The bronze beast-mask swallowed the moon, and the mournful strains of a broken bone ocarina drifted through the icy winds of the abyss. Su Jiuli’s residual ashes swept across the peeling shamanic scripts on the stone walls. Suddenly, the Netherworld Decree Mark on her wrist began to undulate like a swimming tadpole, its dark red patterns crawling into the fissures of the rock, scorching into existence the "Soul-Guiding Manual," a lost legacy of the Celestial Fox lineage. As the ocarina’s melody turned frantic, nine ancient Celestial Fox corpses, wrapped in heavy bronze chains, burst from the earth. The broken halberds clutched in their cadaverous claws were rusted and jagged, and from the cracks in the metal, Ancestral Blood—sharing the same origin as her own—oozed out.
"Senior Sister, these are the true gravekeepers of Qingqiu..."
Lu Xiaopang’s phantom image seeped from the tip of a halberd, his withered fingers crushing a skull-carved ocarina. Amidst the flurry of bone dust, the corpses’ eye sockets snapped open, and three hundred Soul-Devouring Gu Insects surged from their pupils. Before the swarm could reach her, the sound of an ocarina rang out, shattering them into nothingness. Su Jiuli lowered her head, realizing that the broken ocarina in her hand was humming on its own. Blood drops leaking from the ocarina’s holes coalesced into a Star Orbit map, the end of which vanished into the bronze astrolabe embedded in the corpses' spines.
Chapter 165