The temple crowd reversed their cultivation and broke free from the temple's binding. They fled toward the exits.
The white-robed skin-figure hunted them. A woman turned and saw his back split open like a massive mouth. She screamed. He swallowed her whole. His skin rippled, then spat out bones and hunted the next.
Su Yan and Yuan Qi leaped onto a floating boulder. Yuan Qi prepared to jump to the next one. Su Yan stopped him. "Don't move!"
He slashed with sword qi, splitting the boulder in two. Their half sank slowly, like a stone in water.
Those behind copied him, jumping onto boulders and splitting them—but too many people, too much weight. The boulders plunged. Screams faded into the void.
The great temple shook. It rose on countless legs and *ran*, chasing the escapees.
"I forgot," the white-robed voice laughed. "I can't leave through the door, but I can make the temple come to *you*. Where are you, sword brat and wretched serpent?"
Su Yan looked up. People fell from the sky, still screaming, not hitting the ground yet. On the peaks, massive gods leaped from the mountainsides, riding incense clouds. Fleshy boulders waved vein-tendrils, snatching victims.
"A-Yan, what's that on your back?" Yuan Qi asked, spotting the mask.
Su Yan grinned and showed him the Wuchang Mask. "I found it. A clerk wore it and turned into a reaper spirit."
Yuan Qi explained: "Nuo masters craft masks by capturing powerful spirits and demons, cutting off their faces, and refining their essence into the mask. Wearing it transforms you into that being. That's a reaper's face."
Su Yan almost dropped it. He thought better and kept it.
Their boulder kept sinking. Suddenly thunder crashed above. Prefect Zhou Heng and Magistrate Ling had joined forces against the temple.
Zhou Heng's brain erupted with light—a chaotic sea containing five nested caves spiraling into void. He had opened the Mud Pill Secret to the fifth level.
Magistrate Ling wielded a judge's brush and scroll of life and death, golden characters bombarding the temple.
Even together, they faltered. The temple was the nuo master's Inner Realm. Every waterfall, every tree, every rock was a deadly technique.
A stray attack struck their boulder. A corner sheared off and floated upward.
Su Yan and Yuan Qi stared. The boulder plunged.
Su Yan leaped. "Yuan Qi, wait at the temple gate!"
Yuan Qi wrapped his massive body around the stone. After a hundred yards, the descent slowed. He looked up to see a tiny figure riding a bronze bell through lightning and storm.
"A-Yan will be fine," Yuan Qi told himself.
* * *
Su Yan rode the bell through raging winds and flooding water. Lightning struck the bell's surface. Ancient patterns blazed, forming a barrier that deflected the storm—but the impact sent them tumbling into a mountainside.
Su Yan staggered up, bruised. The bell smoked, its patterns scrambled.
Nearby, something crashed through the forest. Su Yan hid behind a rock and peered out.
A ghost-faced god swung his sword, severing a golden ape's head. The ape's body shrank to a middle-aged man. The head rolled free, eyes wide in death.
*Zhou Zheng.* The Judicial Commissioner who had nearly captured Su Yan. Dead.
The ghost-faced god turned. Its gaze swept toward Su Yan's hiding place.
Su Yan ducked.
"A-Yan, it's coming!"
Heavy footsteps approached the rock. Su Yan's heart thundered. "Bell, can you fight like you did against the lightning?"
"Fight? You haven't raised me for a thousand days! I'd need a thousand days of nurturing to kill something like this. We can't fight, and we can't outrun it!"
The god peered around the rock—and froze.
A Wuchang reaper crouched there, thin as a corpse, pale as death, tongue hanging to the ground. It trembled.
The ghost-faced god grunted and tossed a bloody bag to the reaper. "Hah-hoo-hroo!"
The reaper nodded and took the bag.
"Boh-yeh-hroo!" The god walked on without looking back.
Su Yan—disguised as the Wuchang reaper—followed. The mask let him understand the ghost tongue.
More gods joined them. A bull-headed god pulled two Myriad Souls Pills from a corpse and dropped them in Su Yan's bag. The ghost-faced god said something about the reaper looking sneaky. The bull-headed god laughed and tugged Su Yan's tongue.
Su Yan nearly screamed. *They don't know. They think I'm one of them.*
The procession marched toward the peak. Su Yan counted thirteen gods around him now, plus others from neighboring peaks. He was the smallest—a reaper barely ten feet tall among giants twice his height.
The gods kept giving him their Myriad Souls Pills to carry. The bag grew heavy. Fifteen pills. Enough to make any cultivator rich beyond measure.
*If I ran now...*
*I'd die instantly.*
These pills were tribute for the white-robed master. This was a pilgrimage.
"For me," Su Yan thought, "it's a funeral march."