Stranger Danger

Chapter 712: Corpse Spirit

The serial-killing case would come to be known as the Stitched Corpse Case.

At first, the murders happened only once every three to five months. As most of the victims were nobodies, the case failed to draw the attention of the higher-ups.

Later, the murders grew more and more frequent. At first, it happened only once every three to five months. Then, it happened once every one to two months. Finally, it happened multiple times per month.

The victims were no longer just nobodies either. Male, female, the old, the young, lowly scum or high nobility, at least one person from every class had fallen victim to the murderer.

As if that wasn’t enough, the murderer had openly displayed the corpses he sewed together perfectly in all sorts of ways.

Some bodies were openly displayed in a market.

Some were hung on the city walls.

Some were splayed on the busiest streets.

One body was even left at the center of the throne room of Yan.

The entire world was stunned by the murderer’s sheer audacity. It was as if he wanted the entire world to admire his handiwork.

If the murderer’s killing was a challenge to Yan’s laws and the imperial court’s power, then his corpse-stitching was a blasphemy against human nature itself.

That was the point where the Stitched Corpse Case reached its highest point in Yan. Everyone was scared, and the Emperor of Yan was enraged. He personally ordered a nationwide search for the murderer.

However, the murderer of the Stitched Corpse Case proved to be exceptionally cunning. Not only did they leave zero traces behind at the crime scene, there was no pattern behind their killing at all. The officials of the Three Judicial Offices could not find even a single clue despite a long search.

Realizing that the consequences would be catastrophic if the serial-killing case wasn’t resolved soon, the enraged Emperor of Yan finally employed his almighty power to perform a divination and pluck out the truth from the rivers of fate itself. He succeeded and determined that the murderer was none other than the no-name mortician working in the Morgue of the Bureau of Punishments, Cui Qiuyuan.

Unfortunately, by the time the murderer was finally determined, they discovered that Cui Qiuyuan had left the imperial capital behind a long time ago.

Furious beyond imagination, the Emperor of Yan not only ordered a nation-wide bounty for Cui Qiuyuan, but also took out his anger on the Cui Clan. He reprimanded them for improper conduct and demoted several high-ranking officials in the Cui Clan in one sitting. To this day, the Cui Clan still hadn’t recovered from their fall from grace.

The story did not end with Cui Qiuyuan’s capture, however. No, it was the opposite. Every attempt to detain Cui Qiuyuan, dead or alive, had ended in failure. Some of the elites sent to detain Cui Qiuyuan were Grandmasters too.

The reason was simple. Cui Qiuyuan himself was a powerful Grandmaster, and the corpses he stitched together weren’t just flawless and pretty to look at. No, they were incredibly powerful puppets in their own right.

With his corpses and his own strength, Cui Qiuyuan was able to defeat or kill every elite who was sent to arrest him. He easily made it out of Yan, and for a time, there was no one under the heavens who didn’t know his name.

Since then, the imperial court lost a mortician, and the jianghu gained a new one.

It should not need to be said, but Cui Qiuyuan had only gotten more reckless since he entered the jianghu, killing and stitching corpses wherever he went. He eventually came to be known as the Mortician and ranked on the Earth Champions Ranking.

The four beautiful women accompanying him right now were corpses Cui Qiuyuan had personally stitched together. He called them Corpse Spirits.

A corpse was dead, and a spirit was beautiful.

Cui Qiuyuan was a sick man. He believed that all humans in the world were flawed in some way, and his dream was to create a perfect, flawless human. That was why he kept killing and dismembering people and stitching their body parts together. It was to create the most perfect corpse the world had ever seen.

Cui Qiuyuan’s horrific crimes aside, there was no denying that the corpses he stitched were perfect and beautiful like an art piece. It was also why people called his corpses “Corpse Spirits” instead of the more generic corpse puppets.

Of course, Cui Qiuyuan’s Corpse Spirits wasn’t just perfect in terms of appearance. They were quite powerful in their own right as well. It was why Cui Qiuyuan was able to roam the jianghu unhindered.

Take the four Corpse Spirits currently accompanying Cui Qiuyuan for example. They had successfully suppressed a Sage without him needing to enter the battlefield himself. Sure, the Sage was long dead, but his will was still present. That wasn’t something just anyone could overcome, not Ye Qing at his current strength at least.

After Cui Qiuyuan climbed out of his coffin, he walked up to the headless Sage with unbridled excitement in his eyes. “Perfect. Just perfect. He is dead, but his physical body hasn’t given away to decay, nor has his spiritual qi dissipated in the slightest. He will be one of the best materials I’ve ever had the opportunity to work on!”

“With this body, I will create a better Corpse Spirit—no, no, I will create the most perfect Corpse Spirit in the world!”

“Kekekekeke!”

Cui Qiuyuan laughed boisterously while wearing a sick smile on his face.

“Have you seen my head?”

It was at this moment a cold, quiet voice rang right beside Cui Qiuyuan’s ear like the murmur of death. Every hair on his body stood on end as he cut his own laughter short and appeared ten meters away from his original position.

Not a moment too soon, the White Bone Stakes and Celestial Suppressing Nails used to suppress the headless Sage exploded all at once. At the same time, the heads of four Corpse Spirits turned reverse clockwise twice before jumping into the headless Sage’s hands.

“My Corpse Spirits! You bastard!”

Cui Qiuyuan felt like someone just stabbed him in the heart. It had taken him years of hard work and the body parts of at least a dozen Grandmasters to finally create the four Corpse Spirits. To this end, he had killed even more Grandmasters and offended many powerful factions.

Not only that, Cui Qiuyuan had refined parts of their bodies into Strange Artifacts to further improve his Corpse Spirits’ strength. For example, he had refined their hair into the Corpse Binding Rope, hid a White Bone Stake inside their body, and stored a Celestial Suppressing Nail in their mouths. Thanks to his modifications, every single Corpse Spirit was as strong as a Grandmaster, and they were especially effective against dead spirit-type Strangers. If they worked together, they could even go head to head against a Great Grandmaster, a.k.a Grandmasters who had attained perfection in the Trueman stage.

But now, The headless Sage had twisted their necks and ripped off their heads. Of course his heart ached at the loss.

“This isn’t my head...”

Unfortunately, the headless Sage wasn’t going to give him time to mourn his loss. The headless Sage let out another sigh and asked, “Can you please lend me your head?”

When the headless Sage said, “This isn’t my head,” a powerful wave of resentment washed out of him like a tsunami.

When he said, “Can you please lend me your head?” he appeared behind Cui Qiuyuan faster than the eye could blink and ripped off his head.

As Cui Qiuyuan’s headless body collapsed to the ground, Ye Qing wondered, Is he dead?

He quickly shook his head and frowned deeply. No way. He’s the forty-fourth warrior on the Earth Champions Ranking, the Mortician. There is no way he would die this easily.

As if on cue, a furious voice came from inside the black coffin, “Good. Very good. You’ve successfully pissed me off.”

A blast of energy threw the coffin lid into the air, and an unbelievable amount of death qi leaked into the surroundings. At the same time, Corpse Spirits climbed out of the coffin one after another.

There were male, female, old, young, tall, short. Corpse Spirits of all shapes and sizes crawled out of the black coffin. However, they all shared one thing in common, and that was they were all flawless and incredibly powerful. They looked like gods or celestials who had walked out of a painting.

Those who hadn’t witnessed them climbing out of the coffin with their own eyes would never believe that they were really corpses sewn from multiple body parts.

What happened next felt like something that should only exist in a painting as well.

A Corpse Spirit wielded a sword whose powerful sword qi seemed to encompass the nine provinces.

A Corpse Spirit wielded fists that roared like dragons.

Another Corpse Spirit wielded palms that shook the earth.

A fourth Corpse Spirit muttered incantations that brought forth yin wind and rolling thunder.

A fifth Corpse Spirit drew runes to summon countless ghosts and demons...