The Soul-Commanding Blood Divine Ritual
Hwangbo Pung ground his teeth, his breath coming in ragged gasps.
"Damn it all!"
Blood dripped from his fists, hardened as they were like forged iron, pooling on the floor beneath him.
Paeng Man-gyeong wasn't faring any better. The arm swinging his heavy broadsword was growing heavier by the moment.
The Blood Bones' individual capabilities were hardly inferior to theirs, and even the wounds they had barely managed to inflict regenerating at a horrifying speed.
Seeing it wore on their morale, and their bodies grew heavy faster than usual.
Pung So-cheong's voice rang out toward Ouyang Qiangang, urgency bleeding through it.
"Young Master Hahu, hurry and find the core! We can't hold out much longer!"
Just then, Akasha's voice echoed through Ouyang Qiangang's mind.
Found it, Doctor! High-density energy signature detected at the center of the pond, three jang beneath the surface!
Ouyang Qiangang's eyes turned ice-cold.
My zhang-force has an effective range of one jang. Three jang down, even pouring out everything I have might not reach it. Whew... still, I have no choice but to take the risk. I'll get as close to the surface as I can and end it in a single strike!
The next instant, he unfolded the Illusory Phantom Shadow Divine Art, and his silhouette tore through the Blood Bones' defensive line like a blue comet.
The Blood Bones' claws raked through his afterimages, but his true body was already hovering just above the surface of the pond.
Suspending himself midair with his legs pointed toward the ceiling, he wrung out every last drop of qi from his dantian.
Internal force exceeding one jang condensed above his right palm, and the surrounding air began to warp with a shriek.
Then, a burst of blue lightning-light erupted from his palm, flooding the entire underground cavern with light bright as noonday.
"Explosive Thunder Flame King Drill!"
KWAAAAAAAANG—!
His zhang-force became a colossal iron drill, punching through the water's surface and boring deep into the heart of the pond.
In that instant, the blood pond erupted, a pillar of crimson surging upward as though to pierce the ceiling.
The staggering shockwave hurled even the surrounding Blood Bones away like scraps of paper.
Riding the rebound of his strike against the surface, Ouyang Qiangang slid down to the pond's edge — and his legs buckled beneath him.
Gritting his teeth, he swayed and swallowed back the blood rising up his throat.
He had no way of knowing whether he had succeeded or failed.
A brief silence fell.
Shaaaaaaa—
The pillar of blood that had shot skyward came crashing back down like a waterfall.
And then the entire blood pond began to seethe and boil, shrieking as if its very soul were being torn apart.
GWOOOOAAAK!
With one final death rattle, the iron-hard Blood Bones crumbled like sandcastles, scattering into dark crimson dust.
It had worked.
But before he could savor the victory, a vicious wave of cold exploded outward from within Ouyang Qiangang's own body.
The price of unleashing his full power — the five great acupoints of his suppressed Nine Yin Severed Meridians had all begun to rage at once.
Kgh—!
A pain like a glacier grinding through his meridians.
He immediately popped a top-grade Yang Dragon Pill into his mouth.
As the medicinal pill melted away, warmth spread through his dantian.
Clenching his jaw, he gathered that warmth and fought back against the extreme yin qi threatening to swallow him whole.
This accursed shackle... I will break it, no matter what it takes!
The rest of the party, meanwhile, applied Golden Spear Salve to their wounds and settled into breathing cultivation.
By the time half a shift had passed, Hwangbo Pung and Paeng Man-gyeong, the first to finish recovering, rose to their feet.
Han Jo followed, then Pung So-cheong, and last of all Zhuge Hui opened his eyes.
Their gazes naturally turned toward Ouyang Qiangang.
He was still in the midst of his breathing cultivation.
"What in the world... is that internal energy method?"
Zhuge Hui muttered, his face frozen in astonishment.
A mysterious cold aura was swirling around Ouyang Qiangang's entire body.
In the past, when he had cultivated while suppressing his Nine Yin Severed Meridians, a thick layer of ice had sheathed him from head to toe — but not now.
Tens of thousands of tiny ice grains were orbiting his body in a spiraling helix.
Rotating with an almost living regularity, each one smaller than a fingernail, they glowed faintly blue even in the darkness, glittering like gemstones.
"I've never heard of a cultivation method like that..."
Pung So-cheong murmured, entranced.
Watching the pain etched on Ouyang Qiangang's face alongside the mysterious ice grains circling him, she felt pity mingled with an inexplicable sense of awe.
Paeng Man-gyeong swallowed without realizing it and muttered under his breath.
"Hah... so that's what they call divine. Even his breathing cultivation looks nothing like an ordinary man's."
He had seen countless strange masters and was well-versed in the martial arts, but never in his life had he witnessed breathing cultivation like what lay before his eyes.
Ouyang Qiangang's twisted complexion rapidly eased.
The extreme yin qi of his Nine Yin Severed Meridians was being absorbed and purified by the Supreme Void Formless Divine Art, circulating through him in a steady, stable rhythm.
A moment later, the ice grains dissolved away like mist in sunlight, and Ouyang Qiangang slowly opened his eyes.
Feeling the astonished stares fixed on him, he clicked his tongue inwardly and spoke.
"The martial art I've learned is a bit... unusual. Whenever I practice my breathing cultivation, it tends to look like this. Please pay it no mind."
His voice was calm enough, but the cold sweat beading on his forehead told the story of just how close a call it had been.
Brushing off his robes as he rose, Ouyang Qiangang flashed the party an easy smile.
"Shall we be on our way, then?"
At his breezy, matter-of-fact manner — as though he were off to browse a market stall — the tension that had gripped them all finally broke, and they found themselves laughing.
Zhuge Hui nodded and picked up the thread.
"Of course. Onward."
The party looked around them.
As if no battle had ever taken place, behind the now-shrunken, dry red pond yawned a cave mouth, opening like the maw of hell itself.
They set their steps toward it.
The passage revealed by the dried-up blood pond twisted and coiled, burrowing deep into the earth.
Every time they rounded a bend, it felt as though they were being sucked into an ever-thicker darkness.
The air grew heavier with each step.
The stench of rotting corpses mingled with mold and some indescribable fishy tang, stabbing at their nostrils.
The walls, giving off a faint luminescence, were slick with damp, sticky mucus.
Each footstep produced a wet squelch from below.
Like the walls, the floor was pooled with some unidentifiable black liquid that clung to their shoes and weighed down every stride.
When they had descended some three hundred jang, the passage finally ended.
And before the party, another underground chamber revealed itself.
The ceiling alone had to be several dozen jang high, and the chamber stretched so far that its far end was lost from sight.
But more shocking than anything else were the corpses carpeting the floor.
Thousands of bodies, wasted to little more than skin stretched over bone like draped cloth, lay heaped in mounds, while tens of thousands of skulls lay scattered like gravel across the ground.
An overwhelming death qi swirled through the entire space; merely witnessing it raised gooseflesh from head to toe.
"Sir Hahu... those people..."
Han Jo studied part of the corpse heap closely, then spoke in a voice rigid as stone.
"They are the villagers of Ghost Valley Village."
As he continued, a terrifying killing intent smoldered in his eyes.
"On the lands of the Empire... to dare commit such an atrocity..."
His voice carried a violent fury at the desecration of the imperial throne's authority.
Pung So-cheong's face had gone bone-white.
"How could a massacre on this scale leave not a single whisper in the jianghu...?"
Even allowing for its remoteness, the fact that the Hao Sect had failed to detect an incident of this magnitude was no simple matter.
It meant the perpetrators' reach was great enough to sneer at the Hao Sect's entire intelligence network.
Hwangbo Pung murmured in a heavy voice.
"To commit something like this... they must be prepared to pay with their very souls."
Paeng Man-gyeong and Zhuge Hui could only stare at the carnage in slack-jawed horror.
The party's eyes turned to the center of the chamber.
There, a massive altar rose stark against the darkness, ringed by ten incense burners arranged in a circle.
Ten black-robed eccentrics stood before the burners, each coughing up a green smoke thick with a horrifically potent death qi.
Their sunken, skeletal faces were covered in grotesque tattoos, and the black robes bore sinister patterns drawn in red blood.
From the eccentrics' mouths poured an unbroken stream of an unintelligible incantation.
"Krukhh anark morgul... krukhh anark morgul..."
At the very apex of the central altar rested a single shard of bone, no larger than a man's finger.
Dark crimson smoke curled up from the shard, merging with the green vapor of the incense burners before rising together toward the ceiling.
In the cavern air where that smoke ascended —
There, a skeletal Jiangshi, stripped to bare bone, hung suspended in midair, lying parallel to the ground.
The sight was grotesque and utterly overwhelming.
It stood a full jang tall at least, and every one of its bones — gray no longer, but black — looked as hard as tempered steel.
Red light flickered from time to time in its empty eye sockets; its mere presence crushed the entire chamber beneath its weight.
All of the smoke from the burners and the bone shard was being drawn into the Jiangshi's body.
Whenever the eccentrics' chant reached its crescendo, a dry crack-crack would sound from the Jiangshi's joints.
The party had little difficulty working out what the black-robed eccentrics were doing.
They were infusing the death qi of the burners and the blood essence of the shard into the Jiangshi, refining it.
Paeng Man-gyeong's hand closed tight around the saber at his waist without his noticing. Boiling fury rose in his face along with a deep revulsion.
Zhuge Hui muttered quietly.
"The Soul Commanding Blood Divine Ritual... I thought it had vanished during the Great Demon Subjugation. I never imagined I would live to see this with my own eyes."
Ouyang Qiangang's expression had hardened as well.
Akasha... that bone — it's the same as those things, isn't it?
Yes, Doctor. The energy pattern matches those extracted from the Blood Spirit Human Demon's remains and the Crown Prince's heart. All three originate from the same source.
Analyze the energy flow of those incense burners, that bone shard, and that unpleasant Jiangshi.
Doctor, they are believed to be conducting a form of biological reinforcement.
What do you mean?
The high-concentration death qi released by the bone shard and the blood essence from the burners are being directly 'engraved' into that individual's meridians and bone marrow. And Doctor — the one in the form of a skeleton is not a corpse.
Ouyang Qiangang's eyes widened.
It's alive?
Yes. Faint, but biological signals are being detected. However, it is transforming into an organism entirely unlike an ordinary human. It appears to be undergoing extreme training in order to make the bone shard's power its own.
Ouyang Qiangang's eyes sharpened further.
A living practitioner of demonic arts rather than a dead Jiangshi could be a far, far more dangerous existence.
Zhuge Hui and the others, too, stared in shock at the skeletal Jiangshi and the bone shard.
Hwangbo Pung clenched his fist and asked Zhuge Hui.
"Hui. Isn't that... isn't that the very thing?"
Zhuge Hui nodded with a grave expression.
"It is. The very thing we have been pursuing."
That was what they had referred to days ago as "a matter for the Alliance."
Zhuge Hui sent a transmitted voice to Hwangbo Pung and Paeng Man-gyeong.
The Heavenly Eye Pavilion was the organization responsible for all intelligence under the Changcheon Murim Alliance.
Hwangbo Pung nodded and replied through transmitted voice.
At that very moment, an even more intense crimson smoke erupted upward from the bone shard atop the altar.
And the light that had been flickering in the eye sockets of the hovering skeletal Jiangshi began to burn brighter and brighter.