Chapter 265 : Let Them Kill Each Other (7)
Chapter 265: Let Them Kill Each Other (7)
"I don't know if I should say this, but they brought it on themselves."
Hearing that, Little Tiger Beggar gave a bitter smile.
"I think the Tang Family deserves what's coming to them for this mess too. I'm just worried this whole situation might interfere with dealing with the Blood Cult."
Little Tiger Beggar clicked his tongue with a regretful expression, muttering almost to himself.
"The Flying Dragon Pavilion Lord and Elder Beggar Chaser sacrificed everything to stop the Blood Cult, and now this is happening.”
"...Wait, I thought Elder Beggar Chaser was still alive.”
Little Tiger Beggar nodded.
"He didn't lose his life, but he lost his martial arts."
"Damn..."
Il-mok muttered sympathetically and gave the beggar a formal salute.
“I’m sorry. All I could do was check if he was still breathing before I had to get out of there. I was badly injured myself, and my friends were still in danger.”
The beggar looked shocked that Il-mok was apologizing and waved both hands frantically.
“No, no, I wasn’t blaming you at all! You stayed and fought for all of us until the very end. Nobody could possibly hold that against you.”
This time, the beggar gave Il-mok a salute of his own.
"I can't speak for all of the martial world as Little Tiger Beggar, but let me express gratitude on everyone's behalf. Thank you for stopping the Blood Cult's conspiracy. If you hadn’t been there, we would’ve blamed the Demonic Cult for sure, and the whole world would’ve gone to war.”
He shuddered just thinking about it.
It wasn't that he was afraid of fighting the Demonic Cult. What scared him was thinking about what the Blood Cult would get up to while everyone else was busy trying to kill each other.
"Ahem. I just did what anyone would have done.”
"Hahaha! If everyone were like you guys, the world would be a much better place.”
Clueless as he was, Little Tiger Beggar believed the Maitreya Luminous Cult folk were nothing but good-hearted people.
"Hmm."
Little Tiger Beggar then put up a grave face and asked in a serious tone.
"Actually, there's something I wanted to ask you about this whole incident."
"Feel free to ask."
"What exactly happened there? Elder Beggar Chaser passed out after using his Innate Life Force, so we could only piece together what happened in the fight afterward from examining the scene, but it is not entirely accurate.”
"So you want to know about the battle after Elder Beggar Chaser fainted?"
"That's right."
"Hmm."
Il-mok stroked his chin as if recalling the memory.
Of course, he wasn’t trying to remember anything. He was trying to figure out the most convincing way to lie. He had to make it look like the Blood Cult was the one who killed the Flying Dragon Pavilion Lord.
After organizing his thoughts for a moment, Il-mok began to speak in a calm voice.
"Right after Elder Beggar Chaser passed out, the Flying Dragon Pavilion Lord who had just killed what looked like a Blood Cult elder joined up with me. The remaining Blood Cult forces blocked our path to protect an elder who was preparing an unknown ritual. By the time the Flying Dragon Pavilion Lord and I had nearly finished them off... something strange happened."
"Something strange?"
"Yeah. The Blood Cult elder who'd been preparing the ritual suddenly stopped and started casting spells instead. He kept using the massive amount of Blood Qi gathered by the altar to cast an almost never-ending spell.”
Il-mok shook his head as if disgusted just thinking about it again.
"Nearly a thousand people died at Mount Baihe, so the amount of energy must've been absolutely staggering."
Little Tiger Beggar chimed in knowingly, and Il-mok nodded before continuing.
"What's worse, that elder didn't even care when his own subordinates got caught up in his spells. He just kept hammering us with spells. We were at the point where we thought we were going to collapse from exhaustion first, but then the Flying Dragon Pavilion Lord made a desperate move.”
“He did?”
"That's right. Even as his entire body was being torn apart by the Blood Cult elder's spells, he pushed forward and actually managed to reach the elder. But by then, his body was already covered in wounds, and the Blood Cult elder cast some wicked spell that started draining the Flying Dragon Pavilion Lord's blood."
Following Il-mok's explanation, Little Tiger Beggar seemed to be visualizing the battle in his mind. He swallowed hard, staring at Il-mok with a tense expression.
"But even in that state, the Flying Dragon Pavilion Lord held onto that Blood Cult elder until the very end. He held onto that elder even as he turned into a withered husk. He did it to create an opening for me."
"So while the Flying Dragon Pavilion Lord held him down, you finished off the Blood Cult elder."
“That’s right. He sacrificed himself. Not for me, but for the good of the entire martial world."
"Ahh..."
Little Tiger Beggar seemed deeply moved, clenching both fists with a moved face.
Though sadness seemed to dwell in the eyes of Il-mok as he gazed at Little Tiger Beggar, this was merely the look on the surface.
'Hook, line, and sinker.'
Deep down, he felt absolutely nothing.
The Flying Dragon Pavilion Lord had sacrificed himself to capture the Blood Cult elder.
This wasn't just a lie to hide the fact that he'd killed the Flying Dragon Pavilion Lord himself.
'This will make the Murim Alliance hate the Blood Cult’s guts even more.’
It was a calculated move to amplify their hatred for the Blood Cult.
Il-mok's scheme seemed to have worked, since the beggar nodded with a determined expression.
"I'll make sure to report this to the Murim Alliance. The Flying Dragon Pavilion Lord's great sacrifice must be made known."
"I was thinking the same thing."
He and Il-mok nodded at each other.
Then the beggar posed another question to Il-mok.
"But there's one strange thing."
"Strange?"
"That sunken pit in the center of the altar. It was connected to the end of the Heavenly Demon Secret Cave. That’s how the Qingcheng guys got out safely. If they’d tried to use the main entrance, they would’ve been poisoned too.”
"Ah..."
Il-mok made a small sound of recognition.
"On top of that, there were traces of someone fleeing. Signs of smashing through trees and rocks indiscriminately while escaping. Honestly, I was worried the Blood Cult elder had gotten away. The problem was, the traces were so blatantly obvious that something felt off about it."
Il-mok lowered his head and said, “I’m sorry. I was so focused on getting my friends to safety that I completely forgot to mention that part.”
"???"
“Right after I killed the Blood Cult elder, he managed to pull off one last spell. It was a desperate move. He gathered a massive amount of Blood Qi and chucked a talisman right at the center of the altar.”
"...Was it a spell meant to cause an explosion?"
"There was an explosion, but that wasn't the real purpose. Right after he threw the talisman, a corpse with a talisman stuck to its forehead burst out along with the explosion."
"A jiangshi!"
Little Tiger Beggar exclaimed with a shocked face, and Il-mok nodded.
"I was thinking 'out of the frying pan into the fire' and preparing for one last fight with that jiangshi, but the moment it got up, it fled at an incredible speed and smashed through the mountain just like what you said earlier."
"......"
Little Tiger Beggar stared at Il-mok with a dumbfounded expression,
“Did you… not try to go after it?”
"I didn't expect it to run away, so my reaction was delayed. Besides, I couldn't have caught it even if I went all out.”
“But the trail was a mile wide. You could have just followed that, right?”
“...I was seriously injured from the fight with the elder. And like I said, my first priority was getting my friends out of that Formation.”
Little Tiger Beggar made a complicated expression, but soon organized his thoughts and clasped his hands in a martial salute.
"Thanks to you, all my questions have been answered. In the end, the problem is that jiangshi."
Il-mok nodded and asked Little Tiger Beggar in return,
"You said the trail was easy to follow. Aren’t you guys tracking it?”
"The traces disappeared around the edge of Mount Baihe."
"...The Blood Cult must have retrieved it."
Il-mok sighed, as if picturing the destructive zombie back in the hands of its masters.
***
Somewhere in the Central Plains, deep in the mountains.
In a secluded corner of that mountain that truly fit the phrase mountain beyond mountain, there was a cave hidden by special Formations.
Inside, an old man sat with his eyes closed, ceaselessly chanting incantations.
Before him, candles arranged in patterns with complex occult meanings burned, and at their center lay the body of a middle-aged man.
A bizarre existence that was a corpse, yet flowed with life force.
Suddenly, a cold wind swept through the cave, and all the candles went out at once like their flames had been snuffed by an invisible hand.
The old man stopped his chanting at some point and opened his eyes to look at the corpse.
Though the scheme prepared at Mount Baihe had failed, it could be said that he had avoided the worst-case scenario just by having retrieved this corpse.
The ritual had also been half successful, so it wasn't a complete failure.
The only problem was that they are now short a few hundred people’s worth of Blood Qi.
'Once the Heavenly Blood Jiangshi is complete, revenge won't just be a dream.'
The Heavenly Blood Jiangshi.
The crystallization of decades of effort that the Blood Cult had devoted to the sake of their revenge.
They'd conducted countless research to compensate for the flaws of ordinary Jiangshi and had found a method to create the most powerful Jiangshi possible.
However, creating the Heavenly Blood Jiangshi required the corpse of a martial artist who had succeeded in Marrow Cleansing. In other words, the corpse of an Absolute Master who had reached the realm called the Realm of Truth.
The problem was that those who reached such a realm rarely died unnatural death, and most belonged to some massive power.
For the Blood Cult, which had to stay in the shadows, getting their hands on a body like that was pretty much impossible.
So they pinned all their hopes on an old rumor from Sichuan and spent more than ten years scouring the entire region for the Heavenly Demon Secret Cave.
And a few years ago, they finally succeeded in finding the Heavenly Demon Secret Cave.
And fell into despair.
The Heavenly Demon's corpse had nothing left but bones.
To create a Heavenly Blood Jiangshi, they needed intact muscles and meridians. They needed perfectly balanced muscles and bone structure, along with unobstructed meridians; that's why they'd been searching for a corpse that had achieved Bone Marrow Cleansing.
When the enraged Blood Cult members tried to destroy the Heavenly Demon Secret Cave, the Blood Cult Leader succeeded in coming up with a wicked plan.
He figured out a way to get revenge on the Heavenly Demon for wasting their time. And, at the same time, a way to gather the massive amount of Blood Qi he needed for his project.
After that, the Blood Cult carefully set traps throughout Mount Baihe where the Heavenly Demon Secret Cave was located.
And about two years ago, they succeeded in obtaining the corpse of an Absolute Master who had reached the Realm of Truth.
That very corpse now lay before the Blood Cult Leader's eyes.
The Blood Cult used various drugs and spells to keep the corpse from decaying, and started making their moves in Sichuan.
They stirred up trouble among the three big factions and timed their rumors about the Heavenly Demon Secret Cave.
Though the grand plan they'd prepared over more than a decade had fallen apart, there was no trace of despair in the Blood Cult Leader's eyes.
'I will complete it no matter what.'
Even if it meant dyeing the entire Central Plains in blood.
With that vow in his mind, the Blood Cult Leader turned from the corpse.
A man in black was kneeling behind him.
“Report.”
The man pressed his head to the ground and answered.
"Too many people gathered near Mount Baihe, so we couldn't erase the traces the Heavenly Blood Jiangshi left behind. However, we eliminated all traces from after we retrieved it."
The leader clicked his tongue in annoyance, and the man felt a cold sweat run down his spine.
The grand plan had just failed. This was not a good time to get on the Cult Leader’s bad side.
He could end up as fuel for the very jiangshi project he was reporting on.
“And the Orthodox Faction? What are they up to?”
"Thanks to the Tang Family doing something stupid, their attention seems focused on that."
The man didn't think they'd been lucky or that heaven was helping them. They were people who dreamed of defying heaven with wicked sorceries after all.
"What we'd prepared all this time wasn't completely in vain."
The Blood Cult Leader believed that it was precisely because they'd been sowing discord among Sichuan's three great powers that the Tang Family had done something so stupid in the first place.
"This is all thanks to the Cult Leader's wisdom."
Thud.
The man who'd come to report banged his head on the ground in flattery, and blood began flowing down his forehead.
As if the blood flowing from his forehead meant nothing, the man added more words to avoid displeasing the Cult Leader.
"Also, we've obtained information about those who ruined our grand plan."
"Speak."
"The Murim Alliance's Flying Dragon Pavilion Lord, the Beggars’ Gang’s Beggar Chaser, and lastly, a group called the Maitreya Luminous Cult."
"Maitreya Luminous Cult?"
The Blood Cult Leader frowned at a name he'd never heard before.