劍問蒼天 - 第186章 收魂 - 清風書屋

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.