112: Chapter 112 Unmelting Bones

Jiangzhou City ushered in a long-awaited crisp autumn day.

The sky took on a lofty, azure-blue hue.

With no clouds to block it, the brilliant autumn sun poured down unreservedly, baking dry the stagnant water accumulated in the crevices of the bluestone slabs on Taiping Old Street.

The ginkgo trees on both sides of the street had turned completely yellow.

A dry autumn breeze swept across the street corner, whipping up crisp fallen leaves all over the ground and spinning them away into mid-air.

The air exuded a dry and refreshing scent after being baked by the sun.

This kind of weather was the most comfortable for the living.

But to those unseen nether entities and evil specters, it was a natural death warrant.

The front hall of Lins Funeral Shop had been completely renovated.

The newly installed floor-to-ceiling glass doors stood wide open, and the sunlight poured into the room over a large area, illuminating the hall brightly.

Those brightly colored paper children and paper horses had been moved to the shade in the corner.

Fatty Wang sat imposingly behind the brand-new mahogany counter.

He was biting on the cap of a carbon pen, his fingers tapping away on the calculator with a clatter as he tallied up the bills.

Ayugu squatted by the threshold.

Today, the Miao girl wore a short cloth shirt with distinctive Miao characteristics, paired with washed-out white denim shorts on her lower body.

Holding a dead branch in her hand, she listlessly drew circles on the ground, occasionally poking at passing dead ants.

Leng Yue did not stay in the front hall.

The midday sunlight was supremely strong and yang, and since she was a zombie, this made her somewhat irritable.

Leng Yue retreated into the shadow of the back-facing corridor leading to the backyard.

She wore a form-fitting dark green cheongsam and held a cup of thoroughly cooled green tea in her hand.

Her deep red eyes looked at the sunlight outside the door, her gaze profound and calm.

Frost Star had once again hidden herself in the obsidian quiet room ten meters underground.

Such a sunny day outside was nothing short of torture for the little girl.

She would rather hug that lightning-struck wood array disk and sleep until dark than take half a step upward.

A yellow taxi stopped at the entrance of the old street.

The car door pushed open, and Bai Yu got out, carrying a huge military-green mountaineering backpack, sweating profusely.

Today he wore a plaid shirt paired with casual trousers, wearing his signature gold-rimmed glasses on the bridge of his nose.

With both hands, he laboriously hugged two sealed kraft paper document boxes, walking heavily into the Funeral Shop.

"Old Bai, did you hollow out the library of Jiangzhou University?"

Lin Ye walked out from the inner room, carrying an old purple clay teapot in his hand.

Bai Yu walked over to the Eight Immortals table in the center of the hall, heavily slamming the document boxes weighing several tens of catties in his arms onto the tabletop.

"Bang."

With a muffled thud, a few wisps of fine dust were shaken up from the bottom of the box.

Bai Yu took off his glasses and pulled a square cloth from his pocket to wipe the sweat from his forehead and neck.

"These two boxes of materials are top-secret archives I pulled out from the underground rare books room of the municipal library using my supervisor's highest authority."

Panting, Bai Yu untied the cord on the outside of the document boxes.

As the lid of the box opened, an anti-mildew scent of aged old paper mixed with mothballs instantly permeated the air.

This smell was heavy and dry, carrying a sense of vicissitudes precipitated by time.

The box was filled with yellowed thread-bound books.

The Prefecture and County Annals of the Southwest Borderlands compiled during the Guangxu reign of the Qing Dynasty, hand-drawn geological exploration and hydrological maps from the Republic of China era, plus a few oracle bone script rubbings packed in sealed bags.

Lin Ye stepped forward, placed the purple clay teapot on the table, and casually poured a cup of warm tea for Bai Yu.

"Sit down and talk."

Lin Ye pulled out a chair and sat down.

Bai Yu picked up the tea cup and drank it in one gulp.

He took out a tablet computer from his mountaineering backpack, opened a modern high-precision satellite contour map, and laid it flat on the Eight Immortals table.

"Mr. Lin, take out the human-skin map from that bronze box, and let's compare them."

Bai Yu's tone revealed a rigorous academic attitude.

Lin Ye reached into his bosom and felt out the four-square folded remnant map.

He carefully spread the remnant map flat on the Eight Immortals table.

This map was tanned from human skin.

Having gone through more than two thousand years, the skin surface was severely dehydrated, presenting a morbid dead gray color.

The skin layer at the edges was shriveled and curled inward.

The trends of the mountains and rivers drawn on the map surface with cinnabar mixed with some anti-corrosion minerals exuded a dark red aura of death under the abundant light.

Bai Yu pulled out a high-magnification magnifying glass from his vest pocket.

His entire body was almost lying on the table, moving the magnifying glass inch by inch against the human-skin remnant scroll.

He pointed his finger at a cinnabar red circle in the center of the human-skin map.

"The selection of the site for the Underworld Imperial Tomb of the Western Zhou princes and marquises is extremely exquisite."

Bai Yu raised his head, his fingers tracing a corresponding arc on the satellite map of the tablet computer.

"Look at the trend of this satellite map. In the hinterland of the Ten Thousand Mountains in Miao Territory, there are two mountain ranges distributed at an angle."

"The area where these two mountain ranges are located was an active volcano two hundred million years ago."

Bai Yu's fingertips finally landed on a deep valley where the two mountain ranges converged.

"The remnant veins of the two volcanoes converge here. In Fengshui geomancy, this is called "Two Dragons Playing with a Pearl". These two dragons are dead dragons, and this pearl must be a natural, extremely Yin-cold pool."

Lin Ye stared at the human-skin map, his brows slightly furrowed.

He felt out a pack of cigarettes, pulled one out, and bit it in his mouth.

"Hiss."

A cluster of flame ignited.

He lit the cigarette and took a deep drag.

The grayish-white smoke slowly rose under the illumination of the sunlight.

"Fengshui acupoint selection—it's dotted on the dead dragon's throat."

Lin Ye exhaled the smoke, his voice low.

"The builder of this tomb never sought to bless future generations."

"He gathered the dead aura of the two mountain ranges to irrigate that pearl, forcibly reversing Yin and Yang, attempting to fight for a glimmer of vitality in a land of death."

Bai Yu nodded heavily, his eyes flashing with a fanatical thirst for knowledge.

"That's right! This matches the inscription records on the bottom of that Western Han bronze tripod completely."

"The inscription says that King Zhou sent a hundred thousand troops south to suppress the Sui Sha with a giant bronze tripod."

"This Sui Sha is actually the magnetic field anomaly caused when the Unfading Bone in the underground palace broke the seal."

Fatty Wang walked over holding the ledger.

He pulled over a chair and sat down, his face full of confusion.

"Ye-zi, I've heard you guys talk about zombies before—White Zombie, Woolly Zombie, Flying Zombie. Even someone in the drought demon realm like sister-in-law, those are still flesh-and-blood things."

"What on earth is this Unfading Bone? Just hearing the name makes it sound like a bone. Can a bone still jump up and bite people?"

Holding the cigarette, Lin Ye gently flicked it against the edge of the ashtray.

He did not answer directly, tapping his fingertips twice on the tabletop, initiating the most professional explanation of the Corpse Dao.

"Fatty, after a person dies, their vital essence disperses, and flesh and bone return to dust. The corpses buried in such greatly inauspicious places, nourished by the earth's Yin baleful aura, with grievances failing to disperse, will transform into zombies."

Lin Ye's tone was steady, every sentence pointing straight to the source of metaphysics.

"Ordinary zombies, whether they are low-tier walking corpses that grow white hair or Flying Zombies capable of flying in the sky and escaping into the earth, their power all stems from that uncorrupted corpse body. Once the physical body is destroyed and the corpse qi disperses, the zombie welcomes its true death."

He exhaled a smoke ring, his gaze becoming unprecedentedly solemn.

"The Unfading Bone has jumped outside the laws of the mutual generation and restriction of the Five Elements."

"For an evil entity that has cultivated to this realm, its corpse body has long rotted away completely. All of its three souls and seven physical souls, along with the dead aura of the sun and moon absorbed for a thousand years, are entirely compressed and condensed onto the hardest bone in its body."

"This bone might be the skull, a phalanx, or the spine. It has endured heavenly lightning strikes and subterranean fire smelting without suffering the slightest damage."

Lin Ye extinguished the burnt-out cigarette butt in his hand.

"It is undying and indestructible. Even if only a scrap of bone residue is left, as long as it contacts the vital breath of a living person, it can attach itself to the living person and forcibly seize the body to be reborn."

"It is truly the source of all evil in the entire Corpse Dao."