Chapter 157 – Rouge Immortal Mountain, the Human-Head Lantern, and the Serpentine Brush of Fate - Part 1

Several days later.

A trio of pitch-black crows perched on a gray-tiled rooftop, craning their necks to watch four blackbirds circling overhead. Down below, three figures, no bigger than grains of rice when viewed from above, were traveling swiftly. They were Pang Yuanhua, Pang Han, and Li Yuan.

“There,” Pang Yuanhua said, gazing at the lines of sight coming from the birds in the sky. “Ahead, in that house.”

Without another word, Li Yuan vaulted over the side wall into the Frost Sword Sect’s courtyard. Blood energy surged through him, making his muscles swell and harden far beyond the strength of steel. Gripping his blade with five tense fingers, he unleashed a single slash.

A fierce gust tore through the courtyard, scattering bricks and tiles like a flurry of butterflies. With a sharp flick of his blade, he ripped off the entire roof in one go, exposing a startled female swordswoman inside.

“Who are you? How dare you barge into the Frost Sword Sect?” she shouted, alarmed.

Li Yuan didn’t bother to reply. A crimson bead of boiling blood seeped from the back of his hand, slithering along the blade until it stained the edge a deep, ghastly red. In a blur of movement, he swung again and split the woman neatly in two, revealing a wooden cross-section at the cut.

At the same time, Pang Han lifted Pang Yuanhua’s wheelchair over the wall and joined Li Yuan in the courtyard, both deliberately avoiding the main entrance. Their intrusion caused immediate uproar within the sect. Swift footsteps scurried across rooftops and walkways as multiple figures rushed in from every direction. Before long, the courtyard was surrounded by swordswomen, all of them tense but hesitant to close in.

Some recognized Pang Yuanhua and exclaimed, “Senior Sister, is your illness cured?”

Others cast cold glares. “She’s with the murderer who killed Senior Sister Wang. She is no longer our senior sister.”

Li Yuan gestured at the bisected body he’d just cut down. “Look closely. Is that really your senior sister?”

Everyone turned to see the remains on the ruined floor. Two halves of a body lay separated with no blood in sight—only eerie wooden sprouts, twisting and wriggling from the cut edges, reaching out as if trying to piece themselves back together.

“This is a fake, some kind of illu—!” a swordswoman began to shout, only to be silenced mid-sentence. Li Yuan closed the distance in a flash and cut her down in one stroke. The blade, brimming with swirling blood energy, hummed low with power. Another clean slice, another wooden interior.

“They’re ghost servants,” Pang Yuanhua said calmly, her voice overlapping with the clash of steel.

Any disciple about to attack froze at the sight of the wooden sprout at the wound. Their faces showed shock and confusion. Pang Yuanhua raised her voice. “Listen carefully! It’s a long story, but some among you have been replaced by these ghost servants. If you’re not one of them, keep your distance from everyone else so you won’t get caught off-guard.”

𝒻𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝘯𝘰𝑣ℯ𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝘮

Her words threw the entire Frost Sword Sect into disarray. One woman, eyes blazing, shouted back, “She’s lying! She’s trying to—!”

Before she could finish, her head flew off, rolling on the ground yet still barking accusations: “—sow discord... She’s provoking division within our Frost Sword Sect!”

Terror spread through the crowd; even under the noonday sun, a talking severed head was enough to make anyone’s skin crawl. The head itself seemed to realize something was amiss and hastily added, “Illusion! This must be an illusion! How else could I still be talking with my head off?”

Li Yuan found the sight both chilling and bizarre. Clearly, these ghost servants still possessed human-like intelligence.

A disciple who was close to Pang Yuanhua, voice trembling, asked, “Is...is all this really true?”

Pang Yuanhua met her eyes and beckoned. “Xiao Die, you’re not a ghost servant. Come stand behind me.”

Xiao Die hesitated.

Pang Yuanhua coaxed her again. “You still bunch your legs around the blankets when you go to sleep, right? And kick them off once you drift off?”

Xiao Die’s face turned crimson. Embarrassed, she scampered over to Pang Yuanhua’s side.

Turning her gaze back to the remaining disciples, Pang Yuanhua said calmly, “I’ll call your names; if I name you, come stand behind me. The rest of you, don’t move. If you’re mistaken for a ghost servant, you’ll end up cut down by the Blood Blade Patriarch.”

The name Blood Blade Patriarch rang out like thunder. Though few of them had ever laid eyes on him, his reputation was enough to make everyone fall silent.

Pang Yuanhua began calling out names. One by one, those summoned joined her behind the wheelchair. Anyone who made even a twitch in the wrong direction was immediately struck down by Li Yuan’s blade.

Several ghost servants tried to seize a hostage or mount an attack, but each time they barely moved before Li Yuan’s blade ended them in a spray of wooden scraps.

“Duan Yao... Pang Hua... Pang Ru...” Pang Yuanhua listed them off, thinning the ranks on the opposite side.

Among those left was Pang Qian, who widened her eyes at Li Yuan. “Please, Patriarch, I’m not a ghost servant! Don’t you remember? We even shared the same carriage that one time...”

Li Yuan glanced at the young woman claiming to be Pang Qian. “If you really carry the true Pang Qian’s memories,” he said, “you should know exactly how much pain and hatred she’s experiencing because of you, and how dangerous you are to your fellow disciples.”

Tears streaming down her face, the imposter pleaded, “Even so... I’m still me. She’s gone, and I’m simply taking her place. Can’t I live on? Why don’t I have the right to live?”

Li Yuan responded calmly, “All you’ve done is borrow Pang Qian’s memories to gain sympathy and save your own skin.”

At that, the fake Pang Qian suddenly stopped crying, her pitiful demeanor vanishing. She glowered at Li Yuan with venomous eyes.

He continued, “You should have kept on crying, kept insisting you want to live a good life. You’d say you had no choice but to become a ghost servant, no choice but to come here, and now you’re just trying to survive. You wanted to use those memories to guilt everyone into sparing you. But in the end, you’re not truly human. As soon as I called you out, you gave up trying to pretend. People who truly lose a plea for mercy don’t simply stop. Real emotions can’t be switched off that easily.”

The fake Pang Qian merely stared, looking half-bewildered, half-thoughtful—until Li Yuan flashed to her side and sliced her in two. Though she was severed at the waist, she refused to die, only losing her ability to move.

He cast a faint glance downward. “Then again, even if you had kept begging, I would have killed you anyway. Don’t take my talk too seriously.”

The ghost servant’s body let out a furious howl, its voice hardly human. Li Yuan felt a chilling sense of foreboding. He had been testing the ghost servants’ ability to learn; to his dismay, they clearly displayed some capacity for growth, at least intellectually. Whether their power could grow was still unknown.

A short while later, a Frost Sword Sect elder who had also been turned into a servant appeared. Li Yuan cut her down with a single stroke. Moments after that, the sect leader, Pang Dantai, arrived—and she too met the same end. Broken, splintered bodies piled up in the courtyard, some of them attempting to knit themselves back together before Li Yuan cut them down again.

Once the final tally of ghost servants had been rounded up, Li Yuan piled them in one place, drenched them with blood, and set them ablaze. Their unearthly shrieks, echoing in broad daylight, made onlookers’ hair stand on end. At last, the fire burned them all to ash, and the courtyard was still.

Li Yuan, Pang Yuan, and a group of newly allied Frost Sword Sect disciples then headed straight to Floating Moon Abbey, only to find the ghost servants there already fleeing. They spent two full days hunting them down and burning them. When it was finally done, the Frost Sword Sect sealed off the old carpenter’s workshop for good.

Pang Yuanhua left Pang Han behind to act as interim sect leader. Though Pang Han was always more of a martial arts enthusiast than an administrator, she was the one who had arrived with both Pang Yuanhua and the Blood Blade Patriarch, and that alone was enough to hold the sect together for now.

Meanwhile, Pang Yuanhua took four Frost Sword Sect disciples, including Xiao Die, and followed Li Yuan to Gemhill. There were still unknown ghost servants lurking there that needed to be dealt with. It was an endless chain of emergencies, one crisis after another, leaving them no time to rest.

This was not the life Li Yuan wanted. Yet fate, it seemed, did not force him to keep up this pace indefinitely. When he and Pang Yuanhua finally returned to Gemhill, Pang Yuanhua tilted her head back to peer at the sky, and just kept looking.

Out of respect, Li Yuan waited patiently for her to speak. At length, she said simply, “The lines in the sky are gone.”

They learned soon after that the Fortune Trading Company had already departed Gemhill. That same encampment steward was apparently one of their people. Whatever ghost servants had been there had left with them. Most onlookers would have shrugged it off; it only made sense for a traveling merchant caravan to pack up and move on. If the ghost servants were gone, there was nothing more to investigate, right?

But three figures seated around a table in the Blood Fury Hall of the inner district thought otherwise—Li Yuan, Tie Sha, and Pang Yuanhua. Spread before them were documents confirming that the Fortune Trading Company’s caravan truly had left. Li Yuan’s white finch had even spotted them heading off through Antelope Pass.

“Examine everything they left behind,” Tie Sha said coldly, “everything they sold, and everyone they contacted. Nothing gets overlooked.”

“Quietly,” Pang Yuanhua added.

Then, both of them turned to Li Yuan, waiting for his final decision. He closed his eyes for a moment, thinking. “Don’t investigate anything,” he said at last.

Tie Sha and Pang Yuanhua were both thoughtful but showed no surprise. Tie Sha gave a nod. “Then we await your orders, Patriarch.”

“Stand by for my signal,” Li Yuan said. “Be ready to move at any time.”

Pang Yuanhua asked, “What should I do until then?”

After a moment’s pause, Li Yuan replied, “Go find Tang Nian. See if she can design you a new wheelchair.”