The Blade-Wielding Legend

Chapter 1647 - 835: Three-eyed Yin Constables (2)

He paused, his tone growing even more grave. "The court’s decrees, by the time they’ve crossed these ridges to reach here, are already an arrow at the end of its flight; the clan powers are much stronger."

As he spoke, he glanced around, his voice sinking lower. "And what truly squats here, both upholding order and breeding chaos, are precisely the Magic Veins of the Mystical Sect!"

"The prosperity and complexity of the Magic Veins here, the strangeness and mutability of their systems, far exceed what the Mystical Sect in the Central Plains can imagine."

"Daoist, Buddhist, shamanic, Nuo, ancient Yue remnants... a thousand years of collision, fusion, devouring, and rebirth—long since you within me, I within you, hard to tell one from the other, giving rise to numberless branch-flows of arts."

"The Red Lotus Technique is blazing as fire, skilled in talismanic fire technique, burning evil and purging filth, with flames that at a stir can sweep like a prairie fire; the Huaguang Skill is fierce and swift, venerating the Chong Guanghua Heavenly King, its Magic Spells like lightning, its divine movement like light; the Qinggang Skill borrows from mountain ranges and Earth Evil, upright and weighty, its Dharma Seals like mountains, suppressing evil and Breaking Evil; the Tianzhu Skill is an eastern mutation of the Tianzhu Monks’ arts, mixed with traces of the Esoteric Sect..."

"The Maoshan Skill, though it springs from the Three Maos True Monarch, has long since been nurtured by the water and soil here into many variants—Northern Transmission, Southern Sect, Old Maoshan, Mao Mountain, the two schools of Lvmáo and the like. Talisman, Thunder Technique, Corpse Refining, Exorcism Technique each have their own emphasis, and factions stand on every hilltop..."

Saying this, he could not help but sigh. "The multitude of names, the fineness of the lineages—even if one turned gray-haired poring over texts, one could not exhaustively describe them. They are like the sands of the Ganges, scattered across the wild mountains. Even our Jade Emperor Sect must tread carefully once we enter the mountains."

Li Yan and the others nodded slightly to show their agreement.

The great affairs of the state lie in war and in sacrifice.

The Mystic Sect oversees the state’s Priests, while the Magic Veins involve themselves far more in common life. Firewood, rice, oil, salt; birth, aging, sickness, death; weddings, funerals, festivals; rain or shine, famine or plenty... in every matter there is the shadow of a Magic Vein.

And in the Southern lands where Magic Veins thrive, especially in the South Ridge Mountain, the court’s blades, the Tax Collector’s abacus... their prestige may well fall short of an old elder within a village, a Master of profound Mana, or even a Nuo-dancing Immortal Lady.

Zhou Qingyuan continued, "Once, several self-styled seniors of the Mystical Sect, claiming orthodox origin and cultivation consummated to the Transformation Realm, either bearing secret orders from the court to rectify the Mystical Sect, or harboring grand ambitions to ’sweep clean the cosmos and establish the Mystical Sect as orthodoxy’, relied on their cultivation and sought to enter these mountains to unify and suppress these tangled Magic Veins..."

"And what happened to them?" Sha Lifei hurriedly asked.

Zhou Qingyuan shook his head with a bitter smile. "All were like clay oxen entering the sea—no word ever returned. No living men were seen, no corpses found. Afterwards, fellow members of the Mystical Sect investigated in many ways, yet could scarcely find even the slightest trace of a Duel, as if they had evaporated into thin air."

"The major Magic Veins of Nanling keep this a deep taboo and hold their tongues, though faint rumors leak out from the deepest villages, saying the old monsters lying dormant in the mountains are far more than one or two..."

"We suspect there was most likely an Earth Immortal who made a move!"

Li Yan listened in silence, feeling no surprise in his heart.

Aside from those Earth Immortals who shelter under great orthodox factions, there are many who hide in desolate mountains and great marshes, known as Mountain Immortals.

If it truly is pirates stirring up trouble, their target will surely be these Mountain Immortals!

......

The rains of Nanling come without the least warning, yet are entirely in keeping with the nature of the place.

Li Yan and his party, together with three thousand elite Wuzhou Guard soldiers in armor and Archery specialists, trekked along the rugged, slippery ancient path toward the depths of the Hezhou Tusi Village region.

The farther in they went, the steeper and more perilous the mountains became.

Ancient trees with gnarled branches spread like ghost claws to block out the daylight. All around remained only the clank of soldiers’ arms rubbing, the heavy tread of footsteps, and the distant whimpering of unknown beasts.

The leading Thousand Households of the Wuzhou Guard was surnamed Ma, a sturdy fellow with a dark face and eyes as sharp as a hawk.

He waved his hand, signaling the column to halt at the edge of a Dong Village where a dozen-odd stilted bamboo houses stood scattered in a relatively open area, and called over the only Village Chief here willing to deal with the outside world.

The old Village Chief was hunched, deep furrows crisscrossing his face, the very image of a mountain folk.

"Milords, honored official,"

The old Village Chief’s voice carried a thick local accent, dry and fearful, his eyes evasive. "The village where the trouble broke out is one of the deepest, most ’ancient’ branches of Dongmin in these mountains. They... they never mingle with us ’outer villages’."

"They’re mysterious as ghosts, their village hidden deep in the primeval forest. The paths have been sealed off by vines for a hundred years or more. No one knows what Divine they are worshipping; we only know it’s something terribly uncanny."

Zhou Qingyuan, Steward of Tianshu Hall of the Jade Emperor Sect, added in a grave tone, "I have had dealings with many Magic Veins of Nanling and have vaguely heard that what they offer Tribute to is not any ordinary Mountain God and Land God, but an extremely ancient and deeply taboo ’Black Earth Mother’."

"The origins of this Divine are hard to trace, and its Magic Vein is exceptionally secretive, almost never interacting with the Mystical Sect. I have only heard its name. Many years ago, when I followed my elders from the sect, I had one extremely brief ’encounter’ that hardly counts as a contact. Its believers are deeply wary of outsiders, treating them like venomous snakes and scorpions."

"Yes, yes,"

The old Village Chief nodded quickly, a flicker of dread in his clouded eyes. "’Black Earth Mother’! The old folks in the village have mentioned this name, saying it must never be provoked!"

"A few days ago, calamity struck, and a young man fled from that village, covered in blood and raving mad, babbling nonsense, nothing but words to scare a man to death. The villagers feared he would bring disaster upon us, but did not dare abandon him, so... so they tied him up and put him in the broken side room of the Mountain God Temple outside the village, sending him a bit of food each day to keep him alive."

"Black Earth Mother?" Li Yan’s brows knit. "Lead the way."

......

The abandoned Mountain God Temple was on the verge of collapsing.

The broken clay Divine Statue was long since unrecognizable, cobwebs and dust everywhere.

The air was thick with a heavy stench of mold and piss and shit.

In the corner of a side room, a ragged, skin-and-bones youth was tied to a stone pillar with thick vines.

His hair was matted like weeds, his face caked with filth and dried blood. His eyes were hollow and unfocused, pupils scattered, his mouth ceaselessly spewing rapid, slurred local speech in hoarse shouts and mutters, like a broken spring mechanism, repeating the same few syllables again and again.

Zhou Qingyuan, who was fluent in the local dialect, cocked his ear and listened for a moment, and his face grew unusually grave. "He’s shouting... ’Three-eyed’! ’Yin Constables’! ’Coming’! ’All dead’!... and also... ’Black Lady’ is enraged? ’Divine Punishment’?"

"’Three-eyed Yin Constables’..." Li Yan murmured, repeating the words.

He walked forward slowly and squatted before the deranged Dongmin youth, forming a Mantra with both hands to cast the North Yin Exorcism Technique.

In an instant a fierce wind howled up, but the youth remained mad.

"It’s useless," Li Yan rose to his feet, his voice low. "His soul has been forcibly torn, half of his three souls and seven spirits gone. We enter the mountains."

Leaving the small village behind, the squad set out once more.

Under the guidance of a Dongmin guide familiar with the terrain, they trekked another half day, crossing several treacherous ravines carved out by mountain floods, and at last reached the Black Earth Mother Dongmin’s village.

The sight before them made even the battle-hardened elites of Wuzhou Guard suck in a sharp breath, their stomachs churning.

What village was there to speak of?

There was only a stretch of charred, shattered ruins, completely burned to the ground!

Amid ruined walls and collapsed eaves, blackened beams jutted up, radiating a pungent, scorched stench of smoke and fire.

More terrifying still were the corpses scattered all through and around the ruins!

Several days had already passed. In Lingnan’s sweltering, humid summer, the corpses had decayed severely, swollen and grotesque, like monstrous giants on display.

Flies buzzed in black swarms; maggots squirmed through the bloated, blackened flesh.

A stench so thick it seemed solid mingled with Corpse Poison miasma, forming a faint gray-green haze visible to the naked eye that shrouded this realm of death.

The breath of plague had already taken root.

Yet what chilled Li Yan and the others most was the manner of these deaths!

Just as the Crown Prince’s intelligence had said—hearts gouged, livers cut out!

The chest and abdomen cavities had been brutally torn open, the organs precisely removed, leaving hideous, gaping hollows.

Strangely, aside from this fatal extraction, there were almost no other visible wounds on the bodies’ surfaces!

No signs of struggle, no cuts from blades, not even many abrasions one might expect from resistance!

Forcing down his revulsion, Li Yan bent to examine them closely.

"Hard to say."

After a long moment he straightened, his face so dark it looked ready to drip water. "On the surface, the marks resemble those left when the Yin Bureau carries out a lawful soul-taking, but there are some differences."

"When the Yin Bureau hooks a soul, the soul departs the body, and the flesh is usually intact and unmarked, or at most bears the strangling trace of chains. But here... this is outright torture and blood sacrifice."

By now everyone had heard the implication.

Wang Daoxuan tasted bitterness in his mouth. "So even on the Yin Bureau’s side... something’s gone wrong?"