“No problem.”
Zhang Han nodded.
“As long as it doesn’t involve using people as bait or anything like that, we’ll cooperate with your operation.”
Cao Yang took a body bag made of gold from the backpack on the bed and said to everyone:
“You can rest assured on that point. I’ll handle luring the ghost. You just need to lie in ambush nearby.”
Outside the building, thick fog pervaded the air. Feng Quan’s ghost domain was extremely practical in such open terrain, especially when it came to finding people. If there was any disturbance within the dense fog, the others would be able to notice it at once.
White mist churned, mingled with a faint stench of corpses. Cao Yang stood quietly on the snow-covered ground, silently waiting for that ghost to appear.
Suddenly, at the building’s exit, half of a deathly pale, rigid face appeared beside the doorframe.
What was strange was that even through layer upon layer of fog, Cao Yang could still see that half of a ghastly white face clearly, hanging from the head at an eerie angle.
As if it had merely been pasted there at random, utterly lifeless.
“Do it!”
Zhang Han’s voice came from the side.
Immediately afterward, a resentful wail rang out abruptly and rapidly spread forward.
A string of bare footprints shot out at a speed almost like teleportation, and Cao Yang’s figure instantly vanished from where he stood.
When he appeared again, he was already standing behind the corpse whose face was half covered by newspaper.
And beneath that corpse’s feet, the ground had at some unknown point turned into a patch of earth.
On the yellow soil that gave off a rotting stench, a string of clear footprints was imprinted, perfectly overlapping with the corpse’s own footprints.
Immediately after, a mass of tangled, pitch-black long hair surged out from the dense fog behind it, growing wildly and swiftly covering the corpse until only a piece of tattered newspaper remained exposed.
“No good! I can’t hold on for long!”
Huang Ziya spoke with difficulty as she watched the black hair rapidly fall away.
No sooner had she spoken than the back of Zhang Han’s neck wriggled slightly. A savage tattoo abruptly plunged into the black hair. With Zhang Han’s intervention, the pitch-black hair instantly drew taut, wrapping the corpse tightly.
“We did it.”
Cao Yang looked at the suppressed, motionless corpse and let out a sigh of relief.
“Now you know how awesome your Daddy Xiong is, right?!”
Xiong Wenwen jumped out from behind Feng Quan, arrogantly planted his hands on his hips, and pointed.
“This is what you call catching a ghost without taking any damage!”
Cao Yang glanced at Xiong Wenwen. He had no choice but to admit that this child’s ability was practically cheating.
Predicting the future—as long as the tactics were appropriate, in the vast majority of situations, they could imprison fierce ghosts with zero casualties.
Cao Yang picked up a body bag made of gold and was just about to put it over the corpse.
At that very moment, a terrified expression appeared on Xiong Wenwen’s face, and he shouted loudly:
“I’m going to die!”
As he shouted, he pointed toward the snowy ground outside the door, but there was nothing there.
“There’s a ghost outside! There’s a ghost outside!”
Everyone looked in the direction Xiong Wenwen was pointing.
In the vast expanse of white snow, a sinister and eerie corpse was standing there.
That corpse stood so abruptly amid the ghastly pale wind and snow, completely motionless.
Wind and snow suddenly poured into the building, carrying a dense stench of corpses that blew against everyone until they could almost no longer move.
The first to react was Cao Yang. A heart-stopping sound of footsteps came from beneath his feet, as if someone were rapidly marching in place. The footprints on the ground actually began to overlap, their color growing darker and darker until they gradually turned pitch-black.
The next second, the sound abruptly stopped. In an instant, the entire building was covered in dense, countless bare footprints.
On the floor, the walls, the ceiling—even in the air—patches of invisible footprints appeared, so dense they made one’s scalp go numb.
Afterward, a savage tattoo flashed into everyone’s field of vision.
The tattoo on Zhang Han’s back suddenly bulged. Amid writhing flesh and blood, a skinless corpse drenched in fresh blood rose up from Zhang Han’s back.
Without any warning, the figure standing in the snow suddenly appeared behind Xiong Wenwen.
It was a corpse, deathly pale and withered all over. It stiffly opened its arms and moved to embrace Xiong Wenwen.
Along with the corpse’s appearance, the colors of the surrounding environment rapidly faded, becoming veiled in a faint, deathly white.
Dense stamping noises resounded throughout the building. At this moment, it was as if thousands upon thousands of corpses were constantly marching in place. A series of footprints raced along the ceiling, swiftly attacking the corpse that had suddenly appeared.
At the same time, the blood-drenched figure behind Zhang Han pounced out fiercely and pressed down hard on the corpse’s shoulders.
But even so, those outstretched arms were still approaching Xiong Wenwen. Although their speed had already become extremely slow, the attack was still continuing.
Xiong Wenwen was completely unable to move at this moment. He could only watch helplessly as those cold, sinister arms closed around him.
All of this happened too quickly. Other than Zhang Han and Cao Yang, the rest had no time to react at all.
Before Zhang Han could speak,
the corpse behind them, wrapped in black hair, suddenly began to convulse violently. Beneath that sheet of newspaper, something seemed to be writhing. The newspaper slowly bulged upward, becoming clearer and clearer.
It was half of a man’s face, protruding from the newspaper, its mouth opened wide in pain, as if it were desperately struggling to break out of the paper. The black hair covering the face was rapidly falling away, scattering all over the ground.
At that instant, on the other half of the dead, rigid face, the eyeball that had been hanging low all this time suddenly turned sharply.
It stared fixedly at the ghastly white corpse behind Xiong Wenwen. A hoarse voice came from within the newspaper.
“Run.”
There was no time to think. Cao Yang turned his head and glanced at the human face on the newspaper.
Immediately, a scalp-numbing noise sounded beneath his feet, as if countless pairs of shoeless feet were once again stomping rapidly on the floor at the same time.
Immediately after, along with the sound of stamping, the footprints all around swiftly gathered together, spreading toward the ground beneath everyone’s feet.
The instant the footprints overlapped, everyone’s figures vanished from where they stood.
Across this land covered in ice and snow, the footprints extended madly, dragging out a black afterimage as they sped rapidly into the distance.
“A ghost domain?”
Zhang Han looked at the unfamiliar environment beside him. He was all too familiar with this sudden sensation of displacement.
Other than a ghost domain, he did not know of any method that could instantly move everyone’s position such a great distance away.
But Cao Yang’s ghost domain was completely different from what he knew. It did not completely cover an entire space, but instead used footprints as a medium, relying on the position of the footprints to move.
“Very strange, isn’t it…”
Cao Yang seemed to know what Zhang Han was thinking.
“But that is the fact of the matter. When facing fierce ghosts, the ‘patterns’ we have explored cannot be treated as ‘common sense.’”
After Cao Yang finished speaking, he fell silent.
Zhang Han did not press him further. Every ghost controller had secrets of their own.
He turned to look at that corpse. That half of a human face seemed to still possess the consciousness of a living person. If it had not assisted Zhang Han and Cao Yang at the final moment just now, Xiong Wenwen would probably have met with disaster.
The entire corpse had already been covered by Huang Ziya’s black hair, leaving only half a torn sheet of newspaper exposed, upon which a man’s face could be vaguely seen.
After a brief silence, Zhang Han said:
“You have one minute to explain.”