The Little Demonic Cultivator in the Courtyard: Borrowing 100,000 Japanese Pirates to Heal

Xu Jiande cut down the remaining Japanese soldiers one by one in order. One of them suddenly opened his eyes as he was being cut, grabbing at Xu Jiande's clothes with both hands. Xu Jiande didn't shake him off, but simply pushed the knife down, waiting for the hand to release itself.

It was too dark for him to see the faces of those people, but he could smell the growing stench of blood, so strong that even the dew in the camp couldn't mask it.

Xu Jiande killed very quietly, without using firearms.

For some reason, Xu Jiande's killing spree went very smoothly. He could feel the demonic energy rising at an unusually fast pace, and he was beginning to break through the barrier.

They're about to advance.

In high spirits, Xu Jiande cleared away tents one by one, like a harvester rolling over a field.

When the knife got dull, he used another one.

Use the two knives alternately; if they become too slow, switch to a new one.

When he reached the eleventh peak, he heard footsteps outside.

A Japanese soldier got up in the middle of the night to relieve himself. He dragged his shoes to the wall, faced the wall, and urinated.

Xu Jiande approached from behind, waited for him to finish shaking, then pressed the knife against the back of his neck and slashed. The man fell into the mud he had just urinated on, splashing a little water.

Xu Jiande continued.

He forgot how long he had been killing. He only remembered that when he walked through the tents, the blood on the ground had accumulated to the point that it could illuminate the flickering light of the gas lamp.

A wind picked up in the latter half of the night, making the tents flap and rattle as if the whole camp was trembling. There was a strong smell of blood in the wind, trapped in the air and unable to dissipate.

The last few tents were small tents where officers lived.

Curtains were hung at the entrances, and some even had lanterns lit.

When Xu Jiande went in, an officer was lying on a cot, clutching a small booklet in his hand.

Xu Jiande turned him over and stabbed him diagonally downwards from above his collarbone, straight into his heart.

The officer's eyes widened suddenly, and he opened his mouth as if he were a fish blowing bubbles, but only a mouthful of bloody foam came out.

By the time he finished cleaning the last tent, the sky was already beginning to lighten.

There was no other sound in the entire camp except for the wind, which made the hair of the dead men flutter like grass.

Xu Jiande walked to the westernmost wall, and with the blood on his sleeves, wrote five large characters on the wall.

The vengeful spirit has taken its revenge.

The strokes were thick, and blood flowed down the wall like several dark red earthworms.

That wall was the only relatively intact white wall in the camp, and now it has become a blood-stained plaque.

Xu Jiande stood in front of the wall, glanced at it, and was satisfied.

Then he scaled the camp wall and disappeared into the alley to the south.

After daybreak, two grain trucks that had come from the direction of the dock stopped at the camp gate.

The Japanese soldiers escorting the truck jumped off, but no one answered their calls. They pushed open the door and saw the entire camp covered in blood; they were so frightened that they fell to the ground. When the news spread, the entire north bank was in an uproar.

The garrison surrounded the camp. Some counted the corpses, others checked the footprints.

Two military doctors went into the tent, walked around for a bit, and then came out. One was squatting in the corner, dry heaving, while the other had red eyes and didn't say a word.

Someone tried to dial the phone, only to find the line was long gone. Like blind men without eyes, they crouched in the pool of blood, looking at each other.

A sergeant stood beneath the wall covered in blood-written characters, looking up at the five words.

Someone whispered that it looked like it was written by a celestial being, or perhaps left by a vengeful ghost.

The sergeant didn't speak, his grip on the rifle butt cracking. After a long while, he suddenly turned around and yelled at the soldiers, "Don't fucking talk nonsense! Shut the hell up!"

The soldiers looked at each other, but no one answered.

Soon, another team was ordered to collect the bodies. They dragged the corpses out one by one and laid them out on the playground. It took more than two hundred people over an hour just to drag them out.

Blood seeped into the soil, staining the playground in concentric circles of purplish-black. After the final count, the report came up: two hundred and twenty-one people, all gone.

One of them still had a slightly warm throat and his fingertips were still twitching.

That night, new rumors began to circulate in Jingzhou City. It was said that the previous night, a vengeful ghost had crossed the north bank, killing an entire battalion of soldiers with a single stroke. After the killing, it even left its name on the wall, something like "The vengeful spirit has taken its revenge."

Some say it was the guerrillas outside the city who did it, but how could guerrillas wipe out two hundred people in one night and escape unscathed? Nobody can say for sure.

Only the group of survivors hiding underground in the south of the city, huddled in their respective earthen caves, felt a mixture of surprise and joy.

Someone secretly lit incense and bowed towards the north bank. Someone carved the words "The wronged soul has taken its revenge" on a piece of wood and pasted it into a crack in the wall.

Xu Jiande didn't hear any of this. He was lying in a half-collapsed cellar in the south of the city, wrapped in the military overcoat he had taken from the dead Japanese soldier.

He was extremely tired. But when he closed his eyes, all he could think of were knives, blood, and those faces he couldn't quite make out.

His eyelids twitched violently, and his fingertips tapped repeatedly on the hem of his clothes, as if he were counting or having a seizure.

He reached into his robes, touched the handkerchief Bai Ling had given him, and grabbed it. It took a long time for his eyelids to stop twitching.

Then suddenly the demonic energy began to flow rapidly on its own.

Xu Jiande felt the vortex of energy in his dantian suddenly leap. It was like someone stirring up a stagnant pool with a stick, or like a snake that had been lying dormant for too long suddenly raising its head.

His whole body tensed up involuntarily, and his legs straightened abruptly, leaving a shallow mark on the grass mat with the soles of his shoes.

The demonic energy flowed faster and faster in the meridians, starting from the dantian, rushing upwards along the Ren meridian, passing the Qihai and Tanzhong points, and then reaching the throat in one breath.

Xu Jiande was overjoyed, naturally knowing what it was.

This was a sign of advancement; the stone door had been pushed open from the inside. He quickly sat up cross-legged, palms facing upwards, suppressing all distracting thoughts and focusing his entire mind on his dantian.

But the pain came on more violently than he had expected.

The three forces of blood energy, demonic energy, and resentment mingled together in his dantian, like three rivers flowing into a pool at the same time, colliding, tearing, and merging with each other.

Each impact felt like someone was smashing his stomach with a sledgehammer, and each churning felt like someone was turning his intestines inside out with a red-hot iron rod.

His dantian swelled larger and larger, so much so that the veins on his forehead bulged, his arms trembled involuntarily, and his ten fingers dug into his knees until his knuckles turned completely white.

Xu Jiande gritted his teeth and tried to straighten out the three forces.

But they wouldn't listen to him at all. Their blood was hot, scalding hot, like oil just scooped from a pot.

The demonic energy was cold, both cold and sharp, like the wind in the twelfth lunar month that seeped straight into the bones.

Resentment is the most malevolent; it is cold and bitter, sticky, and clings to the walls of the meridians, impossible to shake off no matter how hard you try.

The three things mixed together made his meridians feel like they were being rubbed and ground with sandpaper.

It's not just any kind of pain.

First, it felt like a ball of fire was stuffed into his dantian, burning his internal organs.

Then the burning sensation climbed up the Du meridian. After climbing a section, the skin and flesh on my back felt as if they had been ripped open. A little further up, it felt as if a row of iron nails had been driven into my spine.

When it reached the back of his neck, he froze completely, his neck tilted back, his mouth wide open, but he couldn't make a sound, only a few very faint and low gurgling sounds squeezed out of his throat.

It's like being skinned alive.