Nightmare's Call

Lin Sheng’s hands still shivered when he woke up from the dream. Getting up and sitting on the edge of his bed, his hands shuddered involuntarily as if he had a bad cramp. Not just that, his chest felt swollen and pressurized as if it would burst like a balloon at any time.

Lin Sheng took a deep breath and then breathed out in several steps. The breathing method that he learned from somewhere in regulating his breathing and emotions worked like a charm. After a few rounds, his emotions settled down, and the quivering of his hands stopped.

“I’m having indigestion after ingesting the soul.” He mumbled, and then stood up and walked to the desk just as he had done it a hundred times before. He took out his encrypted notes from the drawer and began to write, documenting some of the turning points in his life.

After learning the Deviltongue, he began to use a mixture of the Deviltongue alphabets, Rehn characters, and Han pinyin in the encryption. There was no question about the security of this encryption method, but the downside to this was that it made a short content doubly longer.

Lin Sheng turned on the table lamp. Holding a pen in hand, he began to ponder and write. That done, he came back in bed and lay on his back, starting his meditation on Ashen Seal. His cultivation of Ashen Seal-Sanctuary was complete. He was now meditating on the second ability—Ashen Seal: Furious Roar. The longer he meditated, the better his mastery of Furious Roar became. And after a while, as the caprice in his heart gradually came under control, he halted his meditation and started to sort out the useful memories from the useless ones, which he had just acquired.

The memories of Khadula had little substance except for the part concerning his life. He was born deformed and abandoned, no one wanting him because he looked like a monster. When some hawkers plucked him out of the street, they used him as a money-spinner until his antecedents were revealed.

However, there was no information about how Khadula obtained his ability and how he ended up in the Fay Vault. However, a white-haired old man wearing a yellow magician robe with a missing arm appeared in his memories. The old man’s name was Dark Igor.

“Dark Igor... I knew it was him, the one who created the Circle of Reaping and polluted the entire Fay Vault.” Lin Sheng lamented. The soul of the face with a thousand arms was so nasty that he still could not fully assimilate it even he had woken up from the dream for so long.

Lin Sheng lay in bed, alternating between meditation, sorting out the memories fragments, and taking some rest.

Time flew and the sky outside was gradually softening to a blue. He waited until his strength had somewhat recovered before he got out of bed, packed his stuff, and put on a loose garment. After wolfing down a few leftover boiled eggs of yesterday, which he found in the kitchen, he could not wait to get out of the door.

“If I could summon the face with a thousand arms, it would turn the tide of the current situation completely!” Lin Sheng said to himself. The Redwin military would think twice before they made a move against the Ironfist Society. They did not want to provoke an unknown force like the Ironfist Society if it did not harm their interest.

Lin Sheng had no clue how what level the strength of the face of a thousand arms was at. But it was way much stronger than he was for sure.

Before he left, Lin Sheng left a note on the table. He then closed the burglary-proof door behind him and when he came into the stairway, he stopped and calmed himself down for a while. His hands would shudder involuntarily if he did not pay attention. It was as if his nerves suffered from some kind of sequelae; his body was always tense. From these symptoms, he roughly figured that he might have taken in too many soul fragments at the same time, causing indigestion, and Khadula was affecting his soul.

He was not overly concerned, though, because he had experienced many similar phenomena before. The symptom would go away by itself as long as he kept practicing his sacred power, the most fearsome energy capable of cleansing all impurities from the soul.

The after-six morning in Huaisha looked like an icy beauty shrouded in a blue gauze. Its last stronghold slowly lost ground to the relentless assault of the wind and waves.

Lin Sheng rode his bike, heading straight in the direction of the jungle. While he went, he could sense someone was trailing him from outside the neighborhood where he lived. So he sent Crow, the Blackfeather swordsman, to shake off the tracker.

He had only a Blackfeather swordman and two armored vault guards with him, as Sacred Shield Tyrant and other summoned creatures were dead and no longer summonable. So he planned to take this opportunity to vacant more room in his soul for the face with a thousand arms, who was more powerful than he was. But he had no idea know how much soul space he needed to accommodate the monster. Perhaps the more, the better, he thought.

His bicycle’s tires suddenly screeched to a halt. Lin Sheng alighted. Wearing black sports attire and carrying a backpack filled with ingredients on his back, he darted into the mountains on foot. His steps were light and fast, almost twice as quick as a human could go.

He passed through the field into the dense forest, threading up the slope until he saw a dilapidated temple up ahead. The temple seemed to have been cleaned up recently with the broken door hanging askew previously repaired, and the bushes on the forest floor and moss on the steps trampled and even cleared. Lin Sheng carried his backpack, pushed the front door open, and came into the central courtyard. Most tree’s roots growing out of the surface into the courtyard had been ripped apart, overgrown bushes and veins were replaced by a clean open space in the middle.

Lin Sheng came to the open ground. With the snap of his fingers, a black crow flew over his head silently before it circled above the temple. At the same time, Crow, the Blackfeather swordsman, emerged from a plume of black smoke. Together with the other two armored vault guards, Crow began to make his round outside the temple. As for another soldier, Lin Sheng had sent him to protect his family.

He put the backpack down and took out the ingredients and a piece of plastic sheet that had a magic circle already drawn on it. He needed to finish this ceremony as quick as he could because if Redwin found that he had escaped their surveillance, they would likely take actions. So Lin Sheng quickly spread the plastic sheet open on the ground and deftly placed the different ingredients in their respective places.

With the help from the Ironfist Society, he had more than enough materials for many rounds of the ceremony. But gold nugget and silver powder were in short supply, and they barely sufficed for three more rounds of summoning rituals.

“I have to get some more supplies. The Ironfist Society has spent half of its money on materials.” Lin Sheng lamented. After putting up the flat pan, he poured the filtered water in it and lit the butter lamp using a lighter. As the water boiled, Lin Sheng scooped up a ladle of premixed ingredients and tossed it into the pan.

“Here it goes.” He placed the last white spider into the liquid in the pan and began to chant in some strange syllables. “Mu, ba, en, di, yu, yi...” Following immediately, plumes of white smoke from the butter lamp began to drift toward the flat pan before disappearing into it. The murky liquid in the pan started to ripple and steam started to rise. The steam that looked like a blanket of fog quickly drifted toward Lin Sheng and engulfed him in it