UCS Chapter 109.2

The man’s grip was iron. He kept his arm locked around Yun Wan and glanced over at Yun Zhiyi. “Oh? There’s a little sister here too?”

“Too bad your little sister is a virgin. Otherwise I’d buy you both and have some fun with the pair of you.”

Watching this man humiliate her sister right in front of her, Yun Zhiyi’s fury surged, but she watched his eager, excited eyes and understood: the more pointless the resistance, the more it would only excite him.

Her mind raced. She recalled something Xiong Xiong had once told her to give her a basic grasp of the situation, and she said suddenly, “Your ‘True Immortal’ — do you think he knows what you are doing in the ritual sacrifice grounds? And do you think he will be pleased?”

The man’s hands went still.

He looked at Yun Zhiyi. She looked back at him, her expression perfectly composed.

The man released his arm from around Yun Wan and shoved her hard. “What are you so proud of?” he snarled. “Nothing I hate more than spoiled little princesses like you. You are all going to end up as the True Immortal’s nourishment anyway.”

“I’ll let you sisters have one last chat.”

Yun Wan stumbled and was pushed to Yun Zhiyi’s side.

The man’s gaze was ugly, and his character uglier still. He wanted to give the two sisters one final reunion, to offer them hope, and then drive them into an even deeper despair.

Yun Wan wept continuously, saying over and over that she should never have suggested they come visit the film set.

The three girls huddled together for warmth in the all-encompassing cold.

Nearby, Xiong Xiong was sweating so hard his forehead was dripping with anxiety. He had already crushed the Yin stone to pieces. The ice around his body was melting rapidly and he was practically lying in a puddle of water, which was the only reason the two men on the other side had not noticed him, too busy ogling the girls with their brains gone to mush.

The communicator’s effective range was only ten kilometers to begin with, and beyond fifty the signal began to cut in and out. Whatever this ritual site was, it blocked signals with unnerving thoroughness. He was holding his breath so hard his face had gone red, but the signal remained faint at best. He had no idea whether backup would be able to reach them in time.

Then there was the rope. It carried heavy Yin energy and ghost energy; ordinary means could not cut through it. He himself could probably break free, but what about all these girls?

The two men seemed to have received some kind of signal. They suddenly moved.

One walked over to the stone door. The other made straight for Yun Wan, cursing under his breath as he reached out to grab her. “If you don’t want to die in here, you come with me. Once that door shuts, it won’t matter whether you are a virgin or not.”

Yun Wan was seized.

She looked up at the man with eyes full of tears.

Yun Wan was genuinely beautiful. The sight of her with tears brimming in her eyes was heart-stirring in every sense, and the woman seemed already on the verge of giving in. He could feel two soft things pressing faintly against his arm.

If the timing had been better, he would have taken her right here and been done with it.

The pity of it was that though Yun Wan was beautiful, her younger cousin was even more beautiful. Too bad she was a virgin, set aside as an offering for the True Immortal.

Thinking this, the man dragged his greedy, nauseating gaze across Yun Zhiyi’s face, then turned and headed for the exit with Yun Wan in his arms.

At that very moment, a tremendous boom rang out like the sky itself was splitting open. The ice columns in the great central pit began to crack apart, inch by inch, and two streaks of light, one red and one white, leapt up from within the pit.

Looking closely, they were two human figures.

One was dressed in a white Taoist robe. The other was dressed in a red bridal gown.

The one in the red bridal gown seemed to carry some strange and magnetic pull. The moment the two men laid eyes on him, the one by the door forgot to close it, and the one carrying Yun Wan stopped in his tracks. Both stared blankly, as though their three hun souls and seven po souls had all drifted away with the sight of him.

“What the hell, what the hell, what the HELL! This rotten thing actually killed this many people!”

The red bridal gown spoke. It was unmistakably Gao Gusheng.

Gao Gusheng spotted the standing man in one glance, and the woman he was holding, who looked like it might be Yun Zhiyi’s cousin?

Yun Wan’s nose was red-tipped, her eyes full of tears, clearly there against her will. The moment Gao Gusheng saw it, his anger found an outlet at last. He launched himself forward and delivered one flying kick.

Gao Gusheng had put every ounce of his strength into that kick. The man was sent flying and hit the ground unconscious.

The other man tried to run. Ying Bujie knocked him out cold.

White spiritual energy flickered in Ying Bujie’s hand, breaking apart into hundreds of points of light that sank into the bodies of everyone present. The girls began to come around quickly.

“Sister Yun, are you alright?”

Seeing that Yun Zhiyi was still in her pyjamas, Gao Gusheng thought to take off his outer layer and give it to them to cover up. It was the middle of winter and thick pyjamas were not exactly indecent, but they were still pyjamas. He reached to take off his coat, then looked down and realized for the first time that he was still wearing the bridal gown.

Whoever designed this wretched gown, he had no idea. The whole thing was held together by a single waist sash. If he took it off, he would have to take the whole thing off, and end up sprinting around in the nude.

Gao Gusheng: …

Everything had happened in such a rush that Daoist Ying was only wearing a thin layer too. He could hardly ask Daoist Ying to go bare-shouldered.

“Let me untie you first.”

He took out a small wooden knife and had barely moved to cut the ropes when…

“Lele?”

Someone called his name.

Gao Gusheng turned around and saw Xiong Xiong, and suddenly understood exactly how his father had felt upon seeing his makeup for the first time.

That was really spicy.

Gao Gusheng blinked, eyes watering from the heat.

He handed the wooden knife to Yun Wan and asked her to untie Yun Zhiyi and the others.

“Uncle Xiong, you went undercover in here?”

“Yes, but my signal is terrible here.”

The ropes were not yet undone. Xiong Xiong shifted over with difficulty and held out the communicator in his hand. “This is…”

Before he could finish, another tremendous boom rang out. As though facing a blazing sun, golden light flooded in from nowhere, illuminating the entire gloomy ritual site in a blaze of gold, suffusing everything with warmth. Even the massive blocks of ice in the pit began to slowly melt.

Gao Gusheng shot to his feet. “Dad?”

He glanced over at Ying Bujie and saw that Ying Bujie’s brow had smoothed, his expression as though he were looking upon an old friend.

In the blink of an eye, Ying Bujie returned to his usual blank-faced composure. His voice was steady, yet it resonated through the entire ritual site.

“The calamity has passed. Please enter the cycle of reincarnation.”

A black vortex appeared before him. Following his words, countless female ghosts crawled up out of the great pit, and then walked, step by step, toward Ying Bujie.

Some had shattered skulls. Some had missing limbs. Some had broken spines. It was as though a hundred ghosts were walking in the night.

They passed through the living girls who had been brought here bound, like the crossing of a threshold between life and death.

As they moved, they gradually shed the ghastly appearances of their final moments and became as they had been in life. They bowed in the direction of the flickering golden light, then bowed again toward Ying Bujie, and one by one stepped into the black vortex.

Yun Zhiyi watched as the girl she had searched so desperately for turned to look in her direction. Her eyes were like the surface of a lake in sunlight, shimmering and bright. She raised a hand and waved.

Reading her lips, it looked like she was saying: goodbye.

Yun Zhiyi’s tears blurred her vision.

That girl had been gentle and earnest. Once, Yun Zhiyi had run into her while she was picking out something for her boyfriend, her eyes full of a warm and hopeful happiness.

Yun Zhiyi blinked rapidly and said softly, “Goodbye.”

In that very moment, the world spun.

She suddenly fell backward.

With the ice in the great pit now melted, what remained was a bottomless chasm. Even setting aside whatever else might be at the bottom, the drop alone was enough to kill a person on impact.

Time seemed to slow. Yun Zhiyi saw her cousin Yun Wan looking at her, eyes cold and indifferent, a trace of frenzied excitement poorly concealed beneath them.

The hand that had pushed her had not yet pulled back.

In that instant, every single moment of the journey flashed through Yun Zhiyi’s mind.

The strange WeChat message. The room packed up so neatly. The milk. The door opened with a key. The desperate cry for help in a hopeless moment. The rope she had tried to gnaw through for so long without success.

So the one who had wanted to harm her was her own cousin.

In midair, Yun Zhiyi wrenched herself over in a violent spin, head down and feet up, trying to kick off the pit wall and use it to launch herself back up.

But the wall was perfectly smooth. How was she to find any leverage?

Yun Wan was startled by her movement. A flash of viciousness crossed her eyes. She let out a cry of alarm, reaching out as though to grab Yun Zhiyi’s hand, but using her body as cover to shove her further down.

Her whole body was bound. She had no way to dodge. She was moments away from plunging all the way to the bottom of the pit, when a gust of wind brushed across her cheek and Tian Mian clamped her teeth down hard on Yun Zhiyi’s pyjama collar.

Yun Zhiyi’s fall stopped.

Tian Mian had exceptional teeth, neat and strong and pretty.

She could bite down on anything she wanted to hold onto.

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