Chapter Eighty-Nine: The Massed Dead Bow in Reverence

I left with the peddler, and Qin Zhong hid inside the black sedan chair, too afraid to come out.

The road was silent all the way.

The peddler was already an uncanny man, and his thoughts were even harder to fathom. I had no idea where he meant to take me.

At last, in a stretch of desolate wilderness, he stopped.

He set down the pole on his shoulder, turned back to look at me, and wore an expression so strange I could not read it.

I thought he was about to speak, but instead he turned away again, formed a hand seal, and murmured a spell. Then, in that wasteland, a road suddenly appeared, winding away into the distance.

I knew this road. It was a yellow-earth path, with withered grass on both sides. A gust of cold wind swept past, and white paper offerings scattered across the ground.

This was the road between the living and the dead.

"You may go now. The underworld is no place for you," the peddler said.

"You... weren't you going to settle accounts with me?" I asked.

To be honest, I had never imagined that the peddler, willing to offend the Hall Lord and snatch me from Qin Zhong's grasp, had done so in order to save me. In our village, he had already saved me many times, and so my opinion of him had changed greatly. He seemed always to be looking for a chance to settle accounts with me, yet every time he ended up helping me instead.

The peddler smiled at me. "You want me to settle accounts with you?"

"No, that's not what I meant!" I quickly denied it.

But he only smiled again and said, "Rest assured. I remember the account between us. It's just not time to settle it yet. Your soul has left your body, and the affairs of the living have not yet been resolved. You ought to return and do what you must."

Hearing that, I immediately clasped my hands and bowed. "Thank you for saving my life. I, Lin Yi, will never forget this."

"Enough. Go on," he said.

I nodded and walked along that road between worlds.

The peddler told me that at the end of the path lay the bottom of the White River, and that in White Bridge Town there might be even greater disaster ahead. He told me to be careful. If I were killed again and entered the underworld, he would not save me a second time.

As I was leaving, I asked him, "Weren't you imprisoned?"

The peddler merely gave a faint smile. "The prisons of the underworld, even the eighteenth level of hell, cannot hold me. No matter where I am, I come and go as I please."

His words truly stunned me. He could come and go from the eighteenth level of hell as he pleased. I did not know whether he was boasting, but I became more and more curious. What in the world was his true identity?

Out of curiosity, I asked him again.

Yet he only played coy, saying that he was nothing more than a peddler who traveled between the worlds of the living and the dead, without any special standing. I knew that was only an evasion. This man was so fearsome that even the Hall Lord nearly soiled himself at the sight of him, and the ghost soldiers, with a single glare from him, could be thrown from their horses. No matter what, I could not believe he was merely a peddler.

After parting from him, I kept walking along that road between worlds.

Along the way, white paper offerings kept drifting down. The peddler had once told me that these paper offerings were guides for the road; if one followed them all the way, one could return to the world of the living.

I did not know how long I walked before the road between worlds finally ended.

By then, I was already at the bottom of the White River. I saw that not five paces away from me lay my own body, swaying faintly with the undercurrent on the riverbed.

Seeing this, I was about to return to it when someone seized my wrist.

Turning around, I found it was actually Wanyou.

Wanyou glanced at my body and slowly shook her head. It seemed she did not want me to return to the world of the living just yet. I wanted to ask her why, but underwater I could not seem to speak. Still, her voice rose in my mind: "Leader, this is not yet the time for your return. Your body has not healed. You must wait a little longer."

"All right."

I answered, and unexpectedly, even in my soul form, communication was possible beneath the water.

"Leader, I came down the White River to scout the way, and as expected, I found something strange beneath it. Ma Zhenxing's resurrection was not true resurrection at all. He absorbed the corpse aura from the riverbed and became a zombie. Ahead there is a stone pagoda, and the Corpse King is sealed within it," Wanyou said.

Ma Zhenxing's return had indeed been strange. So that was it: he had become a zombie. No wonder, on the ritual platform, all the other elders had taken action while he merely watched everything unfold without the slightest reaction.

After that, Wanyou led me downstream.

Just then, the river suddenly roiled with a dark undercurrent, and both Wanyou and I were unable to steady ourselves on the riverbed. Then, from somewhere not far off, came the sharp sound of something breaking.

"What happened?" I asked.

Wanyou did not answer. We immediately swam toward the sound.

The riverbed was strewn with corpses, and none of them showed the slightest sign of decay. Water plants had crawled all over them, and their clothing ranged across every dynasty. The only strange thing was that they were all kneeling toward one direction.

At the place where these corpses knelt stood a stone pagoda.

"That pagoda?" I asked.

Wanyou nodded. The water here was murky beyond measure, and only the outline of the pagoda could be made out.

When the filth settled a little, the pagoda became visible. Half of it was buried in silt, half exposed. It had once been bound with bronze chains, but every one of them had now snapped.

So this was the breaking sound just now.

"One of the White Bridge structures has collapsed. The Nine-Dragon Suppression Formation has lost one of its dragons, and it can no longer hold the Corpse King. The Corpse King has already broken out of the pagoda!" Wanyou said.

"Who is sealed in this pagoda? Is it the thousand-year Corpse King?" I asked.

Wanyou shook her head and said, "Not the thousand-year Corpse King, but something even more terrifying. Leader, surely you know that the legendary Four Great Corpse Kings are the ancestors of all zombies. What is sealed in this pagoda is one of those four. However, the corpse aura and baleful energy in the river are too heavy, and the water is too filthy. I cannot tell which one of the four it is."

I had originally guessed that what was sealed beneath the water might be the thousand-year Corpse King, after all only something of that level would be worthy of the Nine-Dragon Suppression Formation. I had never expected it to be one of the legendary Four Great Corpse Kings.

The Four Great Corpse Kings of legend were Jianggui, Houqing, Hannya, and General Shi. It was said that whichever of the four emerged would bring about a terrifying catastrophe.

Wanyou said that, by rights, Ma Zhenlei alone did not have the ability to destroy the Nine-Dragon Suppression Formation.

But when Ma Zhenlei tried to take my life, my blood splashed onto White Bridge, and only then was the bridge ruined and the Nine-Dragon Suppression Formation broken.

I asked why my blood could break that formation.

Wanyou only shook her head, saying that she did not know either.

Still, Ma Zhenlei using my blood to break the Nine-Dragon Suppression Formation was merely an accident. The Ma family had long harbored ambition. Their flattery toward the Corpse King beneath the formation, the River God wedding, and the raising of the Corpse King with a hundred children of yin and yang were all because Mao Mountain had methods for raising corpses. Ma Zhenlei wanted to seize that Corpse King for himself and use it for his own ends.

If the Corpse King were truly made to serve them, then perhaps the whole world would become like White Bridge Town.

Ma Zhenlei's ambition was truly monstrous.

After Wanyou arrived in White Bridge Town, she had already made contact with Granny Wang. The two of them knew Ma family's scheme, and so under the guise of the River God wedding, Wanyou entered the water. Her purpose was to prevent the Corpse King from breaking the stone pagoda. Unfortunately, Ma Zhenlei's unintended act destroyed the Nine-Dragon Suppression Formation.

Without that formation, the Corpse King's emergence was only a matter of time and could not be stopped.

No wonder.

When I was leaving the underworld, the peddler had said that an even greater disaster was about to befall White Bridge Town. I had thought Ma Zhenlei alone was already a grave calamity, but I never imagined the thing he meant was this legendary king of zombies.

Then I suddenly thought of something. When Ma Zhenlei killed me, Granny Wang was also injured by him and fell into the water. So I asked Wanyou whether she had seen Granny Wang. Before Wanyou could answer, I saw a pale shadow drift over. She said, "Child, I am here."

It was Granny Wang's soul. She too had been killed by Ma Zhenlei.

"Granny Wang, you..."

Granny Wang waved a hand and said, "Child, don't worry. I am fine. I've only changed the way I live, that's all. Wasn't your grandfather the same?" Her meaning was clear: she too could no longer return to the world of the living.

At that very moment, the water beneath us suddenly churned. The turbid water surged in every direction, and corpse aura and baleful force boiled through the river.

The kneeling corpses below us all suddenly began to move.

"Ten Thousand Corpses Paying Homage. These submerged bodies have come to life. They must be obeying the Corpse King's command!" Granny Wang said with a frown.

"Quick, get to shore and stop these zombies, or the consequences will be endless," Wanyou said.

I nodded as well.

Then we immediately fought our way upstream, avoiding the places thick with corpses, and returned to where my body had sunk into the water. My body had not been invaded by corpse aura or baleful force. When we found it, Wanyou went over to check and said, "It's all right now."

Then she formed a hand seal.

A wisp of energy swept my soul away and drew it into the center of my body between the brows.

I remembered that my shoulder and the space between my brows had both been shattered by Ma Zhenlei's Mao Mountain forbidden art. If I returned to the world of the living like this, wouldn't I still be a cripple?

But when my soul returned to my body, I discovered that was not the case.

Aside from a slight ache in my shoulder, my injuries had fully recovered. Moreover, I could feel that my primordial spirit was still intact and had not been shattered.

I held my breath and, together with Wanyou and Granny Wang, went up to shore.

By then, many zombies had already climbed ashore and were crawling toward the town. At first they crawled, but before long they began to walk upright, all of them making that eerie clicking sound from their throats, enough to make one's scalp tingle.