Chapter 141

Runsheng had a special sensitivity to the aura of Dead Sinkers.

Li Zhuiyuan trusted Runsheng’s judgment.

But from the woman’s line, “That’s my husband,” the boy did not hear much panic.

“Get away from her!”

Runsheng grabbed Tan Wenbin by the arm. His qi gate opened. A moment ago they had only been swimming normally, but now he shot through the water like a fish, instantly pulling away from the woman.

With the woman at the center, withered stalks of grass began to emerge one by one. That was only the part above the surface. Beneath the water, straw figures with Yellow Talismans pasted to their backs lay in ambush.

And the man in the straw rain cape finally lifted his head, revealing a face covered in shifting scars as he looked toward Li Zhuiyuan’s group of three with a scrutinizing gaze.

Anyone in that situation, seeing his wife and child surrounded by three strange men, would have thoughts.

Li Zhuiyuan decisively chose to avoid him, which was equivalent to making his stance clear in time and preventing a conflict from breaking out.

Because he had no reason to clash with the other side.

In theory, they were all in the same examination hall. Their test papers were different, but the subject direction was the same. Once they dealt with the first wave, Li Zhuiyuan’s side would go in to wrap things up.

Any unnecessary drain on the other team might lower the completeness of their wave, which in turn would raise the difficulty left behind when Li Zhuiyuan’s team stepped in.

The smartest approach was not only to avoid dragging them down, but also to offer some help so they could finish that wave cleanly, weakening the problems in Li Zhuiyuan’s own wave as well, maybe even… guiding both into being solved together.

The other side withdrew their method. The straw figures floated to the surface one after another and then slowly drifted apart. Sheets of Yellow Talismans bobbed across the lake.

Li Zhuiyuan glanced at them. They were Chenzhou Talismans.

The man in the rain cape did not move. The woman pushed the swaddled baby and swam toward him on her own.

Li Zhuiyuan said, “He’s injured, and badly.”

People who share a bed are cut from the same cloth.

The woman had spoken of her husband with immense pride, so this man was probably extremely self-assured by nature as well.

Li Zhuiyuan looked around, then pointed to the nearest muddy bank. His group went ashore first.

After listening to his wife’s account, the man in the rain cape chose to come over to that same bank.

Once ashore, he revealed his true appearance.

The stench of a Dead Sinker was so strong that even Li Zhuiyuan could smell it.

The man’s body was covered in wounds that were festering, and all of them were old injuries flaring up again. The thick scars on his face especially looked as though something were wriggling inside them.

“Nantong Li the Corpse Retriever.”

His voice was hoarse and weary.

Li Zhuiyuan stepped forward two paces and nodded to him. “That’s me.”

“My wife is kindhearted. She’s easy to fool.”

“Your good lady is clever. She isn’t easy to fool.”

The man in the rain cape stared at Li Zhuiyuan, suddenly raised his voice, and demanded in a tone that struck like a hammer, “Li the Corpse Retriever, have you ever lit the lamp?”

The feeling when the woman had asked that question was indeed different from the feeling when the man asked it.

There was an edge of interrogation in it, like the hull of a boat bearing down on you, sending waves crashing your way.

It was as if an invisible wind had rushed straight at the boy. But the moment it touched him, it quickly spun apart and vanished, as though even the wind itself felt guilty.

Behind the tacit understandings of the jianghu, there were always rules that had shaped them into being.

Put simply, this was called spirit. Put more deeply, it was the river itself watching your courage.

So even if the river had scared you so badly that you were crying for your parents, so long as you still had not chosen to light the lamp a second time and give up, you had to wipe away your tears and shout that slogan aloud.

But with Li Zhuiyuan, the river had sprung a leak.

It was the river that had broken the rules first. Before he had lit the lamp or made his oath clear, it had already wrapped him into the river.

The procedure had been unjust from the start, so here it had lost its binding power over Li Zhuiyuan.

The boy could question Zhao Yi, and Zhao Yi had no way to avoid it.

But the boy himself could casually pick up an identity and pin it onto himself.

Originally, this was only a tiny and insignificant loophole. But once Li Zhuiyuan began wrestling more directly with the “one setting the questions,” like now, that loophole could produce enormous effects.

In the contest of lighting the lamp and crossing the river, everyone was an opponent. If he could sidestep that identity, the degree of taboo and caution would drop sharply.

Li Zhuiyuan said, “I have not personally lit the lamp yet.”

On hearing that, the man in the rain cape visibly relaxed.

He cupped his fists toward Li Zhuiyuan and said, “Xiong Shan, a drifter from Changsha!”

Li Zhuiyuan froze slightly. Today he had seen an entrance greeting even simpler than his own “Nantong Li the Corpse Retriever.”

Xiong Shan showed a smug smile and asked, “Never heard of me?”

Calling himself a drifter with no sect or clan, reaching this point entirely by his own ability, was his pride. It was like how Zhu Yuanzhang, after becoming emperor, had never erased the fact that he had once been a beggar.

So Li Zhuiyuan deliberately catered to him and answered, “True enough. Never heard of you.”

“Hahaha!”

Xiong Shan laughed heartily, and his wife, standing nearby and watching her man, smiled too.

“It’s right that you haven’t heard of me. I have no sect and no school. When I was little, I was kidnapped by some crooked practitioner with evil intentions and made into a sacrificial child. After being tortured for years, I found a chance to kill him and take everything he had. That was how I entered this trade.

“Later, I figured out how to light the lamp on my own and have roamed the jianghu ever since. Along the way I met a few good brothers, found myself a wife, and then had a child.”

Li Zhuiyuan said, “Impressive.”

Xiong Shan looked at Li Zhuiyuan and said, “I’m a rough man. Though wandering the jianghu has broadened my horizons, I’ve still never heard of Nantong Li the Corpse Retriever. But my wife says you’re capable, and you’re this young. In the future, I’m afraid another flood dragon will rise on these waters.”

“Thank you for the good words.”

The woman began signaling frantically to Li Zhuiyuan with her eyes.

She felt that her husband had already thrown him an opening. If the boy bowed his head and acknowledged him now, then his future prospects would be limitless. At the very least, with every wave that passed through the jianghu, he would get to share in immense benefits.

Li Zhuiyuan saw it, but pretended not to.

Xiong Shan lightly patted his wife’s hand and said, “He’s young and accomplished. He’s bound to make his own way in the future. Why would he follow me?”

Li Zhuiyuan asked, “You’re hurt?”

The warmth on Xiong Shan’s face immediately faded. He nodded. “A minor injury.”

“You can’t keep the Corpse poison in your body suppressed anymore?”

“You can tell?”

“Do you have a way to treat it yourself?”

“At worst, it’ll just take more time. It’s nothing serious.”

“I have a method that works immediately. Want to try it?”

Xiong Shan asked, “What do you want in return?”

Li Zhuiyuan said, “We both walk the path of eliminating evil and defending the right. What’s strange about lending each other a hand?”

“So pure, are you?”

“My elders at home drilled it into me from childhood. We of this generation should take safeguarding the righteous path as our duty.”

“Fine. Since you’re being open, I can’t show cowardice either. If you have a method, then help me try it. But let me say this first: what’s going on with my body is rather complicated.”

“I’ll do my best.”

After removing his rain cape, Xiong Shan sat cross-legged on the spot.

Not only his face, but his chest as well was covered in thick scars, with blood essence moving beneath them.

Runsheng drew in a deep breath and swallowed hard several times in a row.

Xiong Shan looked at Runsheng in puzzlement. “Are you hungry?”

Then Xiong Shan looked at his wife. “Lihua, get him something to eat.”

“No need. I have some.”

Runsheng pulled out a compressed biscuit from his bag. Softening it with the rain as he ate, he kept staring at Xiong Shan’s body.

Li Zhuiyuan walked up in front of Xiong Shan and examined him carefully.

If the other man had simply been poisoned, Li Zhuiyuan would have had no solution. That was Yin Meng’s specialty. Although Yin Meng did not seem to actually understand detoxification, she could at least test methods one by one.

The Corpse poison in Xiong Shan’s body was innate. Once it reached a certain level, it could no longer be suppressed. Combined with injury, it became easy for it to erupt and turn back on its host.

This fellow was definitely human, but the proportion of Dead Sinker in him was very large.

No wonder Brother Runsheng was practically drooling over him. From the standpoint of food, Xiong Shan had both rich flavor and fresh tenderness, like a top-grade dry-aged steak.

He would actually be easy to treat. A small formation temporarily set on his body would suppress the Corpse aura. As for those external injuries, they were minor matters to Xiong Shan instead.

Li Zhuiyuan took out a set of small array flags from his bag.

Xiong Shan saw them and asked, “You know formations?”

“A little.”

“The ground around us is all mud. It doesn’t seem convenient for setting one up.”

“It’s fine. I’ll set it on your body. It’ll hurt a little, so bear with it.”

“No matter. Go ahead.”

Li Zhuiyuan drove the small array flags into Xiong Shan’s body one by one. Each time he inserted one, he had to twist it with his fingers, then flick it with his fingertip just as he let go.

It felt like acupuncture, except the needles were a bit bigger.

The woman held the child and watched warily from nearby.

After placing all the array flags, Li Zhuiyuan reminded him, “I’m about to activate the formation. Work with its force and suppress the Corpse poison inside you together with it.”

“Alright!”

“Brother Binbin, hold the umbrella.”

Li Zhuiyuan activated the formation.

Xiong Shan’s eyes bulged wide and his body trembled. Very soon, the raised scars on his body began to subside, and streams of pus started spurting out faster.

Tan Wenbin quickly brought the Black Umbrella of Rebirth in front of Little Yuanhou first, preventing him from being splashed with filth.

The ground around Xiong Shan turned into a reeking black mess, but his body looked much cleaner, and fresh red blood began to seep from his wounds, proving that he was indeed recovering.

“Hah…” Xiong Shan drew his aura back in and said in disbelief, “You call this knowing only a little about formations?”

Li Zhuiyuan said, “Just a blind cat finding a dead rat.”

“Would you consider joining my group? I’d do my utmost to protect you.”

Li Zhuiyuan shook his head.

Xiong Shan was not angry. He mocked himself instead. “Looks like I’m the ignorant one. The Li family of Nantong must also be one of those hidden great clans of the jianghu.”

Li Zhuiyuan said, “Not to that extent. But we do live fairly well.”

After all, Taigong had meat and wine every day. By village standards, life really was comfortable.

Xiong Shan said, “You’re being too modest.”

In the jianghu, someone skilled in formations was like a child nowadays whose hobbies listed piano, skiing, and horseback riding. The child might not truly be outstanding, but the family was probably well-off.

Xiong Shan stood up and let the rain wash the blood and grime from his body before putting his rain cape back on.

“Little brother, I owe you a favor. Without your help, I’d have been delayed for a long time, and the situation might have grown even worse because of it.”

“Do your best to solve what’s happening here, and consider that your repayment.”

“So young, and yet you already have such breadth of vision.”

“You already went in earlier?”

“Yes. I went in. Peach Blossom Village lies beneath the lake. Behind the village is an underwater pool, likely the original center of Lake Yinma. From there, you can enter the depths of that water burial.

“There are… a lot of people inside.

“I did manage to sneak in. I almost got to see that general, but at the final step, my identity was discovered. There were too many Dead Sinkers inside, and the Corpse aura was too heavy. I got injured, and that caused the Corpse poison in me to spiral beyond suppression. I nearly died in there.

“But I’ve already figured out most of what’s going on inside. Once my people are all here, and the other three families arrive as well, we can go down one more time and seal that general back up.”

“The other three families? You mean the Xie, Wang, and Bu families?”

“Who else would I mean?”

“The Wang family’s people have already been wiped out.”

“Lihua told me. But that doesn’t count. This general may already be decayed and ruined, far from the might he had in his prime, but he still isn’t something any random cats and dogs from a family can handle.

“The three families need to send their true core members here.

“I need them to cover for me and create an opening.”

Li Zhuiyuan said, “I think you may be oversimplifying things.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I’ve heard the story of the four families of the Old Heavenly Gate, but I remain skeptical about how true that story is.”

“Even if some embellishment was added, it couldn’t be too outrageously false.”

“It might be very false. Around the Ming and Qing transition, that should have been the golden age of corpse drivers. Several massive waves of migration created enormous demand for transporting corpses. Yet even in that kind of environment, Niudaojie still failed to rise again. What do you think the reason was?”

“You suspect the three families have been suppressing Niudaojie all along? But even if they’re all part of the four families of the Old Heavenly Gate, wouldn’t factional struggles and mutual suppression still be normal?”

“Maybe it was worse than that.”

“You can’t be saying they truly dared commit something so outrageous? Weren’t they afraid heaven would see?”

“Heaven only cares about the result. It doesn’t seem to care about anything else.”

“It’s still better to think more positively about people. I believe that in a matter like this, those three families won’t lose their heads.”

Li Zhuiyuan nodded. “So your plan is to have those three families help you lure away the ‘people’ in the water burial by dying?”

“What do you mean, dying? That sounds awful. This is called sacrificing for the righteous path, haha.”

There was something savage in Xiong Shan’s laughter.

He had wanted to put on an act, but since the boy had exposed it directly, he simply stopped pretending.

More importantly, a man who had risen from the rough margins to reach this point could be upright, but he could never truly be naïve and simple. Otherwise, it would be too unfair to all those who had already drowned beneath the river waters.

“Did you see that Niudaojie practitioner?”

“I searched both above and below the water, but I didn’t see him. I did, however, discover signs of human interference. Someone is deliberately trying to break the seal and release that general, or at least let that general’s power seep out into the outside world.”

Li Zhuiyuan fell silent. He could hear it clearly now. Xiong Shan’s goal was to reseal the general, which meant Li Zhuiyuan’s own role later would probably be to deal with that Niudaojie practitioner.

Glug glug… glug glug…

Ahead of them in the lake, a strange, long chain of bubbles rose. At first it came from only one place, then several more spots started bubbling too.

“They’re coming out again. A little too close. Lihua.”

“Mm.”

The woman answered, yanked out the baby’s diaper again, and once more set up the cloth sail as a table, placed the mirror, and burned paper.

This time Li Zhuiyuan did not move. He reached out and took the half-burned Spirit Money from the woman’s hand. Runsheng and Tan Wenbin each took a piece as well.

Very soon, a procession emerged from beneath the water some dozens of meters away at an angle.

Everyone lowered their heads, including Xiong Shan.

Just after that procession came out, a second appeared on the other side, then a third, a fourth…

There were eight processions in total.

Each one deliberately came over to the “inn on the path of yin and yang” where they were gathered, circled around once, and then left to the sound of bells.

This time Li Zhuiyuan did not try to peek at “it” again. But even with his head lowered, from the ground within the corner of his eye he could still see their feet.

Each group consisted of two people walking one in front and one behind, carrying a bamboo pole between them. In the middle was a person whose feet did not touch the ground.

When they had all gone, everyone raised their heads again.

Xiong Shan said, “When they come back, there’ll be more than just these. They always pick some people up onto the road.”

Li Zhuiyuan said, “Are these the general’s patrol squads?”

“That’s a very good comparison. Very vivid.

“In every corpse-driving procession, there is one whose feet never touch the ground. He represents the general’s eyes. Any attempt to spy on him brings bad consequences.

“Lihua said you looked at him?”

“Curiosity drove me.”

“How did you manage it? Can you teach me?”

“I’m willing to teach you, but it isn’t easy to learn.”

“That’s alright. You’ve asked me so much about what’s below. I trust you want to go down and take a look yourself, right?”

“Yes. That’s right.”

“I can take you down and properly satisfy your curiosity.”

“Thank you.”

“Then do you know how I got down there?”

Li Zhuiyuan said, “Could it be when the corpse-driving procession that came out earlier returned…”

“That’s right. I blended in and helped carry the bamboo pole.”

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