Volume 5, Chapter 24 – Gathering Evil

Northern Yu, Nankai City.

A young scholar in white Confucian robes, with a face like carved jade and the look of a refined bookman, descended from midair onto the city wall with a group of attendant cultivators. He was immediately greeted with great enthusiasm by Dou Wenshi, the commander of Nankai, who had been waiting there to receive him.

“I have long heard of Marquis Wenchang’s great name. Seeing you today, you truly are extraordinary!”

The young scholar paid no attention to Dou Wenshi’s flattery. Pointing across the battlements at the towering shadow shrouded in bloody mist, he asked, “When I came here four years ago, that thing was only fifty meters tall, wasn’t it?”

“Can Commander Dou explain to me why, in only four years, the wall opposite us not only failed to be cut down any further, but has actually grown even taller?”

“Th-this…” Sweat broke out on Dou Wenshi’s forehead as he cursed inwardly that the man had to bring up exactly the one thing he should not.

Why couldn’t the Xia Capital’s Great Bastion be taken? What sort of normal person even asked a question like that?

Who did not know by now that the Xia Capital was the toughest bone on the other side to chew through? It had the greatest concentration of troops in all Eastern Xia, the strongest military equipment, and the largest number of high-level experts and commanders. And on top of that, every time the city was defended, that little girl would stand atop the wall personally directing the battle as though she did not care whether she lived or died. Was it really supposed to be that easy to attack?

But Marquis Wenchang’s status was simply too exalted. Not only did he bear the surname Yao, his talent was also second to none. It was said that at fifteen he had already comprehended and passed through nine Body Tribulations. After that his rise became unstoppable: thunder tribulation at eighteen, Dao-Origin at twenty, and by twenty-two he had already condensed a divine pool and become an Immortal Venerable. He had entered under the sect master of Qianyuan Sect and was one of the truly famous monstrous prodigies of this generation in the imperial court.

So Dou Wenshi did not dare show the slightest displeasure. He could only smile obsequiously and go along with Marquis Wenchang’s line of thought. “Well… naturally, that is because this general has no capable people under his command, and I myself am dull-witted and poorly endowed. I truly have no way to flatten the Eastern Bastion.”

Then his tone shifted and his expression sharpened. “But if my division were fortunate enough to come under Marquis Wenchang’s command, then I dare say we would definitely take the Eastern Bastion fortress within half a year!”

“At that time, this general will gladly follow Your Lordship in trampling Zhengyuan Palace flat, capturing the false empress, and purging treacherous evil! I would offer up all my cultivation and all my qi and blood, all for the restoration of Great Yu’s glorious foundation!”

“Hahaha! Good!”

The young scholar had been wearing a dark expression a moment ago, but upon hearing this, he instantly felt pleased and gratified. Laughing loudly, he voiced his approval.

“Well now, Dou Wenshi. You haven’t accomplished much real work since landing in Nankai, but you’ve certainly learned how to kiss up from all those old camp hands.” First he laid bare Dou Wenshi’s motives in a single sentence, making the latter’s expression flicker slightly. Then he looked proudly at the looming outline of the Great Bastion and raised his chin a little. “But this time, you’re actually not wrong.”

“Four years ago, when my master and I came here to assist, we pressured that Huang Qian so hard he only dared hide like a turtle in its shell.”

“Four years later, I have inherited the divine pool of a senior predecessor from my Dao lineage. My attainments are complete. I alone now equal what my master and I could accomplish together back then!”

At this point, two sharp gleams burst from Marquis Wenchang’s eyes.

“This time, my father and my master allowed me to lead troops here for one purpose only: to strike now, at the start of spring when the snow is thawing, and smash those Xia people by brute force while their defenses are thin!”

“When the time comes, I will personally capture that false empress of the Xia people alive, strip off her clothes, cut off her hands and feet, eat her lungs, then spear her corpse up on a military banner. At every place we pass, I will hang her out for all to see, so the Xia people can learn what humiliation means!”

By the end, Marquis Wenchang’s voice had turned cold and sinister, as though it had erupted from the depths of the Nine Netherworlds. Dou Wenshi felt a chill in his heart just listening to him, and even the trusted followers and attendants behind him felt gooseflesh rise under their clothes.

Of course, they knew perfectly well why Marquis Wenchang bore such hatred.

The truth was that four years ago, when Marquis Wenchang came to supervise the southern front under the leadership of his master, the sect master of Qianyuan Sect, he caught sight of the false empress of Eastern Xia standing atop the city wall through a hundred meters of bloody mist. Her bright red phoenix robe was whipped by the gale, outlining her figure. She had a bow on her back and a sword in hand, all valor and brilliance. At first sight, Marquis Wenchang lost his heart to her and tried to approach her amid the battle.

That battlefield had been utter chaos. Not all of them had been there at the time, so they did not know the exact details. They had only heard that Marquis Wenchang had not even lasted three moves against the false empress of Eastern Xia before she beat him to his knees, then slapped his face with her sword hundreds of times. In the end, had the sect master of Qianyuan not intervened in fury and rescued him, Marquis Wenchang would have been cut down by her after suffering the utmost humiliation.

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So naturally, he had never forgotten revenge.

Breaking the Great Bastion wall of Eastern Xia and capturing the false empress of Eastern Xia alive to avenge himself had likely become a mental barrier on Marquis Wenchang’s path of cultivation.

As the commander of Nankai, Dou Wenshi was the one responsible for directing the maintenance and repair of Nankai City, so of course he knew about all this. He hurriedly changed the subject and nodded repeatedly. “Exactly…! When the time comes, those lowly Xia people will definitely learn their lesson!”

“Men!” he shouted, hurriedly issuing another order. “Bring up the offerings! Quickly!”

“Bring up the offerings!”

“Bring up the offerings!”

The orders rang out one after another. Very soon, a group of men in official military uniforms came up onto the city wall carrying a row of wooden cangues. Beside them came several servants carrying huge trays, each covered by a carved crystal dome of luminous blue, making it impossible to see what was inside.

But as they drew closer, the things mounted in those wooden cangues became clear.

They were boys and girls about sixteen years old. Every one of them had had their hands and feet chopped off. Chains had been hooked into the severed stumps and embedded into the wooden cangues, forcing their remaining bodies and faces to be displayed for the Northern Yu cultivators to inspect and comment on at will.

And as the soldiers hung the cangues on the city wall, set the enormous trays beneath them, and lifted away the covers, what lay inside proved to be neatly washed hands and feet, severed one by one. There was no need to say whose they were. They belonged to these wretched “offerings.”

“The quality of this batch of offerings is not bad.”

Marquis Wenchang’s gaze followed the cangues as they moved. Though the boys and girls all wore ashen expressions and had the vacant, hopeless look of the broken-minded, each of them had red lips and white teeth, and had been scrubbed and groomed with great care. He nodded in full approval.

“Not at all!” Dou Wenshi’s heart finally settled back into place, but he still spoke with feigned humility.

“After all, Your Lordship is the number one genius in all Great Yu under the age of thirty, with every hope of entering the Sacred Court after the Old Venerable Saint and the two Venerable Saints Zhao and Wu! Naturally, the quality of the offerings has to match Your Lordship’s status!”

“Exactly!” Marquis Wenchang’s attendants chimed in at once.

“Your Lordship becoming a Venerable Saint is already a certainty! What is Zhao Feng? What is Wu Yuan? Once Your Lordship breaks through this mental barrier, your cultivation will soar to the heavens, and you’ll grind them beneath your feet in no time!”

“Hmph…” Marquis Wenchang put on a disdainful look, but he only held it for less than three seconds before the corners of his mouth rose and he began arrogantly enjoying the praise.

“Pah!”

Just then, a sharp rebuke suddenly flew over.

Everyone turned and found that the voice had come from one of the boys.

That boy had a somewhat feminine face. He too had been turned into a limbless stump and hung in a cangue, but unlike his dead-eyed companions, he glared over with fury blazing in his eyes, hurling out crisp, ringing curses.

“What Venerable Saint? What prodigy?”

“You’re nothing but a pack of idiots and trash who got crushed under the High Emperor’s heel!”

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“When the High Emperor was alive, who dared call himself a prodigy in front of her?”

“You filthy maggots who don’t know the height of heaven or the depth of earth, who betrayed the human race and the human path! Every one of you looks like a proper human on the outside, but you’re not fit to see your own reflections even in your own piss!”

You insolent brat!

At his rebuke, the faces of the officials and cultivators on the city wall all changed.

Because by sheer, terrible luck, he had struck exactly at the deepest pain in every one of their hearts.

Northern Yu and Profound Xia might have their own Heaven’s Pride Lists and Venerable Lists now, with countless names arranged upon them, but in truth those lists, along with the whole notion of “prodigies,” had been a joke ten years ago.

Why?

Because a single young woman had burst into the world. In one short year, at the tender age of eighteen, she attained the supreme Dao Realm. Not only did she personally slay Pang Tiandao, the false master of the Sacred Court, she also intercepted and slew the soul of Blood Heaven with one person and one sword, then created a new method that remade the fate of Great Yu Sword Dao itself. With a single decree, she established the order of the Heavenly Dao!

Even though the main world was still being affected by the tides of the Void Tribulation, and many rules had been forced to change, the reason earth was still earth, heaven still heaven, and the sun and moon still the sun and moon, was because of the force of her decree!

With achievements like that, with deeds like that, who dared stand shoulder to shoulder with her and presumptuously call himself a prodigy?

No one!

Not a single one!

Before Year One of Chaos, if one looked back over decades, centuries, or millennia, every time the realm descended into turmoil there would inevitably be rising heroes and outstanding figures dancing onto the stage together. Name after name would ascend into the halls of history, standing alongside countless predecessors, blazing with glory and brilliance.

And after Year One of Chaos, in these past ten years, heroes had risen in clusters again. Every race, every sect, every dojo had produced prodigies in endless succession. What a glittering, galaxy-like flourishing age it was. A great age of contention!

But only around Year One of Chaos, in that brief span of half a year to a year, the stars dimmed, and almost no names were worth recording.

Why?

Was it because the prodigies and heroes of that era were not strong enough?

Almost certainly not!

Everyone knew it. Even people like them, her enemies, understood it perfectly well in their hearts. It was because one person had been born into the same era as all those prodigies and heroes.

Emperor Xiang!

As long as she existed, her radiance was blinding enough to eclipse the light of every other star!

Had Heaven not given birth to Emperor Xiang, the human path would have been an endless night for all ages!

That judgment, forged from the voices of countless people across countless strata of society, was like an unrivaled divine weapon, like the scar cut by a stroke from such a weapon. It had carved itself deep into their hearts, and even now it had not healed!

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Because it could not be refuted.

Achievements like hers. A realm like hers.

No matter how conceited or arrogant a person was, they could not refute it!

Everyone’s faces turned iron-blue.

The boy’s words made all their earlier praise sound like the babbling of stage clowns, as though they only dared boast and contend in the era after that person had passed from the world.

Marquis Wenchang in particular had gone stiff-faced, the skin of his face twitching. One look was enough to tell that his rage had reached the limit. In another moment, he would definitely deal with this stupid brat personally.

“Well, well, boy…”

Marquis Wenchang strode up to the youth, glanced at the tray beside him, and said with a sneer, “Do you know what fate awaits you next?”

The boy returned his sneer. “Nothing more than having our severed hands and feet fed to the demon beasts you raise right in front of us, then our bellies split open and our livers taken out for you to eat, after which our skin and bones will be stripped away and fused into this place as building material for the city.”

As he spoke, a fierce gust blew past, carrying an overpowering stench of blood and clearing away a little of the thick bloody mist, revealing what was embedded in the materials of the city wall.

It was human bones.

One hardened skeleton after another!

Hundreds of thousands of them, perhaps even millions, cast together with stone and steel, forming the fortress walls of Nankai City!

“You know all that, and yet you’re not afraid?”

Light flashed in Marquis Wenchang’s eyes. “You’re about to die, and you’ll die after suffering every humiliation imaginable! You won’t beg for mercy? You still dare provoke me?”

He gave a hard wave of his hand and said disdainfully, “Originally, I meant to kill you. But now I’ve changed my mind.”

“As long as you admit right now that what you said just now was wrong, that Emperor Xiang was nothing but a lucky opportunist who rose in a single step by obtaining the Xuandi inheritance, and that the so-called Eastern Xia Imperial Court is merely a false-imperial regime built by borrowing her name, a regime that not only falls short of my Great Yu in legitimacy, but is inferior even to Profound Xia in the west… then I will spare you. Not only will I refrain from eating you, I’ll even restore your hands and feet and let you go back to live a comfortable life.”

“Well?” He narrowed his eyes at the boy’s face. “What do you choose?”

There could actually be such a good deal?

Upon hearing this, the other boys and girls nearby were stunned for a moment, then all went mad.

“Your Lordship! Me!”

“Choose me, Your Lordship!”

“That nonsense about Emperor Xiang attaining the Dao in one year is ridiculously exaggerated! It’s obviously fabricated by people who doctored the historical record! How could it compare to Your Lordship’s talent!”

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“Your Lordship is ten thousand times greater than Emperor Xiang! This servant girl is willing to serve Your Lordship for life! I only beg Your Lordship to show mercy and spare me!”

“Heh…” Seeing that scene, Marquis Wenchang immediately revealed a smug smile and turned his head to look again at the defiant boy.

Then he froze.

The boy had not softened and begged for mercy like his companions. The mockery in his eyes had only deepened.

“You people still claim to be human, to be cultivators of the human race, but in truth you’ve willingly thrown in your lot with the voidfiends. You’ve been corrupted by demonic aura. You’ve learned to drink human blood, eat human flesh, and use humans as sacrifices.”

“The Master said that people without virtue do not count as people. No matter how human they look, they are only demon beasts.”

“I’m amazed you can even speak human language, because you don’t deserve to speak it. You don’t even deserve clothes. You belong wallowing in piss and shit, to be slaughtered like livestock by real human beings…”

“That’s enough!”

Marquis Wenchang exploded in rage.

At last, his patience was exhausted. He lunged for the hateful boy, determined to slice open his belly with his own hand, drink his blood fresh, and devour his flesh raw!

The boy resigned himself and closed his eyes, ready to meet the fate laid out for him.

Snick!

Suddenly, he heard a faint sound in his ear. Before he could even open his eyes, a spray of hot liquid tinged with the smell of blood splashed down over him, almost drenching his head and face.

What happened?

The boy opened his eyes in shock and saw Marquis Wenchang staring in stunned disbelief. The right arm he had thrust forward had been severed cleanly at the elbow, and hot blood was still spraying from the stump.

“So many gathered in one place?”

“Good. That saves me the trouble of searching for them.”

Then the boy heard a woman’s voice from above, from the top of the city wall. It was cold and clear and yet exquisitely pleasant, as though someone were standing up there speaking down to the evil cultivators below.

Who was it?

The boy craned his head up desperately, trying to see who would dare do such a thing.

But every angle was blocked by the wall above.

He could hear the voice, but not see the speaker.

The only thing he could see was the shock-filled terror in the eyes of the evil cultivators before him, as if they had seen a vengeful ghost.