“Fang Shiming is regrouping with us. My paper man ran into a ghost. That ghost was very special... My paper man died without sending back any information.”
Yang Jian and Liu San walked along the side of a street. A tearing gale carried cold rain with it, and the air was thick with the stench of corpses.
“Find the source. There’s no need to get entangled with an unknown ghost.”
Yang Jian was considering their next move.
My ghost domain can’t extend too far, or even my ghost domain will be blown apart by this wind.
If someone is controlling it, then the moment we meet, I’ll make them die. With the hatchet combined with the ghost tattoo, I can dismember a ghost in an instant.
Ghost Lake can only carry out limited confinement within a selected area. Unfortunately, the Dead Man’s Banner was lost in the tattoo parlor. Otherwise, I’d have more options...
“Yang Jian, something’s wrong. There’s someone standing over there.”
Liu San suddenly stopped.
“No, that’s not right. I keep glimpsing a ghost.”
Liu San’s sallow face was grave as he stared fixedly at an empty, open street ahead.
Yang Jian followed Liu San’s gaze, but there was nothing there at all. He did not see the fierce ghost Liu San was talking about.
“Where is it? Point it out.”
Liu San raised his hand and pointed toward the spot in his vision where the ghost was standing.
A cold, pitch-black, headless shadow rapidly spread toward the street. The shadow had already completely covered the location Liu San was pointing at, yet Yang Jian could not sense the presence of any supernatural aura.
“Can’t find it?”
Yang Jian pondered for a moment.
“Could it be like the ghost hand, existing within a deeper layer of the ghost domain...?”
He made another move. This time, dense red light enveloped the street. However, within the fifth-layer ghost domain, the street was still completely empty.
“Are you sure it’s in that position?”
Yang Jian’s ghost domain was being disturbed by the strange hurricane, causing it to ripple faintly.
“The source of the hurricane is gradually expanding. At this distance, it can already interfere with my ghost domain. We need to move faster...”
Liu San nodded.
“It invaded through my paper man as a medium, but neither Fang Shiming nor you were attacked. It isn’t area-based.”
“Wait! It’s approaching me! Every time I shift my gaze, it moves a certain distance closer.”
In the corner of Liu San’s eye, a deathly pale figure stood motionless in the distance.
But each time he shifted his gaze, that pale figure would move a little closer to Liu San. Now Liu San was staring rigidly at the road ahead, not daring to look around carelessly.
Yang Jian’s ghost hand gripped an old hatchet, his expression turning stern. He did not want to waste time here and intended to cut through the mess quickly, directly dismembering that ghost.
The next second, the world emitting red light abruptly fell into stillness. Yang Jian appeared in the area Liu San had indicated, and the pitch-black ghost shadow instantly covered the entire road surface.
The same situation happened again. Within this paused ghost domain, Yang Jian still could not sense any supernatural aura.
“I still can’t see it.”
“Impossible. According to headquarters’ intelligence, the ghosts within the hurricane zone were released from Ghost Lake after it was blown apart.”
“If this ghost could be sunk into Ghost Lake, then at the very least, that means Ghost Lake can suppress it.”
Yang Jian rapidly thought through and analyzed the ghost attacking Liu San.
“Even if my current ghost domain can’t invade Ghost Lake, I should still be able to find a ghost that can be suppressed by Ghost Lake.”
His scarlet ghost eye stared fixedly at the road surface.
“Unless the ghost’s location isn’t actually here. Could it be that something is wrong with Liu San?”
Yang Jian turned to look at Liu San, then looked at the road surface his finger was pointing at.
“Seeing it... Every change in line of sight is accompanied by a change in the fierce ghost’s position. Wait, Liu San said he could see it the whole time...”
“That’s impossible. Other than this gale, I haven’t sensed the existence of any ghost domain. Could it be...”
Yang Jian thought of an astonishing possibility, but time was pressing now, and he had no way to verify whether it was correct.
He had to take a gamble. He suddenly turned his head and shouted at Liu San.
“Gouge out your own eyes! That ghost has been in your eyes all along!”
Liu San’s expression changed. He instantly understood what Yang Jian meant and raised his hand to stab at his own eyes.
But in the next second, a stiff, eerie corpse suddenly appeared before Liu San’s eyes.
The body, covered in rotting corpse spots, gave off waves of corpse stench. Its pitch-black, hollow eye sockets stared fixedly at Liu San.
All at once, the corpse spread its rotten arms and tightly embraced Liu San.
But from Yang Jian’s perspective, Liu San had suddenly frozen where he stood, both hands raised in midair without moving an inch, his entire body seemingly fixed in place by some strange supernatural force.
“Something’s gone wrong...”
During the tattoo parlor incident, Yang Jian had seen that old corpse of Liu San’s. Even the current Yang Jian was deeply wary of it. It was absolutely impossible for it to have no ability to resist.
A flash of scarlet passed. Yang Jian appeared in front of Liu San, and his ghost hand fiercely stabbed into Liu San’s eye sockets, digging out two bloody eyeballs.
Liu San instantly felt his whole body lighten, and he immediately regained the ability to move.
“A terrifying supernatural attack that doesn’t exist in reality...”
Liu San crouched on the ground, his heart shaken beyond measure.
Just now, the old corpse inside him had been completely unable to touch the fierce ghost before his eyes, yet that fierce ghost had been able to attack him.
If Yang Jian had not gouged out his eyes, perhaps he really would have fallen here today...
“These eyes... aren’t yours.”
Yang Jian’s ghost hand held a pair of eyeballs.
The entire eyeballs were pitch-black, while the pupils were a ghastly white that slowly spread outward, as if they had just been dug out from some corpse that had been dead for a long time.
Liu San took out two sallow eyeballs made of yellow paper from somewhere and stuffed them into his eye sockets. He moved them a little, and the eyeballs mechanically turned within their sockets.
“When were they replaced? I didn’t sense it at all. An attack that doesn’t exist in reality, and it isn’t consciousness-based either. Does it only exist within one’s line of sight?”
Yang Jian looked at the eyeballs in his hand as they slowly turned white and said,
“The killing pattern is very simple, but also very difficult to discover. As long as you see it, your eyes will be replaced. Even for me, if I couldn’t figure out this ghost’s killing pattern, it would be very hard to escape.”
Liu San slowly stood up, seeming to have already recovered.
“Supernatural incidents are often this unreasonable. No matter how many ghosts you’ve controlled, when you run into certain anomalies, you can still capsize in the gutter.”
“Let’s go. It’s time to move. We’ve wasted too much time here.”
Yang Jian looked at the increasingly dark clouds overhead. It was as if they were brewing an even more terrifying storm.
At the center of the hurricane.
Corpses blotted out the sky and covered the earth, forming a massive tornado that reached straight into the heavens. Cold lake water flowed slowly among countless mutilated bodies.
An old man with a face full of wrinkles, so thin he was nothing but skin and bones, held a rotting ball of flesh in his hand. Corpse water was continuously gushing out from within the ball of flesh.
“We can’t stop him. That man called Yang Jian is too sharp. He analyzed the killing pattern of those eyeballs almost instantly.”
“In our current state, we can’t act casually... That Elder Qin has been observing the future all along.”