Dachang City. Beside an empty highway, two horrifying corpses were half-kneeling there.
A red light flashed, and a sinister figure abruptly appeared, an old, worn hatchet still in his hand.
Dull blackness and piercing red light intertwined. Within that crimson expanse, lake water and black flames faintly churned.
Everything in this space had come to a standstill. This was Yang Jian’s sixth-layer ghost domain; the instant he arrived, he had paused time here.
Before him were the corpses of Zhang Han and Tong Qian.
“Zhao Lei?”
Yang Jian stared at that half-familiar human face. He did not know what had happened here.
But judging from the current situation, Zhang Han seemed to have encountered Zhao Lei. Yang Jian had always wanted to find Zhao Lei’s face, but had never had any clues. He had not expected Zhang Han to run into it instead.
The ghost hand touched the hideous smiling face on Zhang Han’s face, pieced together from bone.
“He’s already completely dead.”
At this moment, Zhang Han had no life in him at all. If not for Yang Jian’s suppression, the fierce ghost inside his body would immediately go out of control.
The red light grew denser. The things that had been frozen around him resumed moving again—no... the entire area was being restarted. Yang Jian intended to bring Zhang Han back through an area-wide restart.
A terrifying supernatural force was forcibly pushing everything in this area back into the past.
Everything was steeped in rich, blood-colored light.
Time passed second by second, but Zhang Han’s corpse still showed no reaction.
Ten seconds.
Yang Jian silently counted in his heart.
Twenty seconds...
The cold lake water churned. The headless ghost shadow within it was indistinct. The ghost eyes suddenly shut, and the red light dimmed in an instant. The eighth-layer ghost domain collapsed, falling back once more to the sixth layer.
His brows furrowed slightly.
“Too much time has passed. I can’t maintain a restart for that long.”
From the moment Yang Jian entered the range of Dachang City, he had noticed the abnormality here. Although he had rushed here at the first opportunity, too much time had already passed—at least more than a minute. Even he could not perform an area-wide restart for that long.
But since Yang Jian had already returned, he was determined to bring Zhang Han back.
Behind him, the enormous headless ghost shadow slowly stood upright. Pure darkness gathered into the shape of a head, its edges flickering with pitch-black flames.
A faint trace of scarlet glimmered at its forehead.
Just as he had initially used the headless ghost shadow and the ghost eyes to achieve balance, now Yang Jian intended to forcibly suppress the ghost eyes with this black fire, forming a new balance.
He abandoned his human shell, using the headless ghost shadow as his body and shaping a head from black fire.
A terrifying fierce ghost descended upon this frozen space-time.
This ghost’s head looked exceedingly strange. It was clearly pitch-black, with no discernible form at all, yet anyone who looked at it would immediately and clearly recognize that this was Yang Jian’s face.
The faint scarlet at its forehead grew increasingly dazzling. As a stretch of cold lake water flowed out, eight scarlet eyeballs once again overlapped atop the pitch-black head.
The second area-wide restart began.
This time, the out-of-control red light surged wildly, instantly filling the entire space. It seemed even the waning moon in the sky had been covered with a dim layer of scarlet.
Yang Jian’s gaze locked onto Zhang Han’s corpse. The restart had already approached one minute. A faint restlessness came from the ghost eyes. Even under the suppression of the black fire, Yang Jian could not sustain this kind of restart that reversed life and death for too long.
Suddenly, Zhang Han’s finger moved lightly.
“It worked. With the help of the black fire, I can at least achieve an area-wide restart of around one minute.”
The pitch-black ghost shadow covered him like a tide.
A crackling series of bones snapping back into place sounded from Zhang Han’s face. The ghost shadow was reassembling his completely deformed skull.
“Captain?”
Zhang Han stared blankly at the inhuman Yang Jian before him. Sensing that familiar aura, he found it somewhat hard to believe.
He had already steeled himself for sacrifice. He had never expected that at such a critical moment, the person he had been thinking of in his heart would truly come to save him.
“It’s me.” Yang Jian’s voice came through the black flames, cold and calm.
He pointed at Zhao Lei beside them and asked, “Tell me what happened. Why are Zhao Lei and Tong Qian appearing on the same face?”
Zhang Han immediately gave a brief account: from headquarters sending someone to find him and request assistance, to encountering Cao Yang and Zhao Lei, and finally to Tong Qian sacrificing herself to awaken Zhao Lei’s consciousness.
“Something like that happened?”
The wisp of scarlet at his forehead fluctuated slightly. He had always thought Zhao Lei’s face had disappeared along with the newspaper in that room of the Caesar Hotel. He had not expected it to survive, and even escape successfully with the help of one of the fierce ghosts inside.
“Captain, Tong Qian seems to already be dead. The newspaper controlled her consciousness. Zhao Lei and she are fighting over this corpse.”
“No, she isn’t dead yet...”
Yang Jian’s gaze turned to Tong Qian. The ghost shadow had already sealed her mouth, preventing that eerie laughter from continuing to spread.
But Yang Jian could sense that Tong Qian’s consciousness was still there. Only, at this moment, that face of hers was staring fixedly at them with a gaze of extreme hatred, as if she shared an irreconcilable blood feud with them.
“It’s very similar to Zhao Lei’s situation back then. Her memories have been altered, and this time the extent of alteration is even greater. A ghost controlling a person...”
Looking at Tong Qian’s almost man-eating gaze, Yang Jian thought of the Reform Society he had come into contact with before—that mode of behavior that was almost like the instincts of a fierce ghost. It was a state of even deeper mutual intervention with a fierce ghost, and the supernatural power it could drive was even more terrifying.
But Tong Qian did not possess the supernatural means to resist this state. Her consciousness would gradually be occupied by the fierce ghost, her behavior would draw closer and closer to that of a fierce ghost, until she was finally reduced entirely to a ghost that retained only a portion of a living person’s consciousness.
Just then, Yang Jian sensed a child-sized presence breaking into his ghost domain. Afterward, several more people entered one after another. One of those auras was one he could not be more familiar with.
“Ghost Child?”
Sensing the changes in his ghost domain, he knew Feng Quan and Huang Ziya had arrived with the Ghost Child and Wang Shanshan. With a thought, Yang Jian directly shifted them in front of him.
“Captain?!”
“Brother Leg?”
“Yang Jian?”
At this moment, Yang Jian’s body was an enormous pitch-black ghost shadow. His head burned with silent black flames, and a faint point of scarlet appeared between his brows. Cold lake water slowly spread beneath his feet, and within it, one could even vaguely see a vicious, savage dog pacing.
No matter who looked at him, they would see a terrifying fierce ghost through and through. If not for the outline drawn by the black fire, from which Yang Jian’s features could still faintly be made out, the others would have almost turned and fled at once.
But Wang Shanshan took a step forward. Concern showed on her pale, cold face. “Yang Jian, what happened? How did you become like this?”
From within the pitch-black head came Yang Jian’s cold voice:
“I’m fine. My condition is very good. I’m simply trying out a method of controlling the supernatural.”