Volume 3, Chapter 44 – Investigation (Double-Length)

When Bai Xiang got back in touch with Zhen’nan, the voice that came through her earpiece was Xiang Xian’s, weak and exhausted.

“The situation is bad.” Xiang Xian did her best to objectively describe what was happening on her side. “We’ve been invaded from all directions at once by three types of Demon Pools, and each one has a contagious nature. Just in this one hour, quite a few people have died.”

Three Demon Pools. One was “physical-type”: it manifested as a ghost-face mask formed from congealed blood. Once it flew onto someone’s face and adhered perfectly, the host would go mad, fall into demonic frenzy, and start a massacre—and the “ghost-face curse” would be passed on to whoever killed that host.

The second was “phantom-divinity type”: it used some unknown power to control phones into dialing through contact lists. As long as the person who picked up replied with more than three sentences, they would explode and be torn apart, and the phone they left behind would inherit the same dialing behavior.

The third was “urban-legend type”: it spread through descriptive text or spoken words; its body was an urban legend centered on a Demon Pool.

“The first one’s easy to solve. Once you’ve Forged the Sword, you’re immune to the ghost-face contagion. Just send disciples out and have them kill everyone rampaging under ghost-face control.”

“The second one’s more trouble. The transmission speed of instant communication is too fast. By the time I realized something was wrong, it had already spread pretty far.”

Here, Xiang Xian sighed. “The only reason we’ve managed to suppress it is because we’ve always been strict about phone control…”

Just hearing it, Bai Xiang could imagine how tricky it would be if the second Demon Pool spread. Even if Xiang Xian had ten Divine Fetus cultivators, as long as they couldn’t teleport, their kill rate could never match a Demon Pool that spread at signal speed.

And that last line was even more interesting. Bai Xiang guessed the reason the “phone Demon Pool” could be suppressed had less to do with how hard Xiang Xian was working, and more to do with the fact that most people in Zhen’nan Circuit simply didn’t have phones.

That was indeed the case—just from Bai Xiang’s own experience. Back at No. 1 High, when she’d observed her classmates, aside from the ones from better-off families who’d been given phones, over half the students only had a SIM card so they could contact home.

The other half didn’t even have a SIM. They’d pay a few coins to use the payphone at a corner shop.

Phones were expensive… They could get online, and even though Great Yu’s network was tightly controlled, you could still access a lot of restricted information.

In the early days, you couldn’t buy a phone even if you had the money. That was why phone coverage never went up—Bai Xiang had noticed that even many teachers didn’t have one.

Xiang Xian’s later description confirmed Bai Xiang’s guess: the “phone Demon Pool” had basically slaughtered everyone in its own little social circle, then its spread rate suddenly plummeted and it was finally hemmed in and locked down inside a single payphone with its signal cut, where it could do nothing but ring and ring in impotent fury.

“Honestly, that one isn’t all that troublesome.” Xiang Xian continued, “The warning signs are obvious. The phantom-divinity trigger condition is ‘breaks between sentences, cannot answer more than three lines’. As long as you’re on guard, it’s very hard to get caught.”

Take Guo Rongzhi, for instance. When he got Jiang Lai’s call, he’d asked two questions and realized something was wrong, so even though he was the first one the Demon Pool had targeted, nothing happened to him.

“So the third one’s the real problem?” Bai Xiang pressed.

Everyone knew the heavy hitter showed up last.

“Urban-legend type”—it sounded a lot like the horror stories that circulated at school.

“It’s not a legend about something that happened ; it ‘exists inside the legend’.” Xiang Xian’s tone turned grave. “The story is about a group of people playing a ghost-hunting game in a guesthouse. The ghost actually manifests and starts killing them off one by one.”

A guesthouse? A classic urban-legend setup.

With two lifetimes behind her, Bai Xiang had heard more than her share of that kind of thing. She knew “ghost-hunting games” were just a bunch of “occult hacks”.

Like lighting four candles at midnight in a room with only three people—each person blows one out at the same time. If they manage to do it so the second hand is exactly on twelve when they blow, the fourth candle will go out too—meaning there’s something unknown in the room now.

Bored students loved that kind of game. She figured the content of this story wouldn’t be much different.

“The story itself isn’t the issue.” Xiang Xian went on. “The problem is that once it’s told, everyone who hears or reads it will be infected.”

Bai Xiang asked, “What happens to them?”

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“They drop dead within three hours, and before that, they develop an urge to share that goes completely beyond their normal personality—that is, an uncontrollable desire to tell the story to other people.”

Yeah, that was nasty.

Bai Xiang immediately saw how troublesome this “urban-legend Demon Pool” was. It wasn’t like the “physical Demon Pool” with the ghost-face masks, where you could eradicate it as long as you destroyed all the masks. It wasn’t like the “phantom-divinity Demon Pool” with the phones, where you could at least ‘hear’ something was wrong at a glance.

This Demon Pool was invisible.

You couldn’t see it or touch it. You couldn’t even verify whose mind it was hiding in.

After all, who hadn’t heard ghost stories growing up? If you asked me whether I knew “that story”, how was I supposed to know which one you meant?

Using “today” as the temporal boundary wouldn’t work either. Flight was tense and monotonous. To ease the tension, plenty of people would try to entertain their group with stories on the road. In a single day, who knew how many random tales had bounced around a population of hundreds of thousands? There was no way to “anchor” the infected group.

The only effective approach was to ramp up publicity, warn everyone not to tell stories to others. Then the “uncontrollable urge to share” would stand out.

“It won’t work.” Just hearing Xiang Xian’s voice made it clear how vexed she was. “This isn’t Chilong Circuit. We don’t have any way to spread intel to everyone in time.”

Chilong Circuit was at least a modern city. Even if most people didn’t have phones, they could still get news from broadcasts, outdoor screens, or radios.

Zhen’nan Circuit didn’t have anything like that. They didn’t even have a civilian radio station. Even if someone had a receiver, there was no signal to pick up.

What then?

All they could do was shout into loudspeakers—ridiculously inefficient.

“I’m back already.” As Bai Xiang notified her, she dropped from the sky, landing on the same stretch of wall Guo Rongzhi and Song Ruhua had stood on before.

“I’ll see if I can solve it… Has Master made any suggestions?”

“My guess is that the condition for destroying it is ‘killing every single person who knows its content’,” Xiang Xian said. That was what gave her the biggest headache.

Because the infected didn’t die immediately; they only dropped after a three-hour delay. That meant almost all of them would cling to hope.

What if it’s not me?

What if I’m fine?

If lying meant a chance at living, while admitting you were infected meant certain death—why would anyone honestly tell you the truth?

That instinctively drove the infected to hide among the crowd and keep letting the Demon Pool use them to contaminate others.

“How strong is it?” Bai Xiang asked again. “Is it about the same as the ghost-faces?”

The “ghost-face Demon Pool” was a physical attachment. That trick didn’t work on most swordsmen who’d already Forged the Sword.

Because there was a Demon Pool within the sword as well—and Demon Pool against Demon Pool produced a rejection effect. Cao Chuan had explained that to her before.

“That’s not absolute!” Xiang Xian warned.

“Swordsmen are only immune to the curse that spreads after killing a ghost-face host. If the ghost-face climbs straight onto your face—even forging a sword won’t necessarily save you!”

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Bai Xiang narrowed her eyes. “They get stronger as their kill count goes up?”

“Yes!” Xiang Xian nodded. “So a sword’s resistance isn’t absolute. Some Demon Pools are so dangerous even I don’t dare touch them lightly. If you’re going to handle this one, you’d better be careful!”

Cao Chuan had said much the same.

Bai Xiang tried to recall his exact words from back then.

【Every Demon Pool has its own unique energy field. When different fields collide, the results depend on their relative strength.】①

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①: From Volume 1, Chapter 50.

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“I understand.” Bai Xiang nodded. “I’ll be careful.”

Before Xiang Xian could say anything else, she cut the line.

First, she glanced toward Tingyu Tower, then looked down at the silver briefcase in her hand. The next moment, Bai Xiang once again used the air-leaping technique, dropping down toward a refugee camp set up behind the wall.

Though she was alone, her landing made two sounds.

Bai Xiang ignored the startled looks from the roadside and said calmly, “This doesn’t seem to concern the rest of you.”

“Matters of merit and the Dao aren’t yours alone to decide.”

Kong An stepped up from behind, straightening his posture to address her properly. “Earlier, that was my fault… Let me help. What do you say?”

He was clearly the one volunteering his time and effort, yet he put it in terms like he was asking for a favor. In truth, Kong An was pretty conflicted himself.

But he couldn’t help it—he was too curious about the “Dao method” Bai Xiang had mentioned before leaving.

He had to know how that kind of Dao method worked; he would not leave until his curiosity was satisfied.

He had problems of his own, too.

Bai Xiang glanced at him without replying, then walked into the camp on her own, trying to track traces of the “urban-legend Demon Pool”.

She wasn’t flailing around blind. Back when she’d first dealt with “Shenli”, she’d discovered that whenever Demon Pool pollutants approached her, her inner body-scape would feel like it was being scorched under a blazing sun.

“You won’t find anything like that.”

Kong An, unaware she had this trump card, followed along and lectured her in all seriousness. “That urban legend makes very clever use of human nature. The best way to handle it now is quarantine—move everyone in the affected range out, then decide how many to ‘deal with’ after observing.”

Bai Xiang didn’t look back. “Didn’t think everyone liked listening at people’s walls.”

“The wind carries mutterings to my ears.” Kong An was perfectly frank. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to eavesdrop.”

Bai Xiang asked another question. “And what exactly do you mean by ‘deal with’?”

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“Obviously—” Kong An started to answer, then dropped his voice the next second, letting it drift over to her on a curl of air. “The same ‘handling’ Dao Master Bai has in mind.”

Bai Xiang frowned. “Has Xu Prefecture always handled things that way?”

“Not just Xu Prefecture. All Nine Provinces under heaven do.” Kong An raised a brow, not understanding her resistance.

In his view, this was perfectly normal. Not just normal to him—even common folk thought so.

What else could you do?

When they ran into a troublesome Demon Pool, yes, cultivators shouldered the frontline. But if the Demon Pool was too strong and even cultivators couldn’t hold it, or if the pollution had spread beyond human ability to contain, then the only option left was “a warrior severing his own arm”—making a choice before things got even worse.

Demon Pools weren’t demon beasts.

Demon beasts at least had minds. Demon Pools were more like rigid programs.

There was no need to butt heads with a Demon Pool. You hemmed it into a region, let it kill everything living there, and once it had no more hosts to trigger, it would dissipate on its own.

Kong An had assumed Bai Xiang’s rise had been “too fast” and she’d skipped a lot of this basic “common sense”, so he explained it all in detail.

Bai Xiang’s face showed nothing, but inside she found the rules of this world even more loathsome.

Even natural phenomena beyond anyone’s control were this filthy and foul.

No wonder they’d built thirty-six fortress cities.

At the same time, she was using Jade Spirit to analyze the essence of Demon Pools.

Pu Ling, sixth Dao Master of Yuming Sword Dao, had believed Demon Pools were “disordered yet conditionally stable soul-energy”.

By his theory, all living things had spirit and soul, and soul was a form of energy. After a living being died, that energy dispersed into the world. It didn’t vanish completely, but under external influence—say, certain terrain configurations generating geomagnetic fields—it would be driven into “disorder”. That was the basic principle behind a Demon Pool’s formation.

It sounded reasonable enough. Take the Blood Sea for example; the reason it spawned so many Demon Pools might be that it held enormous amounts of fragmented soul-energy that even Feixiang Heaven couldn’t draw in and use.

The federal states’ research into Aogu God warriors, into Aogu particles, was the practical side of that theory—Aogu particles were a new energy refined through studying Demon Pools, and they’d already proven at least half of Pu Ling’s guess correct in practice.

Aogu God warriors were only able to restrain cultivators because they’d mastered this new energy. Essentially, they developed and exploited soul-energy, driving their own soul into their enemy’s body to “interfere” and “vibrate” it. Once they mastered that technique, they could even construct lifelike illusions out of thin air.

The “Phantom-Spirit Shock” Elande had used on her worked like that: it spent Aogu particles to batter the target’s soul. Because it also damaged the user’s mind, even at her limits she could only use it twice.

That move did work on Sword Dao cultivators. Cultivators were already busy resisting demonic pollution; throw a Phantom-Spirit Shock on top and you got something like true damage or holy damage—light cases coughed up blood, heavy cases fell into disorder and broke their seals… Too bad it just didn’t work on Bai Xiang.

So, if conventional methods couldn’t flush this thing out, could she maybe try these “foreign methods” instead?

Bai Xiang thought it through further.

She’d been walking around for half a day now and hadn’t felt that scorching sensation even once. She didn’t believe her heart-aspect had suddenly stopped warning her, and she certainly didn’t believe she’d just happened not to bump into any infected at all.

Her detection range in this respect was already on par with “divine sense” in a xianxia novel. Just walking around, she could cover dozens of meters around her. A sweep like that really shouldn’t turn up nothing.

So the “urban-legend Demon Pool” had to be special.

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Her warning capacity wasn’t as monstrously overpowered as her soul abilities. As far as she could tell, it could only sense malicious contamination.

When Demon Pool pollutants approached with intent to harm her, their infecting behavior would trigger a warning.

But if they just lay low, hiding in someone else, they probably wouldn’t.

With that in mind, she made one circuit of several refugee camps and confirmed it—if she wanted to catch the “urban-legend Demon Pool”, heart-aspect warnings alone wouldn’t cut it.

Still, it hadn’t been entirely fruitless. She and Kong An had each taken out one Demon Pool.

Those two weren’t the “urban-legend” one; they were fresh intruders and hadn’t had time to spread before being dragged out.

“I told you this way wouldn’t work.”

Kong An had been trailing her in circles all this time, and his expression was getting impatient.

His temperament was on the mild side, but he was still a Dao Lord of the Nine Prefectures. Traipsing around like he was on a walking tour through a place like this with Bai Xiang was… not his idea of a pleasant afternoon.

Bai Xiang ignored him, ducked alone into a narrow concrete alley between buildings, and this time took out a gleaming “Great Yu Tongbao” coin.

Real “Great Yu Tongbao” coins were bronze-colored, never bright gold.

This thing was a Demon Pool’s true body.

It hypnotized most people who saw it into thinking it was no different from any other coin.

As long as you used it, spent it, you’d fall under its curse. It would drain your life-force until you dried up and died.

The more life-force it absorbed, the more brilliant and beautiful its gold sheen became.

Judging by that, it had already killed plenty of people before reaching Maozhou—very likely starting its killing before the flight had even begun.

What is she trying to do?

Standing behind her, Kong An frowned deeply. He had no idea why she was taking out the Demon Pool’s true form.

Bai Xiang’s next move confused him even more.

She produced a small vial, took a swig with a blank face, then pressed the gold coin to the center of her brow and closed her eyes as if sensing something.

Kong An opened his mouth to speak—then froze in shock the next second.

The coin was vanishing bit by bit, dissolving into a spray of gorgeous red motes of light.

What the…?

Kong An was completely lost.

He could only watch as Bai Xiang caught that cluster of light, walked out of the alley, and sprinkled it over the street—

Where one passerby’s face changed drastically, and he turned and bolted without a word.