Chapter 746: Ghost Art Fifth Layer

Hemp rope bound her limbs, suspending her at the stairwell entrance.

She wore thin clothing that clung to her full, supple figure. Blackened bloodstains marred her snow-white skin.

Her hair hung loose over her shoulders, and her eyes were wide open in a dead stare.

"Zhang Shuxue?"

I recognized her the moment I saw her face. I slowly approached the woman hanging at the stairwell entrance, her body as limp as a deflated rubber ball.

There were no obvious fatal wounds on her body; the cuts on her wrists and ankles had only been made to drain her blood.

"The blood hasn't coagulated yet, and I can still feel her body heat. She couldn't have been hanging here long." I snapped the ropes and laid her flat on the ground, then checked her neck and vitals. I still found no fatal injuries. "Strange. How did the killer finish her off? Her lip color is normal, so it wasn't poison. Her pupils are dilated, though—it looks like she suffered a massive shock right before she died."

Zhang Shuxue's eyes bulged outward like cheap glass marbles—cloudy, dull, and mottled.

"She was the Doctor's younger sister, and she was also controlled by an obsession. Why would they kill her?" A living person had been reduced to a corpse in the blink of an eye. I crouched beside Zhang Shuxue, my expression shifting darkly.

"Could it be because she revealed something important to me? Did that anger the obsession?" I recalled my conversation with her. Aside from recounting her past, she hadn't said much about the Red Building itself.

"Did I overlook something? Or did they kill her for a completely different reason?"

"Hanging her corpse at the stairwell entrance... is this a provocation? Impossible. The Red Building Tenants wouldn't do something so childish." The current broadcast was still shrouded in mystery. There were too many side plots. Even though I tried my hardest to uncover the truth, various circumstances made me feel like I still hadn't touched the core of the matter.

Death might have been a release. At least, it was for Zhang Shuxue.

"Now that she's dead, what form will the obsession controlling her take? Will it revert to a dark shadow covered in bite marks?" Unable to figure it out, I straightened up and looked around. "Her limbs were tied with hemp rope, and her blood hasn't even cooled yet. It feels like Zhang Shuxue is bait on a hook. The Red Building Tenants must be preparing to use her corpse to lure something out."

The night was as black as ink. Wind and rain lashed together, the raindrops drumming a noisy, chaotic rhythm against the walls and the earth.

The Longchang Old Site was massive. There could very well be some monster lurking in the shadows right now, watching everything.

"The Old Granny and Junsheng are connected to the Reincarnation Mirror Fragment—that's the first side plot. The top-floor tenant of Unit Four and the Faceless Woman make up the second. The Red Building Tenants and the obsessions are the third..." My mind was perfectly clear. Everything I had experienced was slowly converging. All three plotlines had to point to the exact same place in the end.

Raising my head, I stared at the towering Ancient Building before me, murderous intent boiling in my heart.

Zhang Shuxue's death made one thing crystal clear: the Red Building Tenants no longer deserved to be called human. They lacked even the most basic morality. If I spared their lives, they would escape the Red Building and become serial killers, sowing fear and death wherever they went.

Slaughter was addictive. Once someone got a taste for blood, they could never truly give it up.

"You were just another poor soul." I closed Zhang Shuxue's eyes and dragged her body out of the rain. Only then did I enter the towering Ancient Building alongside the Fate Ghost.

This building was different from the adjacent ones. Footprints were stamped into the moss on the floor, and jagged gouges from an iron weapon scarred the walls. Someone had been here not long ago.

"The footprints are messy and mismatched. At least six or seven people have come through here."

Walking through the corridor, I could pick up a faint stench of blood. I lowered my head and spotted inconspicuous bloodstains mingling with the broken bricks and mud.

"Did the Red Building Tenants leave this?" I remembered Li Ming, the child who had been abducted and brought to the Red Building. His stomach had been sliced open; it was highly likely that the blood on the ground belonged to him.

Wearing the Good and Evil Asura Mask, influenced by the Blood Fox's monstrous killing intent, and burdened by the negative emotions I had accumulated from devouring obsessions, I desperately needed to vent my frustrations through slaughter.

"At this rate of devouring, my Yin-Yang Ghost Art will soon break through to the Ghost Art Fifth Layer. Once that happens, even if the Butcher is hiding among the Red Building Tenants, I'll have the power to put up a fight."

As I walked down the long, dim corridor, my shadow twisted and stretched out. The black hair condensed from malevolent yin energy fluttered behind my back. The Fate Ghost and I walked in tandem toward the deepest stairwell.

The Ancient Building was completely dilapidated. Cold winds swept through the halls, and the constant drip of water echoed from every corner like an eerie funeral dirge.

Reaching the landing between the first and second floors, I found a massive dark shadow blocking the middle of the narrow stairwell. It had its back to me, its body swaying slightly like a mountain of flesh.

Up until now, all the obsessions I had encountered in the Ancient Building had been covered in bite marks. This was the first time I had run into an obsession representing the man-eaters.

Its corpulent, barrel-like body completely blocked the stairs. I didn't make a sound as I quietly closed the distance.

The monster only noticed my presence when I stepped within three meters of it. Its nearly transparent skin scraped against the walls, revealing swollen, deformed internal organs hanging over its skeletal frame.

Honestly, I found this obese obsession far more disgusting than the ones covered in bite marks. After all, it had formed because it had eaten so many of its own kind that its gluttony morphed into a psychological knot.

It struggled to twist its neck. Its disproportionately small head rotated a full one hundred and eighty degrees, locking its soybean-sized eyes onto me.

"What are you looking at? You got a death wish?"

My low, hoarse voice squeezed through my clenched teeth with a hint of pure brutality.

The moment the words left my mouth, I pushed off my back foot and lunged forward like a cheetah.

My fingers blurred as I formed hand seals. By the time I reached the obese obsession, the mudra was already complete.

The Blood Fox Tattoo on my chest roared to life and pounced in tandem with my movements. A massive, blood-red fox tail swept out from behind me, crashing down on the obsession's head like a tidal wave and smashing it ruthlessly into the ground.

"Gluttony is a cardinal sin. There's no need to spread the misery you suffered in life to anyone else." Shrouding my hand in a blood-colored aura, I plunged my palm into the obsession's chest like a sharpened blade. The fat on its face jiggled violently, and its beady eyes locked onto me.

It swung a massive, flabby hand at me, only for it to be blocked by an onslaught of fox tails. My eyes were ice-cold as I watched it. Gripping its heart—which was several times larger than a normal human's—I squeezed down hard.

The obsession seemed to actually feel fear. It thrashed and struggled desperately, but my expression beneath the mask remained completely unmoved.

"I'm killing you to save others. And to save myself."

Stomping my foot firmly onto its chest, I pulled with both hands and ripped its heart clean out.

The moment the heart left its body, it dissolved into black threads brimming with negative energy. To an outsider, it would have looked like the heart simply melted into the palm of my hand.

The organs dangling from its skeleton rapidly shriveled up. The obsession's body shrank down smaller and smaller until it completely shattered, flowing like water directly into the fox tails and my own body.

The power contained within the obese obsession was fundamentally different from the emaciated, bite-marked ones. The latter were born from resentment and indignation. This one, however, filled me with an uncontrollable urge—a ravenous hunger to eat everything in sight, to swallow down everything beautiful and claim it as my own.

"The power within this type of obsession is significantly stronger than the ones covered in bite marks. But the negative side effects are just as intense." I had the Fate Ghost stand guard while I leaned my back against the wall and looked inward at my spirit platform.

After devouring such a massive number of obsessions, my spirit platform was no longer clear and pristine. It was now overrun by a terrifying mix of blood-red and grayish-black hues.

I attempted to circulate the Profound Truth Mental Method. My true qi surged through my yang meridians, but it was completely incapable of purging these negative emotions.

"If this continues, once they take root in my spirit platform and sea of consciousness, they'll probably spawn entirely new obsessions inside my mind." It was incredibly difficult to truly destroy an obsession. Whether it was a single person or an entire dynasty, everything would eventually lose to time and fade into history. In this world, sheer willpower was the only thing that would never rot or yield.

"These two types of obsessions... one was left behind by the victims who were eaten, and the other by the gluttons who ate them. Just looking at them makes my skin crawl." I exhaled a long breath of stale air. The situation in my sea of consciousness was severe, but I simply didn't have the time to deal with it right now.

"Every gain demands an equivalent price. As long as my ghost art can break through and grant me absolute power, this bit of pain and torment is nothing." The vibrant, blood-red fox tails retracted back into my body. Only the Fate Ghost remained, following closely by my side. As I continuously absorbed the obsessions, some stray black threads seemed to slip into his body. However, these stray fragments of memory and emotion didn't harm him at all. Instead, they made his eyes look far more vivid and full of life.

After devouring the obese obsession, my comprehension of human nature, desire, and various negative emotions deepened considerably. My proficiency in the ghost art was also steadily rising.

"The main building only has seven or eight floors in total. I wonder how many more obsessions are hiding inside." I looked up at the pitch-black stairwell and shook out my hands. "It doesn't matter, though. I'll just slaughter my way to the top. I really want to see how those Red Building Tenants plan to fight an Underworld Live Show Streamer like me once they lose the protection of these obsessions."

The Underworld Live Show was an unfathomable existence, and every single Streamer was extraordinary. Naturally, that included me.

Blood-red light swirled in my eyes. Once my murderous intent was sparked, it was impossible to suppress.

Abandoning the blood trail, I began roaming the main building purely to hunt down more obsessions. After devouring seven obese obsessions in a row, my eyes were completely bloodshot. My mind was overrun with all sorts of malicious thoughts, pushing me to the very edge of losing control.

The gains, however, were massive. My ghost art had ascended to a terrifying level, and I already had half a foot through the door of the Ghost Art Fifth Layer. This was something completely unimaginable back in Jiangcheng.

One had to understand that the ghost art became exponentially harder to progress the further one went. It required the cultivator to simultaneously comprehend the paths of both humans and ghosts, and it heavily involved the concepts of reincarnation and yin and yang. Normally, very few people were willing to spend huge amounts of time meditating on these concepts. Take the Maoshan Yin Masters, for example. Once their ghost art reached a certain level, they would pivot to specializing in Daoist arts, relegating their ghost art to a purely supplementary role. Someone like me, whose ghost art completely crushed their Daoist cultivation, was absolutely unheard of.