Chapter 469 - Awaiting Heavenly Thunder, Assisting the Lotus Cult, Devouring the Flower Shop, The Mirror of Sin - Part 3

Li Yuan already knew these people were tied to the Lotus Cult. And he wanted to see more. So, for now, he abandoned his plan to return to the imperial palace.

Quietly, he followed the group with his eyes.

They were retreating south.

The underground passage led toward a small grove on the southern edge of Silver Creek.

Unfortunately for them, the boar-headed enforcers were everywhere. Their formation was like a net cast across the city. These cult remnants? Escaping would be close to impossible.

Sure enough, just as the survivors were about to emerge from the tunnel, Li Yuan spotted a group of over ten boar-headed martial artists already closing in on the grove that concealed the exit.

If nothing changed, the Lotus Cult survivors would walk straight into a trap.

Li Yuan lowered his gaze slightly, a thoughtful look flashing across his face.

Then his eyes shifted. Gray and hazy, a luminous swirl of unknowable depth, like moonlight reflecting on the floor of a dark sea. And then, he moved.

In an instant, he appeared on the path ahead of the boar-headed martial artists, a hundred meters in front of them.

There, under the moonlight, he sat casually on a large stone.

The footsteps drew closer.

The dozen or so masked martial artists caught sight of him, just a slightly chubby, nondescript young martial artists.

They glanced at one another. Then, wordlessly, they began to surround him.

No questions were asked.

Because at a time like this, in a place like this, if you weren’t an ally, you were an enemy. Simple as that.

Moments later, all of them were on the ground.

Unconscious. But alive.

Only then did Li Yuan stand, dust himself off, and begin walking straight toward the group of Lotus Cult survivors just now climbing out from the tunnel.

Among the dozen or so survivors from the Lotus Cult, there were both men and women. Each of the men looked like hardened fighters carved from stone, and each woman was strikingly beautiful, every movement tinged with an almost unnatural allure.

Just one look, and Li Yuan could tell that most of these were former Red Lotus and White Lotus disciples.

But it was the leader who caught him by surprise. He was fourth rank, a bald man with a calm, smiling face and a green crystal blade hanging from his waist. His combat power was 2,800~11,626 (3,224~13,824).

Clearly, this man had suffered some injuries.

The cultists, upon seeing a stranger standing there, tensed immediately. Some were alarmed. Others were downright terrified.

But the bald man simply raised a hand to calm them.

“If not for this senior’s intervention,” he said calmly, “those boar-faced temple enforcers would’ve found us already.”

He stepped forward, cupped his fists in salute, and said, “I am Peng Mi of the Lotus Cult. Thank you for your help.”

Peng Mi?

Li Yuan immediately recalled the name. This was none other than the former vice cult leader of the Black Lotus Cult.

Back when Li Yuan was still in the Holy Tree Temple, Peng Mi’s name had come up often, and never in a good way. The man had brought tremendous pressure down on them in those years.

But Peng Mi had supposedly been killed by Gu Xuejian thirty years ago. Yet here he stood, clearly resurrected. And after three full decades, he had only barely clawed his way back to fourth rank, far from his former peak. Let alone breaking through any further.

So it was true, resurrecting at fourth rank through a drop of blood was far from easy.

“Go,” Li Yuan said, waving his hand dismissively.

But Peng Mi hesitated, then asked respectfully, “Senior...might you be a former higher-up of the Lotus Cult?”

Li Yuan simply gave a faint smile, neither confirming nor denying it.

Peng Mi sighed heavily. “Our Lotus Cult...we’re nothing more than stray dogs now. No home, no future. Even this secret passage...it’s just a temporary escape, a delay of the inevitable.”

Then, suddenly, he dropped to his knees.

Startled, the other cultists hesitated for a moment before they too knelt, one after another.

Peng Mi pressed both palms to the ground and bowed low, knocking his head against the dirt in a deep, sincere gesture.

Behind him, the Red and White Lotus disciples did the same, kowtowing in unison.

Peng Mi was a fourth rank martial artist, and by most standards, that made him the strongest being in this land. Because the old belief still held true. There were no third ranks in this land, at least not openly.

And yet, for some reason, Peng Mi felt an unfathomable terror in the presence of this unremarkable chubby youth. A kind of vast, unknowable pressure that made his skin crawl.

He had tasted death. He had clawed his way back from it. And now, all he had left were a handful of loyal Lotus Cult survivors, barely scraping by underground, and even that sliver of life was slipping away fast.

The Court of Judges was terrifying.

Peng Mi might be able to kill a few of their men, sure. But those enforcers...they wielded ghost items personally granted by the Ghost Street Judge.

He had seen it himself. One fifth rank Lotus Cult elder, face-to-face with a seemingly mediocre enforcer—only for the enforcer to flash a small bronze mirror.

In an instant, the elder collapsed, writhing on the ground, shrieking like a madman, “I was wrong! I was wrong!”

𝘧𝑟𝑒𝑒𝘸𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝓁.𝘤𝘰𝓂

And that was

before

.

In the past two months, it had only gotten worse.

Another fifth rank Lotus Elder went up against an enforcer. And the moment their eyes met, the elder just...went blank. Became empty. As if every memory had been erased. A hollow shell.

The enforcer calmly cuffed him and led him away.

That fifth rank elder never even got a chance to make a move. Just like that...he was gone.

Almost 30 years ago, Peng Mi had thought himself invincible. But now, he was on the verge of breaking down.

Whether it was the judges of Yan Yu’s temple, or those fifth and sixth rank blade cultivators from the Bladeseekers who

willingly

donned boar masks to serve as the temple’s hunting dogs—Peng Mi feared them all.

Because rank no longer measured power.

The world had changed.

Everything had changed.

And Peng Mi...no longer understood it.

Now, this mysterious man who’d appeared out of nowhere—whether or not he had any connection to the Lotus Cult—Peng Mi only knew one thing. He would beg.

It was pure instinct.

In the worst place, at the worst time, someone had reached out to help him. That kind of person might just be his only chance at survival.

And in the end, what did it matter? People want to live. So what if he had to kneel?

Li Yuan stood there, quiet and unreadable, looking down at the dozen cultists on their knees.

The longer he remained silent, the faster Peng Mi’s heart pounded. Because he

knew

this man could truly save them.

Then Li Yuan finally spoke, his voice calm and distant, “After you leave here, where will you go?”

Peng Mi answered quickly, “We plan to regroup with the remaining disciples of the Lotus Cult.”

“Where?”

Peng Mi hesitated, then gritted his teeth and said, “Swallowcloud Province, Red Cloud Mountain. It’s one of the fallback routes we prepared years ago.”

Li Yuan gave him a quick glance but didn’t press further. Instead, he said, “To the west of here is Little Ink Village. And behind that, Little Ink Mountain. It’s easy to hide there. Tomorrow at midnight, wait for me there.”

A glimmer of hope lit up in Peng Mi’s eyes. “You...”

Li Yuan interrupted, “I have...some old ties to the Lotus Cult. Fine. I’ll take you out of here. Whoever believes me can come. Whoever doesn’t, don’t. You’ll only get one chance.”

With that, he turned and walked away.

Peng Mi remained frozen in place, staring at the spot where the man vanished, long before finally rising to his feet.

Li Yuan, meanwhile, made his way directly to Ghost Prison.

There, Yan Yu awaited. Her appearance had changed again. Her once-ghostly aura had all but vanished, replaced by an ethereal, divine grace. The pallor of her face was gone. Now it was white as snow, smooth and flawless, almost glowing. Her eyes, dark and bottomless, held a quiet, inhuman serenity.

She wore her usual black gown, but it was now adorned with a new touch, a white jeweled flower pinned beside the old, rustic wooden hairpin.

Her red lips gleamed like burning coals. And the hundred ghostly figures embroidered on her dress seemed to twitch and shift with life.

But when she saw Li Yuan, something flickered behind that divine gaze—a faint, unmistakably human trace of joy.

Then, with a flick of her wrist, she gestured sideways.

From the shadows, a little girl in a red dress and red headscarf came running out, holding a flower basket.

Beside her, another small girl in white appeared, pushing a flower cart.

The two girls flanked Yan Yu like loyal attendants. The scene looked almost royal, like a matriarch with her young heirs, or a sovereign queen flanked by twin princesses.

—Almost. If Li Yuan hadn’t recognized the girl in red... If he hadn’t noticed the flower cart stuffed full of

corpses

... If the two girls didn’t have faces pale as death and pupils that were

hollow holes

... He might’ve actually believed the illusion.

Yan Yu smiled and said, “Husband, I’ve finished digesting the flower shop.”

Li Yuan gave a small nod. His gaze, though, was fixed on the two girls behind her.

Yan Yu suddenly burst into laughter. A flicker of mischievous charm crept across her otherwise divine, emotionless face, something startlingly human and rare.

“Want me to bring them out so you can give them a good beating?” she said playfully.

Li Yuan chuckled. “No need for a beating. Just ask them this, where’s

Calico

?”

He glanced at the two pale-faced girls, then added, “Yan Yu, you remember, right? Calico once saved you too.”

Yan Yu frowned slightly, thoughtful. After a long pause, she slowly shook her head. “What you’re talking about... I can’t remember anymore. My memory’s slipping away fast. There’s not much left for me to hold on to.”

Saying that, she cast her gaze toward the two little girls.

The girl in white bent over the flower cart and began digging through it—rustling, flipping, turning over one corpse after another. Soon, she pulled out a half-rotted lump of flesh that, upon closer inspection, was once a tiger.

The red-clad girl, meanwhile, rummaged through her basket until she retrieved a single, pristine white flower. She tossed it toward the rotting tiger corpse.

At that moment, something strange began to happen,

reverse decay

.

Yin energy flooded the corpse, knitting flesh back together. The white flower seemed to carry something else...memory, perhaps? Identity?

Moments later, a spectral tiger cloaked in eerie ghostly energy reformed at the little girl’s side. It lay obediently at her feet. But when it turned toward Li Yuan, its eyes flickered with recognition...then confusion...then suddenly bared its teeth with a low, threatening growl.

“Calico doesn’t like the Yang energy on you anymore.” Yan Yu laughed softly. Then she added, “It’s a ghost servant now. Even with its memories restored, it can’t return to your side.”

Li Yuan exhaled gently. “It saved my life once. As long as it still exists, that’s enough.”

Yan Yu nodded. Then, without any clear gesture or command, a white-robed ghost appeared behind her, holding a heavy box in both hands. The ghost carefully pushed it forward, out of the ghost domain.

Yan Yu said, “Our household’s new line of products. I’ve prepared a little of everything. Husband, take it.”

Li Yuan opened the box and found it packed with all sorts of sinister ghost items and cursed artifacts.

He closed the lid for the time being and said, “Yan Yu, I came this time because I want to help a group of surviving Lotus Cult members escape the South and return safely to the North. Their main forces are regrouping there.”

Yan Yu replied simply, “Alright. Give me the route. I’ll make sure all temple guards and judges stay clear of it during the time you specify.”

Li Yuan raised a brow. “Not going to ask why?”

“I’m not very bright anymore. Don’t understand much these days.” She tilted her head. Then, as if the matter were settled, she said, “Husband, let me walk you through the contents of the box. If I don’t explain, you probably won’t know how to use any of it.”

Li Yuan nodded and reopened the box, listening as she began to explain.

“This white three-petal paper flower is called the worry-free flower. It erases memories.

This white four-petal flower is called frozen blood bloom. It freezes a person’s Yang energy.

This white five-petal flower is called lurelight lily. It forces humans or beasts to stop whatever they’re doing and walk toward it uncontrollably. It only works on those at fifth rank and below.

But I’ve also developed some...multi-ghost items.”

As she spoke, she pointed toward a snow-white bronze mirror nearby.

“That one’s particularly effective. I call it the Mirror of Sin. It was forged from my own lifeblood bronze mirror, fused with the worry-free flower. One glance, and it wipes away memory. It also makes people drown in their guilt. The deeper the sin, the harder it is to escape.

“And yes...it works even on fourth rank martial artists.”