Making several wishes on a single shooting star really was a little excessive.
Qin Shu was not proud of it, but he had never imagined he could take excessive behavior this far.
Because that shooting star streaking toward Phoenix Village through the night sky in a shower of light, sparks, and metaphorical lightning… was not a shooting star at all.
It was Liu Yang Yang.
And once again, he was not wearing any clothes.
At the time, Qin Shu had been staring closely at the shooting star’s descending trajectory, desperately wondering how he could somehow withdraw his wishes.
Then, as he continued watching, his Heavenly Eye once again proved extremely useful. He could see the tiny sparks produced as the “shooting star” tore through the air, and he could see the outline hidden inside that blazing white light…
The clearer it became, the more wrong it looked. The more he stared, the more it looked like a person.
“Chen Shui! Chen Shui! Liu Yang Yang is falling out of the sky!”
Qin Shu abruptly stood, threw open the door, and dragged Chen Shui away from his drink.
Chen Shui nearly choked to death and almost sprayed liquid directly into Qin Shu’s face.
But after turning to look at the shooting star rushing toward them, then looking back at the undisguised shock on Qin Shu’s face, Chen Shui froze for only a moment before choosing to believe him without hesitation. He roared into the room, “Everyone get out here and save someone! A-Dou! A-Dou!”
Bang!
A tremendous impact tore through the roof. Both windows on the watchtower room shook loose and fell, while roof tiles and splintered wood flew everywhere. Even the bricks of the wall beneath them trembled.
Qin Shu stared dumbfounded as A-Dou flew into the air. No—more accurately, it had simply stomped down with one leg. That was all.
Using that burst of momentum, the corpse launched itself into the sky with horrifying strength beyond imagination and charged directly into the increasingly dazzling white light.
An enormous collision immediately followed. The sound violently echoed through the mountains and startled vast flocks of birds into flight.
A deep depression remained in the floor of the watchtower room, dense cracks spreading through the stone tiles. Immediately afterward, brilliant red light appeared inside those cracks. The formation forcibly caught the terrifying impact at the very surface and prevented the force from damaging the foundation of the wall below.
“That’s an agile defensive formation. Low energy consumption, extremely fast response.” Pei Zhao stood at the watchtower entrance and watched the route of the retreating red light with interest, even taking out his phone and snapping a photograph.
He had not panicked once. From beginning to end, he remained extraordinarily calm. He also casually picked up an empty beer crate and covered the little square table Qin Shu and Pei Zhao had been using, protecting most of the cooked meat.
Qin Shu had not even seen where Pei Zhao got the crate from. Following Pei Zhao’s gaze into the room, he discovered that several bowls of fresh uncooked meat had also been covered. Very little dust had touched them; they could still be skewered, grilled again, and eaten.
“Zhaozhao, move farther back! They’re about to come down. Don’t get hit!” After freezing for a moment, Qin Shu immediately grabbed Pei Zhao’s arm and pulled him backward, while the shouts in his ears grew louder.
Phoenix Village’s young men were all tall and muscular. Every one of them stood around the wall staring in disbelief, simultaneously shocked and desperately trying not to laugh. They shouted over one another while squeezing into a circle, collectively forming a human safety net.
“A-Dou, don’t fly around! Look over here! Over here!” someone shouted at the top of his lungs.
Someone else howled excitedly, “Brother Liu looks amazing! Absolutely explosive!”
“Who was the one who said Liu Yang Yang wasn’t wearing anything?” Another person was trying desperately to suppress his laughter and failing. “Holy shit, he really isn’t wearing anything?!”
“Wow. So sexy. So unique… Big Bird Spin-Spin-Spin Bar, Phoenix Village Branch—grand opening tonight!”
Another explosion of laughter followed. Even Qin Shu almost failed to hold it in and coughed several times before recovering.
Serious. He needed to be serious. This was someone’s life. Qin Shu reminded himself that he should learn from Chen Shui.
Chen Shui stood in the center of the crowd, his face rigid. He did not participate in the chaos.
Closing his eyes, he murmured several awkward incantations and ignored the fine cold sweat gathering across his forehead. Several seconds later, he roared, “A-Dou! Descend!”
A violent tearing noise immediately sliced through the air like a shrill whistle.
Bang—!
A-Dou’s clothes had burned away too. Holding the unconscious Liu Yang Yang, it dropped directly into the human net formed below and flattened a large portion of the group.
Sparks scattered. Everyone released muffled groans at almost the same time, the sound resembling lungs being crushed under unimaginable force, all remaining air squeezed out in an instant.
But when Qin Shu looked across the group, he discovered that not a single person had fractured an arm. Even those sprawled across the ground showed no obvious signs of injury. Strong. Extremely strong. If these people were assembled into a modern military unit, they could probably steamroll the Nine Provinces.
Chen Shui somehow remained standing. He had A-Dou hold Liu Yang Yang upright in front of him, then frantically began pounding Liu Yang Yang’s face and chest. “Wake up! Pay me! Brother Liu, I seriously can’t with you. A-Dou’s leg is going to need repairs again!”
A Phoenix Village-style awakening procedure. Since the patient was not alive, the method was simple, rough, and completely lacking in gentleness.
Qin Shu’s own body hurt just watching it. He removed his jacket, squeezed through the crowd, narrowed his eyes, and wrapped the jacket around Liu Yang Yang’s waist. He tied the sleeves firmly together. At least that covered him enough to prevent everyone from becoming awkward when he woke up.
Not long afterward, Chen Shui delivered one heavy strike directly over the heart, and Liu Yang Yang jolted awake with a loud “Agh!”
“…Who—who said I have to pay money? Holy shit, why isn’t A-Dou wearing clothes? Why am I not wearing clothes again?!” Liu Yang Yang stared in disbelief, looking helplessly left and right. Then he met Qin Shu’s gaze and nearly screamed again.
“B-Brother Qin?! Why are you here?”
“Shouldn’t we be asking you these questions?” Chen Shui interrupted before Qin Shu could answer and slapped Liu Yang Yang’s chest again through clenched teeth. “Brother, what earth-shattering disaster did you cause this time? What god threw you out of the sky? You almost destroyed the wall!”
“…I-I don’t know. I’d just escaped Living Water Village. I hadn’t even taken more than a few steps when I fell into another terrifying ghost domain. I somehow got sold into the ancestral residence of some imperial-merchant family and worked as a laborer for ages!”
“What the hell is Living Water Village? What kind of nonsense are you talking about!”
“Shoo, shoo. A-Shui, you’re still young. Don’t listen to this. Brother Qin, let me tell you…”
Liu Yang Yang paused, somewhat breathless. A-Dou’s arm was holding him too tightly, so he instinctively struggled and twisted. Then came a crisp crack. A-Dou’s arm snapped cleanly off. The people around them cried out in shock, and several more joined the ranks of the dumbfounded.
Chen Shui stared blankly for a moment, then reached behind his waist and pulled out the knife they had been using to slice barbecue meat. With a sharp crack, he chopped it against Liu Yang Yang. Another wave of shocked cries erupted from the crowd.
The person was fine. The knife broke. Chen Shui was nearly losing his mind. “Liu Yang Yang! You broke A-Dou’s arm! I just replaced that arm yesterday! Pay me!”
“Ah… huh? That really is A-Dou? That doesn’t make sense. I didn’t even use any strength. No, wait… since when was I this strong?”
“If you didn’t do it, who did?! Everyone saw it! Pay me!”
The confrontation was about to become a very one-sided beating, so Qin Shu hurriedly coughed and stepped between them. “All right, all right, Chen Shui. I’ll pay. I broke it first anyway. I’ll pay for both of your partner’s arms. I’ll transfer the money to you later. Could you hand Liu Yang Yang over to me for a little while? I need to talk to him.”
The instant Qin Shu spoke, Chen Shui immediately quieted. When he heard Qin Shu use the word “partner,” the man even became visibly awkward and somewhat embarrassed. “No, it’s fine. You don’t need to…”
“All right. Don’t be polite with me about your partner’s maintenance costs. It’s only fair.”
Qin Shu gave Liu Yang Yang a look, and Liu Yang Yang immediately understood. Awkwardly clutching the edge of the jacket around his waist, he hurriedly squeezed through the crowd that was craning their necks to watch.
They did not go far. They simply entered another watchtower room that had escaped being struck by the “shooting star.” Qin Shu closed the door and exhaled. “Liu Yang Yang, you’re in trouble. You have to fulfill my wishes.”
“…What?”
“I just made wishes on a shooting star, but I didn’t know the shooting star was actually you.” Qin Shu coughed. “My family and friends staying healthy and safe should be fine. Jiangcheng has been pretty peaceful lately. Zhaozhao and I can protect ourselves and rarely get sick either, so that part probably isn’t a problem.”
He thought briefly before continuing with complete seriousness. “The problem is that I also made wishes involving Phoenix Village, so tomorrow you absolutely cannot miss the joint burial ceremony. Help Granny A-Shu and Grand Shaman Chen. We need to make this end as smoothly as possible.”
“Wait… it’s already mid-January? Of course, of course. This is my own family’s business. If I can help, I absolutely will. I’ll go talk to the village chief tonight,” Liu Yang Yang, still unaware of how serious things were, asked somewhat dazedly, “Oh, and… what happens if you make a wish on me?”
“If you don’t fulfill my wish, you’ll become extremely unlucky.” Qin Shu coughed again. “You probably won’t die, but the City God told me before that when I make a wish to someone, it follows the rule that a request must be answered; if it isn’t, the one wished upon suffers harm… Mm. You don’t want to escape one ghost domain and immediately fall into another, do you?”
Liu Yang Yang: “…”
He stared blankly at Qin Shu for several seconds, then slowly turned toward Pei Zhao, seeking a second professional opinion.
Pei Zhao nodded. In an unusually human gesture of comfort, he even picked up a bottle of chilled orange juice and handed it to Liu Yang Yang.
Liu Yang Yang accepted the orange juice and took a miserable sip, struggling to digest this disaster that had fallen out of nowhere. An indescribable exhaustion spread through him.
His eyes dimmed, his voice gradually weakening as he shook his head in despair. “No. I never want to go back into a ghost domain and work as a laborer again… Those evil ancient elites seriously treated me like livestock. Brother Qin, do you know that in that era they didn’t even have paper to wipe their asses? They had to use bamboo strips. Sometimes reused bamboo strips! Thank god every one of those people died. Otherwise I never would’ve gotten the chance to be smacked out of there by a tail.”
Qin Shu immediately became interested. “Who killed them? And whose tail knocked you out?”
“That group was digging through mountains and filling in the sea, completely destroying the environment because they wanted to build the emperor some giant platform for observing the stars and making sacrifices to Heaven.” Liu Yang Yang sighed deeply. “By ridiculous coincidence, they dug straight into the home of some unknown big shot. All the officials and rich people in the city died. I couldn’t see what the big shot looked like. Everything was just blurry light and shadow… Oh, right. Their home was insanely magnificent. Gold everywhere. There was an entire room full of luminous pearls.”
“Isn’t that just a dragon?” Qin Shu became thoughtful. “That sounds exactly like a dragon. You didn’t accidentally dig into the Dragon King of the Eastern Sea’s house or something, did you?”
“That makes sense! But it probably wasn’t one of the sea Dragon Kings. A Dragon King responsible for clouds and rain can flood half a city with lightning, storms, rising tides, and all that if humans anger it. But if one personally slaughtered people on a huge scale, that would violate heavenly law. Even if it didn’t get beheaded, it would definitely be arrested.”
Qin Shu suddenly understood. “I know about that. I heard Qiuniu was executed because it violated heavenly law too. No one else could kill it. So whoever you ran into wasn’t afraid of heavenly law at all.”
Liu Yang Yang scratched his head. “But they were definitely at the level of an immortal or deity. The pressure was incredibly strong! When the tail hit me, I did manage to see its shape a little. It really did resemble a dragon’s tail—huge and beautiful. It seemed golden, but the gold kept shifting toward green, red, black… constantly changing? Ah. Maybe my brain simply couldn’t understand that kind of existence, so I couldn’t see anything properly.”
“That’s incredible. I think that dragon was definitely good, or at least principled. Think about it. It killed every bad person but didn’t hurt any of the laborers who had been dragged there to dig. It even sent you out.” Qin Shu sounded genuinely fascinated. “I hope I get a chance to go inside someday too. I’ve never seen a real dragon. It must be unbelievably cool…”
“Brother Qin! That era didn’t have toilet paper! They wiped their asses with bamboo strips!” Liu Yang Yang cried in anguish.
“…Then never mind.” Qin Shu coughed. “Let’s talk about tomorrow, starting with the secret arts the Cave God supposedly bestowed. The village chief gave me an apparent-death Gu, Granny A-Shu gave me a red pill, and Grand Shaman Chen can use karmic power to suppress the false god.”
Qin Shu lowered his voice. “What secret art did you receive? Even if what you got probably wasn’t the Cave God’s orthodox art, we use whatever we have for now. I’ll explain afterward. I only want to know one thing: will it be useful in a crisis?”
“? Ah… huh? It wasn’t an orthodox art?”
Liu Yang Yang froze. He apparently had not expected Qin Shu to have already dug this deeply into Phoenix Village’s secrets. After stammering for a long time, he finally said hesitantly, “Actually, I’ve suspected for ages that the secret art isn’t very reliable, because it doesn’t suit me at all. I can temporarily refine myself into a Corpse-Liberated Immortal. No… more like a corpse-liberated ghost. Brother Qin, have you heard of underworld rulers?”
Qin Shu looked completely lost and silently turned toward Pei Zhao.
Pei Zhao had his head lowered and seemed to be thinking about something. Only after noticing Qin Shu’s gaze did he put down the bottle of Chu Orange juice he had unconsciously finished and calmly explain, “Corpse-Liberated Immortals are divided into three levels according to the time of liberation. Corpse liberation in broad daylight produces an immortal, corpse liberation at the boundary between dawn and dusk produces an underworld ruler, and corpse liberation at night produces a ghost. The order matters.”
“If a cultivator has no other path toward immortality and is forced to become an underworld ruler through corpse liberation, then they have to work in the underworld. The benefits aren’t very good, but at least they receive an official position. If they continue cultivating properly for another few hundred years, there is some opportunity for promotion.”
Elio’s Notes: 尸解, “corpse liberation,” is a Daoist mode of transcendence in which the adept leaves ordinary bodily death behind through a substituted, transformed, or seemingly dead body. Older Daoist texts distinguish daylight “upper corpse liberation,” midnight “lower corpse liberation,” and a dawn/dusk category called 地下主. The novel is drawing on that hierarchy here; 地下主 is a lower corpse-liberation status, not a supreme ruler of the underworld.
“That sounds amazing!” Qin Shu’s eyes lit up. “Zhaozhao, can I do that too? I want to work in the underworld. That’s unbelievably cool!”
“…”
Pei Zhao was silent for several seconds. He stared at Qin Shu with a subtle expression, then shook his head and turned toward Liu Yang Yang. “Is yours martial corpse liberation?”
“Yes! I asked Granny A-Shu about it. She said that since I entered the Dao through martial cultivation, after corpse liberation I’d become a minor ghost general. I could command ghost troops beneath me and have them fight on my behalf. I could crawl straight out of the underworld to join a battle. But before that… I have to temporarily abandon my physical body. To be honest, I’m scared.”
Liu Yang Yang sounded helpless. He possessed an extraordinary treasure but did not dare use it, leaving him deeply frustrated. “You might think I’m a coward, but corpse herders specialize in body cultivation. My physical body is the foundation of everything I do. And Phoenix Village doesn’t need to fight wars, right? There’s basically nowhere to use the technique. But if I leave Phoenix Village and no one is protecting my body, what happens if some wandering ghost or reincarnated great deity steals it? I wouldn’t even have anywhere to cry.”
“You aren’t cowardly. You’re cautious enough. Becoming an immortal through corpse liberation is already the worst possible option. This is a heterodox art designed to make you take a shortcut, and it can even mobilize underworld troops without authorization… There is no possibility that a righteous deity bestowed this as an orthodox art.”
Pei Zhao lowered his eyes in thought. “Using it once or twice is not particularly important, but once you taste the benefit and begin relying only on shortcuts, you’re finished. Beyond that, we need to consider what the false god actually intended by giving you this secret art. Not only you—Zhang Mei Jiang’s secret art too. It gave all of you benefits. Eventually, there will be a price it expects you to pay.”
The instant Pei Zhao finished speaking, the gray-white eyeball rustled out of Qin Shu’s collar and sat on his shoulder. Liu Yang Yang flinched.
“Um… Brother Pei… I agree with everything you just said. I absolutely won’t abuse this power. But… what do you mean by ‘false god’?” He finally gathered enough courage to ask weakly.
Qin Shu raised an eyebrow. “You don’t know? The Cave God died around the time of the spiritual energy resurgence. After that, a false god used the Cave God’s corpse to disguise itself as the deity and has been plotting something. Do you know Grand Shaman A-Bu? He’s the one who told us someone among the villagers was being used by the false god. His soul is still lying inside his coffin now, preparing to finally die for real.”
“Wasn’t Grandpa A-Bu already dead? Why hasn’t his soul found rest? Something’s wrong…” Liu Yang Yang’s face turned pale. “Brother Qin, explain everything carefully.”
…
Ten minutes later, Qin Shu had given him a rough account of what had happened. Once the details were arranged in order, the situation genuinely was severe.
Phoenix Village had originally faced four separate crises.
The false god impersonating Long E was stealing the village’s incense worship; the false god impersonating the Cave God was eroding the Cave God’s remains; and someone within Phoenix Village had been manipulated by a false god into using evil Gu methods to poison villagers, forcing people whose allotted lifespans had not yet ended into apparent death before trapping them inside coffins within the cave and subjecting them to the agony of decomposition.
The first crisis had already been eaten by Pei Zhao, so that one could temporarily be set aside. But the last, and most serious, crisis was this: beneath the Cave God’s remains coveted by the false god lay a huge hole.
Supposedly, it was a “missing piece” of the world. The Cave God had suppressed it for countless ages, and after the deity’s death, the corpse itself became the only remaining anchor holding the breach shut. Similar flaws might exist elsewhere in the world too.
Once the anchor lost its suppressive effect and those flaws became completely exposed, never mind Phoenix Village—the world itself might cease to exist.
It certainly sounded frightening. But because the divine remains had not yet been completely eroded, no one could personally investigate whether the claim was true. Only Grand Shamans skilled in divination and communion with deities, along with Granny A-Shu, who had lived for a century and possessed unusually broad experience, could offer relatively confident answers.
The difficult part was that from the ancient Severing of Heaven and Earth all the way to modern society, the spiritual energy resurgence had only begun a little over thirty years ago. Even Phoenix Village’s oldest living elder was barely over a century old. No one had ever encountered something called a “missing piece” of the world.
They had no way to immediately produce an effective solution. All they could do was proceed one step at a time: first eliminate the false god eroding the anchor, then discuss what came afterward.
“…I understand. I suspect the one that really wants to seize my body—or use my body to do something—is actually that false god.”
Liu Yang Yang’s expression turned grim. He looked toward the eyeball on Qin Shu’s shoulder, suppressing his instinctive fear. “Sister Qian, tomorrow, stay close to Brother Qin. Be careful. I’m getting a little scared. Tonight I’m sleeping at Granny A-Shu’s house.”
The eyeball rocked forward and backward once to indicate that it understood.
Qin Shu stuffed it back into his pocket. “All right. Everyone should rest early. Oh, right. Are you going to eat the barbecue we saved for you? You probably haven’t eaten properly in a long time. And you can keep the jacket. No need to return it.”
Liu Yang Yang coughed awkwardly and adjusted the cloth tied around his waist. His spirits immediately improved. “Of course I’m eating it! See you tomorrow, Brother Qin!”
He rushed out of the room first and headed toward the half-destroyed watchtower, his pace accelerating as he shouted along the way, “A-Shui! Bring out all the grilled wings! Your big brother is here to eat!”
“Eat your ass! Come help repair the wall! You caused this!”
“Your big brother is saving the world tomorrow! What does a little romance-brain like you know?”
“…A-Dou. Beat him up!”
An explosion of laughter instantly rose from the wreckage on the wall. Immediately afterward, Qin Shu heard the rapidly approaching sound of something cutting through the air. His feet had barely stopped when an unidentified object flew across his vision. Then came a sharp smack. An imposing Chen Shui dropped straight to the ground.
“What was that?” Qin Shu narrowed his eyes, then understood. “Ah… cough, cough.”
Someone in one of the distant houses had apparently decided the group on the wall was too noisy. They had opened a window and thrown a slipper from afar. It struck Chen Shui perfectly. Accurate, brutal, simple, effective—instant silence.
As expected of Phoenix Village. Everyone was overflowing with martial virtue.
Qin Shu desperately suppressed his laughter, took Pei Zhao with him, said goodbye to everyone, and returned to their courtyard.
They ate until full and showered until clean and fragrant. Liu Yang Yang, missing for so long, had finally returned too, with no missing arms and no broken legs. Very good. Very good.
Although tomorrow remained impossible to predict, when Qin Shu lay down on the bed, turned off the lights, and pulled up the blanket, the familiar scent around him made his heart unexpectedly peaceful.
“Zhaozhao, who do you think the culprit actually is? The older generation keeps being vague about this, but I’m still curious.”
He rolled onto his side to face Pei Zhao and pulled the blanket over both their heads. Comfortably hidden in the darkness, he began quietly gossiping about everyone. “Even though the village chief doesn’t look abnormal, logically speaking she’s still pretty suspicious, right? She’s in her fifties now, so she would’ve been in her twenties when the false god began interfering. Doesn’t that timeline work perfectly? But if she really did it… how would she dare openly bring out Dead Gu and just hand them to us?”
“I checked. The things Granny A-Shu and the village chief gave us are both safe.”
Pei Zhao thought briefly. “So there are still three suspicious points. Granny A-Shu killed A-Dou and has never explained why. Liu Yang Yang was missing for a long time and suddenly returned today; the timing is too coincidental. And Liu Bai Long’s dead husband can talk. Regardless of whether someone is controlling him, he behaves noticeably more human than A-Dou, but A-Dou doesn’t.”
Qin Shu froze. A moment later, he quietly said, “…‘Shameless. Cowards. Annoying insects.’ That’s what he said. I remember. He seemed to really dislike the Gu that Village Chief Liu gave us.”
Or rather, the corpse herder controlling that body from behind the scenes might strongly dislike Liu Bai Long’s apparent-death Gu poison.
“Zhaozhao, what about those ‘old fossils’ Grand Shaman Chen mentioned? Could they be doing something in the background too? Could they be using Liu Bai Long’s husband to subtly interfere with her decisions and village affairs? Even I didn’t realize her husband was a corpse. You were the only one who could tell. How is anyone else supposed to distinguish it…?”
The thought had barely occurred to him before Qin Shu felt the peace he had only just regained turn strangely cold. He pulled Pei Zhao into his arms for warmth, then nearly shivered from how cold Pei Zhao was instead.
Qin Shu exhaled and pretended nothing had happened. “These older corpse herders should be stronger than Liu Yang Yang, and every one of them strongly believes in that false Long E. Who knows whether their minds are distorted too… And Zhaozhao, have you noticed? We’ve been here for two days and still don’t know where any of them are hiding, but they could’ve been watching us this whole time.”
“Mm.” Pei Zhao quietly answered, then gently placed one hand on Qin Shu’s arm. His voice dropped very low. “Qin Shu, close your eyes. Don’t move.”
“…Hm?”
Creak—
In the next instant, the bedroom window was pushed open by a narrow crack.
A hollow eye pressed against the gap, silently staring inside.