The Quest for Immortality - Chapter 1142 (Patreon)

Chapter 1142: Strange Corpses

After half a month of eating wind and sleeping rough, keeping a low profile on the road, Mo Hua finally arrived at Gale Crossing.

Gale Crossing was a ferry town on the edge of a sea of sand—remote and shabby in the old days.

But because beyond the ferry lay the Sand Sea, and on the far side of that, the fourth-rank Desert City, traffic grew heavy. Over time, it became a little immortal city that wasn’t quite an immortal city.

Many cultivators who lived by trading, plying boats, and running ferries had gathered here.

Mo Hua stood at the crossing, looked up into the distance, and could already see yellow sand rolling like waves. Wind and dust rose to the sky, blotting out sun and heaven.

That was the Sand Sea.

On the far side lay the Great Wilderness. Heat surged through the flying grit, and hidden within it were the auras of war flames, running fire, pain, and slaughter, all woven together, making the blood race and the heart pound like a battle drum.

Mo Hua let out a quiet breath, calmed himself, and stepped into Gale Crossing.

The place was a jumble, noisy and chaotic.

There were poor local cultivators, a motley of outsiders, family cultivators, sect cultivators, and even some lone wanderers who walked their own path.

Quite a few of them carried killing intent; clearly, their hands were stained with blood.

Others were wrapped in black cloaks, their qi hidden and suppressed.

But Mo Hua could clearly tell these were demonic cultivators.

The situation in the Great Wilderness was growing ever messier.

Those who could enter the Great Wilderness were all capable sorts, but their motives differed, and their makeup was complicated.

Mo Hua did not want to get entangled in any disputes, lest an unwary moment force him to break his no-killing戒.

Right now, he just wanted to reach the Great Wilderness.

Between him and the Great Wilderness, however, stretched the boundless Sand Sea. Cultivators below the Ascension realm could not fly across empty sky and thus could not cross the sands on their own.

To cross the Sand Sea, one had to ride a sand-ship.

And to ride a sand-ship, one needed a “ship pass.”

Mo Hua wandered Gale Crossing, handed over a few spirit stones, and asked some locals how to get a pass.

He then visited several ferry firms and tried to negotiate.

He failed across the board.

With the Great Wilderness in revolt and war raging, the road was perilous, and ship passes had grown even scarcer.

Worse, not long ago, demonic cultivators had boarded as passengers, butchered everyone mid-journey, and seized the sand-ship.

The ferry companies had become ever stricter about issuing passes.

Without connections—without some respected local elder or clan head to vouch for you—spirit stones alone would not buy a thing.

Mo Hua suddenly found himself missing Elder Ji.

That man had every vice and was by no means a good person—eating, drinking, whoring, and gambling, he excelled at them all—but he was a master of making connections.

If he were still alive, he’d spend a few nights carousing, meet a handful of elders, and might actually pull some strings to get Mo Hua a pass.

Unfortunately, Elder Ji was dead.

He died by yin-cultivator harvest, a miserable end.

Mo Hua felt a faint, inexplicable sadness.

He shook his head. Dusk had fallen, so he found an inn in Gale Crossing and took a room for the night, planning to think of something tomorrow to secure a pass.

Night brought a chill. The wind moaned, rattling doors and windows.

Mo Hua sealed the room with formations, laid down arrays for soundproofing and blocking divine sense, then sat at the table and drew out a book.

The book was old, made of parchment, and bore four characters on its cover: The Compendium of Strange Corpses.

It was a rare corpse-path classic he’d taken from the storage pouch of Elder Xu of Yin Corpse Valley, a cultivator at the Golden Core stage.

On the road, Mo Hua had been busy traveling, worried about backlash from the “fierce-omen baleful ghost,” and wary of his shibo’s machinations. With gloom weighing on his heart, he had no leisure for anything else.

He hadn’t even had time to go through Elder Xu’s storage pouch.

Now that he’d reached Gale Crossing and settled for the moment, he finally had the space to study the “relics” Elder Xu had left behind.

Among those relics, the most unusual was naturally this Compendium of Strange Corpses.

The manual recorded many methods for refining “strange corpses”—zombies of odd forms and uncanny functions.

Mo Hua actually knew quite a bit about the corpse path.

Back when he traveled with his master, his little senior brother, and his little senior sister, they passed through Nanyue City and ran into a corpse calamity. The Lu clan patriarch imprisoned them in a corpse mine, where they kept company with corpse-refiners; Mo Hua saw many examples and techniques with his own eyes.

He had even studied some of the theory.

With that foundation, reading this Compendium made many of the corpse path’s gates and thresholds much clearer.

Demonic cultivators who walked the corpse path, aside from “corpse-transforming” their own bodies, drew the vast bulk of their strength from zombies they refined and raised.

The stronger the zombies they refined, raised, and controlled, the stronger the corpse cultivator.

A zombie’s “strength” split two ways: grade and type.

Grades were the conventional tiers by primary realm: first-grade for Qi Refining, second-grade for Foundation Establishment, third-grade for Golden Core, and so on.

Types were a different matter entirely.

What Mo Hua had known before were the common categories: walking corpse, iron corpse, bronze corpse, golden corpse, and the like.

Grade and type overlapped in some places, yet they were two distinct corpse-path concepts.

A zombie’s grade was determined by the main “material”—the realm of the corpse used for refinement.

The corpse used as material was called the “base corpse.”

Whatever realm the base corpse was, that was the grade of the resulting zombie.

Use a Qi Refining base corpse, and you get a first-grade zombie.

Use a Foundation base corpse, and you get a second-grade zombie…

A Golden Core base corpse yields a third-grade zombie, and so on.

Once the grade is set, you chase the type.

Starting from the base corpse, if you pair it with specific corpse-path techniques, special human bloods, and baleful heaven-and-earth treasures, you can refine different “types” of zombies.

What type results depends on the base corpse’s grade and the refinement method—and on luck.

From a first-grade base corpse you almost always get a walking corpse.

From a second-grade base corpse, you’ll mostly get walking corpses, a small number of iron corpses, and—at a vanishingly small probability—a bronze corpse.

From a third-grade base corpse, walking corpses are still the majority, but iron and bronze chances increase. There’s a tiny chance of a silver corpse, and at a truly rare probability, a golden corpse…

…

The rarer the type, the tougher the flesh and the greater the power—sometimes enough to fight above its grade.

Of course, raising such rare types cost immeasurable effort and demanded terrifying luck.

For a corpse cultivator, raising a single golden corpse—or even a silver corpse—could be called a life’s pursuit.

For most sub–Golden Core corpse cultivators, even raising a bronze corpse was a luxury.

Mo Hua thought back.

In the blood-sacrifice grand array, the Yin Corpse Valley fiend at the Ascension level had raised a terrifying golden corpse.

Young Master Shi raised a bronze corpse plated to look “gilded,” which was still, strictly speaking, a bronze corpse.

When Mo Hua was pursued, the four Golden Core elders of Yin Corpse Valley each had only bronze corpses.

Beyond that, the vast majority of corpse cultivators kept walking and iron corpses.

Those who had bronze corpses were few and far between; silver and golden corpses were rarer still.

Clearly, refining corpses was no easy task; producing a rare type was even harder.

Aside from top-tier corpse-path methods, a corpse cultivator mostly had to kill more, build a larger base of corpses, and gamble on luck.

The bigger the pool of base corpses, the higher the odds of a rare type.

Outside the common scheme of walking, iron, bronze, silver, and golden, there were stranger, rarer “odd-lineage zombies”—the so-called “strange corpses.”

Heaven and earth are boundless; creation is manifold.

Zombies are the same: there will always be marvelous variants beyond common reckoning.

Strange corpses are exactly that.

Elder Xu’s Compendium recorded many types that ordinary cultivators—and even corpse-path elders steeped in the way for centuries—would scarcely see in a lifetime, varieties nearly extinct.

Mo Hua had never heard of most of them before.

For example: the Dizang Corpse, the Beauty Corpse, the Drought-Fiend Corpse, the Flying Zombie… and so on.

The “Dizang Corpse,” it was said, bore the Dizang dao-rhyme. It possessed the faculty of “listening” to the earth: piercing appearances, discerning true from false, tracing tracks, and learning what others could not know.

Mo Hua vaguely guessed that Elder Xu had raised a Dizang Corpse—that was how he had tracked Mo Hua.

But now Elder Xu was dead, and where that corpse had gone, who could say…

The “Beauty Corpse” meant taking a beautiful woman, harming not a hair or inch of skin, killing her alive and sealing her at her most beautiful instant, then refining her into a zombie. This Beauty Corpse was a kind of “mannequin corpse.”

The “Drought-Fiend Corpse” arose when one created raging fire and burned a swath of cultivators to death. From the corpses charred by those flames, nourished by heaven’s chance and the grievances of the world, a “drought-fiend” might gestate.

Where a drought-fiend walked, a thousand li turned to red wasteland.

It was a “natural disaster” among strange corpses.

The “Flying Zombie” was said to be a zombie at the Ascension level, able to soar through sky and burrow through earth; once refined, it transcended the three realms and slipped beyond the five elements.

…

These strange corpses—some eerie, some ferocious, some mysterious, some overwhelming—left Mo Hua deeply shaken.

But most entries in the Compendium only sketched the outline.

They spoke of the strange corpse’s genesis and fortune, but gave no specific “refining arts.”

Mo Hua found that odd, then, thinking twice, found it reasonable.

Since they were “strange corpses,” most were born of heaven-and-earth anomalies—how could one simply manufacture them at will? Also possible: the true refining methods were Yin Corpse Valley’s “secrets among secrets,” on par with a sect’s “forbidden arts,” not to be spread lightly; even Elder Xu might not have been qualified to know them.

The fact that Elder Xu’s Compendium recorded only the names of these “strange corpses” was already a precious legacy.

And the manual did broaden Mo Hua’s horizons; he learned much.

He couldn’t help himself and flipped on. When he reached the third page from the end, he suddenly froze.

The page had been smeared over by someone.

Ink and characters had fused into a dark mass; not a single word could be read.

Mo Hua propped his chin and frowned. “What does this mean? Someone didn’t want others to know, so they smeared the writing?”

Curiosity stirred. He thought a moment, then tried to restore the text and see what the page had recorded.

He tried several methods, but none worked.

The ink used for the smearing was special—mixed with the blood of some demonic beast and the blood of a cultivator with a special spiritual root. It was viscous and had fused with the parchment; it could not be separated.

Whoever erased this record had gone to great pains.

Was it Elder Xu? Or someone else? Mo Hua didn’t understand, so he decided to peek via causality.

If this touched his shibo’s level, he would play dead and not pry at all.

But if it concerned only a Yin Corpse Valley elder, using causal divination to glimpse it should be fine.

And he would not probe deeply—just enough to know what the page said.

Mo Hua reinforced the room’s defenses with arrays drawn by divine sense, then, following the Great Wilderness Demon-Bone Divination, cast an augury on the erased words on the Compendium’s third page from the end.

The more specific and directed the causal divination, the more accurate it would be, consuming less divine sense and lowering the odds of a “backlash.”

By now, Mo Hua had grown increasingly skilled with the art’s subtleties.

Divine sense burned; the augury took hold.

Phosphor lights flickered; causality ran in reverse; an image surfaced.

On the page of the Compendium where blood-ink had blotted out the text, the bloodstain deepened, then lightened to bright red, then gradually faded.

The smothered words began to emerge, one by one…

“Little…”

Little? Mo Hua blinked and kept watching. As causality rolled back and the bloodstain faded, two more characters surfaced:

“Flying…”

Here the augury began to jam. It seemed to brush against some hidden matter, hard to spy upon.

Mo Hua fed in more divine sense.

The Great Wilderness Demon-Bone Divination sped up; the phosphor flames leapt higher; cracks spidered across the demon bone.

At last, another character surfaced:

“Spirit…”

Spirit? Mo Hua was even more surprised. In a demonic sect’s corpse manual, he had found the character for “spirit”?

The last character, unsurprisingly, was “corpse.”

At that, the demon bone crumbled to powder, and the phosphor flames guttered out.

With his divine sense near its limit, Mo Hua ended the divination and silently strung the characters together in his heart:

“Little… Flying… Spirit… Corpse…”

A chill pricked Mo Hua’s heart.

Little Flying Spirit Corpse? What was that?

Not a blood corpse, not an evil corpse, not an yin corpse—but a… spirit corpse?

With “flying” in its name, was it a kind of Flying Zombie? Could it fly to heaven and burrow into earth, with a hint of Ascension?

Why add “little”?

Mo Hua couldn’t shake the feeling that this erased “Little Flying Spirit Corpse” in Yin Corpse Valley’s Compendium was unspeakably strange.

And there was an inexplicable sense of familiarity.

He started to think it over. After a long while, he suddenly realized that a good swath of his mind had gone blank in broken patches.

Past memories had faded a great deal. Many people and many events were blurred.

The details, especially, no longer stood sharp.

A faint cold crept through his chest.

This was the sequela of the “fierce-omen baleful ghost” fate layout.

Once he slid too far, he would either lose his wits and become a slaughter-hungry fiend…

Or lose his memories and become a puppet.

Then the uncanny would descend, and his shibo would seize control…

Mo Hua sighed, thought a while, and put away the Compendium.

Zombies were something to be informed about, but not worth deep study.

He was a righteous cultivator; in this life he would never refine or keep zombies, and it wasn’t worth sinking time into it…

The urgent tasks were to resolve his fate problem and to form his core.

For fate, he had to find “anchors” to preserve his memories and stabilize his human heart.

As for core formation, he would first go to the Great Wilderness and adapt as events unfolded.

But the Great Wilderness was in open rebellion.

Crossing into it meant facing all kinds of strife and killing.

Alone in wartime—convenient in some ways—conflict would be hard to avoid.

Most troublesome of all, to avoid the fate backlash he could not casually kill.

In such a situation, by convention, the best course was to find a “guard” to travel with.

If the “big tiger” were still around, that would be a fine “companion.”

Beyond that was the problem of strengthening his divine sense.

If he wanted to form his core, the first step was to raise his divine sense to second-grade, twenty-four patterns.

And after crossing swords with Elder Xu of Yin Corpse Valley, Mo Hua was sure of one thing:

At twenty-one patterns, the Divine Thought Sword could truly kill a Golden Core cultivator.

Not merely “kill,” but kill in an instant.

Killing and instant killing were not the same concept.

Mo Hua’s gaze grew deep.

In other words, as long as his divine sense was strong enough, once the God-Slaying Sword flew forth, he could “instant-kill” any cultivator whose divine sense realm lay below his own.

Where his divine-sense line fell was his “killing line.”

He could ignore flesh and blood, ignore spiritual power, and cut down all cultivators in an instant.

That was the true might of proving the Dao through divine sense.

Therefore, he had to do everything possible to strengthen his divine sense.

Not only for core formation, but to raise the instant-death “killing line” of the Divine Thought Sword—only then would the perilous journey into the Great Wilderness have real safeguards.

Yes, taking life might violate his fate taboo.

But the choice to kill or not had to remain in his own hands.

Moreover, if he learned stronger causal arts that could counter the “baleful ghost” layout his shibo had set—or if one day he truly gained the power to stand against his shibo and no longer be suppressed by fate—

Then the Great Void Divine Thought Sword could break its “limit,” truly leave the body, and reap lives without scruple.

Dao-transformed divine-sense damage, bypassing all fleshly defenses—instant death.

Regardless of station, physique, or spiritual reserves, beneath the killing line of the Divine Thought Sword, all beings were equal.

Whoever he looked at would die.

That was killing power worthy of the word “terrifying.”

Mo Hua’s heart surged, then cooled. He let out a soft sigh.

“Only…”

To contend with his shibo was like climbing to heaven…

And strengthening divine sense was a steep, thorny path.

At twenty-one patterns, he already surpassed many early Golden Core cultivators; each further pattern would be hard-won.

Twenty-four patterns stood like a moat to the sky.

Mo Hua counted on his fingers, ran some quiet deductions, then raised his eyes to the south and thought:

“May the war in the Great Wilderness hold the opportunity I need…”

…

The next day, Mo Hua went out again to seek a ship pass.

After half a day, he still had nothing.

Without exposing his identity, as an out-of-town lone cultivator with no roots and no ties, getting a pass was almost impossible.

Even offering a high price, no one would sell to him.

There was nothing in this world that spirit stones couldn’t buy.

If there was, it meant you didn’t have enough spirit stones.

Mo Hua was no longer who he once was—he had plenty of stones now—but he dared not spend too much for a mere pass.

First, it would draw suspicion.

Second, flashing wealth invited greed.

Before he even boarded, some desperate cultivator might try to kill him for his money.

Heaven cherishes life; Mo Hua truly did not wish to kill.

After striking out everywhere, he could only give up for the moment.

On his way back to the inn, however, the corner of his eye caught a notice pasted on a street wall.

It announced that a large convoy was recruiting “guards” for a crossing of the Sand Sea.

Mo Hua’s eyes lit up.

He wasn’t clear on the requirements, duties, or danger of this “guard” work.

But he figured that as the first-place winner of the Qianxue Sword Debate Conference, a late-Foundation cultivator, and a strong spiritual cultivator skilled in the five elements, he should be more than qualified…

Decision made, he followed the notice’s directions and stepped into a nearby ferry firm…

Thanks for reading! If you’re enjoying the ride into the Great Wilderness, your support keeps the wind at Mo Hua’s back. If you can, please consider joining the Patreon—every pledge helps me keep chapters coming hot and fresh. And if you have a moment, a rating or review on NovelUpdates would mean the world and helps more readers find this series.

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