The husk lunged for Konzi again. Wuji had identified him as the weak link—this herbalist was the only one using non-lethal orphan spells, binding vines that marked him as a cultivator with a wood spirit root.
Whoosh!
Konzi's vines lashed out like striking cobras. From the left, Liu Li's fire spears screamed through the air, followed by a barrage of flaming palms that turned the darkness into an oven. To the right, Kito's ice shards glistened like jagged diamonds before launching, merging with the invisible, humming wind blades of Yun's executioner-style slashes.
Boom! Boom!
The overlapping spells became a symphony of destruction in the silence of the desolate plains. Before Wuji's mortal reflexes could command a dodge, the convergence struck the husk. Yellow flames incinerated its silken robes; ice punched through its stomach; wind slashes carved deep gashes across its chest.
The four went still, the crackle of dying flames the only sound in the air. A wave of predatory satisfaction washed over them, they had landed the killing blow, easier than they thought. Or so they thought, until the satisfaction curdled.
Yun's face was the first to contort. His eyes widened, staring at the husk's face, now fully exposed as the veil and garments drifted away as ash. The moonlight illuminated it: beautiful, emotionless, and hauntingly familiar—enough to elicit nightmares.
"T... the Illusion Vixen," Yun stammered, his boots crunching on dry earth as he recoiled.
The others turned to him, their brief triumph replaced by sudden, sharp confusion. "What are you talking about?" Liu Li demanded.
"She—she is a Core Formation demonic cultivator," Yun muttered, the terror in his voice sending a ripple of cold through the group. "The Illusion Vixen. Why is she here? Why is she like this?"
"Be clear!" Liu Li snapped, her qi flaring in agitation.
Yun didn't answer. Instead, he spun in a panicked circle, firing wind blades into the empty air around them.
"What are you doing, you fool?" Konzi hissed.
"Checking for array boundaries!" Yun shouted. "She's a grade-three array master. We could be standing in the center of an illusion and not know it until our throats are cut!"
The realization forced them to look back at the husk. The fire had died, but there was no scent of burning meat. The wind blades had carved into its chest, but the wounds were white and dry—not a single drop of blood in sight.
If she were a mere Foundation Pillar Establishment cultivator, she would be a pile of gore from those spells. If she were Core Formation, she wouldn't have been hit at all.
"A corpse puppet?" Konzi whispered, his voice cracking.
"No," Liu Li said, her eyes fixed on the three-meter Heaven Burial Coffin. "The resonance is wrong. If this is a masterwork created through some ancient forbidden method..." Her gaze narrowed on the black stone box. "Then where is the one holding the strings?"
Inside the coffin, Wuji felt the walls closing in. For moments while they debated, he stared at the panel, at the stored lifespan, the ten years.
" Are their lives worth a decade? Ten years for sixty seconds of mid-Core Formation peak." He gritted his teeth. "I can get more years—even if the effects might not be good. But I have to escape this at least."
Wuji felt Liu Li's examining gaze burn against the coffin. Without a blink, he fed the ten years into the husk. Instantly, the husk's presence detonated, the air around it warping as its cultivation surged back to the mid-Core Formation realm.
The qi coating the slender blade flared into a blinding aura. The four recoiled as one, their faces twisting into masks of pure horror. They had been hunting a rabbit and found a dragon.
With Wuji's command, the husk took a step. Its body vanished from their sight. Before they could even turn to look, it appeared beside Konzi, standing to his left with oppressive qi.
"Wha—"
The word died in his throat. With a casual, backhanded chop, the husk's hand blurred. Konzi's head was severed before his brain could register the strike—and before the skull could even begin its tilt toward the ground, the husk was already a shadow behind Liu Li.
Her eyes widened. She tilted her head backward, face contorted in a scream of primal terror. She didn't think further; instinctively, she activated her natal spell. "EMBER MANDATE!"
A sphere of searing, golden solar fire erupted around her.
CLANG!
The sword struck the barrier with the force of a falling mountain. The kinetic feedback and the roar of the counter-flame hurled the husk back, its right hand charred to blackened skin, some of it peeling in flakes, but it didn't matter. It felt no pain.
Wuji's cold mind issued another command in the same beat: Kill the others before they also use their natal spells.
In the next beat, the husk appeared behind Kito. The man was a frantic mess of limbs, trying to mount his flying sword in a pathetic bid for the sky.
GAG!
The jagged, damaged sword plunged through his spine and erupted from his sternum. Without pausing, the husk drove the hilt upward, the blade cleaving through Kito's chest, throat, and skull in a single vertical spray of gore.
Without turning, it leaped to Yun. The middle-aged man didn't fight or try to flee. He collapsed, his forehead slamming into the dirt in a frantic, rhythmic kowtow. "Senior! Please! I am of the Sect—I only—"
The husk leaned over him like a dark god and drove the sword through the back of his bowed head. A sickening pop echoed as the pressure of Core Formation qi turned his skull to mush.
Then the husk turned back to Liu Li, its eyes driving terror into her soul. Through the husk's eyes, Wuji analyzed her flaming barrier. It was thinning, she didn't have enough mastery over her natal spell; it was a leaky vessel draining her dry. "Three more hits," he calculated. "Maybe I can break her before the minute expires."
The husk struck. Each time the Ember Mandate lashed out with a counter-flare, the husk recoiled and lunged again with relentless, machine-like precision under his control. On the final strike, Liu Li's qi reserves hit zero. The golden sphere flickered and died.
She collapsed into the dirt, gasping.
"Senior... please... spare—"
The blade bit into her neck, carving halfway through the muscle before it stopped dead. The minute was over. The "Illusion Vixen" became lifeless once more.
Liu Li clutched her throat, blood geysering between her fingers. Seeing the husk go still, she mistook the silence for mercy. She began to kowtow, sobbing through the hole in her windpipe, her body wracked with the agony of near-decapitation.
"Shit. I have to finish this myself."
Wuji climbed out of the coffin, the cool night air hitting his wrinkled face. His boots crunched on the ground as he approached her. Liu Li looked up, her face ghostly white. For a delusional second, seeing a "mortal" old man gave her a spark of hope.
That spark died when Wuji walked to the motionless Vixen, pried the notched sword from her grip, and turned toward her with eyes that held no warmth, no pity, only cold killing intent.
"Old man! It's me!" she wheezed, her voice a wet, bubbling ruin. "Talk to your Master! I'll get her manuals! Profound Grade! I can find them!"
Wuji looked down at her. He didn't tower over her; he simply crouched, the sword held firm in a white-knuckled grip.
"Esteemed Immortal," he said, his voice low and steady. "Do you truly believe a Profound Grade excuses what you've done?" He watched her mouth work, but no logic came out. "Just one question. Why? We were civilized. We gave you the spirit stones. We followed your rules. Why couldn't you be content? Why did you have to gamble your life on someone you knew would clearly kill you?"
"We were blinded!" she pleaded, her hands reaching out in a blood-slicked gesture of supplication. "We didn't mean it!"
"You meant every bit of it." Wuji sighed, a weary sound that drifted into the night. "You weren't blinded. You were just greedy. Pity your gamble failed." He paused, looking at the blood on the grass. "Forget it. I knew the answer before I asked. I just wanted to see if your kind ever changes."
"Uhh—"
He didn't wait for a rebuttal. He drove the sword into the other side of her neck, pinning her to the dirt. Her body gave one final, violent spasm, and then the silence of the plains returned.
Wuji rose, his gaze cold as it swept over the four corpses. Sword still clutched in his hand, blood-slicked and notched, he turned toward the Heaven Burial Coffin. Standing above it, he slid the lid back and willed the black liquid to appear. He stepped in and sank, emerging heartbeats later within the gray stillness of the interment space.
He walked directly to the suspended disciple, raised the damaged blade, and cut the boy's throat in one clean motion. No blood was sprayed in this space. He grabbed the back of the disciple's neck and dragged him down into the black liquid.
As they broke the surface in the outside world, reality reasserted itself. A violent spray of crimson erupted, dyeing Wuji red, the blood hot on his face. The disciple was dead before his waist even emerged.
Wuji wiped his face messily with his other hand, then heaved the limp body onto his shoulder. Moments later, he dumped it among the other fallen cultivators, a final, confusing piece of the puzzle for whoever found this site.
He returned to the coffin's edge, hesitating only a second before closing the lid on himself and sacrificing another year of his natural lifespan. The conversion process was brutal.
When he pulled himself back out, his skin was more sallow, his eyes sunken into deep, dark hollows. The "emptiness" in his gaze had sharpened into a haunting, ancestral fatigue.
He turned to the husk, still a frozen statue in the moonlight, and fed it five minutes of activation. It blurred toward the bodies, pausing only when Wuji held up a hand. He scanned the remains. Which of these corpses holds value?
His gaze landed on Konzi. Based on the spells used, he was a wood-attribute cultivator, useful for future herb-tending or refinement. Yun's words suggested a demonic cultivator, a variable Wuji didn't want to gamble on yet. As for Kito and Liu Li, he would leave them.
Let the Heaven's Fall Sect find them. Let their analysts choke on conflicting data: a dead disciple, slaughtered merchants, and a demonic cultivator.
He walked first to Liu Li's corpse, searching it. Most of the goods were in her spatial pouch. He yanked it free, then moved to the others, taking each of their pouches. Finally, he stood over Konzi's corpse, grabbed the headless body by the neck with the hand still holding the damaged sword, heaved it up, and carried it to the coffin.
He placed it in the interment space, then turned to the husk and laid it back inside as well, sealing the lid for moments to scrub any lingering spiritual residue from its form.
Standing above the coffin, his mind returned to the past. How did they find me? He rubbed the shallow cut on his cheek, retracing every second spent in the herbal shop. The boxes were stored. The manual... then he remembered.
"The cloth." The small, "kind" gesture Konzi had used to wipe the blood from his face. A physical trace. Does that mean the coffin can remove mystical traces but not physical ones? It feels like it wants a competent master, not one who can't see through mere physical tracking.
With that, he retrieved a basin of water from the interment space, stripped his robes, and climbed into the coffin to scrub his skin raw. He couldn't leave such a pathetic, mortal mistake at the scene of a massacre.
Moments later, after cleaning himself, he materialized the black liquid to swallow the dirty water, then donned fresh robes, burying the old ones in the interment space.
He sealed himself inside, gave the husk ten minutes of flight time, and ordered it west.
Eight minutes later, moving at high speed, the husk intercepted the horse and empty cart still trundling through the high grass. It descended with the coffin, placing it back into the cart with a light thud. Wuji climbed out, seated the husk beside the coffin, and took the reins.
Looking forward through the darkness, he could barely see distant mountains looming like jagged teeth against the starry sky. Glancing back, he felt uncomfortable with the naked husk and ordered it to dress itself, even a corpse deserved the dignity of clothes, and a naked, perforated woman would be impossible to explain to a passing patrol.
As the cart creaked toward the peaks, Wuji made a silent, ironclad vow. He would not descend from those heights until he reached the early stages of Body Refinement. He would hide in the mountains until he was strong enough to return.