Please Stop Talking...

"Burp." To shut the two of them up, Qi Dian had ordered a jumbo portion of fried chicken and cola, and one meal had Old Man Huang stuffed so full he kept belching. Only when the night had deepened did the old man finally shuffle out of the hut. "I'm off, then. You two work hard now. Little Qi, there's a Yel— in the drawer..." "Old sir, off you go—the scooter outside is going to get impatient waiting." Yue Wen hurriedly gave him a shove, cutting the incantation short. Once the old man was gone, Yue Wen turned back to Qi Dian. "Then I'll take charge of the Lantern Wraiths here. Thank you for making way, Brother Qi." "No trouble at all." Qi Dian stayed as coldly aloof as ever. There was fog over the eastern outskirts tonight. A thin film of white mist curled through the cemetery, and the atmosphere turned grimmer still. Half the graveyard had been cleared the night before, and new yin creatures would not spring up again so soon, so Yue Wen went straight to the other half, beyond the slope. Ghost fire had already cropped up there in fresh clusters. These days it was not easy to find evil entities in the city that you could just beat up at your leisure. The wasteland zone outside was crawling with demons, true, but his current strength did not yet allow him to venture out. So Yue Wen treasured these hard-won Lantern Wraiths all the more. He bounded forward and cut them down, one stroke apiece, without a hint of wasted motion. The Lantern Wraiths, claws and fangs flailing, were reduced in a blink to two lumps of smoking wreckage. He ran a rough calculation: clear out every Lantern Wraith in the whole cemetery and he could pocket thirty-odd evil-suppressing coins—quite a respectable income. By value for effort, chopping Lantern Wraiths might actually beat fighting the bigger demons and evil entities. These things carried zero risk, came in swarms, and regenerated without end. Easy to kill, easy on the body. Good and economical. Yue Wen was already mulling over contacting the city's other cemeteries when he got back, to pick up more lantern-wraith-clearing jobs. By just past midnight, Yue Wen at full throttle had all but finished the entire graveyard. The few Lantern Wraiths still left were spread far apart; he had to put on the demon-revealing mirror and track them down carefully through the yin energy, to guarantee not one escaped the purge. The moment the mirror settled over his eyes, Yue Wen sensed that something was off. No demonic aura had appeared tonight, true—but he discovered that the yin energy around him was many times denser than it had been the night before. Gray tides of fog saturated the land in every direction! Every time the gray fog stirred, gusts of yin wind swept through. This made no sense. It was normal for a cemetery to hold yin energy, but that yin energy mingled with the spiritual qi and the wraith-things, and it faded away as the wraith-things were cleared out. With most of the Lantern Wraiths already cleaned up by Yue Wen, the place ought to stay clear for a while. Yet the yin energy was growing thicker by the minute. There could only be one reason for that. Something carrying abundant yin energy had arrived. "This cemetery really is a lively place..." Yue Wen muttered, sweeping his gaze around for the direction where the yin energy hung heaviest. If he had truly come here to clear evil entities for money, he ought to find this maddening... grinding away overtime every day for a couple of measly coins. Unbelievable. But right now Yue Wen felt nothing but excitement. As he was sizing up the situation, the yin energy kept thickening, and the yin winds howling through the cemetery rose to a wail. Then, all at once, a ripple of spiritual power pulsed through the unseen. Pop— A withered, shrunken hand shot up out of the ground right in front of Yue Wen! "Hm?" His expression sharpened. "Corpse reanimation? No—someone is using sorcery to stir up the corpses buried beneath the earth!" With a grinding crunch from the ground, corpses burst out of the soil one after another—some mangled, some whole! Dead, and risen again! Their mouths gave off shrill whimpers and wails. Heads hanging, they did not attack Yue Wen standing nearby, as if they possessed no perception at all. They simply shambled off in one and the same direction, in a strange, twisted posture. Yue Wen looked toward that spot. After a moment's thought, he twisted his own body about and, copying the way those corpses moved—head drooping, arms and legs askew—he slipped into the crowd of corpses and shuffled along with them, mumbling just as they did: "Wai bi ba bu, xi ba xi ba..." Someone had stirred up a commotion this big. He fully intended to see exactly who it was! ... On the western side of the cemetery, at the rim of an earthen rise among the trees, stood a black-clad figure. He was a tall, lanky man in an unmarked black athletic suit, his face swallowed by an oversized hood, only a faint hint of a hooked nose showing beneath it. Beside him stood a long, great banner. As he pinched his hand seals and drove it, the banner snapped and billowed, and it was from here that the ocean-deep yin energy poured forth. Waves of it rolled out in swells, flooding the entire cemetery and waking the corpses that had lain beneath the ground for no great length of time. Beneath his feet, intricate formation patterns spread out like a spiderweb. When a person dies, some residue of mental force always lingers; even in ordinary folk whose souls are feeble, that last trace takes about seven days to fade away completely. The sorcery he was working now clearly drew upon every fresh corpse in the cemetery that still held residual mental force, binding them into something like puppets—enough to let them perform a few simple movements. The Corpse-Summoning Art. One word of command, and a hundred corpses walk the night! In less than five minutes, the recently buried dead of the cemetery had all assembled on the open ground below the rise, packed shoulder to shoulder—one glance was enough to turn your blood cold. Yue Wen was mixed in among them, and just as he had reckoned, beneath that overwhelming tide of yin energy his aura of the living was thoroughly concealed. Seeing this great wave of corpses arrayed in formation, the black-clad man on the rise let out a sinister snicker—then flipped his wrist and pulled out... a phone. He opened his chat app, tapped record, and panned the camera from left to right across the corpses as he spoke: "Boss, take a look. The job is going smoothly. Everyone buried in East City Cemetery lately is here—quite a lot of them. Many of the corpses are too mangled for photos to tell anything apart, so just give me the target's name. One call from me, and he'll step out of the ranks." He sent the video over, and the reply came back within seconds—two words. The black-clad man read them, put his phone away, and, looking down on the corpse ranks below, intoned in a grave voice: "The Law springs from impermanence; my edict is named Yin and Yang! Whosoever bears the name I call, step forward one pace... Zhang Wei!" As he unleashed his power, the whole host of corpses began swaying their heads, trembling with an eerie restlessness. The instant the name rang out, a dozen-odd corpses jolted all over at once, as if receiving an order, and stepped forward in unison! Thump. A row of perfectly synchronized steps stamped out a single muffled boom. "..." The black-clad man seemed briefly at a loss for words. Then he took out his phone again and sent a voice message: "Boss, do you have anything more? There are a dozen-odd Zhang Weis here... I can't haul all of them back for you, can I? Make it information tied as closely as possible to things he did before he died—otherwise what's left of his spirit may no longer respond." A few seconds later, another message came back at once. "Heh heh." The black-clad man sneered, then gave the command again: "The Law springs from impermanence; my edict is named Yin and Yang! Whosoever matches my words, step forward one pace... Zhang Wei, who was working unpaid overtime at his company right up to his death!" At his shout, after a brief stir, half of the dozen-odd Zhang Weis who had stepped out before now took another pace forward! The black-clad man gazed at the six or seven corpses standing before him, brow knotted tight, and muttered, "Capitalists these days really ought to die." He sent the other side another voice message: "Plenty of them did overtime before dying, too. Anything more? Something like the deceased's lifelong obsession, for instance." Only after a good while did another reply come back. "This one should be it, right?" The black-clad man raised his head and declared once more: "Whosoever matches my words, step forward one pace... Zhang Wei, who worked overtime at the company day in and day out and went his whole life without ever once having a girlfriend—a single dog from the cradle!" "Wai bi ba bu, boo-hoo!" At his command, four corpses came shambling out, howling with a sobbing note in their voices! Listen closely to that wai-bi-ba-bu babbling, and it was clearly saying: Please, stop talking... "Damn it, are you lot ever done?" The black-clad man's composure cracked clean through. "What kind of world is this? How is there more than one person this miserable?" And Yue Wen, hidden within the ranks, noticed that one of the corpses was wearing overalls, its hair parted down the middle—and he suddenly remembered what Black Meow had said yesterday. The employer behind this black-clad man was after the very same person the three cat demons had been after yesterday! The black-clad man's emotions looked to be crumbling, and just as he was about to send the other side another message, a clear, sharp cry rang out from the distance. "You dare, heretical cultivator—"