Lan WangJi was standing right beside him, yet neither replied nor moved.
Suddenly, a clear, blue sword glare lit up an area around seven steps away.
… Lan WangJi was there?
Then who was the person that had always stood silently beside him?!
Suddenly, a shadow flashed before Wei WuXian’s eyes. A dark face approached from in front of him.
It was dark because, on top of the face, there was a thick layer of black mist!
The mist-faced man reached out for the Qiankun Pouch hung by his side. However, after he had taken it, the Qiankun Pouch suddenly swelled up. The string that had tied it snapped in half, and three enraged spirits shot forward. Forming an entangled mess, they charged toward him!
Wei WuXian laughed, “Did you want the Qiankun Pouch? Then, your eyesight must be in a bad shape. Why did you take my Spirit-Trapping Pouch instead?”
Ever since they snatched the recently-unearthed torso from the gravedigger’s hands in the YueyangChang Sect’s cemetery and caused him to retreat frustratedly, Wei WuXian and Lan WangJi had always been on the alert. They predicted that he wouldn’t give up and would instead look out for any opportunity to take it back. As they had expected, after they entered Yi City, the gravedigger attacked, intending to take advantage of the thick fog and the chattering crowd. Indeed, his attack worked, but Wei WuXian had long since swapped the Qiankun Pouch that held the left arm with the Spirit-Trapping Pouch.
With a clang, the opponent jumped backward and unsheathed his sword. Instantly, the spirits’ hatred-filled screeches sounded about, as if the attack pushed them toward the verge of dissipating. Wei WuXian thought to himself, So he really is someone with a high level of cultivation. He immediately shouted, “HanGuang-Jun, the gravedigger’s here!”
Without needing the reminder, Lan WangJi knew that something had happened just by listening. He stayed silent. Bichen’s swift, fierce sweep served as response.
The current situation was far from optimistic. A black mist covered the gravedigger’s sword, making it so that the sword glare didn’t come through and allowing it to hide perfectly within the white fog. On the other hand, the sword glare from Lan WangJi’s Bichen couldn’t be concealed at all. He was out in the open while the enemy was hidden in the dark. Also, the enemy was not only highly skilled in terms of cultivation, but he was also familiar with the GusuLan Sect’s sword moves. And, although both of them were fighting blindly in the fog, he could do whatever he wanted, yet Lan WangJi had to be careful so that he didn’t accidentally injure anyone on his own side. Seeing from all of this, Lan WangJi was really at a disadvantage. Having heard a few clashes of the blades, Wei WuXian’s heart suddenly tightened. He blurted out, “Lan Zhan? Are you hurt?!”
From afar, there came a muffled grunt, as if someone had received a critical injury. It clearly wasn’t Lan WangJi’s voice, though.
Lan WangJi, “Of course not.”
Wei WuXian grinned, “So it seems!”
It sounded as if the other person laughed bitterly. He attacked again. The clashing sounds of Bichen’s glare and the other sword were farther and farther away. Wei WuXian knew that Lan WangJi didn’t want to accidentally hurt them and purposely drew the battle away to deal with the gravedigger on his own. Of course, the rest was up to Wei WuXian. He turned around, “How are the ones who inhaled the powder?”
Lan SiZhui, “They are starting to have trouble standing up!”
Wei WuXian, “Come to the middle and number yourselves off.”
It was fortunate that, after finishing off a wave of walking corpses and leading away a gravedigger, nothing else came to disturb them. The noise of the bamboo pole didn’t come out to make trouble either. The remaining disciples gathered around and counted themselves off. Nobody was missing. Wei WuXian took Lan JingYi into his hands and felt his forehead. It was a bit warm. He then felt the foreheads of the other boys who had inhaled the powder from the corpse. They were the same. He lifted Lan JingYi’s eyelids, “Show me your tongue. Ahh.”
Lan JingYi, “Ahh.”
Wei WuXian, “Yep. Congratulations. You’re under corpse poisoning.”
Jin Ling, “How is this something to congratulate someone for?!”
Wei WuXian, “It’s another life experience. It’d be a conversation starter when you grow older.”
Corpse poisoning was mostly due to being wounded by a turned corpse or having a wound touch their necrotic blood. Cultivators usually didn’t allow walking corpses to get so near that they get wounded, so nobody made it a habit to carry elixirs that cured corpse poisoning. Lan SiZhui worried, “Young Master Mo, will anything happen to them?”
Wei WuXian, “Nothing at the moment. When it goes in the bloodstream and travels all around the body and enters the heart, then nothing could help anymore.”
Lan SiZhui, “Wh-what will happen?”
Wei WuXian, “Whatever happens to corpses will happen to you. If you’re lucky, you’re just going to rot away. If you’re not, you might become a long-haired zombie and you’ll only be able to hop around for the rest of your life.”
All of the poisoned disciples gasped.
Wei WuXian, “So you want to cure it?”
Everyone nodded. Wei WuXian continued, “If you want to cure it, then listen up. From now on, all of you have to behave and listen to whatever I say. Every one of you.”
Although a lot of the boys still weren’t familiar with him, seeing that he could intimately call HanGuang-Jun by his birth name as if they were from the same generation, that they stood in the middle of a ominously foggy haunted city, and that they were both poisoned and feverish, they felt particularly anxious, instinctively wanting to depend on someone. And, since anything that came out of Wei WuXian’s mouth somehow had a tone of confidence that eliminated all worries, they couldn’t help but listened to his words, answering in unison, “Yes!”
Wei WuXian pressed further, “You have to do whatever I tell you to. Be obedient. Understood?”
“Yes!”
Wei WuXian clapped, “Stand up. Those who aren’t poisoned can carry those who are, preferably over the shoulder. If you can only lift them on your front, remember to position the head and the heart higher than the rest of the body.”
Lan JingYi, “But I can walk. Why do we need to be carried?”
Wei WuXian, “Brother, if you jump around, your blood is going to circulate quickly, and it will enter your heart sooner. So you shouldn’t move too much. It’s best if you don’t move at all.”
The boys immediately stood as still as boards, allowing their peers to lift them up. Carried on the shoulder of another disciple from his sect, one boy mumbled, “The corpse that sprinkled the poisonous powder really did breathe.”
The boy who carried him complained as he panted on, “I already told you. If it knew how to breathe, then it’d be a living person.”
Lan SiZhui, “Young Master Mo, all of them have been carried. Where will we go?”
Lan SiZhui was the nicest, most obedient, and least worrisome one. Wei WuXian replied, “At the moment, we definitely won’t be able to leave the city. Let’s knock a few doors.”
Jin Ling, “Knock the doors of what?”
Wei WuXian thought for a moment, “Is there anything else that has doors except for houses?”