That day, while Xue Cuo was offering incense in the temple, he suddenly received a revelation from Her Ladyship. After some thought, he discussed it with Ren Shu and Gu Ruhui, and the three of them set off in different directions.
As for the house, he dumped it all on the little golden dragon.
Even so, Xue Cuo couldn’t quite rest easy before leaving. He still went to see Ao Mu, but worried about missing the appointed time, he could only toss the troublesome fellow out first.
“Ao Mu’s destined chance.”
“What chance could that simpleton possibly have?”
“He’s not going to tear down Her Ladyship’s temple, is he?”
Xue Cuo muttered to himself, fingers moving as he calculated. He’d taught Ao Mu a fair bit of talisman work over the years. Not enough to dominate a region, perhaps… but more than sufficient to muddle through. That being said, it shouldn’t be a problem.
And since the Goddess herself had given this sign, nothing major ought to go wrong.
With that, Xue Cuo slung his pack over his shoulder and set out once more. His Supreme Freedom Technique had received a second true transmission from Kong Yun, and with it came another breakthrough.
If he had once counted as merely competent, he was now a true expert at staying alive.
With that, his travel speed only increased. In less than a single day, he reached his destination, the source of the Nine-Bend Yellow River:
Qingzhou.
Xue Cuo had spent over a decade among mortals and heard many tales about the regions of the Divine Lands. Yet no matter where he went, whenever Qingzhou’s ancient city was mentioned, one word was impossible to avoid: slavery.
Dynasties rose and fell in the mortal world, but behind every throne stood the immortal sects. Even the so-called righteous path spoke of resting the people and nurturing life for the sake of the realm. And yet the Mo people of Qingzhou had upheld a tradition of human sacrifice for ten thousand years.
Xue Cuo descended from the clouds and rested on a mountain outside Qingzhou’s ancient walls, then followed the winding path down.
At the mountain’s foot stood a stone stele by the roadside, carved with the characters: “A Letter to My Beloved Wife.”
The man who had commissioned it was Qi Wu, a Mo general. After his wife, Jin Zheng, died, he was consumed by grief. He held an extravagant ritual to see her off, and left behind this stele as a memorial.
Xue Cuo studied it, then suddenly looked up at the mountain. Its peak was lush with dense, thriving vegetation.
A choking sensation rose in his throat.
Was this mountain… piled from bones? A human-bone tomb built by Qi Wu for his wife?
Were all the Mo people of Qingzhou so cruel, so steeped in slaughter?
Did the Heavenly Dao truly turn a blind eye?
Xue Cuo swallowed these questions and continued onward.
Outside Qingzhou’s ancient city, hills of varying heights displayed their beauty openly and grandly. Without the towering steles at their bases, he might have mistaken them for natural scenery.
Gradually, he discerned their arrangement. It was a winding curve, like nine bends. A colossal burial ground.
And at the far end, the blue-grey ancient city stood like a massive upright tombstone.
Xue Cuo couldn’t help but sigh.
What a vast undertaking. What ruthless resolve. What hatred, buried deep.
They had sacrificed an entire province… its land, its people, an unending stream of corpses… to form a bone mound suppressing something beneath the earth.
This formation was not something a mere Celestial Immortal could accomplish. Even one such being would be crushed by the heavenly backlash of sacrificing an entire province.
Only a Golden Immortal, a Great Emperor, or even a Sage could afford such extravagant cruelty. Using thousands of miles of territory to kill a god of the old age.
And killing once was not enough.
The one who laid this formation used the very land that had once nurtured that deity to slaughter it, again and again, for ten thousand years.
This was what it meant to kill both body and soul.
And yet…even so…
Ten thousand years later, that god could still send an incarnation to the Southern Sea, casually gift him a tortoise shell, and form a bond of goodwill.
What terrifying strength.
And what it wanted from him was the water of the Golden Pool. It was born when Xue Cuo opened the Bridge of Rebirth. As to its purpose… considering the Golden Pool’s power of renewal, Xue Cuo felt a chilling premonition.
His hair stood on end. It felt as though he had been watched from the very beginning.
This god had likely known all along why he would go to the Southern Sea. The tortoise shell had merely been a bargaining chip. A move in negotiations with the Goddess.
Xue Cuo didn’t know the details, but reasoning it out, there must have been a contest on the level of gods.
He looked up into the unseen vault of heaven, rubbed his arms, and silently recited the Goddess’s honorific title, steadying his heart.
If this truly was the source of the Nine-Bend Yellow River, then the fate of that river goddess must have been unimaginably brutal.
From the shattered riverbed alone, it was clear her true body had been dismembered and hidden by her enemies.
Head. Limbs. Torso. Flesh.
Nine parts in total. Each sealed beneath one of the nine tallest human-bone tombs.
Xue Cuo watched, shaken to the core. Yet the deeper the dread ran, the calmer his mind became. Gradually, he realised something—
This formation was not incomprehensible to him. Talismans and formations shared common roots, though they diverged in subtle ways.
A cultivator of mediocre talent might starve himself studying for ten thousand years and barely grasp the outline of the Nine Bone Tombs.
A cultivator of exceptional talent, given three thousand years from the moment he learned to read, might stand a chance of breaking it.
But Xue Cuo was neither.
After ten thousand years, these nine tombs had fused completely with the land itself. It was like iron-hard ulcers embedded in flesh, impossible to excise.
And if he disturbed them directly, he would likely draw the attention of something far worse.
What Xue Cuo needed to understand was this:
How had a fragment of the Nine-Bend Yellow River Goddess’s consciousness, or an incarnation, escaped this bone tomb and travelled to the Southern Sea?
He would enter from the point where she had left.
“No wonder she sought me out.”
“If it were anyone else, they might not even be able to read this mess of runes.”
Xue Cuo tapped his head, thinking as he walked deeper. The closer he drew to Qingzhou’s ancient city, the more oppressive the air became.
Along the way, he encountered slave convoys.
The Mo people were far larger than ordinary humans, with powerfully built limbs. Their calves were thicker than their thighs, and dark red tattoos marred their bodies. They were fragmentary, incomplete patterns.
The slaves were dressed in rags, shackled with heavy irons, walking in silence between the verdant human-bone tombs.
Xue Cuo glanced at the Mo tribesman leading the convoy. His cultivation was unremarkable, yet his technique was peculiar. Qingzhou was dry and sand-lashed, yet these Mo people carried a damp aura about them, faintly echoing with the sound of surging rivers.
Xue Cuo flicked out a talisman, communing with the Golden Crow Divine Spirit, stripping the area of daylight.
In an instant, the world plunged into absolute darkness, with no trace of light remaining.
“Who goes there?!”
“Enemy attack! Enemy attack!”
In the blackness, the clatter of falling shackles rang out with startling clarity. Freed of their restraints, the slaves scattered at once, fleeing in all directions, vanishing into the mountains.
Xue Cuo folded his arms. Only once the last slave had escaped did he follow the path taken, find a fissure—
—and leap into the formation.
Buzz—
A strange wave of vertigo swept over him.
Xue Cuo’s vision went black, then a faint light seeped back in.
When he opened his eyes, what greeted him was a ten-thousand-li river of blood, and hundreds of millions of flayed corpses.
The nine human-bone tombs lay beneath the earth, yet here they appeared even more towering and magnificent, piercing heaven and earth without end… like nine blood-red steel spikes, driven inch by inch into Qingzhou, the sacred womb where the goddess had once been conceived.
Xue Cuo stared blankly at this purgatory made manifest. Terror-soaked blood miasma and boundless resentment had condensed under the formation, birthing powerful monsters that wailed without cease.
They rampaged everywhere. Whenever the waters of the Yellow River showed the slightest hint of clarity, they hurled themselves into it, dissolving their own bodies into the flow and churning it back into a blood demon.
Others wielded bone whips, patrolling incessantly. They watched the points where the bone tombs were driven into the earth, and at the slightest tremor they lashed them again and again, forcing the tombs to sink deeper, to be wedged ever more firmly in place.
Xue Cuo barely dared to breathe. He layered eighteen separate concealment disguises over himself and crept trembling into the depths of the blood river.
From time to time, massive shapes rolled through the current. An enormous blood-red eye, or the severed limbs of giants clutching weapons, rising and sinking in the flow.
These remnants were unlike the flesh-spawned monsters. They carried a familiarity that made Xue Cuo’s scalp prickle, and his instincts warned him not to look too closely.
He lowered his gaze, stilled his thoughts, and continued towards the river’s end.
The deeper he went, the more giant limbs appeared, and the more mind-ensnaring monsters gathered. Yet none of them could see him.
He passed a mouth suspended in the current, its teeth shattered, half a tongue left flapping as it screamed hoarsely, “Your
Ladyship, run! Kill—kill—kill!”
Xue Cuo frowned. Could this have been one of the goddess’s attendant deities?
The existence that had slain the Nine-Bend Yellow River Goddess. Had it torn her followers apart and thrown them back into her own river?
A chill ran through him once more. What depth of hatred could drive such acts? Or perhaps there was no hatred at all. Only a move by the victor, a piece sacrificed to shatter a god’s mind.
Xue Cuo sighed silently. He passed a shattered head, its eyes staring wide at the sky, and with a gentle motion, closed them.
The head jolted, suddenly animated. “Your Ladyship! Is it Your Ladyship?!”
There was no answer.
The young man walked on, leaving the remains behind to weep alone. His passage was disturbingly smooth. Xue Cuo did not need to think hard to know whose hand had arranged it.
He walked until the blood river gave way to a barren, desert-like expanse.
It was deathly quiet. The sky above had turned ash-white, and grey mist stretched endlessly ahead. At his feet lay a small puddle, shallow and unremarkable.
Xue Cuo had never seen the goddess, yet he knew without question that he had arrived.
He crouched down and drew a small incense burner from his sleeve. It held half a burner of Golden Pool water.
“Your Ladyship, Nine-Bend Yellow River Goddess,” he said softly.
“This junior, Xue Cuo, disciple of the Goddess of the Great Loch, cultivator of the Xianghuo Divine Dao, dares to address you as shibo*.”
(TN: address for one’s teacher’s shixiong or shijie)
“You and I have met only once, yet our karmic ties run deep.”
“This is the water of the Golden Pool.”
“Before I pour it, Her Ladyship asked me to ask you one thing: do the three promises you once made her still hold?”
Silence answered him… so complete it was terrifying.
Xue Cuo waited without moving, cold sweat seeping down his back. He stood frighteningly close to the god’s true body; perhaps the ground beneath his feet was part of it. If she flew into a rage and decided to kill him on the spot, he would have no chance of escape.
Fortunately, nothing happened. To the goddess, silence was consent.
Xue Cuo finally let out a breath. He raised the incense burner and murmured, “Shibo, I’m beginning.”
The sound of water was warm and gentle. It trickled into the puddle, soaking the sand and spreading outward in slow rings.
Suddenly, Xue Cuo sensed something and stepped back.
The once-dry puddle erupted, a clear column of water bursting forth, followed by countless fine streams. The ground shook violently. From below came a voice brimming with unrestrained pleasure. Exhilaration, fury, and boundless joy all at once.
It surged and echoed, like the Yellow River in flood, like a roaring waterfall… proclaiming the end of winter and the arrival of spring.
“Xue Cuo.”
“I owe you a debt.”
The voice drifted from the pale mist, distant and indistinct, yet unlike the Goddess of the Great Loch’s aloof coolness. Its emotions were vivid and unguarded, like those of a familiar elder.
It coughed lightly, inscrutable once more. “Shibo has a worthless little thing. Perhaps it has some connection to you. Do you want it?”
Before leaving, the Goddess had said to him: be sincere, and you will gain something.
So that was what she meant.
Xue Cuo had been about to decline out of courtesy, but understanding dawned. He nodded vigorously. “Yes! I want it! The more the better. Thank you, shibo!”
……
Elsewhere.
Ying Xiao stared worriedly at Ao Mu, who sat hunched over the table. He draped an arm over Ao Mu’s shoulder. “Brother, I’ve seen your eldest shixiong draw talismans. Yours… don’t quite look the same.”
Ao Mu’s face was smeared with cinnabar. He wiped it away, staining the corners of his eyes red, bit down on the pen tip, and frowned in deep thought, then added yet more unnecessary strokes. “I’ll try again.”
Ying Xiao hesitated. “I don’t really understand talismans, but I remember that summoning gods is something only high-level talisman masters attempt. You’ve just started. You really shouldn’t—”
Pain flashed through Ao Mu’s eyes. “Master Xuan’s fate is unknown. Eldest shixiong has vanished. The villagers are panicking. This is life or death. We don’t have the luxury of caution.”
Ying Xiao ventured carefully, “Then… have you considered summoning your own goddess… instead of… this?”
He eyed the talisman, its writhing lines like a nest of crawling insects. “What even is this?”
“I already summoned Her Ladyship,” Ao Mu said. “I’ll try inviting a few more.”
Ying Xiao sucked in a sharp breath, horror written all over his face. “A few more?! Who taught you that? Who are you even summoning? I don’t understand. Don’t scare me like this! Are you sure it’s safe? Why don’t I take you to find my master? Let’s stop, alright?”
Ao Mu stood up firmly and patted Ying Xiao’s shoulder. “Eldest shixiong’s not here, so it’s my duty to look after you. And instead I’ve made you worry. Don’t be afraid. I know my limits. These gods probably won’t answer anyway. I’m just using their names to frighten the water folk.”
Ying Xiao swallowed. “Brother… at least tell me who you’re summoning.”
Ao Mu held up the talisman covered in worm-like lines. “Dragon Kings of the Four Seas.”
Ying Xiao: “……”
