Volume 5, Chapter 67 – Bringing Them Into the Fold

Hu Wenping and his group never truly lived to see tomorrow’s sun.

Aside from Tian Yaozhong of White Cloud Academy, the gaunt man who had argued with the round-faced woman earlier, everyone else gradually lost their reason amid the increasingly fierce and uncontrollable “mutual denunciations.” What should have remained a battle of words turned into hand-to-hand violence.

Perhaps this could only be blamed on how thoroughly Hu Wenping had prepared. Just as he understood perfectly that if he failed to do his part, the others would sell him out at once, there was no way he would not have prepared a backup plan against exactly that possibility.

So when Hu Wenping, in a stiff voice, began confessing certain matters one by one, word by word, those scholars who had been driven into a corner with no way to defend themselves could no longer maintain their usual composure.

The first to pounce was the round-faced woman, Fu Guangxian. She gave Hu Wenping some trouble, clawing several strips of flesh right off his face and letting out a horrifying shriek sharp enough to stop a crying child on the spot.

Hu Wenping drove a kick into her stomach. There was a stab and a yank. When he drew back his foot, a sprung dagger jutted from the toe of his shoe. Then he watched as the round-faced woman was split open, her guts and reeking innards spilling all over the floor.

The scene was no less gruesome than a slaughterhouse. Under normal circumstances, these cultured people who preached that “a gentleman keeps away from the kitchen” would have been sick with disgust. They would have vomited on the spot and weakly condemned Hu Wenping for being bloody and violent.

But this time, as even more terrible consequences began brewing in their hearts, they suddenly discovered that the scene they normally detested no longer seemed all that nauseating.

Hu Wenping’s very existence had become an obstacle to their one overriding premise: they had to survive. They had to overcome everything and find a way to shut him up before he exposed their own affairs.

After all, Her Majesty had shown no reaction to what Fu Guangxian had done. Perhaps that in itself was tacit permission, permission for them to carry out their denunciations in the most direct way possible.

Once things reached this stage, the situation was completely out of control.

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From the elevated vantage point where Bai Zhuqing stood, all she could see was a pack of refined scholars gone mad. First they tried to use their gathered, chaotic clamor to drown out the things Hu Wenping was saying. Then, amid Hu Wenping’s furious roars, they threw themselves at him and buried him beneath layer upon layer of fingers, some slender and soft, others plump and thick.

It was terrifying.

They were plainly only the most ordinary fingers. They held no weapons, and their nails were trimmed with exquisite care, fully reflecting their owners’ comfort and freedom from labor… yet Bai Zhuqing felt that they were more terrifying than the claws of any demon.

And just like that, Hu Wenping was torn apart.

A mob of unarmed scholars gripped his throat, scraped at him with their fingers, and bit into him with their teeth, sending him into death in unbearable agony. Before he died, he suffered immense torment.

The people who killed him did not even have time to celebrate before, in the very next moment, a “voice of denunciation” came from who knew where and snapped that freshly retied string once more.

The chaos continued. Curses, furious rebukes, and screams echoed through the room. In the end, only Tian Yaozhong survived.

But he was barely recognizable as human by then. He had lost one eye, all the fingernails on both hands had been torn off, one of his hands was bent backward at an unnatural angle, and his entire body was covered in ripped, mangled flesh, as though he had washed his face in bloody mud.

“This subject… this subject denounces…”

He had forgotten who he was, and he had also forgotten what he had originally wanted to do. All that remained was instinct, driving him to drop to his knees toward the people above and crawl there on his stomach, continuing in broken fragments to describe the crimes of those corpses.

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“Take him away and have him cleansed. Let him rest for a day, then bring him to see me.”

Bai Xiang gave the order and rose to leave.

This level of bloodshed was nothing to her. Leaving everything else aside, every time she campaigned against a demonic tide, she could create a hellscape far more exaggerated than this.

This was enough.

She had already read their intelligence dossiers in advance. Tian Yaozhong counted as one of the clever ones among them, and he had never committed any truly monstrous evil.

If he was the one who survived, so much the better. Once he regained his senses, he could be fully brought into the fold and made into a trusted confidant to work for Qing’er.

With that, Bai Xiang left, handing everything over to Bai Zhuqing to deal with.

Bai Zhuqing stared deeply at her retreating figure, wondering whether the reason those people had gradually lost their minds had anything to do with her elder sister secretly meddling behind the scenes.

After all, Bai Xiang was far too skilled with “sound.” The closer the “sound” was produced, the more it could influence a person’s emotions.

In the past, that trait had generally been used with Illusory Gods and in explaining qi methods. As she gradually grew stronger, she had even reached the point where a single utterance could impose a decree upon the myriad phenomena of heaven and earth. Affecting a few ordinary mortals who knew nothing of cultivation should not have been difficult.

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Hah… was this her way of getting things started for me?

With a strange sense of being encouraged to go ahead and do it, Bai Zhuqing’s eyes flickered as she began calculating over that joint letter bearing a thousand names.

Time passed, and the night quickly came to an end.

The next day, after finishing her cultivation, Bai Xiang went downstairs to bathe. When she came out in a white robe afterward, she saw Bai Zhuqing asleep at the computer desk, breathing evenly and soundly.

Thanks to Taishang Response, Bai Xiang was not surprised by why she was here. She simply carried her upstairs, removed her dress, shoes, and socks, tucked her into bed, and thoughtfully pulled the covers snug around her.

“Ying ying? Mama~?”

The little White-Ginseng Spirit Fox leaped onto the bed from the side, lay down by the pillow, and stared at its mistress with its tiny nose raised.

“Sleep with her.”

Bai Xiang rubbed the little thing and found its fur truly silky-smooth.

Not growing up might be nice too.

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When the demon clans grow up, they all have to pass a tribulation and take human form. Once they have intelligence, the two of you probably will never be able to be this close again.

Because humans are just that awkward a kind of creature. Some thoughts in their hearts, they are only willing to say to beings that are not their equals.

Then Bai Xiang went back downstairs and began reading through some of the documents Bai Zhuqing had left on the desk.

They were all “government affairs,” and most of them had basically already been handled. They were the distilled essentials after being sorted and consolidated, so she only needed to glance through them in broad strokes.

The first matter was the cleanup after the lecture.

According to the statistics, roughly 960 disciples of the Dao had broken through their realms within a single day after listening to the lecture. This directly produced more than four hundred junior pillars above the seventh layer of Refining Qi, and there were nearly a hundred more False Cores as well.

If the independent cultivators below were counted too, that number would have to be doubled. Nearly all of those who had broken through had left behind names under “Zhang Zaixiang,” and Bai Zhuqing had also ordered people to register every one of them. As soon as they showed themselves again, people could be sent to invite them and draw them under the Imperial Court’s banner.

The little girl had thought things through well. The fact that they had registered their names and bowed in homage showed that, to a certain extent, they had already submitted in heart. Those who liked wealth and status could directly serve the Imperial Court, while those who preferred quiet cultivation could join the Shenming Sword Dao. This matter should not encounter too many twists and turns.

In this way, the Imperial Court would be able to replenish a great deal of manpower in one stroke.

And if those old monsters of the Origin Realm who had also come to listen in secret and likewise gained enormously were counted as well, then that severe shortage of manpower should be greatly alleviated.