Chapter 245: The Seat Ritual Battle Finally Truly Begins |
The moment Lu Yuan’s words, “we’ll change the name,” left his mouth, every light along the stone passage shivered as one.
It wasn’t that people heard and grew afraid, but that the malevolent worship sensed an affront.
The old methods from beyond the Great Wall treat names and records with supreme importance: in ordinary altars, ordinary seats, ordinary shadows, ordinary lamps, the gravest thing is not who sits above, but who is written in the ledger.
Change a name, and the path changes.
Alter a title, and the seat collapses into disorder.
There were no longer any living people in this formation; even the ledger-holder Zhao Deshun was nothing but a breath given a shell by malevolent arts.
Now that they were going to switch names, it wouldn’t be merely changing a person’s name, but swapping the names of all the evil puppets filling the altar—forcing them to misrecognize each other and strike themselves down.
Lu Yuan’s gaze sank like an old well. He knew the true decisive battle was only just about to begin.
“Zhao Deshun, obey my command.”
“You are not human, you don’t need to pretend to fear death.”
“Since you hold the ledger, hand over that false name on your breath and exchange it onto the altar.”
Zhao Deshun’s face went deathly pale, his lips trembling. “Ex-exchange it to whom?”
“To them.” Lu Yuan lifted a hand toward the coffin and the altar pit.
“The seat master, the lamp master, that embryonic altar-heart beneath—none of them hold true names.”
“I want you to take the ledger’s blank page and write: No-Surname Guest.”
Song Qinghe froze.
“No-surname guest?”
Lu Yuan did not dwell on explanations; he rushed through the steps.
“In old seats and old altars, they fear the nameless.”
“If someone has a surname they can claim ancestors, if they have a name they can be recorded and have a lamp lit. The nameless aren’t entered into the ledger; if not in the ledger, they receive no offerings.”
“They feed on reputation to take seats, they survive on seat-energy.”
“First I’ll cut off their famed households, then we’ll see whether they can still recognize one another.”
He produced from his breast a yellow slip of paper folded tightly. It was not exactly a talisman, more like an old temple’s sacrificial voucher—the edges brittle, with a single thin line of cinnabar characters across the middle reading: Name-Invitation Paper.
Lu Yuan placed the paper before Zhao Deshun and barked:
“Bite your fingertip, press the center of the paper.”
“Do not write your true surname.”
“Write ‘No’.”
“Start with the character ‘No’, then add ‘Guest’.”
“Remember, when you write, do not think of yourself.”
“Think only of the lamp, not of life.”
“Think only of the seat, not of the body.”
“Recite my charm!”
By now Zhao Deshun was already crushed under Zhou Heng’s sword intent, Lin Zhaoxuan’s thunder aura, and Song Qinghe’s sealing plate light. He dared not resist. trembling, he bit his finger and, with shaking hand, wrote the character “No” and then added “Guest” beside it.
Lu Yuan immediately pressed his fingers to the paper and quietly intoned a terse but perilous “Nameless Name Exchange Art”:
“Heaven has no surname, earth has no given name; hills and fields do not acknowledge old households. I exchange you a name with the character No.”
“Swap seats into chaos, snuff out lamps, people not entered in the ledger, ghosts not returning to graves.”
“Now a nameless guest enters the seat gate; former names scatter, later names sink.”
“Urgently, urgently, as by the law’s command!”
When the final word left his mouth, the name-inviting paper quivered by itself, and the cinnabar characters crawled as if alive.
They actually rearranged into the faint, hard-to-decipher two characters: No Guest.
“It worked!”
Song Qinghe whispered.
But in the next instant the overturned-seat lamp at the end of the stone passage flashed violently.
The lamp master’s face, previously a blue-gray, suddenly paled further as if a layer of skin had been stripped away from the inside, exposing a deeper, colder void.
He lifted the lamp and peered into the shade at the little curled figure of a hand, and the corner of his mouth tightened.
“You are dismantling the lamp-seat.”
The lamp master said softly.
Lu Yuan didn’t retreat but stepped forward with a cold smile.
“I’m taking apart this very lamp-seat of yours.”
“You wanted to enroll us in seats, didn’t you?”
“Now it’s your turn to examine what you truly are.”
The lamp master did not answer. He raised the overturned-seat lamp; its flame suddenly sank, shifting from that teal-black to a murky gray-white.
At once, the paper faces on every funeral banner along the stone passage began to crackle—like someone inside was pulling the face-skins down.
Zhou Heng’s expression changed. “It’s going to issue answers with the shadows!”
Sure enough, on the next breath the row of cinnabar-name paper shadows deep in the passage all trembled as one.
They seemed to come alive one after another; the dark lips slowly parted.
No human voice emerged, but a thin, sour, fingernail-on-wood low whine—like nails scraping a coffin board—spat from every shadow-mouth at the same time.
It was the “answering by name.”
In old altars, the most dangerous thing wasn’t the blade or thunder—it was “a shadow answering in your stead.”
“Don’t listen!”
Lu Yuan shouted fiercely. “This is shadow-answering for names!”
“Whoever answers, it writes them into the lower altar!”
Lin Zhaoxuan bit his tongue immediately, holding back blood in his mouth; he pressed the Thunderclap Token to his chest, clamping down on his ears.
Song Qinghe slammed the sealing plate onto the ground. The yin-yang fish’s cold light rolled, forming a thin ice-like shield three feet around their feet.
But the lamp master had already taken a step.
His stride was slow, but each footfall landed between the mouths of those opening shadows.
Where the lamp fire passed, the paper shadows seemed to be threaded forward and crept closer and closer to the coffin.
“Lu Dao-you!”
Song Qinghe’s voice trembled with urgency. “It’s going to drag all the shadows over!”
Cold light surged in Lu Yuan’s eyes.
“Then let it bring them.”
“The more it brings, the less the altar below can tell who’s above.”
He suddenly raised his left hand, fingers splayed, palm facing outward; in his right hand his short blade pressed to his palm, the coin in the blade’s spine glinting an unbroken red line.
Then he stepped the Yu Steps: left, then right, imprinting on the ground an odd “Reverse Big Dipper” pattern.
As he stepped he chanted:
“The Dipper turns and does not return south, stars sink and do not return north.”
“I invert the Seven-Star Step and fold your shadow path.”
“Front stars press back stars, back stars sever front stars.”
“If a lamp recognizes a shadow, the shadow will not recognize the lamp.”
“If a seat recognizes its master, the master will not recognize the body.”
“Heaven and earth flip a line, I reverse your shadow root!”
“Urgently, urgently, as by the law’s command!”
With each step, salt grains under his feet exploded into thin white ringlets like ice cracking. The cracks spread outward along the stone road, forcing the shadows being pulled by the lamp’s fire to hesitate.
But still it was not enough.
Lu Yuan knew that unless he could carve a tiny path of recognition-empty space between the seat master and the lamp master, the embryonic altar-heart below would seize that opening and rise to swallow all the altar energy at once.
He turned to Lin Zhaoxuan and barked:
“Lend me your thunder intent. Strike the lamp’s body, not its flame!”
“Hit the lamp’s bone!”
Lin Zhaoxuan blinked in surprise, then comprehension.
He reversed the Thunderclap Token, pointing its tail forward. With a palm tremor, the thunder patterns no longer struck straight but drove like nails into the brass lamp skeleton.
“Let thunder sing within the bone; bone singing will frighten the lamp!”
“I do not split the fire, I nail three inches of your lamp-bone!”
“Now!”
Four bluish-white thunder ribs hammered in with a reply, and the overturned-seat lamp hummed. The curled hand inside the shade shrank; immediately the fire on one side fell into disorder.
The lamp master’s eyes finally changed.
His smile remained gentle, but it had taken on a darker edge.
“Good technique,” he murmured.
“So you seek to sever not only seats’ names, but my lamp’s bone.”
Lu Yuan’s answer was cold. “You have no lamp bone; you only possess a borrowed shell.”
The lamp master laughed rather than getting angry.
“A shell?”
“Do you know what lies beneath the shell?”
No sooner had he spoken than the entire stone passage emitted a faint, long scraping sound.
As if something extremely heavy was being dragged up from the altar’s bottom.
Everyone’s scalp tingled.
A moment later, the black mud in the altar pit churned and slowly pushed up a hand.
It was not a human hand.
The fingers were long and unnaturally neat; the knuckles were wrapped with rings of blackened cinnabar threads.
The palm was hollow, as if something had been dug out from within.
When the hand reached the rim of the altar pit, a thick, rotten-smelling black mist burst out.
Then a second, a third hand pushed up through the black fog.
Four, eight, a dozen…
Like countless hands sealed under the altar, all clawing up through the crack between lamp master and seat master, racing to climb upward.
“The altar-heart embryonic is trying to possess!”
Lu Yuan’s gaze sharpened. “Everyone step back half a pace—don’t let it touch the shadows!”
Zhou Heng and Lin Zhaoxuan both retreated almost in unison. Song Qinghe shoved the sealing plate upward, but the shadows beneath their feet were swept by that black mist and nearly pinned them to the spot.
Lu Yuan drew a deep breath—there was no turning back now.
He formed the Ancestral-Inquiry hand sign with his left, and with his right he thrust his short blade into the center of the salt ring on the ground.
As the blade pierced the soil, the coin on its spine flared rouge-bright; it gouged a thin circular burn mark into the earth.
“Ancestral Fire Circle!”
“Rise!”
He spun his hands; the mud-swathed hand sign changed instantly into an “Open Altar, Cup the Fire” technique.
Palms facing one another, fingers like cradling a lamp, he lifted slowly as if plucking a formless ember from the earth.
He chanted:
“Altar-fire burns not the doorway, but burns what will not return to roots.”
“Burn your false lamp bone, burn your chaos of family names.”
“Fire rises from the human world, light divides the old altar.”
“One part light makes shadows recoil, two parts light sink the seats, three parts light burn the altar’s bones, four parts light touch your souls.”
“If fire truly takes the master, the evil seat will become dust.”
“Ancestral fire, shine!”
On the word “shine,” the coin-flare on the blade’s spine detonated.
A crimson-gold light first struck the seat master’s face. The old, gray skin cracked with a dry “pop,” like parched paper splitting under heat.
The beam then swung toward the lamp in the lamp master’s arms. The curled hand inside the shade stiffened; a black, bloodlike oil seeped between finger joints.
Finally the light plunged into the altar pit, landing on the cluster of copper nails, paper tags, red cords, and bone talismans.
At once many of these talismans began whitening at the edges, charring as if licked by a living flame from the inside.
Yet just as everyone thought the situation had been reversed, a low, extremely deep laugh echoed from the altar’s depths.
It was neither the seat master’s nor the lamp master’s voice.
This laugh was lower, older, emptier—like a voice exhaled from a century-old weight buried in the earth.
“Well shone.”
“Now that you’ve shined, I can come out.”
Lu Yuan’s expression changed in an instant.
He realized that the altar tapping, name-borrowing, lamp overturning, and shadow-lining had never been the true form of the thing inside.
They were merely shells it borrowed—altar shell, lamp shell, ledger pile.
The real entity had always been at the very bottom.
It was not the seat master or the lamp master, nor those shadow seats,
but something that had been suppressed under two altar clamps, cinnabar threads, old-seat offerings, and infant bones for countless years…
“The Altar-Ritual Spirit Main Seat.”
As the hands parted left and right, the black fog split.
A face slowly rose from the earth.
It had no white paper, no mask, no lamp-shadow—only layers of old flesh crusted with incense ash, blood-mud, and black cinnabar paste.
The brow and eyes were still discernible, but sullen as a cloth over a grave.
Most terrifying, an indentation pocked its forehead: an altar-eye, pressed out by years of offerings and suppression.
When it opened its eyes, the whole stone passage sounded as if thousands of “please guest” calls rose at once.
Both the seat master and the lamp master bowed their heads at the same moment, like two servants who finally had their true master.
The Altar-Ritual Spirit spoke. Its voice was low but it forced every lamp’s flame downward:
“Guests have arrived.”
“It is time to seat.”
When it said, “It is time to seat,” the tone did not rise, yet it struck every chest like a bell sunk for a hundred years.
On the next breath, every paper lamp along the passage dimmed together, then flared up with a different light.
This glow was not teal-black, nor ghost-white, but a murky blend of gray-yellow, old red, and household green—the muddy soup of old offerings, paper ash, bone oil, and human vitality poured directly into their eyes.
Lu Yuan’s vision blurred.
It wasn’t just lamps that faltered; the seats themselves were thrown into chaos.
The Altar-Ritual Spirit raised its skeletal, gaunt hand—so thin it was almost knuckle—and curled its fingers.
At that curl, the paper banners nailed to the walls writhed like live snakes.
The white-paper faces on the banners opened their eyes—no pupils, only concentric spinning black lines, as if someone had drawn circles in their eye-sockets.
“Shadows return to seats, lamps return to masters.”
“Names return to the ledger, bones return to the altar.”
The Altar-Ritual Spirit recited the line blandly, like reading a menu.
But with each syllable, the shadows beneath everyone’s feet were dragged forward an inch.
Zhou Heng suddenly drove his sword into the ground to pin the shadow, but found his shadow pressed like mud.
Before his blade settled, the shadow had already split at his feet, exposing dense gray finger-prints beneath.
“It’s using the altar to alter the road!”
Lin Zhaoxuan roared. The Thunderclap Token vibrated; bluish-white thunder patterns began to erupt, but they were suddenly sucked into the Altar-Ritual Spirit’s forehead altar-eye like lightning snakes falling into a well—half of each bolt vanished with a soft pop.
Lin Zhaoxuan gasped and staggered back three steps, a smear of blood at the corner of his mouth.
“Even thunder can’t suppress it?”
Song Qinghe’s face went deathly white.
Lu Yuan’s look froze. The short blade rested across his chest; the coin-flare on its spine winked in and out.
He saw clearly now that the Altar-Ritual Spirit was not a simple Yin Malevolence. It had been cultivated as a “ritual seat” by borrowing the twin altars, the seating faces, the ledger, the lamp master, and the seat master—four layers of shell.
Now that it had revealed its true form, it was not something that could be scattered by mere blows. They had to sever the supply routes that fed it and force it from the altar-eye.
But it was already inside that altar-eye.
As the Altar-Ritual Spirit rose, everyone could see it had no real lower body; instead, countless strips of old seat-cloth, rope knots, paper ash, and bone fragments twisted together into a “seat” like a human-skin mat turned inside out.
With each movement a strip of old paper slipped from it, inscribed with surnames named in past years, ink long blackened.
“You’ve overturned the altar’s bones.”
The Altar-Ritual Spirit stared at Lu Yuan; a sliver of amusement touched its voice.
“But you forget that above the altar bones there is still the altar seat.”
“You may reveal the bones, but you will not find the seat.”
“You can sever names, you cannot sever the offerings.”
After speaking, it softly pressed the end of its hand toward the far end of the stone passage.
At that press, the surrounding teal-white lamp flames all rolled inward, as if an invisible hand forced them down.
Lu Yuan felt his chest constrict; his ancestral-fire protection nearly scattered.
He planted three Yu Steps to steady himself and bellowed:
“The ancestral fire will not die, lamps shall not be confounded!”
“You are an altar-ritual spirit; I shall use ancestral seal to correct your altar seat!”
“Left call the Azure Dragon, right call the White Tiger, front draw the Vermilion Bird, rear pacify the Black Tortoise!”
“Heaven’s gate opens, the four beasts return to their posts!”
“Urgently, urgently, as by the law’s command!”
As he turned the ancestral-inquiry sign with his left hand, his right blade traced a thin fiery circle in the salt array’s center.
At the instant the fire-ring took shape, shadowy winds lashed at the stone passage’s four corners, as if summoned beast silhouettes forcibly countered the Altar-Ritual Spirit’s press.
But the spirit glanced only once, then exhaled not vapor but strands of black threads as slender as hair.
They struck the ground and burrowed—into the salt, into the incense ash, into lamp wicks—gnawing Lu Yuan’s fire-rings inch by inch until they were severed.
“You borrow four beasts; I borrow ten thousand names.”
The Altar-Ritual Spirit’s eyes revealed countless tiny human silhouettes, as if trapped seat-guests floated in its pupils.
“You use a single flame, I use an altar of lives.”
“What can you use to stop that?”
Lin Zhaoxuan, scorning his wounds, bit his tongue and spat a spray of blood-mist. The Thunderclap Token cut across his chest.
“Thunder Ancestor borrow blood—lend me a strike to break the altar!”
“Thunder as bone, blood as sinew!”
“When the thunder bone rings, ten thousand malevolences fall silent!”
“By decree—!”
Thunder roared and detonated. This time it was no needle-like spear but a fat, finger-thick bluish-white bolt that shot straight for the Altar-Ritual Spirit’s forehead-eye.
The spirit did not dodge. It lifted one hand, fingers closed together, palm up, and somehow caught that thunderbolt midair.
When the bolt struck its grasp, a piercing sizzle erupted—like a branding iron in raw meat.
Yet no pain crossed the spirit’s face. Instead it slowly peeled back its mouth into a grin, revealing blackened teeth.
“All thunder has a root.”
“If the root lies in a human body, then I can borrow the seat and reverse it.”
With a wrist twist, the thunderbolt in Lin Zhaoxuan’s attack became a blackish arc, torn and reversed, slamming back into the stone wall with a deafening crash that shattered rock.
Lin Zhaoxuan staggered, on the verge of collapsing.
“This thing… can invert magical intent.”
A chill ran through Lu Yuan. He realized the spirit’s strength lay not in brute force but in borrowing and reversing:
borrowing names, lamps, altars, arts—even twisting a person’s technique back against them.
They could not permit it to remain inside the altar-eye.
Lu Yuan’s eyes went cold. He sheathed his short blade in a snap and both hands flipped into a “Break the Seat Formula.”
His left hand’s three fingers hooked like claws into heaven; his right thumb pressed at the base of the middle finger; the forefinger stood upright while the rest curled inward, as if cradling an invisible incense burner.
He barked:
“A seat has seat-nails, an altar has altar-nails!”
“Break the seat-nail and the seat loses power!”
“I will not sever your body. I sever your nails!”
“Rise!”
With that he lunged like an arrow toward the Altar-Ritual Spirit’s foot—toward that tangle of seat-cloth, bone, and rope that served as its base.
For the first time, the spirit’s eyes sharpened with tangible cold.
It slowly lifted a foot, and all the paper ash, bone tags, and red cords beneath it shot upright like tiny arms, lashing at Lu Yuan.
The battle for the seats had finally truly begun.