43 Chapter 43

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“Even if Scarlet Ibis is merely playing the god and deceiving people, the ones he fools are beings of the Bone-Illuminating Realm. What has that to do with the mortal world? If you want to replace him, then say so. Why pretend you’re ridding the people of a scourge?”

Xie Chang’an pierced straight through her honeyed words.

Jade Urge did not bother with coyness. “Since he can put on a monk’s robes and shamelessly accept the worship of the masses, why can’t I do the same, as a fellow demon cultivator? Scarlet Ibis’s birthday is in three days. His Unlit Heaven will celebrate in grand fashion, and we can slip inside and wait for a chance to seize him. You take your Golden Thread Robe, I attend to my own business. We each get what we want—wouldn’t that be the best of both worlds?”

Xie Chang’an nodded. “That sounds reasonable enough. Then why haven’t you let my companion in? Are you planning to use him as a hostage?”

“What?”

Jade Urge looked genuinely startled.

“I assumed you had him keeping watch outside.”

Zhe Er had been gone for far too long. Even if he had merely wandered around nearby, he should have had time to count every branch on every tree trunk. Yet he still had not returned. Clearly, something was wrong.

The two of them realized the situation was amiss and went outside the hollow to look for him.

Without the shelter of the tree hollow, the chill wind immediately swept in from all directions.

Even Jade Urge, a demon cultivator who had dwelled in the Bone-Illuminating Realm for many years, found it difficult to endure. She instinctively hunched her body slightly.

“I forgot to tell you. The one controlling those dead spirits is very likely named Murong, and he is a demon cultivator as well. He possesses an extraordinarily powerful magical treasure. The moment his horn sounds, every corpse obeys his command. Sister, since you’re a ghost yourself, you must be careful. I hear that he is driving those dead souls to Scarlet Ibis’s birthday celebration.”

They searched the surrounding area, but there was no sign of Zhe Er. Jade Urge grew troubled, as though she had yet to gather all her people and had already suffered a disastrous setback before setting out.

“This Undying Marsh is too far from their territory. They normally wouldn’t come here, but it’s hard to say. You disturbed those dead souls; perhaps Murong flew into a rage and came after you.”

Xie Chang’an frowned slightly. Ever since leaving the tree hollow, she had felt as though someone was watching her from the shadows. Yet apart from Jade Urge, there was no one around.

Her thoughts stirred. She simply summoned the Heaven-Retaining Sword and slashed through the air ahead.

Sword energy flashed like a rainbow, forcing the chill wind aside.

The tree trunk before them split with a sharp crack.

There was no one there.

Had she been mistaken? She turned her head, lost in thought.

Jade Urge’s eyes flickered. “Sister, that sword technique of yours is truly exquisite. You must have been a renowned cultivator in life, yes?”

Xie Chang’an cut her off. “You didn’t sense it?”

Jade Urge blinked. “Sense what?”

“There’s someone nearby.”

Jade Urge grew wary as well and glanced in every direction.

“Could it be a wandering ghost? There are a few remnant souls sheltering in those hollows.”

“No. It’s a more dangerous presence.”

Jade Urge sensed nothing at all. Suspecting that Xie Chang’an was simply trying to frighten her, she smiled and touched the dry, yellowed hair at her temples. She was about to say something when she casually glanced behind her—

And suddenly noticed a human-shaped figure hanging from a tree not far away.

“Is that the person you’re looking for?”

The figure had been obscured by the withered branches of other trees and happened to be caught in a blind spot created by an outcropping of rock. They had not noticed it before.

But Xie Chang’an saw the figure swaying in the cold wind. It had already been drained dry, leaving behind nothing but shriveled human skin. Her heart sank, and she hurried over.

The Heaven-Retaining Sword shot forth, severing the rope suspending the figure from the trunk.

The body fell limply to the ground.

The swordlight whirled back into its mistress’s hand.

Jade Urge followed behind, crying out dramatically.

“Oh, what a handsome young man he was—how did he end up like this?”

Though she shouted wildly, her vigilance had already risen to its highest level, and she was secretly on guard.

At that moment, the ground suddenly began to tremble. The black earth rapidly softened, instantly swallowing both their feet. Black flames erupted from various places across the ground, sinister and幽 dark, as though capable of burning every living thing in the world to nothing.

Jade Urge’s expression changed drastically.

“Bad news! It’s earthfire! How can there be earthfire at this hour?!”

Seeing Jade Urge panic and dart about in terror, Xie Chang’an knew that the earthfire was no ordinary flame.

She did not know whether earthfire could harm a ghost, so she followed Jade Urge and tried her best not to touch it. Yet the flames had no discernible pattern. One moment they burst up before them; the next they erupted from the ground behind them. As long as they remained within the Undying Marsh, the earthfire continued to appear at intervals, burning for a short while before vanishing without a trace.

Xie Chang’an suspected that the reason only bare trunks and dead branches remained here was that they had all been burned by the earthfire.

Her thoughts raced. She summoned the Heaven-Retaining Sword and struck at a patch of earthfire that had just emerged ahead.

The sword energy passed straight through the black flames. The two seemed entirely unrelated, and her attack struck nothing.

“Stop wasting your effort. It’s useless. Find the nearest tree hollow and get inside!”

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Jade Urge tossed out those words and fled for safety. She ran so quickly that one of her sleeves caught on a tongue of earthfire. The entire sleeve, along with the flesh beneath it, was devoured by the black flames in an instant.

Without the slightest hesitation, she brought her hand down like a blade and severed the entire arm, throwing it away.

Though the body she wore was not her original one, she could still feel pain while inhabiting the skin. This act was no different from cutting off her own arm. Her ruthlessness and decisiveness were plain to see.

Having witnessed the terror of the earthfire with her own eyes, Xie Chang’an followed without hesitation. At last, the two of them took shelter inside a nearby tree hollow.

“Can this fire burn the soul as well?” Xie Chang’an asked.

“It does more than burn souls. Anything it touches, dead or alive, will be reduced to ash before it stops. Only these tree trunks, which grow naturally in the Undying Marsh, can restrain the earthfire.”

Jade Urge leaned against the hollow and slowly caught her breath, her face filled with confusion.

“But the earthfire only appears on nights of the full moon. There are still three days before the full moon. Why has it come early?”

Then she noticed that Xie Chang’an did not look worried and suddenly understood.

“That human skin just now wasn’t his?”

Xie Chang’an gave a quiet affirmative. “It belonged to a broad-faced man with long brows. There was another eye between his brows, outlined in red but unopened.”

“Wailing Wei?” Jade Urge drew in a sharp breath, utterly shocked. “That was the original body of the great demon Wailing Wei. He’s dead?”

Xie Chang’an frowned. “How many great demons are there in this place?”

“There are only four powerful enough to dominate a region: Scarlet Ibis, Murong, Witchsong, and Wailing Wei. The four have always been at odds. Scarlet Ibis pretends to be a Buddha-son and has made himself supreme, while the other three loathe one another as well.”

“How strong was Wailing Wei?”

“To be called a great demon, he naturally possessed profound cultivation. In my judgment, he must have reached at least the perfected Harmonization Realm—equivalent to the Sword Heart Realm among sword cultivators. He was only one step away from entering the Demon Immortal Realm. For someone like that to die out there…”

Jade Urge’s brows drew tightly together, and she said no more.

Xie Chang’an fell into thought as well.

Wailing Wei was dead. Whoever had killed him must have been stronger than he was.

Yet now only a human skin remained, and the murderer was nowhere to be found.

Zhe Er had disappeared too.

A thought flashed through Xie Chang’an’s mind. She seized it, and from it arose an even stranger possibility.

“The angle from which you saw the hanging skin was not especially narrow. When we came over, did you look around?”

Jade Urge was clever. She immediately understood what Xie Chang’an meant.

“I truly didn’t see that skin then!”

The moment she said it, a chill crept up her back.

In other words, the hanging skin had appeared during the brief exchange after they entered the tree hollow.

If Zhe Er had encountered Wailing Wei and the two of them had fought, the disturbance would have been so great that there was no way they could have failed to hear it.

Could the Bone-Illuminating Realm have produced, without anyone knowing, an unfathomably powerful figure capable of killing a great demon without making a sound?

The more Jade Urge thought about it, the more terrified she became.

“You said that the earthfire appears every full-moon night, and that it should not come until three days from now?” Xie Chang’an asked again.

Jade Urge was growing impatient. “Yes. What about it?”

“Look at the sky outside.”

Jade Urge instinctively raised her head.

The sky was perpetually gray, with neither day nor night, yet at times the sun or moon could still be discerned through gaps in the drifting clouds.

At that moment, a full moon hung high overhead, illuminating the dense fog around them.

“Impossible…” Jade Urge could hardly believe it. There was no way she could have miscalculated the date.

Xie Chang’an spoke slowly. “Have you considered that it isn’t the full moon night that came early, but that although it felt as if only a few moments passed while we were in the tree hollow, three days had actually gone by before we emerged?”

Jade Urge whipped her head around to look at her.

Xie Chang’an remained calm. “Leaping backward into the past or forward into the future sounds absurd, but it is not impossible. I thought that after spending so long in the Bone-Illuminating Realm, you must have seen every strange and unusual thing there is.”

“That’s far too…”

Too bizarre.

“I’ve traveled in and out of the Bone-Illuminating Realm for many years, and I often linger in the Undying Marsh. I’ve never heard that time can leap forward here.”

“But you said it yourself,” Xie Chang’an replied. “The earthfire appears only on nights of the full moon. It has never deviated from that rule. Besides, my companion is gone. He would not have left without a word unless something beyond his control happened to him. And if he had fought someone, there would not have been complete silence. Then there is the skin of that great demon. You know better than I do that Wailing Wei was a great demon of the Bone-Illuminating Realm, yet he died here, and we did not hear the slightest disturbance.”

Jade Urge’s face was deathly pale, her expression taut. What had happened had already exceeded the limits of her understanding, and she hated the feeling of being unable to control anything.

“There is one more way to verify whether we are right,” Xie Chang’an said.

Jade Urge spoke softly. “If we truly arrived three days later all at once, then Scarlet Ibis’s birthday feast should be taking place right now. We’ll know the moment we see it with our own eyes.”

Xie Chang’an nodded. “Then let’s go. You wanted to replace him. Now you needn’t wait any longer.”

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“Aren’t you worried about your companion?” Jade Urge asked.

“If I haven’t seen his corpse, then he should still be safe for the time being. He’ll find a way to come to us. Instead of worrying about that, you should think about how you’re going to take the Buddha-son’s head in front of ten thousand people.”

Jade Urge quickly returned to her former graceful, flirtatious manner, making light of everything.

“Scarlet Ibis is extremely powerful. I can’t kill him alone. I’ll need your help, Sister.”

Xie Chang’an actually had an even more absurd and uncanny suspicion.

Their sudden arrival three days in the future might have been connected to the sword she had just struck toward the Undying Marsh.

The Heaven-Retaining Sword had been forged from the Heaven-Retaining Blade and the God-Eating Mirror.

Zhang Fanruo had once said that the God-Eating Mirror had an extraordinary origin. It could look back into the past and leap into the future, but after being used several times, it had become drained and shattered, allowing it to be easily forged into the Heaven-Retaining Sword.

Now that she thought about it, those words seemed to carry profound meaning.

But she could not be certain that the matter truly had anything to do with the God-Eating Mirror, much less discuss it with Jade Urge. For now, she could only keep the thought to herself.

“Do we need an invitation to attend the feast?” she asked.

“No. But we must cross Bodhi Lake before we can enter Unlit Heaven. On ordinary days, he often gives sermons on the lake to the solitary ghosts and wild demons of the Bone-Illuminating Realm. Today, he has turned the lake into a trial. An ordinary person would never make it across, but with your abilities, Sister, you’ll surely have no trouble.”

“He practices a vow of silence. How can he give sermons?”

Jade Urge smiled. “He can conjure illusions and false visions. He doesn’t need to speak at all. His followers simply enter those illusions on their own and relive their former lives. They cry and laugh, and in the end, he has them firmly under his control.”

Xie Chang’an was somewhat surprised. This man could create one small illusory realm after another, much like the Great Feather Wandering Immortal. His strength was clearly no trifling matter.

“Since we’re attending a feast, we should make some effort with our appearance.”

Jade Urge looked her up and down, somewhat dissatisfied.

“There’s no need to speak of your beauty, Sister, but these clothes are stained all over with blood. They diminish your dignity. Let me tidy you up.”

She produced a sheet of red paper and a pair of scissors. With two quick snips, she cut out the rough shape of a garment, then snapped her fingers. A flame sprang to life. As she set the paper clothing alight, Jade Urge chanted under her breath.

“Lend me the garments of Heaven; grant this paper its transformation!”

She shook the red paper in her hand, and it instantly became a red dress, with both undergarments and outer robes perfectly formed.

Xie Chang’an stared at it. “…Do all your clothes have one sleeve longer than the other?”

Jade Urge flushed with embarrassment and anger. “Are you going to wear it or not? If not, I’m leaving you behind!”

Speechless, Xie Chang’an asked her for another sheet of paper. She cut it anew, burned it, and transformed it into a fresh outfit. She even used the scraps to conceal the broken umbrella, turning it into a red parasol.

The clothing she fashioned was clearly worlds apart from Jade Urge’s. The upper garment was elegant and flowing, no different from something sold in the finest tailor’s shop.

Xie Chang’an had already been beautiful even when covered in bloodstains. Now, with her splendid attire complementing her features, she seemed radiant.

Jade Urge was stunned. She stared at her for a long while.

“Close your mouth,” Xie Chang’an said.

Jade Urge instinctively swallowed and wiped the corner of her lips.

“You can turn paper into horses too?”

“This is basic training for disciples of the Daoist sects.”

Jade Urge was nearly laughing from exasperation at how casually Xie Chang’an had shown off.

“But aren’t you a sword cultivator? If every sword cultivator outside were like you, wouldn’t the whole world be overrun by sword cultivators?”

Her temper had always been poor, yet for some reason, when faced with Xie Chang’an’s countenance, even her sarcastic barbs softened by several degrees.

Xie Chang’an seemed to know exactly what she was thinking. She deliberately curved her lips at Jade Urge and delivered an even more infuriating reply.

“I’m different from other sword cultivators. I’m more powerful.”

The corner of Jade Urge’s mouth twitched. She should never have asked.

“And you? Are you going with me like this?”

At Xie Chang’an’s words, Jade Urge snapped irritably, “Like this. I’ll be your attendant.”

Though she said that, she still shed the skin-clad body with its missing limbs and broken legs, transforming into a fiery fox. She kicked off with her hind legs and bounded straight into Xie Chang’an’s arms.

Ever since awakening from the parasol last time, Xie Chang’an had been able to form a physical body. Thus, unlike when Zhe Er had leaped at her, Jade Urge did not pass straight through her.

“So you’re going to be my little pet.”

Xie Chang’an caught her, a smile curling at the corners of her mouth.

The fox glared at her and pawed several times at her chest with both forepaws, as if digging into the earth.

“Come on, come on!”