Chapter 19 – Awakening

The Male Ghost did not give chase. As the black mist had said, he was now in a ghost’s body — his strength was still weak, and certain techniques he had used in life were no longer available to him. Relentlessly pursuing his quarry would do him no good.

At that moment, the Male Ghost turned his gaze toward the epicenter of the great upheaval and suddenly felt that something was wrong. Why were all hundred ghosts burrowing into one person’s body?

Was it an attempt at body possession?

The Male Ghost probed Zhan Changfeng’s vital energy and found only the faintest thread of breath remaining — she was clearly beyond saving. Without a second thought, he swept a golden leaf out with one hand, channeling a vast and righteous force directly at Zhan Changfeng, intending to destroy her along with the hundred ghosts.

The force was overwhelming, like a gale snapping dead wood. Though it had not yet reached her, its shockwave alone was enough to terrify the hundred ghosts into fleeing in a panic — yet they seemed to be held by some unseen power, unable to move more than three zhang away from Zhan Changfeng.

In a flash of lightning, a beam of sharp sword light crashed into the golden leaf and sent it tumbling to the ground — a mortal weapon had knocked it away!

The Male Ghost snapped his gaze toward the center of the hundred ghosts, his eyes sharp and piercing. “Who are you!”

Suddenly, a great yin wind surged. The hundred ghosts let out piercing, agonized shrieks, as though their hearts and lungs were being torn out. Amidst the overlapping phantom silhouettes of the hundred ghosts, Zhan Changfeng stood pale-faced and drenched in blood, at the very limit of her endurance. Blood-red seeped into her listless eyes, which were on the verge of losing all vitality — yet her spine remained straight, not bent even a fraction.

The Male Ghost probed carefully and realized it was nothing like what he had assumed. The hundred ghosts were not trying to seize her body at all — she was seizing the hundred ghosts’ power.

His sharp eyes noticed the ink-jade thumb ring on Zhan Changfeng’s thumb. From a distance, divine light seemed to flow through the ink-jade thumb ring — it was stripping threads of pure yin energy from the hundred ghosts and channeling it into her meridians, replacing the flesh and blood she had lost.

At that moment, Zhan Changfeng’s form trembled slightly, as though enduring tremendous agony, yet the Male Ghost sensed her vitality growing ever stronger — the vitality of one who belonged to the dead.

Those eyes gradually turned blood-red, and her will awakened once more.

“Seizing yin force, seeking rebirth in vain — nothing good can come of this!” The Male Ghost drew a line with his fingertip, and the nine golden leaves on the ground merged into a single golden longsword that thrust toward Zhan Changfeng.

“Insolence!” The agony of having her bones and body remade made speaking difficult, yet amidst the “stripping” and “reforging” of this rebirth, she tasted a pleasure unlike anything she had known before — as though a new door had been thrown open, and all the rules and shackles of the world she had been born into no longer mattered.

Yin energy coalesced into an enormous hand that seized the golden longsword. “Leave at once, or do not blame me for being impolite.”

The Male Ghost’s silhouette had already begun to grow transparent. A divine treasure like the Golden Decree was not something he could wield at will in his current state.

Yet the Male Ghost had once been a disciple of a great sect, a son of heaven — he was not the sort to simply leave when told to. Moreover, he could see that Zhan Changfeng was in the midst of her transformation and at her most vulnerable.

This youth possessed something strange about them, and their behavior was wild and supremely arrogant. If they succeeded, they would surely become a scourge upon one side of the world. The Male Ghost had resolved to eliminate them, so he quietly regulated his breath, waiting for the right moment.

In the midst of this chaos, a human silhouette was gradually solidifying. She appeared as a young woman — elegant and gentle, with a noble and dignified bearing that could serve as the very standard for the daughters of great aristocratic houses.

This Resentful Ghost had not devoured her own kind, yet her gaze — her consciousness — awakened in tandem with the Male Ghost’s own return to clarity.

As the Male Ghost fought the black mist with his golden leaves and thrust at Zhan Changfeng, she lifted her head as if startled from a long dream, rising from a hundred years of sunken darkness. The world had changed beyond recognition — but why, why are you still alive?

In that instant, the elegant and gentle woman was like a blade unsheathed, her eyes filled with both grief and resolve. “Mu Yunxi, how can you still be alive.”

The moment she spoke, the Male Ghost — now named as Mu Yunxi — also saw her. After a brief flash of dazed shock, his expression grew complicated.

The female ghost’s obsession was so powerful that it broke free from Zhan Changfeng’s invisible hold and launched itself at the Male Ghost.

The Male Ghost’s face was cold. “The past is over and done with — why do you still dwell on it!”

“The past is over and done with?” The female ghost seemed to have heard something laughable. “Do you think just because you died and became a ghost, the lives of the hundred and twenty-some souls in my household can simply be forgotten?”

“Do you think a single ‘the past is over and done with’ erases the blood debt of a slaughtered father, a murdered mother, and a stolen child?!”

The two ghosts tangled together in fierce combat, locked in a struggle neither could break.

The Male Ghost seemed to harbor some guilt. After a hundred exchanges, he tried to break free and flee, but the female ghost was unwilling to let him go and pursued relentlessly.

Jiang Wei had taken Zhan Changfeng’s words to heart and made a habit of wandering the area with his men during his off time. On the night the strange arts first appeared, he had noticed an extinguished campfire in the woods and tucked it away in his memory.

Tonight, when the disturbance broke out again, he immediately led his men to search the area, and sure enough, found a suspicious-looking old Daoist lurking about.

The old Daoist seemed to have sustained serious injuries. Though he managed to run for a stretch, he was ultimately caught.

When Jiang Wei returned to the front gate of the manor, however, he felt the sky above was pitch-dark and oppressive, and the wind carried a bone-chilling cold that made one shudder. As for the old Daoist, it was as though nails had been driven into both his legs — he dared not take so much as a single step forward, even at the cost of his life.

Jiang Wei knew something major must have happened inside. He hurriedly called upon his lightness technique to dart in, but halfway there, two strange gusts of wind knocked him off his feet. He reached up to touch his arm and felt every hair stand on end.

“Your Highness, Your Highness!” He scrambled and crawled into the courtyard, only to find his comrades collapsed on the ground, their faces a dark and ashen blue. And Zhan Changfeng was submerged in a pool of blood.

“This… this…” The tall and sturdy man was so grief-stricken he was nearly in tears. With trembling fingers, he reached out to check Zhan Changfeng’s breath, then his eyes went wide, and he quickly checked her pulse — at which he simultaneously burst into tears and laughter.

“She can still be saved, she can still be saved.” He dared not remain any longer in this manor and immediately moved to carry her to a physician’s hall in the city.

Zhan Changfeng still retained a thread of consciousness. She struggled to stand. “Take me to the side room. Let no one disturb me.”

“Your Highness!” Jiang Wei instinctively moved to protest, but the moment he met Zhan Changfeng’s opened eyes, every word he had meant to say vanished from his mind.

Those eyes, like blood-red glazed glass, were cold and unfathomably deep, instilling a nameless dread — as though something utterly incomprehensible and irresistible lurked within them.

As if under a spell, Jiang Wei carried Zhan Changfeng to the side room and stood guard at the door himself, completely forgetting to deal with the captured Master Huang.

The human body is a union of yin and yang, with the five viscera and six bowels corresponding to the five elements. When the two energies fall into disorder, the spirit becomes untethered and a hundred ailments arise. Yet at this moment, Zhan Changfeng was drawing in the pure yin energy of heaven and earth to remake herself from within.

The pure yin energy and the body’s own yin-yang energies used her flesh as their battlefield, locked in mutual opposition — at times her flesh would fall away entirely, exposing white bone; at times white bone would sprout new flesh and blood. Had anyone seen what was happening beneath her clothing, they would have been struck speechless with terror.

Simply inhuman.

But then, Zhan Changfeng had never quite been human. The moment those treacherous Puppet Arts were used against her at the age of three, she had already died.

Her memories after death were not clear — only a vague recollection of going somewhere, meeting someone, and then, as if in the blink of an eye, being pulled back into the world of the living by the Long-bearded Daoist.

What she remembered clearly was only this ink-jade thumb ring that had appeared on her hand from nowhere, and the «Nine Cycles Rebirth Art» inscribed in her mind.

The «Nine Cycles Rebirth Art» cultivated the bones.

The first cycle: transform the natural-born bones into pure yin bones. Upon completion, one can freely shift between the forms of the living and the dead.

This cycle was meant only to generate a second set of bones outside one’s natural skeleton using yin energy, with little interference to one’s flesh and blood. But Zhan Changfeng’s injuries were far too severe. The ink-jade thumb ring had automatically activated to protect its master, guiding yin energy to replace her flesh and blood — which naturally came into conflict with the body’s own yin-yang balance.

For the moment, the pure yin energy stripped from the hundred ghosts was proving insufficient.

Time was pressing. Zhan Changfeng seized control of the ink-jade thumb ring and set aside any concern for her flesh and blood, channeling all of the pure yin energy into generating the pure yin bones.

After the bones were formed — a process of heart-rending agony — a faint and hazy white light spread across the paper window. But Zhan Changfeng dared not allow herself to lose consciousness.

No one could have imagined that she would take a small heated knife and personally excise her own necrotic and failing organs, then, with the ink-jade thumb ring as her aid, restructure the pathways of her meridians, blood vessels, and bodily systems.

She maintained a state of half white bone, half living flesh.

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