Chapter 421 – The Black Lotus Blooms in the Jade Capital; a Burial Shroud at the Alley’s End - Part 3

A little over a month later.

The thunder of iron hooves rolled up to the walls of the Jade Capital.

Armor gleamed pale as frost, throwing off a May light that made the eyes flinch. The monstrous mounts were hideous, their wrinkled plated hides enough to chill the marrow.

The Jade Capital was a high-walled great city. Yet on the very day the army arrived beneath it, before either side could even speak, a handsome silver-haired youth rode an exotic beast out from the ghost cavalry’s front.

Peng Mingyi lifted a hand to shade his eyes and smiled up at the towering walls, at the saw-toothed crenellations and the solemn faces behind them. These were men in their prime, and even some boys barely grown, likely green recruits.

Off to one side stood Daoists in their robes, wind scouring the parapets as they stared down at the army, their gazes cold on the monstrous mounts before settling, all of them, on Peng Mingyi.

Li Yuan knew that to keep Peng Mingyi, Zhao Gutong, Ying Zhuoyao, and the rest from suspecting anything, Lu Xuanxian had told no one here about the lotus.

How many would die had never mattered to Lu Xuanxian. What mattered was whether the world’s end was coming, whether humanity would be wiped out.

That lotus was terrifying.

Lu Xuanxian had told Li Yuan plainly that Peng Mingyi had a fistful of trump cards—lotuses, plural. He’d watched with his own eyes as someone tried to assassinate Peng Mingyi, only for the man’s body to seem...elsewhere, in another world, untouchable.

And until Peng Mingyi planted a lotus in the Jade Pool, no one could know which blossom was the original, true flower.

The only opening would be the instant the real lotus sank into the pool, the moment when both Peng Mingyi and Zhao Gutong would lock up, rigid as statues.

In that instant, the true lotus would appear.

In that instant, Peng Mingyi would be corporeal and vulnerable as well.

At the same time, the exotic beast mounts of the ghost cavalry, cut off from Peng Mingyi’s control, would be weakened, drastically so.

No outsider could see it, but that moment was the seam. Strike then, and the ritual would break.

The thought flickered through Li Yuan. He lifted a finger, eased the curtain aside, and looked into the distance.

Peng Mingyi’s silver hair streamed as he reined in before the walls and called up, “Are you...very tired of it all?”

On the rampart, a Daoist in a shabby robe, standing in shadow, didn’t waste a word. His fingers twitched; a sword rose under his control, lightning crawling faintly along the blade.

“Go!” With a clipped cry, he snapped his fingers, and a bolt of violet lightning leapt forth between them.

The violet carried a breath of blue frost, surging without cease, its force caging dragon and tiger, its very inches steeped in demon-slaying will.

This was Daoist Purebreeze of the Skyruler Manor. He’d only been at fourth rank a little over 20 years, but he was no slouch. He’d come today to try his luck, to see if he could erase one of the enemy’s elites in a single stroke.

The two sides were already set against each other; there was nothing left to

negotiate

.

As for those monstrous mounts...they were fearsome, yes, but the Jade Capital was a nest of hidden dragons and crouching tigers. If they forced their way in, who knew how it would end?

In a blink, the lightning had reached Peng Mingyi.

With strength like his, how could he possibly withstand a fourth rank powerhouse’s ambush strike?

The sword punched through him at once.

And then, something strange happened.

Peng Mingyi’s body shivered, real and unreal at once... as if that brutal thrust had passed through a dream.

Daoist Purebreeze flicked his hand and tossed a remarkable talisman into the air. At once, daylight thunder, thick with blazing yang, cracked through the clouds and poised to descend.

Peng Mingyi didn’t waste another word. With a sweep of his sleeve, he flung a lotus into the sky.

A black lotus. The moment it hit open air, it scattered on the wind.

Li Yuan’s pupils pinched tight. He fixed on the tearing petals.

The sky went uncanny. A single petal became a hundred blooms; a hundred became ten thousand; ten thousand were still multiplying. So many it was grotesque; so many it beggared description; so many it would make a trypophobe shriek.

The black on those flowers bled like ink in water, dissolving to reveal the petals’ native white.

The white petals formed a river that draped the entire parapet in an instant. The black, meanwhile, fell like a sudden downpour, then rose again like ghosts in flight.

A thunderclap crashed. The heaven-thunder struck the river of petals...and melted away to nothing, its dissipation visible to the naked eye.

Thunder was born of pure Yang, and fearsome, but the Yin energy of this flower river was more fearsome still.

The white river flowed on, folding into a vast, whirling lotus with twelve petals.

And the black, like the lotus’s own exhalation, spread everywhere.

Hum, humm. Plip, plip. Thud, thud. Clatter.

All kinds of sounds burst to life at once.

𝑓𝘳𝑒𝑒𝓌𝘦𝘣𝘯ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝑚

Li Yuan stared in shock. Up on the walls, people of every rank were collapsing. Even that remarkable Daoist from before suddenly lost all strength.

A heartbeat earlier, Daoist Purebreeze had been thinking how to respond. A heartbeat later, his mind was slipping its moorings, stray thoughts flashing by—

Who am I? Where am I? What was I about to do?

A few shards of memory still bobbed to the surface now and then, letting this Daoist elder of the Skyruler Manor recall, in snatches, why he’d come. But they were only shards. His memories were being ripped away at speed.

A petal landed on him and he sagged bonelessly, like a puppet with the soul cut out. He toppled onto his back, life or death unclear.

Then the black drifted down and wrapped the petal. It tightened into a little inky bead, like a dewdrop from a lotus. It hung there in the air, black and white marbling within it, as if something were being formed.

Li Yuan watched. He knew this scene better than anyone. It was the first great terror he’d met in this world, the Flower Shop. What these people were suffering was exactly what he had, back then. Only this time the scale was different by orders of magnitude.

The Flower Shop’s blossoms had transformed into something else; even a fourth rank Daoist couldn’t escape.

And that black... Li Yuan’s mind jumped, instinctively, to the Exotic Beast Park. Whatever was gestating inside had to be an exotic beast.

The Flower Shop stripped away memory. The Exotic Beast Park bred exotic beasts. But beasts born this way...wouldn’t be the same.

Sure enough, after a moment a monstrosity spilled into the air—a snake’s head on a pig’s tail—howling mindlessly as it bolted away.

Then more came. More and more.

Peng Mingyi edged back and kept the troops outside. He didn’t enter; he only tipped his head up, drunk on the sight. “Form follows mind. Every man is a beast.”

Lu Xuanxian rode close and said darkly, “Don’t turn the Jade Capital into a ghost domain.”

“Those in pain will die,” Peng Mingyi replied. “Those in happiness will live.”

Zhao Gutong swept a sleeve and stepped forward. “Grand General Lu, at most half will die.”

“Half?” Lu Xuanxian said. “Do you know how many that is?”

“It’s all for the future, isn’t it?” Zhao Gutong sighed.

Lu Xuanxian fell back without a word.

˙·٠✧🐗➶➴🏹✧٠·˙

A long time passed. Longer still. Half a day went by, then a whole day.

At last, the noise behind the gates ebbed away.

The exotic beasts made by the black lotus clearly couldn’t last. Now, only silence remained.

The whirling black lotus in the sky was gone.

“Your Majesty, it’s time to recapture the Jade Capital,” Zhao Gutong said.

Li Yuan was quiet for a moment. “Enter.”

The host moved in, slow and steady, along streets gone dead. Corpses lay thick on either side.

The corpses had first been stripped of their memories and turned into exotic beasts. But these were mad beasts, uncontrollable. Even Peng Mingyi couldn’t guide them with any precision, which was why he’d kept the army waiting outside.

Meanwhile, the memoryless people were soon trampled and gnawed to death by those same beasts.

When the bodies vanished, the thought that sprang from those bodies vanished too. The exotic beasts...slowly faded.

The bustling Jade Capital, at least at this gate, had become a dead place without the living.

Li Yuan felt a prickle and slid a glance out the window.

The strings of lanterns along the street looked like grinning human heads.

There was no flame inside them, yet they glowed, an uneasy red that washed over the carpet of corpses.

Lanterns lighting the road to the netherworld

, Li Yuan thought.

They can guide the living... and the dead as well?

˙·٠✧🐗➶➴🏹✧٠·˙

Elsewhere, in Hidden Dragon Province’s ancient ghost street, an unimaginable press of people was flooding in.

Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, each had incurred sin by letting desire turn into beasthood; so even in death, some force dragged them here.

Here, their memories returned to what they’d been in life, but their power was scrubbed away, down to the last mote.

And a voice in their hearts urged them on.

Go forward. Keep walking. Don’t stop. Ahead lies the road home.

As if bewitched, the masses obeyed and walked.

The human current, wave after wave, queued into an endless line and flowed toward the depths of the ancient ghost street.

At the entrance were peddlers; inside, little ghost shops; deeper in, big ghost shops; and at the very end, the street’s signature ghost shops. But beyond the signature shops?

Long ago, Li Yuan had asked Pang Yuanhua and even Yan Yu that very question. Neither knew.

Everyone assumed places like the Exotic Beast Park and Happyland Zoo were already the street’s end.

They weren’t.

˙·٠✧🐗➶➴🏹✧٠·˙

“Move!” Peng Mingyi showed a rare trace of urgency.

The ghost cavalry fanned out and hurried on.

An hour later, after the army entered another quarter of the Jade Capital, Peng Mingyi cupped both hands and blew out another black lotus.

Right there in the air, the world-killing lotus spun up a second white river of petals and a smear of inky miasma.

Beasts, the dead, and lanterns.,.the scene repeated all over again.

On the ancient ghost street, the crowd swelled further.

As Zhao Gutong walked, he halted. His gaze had snagged on a gloomy alley in the middle of the market’s bustle.

He studied it. It was an alley that felt like it hadn’t existed a moment ago and had just popped into being. At its far end, there was the faint outline of an ancient residence.

Zhao Gutong turned to Peng Mingyi.

Peng Mingyi nodded.

Zhao Gutong strode to the golden dragon palanquin and said respectfully, “Your Majesty, the time has come to fulfill our last agreement.”