After learning that Xie Qingdu might have been afflicted by a sinister influence, Lu Yaotiao had no idea how to face this formerly admired, cool and aloof senior.
That gaze they’d exchanged at the Fox Immortal Temple had been chilling, hiding a strange, evil glint. Later, their encounter at the mall and Xie Qingdu’s stare had made her hair stand on end. Until the Southern Mountain matter was entirely resolved, she wasn’t sure if Xie Qingdu had returned to normal.
Her heart thumped wildly, its steady rhythm long disrupted by tension. Snapping out of it, Lu Yaotiao’s grip on her phone suddenly loosened, letting the still-vibrating device fall onto the sofa. The newscaster’s almost mechanical tone still echoed in her ears. She raised a stiff hand and pressed it to her forehead.
“Junior Lu, why aren’t you picking up?”
The voice that suddenly echoed in the empty living room frightened Lu Yaotiao so much that she jerked and plopped down onto the sofa. She didn’t recall answering the call! Why was her senior’s voice sounding right now? Could she have accidentally pressed the answer button? Lu Yaotiao wanted to scream, but she was like a chicken being strangled, unable to utter a word for a long time. After a few minutes, she looked at her now-darkened phone screen. There was no sound coming from it—it seemed Xie Qingdu had hung up after getting no reply.
Lu Yaotiao: “…” She rubbed her temples, feeling as if a sinister draft swirled through the room. She didn’t want to stay a single minute longer. Remembering the Xuanzhen Dao Court her parents usually contacted, she abruptly stood up, grabbed her phone, and strode toward the entryway. Yet the moment she opened the door, her entire body froze as if encased in ice, cold and stiff.
Someone was standing outside.
Her former coldness had thawed. She offered a faint smile, like spring ice cracking, which nearly stopped Lu Yaotiao’s heart from sheer fright.
It was Xie Qingdu.
Xie Qingdu blinked at Lu Yaotiao and asked softly, “So you were home, Junior?”
Lu Yaotiao’s fingers, gripping the doorframe, tightened. She wanted to slam the door shut with all her might, to retreat into her own little world, but her stiff body completely refused to obey. She just forced out a pale, forced smile and woodenly said, “Yeah.”
Xie Qingdu pursed her lips, as if she wanted to ask something, but upon seeing the sheer terror reflected deep within Lu Yaotiao’s eyes, she sighed. “I came to apologize.” The sound of an elevator running, along with noisy voices, drifted closer. Xie Qingdu asked again, “May I come in and sit for a moment?”
The words “Absolutely not” reached her lips but dissolved into nothingness. Lu Yaotiao stared listlessly at the hallway. She desperately needed “yang energy” and “liveliness,” but if Xie Qingdu were truly some great supernatural entity and suddenly went berserk in the corridor, she’d likely hurt innocent people, right? Steeling her nerves, Lu Yaotiao summoned a spirit of “great fearlessness” and forced out a smile uglier than a grimace. With a trembling voice, she said, “Okay.”
Xie Qingdu was polite and elegant.
Just like the “moonlight” that had once made Lu Yaotiao’s heart flutter.
Unfortunately, this hazy admiration and appreciation had been thoroughly suppressed the moment they encountered supernatural events. Lu Yaotiao stepped aside in near-panic, ushering the “terrifying” Xie Qingdu into the room.
The two sat facing each other.
Belatedly, Lu Yaotiao felt a throbbing pain from her knee.
She secretly reached down to rub her knee, which was almost certainly swollen and bruised, her voice trembling. “Senior, do you have no classes today?”
Xie Qingdu gave a noncommittal “Mn” and explained, “My experiments are at a resting point; I’ve been relatively free lately. Besides, I still have matters to attend to.”
Lu Yaotiao’s hairs stood on end.
She immediately interpreted “attend to” as a bloody scene. She secretly scooted backward a little and let out a couple of dry, mirthless laughs.
“I’m sorry; I wasn’t myself before,” Xie Qingdu said, noticing Lu Yaotiao’s unease. She didn’t beat around the bush but got straight to the point. “You should also know the world is vastly different from the past. The previous two times weren’t my true intentions. The Ancestor has already removed that wisp of demonic energy from me.” When she said the last sentence, Xie Chaoyun’s expression was somewhat dazed. She had originally dismissed it as a bizarre dream, but the dream repeated again and again, until even the “Ancestor” appeared before her, holding an “identity card” issued by the Xuanzhen Dao Court, leaving her no choice but to believe.
“I see…” Lu Yaotiao looked up at Xie Qingdu, meeting her eyes, which were like gentle ripples on a spring pond. For a fleeting moment, she mustered some courage. “I don’t quite believe you.”
Xie Qingdu furrowed her brow and asked, a little troubled, “Then what would it take for you to believe?”
Lu Yaotiao didn’t reply. She stared at the seemingly harmless Xie Qingdu before her, lost in thought. Her brain, once frozen by fear, gradually started working again. So absorbed was she that she didn’t notice Xie Qingdu standing up and approaching. By the time she snapped back to attention, the distance between them had narrowed to nothing, without any barrier. Lu Yaotiao nearly shot up in fright. In her moment of uncontrolled consciousness, she did only one thing—slapped the “True Form Chart of the Five Peaks” Jiang Yiguang had given her onto Xie Chaoyun.
Xie Qingdu: “…”
Inside the Head Hill Cave on Southern Mountain.
The three of them moved forward along the dark path. The Seven Star Sword left deep gouges on the cave wall, but the “Devil-Refining Incantation” wasn’t damaged in the slightest. The mournful wind and the sinister ghostly aura grew ever more palpable. The clash of weapons echoed clearly against their eardrums. Yet at a certain moment, all sound ceased abruptly. The four Yellow-Scarf Divine Soldiers, who could move mountains and drain seas, had exhausted their spiritual energy under the combined assault of one ghost and one demon, reverting to four talisman beans, which were then instantly crushed to dust by the surging wind.
Tushan Yi on her prison altar was laughing. Suppressed by the spell, every use of demonic power brought violent backlash. Now she was laughing wildly while coughing up blood, even her form growing somewhat illusory. Her gaze remained glued to the ghostly Xie Chaoyun, her eyes seeming to hold both resentment and pity.
“The seal inside the cave still holds. It can more or less suppress the sinister chill brought by the ghost domain,” Wang Xuanming said, trying to reassure himself, though his trembling voice betrayed his fear.
Jiang Yiguang remained silent, merely taking the place of the little paper dolls and becoming the one pushing the wheelchair. Her field of vision gradually widened. Beneath the talismans glowing with golden light, amid the wind and thunder, she saw the Celestial Fox with its “nine tails” severed. A Celestial Fox’s tails represented its Dao attainment; with all nine tails cut off, could she still maintain the state of a Great Demon for a millennium? The thought had barely formed when a fiendish, baleful demonic energy erupted from the prison altar, triggering the latent power within the talismans. With her broken body, she clashed against the spell arts of wind, thunder, and heavenly fire. A thunderous explosion echoed, and nothing remained on the altar. The body of a Great Demon wouldn’t be destroyed so easily. But what if it was only a shred of obsession that had lingered for a thousand years?!
“This is obsession!”
Jiang Yiguang’s thought had barely formed when Fu Juan’s voice followed closely.
The entire seal existed to imprison the Nine-Tailed Fox. If the Nine-Tailed Fox were to perish, the nine dangling chains would lose their “anchor point.” Just as now, they hung down vertically into the icy water, and all the sealing runes, which contained vast, righteous energy, faded away. The cave instantly darkened. Only those scarlet ghostly eyes remained, like two huge, eerily gleaming red lanterns.
Jiang Yiguang: “…” The Nine-Tailed Fox’s “annihilation” only deepened the shock to Xie Chaoyun! After all, what this esteemed one thought was a “seal” was far from the truth. Being deceived like this didn’t feel good, especially when the one imprisoned was deeply tied to her, with love and hate intertwined. Jiang Yiguang finally understood. This whole Southern Mountain was a trap set entirely for “Xie Chaoyun.” It was meant to turn a millennial ghost into a Ferocious Ghost! She knew that once, a Ghost King incident had cost the Xuanzhen Dao Court many elites. If Xie Chaoyun’s ghost domain fully formed, the entire Shen City would be swallowed up, wouldn’t it?
But if this was a world penned by someone else, and a consciousness dominated it from the shadows, then the protagonist… surely wouldn’t lose, right? She was technically part of the protagonist’s group, so she was invincible and could just charge in recklessly?!
[Host, please get a grip.]
The System, which had been playing dead, finally spoke up.
[If this were merely a rigid world, autonomous consciousness wouldn’t be born. You wouldn’t even be aware of yourself. When you can become aware of yourself, it means the world has become active. This is not a game to clear. Before you truly break free of the plot, you indeed won’t die by any other means. But if the protagonist dies… the entire world will collapse. Everything will be in ‘nothingness,’ so of course, there’s no life or death to speak of.]
[When your self-awareness awakens, what you change is not just yourself.]
Jiang Yiguang digested this string of words from the System. After a long moment, she said in her mind, “So I’m the protagonist?”
[%#@&]
After a string of static and garbled noise, the System went silent again.
Jiang Yiguang was used to the System’s “silence.” This “Golden Finger” was, most of the time, utterly useless.
Her exchange with the System was but a fleeting instant. But within that instant, Xie Chaoyun’s suddenly elongated, sharp claws swept forward with a howling, malevolent wind, aimed right at her face! And just as the claws closed in, a chilly, piercing sword light, carrying a crescent arc, clashed against the claws with a “clang.” Fu Juan, wielding the Seven Star Sword, pressed her thin lips tight, a thread of blood trickling from her mouth. Fu Juan’s condition was far from good at this moment; even the most reckless person couldn’t directly withstand a Ghost King.
Wang Xuanming wasn’t idle, either. He formed a hand seal and directed his flying sword straight at the Ghost King.
Wind howled, thunder rumbled.
The fierce assault kicked up waves of energy. Jiang Yiguang hadn’t yet learned many Daoist arts and could only hurl all the talismans she carried with reckless abandon. But Xie Chaoyun’s baleful aura was incredibly dense. As she “turned ferocious” and “resentful,” the crimson blood light instantly snuffed out the flames on the talismans.
