Chapter 47: Summoning the Souls of the Dead A few soldiers, unable to hold their breaths for any longer, finally broke and gasped for breath.
“Huff, huff...” The sound of them gasping for air was lost in the howling wind.
But in that instant, over a hundred wrathful souls swirling above suddenly halted midair, then turned in perfect unison to stare straight at them.
The unlucky few had not even taken two full breaths when the horde of wrathful souls surged downward like a black wave, ramming directly into their heads.
With a pop, the three life fires on each of their bodies extinguished in an instant.
No one dared to intervene.
To the horrified onlookers, the moment a wrathful soul pierced their victims through their ears or nose, the men would then freeze for two or three breaths, then begin shrieking in agony.
Their eyes turned blood-red, and spittle ran uncontrollably from their mouths. They looked like rabid animals, but unlike the hosts of Three Corpses Worms, they did not lash out at others. Instead, they sprinted in all directions, senseless and wild, slamming into walls, rolling on the ground, crashing into pillars.
Dozens of wrathful souls fought inside a single mind, tearing at one another. It was like stuffing a fistful of firecrackers into someone’s skull. Who could withstand that?
Within ten breaths, all of them had collapsed with blood flowing out from every single one of their orifices.
The survivors watched, shaken to the core.
The problem was that the more frightened they grew, the faster their hearts pounded, and the harder it was for them to hold their breath. Faces across the crowd were turning purplish-blue from strain, and the wrathful souls still had not stopped erupting from the pool. There was seemingly no end in sight.
It was now a matter of two choices: suffocate, or let the wrathful souls drill into their skull.
Only a few breaths later, another five or six succumbed to the former.
He Lingchuan and Nian Songyu were faring better, thanks to their lung capacity as warriors. Meanwhile, He Chunhua’s face had turned a deep, terrifying purple. He was nearing his limit.
He Lingchuan finally moved and grabbed Sun Fuping by the sleeve, mouthing, “Do something!”
He was a warrior, making him completely useless against spiritual beings such as these wrathful souls.
Perhaps Sun Fuping had reached the same conclusion. With a flick of his sleeve, he shook off He Lingchuan’s hand, stepped into the middle of the crowd, and raised his staff.
He shoved something into the beast’s mouth atop the staff, then drove it hard into the ground.
With the beast head as the core, a golden-yellow barrier burst forth, forming a dome of light that enclosed everyone inside.
A barrier!
Sun Fuping shouted, “You can breathe now!”
Relief washed over the crowd. Some doubled over, gasping, while others inhaled so hard they could not stop coughing.
Seeing the barrier, even He Chunhua could no longer conceal his anger. “Why wait until now?”
Had he acted ten breaths earlier, those five or six lives could have been saved.
Sun Fuping’s expression was grim. “This is an illusory barrier. It doesn’t last long and is less effective than life fires. I only use it as a last resort. Can you tell me how much longer the wrathful souls will be surging out?”
No one could.
He Chunhua fell silent. The soldiers looked at Sun Fuping with mixed expressions.
He paid them no mind.
“Protecting the majority takes precedence,” said Nian Songyu. Then, he followed up with a question, “So what now?”
“We wait,” Sun Fuping replied, eyes fixed on the pool. “Only when the wrathful souls stop surging out can we proceed to the next step.”
Now that the worst had passed, people finally had a moment to observe the terrifying, wrathful souls still filling the sky.
Situ Han murmured, “Hey, there seem to be more human-shaped ones now. A lot of them look like they’re armored cavalry.”
Ghostly warhorses galloped through the air, their riders brandishing blades and shouting, as if still locked in battle on some forgotten battlefield.
“Soldiers are the most common among the dead, and their resentment runs deepest,” He Lingchuan said, startled. “Look at that!”
The wrathful souls erupting from the pool had gone from grotesque hybrids to mostly human ghosts, and now, even those had grown massive. Though wrathful souls lacked physical weight, the one He Lingchuan saw now looked like the fusion of multiple spirits, with seven arms and eight limbs, and extra pairs of eyes embedded on its chest and shoulders.
In front of it, regular wrathful souls were like commoners standing before an ancient banyan tree. They were utterly dwarfed and could not even be considered to be in the same league.
The pressure this wrathful soul radiated toward the living was unlike anything they had felt before.
Yet, oddly enough, Sun Fuping seemed relieved the moment he saw it. “Just as expected...”
He Lingchuan squinted. “Just as expected? What exactly did you expect? Finish your damn sentences, or you’ll end up dribbling when you pee at night.”
“They’ve been in the pot for too long. As a result, some of the wrathful souls began devouring and fusing, forming new and powerful entities, like raising gu in a jar[1].” Sun Fuping pointed at the monster. “Just as I expected, the wrathful souls emerge from weak to strong. This means that... our wait is nearly over.”
That seven-armed and eight-legged abomination had clawed its way out just like the rest. It was about to follow the main horde upward until Sun Fuping finished speaking. Then, it suddenly stopped. All sixteen of its eyes blinked in eerie synchronicity and turned to stare straight at the barrier.
He Lingchuan felt his scalp crawl. Its stare was scarier than Nian Songyu’s. “Can it see us?”
“Shh!” Sun Fuping cut him off sharply.
However, it was already too late.
The sixteen-eyed abomination tilted its head and began sniffing the air. It then stepped out of the pool and started lumbering toward the barrier.
Its gait was clumsy, uneven, almost ridiculous. However, Sun Fuping knew that there was nothing funny about this at all. It had just entered the human realm and had not yet fully adapted to it.
The illusory barrier had no real defensive power. True defenses would provoke hostility from the wrathful souls. Its only purpose was to suppress signs of life, to keep the living from being noticed.
However, in a sea of strange and varied wrathful souls, there were always a few with unique traits, and there were always ones who were harder to deceive.
From this abomination’s behavior, it had not completely seen through the barrier, but it was clearly suspicious. And it had decided to investigate.
Within the illusion, it sensed no clear scent of flesh or blood. However, it did catch faint traces of vitality, like fireflies blinking in the dark. When it tried to focus, the glow slipped away again.
And that piqued its curiosity, causing it to want to get a closer look.
As it neared the barrier, Sun Fuping barked, “White Mountain, Azure Water! Raise the Soul-Stilling Banner!”
Two of his personal attendants lunged to the front line. As if by magic, a massive white cloth banner appeared in their hands. They planted themselves at the edge of the barrier and began to wave it in broad, sweeping arcs.
The banner was covered in dense black and red talismanic runes. As it fluttered in the headwind, the runes seemed to float up from the fabric, slowly rotating in the air. Then, the faint murmur of Sanskrit-like chanting filled the space.
It looked like nothing more than a cloth on a staff, appearing to be a mere piece of ironwood and fabric. However, it clearly took all four of their arms to keep it aloft.
The motion they made was methodical and precise, like they were carving a glowing infinity symbol, “∞”, in the air.
Meanwhile, Sun Fuping stepped to the front of the group and signaled everyone to close their eyes.
However, the order came too late. The moment the white banner appeared, many eyes instinctively followed its motion. After two passes, several people’s eyes glazed over, caught in a trance. Like moths to flame, they began walking toward it.
One man passed right by He Lingchuan. He Lingchuan grabbed the man’s shoulder and slammed his eyelids shut.
The man struggled for a moment, then they went limp.
Others caught on quickly, restraining any comrades who had fallen under the banner’s spell. One by one, they clamped eyes shut and dragged those who were entranced back into place.
1. This refers to the ancient folk practice of creating a venomous poison by forcing venomous creatures, the gu insects, to consume each other in a closed container. The surviving gu or its larvae were said to hold a concentrated form of the poison, which could then be used for various purposes. ☜