The Invincible Bodyguard Starting by Escorting the Doomsday Imperial Princess Chapter 81 : Chapter 81

Chapter 81: Uncanny Fiend Possession!

Luo Li thought it over carefully and suddenly understood. Her eyes lit up.

“Brother Chen, what you an is that we can only enter the town while ‘Yin’ is in effect, and then, while they force us to carry out tasks, we exploit the loopholes in their rules?”

“Mhm. Now that sounds more like it.”

Chen Guan nodded, a trace of gratification appearing in his eyes, before adding another reminder.

“Wait until nightfall first.”

He looked once more at the setting sun, which was about to sink below the horizon, and a faint sneer curled at the corner of his lips.

“You dragged into your rules to play gas?”

“Fine, then. Thanks for gifting a Ten Thousand Deaths, No Retreat!”

…

At the sa ti.

Outside the rule-bound strange tale—Wanci Town.

Or rather, it should now be called the real Wanci Town.

At the eastern end of the town stood a small temple.

The temple had been built from an unknown gray-white stone, but anyone who often dealt with corpses and bones could tell at a glance that it had actually been built from tens of thousands of white bones.

Thick moss covered the roof tiles, forming one twisted, agonized human face after another.

And yet, despite being such a strange temple, incense offerings never ceased before its gates, and its worshippers ca and went in an endless stream.

Even more bizarrely, the lintel above the entrance was bare. There was no plaque, no na.

The townspeople were all accustod to calling it “Ci’an Temple.”

According to legend, as long as one kowtowed here with sincere devotion and made a grand vow, then no matter what one asked for, the deity in the temple would help them without refusing even ten thousand deaths.

At that mont, inside an eastern side room of the temple, an old man sat cross-legged in dry stillness.

This old man was the master of Ci’an Temple.

The townspeople knew nothing of his past and nothing of his origins. They only knew that, ever since they could rember, an old man surnad Ci had always lived in the temple.

Everyone in town affectionately called him Grandpa Ci.

“Creak—”

The door was gently pushed open.

A man and a woman walked in from outside, with a scholar holding a folding fan following behind them.

The man was exceptionally burly, with knotted muscles like those of an upright bear. A savage scar stretched from the corner of his mouth all the way to the back of his ear, lending his presence an added asure of brutality and violence.

As for the woman, she looked to be only a little over twenty, yet possessed a mature, curving figure, and every part of her radiated a wild, seductive charm.

But the true leader was the scholar at the rear, dressed in a Confucian robe and looking refined and scholarly.

His face was as fair as jade, his bearing elegant, and a white-jade folding fan swayed lightly in his hand, making him look like the polished young master of a noble clan.

This man was nad Zhang Wen.

Not many people in the jianghu might recognize that na.

But if one ntioned his other nickna—the Uncanny-Fate Scholar—even a three-year-old child would likely stop crying on the spot in fright, and many wandering heroes of the jianghu would spend the whole night sleepless and tornted by nightmares!

This man was one of the four Grand Elders of the underground organization Tai’an Hall within the Great Zhou Imperial Dynasty, a figure whose na struck terror into all who heard it—Zhang Wen, the Uncanny-Fate Scholar, who specialized in uncanny assassinations.

He gave the folding fan in his hand a light shake, then bent slightly toward the old man sitting motionless before him and asked with a smile,

“Elder Ci, how is the situation inside?”

The old man known as Grandpa Ci slowly opened his eyes.

Bizarrely, there were no pupils in his sockets at all, only a murky gray-white blur, like two cloudy glass marbles.

He “looked” at Zhang Wen with those hollow eyes and asked in a puzzled voice, “Weren’t ten people supposed to enter Wanci? Why have I only sensed two?”

“Two?” The folding fan swaying in Zhang Wen’s hand abruptly stopped.

He imdiately turned toward the burly man behind him and said, “Go investigate. What happened? Could it be that the people assigned to receive Her Highness never found her?”

The burly man cupped his fists and, without the slightest hesitation, turned and strode out at once.

Zhang Wen continued, “What are the cultivation levels of those two?”

Elder Ci grinned hideously. “Her Highness is only at the Xiantian Realm. It’s just that... as for the other one, even this old man cannot quite see through him. Still, judging from his blood vitality, he should be no more than twenty years old!”

“Not even twenty?” Zhang Wen gave a dry laugh. “Then that’s fine. At most, a twenty-year-old could only have reached the Subtle Insight Realm.”

“Heh, that old bastard Su Jingyan still counts as soone who keeps to the rules. He didn’t let her step onto the path of cultivation and ruin our plans. Good. Very good.”

“Pavilion Master, that ‘Her Highness’ does not understand cultivation. Since the people we arranged never led her in, I fear this carefully prepared trial... will not be easy for her to complete.”

The voluptuous woman beside him frowned as she spoke.

Zhang Wen turned his head slightly. The folding fan in his hand began swaying once again, and inscrutable light flickered in his eyes.

“No, Xiao Jing. You are mistaken.”

“On the contrary, she has actually... already completed our trial.”

“Hm?!” Xiao Jing froze when she heard that. Though confusion filled her heart, her fear of Zhang Wen kept her from asking further.

Zhang Wen seed to enjoy this feeling of controlling everything, and he explained at an unhurried pace.

“In truth, the trial of Ten Thousand Deaths, No Retreat appears to test her disposition and thods, but in reality, it is even more of a transformation.”

“For the past sixteen years, under Su Jingyan’s guidance, what she learned was only the surface. The truly important things—those are what she must begin learning now.”

“And that task will be cultivated by our Tai’an Hall.”

Even after that explanation, Xiao Jing still looked as though she were listening through a fog.

But the old man who had been sitting there in dry stillness all this ti was filled with anticipation behind those pupil-less eyes.

He had prepared for this mission for a full hundred years, painstakingly forging a road of slaughter for Luo Li.

As long as she followed the road they had laid out, the fate of Great Zhou would begin its final countdown.

“Mr. Zhang,” Elder Ci asked in that hoarse voice of his.

“Once this old man completes this task, will the Hall Master grant a grand temple?”

Zhang Wen nodded, a gentle smile hanging on his face.

“Rest assured, Elder Ci. I, the Uncanny-Fate Scholar, have always kept my word.”

“For the sake of our plan, you have waited here in bitter silence for a hundred years. You can be counted the greatest contributor in all of Taiping Pavilion. It is ti for you to leave this town.”

“And naturally, the incense temple you receive will not be a small one.”

Grandpa Ci was far more than a re temple keeper. He was a genuine fiend thrall, a man who had lived for well over a hundred years.

A so-called fiend thrall

was created by using a special secret technique to parasitize a human onto the rules of an Uncanny Fiend, rging the two into one.

Aside from allowing the fiend to be bound and used in one’s sches, the greatest benefit was that one could gain a lifespan nearly equal to that of the Uncanny Fiend itself. So long as the rules did not shatter, they could live forever without dying.

They were both the caretakers of the rules they parasitized and, in practical terms, the true carriers of those strange-tale rules.

Wherever he went, the Uncanny Fiend could go as well!

This was also the only way to control an Uncanny Fiend.

And likewise, it was one of the absolute trump cards in Tai’an Pavilion’s hand, sothing they would never use lightly.

As for this “Ten Thousand Deaths, No Retreat,” it was a powerful Uncanny Fiend that Tai’an Pavilion had captured a hundred years ago only after paying an enormous price, then hidden until today by letting Elder Ci lodge himself within it as a concealed card.

“Still, at this most critical mont, please do not let your guard down.”

“That is only natural.”

Grandpa Ci nodded expressionlessly, then added at the end, “That thing has been nourished by incense offerings for more than a hundred years. No one understands its rules better than I do.”

“Although that little girl will not face any danger to her life, if she wishes to walk out from inside, then she must use the blood of the common people to establish human law. Other than that, there is no second way.”

“Have they... found that way to break the deadlock yet?”