Chapter 41: How Outrageous!

“All right, you can go. Send my disciple up,” Wen Jinge said, holding a brush as large as a broom. She dipped it into a bucket of gold powder and inscribed talismans across the entire bottom of the pool. Then she turned the old man over and began circling and marking his body with cinnabar. “This is the first time I’ve understood the fun of shamanic rituals.”

“What’s so entertaining about it?”

“You get to treat people as less than human,” she replied, utterly devoid of pity, dumping the man into the vertical pit she’d dug. She then pulled a hefty hammer from her storage pouch. “Oh, wait, he’s a demon, not a person—so I don’t need to treat him as a demon, either.”

Lu Wei’s eyelid twitched. Wen Jinge had truly treated him well—she’d only slapped him a few times.

This was treating a demon like a nail to be hammered!

“Are you familiar with the geomantic burial points for tombs?”

“Not really. I don’t even know where my own bones are buried,” he answered with a yawn, squatting off to the side. He had to admit, being human wasn’t so bad—you could eat and drink as you pleased.

“Your bones aren’t in the illusion?” This reminded Wen Jinge of the four corpses she’d encountered after defeating the Northern Demon Bell. “Is it only demons whose bones are missing that need to possess others?”

“What else? When it comes to bodies, the original is always best.”

“I’ve got a question!” Wen Jinge hammered away, and at last there was only the old man’s head left above ground. “If I grind a demon’s bones into powder, can he still use them?”

Lu Wei paused, then considered it from the other side. “As long as nothing is missing, it’s barely possible.”

“So it seems the original really does beat anything stolen,” she mused, watching as blood began to seep from every orifice of the old man’s head. He should have woken by now, but the binding spell rendered him immobile. “Suppose you found the one who hid your bones—what would you do?”

“I’d kill him. If he’s already dead, I’d kill his descendants. Anyone who won’t even leave a corpse alone is certainly no good person. I despise that kind.”

“That’s the sort of progressive thinking demons should have!” Wen Jinge gave him a thumbs-up, then placed ritual implements beside the old man’s head to prevent his soul from fleeing the body. “But if his descendants were starving to death and ate your ashes mixed with water, would you save your ashes, or possess his body and become the very thing you detest?”

Lu Wei: …

“Why so quiet?”

“You’re just putting me on the spot—and scaring him, too!” Lu Wei was truly at a loss.

“I’m just trying to tell you the right answer. If you succeed in possessing him, his soul is destroyed, and both the body and bones become yours.” She was so worked up by her own logic that she punched him in the arm. “Brother, that’s a double win!”

Lu Wei: …

Whether it was a win or not, he couldn’t say—but Wen Jinge’s way of thinking was just outrageous.

Thank goodness Wen Jinge wasn’t possessed by demonic intent right now. If she ever was, the entire demon race would be wiped out!

Lu Wei had grown accustomed to her, but others hadn’t. Take the old man, now buried with only his head exposed—he was so terrified by Wen Jinge that his soul began to slip free.

The moment he moved, the talisman on his forehead ignited. He’d been secretly pleased, thinking the wounded Wen Jinge was hardly a threat, but as soon as his soul left his body, it was sucked into a mirror.

“Let me out! Let me out!” came his desperate cry.

“Do you know who I am—” Wen Jinge interrupted, holding the mirror up to examine it. “Actually, I really don’t care who you are.”

Lu Wei stared. “You know who sent him?”

“It doesn’t matter who sent him. What I need is a confidant of that demon lord. Anyone sent first into the fray isn’t much, anyway.”

The old man was stunned. Wasn’t Wen Jinge supposed to be a brainless bully, using her power to extort others? Why was the woman before him so very different?

It couldn’t be. His information had never been wrong before.

“Look at him, dumb as a post. He was probably sent because he’s too stupid for anything else.”

A wave of suffocating despair washed over the old man as Wen Jinge tipped the mirror downward. Beneath his lifeless body, a blue sand beast scurried back and forth, pushing a black coffin.

“Master, I’ve set the coffin in place,” the blue sand beast called up from below. “I’ll get started on the other six pits.”

“What’s in the coffin?” Lu Wei slapped his cheeks to stay alert. “You didn’t add any more arrays, did you? We’re both still up here—don’t go overboard.”

“I don’t know what’s inside. I can’t open it. I stole it from the Gate of Burning Heaven. Aside from a purple-gold alms bowl, this coffin is the only thing of note.”

“What’s so special about it…?” For something to impress Wen Jinge, it had to be extraordinary.

“At the Gate of Burning Heaven, it was placed like an ancestral shrine in a normal household. Both the living and the dead had their name tablets enshrined there. Times are tough, so I thought maybe the floor tiles could fetch a price—after all, they’re jade. Unless someone crawled under the altar, no one would notice a missing tile. But I triggered a mechanism and stumbled upon this coffin made of black iron, so I just took it.”

“…You even stole a coffin.” Lu Wei’s head throbbed.

He grew anxious thinking about their journey to seek the White Deer clan’s lost legacy. He had no memory of the clan’s destruction; the only flashes in his mind were familiar faces dying by his sword. He didn’t even know if anyone had given them a proper burial.

If Wen Jinge ever found the old clan site, would she just loot every coffin she found?

The thought cast a shadow over his face, but Wen Jinge said, “This isn’t just any coffin. This is millennium-old black iron—it’ll fetch a fine price.”

“Then… what are you digging these pits for?”

“Oh, this—where I come from… ha, in my imagination, it’s called pinning.” She pointed at the old man’s head, then at the blue sand beast. “See over there? The box of spirit stones outside the coffin is what we’d call a coffin. This black iron one is like a person.”

“A person?”

“Yes.” She shook the mirror. “Do you have any accomplices?”

The old man: …

“I need six more demons. Nothing fancy—your level of demonic power will do.”

The old man: …

“Look, it’ll be so lonely for you down there all alone! Even if you can’t move, having a few companions to chat with will pass the time.”

The old man: …

Whether it was her sincerity or something else, within the next three or four days, six more demon cultivators showed up. At last, Wen Jinge had gathered her seven ‘nails’ for pinning.

Lu Wei didn’t hand control of his body to Qiao Yu. He and Wen Jinge both wore invisibility talismans and lay in the empty pool day and night, watching as the demon cultivators arrived in droves—only to be hammered into pre-dug pits one after another.

The old man’s eyes had grown dull, watching his kin buried beside him, overcome by a nameless sorrow.

“Come on, close your eyes. It’s almost over.”

“You’ll be struck down by heaven for this!” It was the first thing the old man had managed to say since Wen Jinge subdued him.

“As far as I know, it’s demons who are rejected by heaven’s laws,” Wen Jinge sneered. “Besides, you had no qualms about attacking my disciple. Now I only make you wish you were dead, and somehow I’ve committed a grave sin?”