Ru Yujin's genius has no limits!

"Follow me, servant," I ordered the zombie for a start, then walked ten meters away from it.

The zombie followed me for several steps, shuffling its feet, then stumbled upon a rock and fell. However, instead of standing up and keeping walking, it crawled toward me until stopping nearby.

"Um. Rise?"

It didn't move.

"You should address it with a 'servant', or it might not know you talk with it, Disciple," Lin Chu supplied, approaching me again. "However, if you decide to make another eternal servant, be careful—all servants nearby might decide at once that you are speaking to them."

Was I imagining the smugness in Lin Chu's voice? No, he was too much of an icicle for that. Surely…

"What if I name them?"

"They will forget these names, together with most things you might try teaching them. The eternal servants are just a step above corpse puppets."

I frowned.

"Rise, servant. Your name is now… Stinky. Remember it."

It stood up.

"Yes, master."

I turned to Lin Chu.

"Now I see what you have meant by the uselessness of the Eternal Servants. But there are better undead than that, Master. What about the hungry spirits? They could act and fight on their own, and are fast and tough."

I remembered the Circle of Hungry Spirits very well, since I helped to perform it five times in a row. However, I never tried to do it myself. It required a lot of Death energy and was a Qi Condensation technique.

However, a single Circle of Hungry Spirits summoned several dozen of them. What if I just wanted a few?

Lin Chu shook his head.

"The hungry spirits are deadly and always thirsting for blood, true. However, I don't know how to make them last. The ritual of their summoning was a battle trophy of the Purple Dragon Sect. All other undead Purple Dragon Sect can summon are all those of flesh and bones. Eternal Servants to work in mines, and Eternal Guardians to fight—and this is it. Cultivators of the Purple Dragon Sect always preferred to slay their foes with blades empowered by death, rather than give that job to others."

"Eternal Guardians? What are these, Master?"

"Forget about them, Ru Yujin, and remove that greed from your eyes! The ritual of their creation is kept within the Ning family, which rules over the Purple Dragon Sect itself. Only cultivators of Qi Condensation stage can use it, and it costs many Qi stones worth of Qi. A powerful creature itself, once created, an Eternal Guardian can be equipped with weapons and armor until it's strong enough to fight Qi Condensation cultivators. But this would require years of work for each guardian."

Ah. So in the end, like I suspected, the reason cultivators of the Lin clan used very few undead was because they didn't know the techniques!

I hid my disappointment by looking at my zombie.

"Stinky, raise a hand."

It didn't move.

"Servant, raise your hand."

It raised right hand. I sighed, then bowed deeply.

"This lesson was as enlightening as looking upon the faces of gods, Master. I will cherish and treasure it, so that very bit of knowledge you give me will grow like a bamboo seed in black soil…"

"Fen Kuang is swearing that he will be ready to fight again in only a few days. The doctors say otherwise, but whom should I believe when I consider your 'punishment' to be over and send you to fight alongside Fen Kuang, Disciple?"

"Master, I apologize ten thousand times for offending you with my wordiness. I shall leave to comprehend your wisdom in solitude… Servant, follow me. And get up if you fall!"

***

I washed my zombie under the rain with a summoned cloud. After that, it stopped stinking, but stayed just as stupid as before.

I could already imagine how badly its fight with anyone or anything could go. Lin Chu was right when he said that Eternal Servants were of no use in a war, but only after seeing one with my own eyes I could understand it fully. Words couldn't describe that level of stupidity.

But I was not giving up on winning this siege.

I returned to my room, ordered the zombie to sit in the corner, and went back to the beginning—to the training ground. It was time to experiment.

There, I raised my hand.

So far, I worked mostly with Water and Death Qi. But not only with them.

I placed my fingers into a position for an Ice Cutter, but gathered Metal Qi instead of Water Qi.

Immediately I predicted that if I activated the technique, it would just create a harmless burst of Metal energy. So I didn't use it and instead remembered motions of Qi required for the Blade Breaker technique.

With a lot of waving my fingers and several failed attempts, I flicked my wrist at the training dummy.

An almost invisible, transparent gray wave flew from my palm and hit the straw dummy. It didn't even twitch.

With loud clangs, the metal nails inside it shattered into pieces, and the dummy fell apart.

I grinned.

"Ha! I will call it… Better Blade Breaker, how about this? Or maybe, Breaking Cutter?"

By taking the metal resonance of the Blade Breaker and putting it into a long-range form of an Ice Cutter, I created a more dangerous version of the Blade Breaker technique. It only took me a couple of hours, too.

It was still imperfect—the size of BBB could've been bigger, and the range was twice as short as that of an Ice Cutter. I could've also tried to add Water Qi in it, so Blade Breaker both broke metal and cut through flesh, becoming an ultimate attack against armored opponents.

However, I only created BBB to see if I could.

What I actually wanted to do was much more ambitious. But if it worked, then not only this siege—the Lin clan will win this war! All the wars… most of the wars.

And Lin Chu, to whom I was even ready to give all the credit, will definitely become an Elder. At which point, I will finally be able to take my revenge on Lin Tan and Lin Deng.

If there was no technique that could let the Lin clan win, then I had to make one.