Chapter 196: Lingering Hatred

When those eyes locked onto him, Ji Jue felt every hair on his body stand on end. A chill ran through him from head to toe.

But he was also baffled. You chased us all this way, threw yourself against the window like some vengeful ghost, and now you’re inviting me to eat with you? Eat what?

Only then did he realize something seemed wrong.

Everyone in the vehicle turned and looked at him. Even Lou Feng beside him, shocked as he was, instinctively shifted a little farther away and gave him a suspicious look, as if to say, Are you on their side? Wait. Don’t tell me you’re the one who led that thing here?

No, hold on... Ji Jue glared back in grief and indignation. I finally managed to get accepted into the team, so how did I suddenly become the traitor?

Before he could even defend himself against this outrageous accusation, someone else had already lost their patience. On the roof of the vehicle, Ji Liu, who had been waiting for Tong Shan’s signal for quite some time, dropped from above the instant he received it.

“Diu lei lo mou[1]!”

It was barely a two-meter drop, yet he stomped down like a meteor falling from the sky, trampling the strange figure that had lunged forward beneath his foot. It was clearly only a stomp, yet it stirred up a crimson tide that spread outward, twisting everything around it beneath the impact.

He had unleashed the blessing known as Storm Sweep!

Scarlet flames flowed, covering his right hand as he reached forward. He grabbed the figure by the neck, hauled it up from the ground, and smashed it back down. Spirit matter transformed into flames and erupted, swallowing that twisted, writhing figure.

It was like pouring gasoline over it. The red flames clung to it like a curse eating into the bone, spreading at terrifying speed. Wherever they passed, everything was reduced to ash.

Such astonishing spirit matter fluctuations, and such terrifying destruction aimed at all physical things, were not merely the result of inherited technique. At their foundation was another crucial, high-level blessing of the Swarm—Fortress Breaker!

In the span of a finger snap, the creature disappeared without a trace. Only ash drifted from Ji Liu’s hand.

“What the hell was that?” he asked with a snort.

His face darkened, and he spun around. That was when he realized that the eerie doorway with the tattered curtain had appeared behind him at some point. Behind the curtain, a face identical to the one from before slowly leaned out. Its smile was strange and distorted, and one hand had already reached toward him. It was trying to drag him behind the door.

“Come sit, come sit, hurry inside...”

Ji Liu retreated at incredible speed, but the doorway followed him like a shadow. Then something tore through the air with a deafening volume. An invisible force appeared, its pressure as terrifying as that of the deep sea, pinning the doorway in place.

Tong Shan had finally made his move.

A curved blade appeared out of thin air in Ji Liu’s hand. He brought it down from above, cleaving the laughing figure in two from head to toe. Then, with his sister’s support, he ran back into the vehicle.

The split figure began growing rapidly in midair, turning into two separate forms. With piercing laughter, they lunged forward once more, but their movements halted as if a nail had been driven into the ground beneath their feet. The split phantoms convulsed, their laughter turning almost into screams and groans. It was all because of a thin thread of silver light.

Just as the others were about to make their move, Ji Jue reacted. With a flick of his hand, he sent a bead of mercury through the gap in the vehicle window. Infused with a large amount of spirit matter, and launched by Flawless Craft, the mercury flew almost with the force of a bullet. It passed right between the two afterimages, spreading like spider silk into countless fine strands of silver light.

The strands that landed on Ji Liu snapped instantly beneath the sweeping gale, but the few thin mercury threads that caught on the two eerie shadows, tough as steel cables, pulled taut at once and contracted.

An invisible spirit matter vortex flared from within the mercury, like a great unseen mouth. It dragged at the afterimages, sucking them in like a black hole.

The two eerie phantoms stiffened in place. Their movements rapidly slowed, and their bodies flickered violently. But what made Ji Jue frown was that the afterimages seemed to have taken root. The gravity of Solid Alchemy couldn’t pull them into the mercury’s restraints at all.

Something was wrong, horribly wrong.

Even though he had acted in a hurry, Ji Jue had still used twice the amount of Mercury after estimating their size, just to be safe. Based on his past experience, for remnant spirits like these, that much should have been enough to deal with not just two, but even four or five of them.

Yet, he could not drag them in at all.

It was like bending down to pull out a weed. Only when he grabbed the stem and started pulling did he realize there was a far deeper, far larger root system hidden underground.

That strange, cackling afterimage was only the surface. Hidden behind it was some enormous thing, which was why it could be destroyed and reborn endlessly. Even after Fortress Breaker burned it to ash, it could swiftly reappear, haunting them like a vengeful spirit that refused to leave.

The mercury only held it for a second, but that was enough. Tong Shan decisively stepped on the accelerator, and the vehicle shot forward at full speed.

Two short seconds later, the mercury burst and evaporated. The strange figures that had been laughing and clinging to them could no longer find their target. No matter how they searched, they could no longer smell or track the outsiders. On the empty street, they screamed, laughed, and wailed miserably.

From the doorway behind the tattered curtain, a hand reached out and beckoned to them. As they cried and laughed wildly, they were dragged into the darkness like mad dogs on leashes.

The curtain stirred faintly in the wind. At last, it vanished alongside the broken doorway. Or perhaps it had merely returned to silence, waiting for the next visitor to come to its door.

Ji Jue finally came back to his senses and wiped away his sweat. They had been inside Spring City for less than ten minutes, and he had already seen more than enough to know this place was insane.

“What exactly was that thing?”

A seemingly ordinary shadow had turned out to be the projection of some eerie thing. And those frail remnant spirits that clung to them relentlessly could not be killed at all, and would haunt them without end.

Ji Xue sighed. “Have you ever watched a horror movie? Just think of them as vengeful ghosts from a horror movie. Once they latch onto you, they won’t stop until one of you is dead. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you can find a way to counter them and drive them off. But if you can’t, then that entire advance exploration is done for. If things go badly, you might even lose some people.

“You two both read the safety manual, right? If a stranger you meet inside tries to talk to you, don’t answer. Don’t pay attention to them. Leave immediately. Even if teammates leave your line of sight, you have to verify their identity when they come back. If they’re out of sight for even a moment, there’s no telling whether they’ll still be the same person when they come back.

“Team Two from Tide City fell victim to that. By the time they noticed, there were already three extra people in the team, and they couldn’t tell them apart at all. In the end, they had to trouble Mr. Tao to step in.”

Seeing that everyone else treated these occurrences as normal, Ji Jue felt a faint chill down his spine. “Are there... a lot of those things in here?”

Ji Xue paused, then looked back at him and said softly, “They’re everywhere.”

Decades ago, when Spring City fell, Mr. Tao made a decisive choice and became a Celestial Being. Like a Celestial Pillar, he held up the whole of Spring City for two hours, leaving every citizen with one last chance to survive.

But aside from the survivors who managed to flee Spring City during those two hours, there were many victims who couldn’t escape because of accidents or various other mishaps.

They fell together with Spring City, struggling to survive in that descent into darkness. Some of the lucky ones were found later by search and rescue teams. Others, long before that could happen, had already completely mutated and become corrupted. Or they had died. Their bodies rotted, weathered, and turned to dust. Their souls twisted, shattered, or dissolved because of the aberration into something utterly unrecognizable.

Those countless lingering regrets, madness, hatred, and despair scattered with the wind. Over the long years, they had merged with everything in this place that had become twisted beyond recognition. Many years later, one tiny fraction of it was catalyzed by the Heretic Cult and formed into a malignant tumor that birthed aberrants, drifting toward Cliff City.

Ji Jue let out a soundless sigh. He had nothing to add.

From the roof of the vehicle came a rhythmic knocking.

Tong Shan waved a hand, so Jiang Xuan braced himself on the seat and climbed onto the roof, while Ji Liu dropped down. His face twitched as he gasped in pain. “Damn, something’s wrong. Sis, help me take a look.”

He stuck out his butt.

“Get lost!” Ji Xue was just about to kick him when she saw a pitch-black fingerprint on the protective suit covering his backside.

Xu Guan couldn’t help but burst out laughing. “Ji Liu, did that thing grope your butt? Should we crown your ass Cliff City’s finest peach?”

“Go to hell.” Ji Liu rolled his eyes and gritted his teeth as he took off the protective suit. Only then did they see a clear finger mark on his pale backside.

All the laughter in the vehicle died out. It was aberration contamination. No, to be precise, it looked more like a mark. If they left it there, there was no telling when that ghostly thing from earlier would come looking for him again.

“There’s no other way.” Ji Xue’s expression shifted, revealing a sorrowful smile. She pulled a dagger from her boot, ignoring Ji Liu’s shocked and terrified look. “We’ll have to cut it out.”

“Holy shit, wait a second—”

“The longer we wait, the more things could go wrong!” Ji Xue glared at him. “Don’t worry. I’ll make it quick. Mine is pretty big, so just bear with it, Ji Liu.”

Watching the gleaming blade being measured again and again against his backside, Ji Liu grew more and more terrified. Before he could stop her, however, Ji Jue grabbed Ji Xue’s hand.

“Ms. Ji, hold on. We may not need to go that far.”

He pushed the dagger back down, and Ji Liu’s face instantly lit up with joy. “Oh, Jue really is a decent guy after all—holy SHIT!”

Before he could even breathe a sigh of relief, he saw Ji Jue draw a boney, short blade even more exaggerated than the dagger from before. Then, cleanly and decisively, Ji Jue thrust it straight into his butt cheek.

Everyone gasped in perfect unison and winced as if the blade had gone into their backside instead. Before Ji Liu could even struggle, he only felt a chill in his butt. Then the burning pain from before vanished completely.

Ji Jue pulled out the blade. Mercury, thin as tinfoil, wiped away the nonexistent bloodstains from the edge before he sheathed the blade.

“Done.”

“Huh?” Ji Liu turned back stiffly and looked through the reflection on his phone screen. To his surprise, the pitch-black finger mark on his backside had vanished without a trace.

Not only that, there wasn’t even a cut on his body. Everything that had just happened seemed almost like an illusion.

He was healed!

1. This is a Cantonese insult that means “fuck your mother!” ☜