Along the path of pursuit, Wen Yue had already lost count of how many Northern Wei cavalry he had slain.

His body felt sticky, his dark crimson armor now coated in layers of drying blood, crackling under the wind.

They had chased the fleeing enemy for twenty li.

Near a hilly valley.

Tuoba Bao ceased his flight, pulling the reins on his panting steed.

He dismounted in one fluid motion, eyes dark as he stared coldly at Wen Yue.

A duel of rider against rider.

It almost harkened back to the days of single-champion duels.

Tuoba Bao suddenly laughed and gripped his long spear tightly, shouting menacingly, “Pretty boy! I spared your life out of kindness, and yet you’ve chased me all this way, seeking your own death?”

Wen Yue remained unflinching, dismounted as well.

His gaze swept across the surrounding landscape.

Green hills, flowing waters, a secluded mountain stream, an excellent place to bury bones.

Under the gaze of the Spirit-Seer Eyes, he saw no ambushes.

It seemed Tuoba Bao truly had reached the end of the road, and it was time to reveal his own cards.

Within the soul banner, Tu Shanjun also probed carefully, but sensed neither the presence of other cultivators nor any large fluctuations in baleful aura.

The turbulence of killing intent remained clustered around the dead soldiers.

The battlefield lay blanketed in a gray haze.

“You’ve chosen a fine place to die,” Wen Yue said, twirling the crescent blade in his hand, voice calm.

His blade arts were family heirlooms, and he’d trained in them under Xue Yi for over a decade.

With his current body and physique, his skill ranked among the first class.

“Pretty boy, the deer’s fate has yet to be decided. You think I’m afraid of you?”

Tuoba Bao abandoned all pretenses, ripping off his armor.

The aura of death around him thickened.

Even his skin turned an eerie ash-gray.

His pupils gradually whitened, until sclera and iris became indistinguishable.

A flicker of astonishment flashed through Wen Yue’s eyes. “You’re not human?”

“You talk too much.”

Tuoba Bao had no intention of explaining his transformation. With a fierce roar, he charged.

Wen Yue had hoped to pry some information from Tuoba Bao’s mouth, but clearly, the man was not the talkative sort.

Since Tuoba Bao had shed all disguise, Wen Yue saw no reason to continue hiding either.

With a surge of spiritual power, his true power erupted and he summoned the soul banner outright.

Two zhang away from Wen Yue, Tuoba Bao froze in his tracks. The ferocity on his face vanished.

He stared stunned at Wen Yue’s transformation, his gaze falling on the fluttering soul banner in shock.

Without thinking, he turned to flee.

But he slammed into something, stumbling backward. Fixing his gaze, he saw it was a towering ghost.

A seven-foot-tall fiend loomed over him, its crimson eyes staring down.

Tu Shanjun was rather curious, Tuoba Bao seemed to have used baleful aura to force a breakthrough into the realm of Innate Grandmasters.

But such methods were harmful to the human body.

This sort of technique was far beyond what common folk could grasp.

Tuoba Bao was silent for a long time before he spoke. “If I tell you why I became like this… can you spare my life?”

Wen Yue shook his head.

Not merely because he was an enemy general.

Now that Tuoba Bao knew he was a cultivator, there was no way he could be allowed to live.

“I understand. Then make it quick.”

“How about this, why don’t you tell me anyway? I’m quite curious,” Wen Yue smiled, warm and casual as if chatting over tea.

“Oh, and I forgot to mention, I used to be the Commander of the Southern Office of the Embroidered Guard in Great Liang.”

“You’ve heard of the Embroidered Guards, right?”

As a former commander of the Southern Office, one of the heads of the notorious Embroidered Guard, he was no stranger to torture and coercion.

The imperial prison of the Embroidered Guards, now that was a true earthly hell.

Tuoba Bao’s face changed. He pulled a dagger from his belt and tried to kill himself.

But such tricks couldn’t escape Tu Shanjun’s notice.

With a flick of spiritual force, Tu Shanjun dislocated Tuoba Bao’s arm joints.

His arms dangled like noodles at his sides.

“Talk now, how about it?”

Wen Yue stepped forward and pulled a small pouch from his waist.

From it, he withdrew a set of silver needles. “Three Needles of the Yama King, an unspoken secret of the Embroidered Guards.”

“Very few still know how to use them.”

Tuoba Bao’s eyes bulged wide. He had definitely heard of them.

…

The interrogation did take its toll, many tricks had to be used.

No matter how tough Tuoba Bao was, even a man desperate for death had his limits.

And the intelligence extracted was intriguing: Northern Wei soldiers had indeed received aid from a cultivator.

Originally, Tuoba Bao had only been a first-rate martial artist, trained to organ refinement. But after using a sinister pearl provided by the cultivator, he had miraculously broken through to become an Innate Grandmaster.

His body had become abnormally strong, nearly impervious to blades and arrows.

The price was that his cultivation would never advance again.

No wonder that starting ten years ago, Liang’s armies had suffered repeated defeats.

Nearly hundreds of thousands of troops had perished.

So cultivators had long since interfered in the war.

The more Tu Shanjun listened, the more it sounded like a corpse-refining technique and not just corpse refining, but daringly using living humans.

Could the sect behind Northern Wei really be unaware?

Or perhaps… they knew but turned a blind eye.

Maybe that loose cultivator was once a disciple of a proper sect, but after obtaining demonic arts and heretical spells, took a chance and began practicing them.

It was also possible that a demonic loose cultivator had infiltrated Northern Wei’s capital.

Or perhaps the sect backing Northern Wei had endorsed it outright.

According to Liang’s calculations, if the major sects didn’t place guarding cultivators in Liang City, Northern Wei might’ve taken the same path.

Tuoba Bao himself had little contact with that heretical cultivator, so he didn’t know the full story.

But he did reveal the name of the sect behind Northern Wei, it was called Primordial Spirit Sect.

Tu Shanjun couldn’t help but sneer at cultivators’ taste in names. Did they all like including “Spirit” in their sects?

Liang had the Five Spirits Sect, and now Northern Wei had the Primordial Spirit Sect.

After prying out the Wei army’s camp arrangements, military deployment, and supply routes, Tu Shanjun finally gave Tuoba Bao a swift end.

He also extracted Tuoba Bao’s soul and cast it into the soul banner.

In the moment his soul was drawn out, bathed in condensed baleful aura, Tuoba Bao’s soul transformed into a ranking ghost.

This was because the baleful aura had already infiltrated his body and his corpse, having undergone partial zombification on the battlefield, had absorbed enough lingering death qi that even his soul was soaked in it.

It wouldn’t be long before, as the death aura erupted, his body would fully zombify, his soul would bind to the corpse, and he’d become a corpse ghost.

On the return journey, Wen Yue used his spiritual power to absorb the lingering baleful aura.

But there were still very few powerful ghosts.

Tu Shanjun advised him to wait, let the baleful aura incubate further, and stronger ghosts might emerge.

So he stopped Wen Yue from absorbing all the battlefield’s aura.

Better to wait a few more days.

Wherever war arose, death would follow, and death always birthed killing intent.

Many soldiers’ souls were shattered by the intensity of death qi, or vanished under the sun’s rays.

But there were exceptions, some souls not only survived the onslaught of death qi, but evolved into malevolent ghosts.

Still, mortals had limited life force, and ghosts born of them rarely became truly powerful.

Should a ghost appear, the mortal dynasties would turn to guarding cultivators for aid to destroy them.

Righteous cultivators disdained using impure baleful aura from the mortal realm.

It clashed with their techniques and would pollute their spiritual radiance, causing regression.

Even demonic cultivators had to tread carefully, impure baleful aura could disturb the mind.

Demonic arts, too, eroded sanity.

Without proper mind-fortifying techniques, many who practiced demonic cultivation eventually lost themselves, their negative emotions overriding reason, becoming cruel and cold-blooded.

Unfortunately, demonic arts were easy to come by, but soul-purifying techniques were rare.

At least after slaying ghosts, one could obtain Yin Pearls, which had some value. But low-tier ghosts still couldn’t compare to spirit beasts or demons.

Thus, the battlefield’s baleful energy became a gift to Tu Shanjun.

Wen Yue, with Tu Shanjun close at hand, stood first in line for any ghosts that might appear.

Should any powerful ghost be born, it would fall into their hands.

However, the death qi had not yet fully matured. It would take a few more days to bear real fruit.

Upon returning from this grand victory,

Commander Geng Lie wore no pleasant expression, which left Wen Yue somewhat puzzled.

The war report still needed to be written, merits still needed to be recorded.

While in the Wei camp, news of Tuoba Bao’s annihilation caused an uproar.

The commander of a 150,000-strong army, Tuoba Hong, sat heavily on his war chair.

His brow furrowed deeply as he listened to the soldiers who’d escaped recount the events of that day.

(Chapter End)