Chapter 250: Daybreak

It was like sunlight shining over a frozen river at the end of winter.

Dark currents surged beneath the surface, accompanied by the occasional crack of fracturing ice.

At first, it was faint, but soon the endless sound of shattering echoed throughout the entire Amusement Park!

"What's going on?" Lu Xing and Qiu Ren were baffled. "Just who exactly is this kid? Every time we try to kill him, something unexpected happens."

The bizarre noise was coming from the Magic Mirror Maze. Everyone's eyes snapped toward it.

It was hard to see clearly through the open doors—only mottled reflections. Something inside the maze seemed to be waking up.

Crash!

The mirrors exploded. Shards of glass shot all the way out onto the street, leaving the ground glittering from afar.

'The Fate Ghost?' Such a massive disturbance in the maze could only be caused by the Fate Ghost. I suppressed my excitement and looked down at my palm.

The pure Black Eyeball rolled in my palm. Inside its pupil, a faint phantom seemed to be slowly solidifying.

"Forget about everything else! Kill him first to eliminate future trouble!" Lu Xing yelled at Qiu Ren. He formed hand seals and chanted an incantation, sending seven fierce ghosts pouncing toward me. Without even looking, I grabbed a handful of talismans from my coat, threw them out, and ran backward.

"After him!" Qiu Ren chased closely with his blade drawn. He was dead set on killing me, every strike aimed to take my life. I barely managed to block him, stealing glances at the depths of the maze out of the corner of my eye.

Logically speaking, the feng shui setup had already been broken, and the yin energy had sunk back underground. The area should have been completely peaceful by now.

Yet at this moment, a dense, malevolent aura gathered within the maze, blotting out half the sky.

"An entity of ultimate evil?" Lu Xing's cheek twitched. He had seen a similar scene by the Two-Faced Buddha's side a long time ago, but it was so far in the past he couldn't remember it clearly.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

A series of sharp cracks rang out as all the windows and mirrors around the maze completely shattered. From amid the broken glass on the ground, a pale young man with ordinary features walked out.

His height and build were similar to mine. Even his face bore some resemblance to my own.

"Is that a man or a ghost?" The young man's body was solid, and at first glance, he looked no different from a living person. Lu Xing couldn't tell for a moment. But as the youth stepped out of the Magic Mirror Maze, everyone present was stunned.

The young man's long black hair floated behind him, stained with blood and swirling with malevolent yin energy. Even more terrifying, the ends of his blood-soaked hair dragged over a hundred crying, struggling yin souls!

The sight was horrific. The Mirror Ghosts from the maze had all been bound by this single entity. The black hair acted like giant pythons formed from resentment, biting into the bodies of the yin souls one by one. With every step it took, the number of yin souls behind it decreased by ten percent.

Wreathed in resentment, it looked like Yama, the lord of life and death, walking right out of the Ghost Gate. The entire street fell dead silent; even the sounds of insects and birds vanished.

A ghost talisman slipped from Lu Xing's hand, but he didn't even notice. Among everyone here, his reaction was easily the most dramatic, because he was the only one who knew what this ghost was called.

"A Mahayana Fate Ghost!"

To help Lu Xing, the Two-Faced Buddha had once bestowed upon him a Soul-Reaping Fate Ghost. Fate Ghosts varied in strength depending on their fate pattern in life. Although Lu Xing's was also at the Mahayana tier, its fate pattern wasn't a core destiny among the Eight Characters Divine Fiends, but merely a distant star, barely making the cut.

Even so, Lu Xing had suffered immensely just to control that Fate Ghost, feeding it with his own blood for months before they could form a mental connection.

During the battle at Century New Garden, the strength of the Mahayana Fate Ghost had been proven. Even armed with an Upper Vehicle Talisman at the time, I couldn't guarantee a hundred percent chance of destroying it. If it hadn't exposed its true form in the end, the outcome of that fight would have remained uncertain.

Compared to the Soul-Reaping Fate Ghost, the one before us was more than ten times as terrifying. The Death God was one of the Eight Characters Divine Fiends—an inauspicious star. This star illuminated the path of ghosts, perfectly aligning with the Fate Ghost.

I looked at the Fate Ghost, whose aura had drastically transformed, and gave a slight nod.

The yin energy surged backward. No wonder the yin souls inside the maze hadn't escaped earlier. When the grand formation was broken, the Fate Ghost had seized control, swallowing all those refined yin souls to strengthen itself.

Even Qiu Ren himself likely didn't know exactly how many Mirror Ghosts and yin souls were hidden within the Magic Mirror Maze. This massive accumulation had now entirely become nourishment for the Fate Ghost, helping it break straight through to the Mahayana Realm.

After a brief moment of thought, I understood the cause and effect. Although I wasn't clear on the realms of ghosts, just looking at Lu Xing's ghastly expression told me that the Fate Ghost's breakthrough this time was absolutely extraordinary.

"Fate Ghost!"

I held the Black Eyeball high and shouted at the young man. He looked at me expressionlessly, my reflection slowly surfacing within his hollow eyes.

Seeing that the situation had turned dire, Qiu Ren and Lu Xing attacked even more frantically. "Don't give him the chance!"

Both of them had been terrified by my trump card. The moment the Mahayana Fate Ghost appeared, the fierce ghosts from their talismans couldn't even compare. The gap was just too vast.

As they caught me in a pincer attack, I ended up grappling with Lu Xing in close quarters. Qiu Ren seized the opportunity and thrust his knife toward my lower back.

Just as the blade was about to pierce me, black hair swept over, tightly wrapping around Qiu Ren's arm. The strands bit deep into his flesh, drawing blood instantly.

"What the hell is this?!" The pulling force from the black hair slowly increased, dragging Qiu Ren to the ground. He hacked at the hair with his knife, but ordinary blades couldn't cut through strands condensed from yin energy. More and more hair crawled onto his body.

"Lu Xing, save me!" he screamed frantically at the threshold of life and death. But Lu Xing could barely protect himself. Tangled in a brawl with me, he also had to deal with the black hair suddenly appearing around us. Splitting his focus, he gradually lost the upper hand.

"Damn it, damn it!" he cursed endlessly. The tides had turned against him, and a few ghost talismans alone couldn't salvage the situation.

Under my reckless, blow-for-blow fighting style, he finally backed down. Wiping blood from the corner of his mouth, he threw out his last few ghost talismans, using the fierce ghosts to block me momentarily as he rapidly pulled away and dashed toward Qiu Ren.

"Save me!"

Qiu Ren was almost dragged right up to the Fate Ghost. Lu Xing tried a few talismans, but they were entirely useless against the black hair. His face contorted, and he suddenly snatched the knife from Qiu Ren's hand.

"What are you doing?!"

"Saving you!" Lu Xing snapped. Without a moment's hesitation, he swung the blade down and directly severed Qiu Ren's hair-entangled arm!

A miserable shriek echoed down the street. It was likely the last time such an agonized scream would ever ring through this terrifying Amusement Park.

"Move!" Lu Xing grabbed Qiu Ren, not even bothering to retrieve the severed arm, and ran toward the Haunted House.

'Running toward the Haunted House? Is there a secret passage?'

I communicated with the Fate Ghost, wanting to pursue them, but Lu Xing had prepared a contingency. He took out his Compass and triggered several other hazard nodes, forcibly using the remnants of the feng shui layout to obstruct the Fate Ghost.

In a matter of ten seconds or so, the two vanished into the Haunted House. I tracked the blood trail and had the Fate Ghost enter the dark, complex underground structure to search, but turned up nothing.

Those two seemed to have disappeared into thin air, quietly escaping through some unknown exit.

They had operated this place for five years, so it wasn't hard to understand that they'd left an escape route. After a moment of hesitation, I sighed, recalled the Fate Ghost, and ran back to Tie Ningxiang's side.

She had lost a massive amount of blood, and her condition was not optimistic. Together with Yi Yi, I helped her into Balding Uncle's taxi, leaving the Amusement Park and rushing toward the nearest hospital.

After the taxi drove out of the Amusement Park, we ran right into the arriving police. Wu Meng was leading the team personally. According to him, they had arrived half an hour ago but couldn't find the exact location of the Amusement Park, as if they had encountered a ghost wall.

I didn't chat with them in detail, quietly standing guard beside Tie Ningxiang. At this point, the night hadn't yet passed, and the livestream wasn't over. I was afraid someone else might come to hurt her.

I refused to leave her side for even a single step; my mind was a mess. I wasn't sure if Tie Ningxiang was fated to suffer this calamity, or if she had been dragged into it because of my livestream.

If I hadn't livestreamed at the Anxin Hotel in the first place, Lu Xing probably wouldn't have known that she possessed the General Star Divine Fiends destiny, much less targeted her.

The taxi sped through the night. The scenery on both sides blurred backward as dim, yellow streetlights illuminated the road ahead.

About forty minutes later, Tie Ningxiang was transferred to the hospital's emergency room. I sat in the hallway, not speaking a word to anyone, until the sky outside the window paled with dawn.

"The patient is out of danger, but she still needs to rest and recover for a period of time. Who are the patient's family members?"

The morning sun shone on my face. Without me realizing it, the night had faded. The sky had finally broken into dawn.