The Sovereign of a Thousand Years
**"Gurk—"**
The short man's throat bobbed visibly.
He had spent years in the Land of the Undead by now, yet every time night fell, his heart would slam into a frantic rhythm. Even when they flew to other cities far from the Ancient Capital, the moment darkness swept in, that same dread and unease came creeping back without fail.
"Everyone eat your Gray Garlic — now!" the short man urged the group.
The Woman in Black Stockings and his two companions didn't hesitate, swallowing the foul-tasting Gray Garlic in a single bite.
Liu Ru ate one as well. Only Mo Fan was still standing there, grimacing in deliberation.
**"Urghh—! Urghh—!"**
The gurgling retch of something rotten lodged in a throat burst up from the earth right beside him. Mo Fan spun around and found himself staring at a skull riddled with writhing maggots pushing out of the soil — eyes drooping, jaw hanging loose.
It seemed wedged on something underground; only the head had broken the surface while the body remained buried beneath. The instant it spotted Mo Fan, it began lurching toward him with the frantic hunger of a starving man who'd just laid eyes on a gleaming golden drumstick.
"You think something like *you* can lay a finger on your Grandpa Mo?" Mo Fan didn't miss a beat — he drove his boot straight into the Undead's skull.
The head was already separated from its neck. The kick sent it spinning through the air in a clean arc before it smashed into a bare rock outcropping, splattering everything in a wet, pulpy mess.
**"URRAAAGH—! URRAAAGH—!"**
Howls erupted all around, rising on every side.
Without warning, a vast slab of earth cracked open less than ten meters away, exposing an enormous burial pit. The stone bricks were half-crumbled with age, rotted almost beyond recognition. Inside, more than twenty half-decomposed Skeleton remains lay scattered in every direction — and as if they had heard the rolling skull's summons, they scrambled out of the pit with eyes blazing red.
The Skeletons' blackened bones suggested they had been poisoned en masse in life. The tools strewn around them made it clear they were craftsmen and attendants entombed alongside some ancient lord. Mo Fan had thought twenty-odd was already a crowd — then he noticed a secondary tunnel burrowing beneath the main pit, and from its depths Skeletons kept streaming out in an endless tide, every one of them blood-smeared and ghastly.
Mo Fan's fist grazed the air, and fire erupted in its wake.
*They're all crawling out of the same pit — I'll just blast the whole thing.*
"Mo Fan, look around you." Liu Ru's voice came sharp and urgent.
Mo Fan turned — and went rigid.
Seven or eight more of those stone burial pits, all clustered within a patch of ground barely a few hundred meters across.
Skeletons massed in regiment after regiment, assembling like soldiers called to formation. Their gazes, like a multitude of stars, locked onto Mo Fan — the only breathing creature in their midst. The sheer spectacle of it was so terrifying that his whole body locked up.
"You know, if you chew it slowly, this stuff isn't actually half bad." Mo Fan grabbed a piece of Gray Garlic and took a vicious bite, his face twisted into the most hideous expression imaginable.
The short man let out a disdainful laugh, swept his gaze across the endless Skeleton horde, and said, "We should get moving. This looks like the burial ground of some Qing dynasty official — the number of attendants and craftsmen here rivals a royal funeral. The Skeletons themselves aren't what worries me; we could probably handle a fight. What I'd dread is if any of those senior officials were powerful Mages in life — once they die and turn into Undead generals, that's when things get deadly."
"And keep your mouth pointed away from me while you talk," Mo Fan added.
The Gray Garlic worked with brutal efficiency. The breath it produced was so pungent that even Undead occasionally decided you simply hadn't brushed your teeth — and even the more fastidious among them would step aside rather than endure the smell.
Threading through the massed Undead hordes, the Woman in Black Stockings finally spoke. Her voice was as beautiful as a clear, ethereal melody drifting down from above. A touch of feeling in her words would have made it perfect — yet perhaps it was precisely that otherworldly detachment that left a maddening itch in the heart.
"Is it always like this here?" she asked.
The short man, clearly flustered and delighted to have been addressed by her, answered at once: "Not before. Since the Shamang River uprising, the death energy in this area has grown thick. People in the field are saying a new Undead era is coming. Perhaps — if the supreme ruler of this Undead domain has changed hands, something like this is possible."
"Supreme ruler?" The woman's second question came immediately.
"No one has ever laid eyes on it, but everyone knows it exists." The short man eagerly leaned into his own knowledge. "People call it the Undead Emperor. Legend says it's what the Sovereign of the Tang dynasty became after death."
"How many years ago is *your* Tang dynasty?" the woman asked.
"*Your*?" The short man blinked.
A flicker crossed Mo Fan's eyes. He had caught something in her phrasing — this woman was not from this country. No wonder her Mandarin had always carried a slightly discordant lilt.
"Over a thousand years," the short man said, unable to pin down a more precise figure.
"A Sovereign of a thousand years..." the woman murmured to herself, and let the question rest.
She may have stopped, but the short man — warming to his role as the learned one — pressed on regardless: "Exactly right. With Undead, age is everything — the older they are, the more terrifying they become. A thousand years of death energy as nourishment... heaven only knows what kind of world-shaking abomination that would produce."
*This world's history lines up,* Mo Fan thought, his memory surfacing the fact that the Tang capital had stood in what is now Xi'an. If this region had been feeding Undead since ancient times, it was entirely plausible that the ancient emperors buried here could eventually transform into Undead...
"These ancient emperors really have some nerve," Mo Fan muttered. "Dead for over a thousand years and they're still ruling some underground kingdom of the night."
"Royal tombs are almost always prime feng shui sites — absorbing the qi of heaven and earth until they eventually spawn demons and monsters is perfectly natural," the short man said. "Everyone keeps saying the ruler of the Undead domain has changed, but that's a funny thing to claim — as if they actually know who the previous ruler was. Whether anything changed or not, the Undead don't know. Somehow we living people do."
"Has truly no one ever seen the Undead ruler?" Liu Ru asked, her voice small.
The short man shook his head, his manner completely sincere. "Not even the most powerful Mages. In the old days, a group of foreigners who called themselves the Holy Judgment Court came looking for answers — top-tier Mages, every one of them. Not a single one made it back alive. They say the last ones to go even turned into Undead themselves." He clicked his tongue. "These foreigners, always coming here and causing us trouble."
The moment he finished, he realized that the Woman in Black Stockings was herself a foreigner, and broke into a sheepish grin. "I wasn't talking about you."
"No offense taken. I find it rather entertaining when Holy Judgment Court people do something foolish." A glint of amusement flickered through the woman's bright eyes.
*The Holy Judgment Court?*
Mo Fan had caught wind of the name before — a European magic organization, something like China's Tribunal in function: an arbitration body of its own kind.
The Tribunal's role was enforcement, pursuit, and execution of tainted, evil Mages. The Holy Judgment Court, from what Mo Fan had heard, supposedly had a mission statement straight out of Ultraman — to safeguard world peace.
*If I ever enter the World Academy Tournament, I'll probably end up dealing with these foreign magic organizations,* Mo Fan mused quietly to himself.