Chapter 33: Bloodcorpse (1/2)

“Yeah. How can there be anyone so huge?” Lu Yun murmured in assent. He approached a wall of the passage, tensing his jaw as he removed a corpse fly that glowed faintly with a reddish hue. “It really is a larva!” The immature form of the corpse fly clouded his expression.

“No, not necessarily,” Lu Yun tried to reassure himself. “These corpse flies have only recently hatched, but their larvae are ghostface maggots. The lack of maggots here means that we aren’t inside a zombie.”

“What are ghostface maggots?” Qing Han asked in a trembling voice.

“Well, these are corpse flies, right? Maggots mature into flies, and ghostface maggots grow into corpse flies,” Lu Yun explained, taking a deep breath.

Whether this was the interior of a giant corpse or zombie, their proximity to either possibility didn’t bode well. Still, his intensifying curiosity nagged him forward.

“Let’s keep going. I’d like to see what else is here!” As a tomb raider, a natural desire to excavate secrets tickled at him.

“Stop making up these outrageous lies!” the immortal in red cried out. “I’ll kill you right here and now!”

“Li Xing!” Qing Han called out suddenly.

The red-clad immortal violently shivered. “Please forgive me, sir!” His expression was respectful, but there was well-hidden venom in the back of his eyes.

“Keep going!” Qing Han demanded coldly.

An indeterminate amount of time later, the entourage stopped once more.

“What’s that?!” The envoy’s pupils contracted slightly and he glanced at Lu Yun for guidance.

“A layout of the nine sectors.” Lu Yun sounded tense. “I see the eight trigrams hidden within.”

The pathway that had been nine meters wide became narrow up ahead. Nine jet-black coffins barred their way forward, each about a person tall.

The others found no significance in the chaotic arrangement of the coffins. Sure, it was sinister and uneerie, but nothing was particularly noteworthy to them.

However, Lu Yun was of a drastically different opinion. The coffins formed a terrifying layout based on the nine sectors. [1] The eight trigrams layout underneath melded with the one on top to form a very peculiar killing formation. Any carelessness would doom the group beyond redemption.

Lu Yun knelt and drew in the earth with his fingers, making rough calculations to figure out the changes of the formation.

“What’re you playing at now?” snickered Li Xing when he saw the young governor’s odd behavior.

“Shut up, if you don’t want to die,” Lu Yun retorted without raising his head.

“Grand Steward Li, you shouldn’t get upset with an ant like him. He’s just trying to show off before the seventh young master by making up all of these tall tales. First a giant corpse or a zombie, now this rot about sectors and trigrams. I don’t think these coffins mean anything at all.” One of the two remaining attendant immortals sneered.

“If that’s what you think…” Standing up, Lu Yun dusted himself off, “are you brave enough to walk past?”

“Why not!” The immortal colored a little, then snickered in derision.

There was an enormous monster in the lake that had eaten the blue-robed immortal, but there wasn’t anything here that could hide anything remotely so dangerous. Even if those strange zombies were lurking in the coffins, what could a few zombies do to him? A little fire would burn them to a crisp.

In fact, it was very likely that the coffins housed more of those creepy zombies from earlier, nothing more. Conjuring a fistful of flames, the intrepid immortal stepped into the formation of coffins.

“What’s this?! Ah, aaaah!” A frightful shriek sounded out, then was prematurely cut off. Absolute silence reigned afterward.

Those who remained outside had no idea what had happened.

“What was that all about?” Goosebumps popped up all over Li Xing’s body. He possessed the strongest cultivation level here, as a peak true immortal who was very close to empyrean. Nevertheless, he hadn’t picked up anything whatsoever about what had happened between the coffins.

“I can’t very well stop someone from jumping off a cliff, can I?” It was Lu Yun’s turn to snicker. “Don’t you see the fearsome formation that these coffins represent?”

“Formation? What formation?” Li Xing scoffed. “I may not be a formation master myself, but I have the common sense to know that something this simple can’t possibly be a formation! A few coffins scattered on the ground? What a joke.”

In the world of immortals, formations were generally complicated affairs. What was before him was nowhere close to what he would expect a formation to be.

“The dao has its origins in the simplest of things,” countered Lu Yun. “The first formations came from marvelous arrangements of natural stone that embodied the fundamental laws of the world.”

He’d read about these things in his sect’s texts. Of course, the words described feng shui layouts rather than formations, but the principle was the same.

“Dao… is simple.” Qing Han felt an invisible wall before him shatter with a boom. “Dao is... simple!” His excitement grew as he pondered this.

“If you think this formation is so simple, why don’t you have a go?” Lu Yun hadn’t noticed Qing Han’s reaction as he focused on Li Xing with a half-smile.

The immortal reddened, unable to respond.

Strange, I’ve done nothing to offend that man. Why does he cause trouble for me at every turn? Lu Yun frowned a little. He glanced back at Qing Han; the rush of elation upon the latter’s face had already receded.

Qing Han wants to kill me so he can put his own men in the Dusk governorship. Why is he hesitating now, then? This Li Xing seems to be his representative, but not entirely with his permission. The young governor could make neither heads nor tails of the situation.