Chapter 12 — Shadows

Betty's eyes went wide with terror, and just as she was about to scream, Gao Cen clapped a hand over her mouth. "Shh, don't make a sound—you'll startle whatever's in the fog."

The girl's eyes were huge, tears nearly spilling over, and clutching her frying pan tight, she nodded with all her might.

Gao Yang could not help shaking his head. She hadn't cried when they faced the dragon, and now she was frightened out of her wits. Truly, everyone's weaknesses were different.

"What are these things?" Rebecca was a little frightened too. She gripped her staff tightly, and small sparks were already leaping at its tip. "When did we get… surrounded by these things?"

"Wraith Mist. Damn it," Heidi ground her teeth. "How could such a thing be here?"

Wraith Mist—Gao Yang had already found the relevant knowledge in his memory. It was a product that could arise naturally or be made by hand, and the natural kind was the more common: in places where shadow energy gathered and the undead roamed, Wraith Mist had a very small chance of appearing. It was part of the shadow environment, yet it was also influenced by the aura of the dead, and so became exceedingly destructive. Once it appeared, however, the mist was invisible—it took shape and grew in the spirit world, and in the material world people could see not a trace of it.

Unless the victim had already stepped deep into the mist.

Unawares, it would slowly kill whatever victim strayed into it, accomplishing this through low temperatures and hallucinations and terror that invaded the mind. When ordinary people wandered into it, they often never understood what had happened even as they died, because to the very end they saw nothing at all.

The thick fog would only appear at the instant their souls plunged into the shadow world, seizing hold of their entire deathbed memory.

It was also possible to manufacture Wraith Mist artificially, but the conditions were too stringent and the demands on the caster extremely high, while the effect was inferior to most spells of the same rank. And so those gloomy necromancers never wasted their time on it.

Gao Yang had already drawn his Pioneer's Sword, but he made no attack. Wraith Mist was peculiar: though one was harmed the moment one entered its range, it did not in fact attack first—those injuries were merely its inherent property as a "negative environment." Only when the "things" within the mist were disturbed would it turn savage.

And once Wraith Mist turned savage, it was very hard to deal with.

Gao Yang could not be sure whether the mist had already been disturbed, so he did not order an attack. Instead he cautiously searched for weak points in the fog, ready to seize a chance and break out. But just as he was doing so, a soft, ethereal laughter suddenly reached his ears from somewhere deep in the mist.

Son of a bitch—they'd been played by a patch of fog!

Gao Yang raised his longsword on the spot and brought it down in the direction the sound had come from. A streak of dark red firelight broke away from the blade and cleaved in two a certain indistinct figure surfacing in the fog.

"Focus fire on that thing flitting around in the fog all dressed in white!"