Chapter 598: - Worth It

“Heh... heh...”

Sha Tuo Queshi laughed.

He was pleased with that answer.

No.

Extremely pleased.

The Blind Man played the erhu in the courtyard every day, not because he was deliberately showing off to attract anyone’s attention, nor because he was trying to cultivate his temperament.

In truth, the Blind Man was busy.

He was busy holding together the situation at Snow Sea Pass, and busy organizing soldiers and civilians to rush the harvest of the potatoes and sweet potatoes he had personally selected and bred, then storing them away.

He genuinely did not possess the leisure to sit in the courtyard at the same hour every day and play a few pieces.

At the heart of it, the reason was that when he returned to relieve Fourth Lady, Fourth Lady had told him:

Sha Tuo Queshi had awakened.

Liang Cheng was absent, so there was no fellow zombie available to observe and analyze him. The Blind Man himself could not say precisely how far Sha Tuo Queshi had awakened.

One thing was certain.

Sha Tuo Queshi had not fully recovered.

Put simply, he was not yet in a state like Liang Cheng’s.

Yet he truly had recovered something. The problem was that his memories, awareness, and thought processes remained somewhat narrow.

The Blind Man had once worked as a psychologist, but this time he was exploring the mental condition of a zombie.

Naturally, the difficulty was enormous.

In the Blind Man’s view, Sha Tuo Queshi was no longer entirely the Left Guli King of the past.

Years spent asleep in a coffin, crossing from the ranks of the living into those of the dead, might genuinely have caused him to lose certain things.

Whether those things could ever be recovered remained unknown.

Yet he was still Sha Tuo Queshi.

He should have retained a portion of his memories and awareness.

And under circumstances like these, one result often appeared: extremity.

It was like the village idiot by the roadside. You thought he was stupid, perhaps even stupid in a somewhat endearing way, because he did not happen to be holding a knife.

Extremity meant a lack of control.

Just like this time.

Sha Tuo Queshi had clearly understood what the enemy intended.

Yet he still chose to take Tian Tian outside with him.

And Tian Tian’s domineering answer fit Sha Tuo Queshi’s taste perfectly.

In Sha Tuo Queshi’s perception, Tian Tian was no heir of Great Yan’s Prince of Jingnan.

He was merely a child who had played, slept, eaten, and grown above his coffin.

Over these past two years, you could say Sha Tuo Queshi had been asleep inside the coffin.

But you could also say he had always been watching the surroundings.

Sha Tuo Queshi moved.

He charged at the old man.

The old man’s first reaction was to glance at the green-robed man beside him.

The green-robed man raised his sword and moved forward, cutting in diagonally from the flank.

Only then did the old man relax. He brought both hands together before his chest and began altering the surrounding configuration.

The existence before them would be extremely difficult for either one of them to handle alone, so the old man first needed to make sure the green-robed man was not planning to let his fellow cultivator die instead of himself.

Sha Tuo Queshi hurled the saber in his hand directly at the old man.

Three barriers appeared before the old man.

The saber carried terrifying momentum. It smashed through the first two barriers in one breath and only began to slow against the third.

After stopping the saber, the old man slammed both palms against the ground and roared:

“Formation!”

In an instant, three surges of force rose from the earth and wrapped themselves around Sha Tuo Queshi.

Escape arts and movement techniques, every one of them drew upon unconventional methods.

The Sand Dune Sect could essentially be considered one branch beneath the broad category of sorcerers. It merely incorporated certain sacrificial techniques from the Barbarians of the desert, making it appear somewhat unorthodox.

But in essence, its arts still revolved around manipulating the force of the surrounding configuration to obscure, bind, imprison, and... kill.

The green-robed man’s sword came quickly.

Seeing that the old man had already established his momentum and intended to trap Sha Tuo Queshi, the sword in his hand became even more decisive, driving straight ahead without retreat.

And yet, to the green-robed man’s astonishment, and the old man’s shock, the momentum the old man had just established, the formation he had created, dissolved the instant it collided with Sha Tuo Queshi’s body.

All that movement had looked fierce as a tiger.

In the end it truly became a tiger sniffing a rose.

The reason was simple.

So-called formations, so-called momentum, were nothing more than borrowing force from the surrounding environment, then using the target’s blood and qi as a guide to bind him.

The caster merely acted as the link.

But inside Sha Tuo Queshi there was no blood and qi.

So once the formation and momentum touched him, they became like rootless duckweed and dispersed at once.

When Sha Tuo Queshi first appeared, both the old man and the green-robed man had already concluded that although his aura fluctuated, there seemed to be no blood-and-qi fluctuation within him.

But the old man had lived too long. Experience had made him, and experience now betrayed him.

Almost by instinct, he cast his technique in the manner he always had.

Perhaps even the old man himself had forgotten the true foundation and source of the arts he practiced.

The higher one stood, the more the most basic things sometimes became blurred.

At this moment, that mistake amounted to digging a pit for the green-robed man.

It was worse than simply turning and running.

Because the old man had acted, yet his action ended up resembling a feint that helped conceal the enemy’s real strike.

With nothing obstructing him, Sha Tuo Queshi reached out with one hand and seized the green-robed man’s sword.

Sparks burst violently where the blade ground against his palm.

Then, as though he did not care in the slightest that Tian Tian still sat on his shoulder, Sha Tuo Queshi drove his body directly forward.

In that split second, the green-robed man made an excellent response.

Realizing he could not pull the sword free, he immediately brought the index and middle fingers of his right hand together and fired a strand of sword qi straight toward Tian Tian on Sha Tuo Queshi’s shoulder.

An excellent case of besieging Wei to rescue Zhao.

Hum!

Baleful qi erupted from Sha Tuo Queshi’s body.

Tian Tian was hurled into the air as though swept up by a wave.

The green-robed man’s sword qi pierced through the empty space where the child had been.

But in the same moment, he lost his best chance to create distance.

Perhaps because the green-robed man also trained in saber arts and tempered his body, he believed his physique was not as fragile as that of a conventional swordsman.

Or perhaps he was simply too proud. Too proud to retreat in an ugly panic and let the enemy stick close to him, immediately surrendering the initiative. Instead, he wanted to use an extreme method to force the situation back into balance.

But on a battlefield of life and death, if you succeed, that “perhaps” becomes a brilliant move, startling and ingenious.

If you fail, then that same “perhaps” becomes the original sin that killed you.

Especially when the man before him had been a Third Grade Martial Artist in life.

For a son of the Sha Tuo Tribe to rise all the way to the post of Left Guli King beneath the Barbarian Royal Court, commanding tens of thousands of riders and numerous subject tribes, showed just how terrifying Sha Tuo Queshi’s natural talent had been.

The fighting instincts he still possessed were rooted in his life as a Martial Artist.

And coincidentally, a zombie body was naturally renowned for toughness and strength.

To a certain degree, his profession before and after death matched perfectly.

If Sha Tuo Queshi had been a sorcerer or a swordsman in life, then even after awakening, his combat strength would inevitably have been greatly diminished.

Unfortunately for his enemies, he had been a Martial Artist.

And so, the green-robed man who had descended from Wenming Mountain and Sha Tuo Queshi crashed chest-first into one another.

Duels between Martial Artists were often extremely dull.

The higher the grade, the duller they became.

Not long ago, outside the Chu imperial palace, the clash between Prince of Jingnan and Shadow had been a duel at the very summit of the Martial Artist path.

Yet if one ignored the final exchange, when both sides erupted with a single strike at the threshold of the Second Grade, the rest of the fight had been remarkably plain.

Count Pingye had understood this truth long ago.

On the battlefield, he avoided wearing conspicuous armor or carrying conspicuous weapons whenever possible.

Because a little splendor, a little style, meant absolutely nothing before life and death.

Boom!

The green-robed man truly had trained his physique.

In the first collision against Sha Tuo Queshi, he did not visibly lose ground.

His path of saber and sword was in fact a dual route combining the Martial Artist and the swordsman.

It did not sound quite as wild as the Western idea of cultivating both magic and battle qi, but bringing both paths to a high level was still anything but easy.

The problem was the first collision between their bodies was not the end.

It was the beginning.

The green-robed man gripped the sword hilt.

Sha Tuo Queshi held the blade.

Neither had another weapon in hand.

After the collision, the blood and qi inside the green-robed man’s body inevitably surged chaotically.

Sha Tuo Queshi, by contrast, instantly condensed his baleful qi and crashed into him again.

The scene was dullness piled upon dullness.

The final trace of elegance in the exchange was buried completely.

The green-robed man had no choice.

At this point, he could only endure everything head-on.

The second collision came.

Crack!

The green-robed man had already known his opponent’s body was tougher than his own.

What he had not expected was what came after.

His own blood and qi began flowing backward.

His muscles tightened.

And from the other man’s body came the sound of flesh and bone splitting apart.

As though bones had shattered.

As though the frame itself had been smashed open.

The green-robed man did not believe he had won.

He felt no joy.

Anything this abnormal was bound to conceal something monstrous.

Crack!

Sha Tuo Queshi’s chest split open.

Several ribs emerged from inside him, opening outward like blades and pointing directly at the green-robed man.

Then came the third collision, almost immediately.

The green-robed man tried to evade.

There was nowhere to go.

He did not even have time to cry out, much less indulge in regret.

Psh! Psh! Psh!

He had held his ground during the first two collisions only because he had forced blood and qi through his body to reinforce it.

By the third collision, his blood and qi could no longer circulate and mobilize as swiftly as at the beginning.

Without that support, his physique naturally became strong outside and hollow within.

Sha Tuo Queshi, meanwhile, had willingly accepted damage during the second collision in order to force the third.

The result was simple.

Three ribs thrust outward from Sha Tuo Queshi’s chest like blades and stabbed straight through the green-robed man’s torso.

At the same time, corpse poison carried within the bones began spreading through the man’s body with tyrannical force.

The green-robed man raised one foot and kicked Sha Tuo Queshi.

Sha Tuo Queshi did not move.

Instead, the green-robed man himself flew backward and crashed to the ground.

He had no attention to spare for anything else.

He immediately looked down at the wounds in his chest.

The flesh around them had turned blue-black.

Even when he circulated blood and qi, he could not contract the muscles enough to stop the bleeding.

This poison was fierce.

Sha Tuo Queshi remained standing with his chest open.

He raised one hand.

Tian Tian happened to be falling back down at that moment.

Sha Tuo Queshi caught the child and placed him on his shoulder again.

Then he lowered his head and looked at his own chest.

Baleful qi was leaking uncontrollably from within.

But he had merely been wounded.

The man opposite him might die.

The green-robed man nearly growled:

“What the hell is he?”

The old man drew a deep breath.

He turned his head.

Looked at the green-robed man in his miserable state.

And answered:

“A corpse puppet.”

Then the old man suddenly realized something else.

“I have seen walking corpses refined by desert shamans before. They were stupid things, only somewhat stronger than normal men. They cost an enormous amount to create and were not very useful. But a corpse puppet this powerful... how could it possibly have been refined? Oh. I remember now. Four years ago, outside the Marquis of Zhenbei Residence, the Barbarian Left Guli King died under the encirclement of several thousand Zhenbei cavalry. His corpse was hung before the memorial arch of the Marquis Residence drill ground. But countless Barbarian shamans performed rites together and triggered a corpse transformation, allowing the body to break free and escape. Heh. That battle caused terrible losses among the Barbarian shamans. But everyone believed the corpse puppet refined from the Left Guli King’s body must have been reclaimed by the Barbarian Royal Court. Who could have imagined the Royal Court would pay such an enormous price only to prepare a wedding dress for Count Pingye? Yes. At that time, Count Pingye should still have been in Beifeng Commandery.”

The old man laughed.

“This old desert rat has spent most of his life in the sands. I truly never imagined there would come a day when I would fight the Left Guli King face-to-face.”

As he spoke, the old man clenched all ten fingers.

His nails pierced directly into his palms.

Blood streamed down and landed on the ground, gradually forming a strange pattern that emitted waves of green light.

“Heh. Perhaps this really is my fate. It is only a pity the mission failed. If I can take control of this corpse puppet, then the long journey all the way to eastern Jin will not have been wasted. You from Wenming Mountain, that poison will not kill you immediately. I will help purge it later. First buy me a little more time and let me subdue this corpse puppet. As for the child, he is yours.”

The green-robed man hesitated.

Then stood.

He picked up the saber he had dropped earlier.

Although poisoned blood still streamed from the wounds in his chest, he understood that retreating now meant everything they had done would become meaningless.

Worse, he might leave his life here.

Over there, Sha Tuo Queshi pressed one hand against the ribs protruding from his chest.

Then forced them inward.

His body trembled.

The leaking baleful qi was temporarily suppressed, but his own aura weakened at once.

He was not a complete zombie like Liang Cheng.

He had not fully awakened.

His limitations were still enormous.

The green-robed man smiled.

“You cannot remove this corpse poison.”

The old man continued forming his array.

He did not answer.

“But I’ll still help you.”

The green-robed man held the saber horizontally before himself.

“I have no desire to die this pointlessly.”

There were countless arts beneath Heaven, each checking and restraining another.

The old man’s previous move had not merely been useless. It had nearly buried the green-robed man.

But once he recognized Sha Tuo Queshi’s present identity and state, the old man’s particular methods became more suitable than the green-robed man’s for dealing with him.

As the pattern beneath the old man slowly completed itself, Sha Tuo Queshi began faintly sensing danger.

He was not a complete zombie.

Problems Liang Cheng would never need to fear were problems Sha Tuo Queshi did.

That was his weakness.

But there was still a way to avoid that weakness.

Last year, when the Commandery Princess arrived at Snow Sea Pass, Sha Tuo Queshi’s hatred had been stirred by the connection in his aura, causing him to release his baleful qi toward her.

But the Commandery Princess had possessed a firm mind and a protective magical artifact.

If Count Pingye had not intervened within the realm of consciousness and forcibly shattered her defenses, Sha Tuo Queshi might have suffered irreversible ruin at that time.

Of course, back then he had not revealed himself directly because he feared exposing Zheng Fan.

This time, the light in Sha Tuo Queshi’s eyes gradually faded.

In its place appeared a crimson glow representing madness and savagery.

The old man’s mouth fell open.

His face was full of disbelief.

His formation was nearly complete, yet he had somehow encountered almost the same problem as before.

The first time, he could not find blood and qi inside Sha Tuo Queshi.

This time, he could not find any conscious mind within that body.

Because Sha Tuo Queshi had sealed his own consciousness.

At this moment, he was simply a zombie.

A zombie without thought, without intelligence, possessing only instinct.

One could say this self-sealing temporarily lowered his level.

But there was no doubt that, in matters of consciousness, it left him without any opening to exploit.

Previously, he had intelligence.

He could speak.

He could communicate.

But because that awareness remained incomplete, there were gaps.

And where there were gaps, others could take advantage.

“ROAR!”

Sha Tuo Queshi exposed his fangs and released a furious howl.

“Rawr!”

Still sitting on Sha Tuo Queshi’s shoulder, Tian Tian clenched both little fists and copied him with a childish roar of his own.

Sha Tuo Queshi was now a bloodthirsty “low-level” zombie.

Yet he still did not turn and bite the spiritually rich blood-food sitting on his shoulder.

Because after sealing himself away and leaving only the most primitive core behind, there remained in his mind a single image.

Night.

A hillside.

Torchlight.

An offering table.

He seemed to be standing beside the offering table, and at the same time behind it.

Then he saw a young man kneel before the table and kowtow to him.

After sealing himself, he forgot everything else.

Only this image remained.

Only that kowtow.

“The rites of the Barbarians have three objects of reverence. First, the Barbarian God. Second, the totems. Third, the yellow sands.”

“Then what are you kowtowing for?”

“It’s a custom where I come from. Whenever we see a prayer mat and an offering table, no matter what god or Buddha is being worshipped, whether we know them or not, we kowtow once as a gesture. It only takes moving the head a little. Worth it.”

“It is worth it.”

[End of Chapter 598]