Those youths were still green and only had so much experience under their belt. They hadn’t detected anything unusual in this area, which was why they’d never thought there’d be such a ferocious evil. At first, they’d been quite sorry because they felt themselves lacking, but after Madam Mo’s indiscriminate tongue-lashing, they were growing upset. After all, they came from a distinguished clan. No one had ever dared treat them this way. The teachings of the Lan Clan of Gusu were extremely strict: they forbade raising a hand against normal folk, and not even rudeness was allowed. Even though they were irritated, they had to force it down, causing dark expressions to cloud their faces.
Wei Wuxian couldn’t take it anymore. He thought, After so many years, the Lan Family still acts this way. What’s the use of all that self-restraint unless you’re looking to suffocate yourselves? Watch me!
He spat loudly. “Who do you think you’re yelling at? Do you really take them to be your servants? They came all this way to exorcise evil for free, and now they owe you? How old is your son again? At least seventeen, right? A ‘child’ still? How old do you have to be to understand human words? Did they not instruct us again and again yesterday not to go near the west courtyard, not to touch anything in the formation? Your son snuck out in the middle of the night to dally about—is that my fault? Or is it his fault?”
Lan Jingyi and the others let out a breath, no longer looking as upset. Madam Mo was both extremely sad and resentful, and her mind was filled with nothing but thoughts of death. More specifically, it wasn’t thoughts of herself dying to accompany her son, but rather thoughts of having everyone in this world die, especially the ones currently in front of her.
Whenever something happened, she’d always order her husband around, so she shoved him. “Call everyone in! Call everyone in here!”
However, her husband was in a daze. Perhaps the shock of the death of his only son was too great, but he shoved her back. Knocked down to the ground so abruptly, Madam Mo was stunned.
If this had been before, Madam Mo needn’t have pushed him; as long as she raised her voice a tiny bit, he’d do whatever she said. Yet today he dared fight back!
The servants were all terrified by her expression, and a trembling A-Ding helped her stand. Madam Mo grabbed her heart, and said with a shaking voice, “You…you…YOU GET LOST TOO!”
Her husband seemed not to have heard. A-Ding shot A-Tong a number of looks, and A-Tong quickly dragged his master out. It was chaos within the east hall. Seeing how the family was finally quieting down, Wei Wuxian went to inspect the corpse further. However, he had barely glanced at it before another high-pitched scream pierced through the door.
The crowd inside the hall poured out and were greeted with the sight of two bodies spasming on the ground in the east courtyard. One was a slumped A-Tong, alive. The other was collapsed on the ground, its body wrinkled and withered as if its blood and flesh had been completely sucked dry. Its left arm was already gone, and there was no blood flowing from the wound. The state of this corpse was exactly the same as Mo Ziyuan’s.
Madam Mo had just shaken off A-Ding’s supporting hand, but when she saw that corpse lying on the ground, she was stunned in place. At last exhausted of the energy to throw more fits, she fainted. Wei Wuxian happened to be standing near her, so he caught her and passed her to A-Ding as she came running over. He then took a glance at his right hand. A cut there was gone as well.
Madam Mo’s husband had only stepped out onto the threshold of the hall. He hadn’t even entered the yard before he died tragically on the spot. Everything had happened within an instant.
Lan Sizhui, Lan Jingyi, and the others paled, but Lan Sizhui was the first to compose himself. He questioned the slumped A-Tong.
“Did you see what it was?”
A-Tong was thoroughly horrified, his teeth clenched so hard that he couldn’t utter a word for the moment, only shaking his head. Lan Sizhui, burning with impatience, instructed his peers to bring the boy inside before he turned to Lan Jingyi.
“Did you fire the signal?”
“I did,” Lan Jingyi replied. “But if there are no seniors nearby who can come to offer assistance, our people will probably take at least an hour before they can make it here. What do we do? We don’t even know what it is right now.”
It was, of course, impossible for them to leave. If a clan’s disciples only cared about escape when running into evil spirits, then not only would they embarrass the clan, but they themselves would be too ashamed to go out again. The terrified folks of the Mo household could not leave with them either. The evil spirit was most likely among them, so it would have been useless even if they fled.
Lan Sizhui clenched his teeth. “Stay on guard until help arrives!”
Since the distress signal was already fired, other cultivators would soon come to their aid. In order to avoid adding to the present trouble, by all accounts, Wei Wuxian should have retreated. Best if whoever came was no one he knew. If it was someone he had crossed paths with before, or had fought with, then it was hard to tell what would happen.
With the sacrificial ritual’s curse on him, he could not leave the Mo Estate yet. Besides, if the summoned creature could take two lives within such a short span of time, then it was abnormally ferocious. If Wei Wuxian dropped everything and left, then by the time reinforcements arrived, the entire Mo Estate would have its streets filled with corpses missing their left arms. And surely, some of those corpses would include the familial disciples of the Lan Clan of Gusu.
After a moment’s deliberation, Wei Wuxian said to himself, Let’s end this quickly.
Those youths were fledglings, each of them looking nervous. Despite that, they still scrupulously took their places to protect the Mo Manor and stuck talismans inside and outside of the hall. The servant A-Tong had already been carried inside, and Lan Sizhui checked his pulse with his left hand while his right massaged Madam Mo’s back. He couldn’t treat both at once and was in a sorry dilemma when suddenly, A-Tong crawled up from the ground.
A-Ding exclaimed, “A-Tong, you’re awake!”
Before any delight could cross her face, A-Tong raised his left hand and seized his own neck.
Seeing this, Lan Sizhui targeted several of A-Tong’s acupoints with a triple tap of his hand apiece. Wei Wuxian knew that while the Lan clan appeared gentle on the surface, their arm strength was not gentle in the least. Using that method, anyone could be rendered thoroughly unable to move. However, A-Tong appeared not to have felt a thing. His left hand gripped harder and harder, his face scrunching more and more with pain. Lan Jingyi went over to pull at his left hand, but it was like trying to break off a chunk of iron: immovable. Moments later, crack. A-Tong’s head drooped down, and only then did the hand let go. But his neck was already broken.
He had actually strangled himself before the eyes of all!
Seeing this, A-Ding’s voice trembled. “…A ghost! There’s an invisible ghost here, and it made A-Tong strangle himself!”
Her voice was shrill and sad, raising hairs on everyone’s necks. They all believed her. Wei Wuxian determined it to be the exact opposite, however. This wasn’t a malicious ghost.
He had seen the talismans those youths had chosen, and they were the spirit-repelling type. They had plastered the entire east hall with them, airtight. If this really were a malicious spirit, then those talismans would have immediately burned with green flames when it entered the east hall. Things would not be as quiet as they were now.
It wasn’t that this group of youths was slow to react; it was that the intruder was truly ferocious in nature. The cultivation sects had strict criteria for determining whether something was a “malicious ghost”: one was considered such if it killed once a month for up to three months consecutively. This was a criterion Wei Wuxian himself had set, and it was probably still in use now. Dealing with this type was his specialty, and based on what he’d seen, killing once every seven days would make this creature a malicious ghost that caused particularly frequent mischief. However, this thing had just killed three times in a row, and in a short time span too. Even accomplished cultivators would have been hard-pressed to come up with a counter strategy, never mind these novice juniors.
Just as he was thinking this, the firelight flashed. A blast of sinister wind whipped by, and every lantern and every candle in the entire courtyard, including the east hall, was extinguished.
Screams erupted the instant the lights went out. The men and women pushed and shoved, falling and fleeing.
Lan Jingyi shouted, “Stay where you are—don’t run! We’ll arrest whoever runs!!”
Those were not words spoken without reason—wreaking havoc in the dark and taking advantage of confusion was the nature of evil spirits. The more the people screamed and ran amok, the easier it would be to attract trouble unknowingly. It was extremely dangerous to be left alone or to lose one’s head at a time like this. And yet it could not be helped that everyone was scared out of their wits, so how could they possibly pay attention to and heed any instructions? It didn’t take long before the east hall fell quiet, with only the sound of light breaths and faint sniffling. Most had probably left.