Crouching down, Jianyu carefully unearthed the partial corpse, until the upper half of a man was lain out beside the fallen wall. Jinhai finally moved to squat beside the body, but his head turned to Jianyu. “What do you see?” He asked quietly. 

Jianyu frowned but started describing the body. “It’s a male torso, about 20 years old. Average build, clearly a peasant labourer from his muscle mass, but recently started to decline. Maybe malnutrition.” He pointed out his observations for Li Xiao-Yu who had come over to watch. “His lower half is gone and he seemed to have been subject to scavengers, there isn’t enough to tell what took the rest of him, beast or blade.” Pausing he studied the corpse for a while before continuing to the more pertinent details. “His skin is a dull grey, eyes sunken.” Stopping again as his brows knit tighter, he picked up a stick and carefully pushed the stiff arm over to expose the inside of the wrist. “Several puncture marks.” Leaning down but careful not to touch the body with his own skin or clothing, he studied the marks. “Skin around them is red and swollen with blackened veins. Poisoned needles most likely.” Settling back to continue his examination, describing what he saw for Jinhai’s benefit. Then he once more took up the stick and pointed at the side of the dead man’s neck and his chest where his rags had been torn away. “Neck and chest, these marks look like tattoos, but they aren’t anything normal.” Jinhai suddenly spoke, after having been quiet the entire time. “I feel dark energy lingering there, it.. feels similar to what’s in the building and the ground.” He nudged his chin towards the building beside them. “A dark malevolence lingers here. It’s not reacted to us yet, but I get the sense it should have, or wanted to, but lacks the power to do so.” Feng Jianyu and Li Xiao-Yu shared a look, but all three were thinking the same thing. A talisman array or formation had been set up here but had then been destroyed, or otherwise damaged. Probably by the destruction of the building itself. 

“What if the building had a formation or array set up using it’s walls as the anchor points.” Jinhai suggested. Xiao-Yu cut in. “If the destruction of the building destroyed the array’s active effect, but the anchors are still here so it lingers, powerless… that would seem reasonable.” All three cultivators turned to study the building, two with their sight and Jinhai with his senses. While both Jianyu and Li Xiao-Yu could use their spiritual sense as well as any cultivator of their tier, neither could currently compete with Jinhai. Without words, Li Xiao-Yu stood guard while Jianyu stayed with Jinhai, the two moving carefully around the mounds of rubble and green growth, until Jinhai stopped and pointed to an apparently indistinguishable section of vine. “There.” 

With a nod, Jianyu jumped onto the mound and started using his sword to cut the greenery away. Soon enough he had uncovered a section of wall that had been almost blown apart. Inside the section was a cavity, and within that cavity, there were etchings and burned talismans, along with exploded bits of metal formation plates. Picking up several pieces of metal and a small lump of rubble, he hopped down and handed them to Jinhai. Li Xiao-Yu also came back over to study the evidence. 

“It’s the same?” Jinhai said, head lifting towards Jianyu expectantly. The taller man grunted in acknowledgement. 

“We would have to get Master Liu HànQiáng to examine it, but I don’t believe in coincidences. It would seem your mystery helper wanted you to find these sites and discover what happened here.” Jianyu handed the biggest piece of metal to Jinhai, while Li Xiao-Yu started to pull the rubble apart, looking for more pieces. If they could collect a large enough sample, maybe  Liu HànQiáng would be able to figure out what the formation was designed for. 

Jinhai accepted the bits of burned metal, dropping them into his pouch. The small spatially expanded item easily holding the several palm sized chunks fed into it. Turning, he left Li Xiao-Yu digging through the building’s remains and returned to the corpse, Jianyu on his heels. Both men crouched down once more, Jinhai reaching out to hover his palm over the dead man’s chest, trying to sense anything lingering on or inside him. Jianyu completed his disrupted examination, though there was little left to discover. “If I didn’t know better, I’d have assumed this fellow had become a fierce corpse before his death.” He scowled at the mystery before them as Jinhai finally pulled his hand back and stood once more. Jinhai copied him, the two turning towards where Li Xiao-Yu was creating a pile of metal fragments, but their attention was on each other.

“A dead man who looks like a fierce corpse but was killed while still alive. A building that is brand new but buried under years of forest growth.” Jinhai frowned, but before he could continue, Jianyu suddenly turned to the mound and pulled up a looping length of vine. “This… it’s only growing here..” He examined it before putting it into his own pouch. “Someone is trying to cover up their activities, they blew up their workshop or holding cell or whatever, somehow forced a vine not native to the area to grow over the remains. A man was murdered while under some kind of imprisonment, most likely being tortured with a poison that turns a living human into a fierce corpse.” Jianyu stopped and looked at the man beside him. Jinhai wore a troubled expression. 

“We ran into a very weak Fierce Corpse the night before A-Yu was killed.” Jinhai’s voice was even as he spoke, but the knot between his brows deepened at the memory. “He seemed to be lost, put up no amount of fight and died without defending himself.” Jinhai lowered his head, clearly disturbed. “What if he had been like this man? A mortal turned into a living puppet?” 

Jianyu turned and set both hands on the other man’s shoulders. “You said he dissolved into ash when slain. No mortal, even one poisoned like our fellow here.. does that.” He reasoned, and Jinhai’s expression eased just slightly. Though he still looked concerned. Jianyu continued. “If he turned to ash, he was a fierce corpse. Maybe he was what this one would have turned into had he lived through the process…” Releasing his friend’s shoulders, he looked again at the half a body at their feet. “This one maybe wasn’t all the way though the transformation, and thus, when he died, he was still mostly human. That being the case, whatever poison was used on him is incredibly dangerous… we need to report this in.” Jinhai nodded, knowing that anything that increased the appearances of even weak Fierce Corpses, would be a huge blow to the mortal world. Not only that, but it would strain the Liu past what they could effectively handle. There were only so many cultivators in the area after all, only so many able to respond quickly to the already numerous disturbances that affected the mortals. An increase of low level attacks would be a slow bleed on the Liu’s overall strength. And with the Sui becoming more ambitious and power hungry in recent times, the Liu, a small cultivation sect compared to most, could not afford to be weakened when the Sui were headed towards their borders. 

After Jianyu set out a flag array to protect and hide the clearing, the three cultivators returned the way they had come, finally reaching their original path. JIjhai led the way to the original mounds he and Li-Tai had discovered, and after a quick but thorough investigation, found the remains of the same set up, if slightly cruder. The formation fragments were rougher and larger, the talismans were missing and the building itself had begun to decay. But they had more than enough to confirm this building and the other were of the same design and purpose. With more evidence collected into Li Xiao-Yu’s pouch this time, the three flew directly from the clearing and back to the sect, Jinhai holding fast to Jianyu as the latter set his sword streaking through the air at almost top speed.