Chapter 101: One More

The tomb of the Li family patriarch held extraordinary significance for all of South Mountain.

Ordinarily, the Li family’s ancestral graves were not located here.

So why bury him in this place? There had to be hidden motives.

Ji Li had been tailing the group all along, keeping a distance of about ten meters. The area was densely forested, making him hard to detect.

The group consisted of six people: five men and one woman.

The leader appeared middle-aged, his face lined with years, wearing an unusual robe embroidered with black-and-gold patterns, and his hair intertwined with multicolored ribbons.

The five behind him were dressed similarly but appeared younger.

Their attire and demeanor were unlike those of ordinary Central Plains people; they seemed like outsiders.

Ji Li had waited this long for their appearance.

He spent three to four hours hidden in an ancient tree.

The middle-aged man was likely the same person who had conspired with Chen Fu in the Li Mansion’s back alley.

The others were his disloyal and unfilial disciples, as he had described.

In fact, the shop attendants had been brought into the Li Mansion due to a misunderstanding.

The original plan of the middle-aged man and Chen Fu was to lure these five disciples for sacrifice, but the attendants had intervened first.

Now, this was a plan to set things right.

Through eavesdropping, Ji Li learned that Chen Fu and the man had split up to conduct separate sacrifices.

Chen Fu would deceive Tongguan and the attendants, while the man would lead the five disciples.

Each group consisted of four men and one woman, matching the requirements for the sacrifice.

Seeing the five disciples, Ji Li realized the pattern.

The sacrifice had specific requirements: not only in number but in gender. The final stage required four men and one woman.

Ji Li had been in the damp, cold forest for too long; his left arm throbbed painfully, as if ants were crawling over it.

He followed at a careful distance, wary of being discovered.

In his condition, he would be at a disadvantage in any confrontation, especially since the gun he once carried had been left with the portrait.

Shaking off fatigue and foggy thoughts, he pressed on.

The path ahead was uphill, narrow, and rugged, making Ji Li’s pursuit arduous.

After an indeterminate time, exhaustion hit him hard. The tree shadows before him made him dizzy.

He understood that his weakened body, a result of his lost arm, only intensified the pain and drained his strength.

Finally, the group reached a hilltop and paused.

Ji Li hid in the nearby forest, straining to hear their conversation.

Among the five disciples, the leader was a dark-skinned, muscular young man. He spoke gruffly:

“Master, don’t waste time. We know you’ve already begun the sacrifice.”

“Oh?”

The middle-aged man halted, slowly turning to the dark-skinned youth and smiling:

“So, you’ve found that fragmentary scroll.”

“Indeed! You obtained it along with the portrait. It contains not only methods of restoration but also records the portrait itself, a mysterious power.”

The group’s only female disciple interjected sharply, eyes glinting with malice:

“Eighteen lives—ten men and eight women—will complete the sacrifice, allowing us to claim the bride in the portrait.

Her name and power are unknown. We can only call her a ghost.

But we all know anything connected to a ghost is unimaginable.

If we succeed, anything is possible!”

The middle-aged man snorted, glancing at the scheming disciples before him, hands clasped behind his back, and responded slowly:

“I can tell you clearly: what the scroll says is correct. Most of the ritual has already been completed.

Those of you who have read the scroll know that until the sacrifice is finished, it causes no real harm to the living.

So how effective it will be, I do not know.”

Hearing this, Ji Li furrowed his brows.

If the man had spoken truthfully in the first half, there was no need to lie in the later, less critical part.

He said the ghost bride could not harm the living before the sacrifice—but something about that didn’t sit right.

Because Ji Li’s severed arm had clearly come from its hand…

He hesitated, carefully recalling the moment his arm was torn off, when a strange thought suddenly occurred to him.

The arm had not been ripped off by the ghost bride.

It had been pulled down by the shadow on the wall that was part of the sacrifice.

“Could it be that the shadow in the portrait is a separate entity, also a ghost?”

This unintended guess made Ji Li feel that things were more complicated than they seemed. It could even be considered a clue for this mission.

At present, though, he could not figure out its exact significance.

The dark-skinned youth among the disciples, his imposing frame pressing forward, stepped closer:

“Then what are you waiting for? You’ve been planning at the Li Mansion for some time, so surely you have someone for the sacrifice.”

“The sacrifice is happening on the northern slope now. If you wish to see, we can go together.”

The middle-aged man spoke with quiet confidence, showing no fear of his burly disciples.

Ji Li, however, felt increasingly uneasy.

Just a few exchanges had already made him suspect that many of his previous assumptions were wrong.

From what he had seen in the ancient tree, he had learned that this mission involved two ghosts.

One was the ghost bride; the other was the spirit-rain ghost.

The spirit-rain ghost was now doing everything it could to prevent the sacrifice. Tongguan and the others were likely fully under its attack.

From the middle-aged man’s words, the mysterious ghost bride seemed never to have harmed anyone.

Everything revolving around it made it seem like the source, yet the deaths were caused either by living people or by the spirit-rain ghost.

So if a deadly ghost already existed, what purpose did adding the ghost bride serve?

Why… insist on having two ghosts?

Ji Li, I haven’t dared to say this before, but now I must, a third persona suddenly said.

“What?”

Today, sunlight is sparse, and our shadows are faint. But earlier, we saw our shadows split into five…

Ji Li furrowed his brow, looking down at the shadows on the ground.

There were only four: his, the second persona’s, the third, and the fourth.

Now there are only four. The extra one… disappeared at some point.