After the East Island Master informed them of the specific location where the Qinghong Sword Sect disciples had been attacked, he added, “Besides you two, some other disciples from the Qinghong Sword Sect will also be heading there. However, you will be operating separately. You’ll have to search for the exact location of the living corpses yourselves; we only know the general vicinity.”
Yun Huizhou replied, “A general vicinity is enough. Living corpses have such a foul stench that if there are many of them, we’ll be able to smell them from a distance.”
Once their plans were settled, Lian Li and Yun Huizhou did not dally. They used their movement techniques to leap out of the courtyard.
After leaving Jiaopan City through the South Gate, they took a long detour to reach the area outside the North Gate.
The Imperial Mausoleum was surrounded by towering mountains and deep ridges. Forget ten thousand living corpses—even a hundred thousand could be hidden there.
Yun Huizhou and Lian Li used their lightness skills to sweep rapidly through the mountains. It took them nearly an hour to find a location suspected to be a nest of living corpses.
The soil there looked as if it had been recently turned, patch after patch of it. Even the trees looked less healthy than those in other areas.
Yun Huizhou was the first to act, throwing a palm strike toward the ground below. The soil was blasted away.
When Lian Li saw the scene beneath, his pupils constricted.
In the pit Yun Huizhou had blasted open, dozens of living corpses lay packed tightly together. The moment the soil was cleared, those corpses—which had been lying with eyes tightly shut—instantly snapped their eyes open and looked toward them in unison.
The scene was even more terrifying than what they had witnessed at Fengling Villa.
These living corpses were also somewhat different from the ones at Fengling Villa. Their lips were pitch black, and they did not seem prone to shrieking. After opening their eyes, they all stood up simultaneously in an eerie, rigid posture and lunged toward the two men.
Lian Li felt his scalp go numb.
Fortunately, there weren’t too many living corpses in this single pit—only a few dozen.
While Yun Huizhou held the living corpses back, Lian Li retreated behind him and unwrapped the large medicinal bundles given by the West Island Master, taking out a small packet the size of a coin.
He pinched the small packet to gauge the amount inside, then said to Yun Huizhou, “We can lure out a few more. This one small packet can coat at least a hundred living corpses.”
The five large medicinal bundles from the West Island Master contained a total of about a hundred of these small packets.
If they used one packet for every few dozen corpses, they would only be able to treat a few thousand at most.
Since they didn’t yet know exactly how many living corpses there were, they naturally wanted to spray as many as possible with each packet.
Yun Huizhou nodded and retreated to Lian Li’s side.
Having gained experience from finding one pit, it was much easier for them to track the signs and find others.
By the time Yun Huizhou had blasted open roughly three pits, over a hundred living corpses had emerged.
The two of them led the corpses around for a while, maneuvering until the hundred-plus entities were gathered in a relatively dense cluster.
Lian Li then tossed a small packet toward the very center of the air above the corpse crowd and struck it with a burst of internal energy.
The paper holding the powder shattered instantly, and the powder was carried by the force of the internal energy, scattering evenly over every single living corpse.
At that moment, Yun Huizhou uncorked the water skin at his waist and splashed an appropriate amount of water into the air. He then used his internal energy to disperse the water, allowing it to merge with the powder and fall onto the living corpses.
The two then ascended to a higher vantage point to see if the drenched corpses would react as the West Island Master had described.
After about five breaths of time, some of the living corpses clearly began to move sluggishly. When Lian Li saw a black insect the size of a pinky nail crawl out of one corpse’s nostril, that corpse collapsed with a thud and ceased to move.
He watched as the tiny black insect crawled across the corpse’s face toward a cheek where the medicinal water had splashed.
Upon touching the water, the tiny black insect shriveled and melted away instantly, like a slug encountering salt, until nothing remained.
After clearly witnessing the disappearance of one black insect, Lian Li discovered that over eighty of the hundred-odd living corpses had already been affected. More than half had already fallen motionless, while others were still waiting for the insects to crawl toward the spots where the medicinal water had landed further away.
But after waiting a short while longer, they were also mostly poisoned to death.
Looking at the results, out of the hundred-plus living corpses, only about twenty had not been affected.
Lian Li was somewhat dissatisfied. “One small packet can’t even handle a hundred?”
Yun Huizhou shook his head and said, “It’s definitely enough. Didn’t you say Senior Uncle West has that… obsessive-compulsive disorder? He would definitely make it a round number. We just haven’t mastered the dosage yet.”
Lian Li thought this made some sense, so he dropped the subject and raised another issue: “I didn’t expect these living corpses to be hidden underground. They activate as soon as they’re unearthed. This makes it impossible to do what we originally planned—scattering it all at once and waiting for it to rain at dawn.”
Yun Huizhou also shook the water skin in his hand and said, “It is a bit troublesome. We only brought two water skins. Once the water is gone, we’ll have to go refill them, which will waste some time. I’m afraid we won’t even finish these packets by tomorrow morning.”
Lian Li sighed and said, “If it were as easy as we first imagined, that would be too simple. Let’s do this: we’ll handle as many as we can for now. When it’s about half an hour before the Hour of Wu, we’ll stop and just locate the hiding spots. Then we’ll activate them all at once, lead them around to gather them together, and scatter the powder right when it’s about to rain.”
Yun Huizhou said, “That’s the only way.”
Throughout the night, Lian Li and Yun Huizhou barely rested. The hiding spots for the living corpses were quite dense, and they could find them easily by following the tracks.
When there was still more than half an hour left before the Hour of Chen, the two of them realized their current efficiency was far too slow. Thus, after refilling their water skins again, they stopped activating pits one by one and prepared to activate a larger number all at once.
They swept rapidly through the mountain forests, locating more hiding spots to prepare for a mass activation.
But it was at this moment that an unexpected change occurred.
