The seniors left, and Gyuvin stood frozen where he was for a long moment, his heart struck cold, still turning over the events of the previous day in his head again and again. Had he somehow managed to mess up something so simple, something he’d spent his life training to do? He didn’t understand; none of it made sense. Part of him bristled with the indignation of being accused out of the blue, but the other part of him, the part that was winning at the moment, was going into overdrive second-guessing every move he had made.
He was broken out of his thoughts by a gentle tug on his sleeve. “Gyuvin, don’t think about it anymore,” Hanbin said softly. “What’s happened has already happened. Let’s go down and fix it, okay?”
Gyuvin steeled himself and straightened his back, though he couldn’t keep the dejectedness from seeping into his voice. “Okay, hyung,” he sighed. “Let’s go.”
He ruminated on it for the rest of the trip down the Peak. Nothing about this situation added up, but he had to wonder if he had really been complacent enough to overlook his own mistake. Gyuvin left Hanbin’s side temporarily to catch up to Ricky, who was walking ahead of them.
“Ricky…”
“Hm?”
“Did I really screw something up?” he asked, a little tentatively, almost afraid Ricky would say yes. “You watched me do it, so you might have seen if I did something wrong…”
Ricky shook his head. “You didn’t. Not as far as I know.”
Gyuvin sighed, visibly deflating. “It doesn’t make any sense. I don’t even know what happened.”
“Don’t pay so much attention to what the seniors said,” Ricky answered, after a moment’s thought. “It isn’t necessarily your fault, or that you did anything wrong. Considering the circumstances, it’s likely there’s something or someone else at play here, so just focus on sealing the fierce corpses and stop second-guessing everything you did.”
“How did you know I was doing that…” Gyuvin trailed off slowly. Ricky gave him another unreadable glance, but said nothing more.
They were nearing the outskirts of Raintree Town now, and Gyuvin could hear sounds of human chaos from afar, screaming and loud voices carried through the air.
“Let’s stay in pairs,” Hanbin said, taking charge. “We don’t know how aggressive these fierce corpses are, but judging from the kind of injuries the farmer had, we’re in no position to underestimate them. Until we’re very clear what we’re dealing with, let’s not let our guards down.”
Ricky came up to stand next to him silently, Tianling already unsheathed at his side. Hanbin directed them to split up and cover different paths, an attempt to clear as much of the town as quickly as possible amongst the nine of them. Gyuvin summoned Yuexi and took off running. He could already tell which direction the screaming was coming from.
The two of them located the fierce corpse in the middle of a field of wheat grains. It was standing so still amongst the scarecrows that Gyuvin could miss it if he couldn’t sense the demonic energy emanating from its general direction.
“It’s just standing there,” he observed, still on guard, but a little bewildered. He jumped the wooden fence easily, weaving through the waist-high stalks of grain to get a closer look at the corpse, his polearm held out in front of him just in case, but the fierce corpse did not move. As he got closer and waved Yuexi towards it, the corpse reacted perfunctorily to the movement, but didn’t make much move to retaliate.
“The demonic energy from this corpse is very faint,” Gyuvin said softly, as if he were afraid the corpse could hear him. “It’s regained its sense of sight and hearing, meaning it’s definitely a fierce corpse, but I think it must only have been converted very recently.”
Fierce corpses, when reanimated from their graves, were restored to their original forms as they were before death. Depending on how high the cultivation of the person who converted them was, the speed of decay of the corpse would vary; a weaker demonic cultivator’s corpses wouldn’t last long, while a strong one could in theory create corpses that were ostensibly immortal.
Gyuvin placed a few simple demonic energy-binding talismans on it before layering a cleansing talisman on top of it, and the corpse gave up without much of a fight, closing its eyes and standing still. “Do you think we should bring it back to the graveyard?”
He wasn’t too familiar with the protocol for dealing with peaceful fierce corpses like this one. Stories they’d been told were usually about fierce corpses that had been imbued with such strong demonic energy they were actively injuring civilians. For corpses like those, protocol was for cultivators to incapacitate them on sight, meaning they were disintegrated into ash by a holy weapon or otherwise destroyed, but Gyuvin felt a little reluctance to destroy this one.
He thought about Seo Jung from the day before, and how she’d looked in her coffin surrounded by wisteria blooms. He prayed she wasn’t being hunted down by one of the others at that moment; please let her be safe in her coffin and her spirit untouched, he thought, as he led the corpse out the gate of the fence he’d jumped over, heading for the graveyard.Â
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