Chapter 344: Yin-Yang Ghost Art

"A car accident?!" I froze in place, shivering. "When did it happen? Do you mind telling me?"

"Four or five days ago now. It's been pouring lately, and several accidents have happened in Jiangcheng..."

From the Security Guard, I learned the full details of the lobby manager's death. It was completely sudden and incredibly bizarre. 'Four or five days ago... that was exactly when I was broadcasting. I clearly saw her that night, and her smile was very unnatural. Could she have already been dead by then?'

I had already confirmed that the lobby manager was a pawn planted by the Underworld Live Show. I had planned to follow her lead and uncover the Live Show's secrets by investigating her life. Now, with her sudden death, that trail was cut off.

'Officer Huang died in a car accident back then, and now Manager Shen meets the same fate. Is this just another coincidence?' I pulled out the Underworld Live Show's Black Card, but the two security guards didn't recognize it at all. They looked at me awkwardly. Combined with my ordinary clothes, they were neither willing to let me inside nor brave enough to turn me away.

"Get someone who can make decisions over here. I don't have time to waste with you." After a tedious wait, one of the receptionists finally recognized me and found the temporary shift manager to escort me into the bank's basement.

I observed this shift manager the entire way. Unfortunately, from every angle, she was just an ordinary person.

'So the lobby manager's trail just ends here. What a pity.' The Underworld Live Show did things without leaving a single trace, and the lobby manager's accidental death made me realize just how terrifying this organization was. 'The Live Show isn't running a charity. Its evil and horror might even surpass the Two-Faced Buddha.'

I retrieved the items I had exchanged from my private safe and hurriedly took a taxi back to Ting Tang Road.

I closed the shop doors, drew the curtains, and went up to the second floor alone. Sitting on the Lacquered Wooden Coffin, I opened the black cloth bundle.

A yellowed pill recipe wrapped a white jade box, which was pressing down on two scriptures—one black and one white. That was everything inside the bundle.

I set the jade box and the pill recipe aside for now and flipped through the two books. The white-covered volume was the Eight-Step Crushing Fist manual. It was richly illustrated, covering everything from stance explanations to power generation exercises, balancing both internal and external training in exhaustive detail.

'This manual won't just improve my close-quarters combat skills. I can also invite Er Gou and the others to train together. It won't be long before we build up a very formidable combat force.'

Tucking the manual into my shirt, I started flipping through the black-covered Daoist scripture.

There was no title on the cover, only a drawing of a ferocious, hideous ghost.

The first page inside contained a few lines: "That of heaven is called spirit, that of earth is called deity, and that of man is called ghost."

"A ghost is what a man returns to. The characters for ghost and return share the same rhyme; thus, ghost means to return."

"The soul returns to heaven, while the body returns to the earth."

"The soul is yang qi. The body is the yin deity."

"Deity acts as the body, spirit acts as the soul. The soul and body are the essences of yin and yang, the foundation of life. Upon death, the soul ascends to heaven to become a spirit, and the body descends to the earth to become a ghost."

"Thus the reincarnation of heaven and earth, humans and ghosts, yin and yang!"

This opening passage described the relationship between humans and ghosts. In short, humans and ghosts were yin and yang—fundamentally opposed, yet capable of complementing each other.

It was like two sides of a coin; they were inherently one body, but ordinary people could rarely see the ghost within themselves.

Continuing to read, I found that the Yin-Yang Ghost Art was divided into nine stages. With my current cultivation realm, I could only read the first three.

"The first stage: cultivate the ghost eye, granting the ability to see yin souls and ghosts."

"The second stage: enslave spirits and drive ghosts, allowing the use of the Five Ghosts to transport wealth."

"The third stage: Ghost Art Minor Success, capable of bewitching people's minds and hunting down souls and spirits."

The ghost art was profound and boundless, and its requirements for practice were even stricter than those of Daoist arts. First of all, the practitioner's eight characters could not lean toward yang. They needed an innate affinity for dark and obscure things. Ideally, it had to be someone who had seen ghosts and monsters before even entering the path of cultivation.

I pretty much met every single one of these conditions. Even though I couldn't be entirely sure about my own eight characters and destiny, I had constantly dealt with yin souls and vicious ghosts since I started broadcasting, giving my body an extremely heavy concentration of yin energy.

To cultivate the ghost eye in the first stage, the book recorded that one needed to soak their eye sockets with cow's tears at midnight. Then they had to sit atop a grave or another place heavy with yin energy for forty-nine consecutive days to open the ghost eye.

'For a normal person, sitting on a grave for forty-nine days would drive them insane, even if they couldn't see ghosts. Why does this method feel a bit unreliable to me?' The first stage of the ghost art was primarily for cultivating the ghost eye. After thinking it over, I had no intention of following its instructions. My time was too tight; I simply couldn't wait forty-nine days.

If it was just to be able to see yin souls and vicious ghosts, I could substitute it with the Heavenly Eye. My Chasing Eye had long reached its limit; I just hadn't settled my mind to break through.

'I don't know what I'll encounter in the next broadcast. Right now, Jiangcheng is dealing with a Ghost Mother and a Thousand-Year Fox Immortal's corpse resuscitation. It's a place of trouble. I must increase my strength.' Thinking up to this point, I opened the jade box, picked up the longan-sized medicinal pill inside, and popped it into my mouth.

'Sight-Clearing Pill: can increase visual range and heavily reinforce eyesight.' I swallowed the pill and sat facing the morning sun. With my eyes half-closed, I honed my eyes according to the cultivation methods in the General Outline of Heavenly Eye Cultivation.

By the time the sun was high in the sky, the pill's medicinal power was fully absorbed. I abruptly opened my eyes. A golden light flashed through my pupils and vanished, its brightness rivaling the blazing sun.

I channeled my qi and regulated my breathing. The brilliance in my eyes retracted, returning to normal.

The first stage of the Heavenly Eye, the Chasing Eye: capable of seeing a bird's feathers from a hundred meters away.

The second stage of the Heavenly Eye, the Judging Eye: capable of reading the writing on a copper coin from three hundred meters away. Opening the eyes allowed one to see ghosts and deities, leaving nothing hidden wherever the gaze fell.

With the help of the Sight-Clearing Pill, not only did I smoothly break through to the second stage of the Heavenly Eye, but through my accumulated foundation, my realm was extremely stable, faintly showing signs of another breakthrough.

'The Judging Eye is complete, allowing me to see ghosts and deities. With this, I should be able to directly practice the second stage of the Yin-Yang Ghost Art.' I didn't have a master to guide me; I had to rely entirely on my own exploration. Even knowing there were risks in skipping realms in cultivation, I still wanted to give it a try.

The second stage of the Yin-Yang Ghost Art was enslaving spirits and driving ghosts. Strictly speaking, this was just the entry level of the ghost art. Most people with yin-aligned bodies or who frequently dealt with ghostly entities could enter this stage without even practicing.

Daoists also had many methods of enslaving ghosts. They usually employed a carrot-and-stick approach: sealing the ghost with talismans and then offering incense to slowly wear away the yin soul's hostility until it could be used for themselves.

The methods of evil cultivators were similar, but instead of offering incense, they used live flesh and blood sacrifices. This could control a yin soul in a short amount of time, but doing so was incredibly dangerous. Once the ghostly entity's strength exceeded the summoner's by too much, the greedy ghost would kill the evil cultivator along with everything else.

Both methods had their drawbacks: one was too slow to show results, and the other carried too great a risk while also committing the sin of slaughter and losing merit.

Unlike orthodox and evil cultivators, the Yin-Yang Ghost Art walked a completely different path.

Connect one's will to the netherworld, transform into yin and yang, and forcefully borrow power from ghostly entities. Cultivated to the Mahayana stage, one could dual-cultivate yin and yang, traverse the Nine Underworlds, hold millions of yin deities in their palm, and become the King Yama of both the yin and yang realms.

I didn't quite believe everything written in the book, nor was I considering anything about reaching the Mahayana stage. Right now, I just wanted to quickly deal with the Infant Spirit wreaking havoc in my stomach.

The cultivation method for the Yin-Yang Ghost Art was the exact opposite of the Profound Truth Dao Method. The meridians and acupoints circulated by the Profound Truth Dao Method were completely avoided by the ghost art, which followed an entirely different network of pathways.

There was also one fundamental difference between the two. The Profound Truth Dao Method cultivated the human foundation, exhaling the old and inhaling the new to strengthen the Pre-Heaven True Qi in the dantian.

The Yin-Yang Ghost Art, on the other hand, could only be practiced late at night or in places extremely heavy with yin energy. It absorbed the purest yin energy between heaven and earth, drawing it into the body and cultivating the human as if they were a ghost.

'Dual-cultivating ghost and Daoist arts... am I going to cultivate myself to death like this?' With a bitter expression, I bit the bullet and studied it, memorizing all the Ghost Art Oral Formulas from the book. I drew the curtains, opened the Lacquered Wooden Coffin, and sat cross-legged inside it.

'The yin energy inside the coffin is very heavy, suitable for ghost cultivation. It's daytime right now. I'll just give it a try first. If it clashes with the Daoist method, I can stop in time.'

I closed my eyes and entered a meditative state. Following my breathing, the blood-soaked soil inside the coffin emitted faint traces of black gas—nearly invisible to the naked eye—that drilled into my body.

Over the course of nine broadcasts, I had accumulated far too much malevolent yin energy in my body. It normally hid deep within me, but now, the moment I circulated the ghost art, this yin energy slowly flowed out from my acupoints like a stream. Its quantity quickly surpassed the mouthful of Pre-Heaven True Qi in my lower dantian, and it was still continuously expanding.

Compared to my Daoist cultivation, my talent in the ghost art far exceeded my own expectations.