novelraw Chapter 120: The Mastermind Finally Shows Themselves
Chapter 120: The Mastermind Finally Shows Themselves
Murong Feng spat a mouthful of blood and stumbled back several steps, dropping to his knees.
The green silk umbrella fell with a snap and broke clean in two on the ground.
"Boss Hu... come to your senses!"
He knew perfectly well this was pointless to say, but he said it anyway.
The figure slowly advancing through the smoke had already revealed a crimson beast's head, both eyes blood red, sunk entirely into feral madness.
The other side had come prepared, and their plan was considerably more thorough than anything on his end.
The four Chang brothers had the upper hand against the mindless ghost dragon.
But the other side hadn't been trying to escape through it. They had buried a lethal poison inside the ghost dragon's body.
Now all four white-scaled pythons who had revealed their true forms during the battle had inhaled the invisible bone-rotting toxin. They lay blackened and motionless.
And the other side's true killing blow had been lying in wait right under his nose.There had been yet another traitor within the inner hall, one who had seized this critical moment to draw Boss Hu into the fighting.
Whatever had been done to that black throwing knife, it had driven Boss Hu into a feral rampage. In moments he had injured more than ten inner hall disciples at the Qi Refining realm.
Murong Feng had no choice but to intervene directly, but Boss Hu's cultivation clearly outstripped his own, and once Boss Hu descended into madness he paid no attention to the damage being done to his own body, putting everything into each strike.
Murong Feng held on for fewer than ten breaths before the green silk umbrella was completely torn apart in his hands.
The one saving grace was that after this sustained all-out assault, Boss Hu's strength was largely spent, leaving him no capacity to continue the destruction.
"Heh heh heh heh..."
A strange laugh drifted to his ear, followed by a quiet murmur, "Those not of our kind will always harbor different loyalties. If you hadn't indulged these demon spirits in their behavior all along, would any of this have come to pass?"
Murong Feng said coldly, "I don't know what esteemed figure you are. Hiding and concealing yourself is one thing, but surely you're not afraid to even give your name?"
"Hahahaha!"
A burst of laughter came from behind him. Murong Feng turned and saw, not far down the street, a woman dressed in a vivid red bridal gown wearing a grotesque smiling mask, watching him with evident interest.
"A history official? No... a Ghost Scribe?"
"Oh? Not bad for a chief inner hall brother. You do have some breadth of knowledge."
The half-human, half-ghost woman raised her hand, extending a dry and pallid finger toward Murong Feng.
"You little wretch, has no one ever told you not to meddle in things that don't concern you? A few students of no particular importance died. Even the teachers haven't said a word. Why must you make such a fuss over nothing?"
"Students of no particular importance?"
Murong Feng raised an eyebrow. "What a casual way to put it. There is no one of no importance among my inner hall disciples."
"It's just that Peng girl, isn't it? If it weren't for her distinguished background, heh heh heh... and she counts as distinguished? You country folk from this backwater really have no sense of the wider world."
"A figure of your broad experience and distinguished standing doesn't seem to have done a particularly clean job of things either."
Murong Feng gave a cold laugh. "A Ghost Scribe of all people, reduced to operating in a backwater like Yun County, enticing Qi Refining disciples from our county school inner hall into becoming your puppets. What a remarkable display of dignity. Why not go to a larger city? Is this more to your taste?"
Those two simple sentences were enough to shatter the half-human, half-ghost woman's composure on the spot.
"Still this sharp-tongued with nothing left in the tank. Are you hoping the garrison troops will come into the city to save you?"
A full-length mirror materialized beside the half-human, half-ghost woman. Murong Feng's reflection appeared within it. She drove her fist through the surface, and the same damage instantly reflected onto Murong Feng's body.
His body fractured like a shattered mirror, countless cracks spreading outward in an instant as blood burst from them.
A moment later, that blood-red bridal gown had already appeared before the heavily wounded Murong Feng where he lay on the ground. Dry, pallid fingers drove straight toward his eyes.
"Do you still remember that snowy night by the river all those years ago..."
But the words cut off halfway. The fingers that had been about to pierce Murong Feng's eyes stopped.
The blood-red bridal gown flashed backward dozens of zhang in an instant, staring up at the night sky above with wary eyes.
The sky had become covered by a layer of five-colored radiance at some point, its light flickering between bright and dim like scattered lanterns.
The next moment, five-colored shooting stars fell from above.
The red-clad half-human, half-ghost woman's form flickered continuously, but the meteors descending from the sky had locked onto her true body. No matter how she dodged, she could not change what was coming.
A crack.
One streak of blazing light was there and gone, striking the grotesque smiling mask from her face and driving it deep into her features.
The half-human, half-ghost woman in her red gown let out a shriek and shattered on the spot into a broken silver mirror, the pieces clattering to the ground in a cascade.
Every evil spirit and demon that had been running loose through the city froze at the same instant, and the inner hall disciples who had caught up with them moved in to destroy them one by one.
The shooting star that had shimmered with five-colored light spun once through the air, became a plain and unremarkable little stone, and fell into Gu Yanzhi's hand.
She held the stone in one hand and gripped the short blade at her waist with the other, scanning the surroundings with alert eyes.
"Don't bother looking. If the Ghost Scribe truly wanted to run, neither of us has the cultivation to stop her."
Murong Feng, who moments ago had been lying on the ground severely wounded with blood soaking through his clothes and apparently no strength left, stood up. He swept a hand across himself and cleared away every trace of dust and blood, his injuries restored entirely.
He glanced at the stone in Gu Yanzhi's hand and frowned. "Where did you get a Five-Light Stone from this time, and what did you promise in exchange?"
Gu Yanzhi's face went slightly red. She closed her fingers tightly around the stone and said coolly, "What was that about the snowy night by the river all those years ago?"
"Obviously something she invented."
Murong Feng sighed. "Ghost Scribes have always specialized in falsifying history and forging memories. If you'd held off a little longer, I might have gotten more intelligence out of her."
"Was that getting intelligence? If I'd waited any longer, she'd have had your eyes scooped out!"
"Ahem... I had the situation under control."
...
The battle came to an end under circumstances Li Qiuchen hadn't anticipated.
He had expected to go several hundred more rounds with Young Master Liu, but before he had even activated the hallucinogenic toxin he had injected into the man's body, Young Master Liu simply shattered before his eyes.
Cracked apart and fell to pieces all over the ground.
Hu Caiyi had gotten quite a fright, but was otherwise unharmed.
A fractured skull was a trivial injury to sustain in Li Qiuchen's company. It was difficult to stay dead around him.
Boss Hu, on the other hand, had taken grievous damage in the night's fighting. He had apparently sustained an injury to his inner core during the clash with Murong Feng, and could no longer maintain his human form. He was confined to bed to recover.
The inner hall disciples had suffered especially severe casualties. Young Master Liu's sudden flight, combined with the evil spirits running loose through the city and Boss Hu's berserk rampage, had left more than half of the forty-odd senior brothers and sisters killed or wounded.
Most of them were pulled back from death by Murong Feng's restoration arts, but a few of the more unfortunate senior brothers had died in ways that were truly, well, nothing left to salvage at all.
Li Qiuchen's operation to retrieve the hostage went largely unnoticed.
Because the night's battle had scattered disguises everywhere.
Chief Senior Brother Murong Feng needed no commentary. A full-scale Spring Restoration technique that pulled dead people back to breathing again, the implications were clear enough to anyone who knew what to look for.
And Senior Sister Gu, when exactly had she put on that official uniform? And of all things, the most feared identity of all, an Internal Affairs Bureau shadow operative? What exactly was the nature of her relationship with Senior Brother Murong? Was the feeling between them a pretense, or had the act quietly become real?
Two senior brothers who had narrowly survived looked at each other's hands without quite meaning to.
One was holding a white bone sword. The other was holding a soul-dispersing bell.
So you're also into... that kind of thing?
What was going on? Wasn't the county school's inner hall supposed to be a respectable institution of learning?
Why had everyone ended up like this?
If there was one person who had suffered the worst of it all, it was Senior Brother Yang Wenping.
Whatever else you might say about the white bone sword and the soul-dispersing bell, at least their owners had used them as inner hall disciples fighting side by side against an external threat, helping to suppress the evil spirits.
Senior Brother Yang, on the other hand, in the heat of the moment, had ripped out the spiritual roots he had been cultivating inside his junior brothers and sisters.
If not for the chief senior brother's restoration arts, he would have set a new record for inner hall disciple casualties at the hands of a fellow student that night.
Even so, to call his situation pitiable would be the wrong word. The only accurate word was ruthless.
The truly devastating part was that now everyone knew the chief senior brother genuinely carried the Medicine Master's Blessing.
And Senior Brother Yang, yours... was fake. It couldn't save anyone.
What a spectacular social annihilation.
Senior Brother Yang's story was so catastrophic that by the time Li Qiuchen went to school the next morning, everyone was talking about it, and almost no one had given Young Master Liu a second thought.
Liu Huai'an, who had been helping Senior Brother Yang market his cultivation methods for so long and had doubtlessly taken no small cut of the profits, found himself the target of collective scorn, unable to lift his head under the mocking remarks coming from every direction, desperately wishing the floor would open up and swallow him.
Since the incident at the beginning of the fourth month, the county school's internal investigation, which had dragged on for nearly two months, had finally come to a close.
Some came out of it pleased. Others did not.
The upper-year senior brothers and sisters were still busy trying to patch their various disguises back together, while waiting in anxious dread for the moment when accounts would be settled.
The newly enrolled novices had caught their first glimpse of what the world of cultivation truly looked like beneath the surface, and it was nothing like what they had imagined.
Demon spirits, ghost creatures, the Medicine Master, Ghost Scribes...
Even Li Qiuchen, to say nothing of the new students who had known nothing of any of this, came away with a profound awareness that the true shape of this world was far more complex and unsettling than he had supposed.
Who was a friend, and who was an enemy?
What constituted the righteous path, and what constituted the demonic one?
The teachers said, read first.
Within books lay the answers to every question the world could pose. Reading, awakening the mind, opening the intellect, broadening one's knowledge, these were the foundations for setting foot on the path of cultivation.
Without a solid foundation, no amount of practice would amount to anything more than a reflection on water.
The fighting was over, but tending to the wounded, clearing away the ghost dragon's remains, driving out malign influences and preventing the spread of illness, and repairing the damaged buildings would all take considerable time.
It was not until the end of the fifth month that Gu Yanzhi returned to the county school's inner hall with a list in hand, and the formal settling of accounts began.
[NEXT CHAPTER]