Fall from the Cliff
The yin wind rustled, and the sky overhead was a sullen black.
Black, heavy fog filled the towering mountains. Suddenly, a figure broke through the mist from above, uncontrollably smashing into the cliff face, then rolling down with the force of the impact. It crashed through brittle dead branches and only stopped after falling into the forest.
After a few breaths of silence, chatter came from within the black fog.
“What was that sound”
“Something fell down.”
Several flickering shapes drifted out of the black fog toward the sound, drifting toward the dead leaves falling in the distance. As if they had caught a scent, they eagerly floated over, only to see a small, blood-soaked body among the shattered stones and dead leaves.
They looked over in delight.
“It’s a mortal! He’s almost dead.”
In the deep forest, a youth lay sprawled over a rough tree root. His clothes had been torn by the shattered rocks of the cliff face, and the exposed flesh on his arms was a bloody mess. Blood filled his mouth, his right leg was twisted at an unnatural angle, and his half-open eyes carried the look of someone nearing the end.
Even stranger was the wisp of soul hovering above him.
The ghostly soul calmly looked at the youth. Lowering his head, he felt blood slowly drain from his body, as if his consciousness were flowing away with it. The pain in his body seemed to recede into the distance. He reached out to touch his own body, only for his transparent hand to pass straight through, leaving behind a laughably absurd feeling.
Tch… Even now, he still could not touch his own body.
The soul had been born with a baleful fate, unable to enter the body properly at birth. As a result, his soul had been incomplete, and he could only drift like this beside his own body, watching that body live out its dull days and endure the torment of illness and pain… And now, a sense of relief at being about to be freed from suffering was washing over him.
Am I going to die?
I probably am.
The youth’s breathing stopped, and the ghostly soul closed his eyes.
At that moment, the dark fog around them stilled briefly, as if guided by something. A cold surge of yin energy suddenly wrapped around the soul that was about to disperse, then coiled around the bloodied body and slowly seeped into the youth’s body.
The yin energy that merged into him suddenly spread apart. The scattered yin energy rotated slowly, rapidly piecing itself together like shards. Complex, obscure lines formed into a strange totem. Golden light flowed over its surface, and soon the golden lines deepened further. At the center of the totem, a shape took form:
It was a pair of bizarre eyes, tempered red by golden light.
Just as the youth’s fading consciousness looked at them, those eyes suddenly opened.
As they stared at each other, the flood of memories in his mind abruptly ceased. It was as if the entire totem had come alive at once. The patterns on the eye totem began to whirl, like a gaping maw with fangs bared, opening and closing to form an inscrutable admonition:
‘You cannot die.’
The youth’s spiritual core felt as if it had been smashed by a giant blow. With a hum, it reverberated through his sea of consciousness. All his awareness seemed to rush back in an instant, while pain like shattered bone surged through his limbs and bones. The shackles pressing down on his shoulders seemed ready to tear him apart, and then came wave after wave of pain stabbing into his sea of consciousness, until his head felt fit to split open.
His whole body seemed driven by some unknown force. Right then, the bloody taste in his mouth suddenly pulled his thoughts back. The smell of blood climbed up through his throat, and he violently spat out a mouthful of foul blood. The meridians throughout his body seemed to suddenly come alive.
“Huh?”
“He’s not dead yet?”
What was that sound?
Who was speaking?
The sounds around him gradually grew clear. The smell of rotten earth came to his nose. The youth slowly opened his eyes and felt the rough tree bark pressed beneath his stomach. In his ears was the rustle of the yin wind sweeping past. His entire body seemed to be dragged forward by some invisible force. Cold wind slithered into his collar, making him shiver uncontrollably.
“He fell from so high up, and this mortal can still move?”
Enduring the headache, the youth suddenly realized that what was dragging him forward was not human, but icy-cold and nauseatingly slimy.
He vaguely made sense of it. His memories were a mess. Right, he seemed to have fallen…
Who had pushed him down?
Who am I?
The youth was startled to realize that his mind was blank.
Invisible yin wind gathered into strange sensations, like human hands, groping over the youth’s body and marking something out in a few strokes. He had been thinking of avoiding that yin wind when his ear twitched, and the faint sounds beside him became clearer. His vision was dark; in the ink-black blur before him, he could not make out a thing. He could only judge where the speakers were by sound.
“Let’s get this straight first: you split the flesh half and half later, and the head’s mine.”
“…I want the head too.”
“If the big ghosts weren’t fighting over territory, would this food ever get to us? Hurry up, don’t let the other ghosts snatch it.” The speaker seemed to be the leader among them. “Drag him over there. While the seal over here is weak, finish eating and leave.”
As the youth listened to the chattering by his ear, his broken leg was already painful, and being dragged by those evil ghosts sent stabbing pain surging through him in dense waves. He caught the smell of blood on himself, unable to tell whether it was his own blood or the stench carried by those things.
Aside from pain, his body felt nothing else. It was empty inside, with not a trace of spiritual power. Even lifting his head took tremendous effort. In the dull pain of his sea of consciousness, he could barely grasp his situation. Listening to the voices, he knew there were three voices beside him, probably yin souls.
Even if he had not been killed by the fall, he was almost dead.
At the thought of death, a heavy pain rolled through his sea of consciousness again.
The complex array formation in his sea of consciousness suddenly froze at that moment. A complicated, obscure formation appeared in the youth’s sea of consciousness, and his nearly shattered awareness was restrained by some strange force. Once again, a mantra like sacred chanting sounded.
‘You cannot die.’
Kill them.
His whole body seemed controlled by the array patterns in his sea of consciousness. An indescribable irritability filled his thoughts. His bloodied fingertips moved of their own accord, touching the damp rotten earth.
Among the chattering voices, the evil ghosts discussing how to divide the meal lowered their heads and saw the mortal they thought should already be dead twitch his head. Not long after, they saw the mortal, with dirty blood smeared across his face, slowly raise his head. A pair of dark, bottomless eyes was looking at them. Those eyes were as beautiful as something crafted by the heavens, yet they were eerie, as if they had been born without a focus. They seemed to be looking at them, yet also seemed to be looking past them toward something farther away.
“This looks like a blind man.”
“Say what you want, but this mortal is actually pretty good-looking, just a bit thin.”
Thin, but still kind of tender. Flesh like that would have plenty of bite.
The more the evil ghosts looked, the more they drooled, and they eagerly dragged him toward a secluded cave.
With every sway of the yin wind, more of the blood on the youth’s body seeped down. His head, which he had barely been holding up, dropped.
The evil ghost beside him looked regretfully at the blood sinking into the ground. Mortal blood was so nourishing…
Suddenly, the evil ghost dragging the youth stopped.
The ghost in front, who had been leading the way, also halted and looked back at its two companions in surprise. “Why stop? Hurry up and eat him, then we leave.”
The ghost tugging at the mortal was trembling slightly. In a quavering voice, it said, “Big brother, the blood…”
The leader turned back at once. The blood dripping from beneath the youth had not been absorbed by the tree roots that loved feeding on blood essence. Instead, it was lingering bizarrely on the surface of the rotten earth. The dark stain grew deeper and deeper, until at its limit it faintly took on a crimson glow. When that glow lit up, all three evil ghosts looked back in unison and saw the ground they had been dragging him across. Unknowingly, a trail of blood had already appeared.
The yin wind howling around them had stopped at some unknown point, and even the black fog had thinned, gradually seeming to be absorbed by that fresh blood. In the end, the crimson blood came alive, continuously flowing along the blood trail into the youth’s body.
Terrified, the evil ghosts immediately let go. The next instant, a huge blood circle appeared around them.
“What’s going on!?” The three evil ghosts’ faces changed drastically as they looked up and saw the small whirlpool overhead.
The youth’s fingertips, hanging down to the ground, had begun moving at some point. His pale hand was wrapped in dirty blood, and the previously blurry script beneath his hand was gradually becoming clear. Only then did the evil ghosts realize the strangeness of his hand. It resonated with the yin energy continuously surging into the blood threads around them. Beneath the Spirit-Gathering Rune, a huge hand seal was formed at once.
They looked in terror at the mortal, only to see him struggle to his feet, bracing himself on the dead tree trunks around him, with the huge hand seal suspended at his side.
Transparent chains extended from the hand seal and bound them directly.
The hand seal condensed from yin energy gradually took on a horrifying silver-white color. In the thick fog, it stood solemn and imposing. The blood on the ground, guided by the hand seal above, rose little by little, sketching mysterious runes like threads of blood in the palm of the seal.
The bound evil ghosts all felt a searing pain like they were being burned by flames, yet they could not break free from the range of the hand seal that this blind mortal had set. All around them, the yin energy pouring in was continuously absorbed by the runes and turned into raging yin fire, burning specifically at their soul bodies.
The three evil ghosts were not very powerful. When they had been alive, they were mortals. After death, as ghosts, they could only start over from the beginning and cultivate again.
On ordinary days, they just scavenged corpses to fill their bellies, barely maintaining their spirit bodies with human flesh and blood while slightly increasing their cultivation.
But when had the evil ghosts ever run into such a hard target? At first, seeing that he had no cultivation at all, they had thought they could feast well. Who would have known this man walked a sinister path, deliberately luring them onto his body, then trapping them here to die?
Even the Daoists they had encountered before had never used a method this vicious!
“Daoist!!”
“Spare us!!”
The youth did not listen to their pleas. With a slight movement of his hand seal, the body of the first evil ghost was torn apart by the formation.
The shattered yin energy was absorbed by the blood threads, and the great hand extended from those blood threads seized the second ghost and pinned it down, killing it with crisp, ruthless efficiency.
“Please spare me, I’ve never eaten a person, I really never have…”
The last evil ghost dropped to its knees and begged for mercy. “I just happened to pass by the cliff and accidentally fell. No one ever came to exorcise me, and if I don’t find something to eat soon, I’m going to die. I still have a wife and children at home. I was thinking of leaving this place to look for them. I don’t want to die…”
Before the evil ghost could finish, it suddenly noticed the restraints on its body weakening.
The youth staggered half a step in front of it, then dropped to his knees with a thud.
His body felt emptied out. The hand seal sustaining the art turned transparent, and overwhelming exhaustion surged in with the pain of his injuries.
He had a mortal body and no spiritual power, yet he was commanding ghosts with yin energy.
Backlash came crashing down on him like a tidal wave. The meridians inside his body carried the cold, chilling feeling of being washed through by yin energy.
The youth pressed both hands heavily to the ground to support his weight. The sound of his heartbeat drove the surging blood through his entire body, and he could not help gasping for breath. His long-dried meridians were being flushed by yin energy. He was shivering from the cold, yet there was an indescribable thrill in it.
The surrounding yin energy turned in circles, as if being pulled by something in the dark.
The last remaining evil ghost saw the mortal kneeling on the ground and was instantly overjoyed. Seizing the chance, it hurriedly fled through the weakest part of the blood threads. Though it did not know what was going on, this was clearly the perfect moment to run for its life.
But before it could take more than a few steps, a voice it had never heard before came from behind it.
“…Want to leave?”
Wasn’t that obvious? If it didn’t run now, when would it?
Wait, who was speaking!?
The evil ghost turned back and met the slowly raised head, and beneath the messy hair, a pair of extremely bizarre eyes.
Crimson-dyed golden threads kept climbing up from the youth’s eyes. Those once dark, deathly eyes now seemed to have suddenly come alive, staring straight at it.