Black flames burned wildly over Yang Jian’s body. Strangely, the black fire seemed to burn only the supernatural; Yang Jian’s clothes, hair, and the like remained perfectly intact, not burned away at all.
Yellow paper rapidly climbed upward from beneath Yang Jian’s feet. The black fire did not attack Liu San; he was trying to help Yang Jian slow the speed at which the flames covered him.
But the yellow paper was burned to ash the instant it touched the black fire. The wrinkled yellow paper was consumed at once, completely unable to keep up with the speed of the black fire’s spread.
At that moment, the densely packed paper figures behind Liu San also ignited with the same black flames. The fire seemed to follow the yellow paper as a medium and counter-invaded through it.
Two lifeless figures surfaced behind Yang Jian. They were Wang Chaling’s grandfather and grandmother, beings of extremely high terror level. They slowly raised their hands, about to grab Yang Jian.
Liu San immediately said, “Don’t touch it! This fire can use the supernatural as a medium to invade!”
But it was already too late. The two terrifying old people abruptly seized both sides of Yang Jian’s shoulders, and the black fire there actually began to disappear rapidly, faintly showing signs of being suppressed.
A flicker of surprise crossed Liu San’s face, but there was no time to hesitate now. He stopped holding back. A square sheet of yellow paper so dark it was almost black climbed along Yang Jian’s arm and covered his face.
With Wang Chaling and Liu San working together, half of the black fire dissipated in an instant, but Yang Jian’s lower body was still under attack.
Yang Jian had been trying to unfold his ghost domain the entire time, but no matter what he did, the moment his ghost domain spilled out from his body, it vanished. It did not feel like it had been suppressed, nor like it had been restarted; it was as if he had never chosen to activate his ghost domain at all.
Immediately afterward, within his memories, a cold gleam of an axe suddenly cleaved out from the depths of his mind. The light and shadows before Yang Jian’s eyes rapidly blurred.
Then, an ordinary-looking man abruptly appeared within the memory, as if he had been there all along and had only now been observed by everyone.
“Li Leping?”
Shen Lin looked at Li Leping, who had suddenly appeared, and only had time to utter a startled sound of doubt. This captain had been hidden in the present ever since everyone had landed on the moon. If he had not shown himself voluntarily, perhaps no one would ever have remembered that such a person existed.
Along with Li Leping’s appearance, the scorched stench of burning corpses spread through the memory.
Yang Jian could no longer quite remember what had just happened. He looked toward the others, a trace of confusion flashing through his eyes, then lowered his head to look at his body. The black fire had already disappeared.
Under the combined suppression of several captains, Yang Jian’s body returned to normal. He stood in place again, his face grave.
But before everyone could recover their senses,
their memories began to change.
That cold, eerie mass of black fire abruptly appeared again. Only this time, the place where it appeared was within Yang Jian’s memories.
It seemed that because of Shen Lin and Li Leping, the location where the black flames appeared had shifted into Yang Jian’s memories.
Within the memory, an overwhelming swarm of vicious dogs was charging madly toward the rapidly expanding black flames.
Biting. Devouring.
But that mass of black fire seemed endless. There was not the slightest sign of it weakening; instead, it burned more and more fiercely.
This was a confrontation between two kinds of supernatural power.
As the first vicious dog’s body ignited with a wisp of black flame,
then the second, the third—
all the vicious dogs were being covered by that absolute blackness.
The supernatural was falling out of balance, being suppressed. In its confrontation with that mass of black flames, the Ghost Dream gradually began to lose ground.
Behind Zhang Sun’s corpse, a shriveled corpse was clinging tightly there.
It seemed the people of the King Organization had used some method to restrict the location of this corpse to this place, but that was all.
“Li Leping.”
Liu San looked at Li Leping and spoke. At this point, it was already obvious who had the coffin nail.
From just now, Wang Chaling’s and Liu San’s gazes had never left Li Leping. This was the only way they could ensure they remembered him.
“I’ve already tried.”
Li Leping took out a coffin nail.
“But it failed. I don’t remember how many times I tried...”
Li Leping paused.
“I don’t even remember how I came here anymore...”
Just as Li Leping was speaking, a patch of wildly leaping black flames suddenly ignited on his face.
Cold. Deathly still.
The attack against him had begun.
The next moment, Li Leping’s figure blurred for several seconds like an illusion scattered by the wind.
Then his entire illusory figure condensed again, appearing before everyone completely unharmed.
Li Leping remained silent, seeming to be recalling something. A coffin nail was handed into Shen Lin’s hand.
“In my current state, I’m no longer suited to holding this coffin nail. I can’t forget the invasion against me...”
Shen Lin glanced at the rust-covered coffin nail. Without any hesitation, he thrust it straight toward the shriveled corpse.
In the next second, something strange happened again. Shen Lin’s action seemed as if it had never begun.
And the black flames abruptly appeared, burning wildly on the hand with which Shen Lin held the coffin nail, as though they had always existed in that position.
Reacting by instinct, Shen Lin raised his axe and chopped down at his right hand.
The severed arm slowly fell onto the surface of the moon. The black flames did not continue to spread; instead, they burned quietly on that severed arm.
Dismemberment. This was Shen Lin’s dismemberment of his own supernatural power.
Although the black fire was strange and incomprehensible, it still followed the nature of ghosts.
The part of Shen Lin’s supernatural power that he dismembered and separated from himself was still a ghost. At the instant of dismemberment, it and Shen Lin became two different pieces of the puzzle.
The black fire could not continue attacking like it would a ghost controller, attacking someone who had not triggered its killing rule.
“Will any action taken against it be met with an attack...”
Shen Lin looked at the burning severed arm, his tone without the slightest ripple, as if what had been cut off was not his own arm, but some irrelevant object.
Wang Chaling, however, turned to look at Yang Jian. Black tongues of flame flickered intermittently over Yang Jian’s body.
“Yang Jian won’t be able to hold on much longer. We need another way to restrict that black fire.”
At this moment, Li Leping took out an old phone from his chest, shaped somewhat like a walkie-talkie.
“Wang Xiaoming, the moment you spoke of has arrived. Yang Jian is about to die.”
Headquarters.
Wang Xiaoming and Cao Yanhua sat at the very front of the conference table, while a crowd of staff filled the entire meeting room.
On the table, an old hand-cranked telephone sat there. From the end of the phone, a long, thin black cord wound outward like the intestines of a rotting human, giving off a faint stench of corpses.
The other end of the thin cord was deeply inserted into the throat of a staff member.
The instant Wang Xiaoming picked up the receiver, that staff member’s face immediately began to turn deathly pale, and patches of livor mortis rapidly surfaced on his skin.