Somewhere overseas, in the center of a city.
The air was filled with a scorching heat. The entire city twisted and burned amid raging flames, the outlines of distant skyscrapers blurring beneath the high temperature.
Between two skyscrapers, a man hovered in midair.
The dark-red kasaya he wore snapped and billowed in the heat waves and violent wind. On the front of the robe, three large characters had been embroidered in gold thread.
Da Luo City.
The man’s face was ashen, utterly devoid of vitality. In his hollow eyes, not the slightest fluctuation of emotion could be seen.
He swung the long staff in his hand, flourishing it in a beautiful arc before steadying it across his shoulders. His hands rested casually on either end as his gaze looked down at an old woman below.
“How wretched,” the man slowly said, his voice dull and heavy.
“You tried to change the world order for your own selfish interests, only to have Wang Xiaoming turn the tables on you. Are you flying into a rage out of humiliation?”
On the ground stood a terrifying old woman. Her face was covered in ravine-like wrinkles, and she wore an old-fashioned European dress. Her entire being seemed lifeless, like a corpse.
She opened her mouth and let out a shrill voice. “Zhang Sun... I think you ought to explain why that so-called Reform Society was able to infiltrate that place so easily and draw out this great fire. Do you know how many innocent people have died because of it?”
“Have you gone senile!?”
A muffled boom exploded outward. A dark, pale-blue force abruptly spread with Zhang Sun at its center. The surrounding temperature plummeted, and vast swathes of flame were instantly pressed apart.
Zhang Sun continued, “A pack of fierce ghosts wearing human skin actually has the nerve to say something like that? If the Ark Plan had truly been carried out, the dead would number far more than this.”
“Is that so...” An extremely ugly, eerie smile appeared on the old woman’s face.
“It seems you already know about the plan. Today, I’ll give you two choices: join us, or die right now.”
Zhang Sun stared fixedly at the old woman blocking his path.
On that shriveled face, within those lifeless eyes, he could not see the slightest trace of a living person. He even suspected that this old woman was a ghost.
The supernatural circles overseas were completely different from those back home. Some information about the supernatural from the old era had been passed down. Methods that had originally led nowhere had, under the research of these deranged madmen, produced certain extremely dangerous, alternative ways of controlling supernatural forces.
The old woman before him was one of the most representative examples.
Although she had not suffered a fierce ghost’s revival, her consciousness had already been eroded too deeply by the supernatural. Her behavior was already close to that of a fierce ghost, and she barely possessed much awareness as a living person at all.
Zhang Sun sensed something. He raised his head and looked toward the top of a nearby building, where there was nothing at all.
But Zhang Sun continued speaking. “You think the three of you alone can stop me? You don’t know whether you’re dead or alive.”
As his words fell, on the originally empty rooftop of the building, a black figure appeared out of thin air. His entire body was shrouded in dense black mist, making it impossible to see his features clearly.
And he was not the only one. On the reflective glass of the building, a black-and-white figure suddenly emerged, as if projected there by some kind of device. This person was extremely strange, seeming not to possess a physical body at all, merely an image, yet one capable of affecting reality.
The staff on Zhang Sun’s shoulder slowly lowered, pointing toward the black figure on the rooftop.
“I will attack you first and smash your head open.”
Then he turned to look at the old woman on the ground.
“At the same time, I will suppress you here. After I kill that man, I will step on the face of the person inside the glass and walk out of this place.”
“If you don’t believe me, feel free to try.”
At that moment, another voice abruptly rang out, carrying a heavy foreign accent. “Of course we believe you. Mr. Zhang is fully capable of doing exactly that.”
“Four?”
Zhang Sun’s expression changed, instantly turning gloomy.
He looked coldly around him. This operation to surround and capture him had clearly been prepared in advance. The people present were no ordinary ghost controllers at all. Every one of them was a core member of the King Organization; back home, they would be captain-level figures.
“No... no, there are others...”
At this moment, Zhang Sun felt a powerful sense of danger and unease.
He lifted his eyes and looked into the distance. At some point, the color of the surrounding flames had become extraordinarily vivid, as though smeared on by an invisible paintbrush, their hues bizarre to the extreme.
‘I have to end this quickly. I can’t drag it out.’
The next second.
“Thump—thump!”
A dull heartbeat resounded throughout the area.
Including Zhang Sun, the entire world seemed to stop amid the sound of that heartbeat.
However, he seemed capable of resisting this eerie supernatural attack and recovered his ability to move a step earlier than the others.
The cold, deep blue around him stretched taut into a straight line, charging straight toward the old woman on the ground.
A trace of panic appeared in the old woman’s eyes. She could still think, but the fierce ghost inside her body was actually unable to move in the slightest.
Just then, a large hole abruptly opened in the ground. A cold, withered hand suddenly reached out from the pitch-black opening, actually piercing straight through Zhang Sun’s ghost domain and grabbing his ankle tightly.
Then came a second hand, a third. In just a moment, dense clusters of hands covered his entire thigh.
Zhang Sun reacted extremely quickly. A cold white mist seeped out from the surface of his body and rapidly covered his leg. The instant those arms came into contact with the white mist, they immediately withered and fell away.
But that brief delay allowed the old woman to widen the distance between herself and Zhang Sun.
Zhang Sun’s expression turned cold. His first attack had been stopped, but his movements did not cease. His figure abruptly vanished from where he stood.
“Thump—thump!”
Along with the second heartbeat, Zhang Sun actually reappeared between the two buildings, as though his attack just now had never happened at all.
He raised the old staff in his hand and, with unstoppable force, brought it down toward the figure on the rooftop whose entire body was emitting black mist.
Everything happened too quickly. No one had time to react. This exaggerated supernatural manifestation, similar to time flowing backward, left the members of the King Organization present momentarily frozen in place.
The man standing on the rooftop was codenamed “Manor Lord.” The fog-like blackness around him was precisely his ghost domain.
At this moment, from his perspective, a long staff blotted out the sky and sun as it descended straight toward him from above, carrying countless agonized wails, about to smash into his skull. There was nowhere to dodge.
In that instant, he had only one thought in his mind.
He would die!
Suddenly, the building where Manor Lord stood rapidly receded. The entire world seemed to be stretched out, and the distance between Manor Lord and Zhang Sun was continuously enlarged, even surpassing the speed at which the staff was falling.
The positions of the two men were being altered by some terrifying supernatural power, infinitely extended.
At the same time, the black-and-white figure outside the building’s glass made his move.
He gently raised an arm, actually ignoring that seemingly infinitely distant space. His palm appeared on Zhang Sun’s body in the manner of a projection, tightly seizing Zhang Sun’s right arm—the one holding the staff.
A sudden sense of losing control swept over him. Zhang Sun looked down and saw that, without knowing when, his legs had already sunk into the ground. Countless cold hands were pulling him down into the earth.
Zhang Sun wanted to break free, but he was shocked to discover that he could not control his body at all.
His entire waist had been compressed into a finger-thick line, as though something had bound him tightly and was trying to strangle him into two pieces.
He looked toward the old woman not far away. The change in his body was actually identical to the old-fashioned dress she wore.
In this instant between life and death, Zhang Sun did not panic. Instead, he calmly analyzed the situation before him.
‘My body is out of control. Both feet have been suppressed. I can’t sense my right hand at all.’
‘My left hand can still move. As long as I kill one of them, I can escape...’
‘There’s still a chance!’
Without the slightest hesitation, Zhang Sun raised his left hand and thrust it fiercely toward the location of his own heart.
But in that very instant, Zhang Sun saw that the pitch-black figure on the rooftop was actually holding a coffin nail in his hand.