Chapter 12: ◎It’s a Form You Would Completely Dislike.◎

In the dry, dim secret passage, a young lady dressed in a plain white underdress held up a lamp as she slowly descended the twisting stairs.

The kerosene lamp cast a warm yellow glow that illuminated only her upper body and a small patch of ground around her. Amid the crisp “clack-clack-clack” of her footsteps echoed intermittent, discordant hoarse wails. They came from very close by—from the devouring darkness not far behind her.

Tong Yuwu seemed utterly oblivious. Her face was bathed in the lamplight, her expression one of relaxed contentment, her steps light and eager as she hurried toward an important rendezvous.

At the foot of the stone stairs lay an open space shrouded in darkness, offering no clues or guides. Yet Tong Yuwu unerringly found the lamp holder on the wall and used the flame from her kerosene lamp to light it. The fixture was ingeniously designed: igniting a single spot triggered mechanisms that spread flames throughout the entire basement.

Light reclaimed lost territory as darkness crumbled and fled.

In the dancing firelight, the underground chamber’s full extent came into view. Beneath the Tong Family Castle sprawled a colossal underground palace far more expansive than the castle above. Its decorations might not rival the castle’s opulence, but in pure functionality, it outshone the castle itself—most of whose space had been lavishly devoted to entertainment.

Tong Yuwu glanced back and saw the three men still floating behind her. A satisfied smile curved her lips. Prolonged suffocation had pushed them to the brink of unconsciousness, however. White foam dribbled from their mouths, their limbs twitched unnaturally, and none could muster any further response to her breathtaking beauty.

Tong Yuwu didn’t seem to mind. Ever the dutiful host, she pressed on, leading them deeper into the underground palace.

They left the entrance behind and walked some distance inward before reaching a special chamber. At its center stood a crystal coffin. Through the translucent crystal, one could make out an adult woman clad in tight-fitting attire lying within.

Tong Yuwu strode straight to the crystal coffin. The three men, tugged along by an invisible force, floated past her and hovered above a peculiar altar to the coffin’s north. The altar was strangely carved, its surface etched with sunken channels like blood gutters. These grooves intertwined into a complex pattern that converged at its southern tip, pointing directly toward the magnificent crystal coffin.

“Mother, I’ve come to see you.”

Tong Yuwu slid open the coffin lid and greeted it softly.

Mother possessed fine features, though in a style utterly different from Tong Yuwu’s. Even with her eyes closed, the heroic vigor in her brows was unmistakable. It wasn’t just the eyes: her nose bridge stood firm and straight, her lip line sharply defined, her chin—neither too long nor too short—chiseled to razor sharpness, as if the very words “person of authority” were etched across her face. Most horrifying of all, that face—which should have been fair and flawless—bore a hideous brownish-red scar from her left temple to her right jawbone. The mark writhed like a millipede with a thousand legs, slashing diagonally across its features and cleaving them in two.

Tong Yuwu’s eyes misted over as she gazed at the scar. She reached out to touch it, only to halt midway and withdraw her hand with sensible restraint.

“I’m sorry,” she apologized.

Mother’s lips were deathly pale, every trace of color drained from her face by that grotesque scar.

She lay utterly still, her chest showing no hint of rise or fall. Clearly long dead, her corpse had been preserved intact only through some supernatural means.

“I’ve been delayed for so long. Please don’t blame me—I only recovered myself quite recently.” Tong Yuwu rested both hands on the crystal coffin’s edge, her voice thick with deep longing. “Of course, if you’re angry, you can punish me just like old times.”

With great reluctance, she tore her gaze from Mother’s face and turned toward the three men on the verge of death. “Now, though, I have something very important to do.”

“Mother, remember how I promised I would resurrect you?”

She rose to her feet and lifted her right hand to her chest. In the next instant, a thick black-covered book materialized in her arms—the very same one Meng Yiran had glimpsed in the garden earlier. The pages rustled open of their own accord, flipping to a halt on the page bearing a human figure illustration.

Crimson lines snaked across the black-outlined body, weaving into an eerie symmetrical pattern that carried an undercurrent of dire foreboding.

Tong Yuwu cradled the book in one hand while tracing the page’s contents with the other. Her slender fingertip brushed the yellowed paper precisely atop the blood-red lines of the human diagram, beginning at the left hand.

Then, as if copying the design stroke by stroke, her finger followed the crimson paths: from the left wrist, crawling up the forearm and upper arm, over the shoulder, piercing through the chest cavity…

She fell silent, and the hoarse groans filling the room grew all the more stark. Above the northern altar, the three men were jolted awake by agony. Starting at their left wrists, identical markings bloomed across their flesh—just like those in the illustration. But instead of red ink, their own blood served as the paint: fresh crimson welling eagerly from beneath their taut skin.

Soon, as Tong Yuwu’s fingertip traced the final stroke on the paper, the patterns on the men’s bodies fully took shape.

Drawn by the pull of gravity, their blood dripped steadily from their feet to the ground, filling the sunken blood channels carved into the altar. Those channels wound across the altar in a complex design before converging into the southernmost passage, flowing straight toward the crystal coffin.

The transparent crystal coffin began to glow with an eerie crimson light from the bottom up, and the woman lying within was shrouded in an ominous red hue.

At some point, Tong Yuwu had shifted her attention from the pages of the book back to the woman’s face.

Her gaze was gentle, her purple eyes fixed without daring to waver, as if the slightest mistake might disturb the woman’s return to the living world. But as time passed and the red glow in the crystal coffin faded, leaving the woman pale once more, the expectation on Tong Yuwu’s face slowly hardened into stunned disbelief.

Snapping back to her senses, Tong Yuwu looked incredulously at the black-covered book. Unable to accept the result, she reached out toward the altar. In the air above it, the three men had been drained from their once-vital forms into withered husks, their shrunken skin clinging tightly to their bones, outlining skeletal frames. Tong Yuwu’s purple eyes gradually darkened until they were like thick ink, yet not a single drop more of blood could be squeezed from the men. Instead, at some point, a backlash struck her. She was hurled backward through the air before crashing heavily against the wall. The black book slipped from her arms and fell to the floor, kicking up a fine cloud of dust.

Tong Yuwu felt a dull ache in her chest. She gasped for breath, coughing up two mouthfuls of blood.

The blood splattered onto her plain white underskirt, quickly blooming into an ominous red stain.

Ignoring her own condition, she scrambled to pick up the book and frantically flipped through it. The pages were densely packed with text, but none of it held the words she sought. Instead, the distorted characters seemed to mock her overreach.

After confirming several times over, Tong Yuwu let out a cold laugh. Propping herself against the wall, she forced herself to stand.

She no longer glanced at the now-dry altar. Instead, she stared blankly at the crystal coffin and murmured to herself, “It was my mistake… He couldn’t even fulfill your wish. How could he possibly help me bring you back to life?”

She pressed her lips together tightly, blood filling the pale cracks and painting an eerie vividness that made her look even more sinister than the female corpse in the crystal coffin.

Her breathing grew heavier, a mad fury leaping in her purple eyes. She raised the black book, her fingertips whitening from the pressure, as if in the next moment she would tear apart the culprit that had dashed her hopes and left her gravely injured.

But in the end, the impulse faded. She lowered her arm and gave it a light wave, sending the black book back into the void.

She wiped the blood from her lips and even took a moment to tidy her appearance, smoothing the stray hairs from her cheek, before returning to the side of the female corpse.

She gazed quietly at the corpse for a long while—so long that her legs began to go numb—before leaning slightly forward and speaking. “There must be something wrong somewhere, either with the ritual as recorded or with what I did.” The beautiful Noble Miss frowned faintly, a thin veil of worry creasing her brow as she pleaded softly, “Mother, just give me a little more time, all right?”

The female corpse offered no response, of course. Its hands were folded neatly over its abdomen, its chest still and unmoving.

Tong Yuwu took the silence as assent, and her expression gradually relaxed.

She turned her head to look at the three dry corpses.

A glint flashed in her purple eyes, and that malevolent power reemerged, dragging the three bodies to the corner. That lightless patch of shadow was already piled high with countless bones. Apart from the three new dry corpses, the other remains were clad in the uniforms of castle servants—though those garments were all quite worn and dated.

With the cleanup complete, Tong Yuwu stood and reached out to slide the coffin lid shut.

Just before it sealed completely, she paused, peering through the final gap at the female corpse’s face.

“Right, Mother.” Her voice was no longer tense as before; instead, it carried an unconscious note of delight. “I’ve taken in a cat. It…”

Her words cut off there, as if she couldn’t immediately find the right description. Her brow furrowed and relaxed in turn.

After a long moment, she licked her lips and finished the thought.

“It’s the complete opposite of anything you’d like.”

“May I keep it?” Tong Yuwu asked again. “It likes me a lot. It can’t live without me. It just has some flaws you can’t ignore—it sheds, it’s afraid of blood, it’s clingy and loves to act spoiled, and sometimes it even causes trouble in secret…”

The more she spoke, the less likely she felt Mother’s approval was. She bit her lip and swallowed dryly, like a young sprout awaiting rain that might never come.

“Never mind…” Tong Yuwu lowered her head. “Whether you agree or not, I’m keeping it. At worst…”

She turned her gaze to the female corpse and let a faint smile curve her lips. “If it’s making you unhappy, let me take the punishment in its place. It’s such a frail little thing—it can’t withstand a beating.”

Her words hung in the air as she gave the crystal coffin a firm shove, sealing the final sliver of space.

Soon, the Underground Palace sank back into darkness. On the staircase leading to the exit, a swaying yellow gas lamp cast its flickering light over the girl’s bloodstained upper body and the small patch of ground around her.

The young miss’s footsteps—tap-tap-tap—faded gradually into the distance, swallowed whole by the shadows lurking just behind her.