I glanced around at the field of dead bodies and sighed—there was a charge in the air, and it wasn't a good one. There must be over three hundred people dead here, spread out over a couple of square kilometres.
They had tried to run, but a regular person running from even me would be laughable, much less those three that had higher levels of cultivation.
Shaking my head, I walked over to the headless body and repeated my ritual of snagging the man's soul, spirit and all before it tore free. I then asked, "So, how much trouble are we in? On a scale from zero, which is none at all, to ten, which is courting death."
I used a new idiom, "courting death", and I quite liked it. It reminded me of the personification of death character in the Marvel universe, who was a cute goth girl.
Xiao Li looked abashed and a little unsure and said, "I'm not sure. Maybe a four. Eight, if they have any comrades close by."
I nodded, bending over to pick up the severed head and held it up like it was Yorick's skull, just being careful not to get blood on my hands, "I'll ask him. If they do, we'll have to leave right away. Can you go find where I fought those other two and loot them? Make sure to bring the body of the one that had the sword back, at least."
He nodded, although he appeared a little icked from the casual way I handled the severed head of his enemy, "I'm a little curious how you'll ask a dead man questions, but I'm sure I'll see it next time." He had already looted the main guy here and held up a small pouch with a grin, "Oh, by the way, look here...It's a spatial pouch!"
Oh, lucky. Wait, why was he so sure we'd continue to murder people to the point where I would need to interrogate their shades or spirits?
I couldn't ask him because he darted off. Sighing, I looked down at the ringleader's severed head and then sat him in the middle of a clear area of ground, producing some other of my ritual tools at the same time, "Well, let's see what you have to say."
The spell Speak With The Dead didn't need the presence of the soul, and in fact, it didn't operate on that basis. That was the domain of a higher-level spell in the fifth level if you wanted to compel answers or the second level if you just wanted to speak with a contained soul, as I had when I spoke with Mrs Mei the first time.
If the souls were in the afterlife, it was tough cookies, though, unless you had an in with one of the divinities that operated the particular afterlife they were in. Otherwise, you couldn't speak to them at all. However, it was rumoured that either a necromantic spell of the ninth or tenth level or definitely the Wish spell could teleport a soul to you.
Speak With the Dead was much simpler. Spiritually, you stored memories in both your spirit and your soul, and this spell was like a database query language for memories of the spirit, using a dead body as the medium. As such, you had to phrase your questions pretty carefully, as the animated body could not think. It was really your spell that was "thinking" for it, so it wasn't any more flexible than SQL. Probably worse.
And if one was curious how such a spell could work when I snatched his soul, spirit and all, in my trusty athame, well... it was because there was always more spirit to go around inside your body.
A soul's relative strength could be compared to a hard rock or a gem—perhaps a diamond, even. Your spirit, on the other hand, had the metaphysical consistency of, at best, fondue.
That meant it acted like liquids and seeped into everything, with your body being the most obvious case, but it occurred even with things you touched. Many people who studied divinations wouldn't grasp this until much later, as the knowledge was very theory-based, but this was the fundamental principle behind the concept of both sympathetic magic and psychometry.
So, his body was still full of spirit. It was also what made animating the dead possible. If someone hypothetically drained all of the spirit from a corpse and thusly created spiritually inert bones, then I wouldn't be able to animate them unless I studied traditional golem-crafting.
The spirit or the soul in higher levels was what almost all necromantic spells were designed to sink their teeth into, and that was mostly what separated necromancy from other schools of magic from an academic perspective. Even when you were working with skeletons, you were still working with the spirit.
I finished casting the spell as a ritual, and Yorick's eyelids opened, but he regarded me with lifeless eyes. I asked it, "Who were you?" This was always a good question to ask first, sometimes even if you knew or expected the answer to get.
It rasped, sounding pretty good for a head not connected to any set of lungs, in my opinion, "Zhang... Shu... Outer... Sect... Disciple... Blood Sea..."
I tilted my head to the side. Blood Sea? It must be the sect they had belonged to—quite an evocative name. Very Khorne-like. "What was your business here?"
"Harvest... blood... essence..."
Well, I could have guessed that, but it was good to have verified. I nodded, "Any more allies nearby, aside from you three?"
"Three... just... three..."
I hummed and considered my last two questions. "Do you have any hidden valuables?"
"My... arm... inheritance..." Well, that wasn't too helpful, but I didn't mind being very thorough in that area. I was going to be dumping my set of Big Chungus bones for this guy's, after all.
I thought about the way he called Xiao Li a dog of the Imperial court, and it was clear that this guy was one of the rebels. But was he a rebel because he was a gross blood cultivator or the other way around? I decided to ask, "Why did you rebel?"
"Imperial... officials... killed... family..." Well, that was a tragic story. His family was killed by corrupt officials, and in his grief, he stumbled upon the inheritance of a demon and vowed revenge. Not a bad plot, I thought.
With that, the magic was finished, and Yorick's... err, Zhang Shu's eyes closed for the final time. I tossed his body and head out of the ritual circle and verified that the lines hadn't been damaged, nodding. I glanced around and carried one of the dead villagers into the circle at random, then spent only a couple of minutes modifying it.
I cast a slightly modified Animate Dead, and the zombie shuffled to its feet. "Stack all of the bodies together, right here," I indicated an arbitrary spot, and then, as I was going to grab another body, Xiao Li reappeared, lugging the body of the hand-to-hand fighter that I had used Vampiric Drain on. I was curious where the other guy was, but he casually pulled him out of his new spatial pouch. Surprised, I raised my eyebrows, "How much can you store in that pouch?"
"Well, I didn't just carry Mr Prune here for fun," he explained, and I snorted—so at least one body but not two. I nodded. That was about normal with a low-level spatial pouch at our level.
He glanced at the zombie that was dragging a body over and asked, both curious and also grossed out, "What are you going to do with all of these bodies of the villagers?"
I blinked and cast Animate Dead again, "Bury them," I said, as though it was the most obvious thing in the world. I had modified the Animate Dead spell in order to not create an undead that lasted forever. The energy needed to animate the dead came from what Merildwen would call the negative energy plane, and it was infinite. However, sabotaging your own spell so that the already corrosive energy spilt out a tiny bit more, damaging the spellform over time, was simple. These zombies would stay animated at most a week, but more likely only a day.
I wasn't sure if there was an actual plane full of infinite yin-aspected Qi here or if it just drew aspected Qi out of the aether, separating yin Qi from what was in the air, but the spells worked the same, so it was, ultimately, only an academic question.
I tended to believe that the latter was probably the more likely scenario, and if there were planes filled with nothing but infinite Qi, then they were a lot harder to access here. Otherwise, Qi-concentrating formations wouldn't need to be powered by spirit stones or other energy sources. We'd have Qi-portal formations or something that just spilt out infinite Qi instead.
"Oh," Xiao Li looked relieved but then frowned at both all of the bodies around and how big of a hole it would take, "Most of the resentment in the air faded when these three died, but not all of it. It's probably a good idea."
I nodded, "But I don't really want to sit around here doing that, so we'll leave my little helpers to accomplish most of it..." I then used repeated castings of Mold Earth to unearth a suitably large mass grave. When my two zombies returned, I changed their orders to dumping anybody inside, and then, when there were no more bodies to be found, to jump inside themselves and wait quietly. The spellform animating them would eventually degrade to the point where they'd return to being entirely dead, too.
Unfortunately, I wouldn't be able to wait around and fill the grave, but we were right by the main road, and I was sure someone would notice it. I pulled out my trusty Flay wand and deboned Yorick.
Wait, I needed to stop referring to him that way, as that would just be painting myself as Hamlet, and he didn't have a good end, either.
I dug his bones out of the rest of him and did notice something unusual on his ulna. I then glanced at Xiao Li and said, "Please burn the rest to ash." He was a lot better at Fire Bolt than me. That experiment had been handily proven.
He frowned, asking, "Why?"
"So someone can't use the rest of his remains to track us down," I said as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. I'd spread the ash in a moving river next.
The best solution would be using an eighth-level necromancy spell to completely destroy their souls, but I couldn't manage that, so I'd just trade them to Judge Wu. I didn't think he had any comrades nearby, but what if his Sect Elder came and investigated the site of his death a month from now? There was no reason to make things easy on them. That would just be seeking death on our part.
Xiao Li's eyes flashed, and he nodded, enlightened, and began casting repeated Fire Bolts at the mess as I quickly moved upwind of his work. I glanced at the man's ulna and found a scroll wrapped around it. How the fuck did he get that there? Well, he had a lot of weird blood techniques, I supposed.
I gave it a cursory examination. A lot more appeared to be written on it than one would expect for a single scroll. It detailed a demonic cultivation method that used harvested blood essence to advance. The scroll had already sucked up all the blood from being in such close contact with the man's bones.
Not anything I was interested in, although there were a handful of simple blood-based spells included at the end. Those, I might look at just because my list of Daoist-type spells were zero. Still, I wasn't very much impressed by this man's so-called "inheritance," but I stuffed it into my hammerspace anyway.
We finished looting and destroying the bodies of the cultivators, except for the one with the incipient shadow that would form in a little while, and were about to leave when I noticed an area that still had a particularly heavy aura of resentment. I frowned when I saw that there was a soul that was in the process of transforming into a malicious, hungry ghost. When Xiao Li also noticed it, he looked at me as if I was an expert and asked, "What should we do?"
I didn't know. I was a necromancer. I specialised in riling ghosts up, not... calming them down. I eyeballed the ghost's size and cast Chain Spirit before it could fully form, then drew it into my amulet, where it used up almost all the space. I shrugged at him, "I don't know. I don't put souls to rest. I put them to work." The truth was that I would prefer not to use a soul from an innocent person like this, but I wasn't sure what else to do. It would become a hazard if I just left it around.
"Maybe we can find some Buddhists," he mused, and I tilted my head to the side. Buddhism wasn't really well-liked by any traditional Daoists, but apparently, one of their specialities was dealing with ghosts as well as other "unclean" things. Personally, I was a little concerned they might consider me in the same category, though, but I finally nodded, and we'd agreed to look for a Buddhist enclave or temple in the capital.
As far as the looting was concerned, the main thing I got, aside from the collected spirit stones and miscellaneous items which we would split, was the malevolent sword that the one guy who was going to attack me never got to use. I used Identify on it and got the information that the sword would cause minor madness when wielded. Other than that, it was a basic enchanted sword with the ability to cause vastly more damage if used to attack things that had blood. It was a low-grade mortal spirit tool, so it wasn't that amazing, but I would still keep it.
I tested its curse of madness by having Xiao Li hold it, and he admitted he felt a little bit off, so I grabbed it from him before he went crazy. I didn't feel anything myself, so I just shrugged, returned it to its scabbard and strapped it to my waist.
I didn't want to think too much about why this curse didn't affect me because I tended to, even now, get stunlocked if I really thought about... Haha, not today! I shifted my focus away from past memories adroitly.
As we stopped for the evening, we first waited for the shadow to manifest in the last cultivator's body, and after I acquired its services, I set a second ritual circle to contact Judge Wu, following my practice of checking it thrice to ensure there were no mistakes. Xiao Li was watching curiously.
Instead of reaching Judge Wu as I had last time, this time, this time I got what was obviously a recorded message telling me to direct any questions or soul deliveries to my liaison, who would be the conduit of messages in either direction. It wasn't even in Judge Wu's voice.
Frowning, I remembered that he said he assigned Mr Chen Lu as my liaison, but I fired him from being my familiar. I hope that guy still wasn't considered my liaison, as I had no way to contact him. I then glanced sideways at my familiar, Crow, who was casually licking his paws after he managed to snag some meat bites from the demonic beast meat we pulled out to make dinner.
I stomped over to him and grabbed him by the scruff, getting a yowl, "Do you have some messages for me?! I will trade you in so quick." I threatened.
The cat looked a little surprised himself, but as soon as I asked it for messages, it opened its mouth and looked like it was about to throw up or hock up a hairball, so I dropped him. Ugh, it really did look like it was throwing up.
However, instead of a bunch of the expected cat vomit, a pristine sheet of paper appeared in front of him. Even Crow looked really surprised. I tested it cautiously to make sure it wasn't covered in cat spit but found it dry—as if it had just been teleported there.
I picked it up and read it. It began, "Welcome to the Wu Tang family. Step into the Wu..." What the fuck? I glanced left and right, sure I was being punked. Was the RZA or the GZA going to appear? The Ol' Dirty Bastard was already dead, so maybe he was the most likely to show up.
The more I read, the more the sense of amused confusion shifted to dread. It claimed that my past actions of "converting a soul into karmic credits" was an implicit consent to shift my existing "legacy contract" into the "Wu system."
My bad feelings were confirmed when, later down the letter, it displayed an account balance of "negative four thousand five hundred karmic sin units." I balled my fist and shook it at the sky. I was being screwed! Not only did I not buy that "implied consent" bullshit, but my brain had almost been leaking out of my ears during that conversation by the end. I couldn't be said to be in a position to provide informed consent even if it was explicit, much less implicit!
Something like this was why I had attempted to pay off the entire debt in one go, but I had screwed up. I should have had at least a few more souls as a buffer. The letter had a bunch to say about the benefits that I could expect, so long as I had the karmic sin units to buy them, but there wasn't much about just what this unit meant until in the very fine print at the bottom, where it was defined as "the average amount of sin received for committing an average huge massacre."
What ... the ... fuck?! What kind of ambiguous fucking unit was that? What the fuck was an "average" huge massacre?! Even Crow noticed that I looked furious and had backed up.
I wanted nothing more than to tear up or incinerate this letter, but the experience where I had to help my grandpa get out of an unwanted timeshare a few years before his death led me to keep all correspondence, so I just shifted it into my hammerspace.
"C'mere," I told the cat, who shook his head, and even opened his mouth to hiss at me.
I reached out and grabbed him by the scruff again, and he yowled in protest once more. I pulled out my athame and fished one of the souls out of it, pushing the intangible thing to the cat, while ordering it, "Take it."
At first, the cat seemed confused, but then he just swallowed the soul as if it were a cat treat, looking a bit surprised at his own action. As he swallowed it, I learned, through some manner of telepathic interface, that the soul was worth zero point four "karmic sin units."
I sighed. That's what I had been worried about. I fed the cat the rest of the souls, and it was only the main guy who had to be the leader of the three that was worth anything, and he was still only worth slightly above three units. Still, I felt really good that we had killed them. Who knows how many people they would have worked up to murder in the future? We got the karmic merit for stopping them, even if I was later feeding them to Judge Wu vis-a-vis my cat.
Xiao Li was wise enough not to ask me any questions that evening, and I just meditated for a while before sleeping. I tried to think of ways to get out of the predicament, but I didn't even know if there was a way to object or to bring Judge Wu to court. Nor did I know if it was wise to do so.
In some of the cities we had passed through, it might be possible for a peasant to bring a cause of action with an Imperial official if you alleged that you were wronged by a city official, but it wasn't anonymous. Even if you prevailed in your case, you still had to live in the city and would get smashed as a bug in retaliation somehow.
I certainly didn't want to piss off the guy involved in judging souls after they died. I could see him arranging to hear my own "case" after I died and throwing the book at me. Even if I were a saint for the rest of my life, and who knows if that was possible here, I could see him sending me to Hells anyway. It might be a sin to misjudge a soul, but why else was this guy running his own for-profit private Hell in the first place if not to bank merit so that he can then do whatever he wants later?
I shook my head. I couldn't do anything now, and perhaps not ever.
I sighed. My goal was the peak, anyway.
Perhaps I would get to the point where I could punch Judge Wu in the nose, settle matters that way and take over the Netherworld Kingdom. Even if I didn't, then I just had to acquire about fifteen hundred more souls that were as big as a sinner as an average high-levelled demonic Qi gathering cultivator.
No biggie, right? Right?
---xxxxxx---
I woke early for some cultivation under the still-bright moon and found that my realm had loosened quite a bit, reaching the peak of the second level, and it was a smooth breakthrough to the third level in no time at all.
I puzzled. Was this because I had resolved to punch Judge Wu in the nose, or as Xiao Li had suggested earlier that evening, that life-and-death encounters had a way of "tempering" a cultivator's spirit and Daoheart? I didn't know. Perhaps a little of both, but it was welcome nonetheless.
Or was some other reason? Vampiric Touch was designed to drain vitality and health, but I hadn't tested it on either an entity that already had Qi inside, especially not to death I had earlier. Perhaps it acted like a water pump, and it would sputter and produce unpredictable behaviour at the moment of death when what it was siphoning out ran dry.
I hummed and inspected my spiritual sea, looking for impurities in the Qi there, such might be found if I had sucked up part of the other cultivator's cultivation base, but I couldn't find any. It was all uniformly the silver mist of a very pure yin Qi, combined with the pure, unearthly white of my ghostly yin core.
Well, at least that was something. I honestly didn't want to utilise such demonic techniques. Not because I had any kind of moral objection but because I didn't believe most shortcuts were helpful in the long term—especially at this stage when my cultivation was still quick and easy.
Perhaps someday, I might change my mind if I ever reached the stage where I ran out of talent and couldn't pursue my path any further, but I hoped not, just because, like all people, I hoped my talent would be inexhaustible.
Before Xiao Li woke up, I tossed away Big Chungus' bones and replaced them with the strongest cultivator's bones in my hammerspace. Xiao Li agreed to carry the remainder in his spatial pouch, but I wasn't sure I was going to keep them until I got some sort of spatial treasure of my own. Xiao Li was a little icked at carrying them, even if he agreed to do so.
My hammerspace was quite limited in the volume it stored, after all. However, if it was entirely empty, I really could carry a lot of bones in it, perhaps at least five or so people, depending on how well the bones stacked.
When I found a stable home and could leave things at my place of residence, then I wouldn't need to carry everything with me, and I'd have more room for both frivolities as well as skeleton labour and guards. I was quite interested in how cultivator bones would differ from regular people's bones and Big Chungus bones, which I considered to be more of a monster, if anything.
We were already fairly close by the time we went to sleep last night; it was just another six-hour run before this nation's capital came into view.
The gates to the capital were a lot better guarded than the smaller cities had been, that was sure. The walls were a good thirty metres tall and were guarded not only by regular guards but cultivators that were about as strong as us, as well.
We were also interrogated quite a deal more than was normal in the last cities we visited. The questioner was a guard captain who was in the Foundation establishment level, too. However, eventually, he acquiesced and let us through, and our story about catching an airship to another nation didn't change, no matter how many different ways he asked.
Xiao Li grinned at me and said, "All we need to do is find a place to live and stay out of trouble for four or five months until our airship arrives!"
You fuck, you just jinxed us.