15 Ink Beasts

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“I told you not to draw too heavily on your sword aura. The people from the Southern Realm will be here in another half hour at most.” Jiang Xingfeng glanced around frantically and hurriedly picked up the swordsman’s mask from the ground. “You tore open the seal with your sword aura anyway. Don’t tell me you’ve awakened the demon blood!”

The swordsman did not move. His eyes gradually took on the pupils characteristic of the demon race, and the signs of demonization became increasingly pronounced.

The thick scent of blood still seemed to linger at the tip of his nose. The swordsman ran his tongue over the points of his teeth. His tiger fangs were sharp and unmistakable, and beneath them lay the demonic aura stirred awake within him by that bloodstink. Frowning, he stared at the pool of filthy blood by his feet, then decisively sealed away his sense of smell and taste. Even so, he could still feel the distinctive scent of the man’s blood lingering between his lips and teeth.

It had nothing to do with the sword aura…

The swordsman lowered his eyes to the ground.

Just then, several immensely powerful presences appeared high above Nanwu Mountain. The two men fell silent at once and looked up.

Corpse water from the Mist Pool splattered across the ground. The cultivators along the shore were still too terrified to react when the light of the seal over Nanwu Mountain’s horizon suddenly pierced through the heavens. The white-haired elder shielding the gathered cultivators frowned slightly.

“Why has Xuan Yu Manor come?”

The seal over Nanwu Mountain had been reduced to ashes by the earth-shaking sword light moments earlier. Now, spirit ships hovered over every part of the mountaintop. At the very front of the fleet stood the spirit ships of Xuan Yu Manor and the Qi family.

The most renowned sect in the Southern Realm of the Eastern Domain was Xuan Yu Manor, one of the Four Great Sects. The most powerful of the Eight Great Houses were the Qi and Su families.

When Xuan Yu Manor’s spirit ship descended, the middle-aged man standing at its prow cast a sidelong glance toward the Su family cultivators. His eyes swept over the cultivators collapsed on the ground and the corpse of the Su family elder washed out by the corpse water. He calmly waved a hand, and cultivators from behind the ship soon came forward to clear away the wreckage.

The cultivator leading the Qi family stepped forward and said courteously, “Young Master Su, this place will be left to the Qi family and Xuan Yu Manor to handle. Do you object?”

Young Master Su, Su Yi, frowned but said nothing more than a cupped-fist salute. He looked toward Xuan Yu Manor, which had come alongside the Qi family.

Had it been only the Qi family, he would have had no cause for concern. But the master of Xuan Yu Manor had come in person.

The Su family was famous throughout the Eastern Domain’s cultivation world for its talismans and spirit-ship techniques. Xuan Yu Manor, by contrast, was renowned for beast taming. Its art of controlling spirit beasts was famous throughout the world. Skilled at commanding spirit beasts and demonkind, and allied with the Southern Realm’s Fairy Spirit Village, its people were the most attuned to the spirits of all living things among every cultivator faction.

Yet Xuan Yu Manor of the Southern Realm rarely interfered in worldly affairs. In ordinary times, such matters were handled by the Qi or Su family. Even when a powerful expert’s final resting place was discovered, Xuan Yu Manor had little interest in competing for it.

For Xuan Yu Manor, its greatest advantages were the Fairy Spirit Village and its extensive ties with the spirit-beast and demon clans. With those connections alone, it was more than capable of standing among the Four Great Sects of the Eastern Domain’s cultivation world. Every year, countless cultivators traveled there to study and seek the path to cultivation.

“Why have those hounds from Xuan Yu Mountain come?” Jiang Xingfeng’s expression changed slightly. He hurriedly glanced at the swordsman’s teeth, then held out the mask. “Before they notice us, why don’t we—”

The swordsman said nothing. He looked toward the deep mountains behind him, then waved a hand, sweeping away every trace of blood on the ground.

“Go.”

“Where?” Jiang Xingfeng asked, bewildered.

The swordsman put on the mask, hiding his face seething with demonic aura.

“To hunt someone down.”

* * *

Deep within Nanwu Mountain, Su Yu climbed dripping wet from the river. He had taken only a few steps when the ruptured meridians within him made him collapse uncontrollably onto the ground.

His hunger had vanished, replaced by endless pain. He hurt so badly that he could scarcely make a sound. It felt as though his meridians had been blasted apart, only to be reconnected by some strange force. One moment, the overwhelming yin energy seemed about to tear him apart and make his body explode; the next, the violent power was suppressed by the totem revolving within his dantian.

In agony, he clawed at the shattered stones along the riverbank. Their sharp edges cut into his palms.

Su Yu struggled to recover his consciousness. His entire pair of eyes had already become identical to the totem in his dantian. The living totem had taken root completely within his eyes, and its rotation grew faster and faster, bringing him an indescribable sense of exhilaration. The contents of his sea of consciousness expanded without limit, while his memories flickered in and out.

Under the ceaseless current washing through him, his severed and reconnected meridians grew broader. They had once been exceedingly narrow; now they were several times wider than before. The chaotic yin energy found a suitable outlet and surged like a breached flood through every limb and bone in the young man’s body.

It was a cleansing of the meridians and a forging of the marrow. Had an elder been present, he would have recognized that the youth was undergoing an unprecedented marrow cleansing.

The chaotic yin energy vanished from his vision. In the blind darkness that returned, there was nothing at all. The world around him seemed to fall silent, leaving only the increasingly rapid beating of his own heart.

In that instant, Su Yu seemed to hear the bones within his body shatter, his meridians snap, and his organs tremble violently.

The eyes of the totem in his dantian spun at tremendous speed. They collided with the Tomb-Guarding Beast’s Pearl of Confinement, which Su Yu had swallowed. The dark pearl desperately tried to escape, but the totem refused to allow it. Instead, it drew upon the dense yin energy within Su Yu’s body, frantically wrapping the pearl and dragging it backward, deeper into his dantian.

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The pearl’s resistance grew weaker and weaker. At last, the totem enveloped it completely and embedded it within itself.

The moment the pearl sank into the totem, a steady stream of ink-black energy poured into Su Yu’s body. It mingled with the jade-white yin energy and rushed swiftly toward every meridian…

Then something astonishing happened.

The wounds carved into the youth’s body by the yin wind gradually healed. The broken bones in his leg regenerated amid the swirling yin energy. The scars covering his body disappeared, while the riverbank became covered in the filth purged from within him.

No one knew how much time passed.

When Su Yu awoke again, the pain in his broken leg was gone, and the numb swelling in his meridians had vanished without a trace. In its place was a lightness that spread from within outward.

He lay silently on the stony riverbank. When he looked inward into his sea of consciousness, he saw the eye-shaped totem turning slowly…

The withered platform that had once occupied the totem was gone. It was even larger than when Su Yu had first examined it internally.

Previously, it had merely coiled in the center of his dantian. Now, it had spread across half of it…

At the very center of the totem was an embedded mass of condensed energy, resembling a pearl. Under the totem’s suppression, the dark pearl could not resist in the slightest. It obediently revolved as the totem commanded.

Had the totem eaten its fill?

At that thought, hunger rose once more within Su Yu’s body. He clutched his abdomen, his fingers flexing unnaturally. It seemed that if his fingertips sank a little deeper, he could dig the totem straight out of his dantian.

The eye totem remained unmoved.

The yin energy in his dantian seemed to sense Su Yu’s intention. When his will stirred, it began circulating smoothly. The moment it approached the totem, the dark Pearl of Confinement at the totem’s center suddenly broke free.

In the next instant, it appeared floating above Su Yu’s palm.

Before Su Yu had time to think, the dark pearl expanded by half. The yin energy scattered throughout the surroundings seemed to be startled awake and surged toward him in one wave after another. The pearl greedily absorbed the yin energy dispersed throughout Nanwu Mountain, and all of it flowed through the pearl into Su Yu’s body…

What was happening?

Su Yu stared at his palm in alarm. Only then did he notice that his meridians had grown wider. His body had indeed absorbed the yin energy of Nanwu Mountain before, but its speed had been nowhere near that of the pearl.

If he had once absorbed yin energy with every breath, the pearl now resembled a river flowing backward, drawing in an endless stream of all the yin energy around him.

After an unknown length of time, the Ink Spirit Pearl in his palm gradually settled down. It returned to its original size, and the moment it landed in Su Yu’s palm, it flew back into the totem.

Su Yu lifted his head.

The hunger within him had vanished, and the yin energy throughout Nanwu Mountain seemed to have disappeared as well.

Had the pearl absorbed all of it?

Earlier, while inside Nanwu Mountain, Su Yu had noticed that the yin energy around him was constantly being drawn away by something, faintly and intermittently. So it had been because of this pearl hidden within the mountain.

There was now more yin energy in his dantian, but it was no longer a simple fatty-white color. Ink-black specks were mixed throughout it, creating a mottled black-and-white energy that resembled what Su Yu had seen in the mountain.

After sensing it for a moment, he discovered that this energy was different from the ordinary yin energy of Nanwu Mountain.

He tried to mobilize the yin energy within his inner palace. It swiftly began circulating through his meridians, bringing with it an entirely different sensation. The yin energy refined by the pearl moved more lightly. Su Yu had thought that the energy gathered around the totem was already pure enough, but the energy refined through the pearl was even purer and far more suited to him.

Su Yu could not help looking once more at the totem and the pearl within him. Seeing traces of black energy still circling the pearl, he was just about to move that energy when, the moment he drew near, the black energy deep within his dantian suddenly scattered.

A small black beast sprang out beside the pearl.

The little beast was identical to the phantom of the Tomb-Guarding Beast he had seen in the Mist Pool. The pain of having his shoulder torn apart by that beast came surging back. Su Yu clenched his fist, and the yin energy in his dantian moved with its master, instantly gathering and charging toward the black beast at the center of the totem.

“What are you doing? You swallowed the Ink Spirit Pearl, and that still isn’t enough?”

Another voice appeared in his sea of consciousness. Unlike the eye totem’s earlier pronouncements of cryptic maxims, this voice was entirely different.

Su Yu’s movement halted. The murderous yin energy in his dantian stopped as well.

What was this thing?

The black beast’s fur instantly stood on end. It bared its teeth and snarled, its voice ringing directly through Su Yu’s sea of consciousness.

“You ate everything I’d accumulated over several hundred years! I finally managed to reform my body, and now you still want to kill me? What’s wrong with you humans? Do you cross the river and then tear down the bridge?”

Su Yu said nothing. With a single motion of his yin energy, he seized the beast.

The newly re-formed black beast was tiny and weak. Su Yu crushed it apart in an instant, scattering it into countless strands of black energy that were drawn back into the totem. Before long, it condensed once more into an even weaker form and crashed into the dantian with a bang.

Su Yu asked coldly, “What are you?”

“I… I am the beast spirit of this place. I suppress the wandering souls and wild ghosts here.” The black beast immediately retreated several steps and curled up beside the totem. “I am also the guardian spirit of the pearl you swallowed.”

Its rambling words held a hint of grievance. The fingers Su Yu had clenched over his abdomen relaxed slightly. After growing accustomed to the totem’s intimidating maxims, hearing a voice like this felt strangely unnatural.

No threat.

Very weak.

Sensing the yin energy around the dantian withdraw, the black beast finally relaxed its terrified heart.

“We can talk things over…”

The black beast had lived for countless years and had never suffered such humiliation. As the beast spirit stationed here to guard the stone stele, it had been lavishly worshiped with fine food and drink since the day it was born. Beneath its command, hundreds or thousands of wild ghosts throughout these mountains had been suppressed.

Had the stone stele not developed a crack some time ago, revealing a flaw in Nanwu Mountain’s seal and allowing the ferocious evils deep within the mountains to discover it, while the leaking yin energy drew large numbers of human cultivators, it would never have fallen into such a state.

First, the ferocious evils of Nanwu Mountain had rebelled, attempting to seize the Mist Pool’s stone stele.

Then came the endless stream of cultivators who forced their way into the mountains.

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It had barely managed to suppress that unruly group of little ghosts deep in the mountains when those detestable cultivators arrived again. In the end, the Ink Spirit Pearl had been swallowed, and the stone stele had lost its protection and been cleaved apart.

It had intended to turn the tables, devour its host, and seize the body of this little human. Who could have known that it would nearly be eaten by the totem in the human’s dantian instead? If not for that great surge of yin energy that had poured in moments ago, it might not even have been able to reform its body.

Now it had no choice but to live under another’s roof, swallowing its grievances and begging for mercy.

“No wonder you were able to find my true body at a glance, and even locate the Ink Spirit Pearl. With spirit eyes born into you, of course I had to be wary.” The black beast muttered curses under its breath, keeping its distance from the totem as it spoke. “Your spirit eyes made the Ink Spirit Pearl acknowledge you as its master… What a freak.”

Su Yu caught the words in its speech.

“Spirit eyes born into me?”

The black beast shifted to a more suitable spot and curled itself up there. At his question, it said in surprise, “Huh? You didn’t know? I mean that thing in your dantian. Those are innate spirit eyes. There have been only a handful of people with innate spirit eyes throughout history. It is a gift that countless living beings could never obtain. Even the innate Dao bodies your human race takes such pride in are still a level below innate spirit eyes.”

Su Yu looked at it huddled beside the totem.

“You’re afraid of it?”

“Afraid? Of what?” the black beast cried. “I’m not even afraid of the sword cultivator who struck me!”

A sword cultivator?

Su Yu recalled the sword lights he had seen at the bottom of the pool. Those sword lights had been far more formidable than any cultivator or ferocious evil he had encountered after awakening beneath the cliff.

He lowered his head in thought and said nothing more.

“If I had been alive in ancient times, I could have swallowed cultivators with innate Dao bodies one after another!” the black beast declared.

After a while, it added in a lowered voice, “…Though your innate spirit eyes are a little strange.”

The black beast could not explain exactly what was strange about them. Innate spirit eyes were rare, but in the end, they were merely an uncommon talent among all living creatures.

The totem before it, however, was filled with an evil nature.

Not only the totem—even this human was extraordinarily strange. The black beast had never seen a human body so severely depleted. The body was clearly on the verge of death, yet the yin energy within it was denser than that of a great ferocious ghost.

If an ordinary cultivator had possessed so much yin energy, they would have long since gone mad and fallen into demonic deviation.

But this man had not.

He was clearly close to death, yet he was somehow living perfectly well.

And the spirit eyes in his dantian had subdued the black beast with effortless ease.

Su Yu ignored it.

The black beast discovered that this human spoke very little, but it refused to give up.

“Why don’t you ask what’s strange about me?”

Su Yu continued to ignore the bizarre black beast within him. It was talkative, and anything it knew would eventually spill out. There was no need to waste words speaking with something hiding inside his body.

His attention shifted to the surroundings. The unfamiliar terrain made it impossible for him to determine where he was. Before falling unconscious, he remembered escaping from the hands of a human cultivator.

He disliked the feeling of being threatened. He loathed it, and he had no favorable impression of those human cultivators. They had still been searching for something in this mountain. With his poor eyesight and difficulty moving, if he stayed here too long, he would inevitably run into them again.

Su Yu suddenly found himself missing that wild ghost named Zhang Fugui. At least the ghost had been able to lead the way.

Still, it did not matter. If necessary, he could simply find another one. This mountain was not lacking in wild ghosts with keen eyes.

The mountain paths were tangled with trees and undergrowth. Before he had gone far, he had already stumbled into numerous trunks.

But the farther downhill he went, the more he sensed that something was wrong.

The yin energy in Nanwu Mountain had once been dense. Now it was thin—and yet, despite its thinness, he could not find even a single wandering wild ghost.

Sensing his host’s thoughts, the black beast replied listlessly, “Of course there aren’t any.”

“You swallowed all the yin energy in Nanwu Mountain. Don’t tell me you still don’t know what you ate?”

The black beast raised its tail and tapped the Ink Spirit Pearl embedded in the totem.

“What you swallowed was the mountain-sealing stele of the ancient Abyss of Ten Thousand Evils!”