From the moment the array was broken to the sweeping away of all the city gate guards, the entire process took no more than a dozen breaths.
This was no longer a battle; it was a one-sided massacre.
Jian Huaishuang stood atop the deserted city gate tower, looking down into the city from his high vantage point.
As far as his eyes could see, there was only a deathly silent long street.
The doors and windows of the houses lining both sides of the street were tightly shut, pitch black without a single flicker of light.
Jian Huaishuang stepped into Kushi City.
A pungent stench of decay, mixed with the smell of dust, rushed toward him.
The street was empty. The doors and windows of the shops and residences on both sides were covered in cobwebs and dust, and some wooden doors still bore the faded remnants of old New Year paintings.
A thick layer of ash had accumulated on the ground, except for one clear path that led straight from the city gates into the depths of the inner city—the tracks left by the knocking ghosts and corpse guards who walked it year after year.
This place was unlike White Jade City, which was a chaotic hell masked by a veneer of peace.
It was even less like the City of the Wrongfully Dead, which, under the Lord’s protection, was a land of hope where vitality and order coexisted.
The feeling Kushi City gave off was that of a strictly enforced dead silence.
It was as if a pause button had been pressed at some specific moment, stripping away all life and sound, leaving behind only an empty shell.
Jian Huaishuang moved along the shadows of the walls, sneaking toward the inner city.
Soon, he passed through the outer civilian area, and a vast complex of buildings appeared before his eyes.
The architectural style here was entirely different from the outer city; these were no longer ordinary residences, but a series of uniform bluestone courtyards. The layout was orderly, exuding the stern atmosphere unique to a sect.
This should be the mastermind's lair.
Jian Huaishuang stopped outside one of the courtyards; the gate was slightly ajar. He tilted his head to listen, but there was no sound from within. He reached out, gently pushed the gate open, and slipped inside.
The courtyard was a mess.
Many tools that no one had found time to pack away were scattered across the ground.
There were blood-stained shrouds, heavily worn carving knives, and a large wooden bucket overturned on the floor. The black liquid that had spilled out was already dried, emitting a sharp, medicinal odor.
Jian Huaishuang crouched down, pinched a bit of the powder from the ground, and sniffed it.
It was corpse-bone powder, a special product mixed with various medicinal herbs specifically used for refining corpses.
He walked into the house, where the scene further confirmed his suspicions.
Unfinished meals sat on the table, long since moldy and spoiled.
The bedding on the cot was also in disarray, as if the owner had just gotten up and would return shortly. The wardrobe was open, with several black robes still hanging inside, abandoned in the rush.
The people here seemed to have evacuated collectively within an extremely short window of time due to some sudden incident.
They had left in a great hurry, leaving behind many things they didn't have time to take.
Jian Huaishuang searched several courtyards in succession; the situation was largely the same.
Rather than an eerie demon’s den, this place felt more like a heavily guarded, self-sufficient temporary base established by a mountain sect.
Only, this base was now empty.
This was completely different from what he had expected.
He exited the courtyard and continued toward the center of the city.
As he went deeper, a strange aura began to grow clearer.
It was an indescribable feeling, as if something massive and ancient was lurking beneath the earth, breathing slowly.
This aura permeated the ground, filled with greed and tyranny, as well as a primal hunger for all living things.
Earlier, outside the city, this aura had been masked by the city-protecting array and the dense corpse-fiend energy, making it less obvious.
Now that he was inside the city, Jian Huaishuang could clearly perceive that this power was the source of the city's bizarre atmosphere.
And when his own deathly energy as an evil spirit radiated outward, the restless aura in the earth actually shrank back as if meeting its nemesis. It dared not approach his body, as if fearing something.
He raised his head and cast his gaze toward the source of this aura.
At the very center of the city, a black stone tower roughly a hundred zhang high stood silently like a sword piercing the firmament.
The Soul-Suppressing Tower.
This name surfaced in Jian Huaishuang's mind.
In the ancient records of the sword sect, such buildings were mentioned; they were typically used by ancient sects to suppress peerless fiends or ominous objects.
However, with the sword sect's meager heritage, they could never afford to build such a structure.
He saw that with the Soul-Suppressing Tower as the center, the ground for several miles around had taken on an ominous bronze color.
The power eroding the earth was indeed suppressed beneath the tower, yet a portion of that energy still leaked out through the foundation. Over many years, it had completely contaminated this land.
Just as Jian Huaishuang was about to approach the Soul-Suppressing Tower, his foot kicked something.
He looked down and found a scroll stepped into the loose soil, the cover marked with the words 'Corpse Soul Sect'.
Most of the scroll had turned into hard bronze, as if it had been soaked in liquid metal, with only the last few pages retaining the texture of paper.
It looked like it had been accidentally dropped by the people here during their hasty evacuation.
Jian Huaishuang picked it up and carefully brushed away the dust.
He flipped open the scroll. Inside were not words, but a series of crudely styled drawings.
The first few pages were incredibly hard, and the images were somewhat blurred, but he could still barely make out the content.
The drawings depicted a tragic famine. On the cracked earth, crops were withered and riverbeds were bone-dry. Emaciated commoners knelt on the ground praying for rain, and there were even horrific scenes of people exchanging children to eat.
Jian Huaishuang continued to flip through. Several pages in the middle had completely bronzed, making the content illegible.
He skipped directly to the final pages.
The scene shifted. A group of people appeared, wearing uniform attire with their faces obscured, each holding a ceramic jar in their hands.
In the next drawing, these jar-holding people were leading the young and healthy men and women of the city in a line, walking into that towering Soul-Suppressing Tower.
Every citizen had a hideous expression and hollow eyes, looking like controlled puppets.
Then, the doors of the Soul-Suppressing Tower were shut tight.
In the final drawing, the tower doors were wide open, and countless corpse guards and malevolent ghosts that had been refined within emerged.
Jian Huaishuang's gaze returned to the Soul-Suppressing Tower.
He saw that the tower was surrounded by layer upon layer of densely packed corpse guards, numbering at least a thousand.
They formed a massive defensive formation, firmly guarding the Soul-Suppressing Tower at the center.
But unlike the corpse guards at the city gate, these corpse guards were more or less stained with a faint bronze hue, as if they, too, were being slowly eroded by the power beneath the tower.
Jian Huaishuang did not move rashly.
He could feel that the aura beneath the Soul-Suppressing Tower was filled with a pure, unmasked sense of hunger.
It was a primitive desire to devour all life.
This feeling... seemed somewhat familiar...
He carefully retraced his memories.
Since coming to Kushi County, everything he had encountered, every ghost he had slain...
Suddenly, a detail he had overlooked flashed through his mind like a bolt of lightning.
When he was killing those knocking ghosts, he had visited many villages.
One of them... one village's aura was slightly different from the others.
The land there seemed even more barren, and the deathly energy in the air was mixed with a faint trace of the same aura as the thing beneath the tower.
He remembered now.
It was Huangshawo!
That village, dominated by sandy soil, was the poorest. When he was slaying knocking ghosts there, he had sensed a slight abnormality, but at the time he had merely thought it was due to the local ley lines and hadn't looked deeper.
Thinking back now, that abnormal aura and this power beneath the Soul-Suppressing Tower were one and the same!
Jian Huaishuang put away the remnant scroll and cast a deep look at the Soul-Suppressing Tower guarded by countless corpse guards.
The thing suppressed beneath the tower was definitely nothing good. Before he was certain, it was better not to act rashly. Perhaps he should go and take a look at that inconspicuous little village.
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