Medicine Master Disciple’s Cultivation Notes

Chapter 117: Tonight Is Especially Lively

Not a word was exchanged. Li Qiuchen and the female ghost attacked each other at the same instant.

Three wooden spikes shot from Li Qiuchen's palm, flying straight at that grotesque smiling face.

The ghost's arms and fingernails elongated in the same moment, swiping hard at Li Qiuchen.

There was a tearing sound. Three gashes opened across the front of his outer coat, but those razor-sharp nails left nothing more than faint white lines on his skin.

At the same time, all three wooden spikes found their mark on the ghost's face.

The ghost let out a piercing shriek, twisted where she stood, and vanished into the earth.

The trapdoor overhead rattled, and Tang Xiaoxue's head appeared at the top of the stairs.

"What was that noise? What did you do?"

Li Qiuchen quickly waved her off. "Nothing, go back to sleep!"

"Let me see!""Don't come down... put some clothes on first!"

While Tang Xiaoxue went back to get dressed, Li Qiuchen took out the Hundred-Li Soul-Chasing Smoke that Senior Sister Yanzhi had given him.

The box contained four substances, each for tracking a different category of enemy: demons, fiends, ghosts, and Medicine Master remnants. They were, respectively, thousand-year demon bone for tracking demon creatures, thousand-year blood vine for tracking fiendish practitioners, shrine incense ash for tracking ghostly entities, and the ground remains of someone who had carried the Blessing, processed through a special method and reduced to powder.

The method of use was equally straightforward. You pinched out a small amount of powder and placed it on the traces left behind by whoever you were pursuing. The powder would then drift on its own toward the direction in which the target had fled and hidden.

Back when Tu Feiyun had led his forces in pursuit of him across hundreds of li, Li Qiuchen had never been able to work out how they'd managed to stay so relentlessly on his trail.

Looking back now, the answer was clear. When the Mohe the Perfected Being had fled Blue Stone Platform, he had already been locked on to by the Hundred-Li Soul-Chasing Smoke. Li Qiuchen's subsequent battle with the Mohe the Perfected Being had left fresh traces of his own.

What a thing to have no defense against, Li Qiuchen reflected inwardly.

Then again, it made sense. Great Chu had been founded eight thousand years ago, and the struggle against those who carried the Medicine Master's Blessing had continued without pause ever since. Progress had inevitably been made. Over all those years, a great many methods specifically designed to counter Medicine Master Blessing holders had certainly been developed.

The Hundred-Li Soul-Chasing Smoke was one. Tu Feiyun's Fire Crow Gourd was another.

Li Qiuchen had absolutely no desire to experience that particular item's capabilities firsthand.

Tang Xiaoxue finished dressing, jumped down, and the moment she saw the collapsed section of ground her eyes lit up like someone had given her a shot of something energizing. "Did a mole come tunneling up? Let's dig down and catch it!"

"It wasn't a mole."

Li Qiuchen stood holding the Hundred-Li Soul-Chasing Smoke, turning the decision over in his mind.

Chase her? There didn't seem to be much benefit in it for him, and he had no interest in thankless work.

But if he didn't chase her, if he didn't finish her off, who was to say she wouldn't come back next time better prepared?

If it were simply an ordinary ghost, Li Qiuchen had nothing to fear.

But the burlap sack over her head and the grotesque smiling face drawn on it stayed with him.

That kind of detail meant there was something more behind this.

Killing the ghost was easy enough, but what if killing the small one brought the big one down on him?

To be frank, the Tang household's defenses were thin right now.

In the middle of the fourth month, Boss Tang had headed north with his people.

The Rakshasa Ghost fighters with their deadly marksmanship, and Aye as well, had all gone with him.

Compared to the county town, the trade routes through the Border Wilds were far more dangerous.

Right now the household had only Li Qiuchen... and Liu Da, who was technically present but whose combat ability offered essentially nothing against something like this.

Had the other side known this and chosen now to target Tang Xiaoxue precisely because of it?

If that was the case, there was no room for half-measures.

Wound a snake without killing it and it comes back to bite you.

"Should I take you to the Hu household for a while, to be safe?"

"Are you questioning my capabilities?"

Tang Xiaoxue was quite displeased.

Your capabilities amount to hitting people with that little pickaxe of yours.

Li Qiuchen sighed and fell back on the usual arrangement. "Same as always, then. Follow my lead in everything."

"Agreed!"

Li Qiuchen opened the box of Hundred-Li Soul-Chasing Smoke and was just about to scatter the powder when he suddenly stilled, ears pricked, looking upward.

"Do you hear something?"

"I think I do."

"Come on, let's go up and look."

The two of them climbed out of the cellar and into the courtyard, where they found the sky streaked with flashes of light, broken at intervals by the booming of spirit techniques and the clang of metal weapons.

What on earth was happening tonight?

Li Qiuchen climbed up onto the roof and looked out in all directions. He could see Murong Feng suspended in midair, a resplendent, gem-studded oil-paper umbrella turning slowly above his head, its radiance blanketing nearly half of Yun County.

And further out, deep in the darkness in all four directions, north, south, east, and west, enormous silhouettes were just barely visible.

It was the four great demons of the Chang family, their true forms revealed, standing guard at the four gates of the city.

Tonight was... a case of closing the gates and catching the dog inside?

...

In a military fortress outside the county town, Tu Feiyun raised his gaze to the map mounted on his wall.

The map was nearly the size of the entire wall, more than a zhang in length and width, and every street and alley of Yun County, down to individual households, was rendered in clear detail.

The map was studded with small flags in red, yellow, and blue. At the location of the Tang family compound in particular, all three colors had converged in one spot.

"Murong Feng has the will for ruthlessness but not the stomach to follow through. He won't accomplish anything significant."

Tu Feiyun shifted his gaze from the map to the short-haired young woman kneeling before him.

"Though of course, being the chief senior brother of a county school's inner hall, one can't demand too much of him."

"I thought the same thing, sir."

The short-haired woman said quietly, "Which is why I came to ask for the general's assistance."

Tu Feiyun shook his head and said, "Gu Yanzhi, you've overstepped. As a flying courier of the Internal Affairs Bureau, coming to mobilize the garrison troops over something this minor, have you considered what the consequences could be for you?"

Gu Yanzhi smiled and said, "Don't frighten me, general. I'm a small courier of no rank. I wouldn't dare mobilize troops without authorization. Officially, I've only come to report information, so that the general has the first-hand intelligence. Personally... Yanzhi knows that the young master has no tolerance for injustice. If something truly goes wrong, he would not stand by and watch."

"You're mistaken. I don't simply have no tolerance for injustice. I have no tolerance for fools."

Tu Feiyun said calmly, "A clever person understands the dangers of playing with fire and thinks about how to prevent it from spreading even while using it. A fool doesn't even know what the phrase 'playing with fire and getting burned' means, and still finds it warm when the flames reach them."

"Look at the county magistrate. He's a clever man. He would rather go to the Chang family spirits for help than come to me. The county school's teachers are clever too. They've kept this matter firmly framed as a dispute between students throughout. Murong Feng isn't particularly clever, but he would rather drag every last brother and sister out of closed-door cultivation to handle this himself than come to me."

"Do you understand why?"

Gu Yanzhi's expression shifted slightly. She said quietly, "Because once the corps enters the city, this stops being a small-scale matter."

Some things weigh nothing until you put them on a scale, and then nothing can hold them down.

"So you do understand the principle. Then why did you still come to me?"

Tu Feiyun raised an eyebrow. "Concern clouding your judgment?"

Gu Yanzhi smiled. "I won't deceive the young master. Yanzhi came asking for the sky and hoping to settle for the ground."

"What do you want?"

"To borrow the young master's Fire Crow Gourd."

"No. Too conspicuous. The moment that fire crow appears, it may as well be me arriving in person."

Tu Feiyun turned and pulled a small, dull black stone from his pocket, tossing it onto the ground in front of her.

Gu Yanzhi picked it up and examined it carefully for a moment, then broke into a wide smile. "Thank you, young master!"

"Don't thank me yet. There's a price."

"Please name it."

"Marry Murong Feng before the year is out, and bring him into my army."

Gu Yanzhi turned scarlet on the spot and rushed to explain, "Young master has misunderstood. Senior brother has no such feelings toward me... and besides, once this matter is resolved, he'll certainly be going to the North Sea Academy to continue his studies..."

"That's your problem."

Tu Feiyun said coldly, "I want results. This is an order."

...

Above the county town, Murong Feng, directing the operation from beneath his umbrella, suddenly let out a tremendous sneeze.

Is someone plotting against me?

The situation below was tense and far from settled, and this was not the moment for him to start calculating causes and effects.

He was struggling to hold things together.

If it had been simply Liu Mengyun at the Qi Refining realm, that would have been no problem at all. He could have subdued him with minimal effort.

But Murong Feng had not been satisfied with that alone. He had wanted to follow the thread and uncover the origins of the Foundation Establishment demon behind Liu Mengyun.

As the inner hall's chief senior brother, whether in terms of strength, depth of mind, or method, maneuvering a junior brother whose only notable quality was a handsome face was, to put it plainly, trivially easy.

Liu Mengyun had held his composure at first, but had gradually found his breathing room growing narrower and more suffocating.

The good news was that tonight, the charge Murong Feng had been carefully building had finally gone off.

The bad news was that what he had in his hands was a sticky mess.

Countless evil spirits and demons were running loose through the city, churning the situation into muddy chaos in a manner that bordered on mutual destruction. Nearly every Qi Refining disciple of the inner hall had been mobilized and was fighting to capture the spirits, which only made things more chaotic.

Murong Feng stood in the air, his expression like still water, his gaze tracking something moving below.

Then, without warning, a tremendous crash erupted from the ground. A residential building not far away collapsed with a roar, and a pitch-black flood dragon shot up from beneath the earth, launching itself straight at Murong Feng.

Murong Feng's face showed not a flicker of surprise. He raised his hand and sent the green silk umbrella above his head sailing forward.

The radiance that had been blanketing the entire city snapped inward in an instant, condensing into a thick pillar of light that bore straight down onto the flood dragon.

The pitch-black flood dragon's massive body, more than ten zhang in length, was seized by the pillar of light. Its movement froze in an instant, leaving it suspended motionless in the air.

The nearest of the great white-scaled pythons lunged forward, coiled around the flood dragon's body, opened its enormous jaws, and clamped them onto the back of the dragon's skull.

The flood dragon made no sound at all. It braced every part of its body and shattered the pillar of light from the green silk umbrella with brute force, and the two vast creatures immediately collapsed into a writhing struggle.

Murong Feng's expression grew grim.

The Old Blind One had been found, but it was no longer alive.

This was a flood dragon that had been dead for some time, refined by someone into a puppet.

So who had the capability to kill and refine a demon at the Foundation Establishment realm?

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