Chapter 186 — Soul Gathering

Zhou Yixuan looked at her face, and his heart sank. He gave a dry laugh. "What?"

Xiaowan drew a long breath and said resolutely: "The Daoist's fate was fixed by himself. It was he who, heedless of all else, rushed here to save us—and so met his unfortunate end. Had he turned and gone his way, where in all this world could he not have found a place to live in peace?" The girl's face was somewhat pale, somewhat sorrowful, and she said in a low voice, "So it is that he died for us. Without him, we would long since be dead. How could we still be here discussing allotted years?"

She looked toward Zhou Yixuan, and he, for some reason, shifted his gaze away. "Grandfather, I will save him. However perilous this art, it cannot be more perilous than what he faced just now to save us—can it?"

She spoke with utter finality.

Zhou Yixuan knew her mind was made up and could not be changed, and so could only lift his head and sigh toward the sky. And the man in the darkness—at this moment both his eyes were fixed upon Xiaowan, gleaming, radiant with light.

Within the forest, it was now the deep of night, and the yin energy was at its height.

In the faint light, that uncanny art slowly unfolded.

The first drop of fresh blood welled from the cut opened on Xiaowan's fair arm and fell, slowly, beside the Wild Wolf Daoist. Then Xiaowan walked around the Wild Wolf Daoist, letting her own blood drip down beside him. Her wrist swayed slowly, and the falling blood upon the ground little by little formed a strange pattern.

In the dense forest, as the blood-red pattern gradually took shape, faint ghostly wails began to rise. Zhou Yixuan stood to one side watching, the corner of his eye twitching slightly. And the black-clad man, who had watched this scene from the shadows for so long, now suddenly knit his brows as well.

This scene—he seemed somehow to have seen it somewhere before!

The Great Sorcerer...

The man in black could not help it—his body gave a faint shudder!

The blood formation Xiaowan had now laid out was plainly somewhat similar to the one the Great Sorcerer had used that day on Mount Huqi when he saved Bili. But after Xiaowan had made her circuit and the formation took shape, the man in black could already see that her formation differed from the Great Sorcerer's in that day. Setting other things aside, the scale of the formation alone was far smaller. Perhaps both used blood as the medium, but Xiaowan, all alone, had cut her own vein for the blood, and so could naturally not be compared with the Great Sorcerer of that day.

Perhaps for this very reason, the array Xiaowan laid down was far simpler in its totemic patterns than what the Great Sorcerer had wrought that day. Yet even so, by the time she had completed a single circuit, Xiaowan was already swaying on her feet, her face ashen pale.

Zhou Yixuan said nothing, stepping forward to steady her. Weak as she was, Xiaowan turned and gave him a faint smile, then slowly lowered herself to sit cross-legged at the array's apex—three feet before the severed head of the Wild Wolf Daoist.

Deep within the gloomy forest, a spectral wail suddenly rose from nowhere. In an instant the whole wood rang with uncanny shrieks, and a yin aura came sweeping down like a blanket from the heavens. Gust after gust of cold, baleful wind blew in from all directions, setting the surrounding trees to swaying; behind every shadow of every branch, it seemed countless icy gazes were fixed upon this place.

Xiaowan's expression turned grave. Slowly she closed her eyes, pressed her pale hands together before her breast, and murmured a mysterious incantation under her breath. After a moment she spread her slender fingers upon her chest, then lowered them slowly and plunged them into the pattern of blood pooled before her.

In an instant the blood pattern encircling the Wild Wolf Daoist's body flared bright—all the blood seemed suddenly to have been granted life, coursing and swirling within the design. At the same moment, into the pallor of Xiaowan's face crept threads of an eerie black qi.

The baleful wind grew ever fiercer; the whole dense wood seemed now to have darkened, until only the array itself remained aglow.

The blood, lively and coursing, was like the most delectable of feasts, drawing countless wandering spirits toward it.

The worry on Zhou Yixuan's face deepened by the moment. He well knew the peril of this soul-gathering art—to think that a mortal would snatch a soul from the courts of the underworld! What manner of danger was that? Still, held back by her own cultivation, Xiaowan was working her spell only within the bounds of this forest, so the disturbance could barely be counted as great; surely it would not rouse those underworld guardians of formidable ghostly power—for if by some mischance she drew their notice, the consequences were truly beyond imagining.

But from the look of things now, even an array of this sort seemed more than Xiaowan could well bear. The black qi on her face grew heavier and heavier, and her body began to tremble. This casting, after all, was not as it had been when she healed Jin Pingyue. Jin Pingyue's soul had not been wholly scattered; with that as a anchor, gathering the remnants was far easier. When the Great Sorcerer had healed Bili on Mount Huxi, the array had been vastly larger, yet even then he had relied chiefly upon the residual soul of Bili captured within the rare treasure, the Joyous Union Bell, and by that uncanny art had searched the deepest reaches of the nine underworlds to drag the scattered soul back by main force. Yet for that very reason, the Great Sorcerer—first, his own vital essence exhausted to the dregs; second, having roused the underworld guardians—was struck by the backlash of their ghostly power, and perished in the end.

And now Xiaowan, with her shallow cultivation, was working the strangest and most abstruse of all ghost-path arts, and lacking the crucial soul besides. Her task was no more than to seek out the Wild Wolf Daoist's soul among all the wandering spirits of this forest—yet the peril of it already defied mortal imagination.

Those two beast-demons had taken no telling how many lives here, and no telling how many wronged souls now circled this place, unable to pass on. And Xiaowan's array was plainly meant to draw a single soul into this corpse—how could that not drive every wandering spirit to frenzy?

In a moment the skies shifted and the winds changed hue; countless threads of half-visible black qi rushed at Xiaowan, each striving to be first. The agony on her face deepened until her features were all but swallowed in black qi.

At this rate, Xiaowan surely could not hold out much longer. Yet for some reason she refused, to the very end, to give up. So many wronged spirits and ghostly vapors circled about her—some wailing like ghosts and howling like wolves, some pleading without cease, some fierce and threatening—all the agonies and despairs, all the evil passions of this world, seemed bent on piercing into her mind. And still Xiaowan struggled on, searching through that endless sea of wronged souls with the last shred of spiritual power that remained to her.

If she failed this time, there would likely be no second chance.