Wandering Gods of Day and Night

It wasn’t until the Eternal Life Sect Leader’s cheek was almost pressed against his shoulder

that he suddenly came to a realization; he felt these two mountains looked like a gigantic vertical maw bared open.

He hurriedly turned his head back and said to Zhou Xuan excitedly, "Master, I feel like these two Snow Mountains together look like a huge gaping mouth, and those crisscrossing rocks are like the sharp teeth inside the mouth."

Zhou Xuan clapped his palms together and said, "Exactly, you and I are thinking the same thing.

If we say the Great Snow Mountain carries a man-eating curse, and we turn that curse into something concrete, then wouldn’t it be the great jaws of these two mountains, opening and closing, chewing all these manor thugs into pulp and splintered bone?"

After the Eternal Life Sect Leader heard Zhou Xuan’s idea, he mentally sketched out that image of twin mountains devouring people and couldn’t help but shiver.

He couldn’t help but stick up his thumb and click his tongue nonstop. "Has to be you, Master Zhou; when it comes to setting up a death scene like this, nobody does it better than you."

"How can you call this a death scene? I think you’re insulting my art of death." Zhou Xuan also slipped into the kind of chatter Little Brain liked best.

Off to the side, the Tiancan Monk’s reaction was even more intense.

He was already immersed in Zhou Xuan’s blood-drenched, enchanting vision.

He lifted both hands toward the sky, let out a long breath, and then couldn’t help but murmur, "Beautiful. This suffocating, bloody flavor—simply too beautiful."

"Don’t just stand there getting drunk on it; get moving."

Zhou Xuan prodded the three of them on. After all, that Ning Jin Longba couldn’t keep listening to the bones forever; they had to hurry and finish setting up this death ritual—that was the real business.

By now he had already drawn up the blueprint; the three just had to follow it.

The Eternal Life Sect Leader lightly shook his rattle and roused all the hired hands and clansmen of Longba Manor.

The Tiancan Monk, meanwhile, swept his sleeves, stirring up a violent gale toward the crevice between the two peaks.

The wind roared through the mountain ravine, and those clansmen and hired hands of Longba Manor, who had just woken, were immediately sucked toward the cleft in the mountain.

The steward of Longba Manor wore a face full of rage; he shouted at Zhou Xuan,

"Do you have any idea who we are? We’re from Longba Manor. That child by your side is our lord’s youngest son.

If you lay a hand on us, if you touch him, within Snow Plain Prefecture you can cry to the heavens and they won’t answer, cry to the earth and it won’t respond!"

In the face of the steward’s bellowing, Zhou Xuan showed no hint of fear; he only felt this steward looked like a stray old dog, yapping and snarling nonstop.

Zhou Xuan cupped Bai Ze Longba’s chin in one hand and, with a contemptuous look at the steward, said, "The ones who can cry all they want and get no answer now are you, not me."

"Old Buddha, send them west."

Zhou Xuan’s gaze was colder than the icicles of this polar wasteland.

The wind in the ravine howled even fiercer.

In the steward’s eyes, it was as if countless Anchor Hooks were being flung from that mountain crevice, hooking into their flesh, dragging them step by step toward the gap in the rock.

He felt death closing in; his heart and liver felt as though they were splitting apart, terror swallowing him whole.

Unwilling to accept it, he asked in despair, "Just who are you people?"

Zhou Xuan chuckled softly. "The two of us rode the same white horse here to this Cuomo Heavenly Pool."

"You’re Master Ning Yu?"

The steward suddenly caught on, then clutched at it like a drowning man seizing a straw, begging for mercy again and again. "Master Ning, our Longba Manor and your Reincarnation Temple have no grievance at all..."

Zhou Xuan let out a cold laugh. "Sometimes people get killed not because of any feud. Steward, after you die and reach Soul Shepherd City, remember to tell Lord Ghost Messenger this: the man who killed you was Mr. Zhou Xuan of Mingjiang Prefecture."

That one line stunned the steward; he just couldn’t reconcile Zhou Xuan and Ning Yu as the same person.

The wind still howled; those dozens of hired hands and clansmen and the steward of Longba Manor were being dragged faster and faster.

Zhou Xuan stretched out both arms and pulled the few children of Longba Manor into his embrace.

He asked the youngest of them, "What’s your name?"

"My name is Bai Ze Longba."

Zhou Xuan nodded; Bai Ze Longba’s gaze was wild and unruly.

His eyes were full of venom as he glared at Zhou Xuan and said, "My father is one of the lords of Snow Plain Prefecture."

"If you know what’s good for you, you’ll let us go right now, or we’ll strip your bones and rip out your tendons."

Hearing Bai Ze’s words, Zhou Xuan narrowed his eyes. He asked, "Have you always been this arrogant?"

Bai Ze Longba seemed even more fired up. With hands on his hips, putting on the lofty airs of an overbearing young master, he said to Zhou Xuan,

"There used to be a few kids who mocked me for looking strange. Do you know what happened to them?"

"No." Zhou Xuan replied lazily.

"Three days later, our Longba Manor stripped the bones and tendons from their entire families and hung their corpses from the beam over the manor gates."

Bai Ze Longba had yet to see truly bloody scenes with his own eyes.

So he assumed Zhou Xuan was just like the other gentry and bandits of Snow Plain Prefecture—good at flapping their gums, not truly daring to kill anyone from Longba Manor, especially him, ’Bai Ze,’ Lord Longba’s most beloved youngest son.

Zhou Xuan steadied Bai Ze Longba by the shoulders and forcibly turned him around, saying, "You—take a good look at the end your hired hands, steward, and clansmen have come to before you talk to me."

Bai Ze Longba looked toward the ravine, just in time to see those people being drawn into the mountain cleft.

As soon as they entered the fissure, invisible hands gripped their feet and began whipping them back and forth against the mountain.

The mountainside was full of jagged rocks, bristling with sharp stone stalagmites.

The hired hands were swung by those unseen hands and smashed straight into those stone spikes.