Returning from the Immortal World

At night, in the residence of the Miao Family’s Head, Mo Awu, Jin Shi, and the rest who had received the news from Tang Xiu finally arrived. They reported the results of their investigation in the last few days. Yet, they couldn’t find out who the backers behind this family were at all.

“Alright. I’m heading there with Yan’er, so you guys will stay here and wait for the result,” decided Tang Xiu eventually after he gave it some thought.

“But Brother Tang, though I know that you and Senior Gu are very formidable, with only you two going over to the Lian Family, it’s kind of… what if…” blurted out Miao Qentang quickly.

“Spare your ‘Senior’ this and that regarding Yan’er, Brother Miao. It’s fine for you to just call her by her name.” Tang Xiu waved her hand and said, “You can rest your worry about us going alone, though. Even if those people are from the Netherworld, there won’t be a problem with Yan’er here.”

“This…”

Miao Wentang was still hesitant a bit, but he eventually nodded and said, “You don’t want my clansmen to go with you, so please at least let me and Mo Awu’s group tag along! They are very formidable and I think quite comparable to myself. Only when you make the men stand guard in the vicinity for assistance will I feel relieved!”

“If so, then you guys will follow us! Alright, let’s not delay matters, shall we? It won’t be convenient for us to act if its daytime, so let’s directly head off to the Lian Family’s place,” said Tang Xiu with a smile.

Gu Yan’er slightly chuckled and said, “Just tell me the place where the Lians live or tell me the appearance of their residence. I’ll take you all there.”

“You mean…” Looking confused, Miao Wentang asked, “Gu… Boss Gu… have you ever been in Ning City before?”

“Indeed, I have once visited this place before, but it was over 20 years ago,” answered Gu Yan’er.

Miao Wentang understood instantly and then told her the address of the Lian Family’s residence, including with the features of the building as she had requested. After some time, just as Miao Wentang was about to call someone to prepare a car, he only heard the buzzing sound of the wind and felt the world spinning around him. Soon after, he saw the environment in the surroundings had changed.

“This… what’s going on?”

He looked around with a dumbfounded look and couldn’t help but exclaim. Just a moment ago he was sitting in his house, so how did he end up somewhere else in the blink of an eye?

“That’s not right… this place is… the vicinity near the Lian’s residence?”

“You’ve never experienced it, so it surely seems strange to you. But you don’t need to feel confused, Brother. Yan’er’s power is beyond your imagination,” said Tang Xiu smilingly. “Anyway, you guys just wait here. I’m heading straight there with Yan’er. Also, don’t worry. We still have a way to inform you should we encounter any danger inside.”

“Understood!”

Mo Awu glanced at the shocked Miao Wentang. Even though his group was also shocked, they were still able to compose themselves much better than this man.

It was some time before daybreak and the Lian Family’s residence was in the midst of a serene atmosphere. In particular, the villa in the north looked like it was being engulfed by a deathly stillness. There were literally no other living beings other than the Lian Family’s ancestors who lived in the underground space. But Tang Xiu and Gu Yan’er were able to find that there were more than 40 experts of this family in the surroundings outside the Underworld Great array. They were divided into six teams that kept patrolling the place.

“Quite a tight security measure, huh?”

Gu Yan’er commented with a smile. She looked like she was enjoying the time spent alone carrying out the task with Tang Xiu.

“It’s indeed quite tight.” Tang Xiu smiled and said, “If we didn’t have the Invisibility Charm I refined, we could’ve been discovered by them already. Anyway, this Underworld Great Array is nothing to us, so I’ll take the lead towards the inside.”

“Alright.”

Her beautiful face beamed with a thicker smile as Tang Xiu’s hand winded on her waist.

A short while after, they had silently appeared in the underground space below the rockery. As Tang Xiu saw an old man sitting cross-legged, he blitzed lightning-fast and instantly sent a blow to kill him. A smile was now worn on his face as he said, “There were three Ancestors of the Lian Family here back then; they probably noticed that I killed two of them, so they replaced them with two others to fill up the secret chambers. Yan’er, if my guess is correct, a new array should’ve been arranged here to cover all the forty-nine underground secret chambers. Each chamber has great benefits to the Lian Family’s ancestors.”

“It’s the Netherworld Great Array,” said Gu Yan’er.

Tang Xiu’s brows creased and he replied, “The Underworld Great Array is on the outside, while there is another Netherworld Great Array on the inside? How did the Lian lay out these two arrays? You also know that these two arrays need very special materials as well as some very particular methods to arrange. Even cultivators at the Golden Core Stage could only dream about it if they wanted to arrange them.”

“The Lian Family’s ancestor has already become a half-revenant, Master,” sighed Gu Yan’er. “I can sense that there’s some particular thing inside their bodies.”

“What object exactly? And how come I was unable to notice it?” responded Tang Xiu with a puzzled face.

After he questioned himself, only then did Tang Xiu’s face turn slightly red as he realized that his present strength compared to Gu Yan’er’s was simply like the difference between day and night. She could sense it, but he may be unable to do the same.

Gu Yan’er just chuckled and said, “Please wait a bit. I’m going to tell you about it later, Master.”

After saying that, she gently raised her hands as two enormously powerful streams of qi shot up instantly. In just a few seconds, all of the forty-nine Lian Family ancestors inside those secret chambers were all dragged out to the front. While watching their expressions enormously alter, Gu Yan’er instantly acted to constraint all of them.

“Curse it! Who the hell are you?”

One of them tried to struggle and growled loudly with a flushed face. He was wearing a red robe, sported a chignon hairdo in front of the temple, and had a black mole at the corner of his mouth.

Tang Xiu just coldly snorted at him before his eyes swept over to the 49 people. He then slowly asked, “If you answer a question of mine, I’ll give you a bit better death; otherwise, you’ll taste my methods that will give you a sensation that you might as well die instead of being alive. Did it ever come to mind that all those you’ve harmed also tasted that feeling?”

The old man in the red robe furiously yelled, “Give us your origins if you want us to answer your question! Else, we’ll never answer your question even if we have to die!”

“The thing is, you’ll never know who I am.” Tang Xiu faintly smiled. “Besides, it’s just a waste of words even if I tell you about me. But… I can dispel some of your doubts, though.”

The red-robed old man asked, “What doubts?”

“Well, didn’t the Patriarch of your family just lead your other clansmen to seek revenge?” asked Tang Xiu. “You see, all of them died to my hand, though.”

The face of the red-robed old man enormously changed. Although he couldn’t move his body, he still furiously roared, “Guodong! Tell me the cause!”

The only old man in a Chinese tunic glared at Tang Xiu with an incredulous expression and called out, “You were the one who killed them? You wretched punk! My father and my sixth uncle were also killed by you?”

“Yeah, I did kill two old men of your Lian Family,” answered Tang Xiu. “Well, I suppose those two are your father and your sixth uncle.”

The old man in the Chinese tunic shouted, “Ninth Grandpa, Lian Bai, the current Head of our family, took out some of the clansmen to seek revenge on his mortal enemies, the ones who killed his younger brother as well as some of our past geniuses.”

The red-robed old man coldly hummed and stared at Tang Xiu. “Do you also have a mortal enmity with my family?”

“I didn’t,” Tang Xiu shook his head and continued, “But now I have.”

His answer made the red-robed old man silent for a few seconds as he slowly asked, “What exactly do you want to know?”

“Well, what exactly is going on in your family? Why did you have some people arrange the two great arrays from the Underworld and the Netherworld? Also, from where did you get this Ghost cultivation art? And lastly, the one thing I want to know the most—what’s the origin of those behind your family?”

The red-robed old man was so shocked that he blurted out, “You know about the Underworld Great Array and the Netherworld one? Curse it! Who exactly are you?”

“Well, I’m just a cultivator,” replied Tang Xiu.

The other party ferociously stared at Tang Xiu and replied with a heavy voice, “I know you’re a cultivator. But we have no enmities whatsoever, so why the hell did you kill the members of my family, and why did you rush here to our place and attack us tonight?”

“There’s a line that I never like to say it myself—Good and Evil can never coexist. Of course, it sounds so forced, right? But then, I really abhor when the strong abuse and torment the weak. In particular, I detest those who’re cultivating and become neither human nor ghost, yet cruelly harm common people in the process.”

“Hmph, Good and Evil are always in conflict for eternity,” snorted the red-robed old man. “But I warn you that the ones behind my family are a horrifying existence beyond what you can imagine. He needs my family to provide them with humans’ souls and blood, while my family also needs cultivation arts to get stronger. If you dare shake the foundation of my family and ruin all the hard work we’ve done, you can be sure that they will come haunting you and rip you to pieces!”

Suddenly, he blinked and grinned, “Ah… sorry. I seem to have said it a bit lightly. Ripping you to pieces won’t even be enough to vent out their grudge. They will absolutely pull your soul out and imprison it in the endlessly burning Ghost Flame, burning you inside it so you’ll scream in extreme pain and agony until your soul is decimated.”

Tang Xiu’s expression slightly changed as he could sense that the temperature in the surroundings suddenly dropped several degrees. A particular and erratic chilling wind blew as four blobs of black Ghost flame appeared out of the blue.

“Hmph, playing some cheap tricks, huh?” snorted Tang Xiu coldly.

The instant after, however, a black sickle appeared in Gu Yan’er’s hand. She gently swept it to the front as two shrill screams suddenly sounded out. The two blobs of will-‘o-the-wisp then condensed into human forms, turning into two humanoid figures formed by Yin Qi whose waists had been cleaved and were screaming on the ground in agony.

“CURSE IT! What kind of horrifying people did you Lians just provoke? IT’S IMMORTAL’S SPIRITUAL POWER! You… are… someone from the Immortal World?!!” The other two will-o’-the-wisps transformed and eventually condensed into two humanoid shadows with blue faces and fangs in their mouth, making them look extremely nasty.

Gu Yan’er flicked her finger to bind these two ghosts and sneered, “Just Ghost commanders-in-chief from the insignificant low plane of the Ghost Realm, yet you dare to meddle in the mortal world? Are there some big problems in the Netherworld and your Ghost Realm or something, causing even your Ghost Monarch to be no longer able to contain you?”

“Please spare us, Venerable Immortal.”

The two ghosts were scared shitless as they let out an extremely panicked scream. Their voices were high-pitched and jarring to the ears, like sounds made by a fork scraping against a plate.