Full of despair, he plummeted right back into the water.
Xue Xian had been disconnected from his true form for over half a year. During that time, it had passed through several unfamiliar hands before being buried beneath Scribe Liu’s accursed residence. Who knew how much filthy mud and how many wandering ghosts it had consumed?
As Xue Xian’s spirit returned to his body, it was like putting on a new skin. He’d need time to reacquaint himself with it. In a moment of excitement, he’d overextended himself, and when he fell back into the river, his explosive might from earlier dissipated. His spirit was struggling to control his body. He wanted to curl up to protect himself from the fall, but his attempts were unsuccessful. Sinking down to the river’s depths, he could only resign himself to his fate.
Meanwhile, Xuanmin had begun to float upward when the whirlpool dissipated. Just as he caught his first glimpse of sunlight, that plummeting dragon collided with him. The half-conscious Xuanmin was slammed into the riverbed by Xue Xian’s long tail, crushing all air from his chest. With that, he was out like a light.
Xue Xian blew a bubble from his snout. There are always certain things we find ourselves powerless against. How about you lose your memory again?
Fortunately, the only person he’d crushed was Xuanmin. Lu Nianqi had escaped unscathed, as well as the bodies of Lu Shijiu and Old Man Liu, and they now floated to the river’s surface.
The clamorous thunderstorm summoned by Xue Xian’s return dissipated as swiftly as it had come. As the rainstorm ceased, someone soon discovered the bodies floating on the river and had a nasty shock.
The corpse collector responsible for this stretch of water rowed his creaking boat to the river’s center. He’d spent his entire life fishing up corpses, but he’d never encountered anything like this. The sheer number of bodies floating on the misty surface of the river was absurd. Some of them had been submerged for who knew how long, their clothes tattered, while others looked like they’d just drowned.
The corpse collector counted on his fingers—nine in total.
The three fresh bodies floated close together. They were probably victims of the same drowning incident. The remaining six were somewhat scattered. Perhaps it was his imagination, but from his vantage point, one of those six bodies seemed to be looking toward an islet in the middle of the river.
Many smaller islets were scattered around Fentou Island. They mostly served as resting spots for waterfowl and were easy to overlook. However, for some reason, they seemed almost like strangers now. Something was definitely off about them.
The corpse collector tugged the corpses over with his pole while musing on what it could be. A moment later, he realized.
“What happened to Fentou Island?!”
The corpse collector was an old hand; he worked briskly. In the blink of an eye, he’d pulled two of the fresher bodies onto his boat. When he flipped the bodies over, he found himself shocked again. Old Man Liu the boatman was his acquaintance, and he’d watched Lu Shijiu grow up.
“How awful.” He sighed, then reached with his pole to pull up the third body. It was the small, skinny Lu Nianqi. He couldn’t help but sigh again. “Old Lu’s family is no more…”
However, after pulling Lu Nianqi onto the boat, the corpse collector gasped. “Why does Xiao-Nianqi look a bit different? I saw him just a few days ago.”
Lu Nianqi often went out. It was his job to gather firewood and cook, so the corpse collector saw him around regularly. Everyone in the area who was even slightly acquainted with the Lu family knew Lu Nianqi’s real age. They’d heard that after he’d lost his father and almost drowned, he’d burned with a high fever for days that damaged his body. Ever since then, his growth had been stunted. At first glance, he looked like a young child, though a precocious one.
The corpse collector wasn’t a tall man, and in his memory, Lu Nianqi had barely reached his chest. Looking at the boy lying on the deck now, the collector roughly measured him with his arm. He seemed taller than before.
“How can someone grow taller in just a few days?” the corpse collector wondered aloud, then quickly provided himself with an explanation—the boy might have been bloated from soaking in the river.
Just as the corpse collector withdrew his hand and was getting ready to fish out the bodies farther away, Lu Nianqi, who was lying lifeless on the boat, shot straight up.
“Kuh, kff, geh!”
Lu Nianqi coughed several times, then spat out a mouthful of river water, his face flushed crimson from the force of it. Blearily, he opened his eyes.
The first thing he saw was the startled corpse collector falling into the river with a splash.
“Uh…”
Xue Xian, lying on the riverbed, was roused by a loud splash on the water’s surface. He stared blankly for a long moment before regaining sensation in his body, along with some control.
He tried to turn his head, but as he did, he spotted a large stone lock lying several feet away. The lock was enormous, half the size of a coffin. It had a square bottom that seemed particularly heavy, and a pointed top with a hole through which a thin iron chain had been threaded. The chain was pulled taut like it was attached to something above.
Looking up, Xue Xian found that the other end of the chain was tied to something resembling tattered cotton fluff with black river plants attached to it, fluttering in the water.
No, it was neither of those things!
Lu Nianqi had seen something on their way to Fentou Island: a black mass beneath the boat that resembled hair. He’d taken it for river plants because, if it’d been hair, the corpse should have been floating on the river surface, not submerged underwater.
Xue Xian took in the stone lock and the iron chain again. Now, he understood why this person hadn’t floated to the surface—they were tethered by the ankle, forcing them to stand upright in the water.
He swung his head, churning the river water, and a broken chain nearby was pulled closer by the current. Judging from the break, he’d probably snapped it during the storm he’d raised earlier.
Thinking silently, Xue Xian waited for his body to recover. Once enough agility and control had returned to his upper half, he raised his front claw and tugged on the iron chain.
And…he missed.
Exasperated, he stared down at his own claw. He’d grown used to reaching out at will in his human form and had forgotten that a dragon’s claws were comparably shorter.
In any case, his first attempt had failed because the chain was out of reach.
It’s a good thing my travel companions are either unconscious or missing, Xue Xian thought privately. How humiliating would it be if they’d seen that? Especially that annoying bald donkey!
He raised his dragon head and moved along the soft mud of the riverbed, unwittingly dragging his lower half over Xuanmin’s chest as he passed by.
The unconscious Xuanmin twitched his fingers.
Xue Xian’s sharp claws scraped against the iron chain. Like a knife meeting tofu, the sturdy iron chain was sliced clean in two. The lower half of the chain slowly sank into the riverbed, while the body it was tethered to began to drift toward the surface.
It’s a little tiring, Xue Xian thought with a click of his tongue. He was still unused to his dragon form. Even raising his upper body to break a chain was exhausting, akin to scaling an intricate pagoda while carrying a thousand-pound weight, leaving his arms weak.
He slumped back to the riverbed, his large dragon head resting listlessly on the soft mud. Adopting the least taxing posture he could manage, he watched the stone lock bound with iron chains. After scanning the area for a while, he deigned to use his stubby front claw to flip the stone lock over.
The bottom of the lock was exposed, revealing a circular mark carved into a corner of its flat surface.
During his time mingling with humans, he’d heard that many craftsmen liked to leave a mark on their creations. They’d leave a large one if possible, making it akin to a signboard. Otherwise, they’d leave a small mark in some inconspicuous corner, as subtly as possible, making the mark invisible unless one knew where to look.
No one would be bored enough to tie up corpses for fun, so there must be some purpose behind it. His intuition told him that these standing corpses were related to that sinister design of the array within the tomb, but everything inside Fentou Island had been blasted to smithereens by Xuanmin. There probably weren’t any clues left.
He tapped his claws on the muddy ground in deliberation before he decided he might as well be a busybody. With a swift sweep of his body, he summoned a current to push the stone lock toward the riverbank.