-ge’s ancestor was named... Xue Erwu.

Thinking back to Yuxuzi saying he had deliberately chosen the three dullest disciples with the most mediocre aptitude to bring here—

That was true enough. The name alone gave off the feeling that he was not especially bright.

Li Zhuiyuan lit the incense and planted it in the ground. When he lit the Yellow Paper, the Corpse Retriever clapped excitedly, eager to try, so Li Zhuiyuan simply handed it over and let him play by burning it on the grave mound.

Then Li Zhuiyuan stepped back two paces and stood to the side of Xue Erwu’s tombstone.

He formally performed the Liu Clan’s rite of homage.

He was currently in the midst of River walk, and the karma around him was complicated. If he paid his respects face-to-face, the dead person lying beneath might not care, but the living descendants left in this world might not be able to bear it.

The rite completed.

Crack!

A fissure split the tombstone right down the middle.

Li Zhuiyuan could not help feeling a little surprised. Had he really become that fierce now?

But very quickly, he realized it was not just the tombstone. The earth behind it had also sunk straight down, forming a hollow pit.

When he walked to the edge and looked in, there was a completely faded coffin inside. The coffin lid had split down the middle and slid off to both sides.

Inside the coffin lay the remains of an old man.

Aside from some dehydration, the corpse’s features were basically preserved intact.

This was not strange. One of the most basic requirements in selecting a feng shui burial site was that the body buried there should not become damp or disturbed, so it could be preserved as well as possible.

They were people of the occult world and were skilled in formations, and this was also an auspicious burial site. If they could not even preserve a corpse properly here, that would have been the truly strange thing.

The old man’s hands were folded over his lower abdomen, and resting on his chest was a thin book.

Other than that, there were no burial objects inside the coffin at all. It looked neat and simple.

Li Zhuiyuan jumped down into the pit, came to the side of the coffin, and reached out to take the book.

There was nothing embarrassing about this. The Xue family ancestor had manifested and was voluntarily showing it to him.

Li Zhuiyuan was also curious what was written in the book, enough that Xue Erwu had cracked open his own coffin just to reveal it to him.

The book was very thin. Though it had a cover, the actual contents were only a few sheets of paper.

It was not a secret manual, not a cultivation art, not a formation diagram. It was more like a memoir.

To be buried with only this showed that the experience recorded in it was the brightest and most precious part of his entire life.

After reading it, a smile appeared at the corner of Li Zhuiyuan’s mouth. He found it very amusing.

Yuxuzi had said the Liu Clan Dragon King had come. That was true. That Liu Clan Dragon King really had come.

When she arrived, Yuxuzi’s three disciples were kneeling outside the formation, mourning their master before the offering table and stone tablet, weeping bitterly.

The Dragon King was not a god. She could not be all-knowing or all-powerful.

When Li Zhuiyuan first saw this formation, he had only felt that its sole flaw was that it suppressed but did not grind away. If he had not later discovered just how accomplished Yuxuzi was in formations, he would not have realized there had been something wrong with the formation’s original intent.

The Liu Clan Dragon King had been the same. She had not seen the problem either. After all, with three disciples this stupid, it was perfectly reasonable for their master to have laid out such a clumsy formation.

Besides, this Liu Clan Dragon King did not seem to be especially skilled in formations.

In any case, she came, and she was moved by Yuxuzi’s “fearless sacrifice and devotion.” She even wanted to take the three of them in as nominal disciples.

This was exactly what their master had dreamed of all along!

But the three refused this heaven-sent opportunity on the grounds that they already had a master, and that their master had only just given his life to defend the righteous path.

It had to be said that these three disciples were genuinely upright and simple-hearted.

This also showed that Yuxuzi’s way of picking people had been badly flawed. If he had chosen a few clever, flexible-minded ones, they might have guarded the place for two or three years, decided they had done enough out of loyalty, gotten tired of it, gotten fed up, and slipped away.

But instead, he had chosen the three dullest and most stubbornly earnest ones. They had truly obeyed his orders and listened like good boys. Not only had they stood guard for a lifetime themselves, they had even made arrangements for their descendants to continue protecting their most महान master.

Although the disciples refused to become disciples, the Liu Clan Dragon King did not get angry. Instead, she accepted them under her command, which in truth was basically the same as becoming retainers.

In the Dragon King’s clan at its height, there had been many who, in pursuit of manuals, cultivation arts, favors, and the like, voluntarily offered themselves—or even their entire families and sects—to serve under them.

Here, it was simply a flexible workaround to avoid violating ritual propriety.

Being under such a command meant that I can send you to do things, and I can teach you things, but outside, you cannot claim to be a member of the Liu Clan, nor can you reveal that you have learned anything from the Liu Clan.

The Liu Clan Dragon King taught the three of them The Liu Clan's Art of Observing Qi, and also handed over several of the Liu Clan’s secret formation canons.

This alone showed that the Liu Clan Dragon King truly was not skilled in formations. Otherwise, she would not have taught disciples by merely handing out “textbooks.”

One could only say that oranges grown south of the Huai become oranges, while those grown north of it become trifoliate oranges.

Under Yuxuzi, these three disciples had been dull blocks of wood, yet with the Liu Clan’s cultivation method and secret canons, even just shutting themselves away and studying on their own, they had still produced remarkable results.

No wonder Yuxuzi, sealed inside for so many years, had never been able to overcome his own disciples. They were no longer on the same level.

And forty years after their master’s death, when the three disciples suddenly began spreading word again, they had likely already realized their master had changed, and had gradually come to understand his true intentions.

But they did not choose to cooperate. Instead, they continued making arrangements to suppress their master forever.

One reason was that the “master” in their hearts had long since become the image carved on the stone tablet.

The second was that perhaps a corrupted master suited them even better, because then, deep down, they could identify even more strongly as members under the Liu Clan.

Just look at this—he wanted to carry this experience, or rather this identity, into the coffin with him even in death. That inner inclination could not possibly have been more obvious.

Li Zhuiyuan shook the booklet in his hand and said with a smile to the old man’s corpse lying in the coffin:

“All right, all right, I get it. You and I are both under the Liu Clan.”

Buzz!

Blue smoke rose from the three ancestral grave sites on the three hills.

This time it was not blue radiance, because radiance was too fast to properly manifest.

The wisps of blue smoke curled upward. Though there was clearly no wind, by the time they reached midair, they had already twisted into winding trails of their own accord.

And every twist, every curl, pointed in the direction where Li Zhuiyuan now stood.

Dimly...

It seemed that three faint, aged voices sounded by his ears:

“Under the Liu Clan, Xue, Zeng, and Zheng...

pay respects to the Dragon King!”

Next Chapter >