“What effect does it have?” Wang Chaling showed not the slightest panic, simply standing there and staring at the man.
“The supernatural nature of ghost money varies depending on the medium it intervenes through. If you’re merely buying your life, I don’t think you’ll last very long.”
A chilling smile tugged at the Banker’s lips.
“You’ll know once you try.”
Wang Chaling glanced in Cowboy Hat’s direction. He did not try to stop him; facing multiple Kings at once, he did not dare be arrogant.
He crouched down and picked up the banknote on the ground, but the banknote appeared eerily in the hand of the terrifying old man behind him instead. With a casual twist of his fingers, the banknote immediately turned into scraps and drifted down. Wang Chaling said,
“There’s no need to stall for time. The situation we’re facing right now is the same. You believe your teammates will win, and likewise, I have absolute confidence in mine.”
He stood up and looked toward the one already approaching the Gravedigger.
“Your judgment was correct: break through Li Jun, the weakest among us, and then join forces to besiege me. But too much of your humanity has already been erased, which caused a flaw in your plan.”
Gazing at the specks of green fire in the distance, Wang Chaling continued, “Li Jun isn’t like people such as us. He won’t take a single step back. I imagine the one wearing the cowboy hat doesn’t want to face a revived ghost either.”
“Damn it...” The Banker immediately turned back to look at the approaching Cowboy Hat.
“Tell him to come back!”
However, in the instant his attention wavered, Wang Chaling’s figure blurred and instantly appeared in front of him.
“You’re courting death!”
Sheet after sheet of wrinkled yellow paper drifted out of the darkness, passing straight through the red balloon.
“We can’t make contact. The other side doesn’t seem to intend to fight us directly, only to trap us here.”
Liu San lowered his head and looked at the large, sturdy black dog.
“Captain Yang, this dog...”
“My dad raised it.”
“Your dad?”
Liu San gave Yang Jian a strange look.
Yang Jian did not respond. Expressionless, he stared at a thin thread around the dog’s neck, a thread almost impossible to detect, extending from the black dog’s neck and connecting to that bright red balloon.
“A medium? Try the hatchet.”
Scarlet light and shadow reflected on Yang Jian’s deathly pale face.
He raised the hatchet and lightly chopped at the thin thread. Something eerie happened. There was no sensation, no resistance. The hatchet passed straight through the thread, as if the thread did not exist at all.
The hatchet could trigger a medium; it was impossible for there to be direct contact without any reaction whatsoever.
The scarlet ghost eye on his forehead shifted uneasily. Yang Jian looked at that thin thread and frowned slightly.
“I have a guess, but it might be a misjudgment.”
On Shen Lin’s side, he was carrying an axe, walking through a landscape of illusory, shattered light and shadow. A faint stench of corpses permeated the surroundings, as if there were a corpse following Shen Lin the entire time.
He stopped and lowered his head to look at the ground.
The ground seemed not to exist. No, it was not that it “didn’t exist,” but that Shen Lin could not understand what exactly he was standing on.
With every step Shen Lin took, the scene before his eyes abruptly changed. More than that, even with a mere turn of his head, the surrounding environment would switch in an eerie instant.
It felt as though he were inside a movie, and someone was continuously cutting between the scenes before his eyes.
“Memories... or a dream?”
Shen Lin was thinking back on what Yang Jian had just said.
“Repeated scenes, supernatural products that exist only within dreams.”
He raised the axe and slowly brought it down. A dull tearing sound rang out, but the ever-changing light and shadow before his eyes were completely unaffected, still appearing and vanishing abruptly.
“This can’t be analyzed from a conventional perspective. In such a state, perhaps there is some deeper connection between the Kings, similar to the fusion of Yang Jian’s and Li Jun’s ghost domains?”
Within a dense expanse of red light, Yang Jian and Liu San stood.
“The fact that we haven’t been attacked yet means trapping us here is indeed the limit of what they can do.”
Liu San stiffly raised his hand and reached toward the balloon. This time, Liu San used the old corpse within him.
However, the same situation occurred again. His palm passed straight through it. Then Liu San slowly crouched down again, reaching toward the large black dog lying on the ground.
The black dog showed no reaction at all, as if it could not sense the two of them. Even when Liu San’s hand touched its sharp fangs, it still did not move.
Liu San stared at the black dog.
“This dog can be truly felt, yet the balloon cannot be touched. Perhaps it itself does not exist here, but we can see it.”
He stood and looked at Yang Jian.
“There’s one possibility. Maybe it’s a multiple-layered dream. We and this balloon may not be on the same level.”
After listening, Yang Jian fell silent for several seconds, then shook his head slightly.
“No. If it were a multiple-layered dream, that would mean someone could suppress us while also dragging us into an even deeper level of supernatural power.”
Yang Jian paused, as if organizing his thoughts.
“The existence of this dog is itself a ghost of an extremely terrifying level. It’s impossible for anyone to suppress the three of us while also dragging us into a deeper level of supernatural power...”
This dog could be said to be the Ghost Dream itself. With supernatural power of this level, let alone bypassing it to attack Yang Jian, even suppressing it would be extremely difficult.
Yang Jian walked over to the vicious dog and crouched down beside it, stretching out his hand to gently rest it on the top of its head.
“But you were half right. This balloon and we are not on the same level, which is why there is no medium here that can touch it.”
“But this dog has always been in my consciousness. Its appearance here is the best hint.”
The scarlet ghost eye slowly turned.
“But we’re still missing some key piece of information.”
Suddenly, Liu San pointed at the dog and said, “Yang Jian, this dog moved.”
From Yang Jian and Liu San’s perspective, the large black dog that had been lying motionless suddenly slowly stood up.
Something eerie happened. As the black dog rose to its feet, half of its head abruptly disappeared first. The cut looked as if it had been trimmed along a ruler, and the vanished portion left not a trace of blood, only a pitch-black cross-section.
Then, as the black dog moved, the missing part abruptly appeared again, as if the severed surface just now had never existed.
With the changes in the black dog’s movements, parts of its body kept abruptly disappearing and reappearing. This bizarre dislocation produced an exceptionally nauseating sense of discomfort.
Liu San looked at the eerie phenomenon before him. “Is it being attacked?”
Yang Jian stared fixedly at the large black dog whose shape kept changing. He suddenly thought of an astonishing possibility and said,
“No, it isn’t being attacked. It’s struggling against this space. But this movement gave me a hint. I understand now...”
At that moment, Shen Lin’s voice came from behind Liu San, cutting off Yang Jian’s words.
“Different dimensions. That dog exists in three dimensions.”