Grudge Qi Mudman
Qi Zai continues: once in a while a Ni clan Gu Master awakens the bloodline and, surviving it, grows an Immortal Gu inside the body that no one else can take away, reverse refinement included. Mortals can use these specially chosen Immortal Gu, though only at high cost. Qi Zai laughs coldly that Ni Ren’s design failed anyway, since the Gu he chose cost too much to leave a mortal holder safe. Whoever grows the first such Gu is called the current generation Ni Xiang, and that first Gu is an information path Immortal Gu, Yes or No, which answers only yes or no from heaven and earth. Each answer costs its bearer fifty years of lifespan. ch. 1036
Qi He is stunned, asking how any Ni Xiang agrees to such a price. Qi Zai only smiles and stays silent, and Qi He realizes on her own that a mortal’s unwillingness means nothing against a Gu Immortal’s will. She concludes Ni clan’s pitiful state was most likely schemed by Qi clan’s own ancestors, and asks whether her clan’s elders can truly do nothing for its own bad situation. A chill runs through her, and she falls silent for the rest of the flight, having grasped that Qi clan’s conduct here is by no means righteous. Qi Zai, who says little by habit, has spoken at length only to school a new clan immortal, since beliefs out of step with that conduct would breed conflict among the clan’s members. ch. 1036
Qi Zai privately decides to hand this branch of Ni clan to Qi He, unconcerned even if the whole of it is sacrificed. They descend toward Rotten Mud Mountain, an unusually eye catching black mountain whose trees are all brown black. On its east slope they find a village already turned to ruins, blood pooled everywhere among piled human and beast corpses. Qi He recoils from the intense smell of blood filling the site. ch. 1036
Qi Zai reads the mountain’s soil, which slows drying blood, and judges Ni clan was slaughtered less than one or two days earlier. Qi He first guesses an unusual mixed beast tide, but Qi Zai corrects her: Rotten Mud Mountain has only one native tide, the mud monster kind, so this is a man-made disaster. She wonders what Gu Master could command so many kinds of beasts at once. Qi Zai answers that Ni clan kept a desolate beast mud monster, black mud now at the village center, and no enslavement path Gu Master’s beast tide could have overcome it even close to dying, so a Gu Immortal did this. His plan to question the current generation Ni Xiang now has little hope, since the village holds no survivors. Killing intent rises in him and he swears to find the Gu Immortal responsible. ch. 1036
Qi Zai gathers the battlefield’s scattered grudge qi into his hand with a method left by his ancestor Qi Xiang, shaking the whole mountain and blasting rubble on the wind. The green qi leaves the air completely, gathered into his hand, now jade colored. He warns Qi He to stay back, since she is only newly ascended and still too vulnerable to the grudge. He explains that the grudge qi rises from Ni clan’s dead, killed to the last including children and elderly, and clings to the murderer too. ch. 1036
Qi Zai channels the gathered grudge qi into the desolate beast’s corpse mud, shaping a giant mudman covered in countless angry faces. It rages, shouting to kill, and Qi He mistakes it for a revived member of Ni clan. Qi Zai explains revival methods have existed ever since fate Gu was broken. His first questions draw only rage, then curses that name him the murderer who forced its grandpa to die, until his hold on his own creation calms it. Knowing the mudman’s intelligence is very low, he questions it slowly, asking its name. It shouts back Ni Jian, but Qi Zai mishears it as an insult and destroys it at once with a wave of his sleeve, breaking it back into a pile of mud. ch. 1036
