Inside the funeral home, it always felt exceptionally dreary and cold, whether day or night.
The heavy stench of disinfectant lingered in the air. Smelling the faint trace of corpse rot and the wafting scent of scorched flesh, Nan Zhi lightly wrinkled her nose.
The smell was much like ignited hair; anyone catching a whiff would feel a visceral revulsion, instinctively avoiding its source.
Standing before the incinerators, the funeral home director constantly wiped sweat from his brow, while several black-uniformed agents from the Special Investigation Bureau stood beside him, taking detailed notes of the situation.
This time, it wasn't the Cat-Faced Old Lady running loose—corpses had been stolen from the funeral home.
Across the city's nine funeral homes, thirty-one corpses were stolen from six different locations overnight.
Hu Manni and her two companions were running around like mad.
When Nan Zhi volunteered to help, she swore she saw Hu Manni's eyes well up with profound gratitude.
“We didn't violate any operating protocols! Everything strictly followed the 《Safety Production Manual》—as soon as midnight struck, all work stopped.”
The director was beside himself with anxiety, repeating incessantly:
“The corpses were stored properly in the mortuary, and there weren't any valuables. Who would steal dead bodies?
You can't tell me the corpses grew legs and walked off on their own, can you?”
Among the black uniforms, a tall young woman looked up, her gaze suddenly falling upon Nan Zhi.
For some reason, in that brief instant, a startlingly sharp glint flashed in her eyes.
“Are you Fellow Daoist Nan Zhi of the Demon Suppression Division?”
Zhang Daowei briskly stepped forward and extended her hand with crisp efficiency, her expression resuming its usual cool detachment:
“Longhu Mountain, Zhang Daowei.”
“Demon Suppression Division, Nan Zhi. I thought you wouldn't arrive until tonight.”
Grasping her hand, Nan Zhi felt as though she were holding a cold, unfinished sword blade, and instinctively released her grip.
“Would it be convenient to brief me on the scene?”
A nearby black-uniformed agent hesitated as if wanting to speak, but quickly stepped back.
Although this was a Special Investigation Bureau case, the current relationship between the bureau and the Demon Suppression Division was exceedingly close. No one was going to make a fuss over trivial matters of jurisdiction right now.
“This wasn't an ordinary human theft. The on-site surveillance was destroyed before the incident, but a faint trace of Yin energy lingers. Combined with the Five-Witch Banner Fellow Daoist mentioned, I suspect an evil cultivator is causing trouble using Five-Witch Soldiers.”
Zhang Daowei paused and glanced at Nan Zhi:
“However, we still don't know what they plan to do with the corpses.”
With that, she explained the details one by one.
As it turned out, Taoism had a tradition of raising Five-Witch Soldiers.
Taoist spirit soldiers referred to magical entities endowed with power that could be commanded and borrowed—such as Talisman Soldiers (heavenly troops and generals), Divine Soldiers (dispatched by deities), Patriarch Soldiers (allocated by ancestral patriarchs), Wandering Soul Soldiers, Five-Witch Soldiers (mountain and forest spirit creatures, or Witch-ghosts formed from wicked mortals after death), Community Soldiers (City God soldiers), Five Paths Immortal Soldiers (immortal soldiers from the Five Families of Beidong), and so forth...
Among them, Five-Witch Soldiers were mostly composed of subjugated wandering spirits and wild mountain spirits. Driven by command banners, they were deployed to battle rivals, capture souls, haul wealth, and steal corpses.
“So the Joy God I saw that day was a Five-Witch Soldier commanded by someone else.”
Stepping into the mortuary, Nan Zhi indeed saw over a dozen morgue freezers wide open. The floor was a chaotic mess of disordered footprints, all with their toes pointing toward the exit.
With cordon tape cordoning off the area, these footprints could only belong to the body snatchers—or rather, the stolen corpses themselves.
Looking out from inside the mortuary, she could almost picture the stolen corpses suddenly opening the freezers themselves, writhing, struggling, and filing out of the funeral home in neat rows into the vast night.
“What on earth do they want with these corpses? I'm genuinely getting more and more curious.”
Nan Zhi crouched down to examine the footprints, momentarily unable to fathom the mastermind's intentions.
The Huang family, Huang Shiduo, ascending to immortality.
The Bai family, Bai Sangu.
The Hu family, Hu Ban'er.
The Special Investigation Bureau.
Each faction was tangled together, their interests deeply intertwined.
Would the authorities choose to protect the Huang family to check the power of the Demon King of Qingmeng Mountain?
And what choice would the elusive Hui family make?
What role was the Demon Suppression Division, whom she represented, meant to play in all this?
While Nan Zhi was deep in thought, a phone call from Hu Manni came in.
One of the corpses had been found.
“The corpses were found, and it wasn't the Huang family's doing.”
Hu Manni's voice sounded somewhat anxious:
“It was a three-hundred-year-old fox from a collateral branch of our family using human corpses to refine evil pills. When they caught him, more than a dozen corpses were still buried under the ancestral manor. The Special Investigation Bureau just issued a notice—all enlightened fox immortals of the Hu family are to be investigated.”
...
The Special Investigation Bureau's roundup of the fox immortals was an absolute spectacle.
Sleek, glossy foxes were carried into police cruisers by members of the Ma family.
The cooperative ones tucked in their tails, buried their heads in their Dima's embrace, and went straight to sleep.
The uncooperative ones bared their fangs, brandished their claws, hissed at the black uniforms, and spat relentless curses:
“This is a fucking frame-up! A blatant frame-up! We just received rewards from the Demon King—what spirit herbs or immortal pills don't we have? Why would we use human corpses to refine pills? They're stinky and sour—what kind of pills could you possibly make from that? Bah!”
“I want to see your superiors! This is slander! That bastard Huang Shiduo is framing innocent foxes!”
“So many corpses under the ground, and they ended up in our house in a single night—does that make any damn sense?! Huh?!”
All uncooperative foxes were tossed into dog crates. To prevent harm to ordinary mortals, a pair of spirit-locking shackles was locked onto every fox's paws.
The scene was utterly chaotic. Hu Manni was also suspended pending investigation; silently holding Hu Cuiying, she stepped into a police cruiser with a calm expression.
—Aside from those fresh corpses, the Special Investigation Bureau also unearthed dozens of skeletal remains beneath the Hu family ancestral manor, one of which belonged to a victim from a major missing persons case several years ago.
What started as a simple case of stolen corpses had somehow escalated into such a massive affair.
Almost the entirety of the Beidong Special Investigation Bureau had mobilized. Aside from Hu Ban'er, Hu Cuiling, and Hu Cuixian who managed to evade capture, every fox in the Hu family, big and small, was “invited” back to the bureau.
Even the Hu family matriarch—Hu Cuixian's grandmother, Hu Yihua, a rotund old white fox as large as a calf—was carted off to the Special Investigation Bureau.
Such massive turmoil naturally caused huge waves across the Beidong demon realm.
In an instant, throughout the three provinces, countless little demons poked their heads out, while the other four families grew restless.
Some even speculated that this was a prelude to the Special Investigation Bureau making a move against the Demon King of Qingmeng Mountain.
...
“Achoo!”
Nan Zhi sneezed. Dressed in light sportswear, she walked briskly through the desolate wilderness, with an expressionless Zhang Daowei trailing behind her.
“Fellow Daoist Nan Zhi, you don't seem to have any intention of interfering in the Hu family's affairs.”
Zhang Daowei hesitated for a moment:
“As far as I know, the Hu family follows an orthodox path of cultivation, unlike other wild demons. This case is obviously fraught with anomalies—does your Demon Suppression Division truly not intend to step in?”
—Ever since the Hu family ran into trouble, Nan Zhi had spent her time roaming around gathering Snow Essence, appearing entirely indifferent.
“With someone from the Demon Suppression Division like me staying right under their noses, would the Hu family dare commit such a crime? In a situation like this, there are only two possibilities: First, the Huang family framed them and intends to make a move against the Hu family. Second, the Hu family orchestrated this whole performance themselves, likely plotting something big in secret.”
Nan Zhi crouched down, took out her medicine hoe, and carefully dug up a sprig of hemostatic grass. When the phone at her waist buzzed, she pulled it out, looked at the screen, and broke into a sudden smile:
“Look, isn't it right on cue?”
On the Lingjing App, an official update had been posted regarding a newly discovered secret realm.
Near the Siberian snow plains, a secret realm was suspected to have manifested.
In the video, a vast expanse of grassland stretched out as far as the eye could see, a boundless sea of green.
The boundary between sky and earth blurred, with only a hazy yellow sun hanging in the sky. As snow drifted by, faint swirls of immortal energy lingered above a hill, revealing lush green foliage, evergreen cypresses, flowing streams among towering peaks, spirit flowers and exotic herbs, and immortal cave abodes.
It was an unnamed secret realm.
And the uploader of this announcement was Huang Shiduo.
Rate on N.U.
