Chapter 17: The Human Soul and Seven Spirits

After confirming that all the zombies in the room had been cleared, Lu Yan finally turned his attention to the faint ghostly remnants he had stripped from them.

Reaching out, he grabbed one of the wandering souls. The face on it wore a dazed, confused expression, lacking even the slightest trace of intelligence—completely unlike the soul of Gongyang Xuanming from the Urban Version, who had shown clear spiritual awareness.

With just a slight stir of his mana, Lu Yan could easily see that these souls, once separated from their decaying bodies, were fragile like thin sheets of paper.

There was no need for any spell at all. A few wisps of mana were enough to dissolve them entirely.

“How could souls be this fragile?”

Frowning slightly, Lu Yan retrieved a Low-Grade First-Tier Spiritual Eye Talisman from his storage pouch.

With a surge of mana, the talisman dissolved into a stream of spiritual light and merged into his eyes. A gleam flickered across his gaze, and suddenly the world around him became razor-sharp, down to the faint traces of flowing spiritual energy.

He focused his vision on the ghostly remnants before him.

With that one glance, Lu Yan immediately discovered the reason for their extreme weakness.

“Among the Three Souls—Heaven, Earth, and Human—the Heaven and Earth Souls are missing. Only the Human Soul and Seven Spirits remain, trapped inside their decayed bodies.

“Even after death, the Human Soul and Seven Spirits couldn’t escape. Over countless years, their bodies rotted while their souls deteriorated—thus giving birth to these walking corpses.”

The rotting bodies of the zombies had bound the Human Soul and Seven Spirits, but conversely, those soul fragments had also delayed the decay of the flesh.

Otherwise, under normal circumstances, a corpse would have decomposed completely after so many years.

That was why, the moment the soul was stripped away, the zombie’s body—losing all spiritual support—rapidly decomposed into nothing but bones.

The effect of the Spiritual Eye Art gradually faded from his eyes, but Lu Yan’s gaze still shimmered with excitement, as though he had just discovered an entirely new world.

He hadn’t expected that the secret behind the creation of zombies would actually carry such a “cultivation-based” explanation.

“If that’s the case, then where did the missing Heaven and Earth Souls go? Why is the Human Soul trapped in a decaying body? What is the true origin of this apocalypse?”

One question after another sprang up in his mind. But since he had only just arrived in this version of the world, there was too little information available to find any real answers.

Dispersing the last traces of spiritual light from his eyes, Lu Yan turned his gaze to the fifteen wandering spirits—souls missing their Heaven and Earth counterparts. He had already made up his mind.

These wandering spirits, having been trapped with the corpses for decades, had long slipped into a state of mindless stupor. Their Heaven and Earth Souls were gone, and they no longer had the qualifications to even reincarnate.

In just a few more days, they would naturally fade away and return to the void.

Rather than letting them dissipate on their own, it was better to use them to enhance his Soul Banner.

With that thought, Lu Yan didn’t hesitate. He immediately activated the banner to begin refining them.

Lu Yan might not be someone who would wantonly kill the innocent just to forge a Soul Banner. But using the wandering spirits of zombies that had long since died? He had no moral qualms about that at all.

Now that the Low-Grade Soul Banner had been completed, further refining didn’t require redrawing formation arrays. Ghostly mist erupted from the banner and engulfed the entire room in an instant.

The fifteen dazed zombie souls melted into the fog like snow under sunlight, their essence feeding directly into the Soul Banner.

Gripping the banner tightly, Lu Yan focused on the changes occurring within.

Normally, after a Soul Banner was successfully forged, subsequent refinement became easier. He had once needed to sacrifice over twenty Qi Refining cultivators to form four vengeful spirits.

But now, the problem was the weakness and incompleteness of these zombie souls. Even after sacrificing more than a dozen of them, the fifth vengeful spirit within the banner had only barely begun to take shape. Its quality was far inferior to that of Gongyang Xuanming or his bodyguards.

Based on this pace, he estimated he’d need at least a hundred of these wandering spirits to fully refine a fifth vengeful spirit at the Qi Refining First Layer.

If this were happening in the Urban or Xianxia Versions, such a requirement would be utterly hopeless. Needing a hundred souls just for one vengeful spirit? Not even the most insane demonic cultivator would dare go on a soul-harvesting rampage.

In the Urban Version, the modern military would have annihilated him.

In the Xianxia Version, sect enforcers would hunt him to the ends of the earth.

But here, in the Apocalypse Version… in this fallen, dead city?

Zombies were the last thing in short supply.

Sacrificing a hundred wandering souls to create a single vengeful spirit? For Lu Yan, that was a deal with no cost at all. His only real limit was how fast he could harvest those souls!

A flicker of joy crossed Lu Yan’s face. Forget conserving mana—he raised his Soul Banner and issued a sharp command to the four existing vengeful spirits:

“Search the upper floors. Kill all the zombies and bring me their souls!”

The moment his voice fell, the four spirits darted through the walls, heading off to explore the other rooms and floors.

Lu Yan took out a spirit stone from his pouch, using it to maintain a constant supply of mana to fuel the Soul Banner. As he moved upward, he followed the route his spirits had already cleared.

Not long after, the floor above began to shake with the sound of furious roars and heavy pounding against walls.

Lu Yan formed a hand seal, his eyes turning dark and shadowed. Through the eyes of his vengeful spirits, he clearly saw dozens of zombies gathered on the top floor of the building.

There were both large and small ones. Around them lay the remnants of tools, rotted food, and other supplies. Some zombies still clutched fire axes or iron hammers tightly in their decayed hands.

Clearly, they had once been survivors—people who had made their last stand on the top floor, hoping to fend off the undead.

But in the end, they had failed.

Perhaps one among them had been infected during a hunt and said nothing, or perhaps they’d been targeted by a more terrifying zombie variant. Whatever the case, something had gone wrong, and every survivor had perished and turned.

Even now, these zombies still gripped their weapons, acting purely on instinct as they lunged at the vengeful spirits.

But it was all meaningless.

The vengeful spirits ignored physical attacks entirely. They didn’t even need to dodge. A swipe of their ghostly claws could tear the souls out of these rotten bodies, reducing them to piles of bones.

One by one, the zombies fell.

One by one, their dazed, wandering souls were torn free, glowing with a pale ghostly light.

By the time Lu Yan arrived at the top floor, all the zombies had already been slaughtered. The hallway was filled with wandering souls, drifting in eerie silence.

Lu Yan lifted his Soul Banner high—black mist poured out, engulfing the entire corridor.

As the fog churned and surged, it refined dozens of souls into the banner. Lu Yan could clearly sense the fifth vengeful spirit coming into full form.

Moments later, the fog dispersed, and a new vengeful spirit emerged before him.

Though this one had been forged entirely from weak, incomplete souls, it had still reached the strength of Qi Refining First Layer.

Its ghostly body was studded with countless dazed, pale faces. Their blank, soulless expressions made the spirit look even more horrifying and grotesque.

Lu Yan scanned the ruins of the top floor. Then he turned and pointed the Soul Banner downward, toward the unexplored lower levels of the building.

“Continue.”

(End of Chapter)