King of Hundred Victories Saber

The Snake Bone Whip suddenly lashed out, winding around Lan Xiaodie’s Long Sword.

Ah Duo’s withered face flushed with an eerie redness: "Go look at the bottom of the coffin, then you’ll know how your father died!"

Lan Xiaodie channeled strength to shake the sword, but felt a surge of sinister, poisonous Inner Strength travel along the blade, her tiger’s mouth instantly going numb.

In a flash of inspiration, she tapped the ground with her toes and leapt into the air, executing "Butterfly Shadow Step" to circle behind Ah Duo.

"Take this!" Lan Xiaodie thrust the sword tip toward Ah Duo’s back heart.

But Ah Duo suddenly turned, opening a mouth riddled with toxic sores and spat out a mouthful of foul, black blood!

Lan Xiaodie swung her sword to block, the black blood splattering on the blade and actually hissing corrosively.

Ah Duo seized the moment to lash out the Snake Bone Whip, the barbed tip hooking her skirt hem and yanking hard!

Lan Xiaodie staggered and pitched forward; in desperation she flicked out the Poisoned Silver Needle from her waist.

Ah Duo swept the needles aside with her whip, but in doing so exposed a brief opening.

Lan Xiaodie seized the chance, the Green Phosphorus Sword transforming into "Poison Dragon Piercing the Heart," thrusting straight for Ah Duo’s throat.

At the last critical instant, Ah Duo suddenly tore open her clothes, revealing a chest densely packed with Gu insects!

Those Gu insects, provoked, rose into the air and swarmed toward Lan Xiaodie like a mass of black clouds.

"Beware the Heart-Eating Gu!" Ah Duo cackled madly, her laughter shaking loose leaves from the forest canopy.

Lan Xiaodie brandished her Long Sword to guard her body, yet felt the toxic miasma spewed by the Gu corroding her Inner Strength.

She suddenly recalled the anti-poison powder Blind Granny had given her, and immediately reached into her bosom, scattering the powder into the air.

The Gu insects shrieked piercingly upon contact with the medicine and fell to the ground one after another, convulsing.

Seeing this, despair flashed in Ah Duo’s eyes: "You think this is enough to defeat me?" She suddenly drove the Snake Bone Whip into her own heart; as blood spurted, even more Gu crawled out from the wound, forming a blood-colored barrier around her.

Lan Xiaodie knew this was the long-lost Five Poison Sect technique "Blood Gu Self-Detonation," and immediately used Lightweight Technique to retreat swiftly.

With a thunderous boom, blood mist flooded the valley.

Lan Xiaodie clutched her chest, injured by the aftershock, staring at the slowly dispersing blood fog, Ah Duo’s final shriek still echoing in her ears: "Go to the coffin bottom... see the truth..."

Forcing herself to endure the pain, she walked toward that Bronze Ancient Coffin; under the moonlight, the engravings at the bottom of the coffin awaited their destined revelation.

With a few bounding leaps, Lan Xiaodie reached one side of the coffin.

By moonlight she saw the coffin bottom densely carved with tiny characters, recording that bloody night twenty years ago: Lan Xianglin discovered Yang Yinglong’s conspiracy of colluding with an evil sect from the Western Regions and intended to report it to the Imperial Court, but was ambushed by traitors of the Five Poison Sect.

To protect his young son, he exhausted all his strength to send Lan Qin’Er out of the encirclement, while he himself perished within the "Ten Thousand Gu Devouring Heaven Array"!

"So that’s how it was..." Lan Xiaodie’s voice was barely audible, her vision turning black in waves.

In a corner of the coffin bottom, there was also half a line of blurred script: "Xiaodie... do not trust..." She whirled around, only to see Ah Duo already lying in a pool of blood, the black blood at the corner of her mouth corroding the ground, and within the old woman’s pupils, there was actually a golden Gu insect crawling!

"Lan Qin’Er... has long since sent people to watch this place..." Ah Duo’s breath was weak as a thread, her withered hand clutching Lan Xiaodie’s skirt hem in a death grip, "The array core of the Ten Thousand Gu Devouring Heaven Array... is..." Before the words fell, the golden Gu suddenly burst from her body, dissolving into toxic smoke that scattered in the night wind.

Lan Xiaodie knelt amid the bloodstained ground, staring at the tattered record in her hand, her nails digging so deep into her palms that blood almost seeped out.

From deep within the valley came muffled thunder; a torrential rain poured down, washing the bloodstains from the bronze coffin, and also washing away the last of the doubts in her heart. She finally understood that what she sought was not only the truth about her father, but also to stop the Jianghu catastrophe Lan Qin’Er intended to unleash with the "Ten Thousand Gu Devouring Heaven Array." And now, Lan Xiaodie had to head for the Red Robe Sect’s main altar, which was closely tied to Lan Qin’Er.

The White Bone Sect, Red Robe Sect, and Healing Association were the "Two Sects and One Association" that had shifted from the Western Regions to develop in Bozhou and in recent years stirred up a bloody storm there. This situation had already been explained to Shi Feiyang by Blood Rakshasa back in the Helan Mountain Range.

The blurred characters at the coffin bottom just now had been carved by Ah Duo, whereas the other words above were part of a scheme to kill Lan Xiaodie. Late autumn in Bozhou was wrapped in the stench of rust and rotten flesh; Lan Xiaodie walked barefoot over scorched earth, the hem of her plain white Miao skirt stained a sooty brown by gunpowder smoke.

When she slammed open the copper doors of the Red Robe Sect branch altar, whose surface was carved full of blood patterns, the sight before her made her breath hitch—twelve Red-clothed Cultists had their clavicles pierced through by dark iron chains and were hung like puppets around the Bronze Altar. Blood gushed along the carved grooves, winding downward to pour into the boiling blood pool at the center. A ferocious effigy faintly looming at the bottom of the pool, as the bloodlines streamed in, had eyes turning crimson like flame, and the curve of its twisted grin was actually identical to the Red Robe Sect Sect Leader’s vicious smile.

"Stop!" The clear ring of the Green Phosphorus Sword leaving its sheath tore through the deathly silence, Lan Xiaodie’s face beneath the silver-horned phoenix crown cold as ice.

She lightly tapped the altar’s edge with her toes, and wherever the embroidered Miao skirt brushed past, the bricks bloomed with black spots—it was precisely the Five Poison Sect’s unique "Bone-Eroding Powder."

The sword edge thrust straight at the officiant’s throat, but twelve scimitars flicked out like venomous snakes tasting the air, instantly forming a dense, inescapable blade formation.

Lan Xiaodie twisted her body to evade the blades; with a flick of her wrist, three Poisoned Silver Needles tore through the air and pierced precisely into the cultist’s Quchi Acupoint.

As his scimitar clattered to the floor, she was already upon him, the Green Phosphorus Sword tracing a bizarre arc: "Poison Dragon Emerges from the Cave!" The sword tip lifted his throat open, blood fountaining onto her pale cheek, making her gaze all the sharper.

"A mere remnant of the Five Poison Sect dares ruin the grand affair of my Red Robe Sect!" A crimson long robe rose from the blood pool with a gust of bloody wind, the Sect Leader’s Bone Whip wrapped around a living human spine, the barbed tip still hung with clots of un-dried brain matter.