"Hey… Si… Si!"
A distant voice rang in his head like a bell, leaving Si confused.
Wasn't he dead?
Wasn't his body and soul ripped to shreds by his very own subordinates?
Upon opening his eyes, he was greeted by the scorching rays of the sun, forcing him to shield his eyes with his palms. He felt a gentle hand grab his shoulder. Looking over, he was stunned to see a familiar face.
A sickly pale boy with an emaciated frame that emphasized his messy short hair and thin face. Yet in this bundle of unhealthiness was a warm smile that could melt the stiffest hearts.
"Bao?"
Si's eyes darted around, dilating in shock at the familiar landscape.
'This is… the Bi family burial grounds!'
"How?" Si mumbled, his voice fractured by disbelief.
The pain he endured during his final moments was still fresh, so what was going on?
Si stared at his fragile hands, then at the shovel lying on the ground. About a Li away were several carts carrying corpses of Bi family soldiers slain in battle.
'This scene feels familiar…'
Si frowned. After living for three centuries and experiencing everything there was to life, his harsh childhood was the faintest of his preserved memories.
"Si, you are scaring me. Are you alright?!"
Bao grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him. Only then did Si's distant eyes focus and fall on him. After giving Bao a long stare, he glanced around, taking in the familiar faces now watching him with concern. He remembered all of them.
Slowly, Si nodded. His strange behavior had already begun attracting the attention of some soldiers stationed there to oversee their work.
"Yeah… Yes, I am."
Si gently pulled away from Bao's grip and picked up his shovel. His gaze shifted to the corpse laid out before him. The left eye had been impaled, most likely by a dagger, followed by another dagger lodged beneath the jaw.
'These are not enough to kill him,' Si noted as his eyes scanned the body.
There were several bloodied wounds across the corpse, but none immediately fatal. After a brief study, he quickly concluded that the man had likely fallen in battle, gravely injured but not dead. He must have suffered in silence and bled out from his numerous wounds.
'Not the best way to go, but I have seen worse.'
Si continued digging, and soon the attention he had gathered slowly faded. Only then did he quietly signal Bao to come over.
"Hey, Si, are you alright?" Bao asked again, this time in a hushed tone.
Si was not patient enough to answer. He ignored Bao's question and went straight to the point.
"What year is this?" he asked.
"Nirvana Radiance, Year 25."
Buzz!
Si's shovel struck the dirt and stayed submerged as his eyes narrowed.
"Nirvana Radiance… Emperor Fengzu!" he hissed, his eyes burning with murderous light.
To think he would come back to a time when that cunning bird still breathed. What kind of trick was Heaven playing here?
Si looked toward the heavens with a complicated expression. He could still see the two moons and ten million souls orbiting them.
'Was I reborn?' he wondered.
If yes, by whom and for what purpose?
As a cultivator of the supreme art of death, no one understood better than Si that nothing in this world was free. Everything came with a price. Some prices were just collected sooner than others.
As if reacting to his thoughts, a strange light platform appeared before him, and strange letters began forming before his eyes.
[After your demise, the weakened Central Plains was ravaged by the horde of the African barbarians. The calamity you created, you will stop it. The Divine General of Death shall rise again, but this time your undying army will serve to protect the people you destroyed. That is Heaven's will!]
Heaven's will!
Si's eyes tightened, and his clenched grip on the shovel tightened further. If it were just a measly ten-thousand-strong army, how could he, the Divine General of Heaven, lose?
The ones who struck at him first, weakening him enough for his enemies to strike him down, were none other than the heavens themselves.
"BI SI, THERE IS NO PLACE FOR YOU HERE!"
Those words had been so loud back then that they ruptured his eardrums before he was viciously assaulted by tribulation lightning. If his meridians had not been damaged by that attack, essentially crippling his cultivation, he would not have been defenseless against his enemies.
Even without his undying horde, he was certain he would have been able to cut open a path of escape.
'You deny me my dreams and still demand atonement?' Si was vexed.
Fury boiled in his heart like never before. His eyes watered, and tears ran down his cheeks as he dug with unexplainable vigor, leaving his peers confused and distant. They were not sure what was wrong with Si today, but it was not entirely unexpected.
They were graveyard slaves tasked with maintaining the Bi family mausoleum, cleaning corpses, burying the dead, and preparing offerings. They worked in close proximity to extreme yin qi, which was generally harmful to health.
Take Bao for instance. When he first came here, he was a chubby boy with plump cheeks. However, after three years of working in the graveyards, not only had he lost weight rapidly, but his skin kept turning paler by the day, and he tended to fall sick often.
Many servants here had died mysteriously. Many had gone mad. Many had committed suicide. Among those still alive, some were even balding. All of this was due to constant exposure to extreme yin qi.
Excess exposure led to a steady weakening of vitality, even if their skin felt cold. The yin qi also disrupted the natural flow of qi. Over time, their meridians collapsed and ruptured, weakening their ability to cultivate other energies. That was why grave slaves like them had the weakest cultivation base among all the slaves.
To make matters worse, the extreme cold of the yin qi slowly froze their organs, causing their lungs, heart, and liver to struggle with natural energy flow and eventually leading to a strange death.
According to Si's memories, in five years everyone here would be dead, replaced with a new batch of slaves.
However, this terrible condition, which killed everyone including his best friend Bao, also exposed him to the opportunity that changed his life. It was while stripping one of the many corpses they had to bury that he found the Supreme Art of Death manual tucked away in the armor of one of the slain soldiers.
It was a brutal martial art ranked second among the Ten Supreme Arts, once believed to be a myth until the appearance of his undying horde. How the soldier got his hands on such a priceless martial art remained a mystery to him to this day.
Tossing his shovel to the side, Si crouched over the body and began stripping its armor while his thoughts ran wild.
If this was Nirvana Radiance, Year 25, that meant this was the year the Kingdom of Yunhe and the Kingdom of Jinshan began their skirmishes before breaking out into a full-blown war a year later, marking the beginning of an era referred to as the Strife of the Five Kingdoms, an event that lasted for ten years.
It was an era in which the five vassal kingdoms of the Gan Dynasty fought each other in a series of epic wars that redefined the royal lineage and nobility of all five kingdoms.
By the end of that era, he had usurped the seat of the Bi family patriarch, becoming Bi Si. While his methods were ruthless and brutal, he had the support of the Yunhe royal family because his strength was needed in the war.
His reign brought back the golden age of the Bi family!