Questioning Heaven, Desiring the Way - Chapter 93

The Seven Kill Sect disciples clearly didn’t really have a choice as to whether they should pay a hundred Spiritual Stones to take the palace’s flying ship to their destination or not. Still, they were also fairly interested in this legendary flying ship themselves.

After they paid up, they walked further into the palace in an orderly fashion. Along the way, young maids and eunuchs accompanying their masters would steal glances at them because they were fairly curious about these sect disciples that they had heard about so often.

The monarchy hired some wandering cultivators, but you couldn’t possibly compare those backward and uncouth people to the disciples carefully groomed and trained by a real sect. The difference was as great as the difference between the heavens and the earth.

The disciples were already used to commoners staring at them this way. They subconsciously looked down on these people, and their sense of superiority was clearly apparent in their gaze, making others dislike them. To cultivators, ordinary folk were mere ants meant for them to kill and abuse as they liked. Even though they were walking through the palace of Fenglin and the residents of this place could not be considered truly ordinary folk, the cultivators still did not see them as equals.

Gu Suihan walked right at the back of the group and looked around at the majestic palace. The architecture was not the most elegant and looked more imposing and domineering than pretty. He sneered unnoticeably, and there was a tinge of disdain in his eyes.

To him, this half-assed sort of cultivation in the Way of Martial Arts was pointless. Nothing would come out of it, yet they were wasting all these resources. It was better just to remain an ordinary person and leave their life and death to fate.

“Gu Suihan!”

While everyone was still observing their surroundings, a shout came from one side of the palace, echoing loudly in the vast space and disturbing the peace.

“Nan Yuntian?” thought Gu Suihan in dismay when he turned to where the voice had come from and raised an eyebrow. He couldn’t believe how unlucky he was to run into a man with a deep grudge against him right here.

Nan Yuntian’s expression was sullen, and his eyes seemed to spew fire. His jaw was so tense that it seemed a little contorted, and his grating voice sounded like a demon from hell. “How dare you leave the Seven Kill Sect grounds!”

“To be honest,” said Gu Suihan a little embarrassedly as he rubbed his nose, “I’ve left the sect grounds several times already. You just never noticed.”

“Why, you! You’re such an insolent and foul-mouthed young fellow! Not slaughtering you on the spot that day is the greatest mistake of my life! I’m going to make sure you die today!” Nan Yuntian’s teeth chattered, and the veins on his neck throbbed angrily.

Gu Suihan burst out laughing and pointed at the place around him. He raised his chin arrogantly and sneered, “Are you out of your mind? Do you dare to kill me in such a place? I highly doubt you can kill me, but even if you could, I’m pretty sure your entire clan will become cannon fodder for the Seven Kill Sect to vent their anger on.”

Nan Yuntian snapped out of his fury upon hearing what Gu Suihan said and scanned the cultivation levels of all the young men and women in front of him. He got a terrible shock. Wasn’t the inter-sect competition only open to internal disciples? Why was Gu Suihan here?

Could it be…?!

Nan Yuntian stared at Gu Suihan in utter disbelief.

“You’re such an intelligent man, Castellan Nan.” Gu Suihan seemed to have understood why Nan Yuntian looked so shocked, so he smirked and slowly removed his internal disciple jade token from his belt to wave it in Nan Yuntian’s face.

His behaviour made everyone who knew how Gu Suihan became an internal disciple nearly smack their foreheads. Gu Suihan had been so unwilling to become an internal disciple that he ran away for three years, yet he was now behaving as though he was proud to be one.

“I won’t let you get away with this,” hissed Nan Yuntian hatefully after nearly boring a hole into Gu Suihan’s face. He marched out of the palace without even turning back.

“Gosh, you have enemies everywhere,” remarked Li Rong.

“Running into such things is inevitable on the journey of cultivation. After getting rid of the younger ones, the older ones came after me. When it comes to such people, either you surrender completely, or you wipe them out completely,” said Gu Suihan with a laugh, as though he wasn’t bothered at all. But there was a glint in his eye like there was something up his sleeve.

Li Rong noticed that glint in Gu Suihan’s eye, and he couldn’t help but feel a little scared. He knew that Gu Suihan was thinking about how he was going to involve these cultivators in the Way of Martial Arts in their plan.

After this incident, everyone not only kept their distance from Gu Suihan since they didn’t want to be implicated for anything, but they would also glance warily at him from time to time. They did not bother hiding the distrust they had of him.

But Gu Suihan was perfectly fine with that. He now had the reputation of being the troublemaker and attracted all the negative attention while Li Rong did what was necessary in secret. That helped to ensure that their plan was not exposed too early on.

Eventually, the group was told that they would stay here to rest for a month before setting off again.

After collecting more Spiritual Stones from the disciples, they were given a place to stay for the month. You Hantian had disappeared with the zheng long ago, probably to attend to other matters.

The disciples had spent a long time flying, and it had also been a long time since they stepped out of the sect grounds, so after taking a rest, they started gathering in small groups and got ready to head out to have fun in the city. It didn’t take long for the area to become quiet again.

Nobody wanted to have anything to do with Gu Suihan, so he could have a small area to himself and didn’t need to share the room with anybody else.

He was cautious as he checked to make sure that everyone else had left before proceeding to set up several formations around his room. He then carefully took a round ball and small bottle out from his storage ring.

The round ball was translucent and was only about the size of his fist. A light grey soul was floating about inside the ball, and a youthful face filled with hatred could be seen from time to time. The small bottle was filled with only enough blood to cover a fingernail, and it had already turned black and was all dried up.

This soul belonged to the one who died at his hands back then, Nan Xingyuan.

Gu Suihan was going to use Nan Xingyuan’s soul and blood as a medium to lay a curse on the living members of Nan Yuntian’s clan.

In order to prevent them from finding a way to undo this curse easily, Gu Suihan decided on using a lesser-known curse – the Blood Failing and Soul Draining 100 Day technique.

This technique cursed both the physical body and the person’s hun and po. As long as you were related by blood to any victim, you would eventually suffer from the curse as well. The only issue with this technique was that it took a long time for anything to happen. It would take a full hundred days for any effects to be seen.

The good part was that this was a failsafe method. As long as one successfully cursed one person, the entire clan would definitely be wiped out. It was a pretty extreme and cruel method.

“The blood of a descendant shall connect their souls, and her spirit shall cost them their lives.”

Gu Suihan was very focused as he took Nan Xingyuan’s soul out of the ball, holding her howling and wailing soul with one hand while using his other hand to scrape a little bit of blood from the bottle gently.

As he shifted his Qi around, Nan Xingyuan’s soul was flattened to eventually become a barely visible thing that resembled a piece of paper.

The blood he scraped off the bottle slowly liquefied, and his finger was like a pen as he used her blood like ink, drawing all sorts of mysterious runes onto the paper-like soul of Nan Xingyuan.

The more runes he scribbled, the paler his face became. His lips were soon almost blue, and his face was as white as a sheet. But the glint in his eye became brighter and brighter, twinkling as brilliantly as the stars in the night sky.

Then, as if he had established a connection to the greater universe and the nether world, the paper-like object that Nan Xingyuan’s soul had become suddenly shuddered violently and let out a loud and long howling sound. But all these sounds were absorbed by the formations that Gu Suihan had set up earlier.

Gu Suihan suddenly stopped writing and then raised his hand like he was going to start writing again, but instead, he bit his tongue hard and sprayed blood into the middle of the runes he had inscribed earlier.

In that instant, the paper soul seemed to have come alive. The runes on it moved about even more rapidly than before, and this large talisman actually gave off waves of vitality.

The talisman flew several rounds around Gu Suihan, then came to an abrupt stop when he gave a loud shout. It instantly turned into a beam of light that shot out from his room and disappeared into the distance silently.

Meanwhile, Nan Yuntian felt some uneasiness as he sat in his own room at home. He looked around his room warily but did not notice anything amiss. But for some reason, he started feeling stuffiness in his heart, as if something was watching him from the shadows, watching him the way a venomous snake hid in the dark to observe its prey. Not only was it hidden from sight, but it carried ill intentions.

Nan Yuntian recalled how he had seen Gu Suihan several hours ago and felt like he had found the source of his uneasiness. All of this was coming from that young cultivator who seemed to be only at the Foundation Establishment stage.

“Gu Suihan! What exactly are you scheming?” Nan Yuntian tried to calm his unsettled heart down even as he muttered these words to himself with a deep scowl on his face.