Chapter Ninety-Four: Blood for Blood

At once, the wind rose in all directions.

The forest roared and rustled. Under the force of my voice, the thousand-year-old pines within it trembled faintly.

Before leaving the woods, I had asked the forest spirit whether it knew anything about my father. Though my mother had told me to stop investigating, I could not bear it for her sake. Who was he, that when my mother suffered such misery, when she lay on the brink of death, he never once appeared?

Was he even a man?

Yet the forest spirit said it knew nothing. It had long lived near the bank of White Dragon Pool, right next door to my mother, and had never heard the slightest thing about my father. It was not that it had never asked. It had. But after that, my mother either said nothing, or else grew furious with the might of a dragon, and it did not dare ask further.

My mother refused to speak of that man, refused to let me investigate him, and said it was all so that I might live well and live on. Why, in the end?

Could it be that my father was some utterly vile fiend who would kill me?

After parting from the forest spirit, I drifted along in a daze, my thoughts in complete disorder.

I did not know when I had left the woods.

Looking out, the once vast and boundless White Dragon Pool had utterly dried up. Bronze chains lay tangled and crisscrossed across the riverbed, though most had already snapped apart.

I stood beneath the mountains, beside White Dragon Pool, and everything that had just happened seemed like a dream. If it truly had been a dream, then when I awoke, White Dragon Pool would still be White Dragon Pool, and she would still be she. Even if I had never met her again, so long as she lived well, how wonderful that would have been.

While my mind was in turmoil, a wind suddenly rose.

At first I thought it was only wind, but unexpectedly, that gale carried with it clusters of black vapor. Those dark mists wrapped themselves around every willow tree along both banks of White Dragon Pool.

Wherever the black mist passed, the leaves of more than a dozen willows were stripped away.

The once-living trees withered and died in an instant.

That mass of black vapor swept up countless willow leaves, its dim light flickering as all of them came slashing toward me from every direction like razor-sharp flying blades.

From that attack alone, I knew it was Ma Zhenlei.

I rose to my feet and clenched my fist. In that instant, the aura all over my body erupted with fury, driving back the incoming willow leaves and scattering them across the ground.

Then, more than ten yards ahead of me, a man stood there. It was Ma Zhenlei.

The moment I came out of the mountains, I ran into him there. It was not hard to guess that perhaps he had been the one who slaughtered White Purity Temple, murdered the mistress of Azure Robe Temple, and killed my mother as well.

“Why are you here?” I fixed my eyes on him and asked.

“Lin Yi, you ruined my Ma family. Why should I not be here?” he said. “Still, I never expected you to be the master of the Ghost Path. But in my view, the famed Ghost Path master, once said to possess talent that astonished all Three Realms and Six Paths, has utterly disgraced that reputation in your hands. You ask me why I am here? Fine, then I shall tell you. Because I calculated that today is the day you, Lin Yi, die.”

At that moment, two other men emerged from the forest as well. I did not know them.

One of them said, “Lin Yi, who would have thought you were the Ghost Path master? But to imagine that you could restore the Ghost Path—how laughably naive. Fellow Daoist Zhang, why don’t we sit here and see what kind of joke the current Ghost Path master makes of himself on the road to restoration? Ha-ha-ha...”

“Fellow Daoist Qiu, let us wait and see. Please, sit!” the other replied.

The two of them sat down by the riverbank, as if preparing to enjoy a spectacle.

“Who killed the mistress of Azure Robe Temple?” I asked. “Which one of you was it?”

At that, one of them stood up, clasped his hands, and bowed in a manner that made him look like a cultured scoundrel.

“I, an unworthy man, am Qiu Yuanzhen, chief disciple of the Complete Truth School,” he said. “Beneath White Dragon Pool was imprisoned a vile dragon to begin with. Taking it and making use of it was only proper. Who could have known that the mistress of Azure Robe Temple was so obstinate? I had no choice but to end her life.”

“And who killed the female Daoists with no arts to defend themselves?” I asked again.

The other man also stood.

“I, an unworthy man, am Zhang Yu, chief disciple of Dragon-Tiger Mountain,” he said. “White Purity Temple originally belonged to Dragon-Tiger Mountain and lived under our protection. The chief disciple of Dragon-Tiger Mountain came in person, and they dared shut me out. Those female Daoists deserved to die.”

“Who killed the white dragon beneath White Dragon Pool?” I asked once more.

“That...” Qiu Yuanzhen said. “We two are hardly capable of that.”

Ma Zhenlei gave a cold smile. “I was the one who killed it. I took its dragon essence, but I never expected it would die so quickly. That white dragon really was weak. I do wonder what kind of power its dragon essence still holds.”

“Where is the dragon essence?” I asked.

I stared coldly at Ma Zhenlei.

So it really had been her who killed my mother.

“Where the dragon essence is, I naturally cannot tell you,” Ma Zhenlei said. “You two saw it, did you not? This Ghost Path fellow is truly full of ambition. If we had not arrived first, I fear he would already have seized the dragon essence!”

“Master Ma, kill him, and we can return to the mountain to report sooner!” Qiu Yuanzhen said.

The fire within me had already begun to blaze.

Ma Zhenlei had once nearly taken my life. Now he had stolen my mother’s dragon essence and caused her death. Ma Zhenlei, today, I, Lin Yi, will make you pay in blood for blood.

My fists clenched, and dark force gathered under my feet.

Seeing this, Ma Zhenlei let out a cold laugh. Though he had only one arm, he unleashed the Blood-Sacrifice Five-Thunder Palm Seal at once.

But I had already memorized his footwork. He had no chance of striking me. I moved against his steps, gathered my power in a single punch, and from an angle he could not avoid, smashed it into his back.

His Five-Thunder Palm, however formidable its momentum, could not injure me in the slightest.

Ma Zhenlei staggered from my blow, even drawing a trace of blood from the corner of his mouth.

When Zhang Yu and Qiu Yuanzhen saw this, the smugness on their faces vanished at once. They both sprang to their feet.

“Master Ma, are you all right?” Zhang Yu asked.

Ma Zhenlei ignored them both. Raising a hand, he wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth and looked at the smear on his fingers with a cold smile.

Then he lifted his head.

His eyes once again turned pitch black.

Within those eyes, wisps of black smoke threaded and coiled, and even his lips and fingernails returned to a jet-black color. This was a forbidden art of Mount Mao. I knew it, and so did those two men of the Daoist world.

“Master Ma, you... how can you use the forbidden arts of Mount Mao?” Zhang Yu stammered, nearly unable to speak.

On the other side, Qiu Yuanzhen was already retreating step by step, his lips trembling as he said in a low voice, “Fellow Daoist Zhang, I heard that the former head of the Mount Mao school died under strange circumstances because he was killed by the forbidden arts of Mount Mao!”

“What?” Zhang Yu was nearly terrified out of his wits.

No wonder the two of them had addressed Ma Zhenlei as master. It turned out that after escaping from White Bridge Town, he had gone straight to Mount Mao, killed the Mount Mao patriarch, and seized the position for himself.

Zhang Yu and Qiu Yuanzhen naturally understood how grave the matter was, and they took off running.

But before they had gone even a few steps, Ma Zhenlei transformed into a wisp of black mist and appeared in front of them, blocking their path.

“Two fellow Daoists, did you not want to watch a good show? Sit down.”

“Fine, sit... sit!”

The two of them had no choice but to sit down in terror and dread. Since they now knew the truth that Ma Zhenlei had killed the Mount Mao patriarch, where could there possibly still be any escape for them?

After making the two of them sit, he turned to me.

“Lin Yi, do not think that because you broke my Five-Thunder Palm Seal, you can defeat me!”

I wasted no words on him. The fury had already swallowed me whole. I formed the hand seal I had realized through my own innate nature, gathered the power of my primordial spirit, and hurled my fist at Ma Zhenlei.

But in that very process, I suddenly realized that my left and right hands had turned into dragon claws of a crimson red, and the white scales had also become red as blood.

This was not part of my innate seal.

Beyond that, everything in my field of vision had also turned blood-red.

At that moment, there was nothing in my mind but slaughter.

I did not know what state I was in now. Only Ma Zhenlei, too, showed a look of shock.

Seeing me charge at him, he let out a furious roar in reply.

A Five-Thunder Palm Seal wrapped in black mist and crimson lightning came crashing straight toward me. This was the Blood-Sacrifice Five-Thunder Palm Seal under the forbidden arts of Mount Mao, sinister and condensed with an incomparably fierce killing power.

And I, with nothing else in my heart, met it with a single punch.

At that strike, a wave of force surged outward, sending Zhang Yu and Qiu Yuanzhen flying away, while Ma Zhenlei was blasted back by hundreds of paces.

By the time he steadied himself, I was already before him.

“I want you to pay with your life for my mother!”

With a wild roar, I thrust out my palm. Ma Zhenlei had nowhere to dodge. My strike slammed into his chest and caved it in. Even Ma Zhenlei, empowered by the forbidden arts of Mount Mao, could not withstand that palm of mine, and his entire face twisted horribly.