Ye Man De looked at the remnants of his Northern Gate Guards. Only a couple had survived; the rest had turned to dust with the rest of the reanimated.
"I'm sorry, Guard Captain," the captain of the Wave Wolves patted his shoulder. There was nothing they could have done. None of them expected such a grotesque event. Still, he felt guilty that he couldn't prevent more deaths.
"Thank you, Cap...tain?" he ended his sentence in a question. In one moment, the captain of the Wave Wolf Squad was looking at him with a sympathetic gaze, the next moment, he was hit by a dark object and ripped away, crashing into the remnants of the northern gate.
Belatedly, Ye Man De turned to look where the Wave Wolf had gone. His shock only grew when they found that a black arrow had torn through the Peak Nascent Soul cultivator and nailed his lifeless corpse onto the other walls of the Ye Residence.
They had just talked, and now the captain silently stared into the distance with empty, bulging eyes. The black arrow, roughly two meters long, was releasing a black fog like flames. Before he could regain his bearings, the ground started rumbling.
With a sense of foreboding, he looked back at the forest. Far beyond the now withered tree, from the dense undergrowth that kept its luscious green, a new row of people appeared. he swallowed. These were distinctively different from the corpses before.
These were not skeletons or rotten commoners in ragged cloth. They were clad in metal plates and tightly wrought mail. They were clearly warriors. They moved with much more intent than the clumsy beasts earlier and showed trained coordination as they stormed toward them.
Ye Man De saw the same horror in the eyes of the Wave Wolf Squad and instinctively raised his arm. They had to alarm all combat squads. They had to give a signal. In his hand, he held a flare that would signal the whole Ye Family to mobilize.
But when he activated it, he found no flare was shot into the sky. He saw the cause before the pain reached his mind. His right hand, pointing to the sky, was gone. Only a bloody, jagged stump was left. Following the gaze of the Wave Wolves, he found the remnants of his hand pinned to the outer walls.
"They have an archer! Be careful! Someone fire a flare!" the second-in-command of the Wave Wolves exclaimed, cautioning his comrades.
"Gh," Man De suppressed the pain and quickly pressed several acupoints to stop the bleeding. Around him, the Wave Wolf Squad realized what was happening, yet many were still unable to completely evade the black projectiles.
They didn't suffer the same fate as their captain, but they suffered various wounds where the graze shots took chunks of flesh out of them. Especially people who raised their hands to fire flares were targeted, just like Ye Man De.
"Retreat behind the walls! Quick! "
There were too many projectiles; it couldn't be just one archer. Man De was already on his way when he heard the vice-leader give the command to his people. Up ahead, he found flares rising to the sky. The injured members of the Northern Gate Guard who had already returned noticed the situation and proved quick-thinking.
Even when the enemy archers managed to stop those who were outside, they failed to stop the people behind the walls. The Ye Family's forces would soon arrive. Their opponent would quickly realize that they had poked the wrong beehive!
In his mind, there was no way anyone would knowingly attack the Ye Family. It had to be an ignorant foreigner. Maybe an expert from another province was paid to attack this place without knowing what he was doing. But even if they were just a disposable pawn, they would not experience any mercy for their deeds today.
Ye Man De cleared the broken northern gate, relief washing over him. He was in safety, at least from the- before he could take cover behind the damaged outer wall, he felt a searing pain in his abdomen. The world turned into colorful streaks as he suddenly accelerated forward.
"Was this what the Wave Wolf Captain saw last?" A fleeting thought passed through his mind as he saw a warehouse charge at him. He finally lost consciousness in a storm of pain.
...
"The doom archers are really packing a punch, huh?" Edward commented, watching an arrow instantly taking out the only lv.113 Cultivator on the field.
"But what about his Nascent Soul?" he asked. Apparently, the death of the body was not the end for a Nascent Soul Cultivator. He would have a hard time surviving and making a comeback, but he was not necessarily dead.
"No need to worry. I studied the nature of their Nascent Soul for a while. Why do you think I went through the trouble of setting up the Land of the Dead?" Evee answered with a self-satisfied smirk. Before Edward could ask another question, she pointed at the body pinned to the wall.
The body of the Nascent Soul Realm cultivator in blue robes suddenly started squirming before ripping his mouth wide open. What escaped from his throat was no human scream. it was an ear-shattering wail, the screech of a beast that was in the middle of losing its mind.
"What in the world?" the faer knight mumbled at the sight. He had never heard any of Evee's undead screech like that. It made his skin crawl even at this distance. The man's skin had turned pale like snow.
"This world," she corrected him. " You just witnessed the birth of the first undead completely unique to this world," the immortal witch revealed to her brother. The Land of the Dead was not simply a way to create a zone that empowered the undead.
It was a place that also forced all living things that lost their lives to return as undead. In normal cases, it could not break the cycle of souls, which meant that only the lingering remnants of souls would be bound to the body to revive it as an undead.
"In the case of a cultivator, their sentient Nascent Soul that should have been able to leave behind the damaged or dead body, is forcefully bound to it, leading to the cultivator using their mind, as a living quasi soul is reconnected to rotting flesh," the immortal witch explained the process.
"How in the world do you know that!? You didn't... experiment on that, right?" Edward asked, a little unsure of what to think. He had little sympathy for these people, but doing something like this as an experiment on a prisoner or something seemed too inhumane.
"Hey! Who do you think I am?" she asked, offended. " Haa'Skon found two of these idiots rampaging in the mountains in the direction of Gamma, where Arget Nore's former land of the Dead is. This was simply the most logical explanation after doing some research," she said with a huff.
Down below, the curltivator-turned-undead ripped the arrow from his chest with pure, unbridled force and another bone-rattling screech. The moment his feed touched the ground, he charged inside through the gate and attacked the next best guard.
The man was too shocked by the actions of his former comrade to react, and the undead cultivator cut him to ribbons with a single strike. Although Edward couldn't see any claws, its victim was clearly falling to the ground in pieces.
"As you can see, these guys show the same most primal characteristics as the natural undead that sometimes are created by an over-saturation of mana. It's an insatiable hate for the living. They are so ferocious that only Haa'Skon could control them properly. At least they won't attack me or my undead, so they aren't a problem for us." Evee continued to explain, still a little peeved.
"That means any nascent soul guy that dies on the land of the dead will turn into such a ... thing?" Edward asked with a swallow. Although they didn't really pose a threat to them, it was still a disconcerting thing to think about.
"You are thinking too shallow. Not just Nascent Soul Cultivators have nascent souls. With some luck, we won't even have to set foot down there."