Chapter 31: Ghost Market, Rouge, and Calamity
Lu Qingyang squatted by the rusty ship's rail, his fingertips twirling a half-piece of Dragon scale to shave his beard.
The qingmu spirit pearl in his Dantian pulsed with warmth, its blood-red veins crawling across the surface like centipedes, dyeing the reflected mirage a dark crimson.
He bared his teeth at the water's surface, then suddenly flicked the Dragon scale towards a wriggling shadow: "Fan Laoliu, your Turtle Breathing Technique is even worse than Widow Wang's from Drunken Immortal Pavilion!"
The black shadow exploded into mist, revealing a dwarf wearing a bronze mask.
In the treasure bowl held in that person's palm, three eyeballs of Taiyi Pavilion Disciples spun round and round: "Fellow Daoist Lu's Dragon scales are of poor quality, why not exchange them for a fragment of a spirit pearl…"
"Exchange your grandma!" Lu Qingyang flung out an Evil-Dispelling Talisman mixed with chili powder, and from the smoke, seven iron-armored turtles scurried out, their shells crookedly engraved with "Ye Wuchen was here."
While the dwarf was frantically stomping on the turtle shells, he flipped over the ship's rail, the magnets hidden in his boot soles sucking up the sunken silver from the seabed, plowing a shimmering silver trail through the undercurrents.
When Yinghuo's silver bell cord sounded from behind the coral reef, Lu Qingyang was using a Dragon scale as a shovel to dig out a giant clam.
Inside the five-foot-wide clam meat was a rouge box, the twin lotus patterns on its lid strangely coexisting and contradicting the blood-red veins of the qingmu spirit pearl.
He dipped a little rouge and smeared it on his wrist, and immediately, the Golden Core meridian map appeared beneath his skin: "Good stuff! It can reveal one's cultivation…"
"That's made from mermaid tears mixed with the heart blood of a Nascent Soul female Cultivator." Yinghuo's toe hooked the rouge box, and the silver bell cord on her wrist suddenly shattered the hidden compartment at the bottom of the box, rolling out three recording pearls engraved with Taiyi Pavilion's secret patterns.
The images inside the pearls flickered, revealing the scene of Ye Wuchen gouging out a heart at the Dragon Tomb altar.
The lanterns of the Ghost Market lit up one by one.
Lu Qingyang squatted in front of a stone-gambling stall, mixing the fragments of the rouge box into a pile of raw jade stones.
When the Taiyi Pavilion's dark sentinels pursued him, he was holding up a discarded stone that had "yielded blood jade" and shouting for a sale, the red wax seeping from the cracks in the stone's skin perfectly covering the spirit pearl's blood-red veins.
In the chaos of the gamblers scrambling, he stealthily took the palm-sized Dragon-seeking compass from the stall owner's secret compartment, its star arrangement on the surface echoing the spirit pearl's mountain-sea patterns.
"The shop in the Kan position has new goods." Yinghuo pulled him through the crowd, the chensha stone in her hair suddenly brightening in front of a signboard carved with fish-tail patterns.
Inside the shop hung three hundred mermaid-fat lamps, and beneath each lamp hung a coma Cultivator.
Lu Qingyang reached for a familiar face's qiankun bag, but his fingertips were burned by a protective spell, blistering: "Isn't this the arrogant one from the Azure Cloud Sword Sect…"
The shopkeeper emerged from behind the curtain, a rotting mermaid skin pasted on his face.
Lu Qingyang smelled the scent of preservative pills and suddenly opened his robe to reveal the Dragon scale on his chest: "Fellow Daoist, your skin-changing technique, why not try the Dragon Clan's secret method?"
The qingmu spirit pearl opportunely exuded Dragon Qi, startling the shopkeeper into stumbling back three steps and knocking over a lamp stand, causing twelve Cultivators to fall to the ground.
Taking advantage of the chaos to snatch three mermaid-fat lamps, Lu Qingyang ran into a blind Daoist selling water-repelling Talismans at the end of the alley.
The cinnabar patterns on the Talisman paper were missing two crucial strokes.
He squatted down and completed them with Dragon blood: "Old brother, your Talismans are drawn as if you're just playing around…"
The completed Talisman suddenly transformed into a live fish and leaped into the sea, and two carrion fish emerged from the Daoist's empty eye sockets.
The drum for the hour of Zi (midnight) struck three times, and the layout of the Ghost Market suddenly changed.
Lu Qingyang kicked open a wooden door from which the scent of rouge seeped, and inside, eighteen Puppet maidservants simultaneously turned their heads—their joints were inlaid with soul- trấn ngọc, unique to Taiyi Pavilion's Forbidden Land.
He pulled the arm of the nearest Puppet and sniffed it: "Sinking incense mixed with corpse wax, your master has quite the heavy taste."
The sound of porcelain shattering came from behind a screen in the dark room.
Lu Qingyang stealthily moved along the wall and saw a woman wearing a bamboo hat carving flesh from herself in front of a bronze mirror.
Her back reflected in the mirror was covered with cracks from a Golden Core self-detonation, and the jade knife in the woman's fingertips suddenly changed direction and stabbed towards him: "Fellow Daoist Lu's concealment technique is even clumsier than three years ago."
"Fairy Su, what are you saying…" He sidestepped the blade, and the iron-armored turtle he flung from his sleeve precisely jammed the gear mechanism, "Did a medical Cultivator switch to making Puppets because Ye Wuchen abandoned her after toying with her?"
Su Li's silver needle grazed his neck and embedded itself in the wall, the Puppet Silk wrapped around the needle's tail instantly forming a trapping array.
Lu Qingyang pulled out the fragments of the rouge box and shook them: "Your injury requires Dragon Tomb blood jade mixed with mermaid tears, coincidentally…"
Before he could finish, his wrist was entangled by the Puppet Silk, and the qingmu spirit pearl suddenly activated on its own, devouring the silk threads as nourishment for advancing to Nascent Soul.
The entire Ghost Market suddenly tilted, and nine bronze coffins emerged from the sea.
Lu Qingyang, dragging half a Puppet arm, leaped onto a coffin, seeing Yinghuo confronting a mermaid priest in the Kun position.
The priest's staff was inlaid with a replica of the qingmu spirit pearl, and the blood-red veins within the replica could even resonate with the spirit pearl in his body.
He seized the opportunity to smear rouge on the surface of the replica, and the blood-red veins rampaged, exploding the top of the staff, and among the flying fragments, a genuine spirit pearl fragment was clearly embedded.
"Thank you for the gift!" Lu Qingyang snatched the fragment from mid-air, landing on the chest of a floating corpse.
A Jade Slip carved with "Taiyi Pavilion Forbidden Arts Compendium" slipped out of the corpse's Daoist robe.
He scanned it with his Divine Sense while fleeing—the seventh page recorded an evil method for transferring the spirit pearl's backlash, and the meridian pathways of the illustrated doll were exactly consistent with the Dragon scale patterns on his body.
When Yinghuo's silver bell cord wrapped around his waist, Taiyi Pavilion's soul-chasing arrows were already breaking through the air.
Lu Qingyang thrust the spirit pearl fragment towards the arrowheads, and the bursting Dragon Qi sent the entire arrow squad plummeting into the seabed.
The moment the fragment embedded itself into the spirit pearl, he glimpsed the Dragon soul imprisoned deep within the blood-red veins—it was himself, stripped of his seven emotions and six desires.
"It'll cost you to keep looking." He covered the spirit pearl and stuffed it into his pants, his fingertips touching the tracking Gu hidden by Su Li.
The Gu worm stiffened into a jade carving under the deterrence of the Dragon Qi, and he casually slipped it into the collar of a Taiyi Pavilion Disciple.
In the darkest hour before dawn, Lu Qingyang squatted on the mast of a fishing boat, tallying his gains.
The qingmu spirit pearl's blood-red veins had spread to his collarbone, but unexpectedly, they had also broken through his Nascent Soul Bottleneck.
He held the newly acquired spirit pearl fragment up to the light for examination, then suddenly spat a mouthful of blood onto the sea: "Ye Wuchen, that bastard, he really sent me a big gift…"