Volume 3, Chapter 45 – Strange Object (Double-Length)

Bai Xiang’s experiment was actually a failure.

Augu particles weren’t something you could just whip up. She didn’t have any specialized conversion apparatus on hand. Even with a Jade Spirit in her head acting like a built-in computer assistant, just that mouthful of Augu potion and one Vibration Art at most could make the spirit-soul energy she released change slightly in nature—become more “corrosive,” able to directly erode Demon Pools’ true form that was weaker than itself.

That was why the gold coin had vanished into those red motes of light. Even in the Federation’s early experiments, this stuff counted as a failed product. It looked legit enough, but incompletely converted energy couldn’t be controlled or used.

Still, Bai Xiang had never planned to succeed outright. As long as it could be used to probe, that was enough.

“What are you still standing there for, hurry up and chase him!” Kong An called to Bai Xiang anxiously.

He really was less and less able to see through this freshman junior of his.

In sword arts and cultivation she had immensely deep accumulation, to the point she could vaguely give him pointers. But in other areas she seemed so slow… You’ve already yanked the suspect out—shouldn’t you be rushing to grab him now?

Thinking it over, Kong An decided to categorize Bai Xiang’s oddities as “lopsided development.”

It had to be that… She really was a once-in-a-millennium genius, sure, but she clearly poured all her energy into the Sword Dao. Only someone this utterly devoted to the sword could rise so fast.

The more he thought about it, the more it had to be that, and Kong An’s heart felt a bit more balanced.

So what if you’re better than me?

In everything else, I’ve got way more experience than you!

“What kind of Dao Lord are you?” Bai Xiang, however, aimed a “looking at an idiot” gaze at Kong An.

“This is a refugee camp, not a normal city street. Have you ever seen refugees wander all over the place right after reaching their resettlement point?”

Huh?

Kong An froze.

What did she mean?

He was puzzled, but in that moment another sensation locked onto him, wrapped around him.

He couldn’t command spirit-soul energy like Bai Xiang, but he could still feel that crisis warning.

Danger from all directions, from every refugee in his field of view. In his senses, they were all radiating malice. A high-level cultivator’s spiritual intuition was ringing nonstop—either kill everything, or get away.

…So that’s how it is?

Kong An suddenly saw the light, finally understanding what Bai Xiang’s earlier words had meant.

The guy who ran wasn’t the problem. A normal person, in an unfamiliar environment, seeing someone suddenly pop out of an alley and scatter red photons across the road—if he’d grown up in human society and heard any of the ghost-story Demon Pool tales, his first reaction should be to run.

The ones who didn’t run were the real problem—especially when so many refugees all saw the red light motes and still didn’t move. That meant this entire area was in huge trouble.

So the people who stayed all had issues.

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Kong An’s face darkened.

Right… He’d subconsciously treated the paths in the refugee camp like the streets of some lower district or slum, assuming the people on the roads would be flowing back and forth, and that it was impossible for an entire patch of street to have everyone go bad.

But this wasn’t a street. The refugees had just moved in and were still holding onto their anxiety about tomorrow. In such an unfamiliar environment, who would be running around?

They weren’t going to flow.

They’d just stay where they were.

In that situation, the moment corruption set in, it would be most of a whole area at once—a big circle of people who’d all already gotten acquainted and recognized one another, all getting hit together.

“…” He’d just been feeling smug a second ago and got despised right after. Kong An’s face was burning.

He hesitated, wondering if he should make the first move and “deal with” these weird refugees.

The moment that thought surfaced, he suddenly noticed that all the refugees on the road—whether they were sitting in doorways resting or gathered together chatting—had their movements stop at the exact same time, then, like machines, they all turned their heads in perfect unison to look his way.

???

Even as a Divine Fetus cultivator, Kong An was scared stiff by this scene that so blatantly violated basic Human Principle.

With a metallic clang , he drew his sword—only to hear a humming sound ring out beside him.

Like a bell being struck in a mountain temple, that invisible hum rapidly spread outward in all directions, forcing everyone under the Demon Pool’s control who’d been about to move to freeze again, locked in their pouncing poses where they stood.

What sword art is that?

Kong An was utterly stunned.

He walked up to one of the frozen refugees, reached out to test for breath, and was shocked to find the person was already dead.

Shenming Sword Dao… Shenming Sword Dao?

Kong An finally put it together—just how much was she still hiding?

“Just a crude application of sound waves,” Bai Xiang said lightly. “Anyone who wants to learn it could, but it’s not of much use even if they did. This move only works on ordinary people.”

“I never said I wanted to learn it!” Kong An snorted, sheathing his sword and flicking his sleeves.

“My Jingzhu Dao has hundreds of sword arts. It’s not like we don’t have anything tied to the Dao of howling wind!”

Then why are you following me?

Bai Xiang didn’t expose him. She rose into the air to count heads, confirming that the refugees who’d died under this “Resonant Sound Sword” of hers numbered in the hundreds.

They should have come from the same neighborhood; they already knew one another on the road, and after arriving here they’d continued to stick together.

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This kind of group was the most dangerous. Because they were familiar, it was easy to let their guard down and focus on listening to the stories the other person told.

[Due to a Demon Pool that spreads through speech, all residents please return home and remain quiet!]

[Repeating: all residents please return home and remain quiet! Do not communicate with others! Violators will be dealt with severely!]

In the distance, a man wearing a white armband wandered over with a megaphone. When he saw the situation here, he was dumbstruck.

“Clear out all the corpses here,” Bai Xiang called down to him from above.

“Report to your superior and have them send more people to move the bodies.”

With that, she slipped away through the air and began circling over all the refugee camps.

This time was different from her earlier probing. As she skimmed by at low altitude, she kept feeling “seared,” a warning flare from her spirit-soul.

Because Demon Pools had no thoughts or intelligence, the “urban-legend Demon Pool” had sensed Bai Xiang’s threat through those “failed photons.” On top of that, she had in fact damaged its propagating sub-bodies. There was no way it would keep ignoring her like before; it would instinctively radiate malice at her.

As long as she could detect it, dealing with it was easy.

The scene just now had already proved that when the urban-legend Demon Pool felt threatened, it could control its propagating sub-bodies to act in concert. To keep it from driving all its sub-bodies mad at once, Bai Xiang didn’t go around hacking and slashing one sword at a time. Instead, every time she flew over a region, she had the Jade Spirit record that region’s model and lock onto targets. Then she flew up over the camp, scattered qi-sha, and shredded them.

Working like that, the extermination went very fast—but it sparked panic among the refugees.

Because the megaphone announcements were so inefficient, many people still didn’t know there was an urban-legend Demon Pool lurking among them. From their perspective, Bai Xiang was killing people at random without distinguishing right from wrong. Some of the bolder ones immediately went to the administrators to lodge protests, demanding that Zhennan Circuit “do something about this crazed demon girl.”

Bai Xiang had no intention of responding to these people. She couldn’t even be bothered to spare them a glance.

Once she was sure that her qi-presence probing no longer picked up any “searing,” Bai Xiang tossed a “you explain” at Kong An, who had kept up with her, then turned and shot off toward Tingyu Tower.

She wasn’t worried this incident would hurt her reputation; things like this would keep happening in the future anyway. Sooner or later they’d have to get used to it.

In the end, it all came down to people in the Dao City being too well protected and lacking any real sense of crisis.

She felt that if it had been those living outside the Dao City—scattered through the villages and towns—they wouldn’t have fallen for it.

Those people spent their lives in constant battles of wits and courage against Demon Pools.

A phone call that no one answered.

A stranger suddenly grabbing you to tell you a story.

Or suddenly more patrols on the streets, a familiar shop closing early for no reason today, the neighbors all putting on eerie smiles these last few days… People out there treated every one of these signs with utmost vigilance.

One moment of carelessness meant death.

Anyone who could survive in such a brutal environment had far more experience dealing with Demon Pools than Dao City residents.

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Bai Xiang didn’t like slaughtering the innocent, but she wasn’t soft-hearted either.

With a Demon Pool like this, which could multiply its propagating sub-bodies severalfold if you gave it even a little leeway, there was no bargaining.

If there was a problem, kill first and talk later.

She flew into Tingyu Tower and landed directly on the viewing platform. The moment she stepped through the door she paused—but still got tackled by a soft body.

“Xiang’er!” Xiang Xian wrapped her up in a hug, squeezing with enough force to choke someone, then pulled her back to look her over from head to toe. Only after confirming Bai Xiang didn’t have a scratch on her did she finally relax.

She’d been watching the refugee camps from the viewing platform just now. She’d originally planned to go herself, but upon hearing that Kong An was there too, she’d decided to stay in Tingyu Tower to hold the fort.

“How did you end up mixed up with Kong An?” she asked, baffled.

“He wants to learn sword from me,” Bai Xiang said briefly, then lifted the case in her hand and dropped something even scarier: “I found this in Chilong, and it seems to be connected to ‘Shenli.’”

She’d originally planned to toss it to Dr. Hannah for research, but seeing Xiang Xian made her suddenly realize something—when it came to doing research, who in the Nine Circuits of Great Yu could compare with Yuming Sword Dao?

This bargain-bin master of hers came with a whole pile of extra identities: a grandmaster artificer and a total research maniac.

So she could just have Xiang Xian take Hannah and Han Yuanfeng to study it together, and if anything went wrong Xiang Xian would be right there to suppress it.

Xiang Xian had just been curious why Kong An wanted to learn sword from Bai Xiang. The moment she heard it had to do with “Shenli,” she frowned. “Knew it was those eunuch bastards up to something!”

“You want me to take charge of housing this thing, right?” She immediately guessed Bai Xiang’s intentions, pulled her downstairs, and found the temporary lab that had just been set up next door. There they found Hannah and Han Yuanfeng.

Xiang Xian was aware of the two of them. After Bai Xiang and Bai Zhuqing left, she had quickly sorted through all of Zhennan Circuit’s affairs, big and small. There was no way she’d miss these two.

Bai Xiang frowned at Han Yuanfeng. “What are you doing here?”

She had planned to have Han Yuanfeng help, but she hadn’t planned to let him into the core circle.

He was, after all, from Red Dust Dao—an outsider. In the research he could be excellent manual labor, but the exact research targets, even the precise nature of the B2 containment object, she hadn’t intended to let him know yet.

“Don’t even bring it up.” Han Yuanfeng looked thoroughly depressed. “I contacted the Dao Lord again yesterday. She told me to just live here with you and not come back. I have no idea what’s gotten into her.”

Red Dust Dao’s Dao Lord was Chen Yuchan.

Thinking of the little twist hidden in that, Bai Xiang felt the corners of her mouth wanting to curl up of their own accord.

Fine, he was qualified to enter the core of the lab.

“It should be the ‘B2 containment object.’”

Hannah, still in that lizard-person form and wrapped in her hooded coat, said this after examining the silver dart.

“What exactly is the ‘B2 containment object’?” Xiang Xian frowned, staring into her vertical pupils.

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“A pool of blood,” Hannah said. “A pool of blood of unknown origin, existing out of nowhere and able to float on its own.”

She began to describe to the three of them the intel she knew. “No one knows when this pool of blood appeared or how it appeared. Under Federation law, its owner is the ‘Brinton State – Koehler Biological Research Institute.’ Twenty years ago, on a private island they used to raise test subjects, they discovered this mysterious blood. It was described as ‘incredibly mysterious, floating in midair and constantly writhing.’ The intel says it completely destroyed that island and turned the few survivors left into monsters.”

“It has many mysterious effects.” Hannah paused, her voice tinged with both fear and excitement. “Any creature that looks directly at it with no barrier in between will undergo bodily distortion; their whole body will swell with huge blood blisters and rapidly grow aberrant organs… It’s also highly toxic. Even when its extract is diluted a hundred thousand times and volatilized into the air, anyone who inhales it will experience intense hallucinations.”

“It has four interference abilities like that, in total. They’re called ‘gaze-borne contamination,’ ‘volatile hallucination,’ ‘mind usurpation,’ and ‘spiritual fragmentation.’ The ‘Shenli’ you mentioned should have only extracted two of those interference abilities.”

“And something like this they classify as B2?” Han Yuanfeng stared, incredulous.

He didn’t understand the Federal language, but he had managed to figure out the pattern of its ranking system.

If B2 was this monstrous, what was B1 supposed to be?

And what did A-class containment objects look like?

“Because this thing has a very obvious ‘weak point,’” Hannah said with a shrug. “As long as you don’t come into direct contact with it, nothing will happen.”

For example, the “gaze-borne contamination” only worked if you looked at it directly. If you viewed it with protective goggles on, nothing at all happened.

Same for “volatile hallucination.” If you didn’t breathe, you wouldn’t get contaminated. If you managed those two points, its abilities were basically useless.

“The grading standard for dangerous objects like this is usually based on how hard they are to counter, not how strong their contamination is,” Hannah explained to Han Yuanfeng, shrugging again. “And I’m not from their research institute, so I don’t even know if that naming logic is actually correct.”

“So what you’re saying is, B2 might be the highest tier?” Han Yuanfeng wiped the sweat from his forehead and shook his head. “If that’s the case, that’s not so bad.”

As if it would be that optimistic.

Bai Xiang didn’t think so.

Maybe the B2 containment object’s countermeasures were easy to carry out, but its manifested outer Aspect was anything but ordinary.

A pool of blood.

Why blood?

Its manifestation was an organic substance, one of the absolutely essential parts of any living structure. Thinking further along that line—if there was blood, might there also be bone, flesh…? What kind of creature did they all belong to? All of those were questions worth looking into.

But that wasn’t her job.

“You three talk,” Bai Xiang said, jerking her chin at Xiang Xian.

“I’m heading out for a bit.”