The Gate of Ghosts — that which dwelled in the depths of the Ninefold Nether, which in some sense marked the very boundary where life and death turned — had appeared in the world of the living!
Now the fog that had never once dispersed found its explanation. It was no work of men but the spontaneous gathering of the natural law of heaven and earth.
Because the Netherworld and the blue sky, they never met. If the Gate of Ghosts was to appear in the mortal world, there must needs be a veil to shroud it.
Those lingering souls that had gathered here, far more numerous than the living population Little Grove Town had ever held, likewise found their reason for being. Wandering souls drifting toward the Gate of Ghosts was an instinct beyond reason and will. The wandering souls of the entire Fenglin City Domain had, it seemed, all amassed here. And it could be foreseen that so long as the Gate of Ghosts stood, more souls would only gather here, ever more numerous and ever stronger!
But how had the Gate of Ghosts come to be here at all?
Wei Yan, almost without hesitation, once he understood the meaning of those three characters, drew from his breast a signal incense-stick of vivid red, ancient in make, and thrust it before Zhao Lang. "Quick!"
He naturally carried a flint about his person, and was by no means a stranger to fire-pathcraft either. But all the same no one could kindle it faster than Zhao Lang.
Years of comradeship with Zhao Lang made their understanding as natural as breath. Even as the red incense reached him, Zhao Lang pressed two fingers together and flicked them, and a tongue of flame leapt to the stick, consuming in an extremely short span that incense, which was no slender thing, to cinders.
Only then did he say, his face somewhat sour: "You had but this single red beacon on your person."
In the armies of Zhuang Kingdom the signal incenses were of three kinds — black, red, and yellow — and only men of a certain standing might hold them, a strategic resource not lightly come by. Once the black beacon burned, the whole state fought to the death; and in all of Zhuang Kingdom there were but a handful with the standing to light one.
The burning out of the yellow beacon meant the lighter stood at the very brink of doom.
And the red beacon, that lay between the two, spelled the peril of a lost city and surrendered land!
Once the red beacon burned, the whole of Fenglin City would be shaken, and Wei Quji could not possibly fail to be stirred.
At present the city-guard soldiers and the Office of Inquiry of the Fenglin City Domain were all otherwise occupied, and Wei Quji sat in command at the City Lord's Mansion, a single plucked thread setting the whole web astir. Did a town like Little Grove Town, where thus far no enemy beyond wandering souls had appeared, really warrant the lord himself coming in person? Or, supposing Wei Yan's judgment proved wrong, and Wei Quji's leaving stirred some trouble for Fenglin City — was that a responsibility he could bear?
But none of these questions needed troubling over, before those three characters.
For that was the Gate of Ghosts.
The thing that appeared in countless legends, that was faintly the very miniature of the mythic age.
Indeed, the moment the phantom of the red beacon blazed before him, the lord of a great city as he was, Wei Quji, without a heartbeat of hesitation, had shot up from where he sat!
He burst into the high skies, the whole of him wrapped in a hurricane of wind, and raced howling for Little Grove Town.
Almost at that same instant, Dong A, who had been meditating in seclusion, snapped open his eyes as well. At all times a strong one of this level must sit in command within Fenglin City; since Wei Quji had gone, he could not be the one to leave as well.
His body never stirred, yet his voice of grave authority carried out of the room: "Pass the order to every disciple that can be reached — whatever task they are at, whatever cultivation they pursue, all must drop it at once and return to Fenglin City!"
Granted the Dao Academy nurtured the hope of Zhuang Kingdom, and had a long course of growth before that. But when the realm stood in peril, every man must take up the fight for it.
And Song Qifang, the current vice-principal of the Academy, sat cross-legged before a pill-furnace, a cattail fan lightly waving in his hand as he tended the flame. A very low, very soft sigh. "Old, now."
...
In Little Grove Town, after lighting the red beacon, Wei Yan did not pause but at once swept his long blade in a horizontal cut — a keen blade-gleam that nearly gashed the very air, before dissipating against the archway.
Yes. It vanished so silently, without a single ripple.
The attacks that followed were the same. Whether blazing fire or howling wind, whatever pathcraft was hurled at it sank like a stone into an ocean. Ling He even flung his own sword at it, yet it too vanished without the least trace.
As if it did not exist — and not only it did not exist; all things that touched it did not exist either.
Huang Azhan stood before the Gate of Ghosts and wavered a long while. He had an insistent confidence in his own boyish pure yang, but after watching Ling He's sword vanish too, he chose with great regret to give it up.
"This whirlpool... should be a passage into the Netherworld. With all these wrongly slain people gathered here in such number... our strikes all fall into the Netherworld, and not upon the living world." Wang Changxiang knit his brow and analyzed. "What appears before us now — this should be the reflection of the Gate of Ghosts, and even that reflection has not fully coalesced."
Not fully coalesced?
The script upon the tablet — Jiang Wang had seen its like in the Great Void Illusion, knew it was Dao script, the writing that set forth the law of heaven and earth. He had been mulling over what the Gate of Ghosts appearing in Little Grove Town signified, until this moment, hearing Wang Changxiang's analysis, he started in sudden alarm.
Then by what means, and in what fashion, would the true reflection of the Gate of Ghosts someday coalesce? And in the end, what would it bring here?
The people did not have long to wait for the answer.
It came upon the countless wandering souls that filled Little Grove Town — the ones that all along could not be killed out, could not be swept clean. At this moment they came surging in a swarm, gathering at the very center.
The company could pay no heed to anything else. They had no choice but to repeat their old trick, withdrawing a distance and tracing a circle with fire-pathcraft, inside which they made their stand.
Had there been a man who could pierce the mist and look down from the sky, he would have seen numberless wandering souls, drawn by some power, charging forward — that vast procession of souls flowing like a hundred rivers storming into the sea!
And the disciples of the Fenglin City Dao Academy, with Wei Yan and Zhao Lang, were like the bitter outcroppings of rock scoured by the river's rush.
They could not move, could not fight back, and could not see the end!
"The wandering souls of the whole Fenglin City Domain have all been drawn here. Perhaps we are to die in this place?" Wang Changxiang smiled, bitterly.
These souls were not strong by nature; in the array before this, the company had moved among them with something like ease. But that had held only when the souls wandered mindlessly, attacking only by instinct when the living drew near. Now those souls converged all in one direction, and the company happened to stand square in their path.
There were too many — boundaryless, endless!
At least within the span Wang Changxiang could force clear with his gaze, they saw no end to the souls.
What they did not know was that before, the place had gathered only the souls of Little Grove Town's dead over the years, with the more distant spirits drawn in bits and pieces by chance. Now the uncrossed souls of the entire Fenglin City Domain were flowing here to converge, at a speed far exceeding anything they could attain on their own.
Those dense threads of soul slicing across the sky linked, across the whole domain, into a spiderweb under spirit-vision — a spectacle that would move ten thousand strong men to awe.
"No." Wei Yan's voice was somewhat cold, and so was his heart. "The City Lord will soon be here."
No one knew how much he had not wanted to light that red beacon, how little he wished that man to see him in his weak, pleading need. But he could not help himself. Before a legendary thing like the Gate of Ghosts, he could not stake all of Fenglin City's safety for the sake of his own pride.
Jiang Wang likewise fixed his gaze on those souls that swept past the "outcrops" — howling toward the Gate of Ghosts, absorbed and consumed in an instant. His feelings were a tangle beyond all telling.
These souls were, for the most part, without awareness. And so there was no struggling, no screaming; it seemed there was no regret either, no pain.
But they had once been living men, every one of them. Each was a soul that ought to have rested — the soul of one who had lived!
Among them there might be one who had once brushed past him in the street, one he had known, a neighbor of his, his grandparents, or perhaps — his father.
He strained his eyes over that dense pack of souls, searching for his father, the man who had died sick in his bed. The man who was not tall, yet who had held up the sky over his whole childhood.
The souls all flashed by and were gone, darting past like lightning from every quarter. He fixed his eyes only on the direction from which Fengxi Town lay, his eyes burned red with staring — yet he could not see them all.
Living alone all his life, he did not want to show his weakness. Later, living with An'an, he had all the more to be a resolute elder brother. He had almost never spoken of it, but truly, he missed him so much!
Jiang Wang so wanted to see him again, and yet feared so much to see him.
So great was his dread of that powerlessness before the Gate of Ghosts.
All at once, as if some threshold had been crossed, the vast procession of souls was swept clean in a single instant by some power. And the phantom of the Gate of Ghosts above the whirlpool stood forth utterly clear and concrete.
In the very next breath, Wei Quji, lord of Fenglin City, descended from the sky wrapped in a hurricane of wind. But the phantom of the Gate of Ghosts flickered and was gone in the same instant!
In a haze, Jiang Wang seemed to feel a wisp of breeze brush across his cheek; but when he shook off his daze, everything before him had changed.
The tremendous whirlpool was gone, and the fog that had huddled about Little Grove Town dispersed at once.
Everything had dissipated — the Nether and the blue sky, never meeting, now never seen!