Chapter 69: Mountain River Brush (Part 9)

Yun Xueqing glanced at him, his eyes showing approval. “Indeed.”

Even though two people had already died on the scene, San Zhi could still manage a smile. “Naturally. My nose is very sharp.”

The man and the Weird stopped chatting idly and turned their gazes to the woman applying the white clay.

The woman applying the white clay had very deft hands and could easily create exquisite makeup, but this was her first time doing it on a corpse. Her hands trembled uncontrollably, and fear showed on her face.

Nothing happened in the first half. The woman safely applied the white clay to the corpse’s arms and legs, leaving only the face untouched.

She swallowed hard, psyching herself up inwardly. She gripped the brush and reached toward the corpse’s face. Just as the brush hairs were about to touch the corpse’s cheek, the corpse’s dead-fish-like eyes suddenly rolled.

Everyone present was staring at the corpse and simultaneously caught the movement. They were all startled inwardly, and the woman was so frightened her soul nearly fled her body. The brush dropped from her hand to the ground.

Her reason shattered. She wanted to beg the Mourning Envoy for mercy, but upon meeting the other’s expressionless face, she shut her mouth. She silently picked up the brush and continued applying the white clay.

Her hands shook nonstop, making it impossible to apply the makeup properly. The white clay on the face was uneven—thin in some places, thick in others, mottled and patchy.

No one present had the mood to pay attention to this. They only cared whether the corpse in front of them would suddenly rise up and do something to them.

The woman holding the brush was especially worried. Her back was completely soaked with sweat.

She could feel it—the corpse before her had indeed come alive.

Even though the corpse’s gray, dead-fish eyes didn’t roll again, she still sensed the other casting malicious, venomous gaze upon her.

She had been targeted by this monster.

Realizing this fact, half her heart turned cold.

With her heart like dead ashes, she developed a broken-jar-broken attitude. Feeling miserable inside, she didn’t want this monster to have it easy either. The brush in her hand poked at the corpse’s face even harder.

The corpse’s gaze instantly grew even more resentful. The woman’s body stiffened, but fortunately, the Mourning Envoy spoke in time: “Next.”

The woman let out a long breath of relief, set down the brush in her hand, and safely returned to the crowd.

San Zhi narrowed his eyes and touched his chin with interest. “Something’s a bit off.”

Yun Xueqing looked at him. “What did you discover?”

San Zhi shook his head. “Nothing yet for now, but you should be careful. Don’t die.”

Before Yun Xueqing could ask what he meant by that, he heard the Mourning Envoy say, “You, continue applying her makeup.”

The Mourning Envoy was pointing at Yun Xueqing.

Yun Xueqing didn’t resist. He went to the makeup kit and casually grabbed two brushes.

He had no experience applying makeup to women, only having accidentally glimpsed his close senior sisters and junior sisters carefully doing their makeup before heading down the mountain for a holiday.

He could only clumsily imitate what he had seen, dipping the brush and smearing away.

Watching Yun Xueqing dip into the eyeshadow palette and apply it to the corpse’s mouth, Fu Mi said, “…Is this really okay?”

San Zhi smiled. “It should be a huge problem.”

As Yun Xueqing’s makeup job took shape, Fu Mi commented, “Even Cuinhua would turn into a flower-like beauty after his handiwork.”

The white clay had given it a bit of human likeness before, but now there was none at all.

Yun Xueqing was oblivious to their silent criticisms and focused solely on the task at hand.

The corpse under his hands seemed to have reached its limit too. It stretched out a hand covered in white clay to stop him, grabbing his arm.

Yun Xueqing was concentrating on his work when a sudden stab of pain shot through his arm. Distracted by this, he had to set down the brush. Looking at the corpse glaring angrily at him, he soothed it gently, “It’ll be done soon. Don’t be impatient.”

The corpse: “…”

He said that, but with the mouth, eyes, and eyebrows already made up, there wasn’t much room left to work. So he simply picked up a black charcoal pen and scrawled a few characters boldly on the side of its face.

Looking at the finished makeup and the words on its cheek, Yun Xueqing nodded in satisfaction. “Still half-hiding the pipa.”

San Zhi made out what Yun Xueqing had written and the corner of his mouth twitched. “You’re quite narcissistic, leaving your autograph like that.”

Yun Xueqing didn’t explain. He looked at the face with some lingering reluctance, feeling there were still imperfect spots. He picked up the brush to touch them up, but then heard the Mourning Envoy’s tone sink low. “Enough. Next. Be more careful—if you make it like this again, I’ll kill you.”

She had grown impatient with Yun Xueqing’s continued tinkering.

The next one to apply makeup was Fu Mi. Looking at the corpse’s mottled face, he couldn’t help the slight upturn of his lips. He picked up the brush to clean up after Yun Xueqing.

Yun Xueqing walked back into the crowd. The satisfaction on his face vanished, replaced by an expressionless look as he rolled up his sleeve.

Where the corpse had grabbed him before, there was now a black handprint.

San Zhi, who had walked over, saw it too and raised a brow. “What rotten luck. You actually got hit with that thing’s curse. I can tell she really took issue with the makeup you did.”

The black handprint on his arm faintly ached, but Yun Xueqing didn’t take it seriously. He pulled his sleeve back down and turned his gaze to Fu Mi.

Someone as slick and adept at disguise as Fu Mi would succeed at anything, including makeup.

San Zhi watched his technique closely and exclaimed in admiration, “Doctor Fu’s hands bring the dying back to life.”

Yun Xueqing silently looked at him. “His makeup is good, but mine isn’t?”

San Zhi snickered. “I thought you had some self-awareness in this area.”

Yun Xueqing silently withdrew his gaze.

By the time it was Fu Mi’s turn as the third person, the corpse’s range of movement had grown larger. It could now half-sit up in the coffin.

Yun Xueqing stared at it intently. “This Weird should be absorbing energy from the people close to it.”

San Zhi rubbed his chin. “Pretty much. More precisely, it uses the absorbed energy to unseal its own power.”

Yun Xueqing’s gaze was calm. “Once the seal is fully released, what will we face?”

San Zhi’s tone turned eerie. “Anything’s possible.”

The most likely outcome was a massacre.

He didn’t say it aloud, but the two understood each other tacitly.

Yun Xueqing said, “If we want to stop the unsealing process, we have to deal with that one.”

He pointed at the Mourning Envoy standing to the side, her face expressionless.

“That probably won’t work,” Fu Mi said slowly as he finished the makeup and walked over.

He pointed without reservation at the Mourning Envoy, who was like an executioner. “Even if all of us here combined our power, we couldn’t deal with her. And even if we barely managed to kill her, another one would appear.”

Yun Xueqing caught his implication. “The Mourning Envoy position must exist?”

“Exactly,” Fu Mi said. “The Mourning Envoy is like a mandatory program we can’t skip.”

The Mourning Envoy was a key figure in the funeral rites and couldn’t be killed—that was the rule carved into this Weird Domain.

If they didn’t unseal it, the Mourning Envoy would kill them, but they couldn’t directly kill the Mourning Envoy either. It was an unsolvable dilemma.

Yun Xueqing fixed his gaze on him. “Where did you learn all this?”

Fu Mi smiled. “By looking with my eyes. That Mourning Envoy’s aura isn’t simple—you must sense it too. As for the rest, of course it’s because… I can divine.”

Yun Xueqing’s heart sank.

Fu Mi’s Oracle could see through so much?

Though their conversation was amicable for now, Fu Mi was from the Strategy God Heavens after all. Their current cooperation was only for survival—they weren’t truly on the same side.

Fu Mi was too mysterious, and the abilities he displayed were astonishing. This threat far exceeded San Zhi’s.

Of course, Yun Xueqing’s attention on him wasn’t just wariness—there was also a strange feeling.

He always felt like Fu Mi seemed familiar, like someone he’d met before. But he was certain he’d never seen Fu Mi.

“What are you thinking?” Fu Mi’s tone was gentle, his harmless face blooming with a faint smile that made it hard to stay guarded.

Yun Xueqing stared at his face, trying to recall any clues related to him, but came up empty. He withdrew his gaze and said flatly, “Nothing.”

Next, it was San Zhi’s turn to apply makeup to the corpse.

He had mocked Yun Xueqing wildly, but in truth, he was just as clueless about makeup—they were about even.

But Yun Xueqing had no leisure to mock back. He was fully focused on how to stop this corpse’s revival.

His gaze fell on the Mourning Envoy.

She wore mourning clothes, a white veil hat on her head, and exuded a chilling aura from head to toe.

Yun Xueqing stared at her, feeling like he’d overlooked something.

His gaze shifted to the identical faces of the surrounding people, and he suddenly realized, “Haven’t we seen the Mourning Envoy’s face yet?”

He knew little about the Mourning Envoy—just that she was a woman in mourning garb with an icy demeanor and a penchant for killing without hesitation. Nothing else.

Her face had always been hidden under the white veil hat; they’d never glimpsed it.

San Zhi grinned lecherously. “No way—you’re getting ideas about a Weird? Don’t tell me you’re expecting a pitifully charming face under that veil?”

He emphasized “Weird” deliberately, hoping to snap him back to reality.

Yun Xueqing shook his head, offering no further explanation.

He had a hypothesis, but needed more observation to confirm it.

The Mourning Envoy urged them to complete the makeup process.

Under everyone’s frantic makeup application, the corpse absorbed quite a bit of energy. It had now fully emerged from the coffin, standing stiffly inside it like a zombie, expressionlessly meeting everyone’s gaze.

Moving to the next phase, the Mourning Envoy couldn’t hide her excitement. “The next phase is crucial. You absolutely must not fail.”

She didn’t state the consequences, but everyone present instinctively felt a chill.

The Mourning Envoy took out a book with Detailed Anatomy Rules written boldly on the cover. “To preserve a beautiful body long-term, there’s one crucial final step: embalming.”

San Zhi smiled. “The thing in the coffin is already standing upright. Next step, it might walk. Can you still call it a body?”

The Mourning Envoy ignored his interruption. “The Egyptians invented a long-lasting preservation method: making a mummy. Now, make the body into a mummy.”

This time, the Mourning Envoy was especially patient, explaining the mummy-making process step by step.

Making a mummy required many steps. They mainly needed to use a metal hook to extract the brain through the nostrils, then rinse the abdominal cavity with wine. Next, handle the organs: open the left side of the body, remove the organs including liver, lungs, stomach, intestines, etc. Clean the organs, dehydrate them with salt, coat them in resin, place them in special jars, and finally dehydrate the body. That roughly completed it.[1]

The more she spoke, the paler everyone’s faces grew.

They weren’t professional forensic experts and couldn’t perform such precise dissection.

Never mind overcoming the psychological hurdle—the first step of hooking the brain out through the nose was already impossibly difficult.

Such a hard task, and they weren’t allowed to fail?

The Mourning Envoy was truly kind; she could have just killed them outright but instead assigned a task.

Even faced with such a difficult demand, Fu Mi still wore a mild smile. “Dissecting the corpse directly like this—won’t we catch corpse poison?”

Under the Mourning Envoy’s white veil hat, a eerie smile appeared, unnoticed by anyone. “This task only needs one person. If that person fails, they die.”

Hearing it only required one person, most present breathed a sigh of relief, though they didn’t fully relax, fearing they’d be chosen.

Yun Xueqing had a bad premonition—and sure enough, the Mourning Envoy extended her slender finger and pointed at him. “You do it.”