Chapter 4254 — He Is Lying

What in the world kind of godforsaken place was this, so grim and so eerie?

Not only Wei Zhao and Huang Xiaotao—Guo Dengtao and Wang Feng saw it too. In an instant their scalps felt ready to burst, their temples pounding, and the two of them, seasoned mid-Golden Core cultivators both, nearly fainted dead away from fright.

Damn it all—even running head-on into a top-tier Nascent Soul spirit beast would not have been this bone-chilling! Was this thing dead or alive? Just what manner of monstrosity was it?

"Hmph. Coming to a place like this to act coy and show off your little romance—tell me, is there actually something wrong with you, woman? Trash is trash. No strength, no sense, and not a shred of courage either. Taozi, just look at the kind of goods you've picked up!" Even now Feng Hongyu had still not noticed the grotesque rhino creature. She went on mocking Wei Zhao and Huang Xiaotao, walking forward without so much as a glance ahead.

Seeing the direction she was heading, the expressions on Guo Dengtao and the others turned even stranger still. They exchanged looks, and for a long while not one of them could get a word out.

"What are you all standing there dazed for? Hurry up and follow Brother Chu—do you want to fall behind and die here?" Seeing their odd looks, Feng Hongyu still had not caught on. She kept up her jeering and kept walking.

Caw! Suddenly a crow cried out, and a carrion crow fighting over entrails burst up from beside her feet. Feng Hongyu gave a great start and felt, dimly, that she had stepped on something stringy and slick. Caught off guard, she slipped, and her whole body pitched forward, stumbling and flailing, out of control.

There was a squelching plop—and then the world went utterly silent. Guo Dengtao and the others were struck dumb. Even Wei Zhao, staring at the scene before him, had to choke back a strange expression. For a long time no one could speak.

At that very moment, because of that blind, blundering fall, Feng Hongyu had pitched headlong straight into the bloody hole torn in the rhino spirit beast's flank.

"What is this—ahhh!!!" A shriek tore through the sky. Feng Hongyu scrambled frantically to get out, her whole body smeared with dark red blood and bodily fluids, half a length of intestine even hanging from her shoulder—and she came face to face with the head on the ground that was still gnawing at entrails.

An encounter like that would have driven anyone out of their mind with terror. Feng Hongyu, so haughty a moment ago, was scared shitless on the spot.

She could not even be bothered to crawl. Feng Hongyu simply sat there collapsed on the ground, howling and screaming as she desperately scooted backward, leaving a wet trail behind her—blood she had picked up, or piss from sheer fright, or perhaps the two mixed together.

Wei Zhao watched, choking back laughter. What goes around truly comes around—and it had come around so very fast!

Chu Bubai, who had been clearing the way at the very front, heard the commotion and hurried back. He rushed over and hauled Feng Hongyu up from the ground with one hand, and in her panic Feng Hongyu finally clutched at a lifeline. Without a second thought she screamed and burrowed into Chu Bubai's arms.

Smelling that pungent reek of blood, watching Feng Hongyu smear all that sticky, revolting filth onto him, Chu Bubai's face went green. The corner of his mouth twitched for a long while, and he could not squeeze out a single word.

"All right. It's all right now, no need to be afraid!" The disgust on Chu Bubai's face flickered past, and then, forcing down the nausea churning in his gut, he wrapped his arms around Feng Hongyu and spoke to comfort her.

Wei Zhao looked at him, then looked at Huang Xiaotao in his own arms, and suddenly felt like laughing. For a man to be saddled with a dao companion like that—people really did die of comparison, and goods really did get thrown out by comparison!

Guo Dengtao and Wang Feng watched this scene too, not sure whether to laugh or cry. They strained for a long while before finally managing not to burst out laughing. A woman like Feng Hongyu was a rare freak of nature, the kind you saw once in a hundred years.

After a good long while of comforting, Feng Hongyu's emotions finally steadied. But then she looked at the revolting filth plastered all over her, turned her head, and with a great retching heave, vomited...

Chu Bubai stood to one side with his arms crossed, waiting. He glanced at the slime smeared on his clothes, and if not for the important plan still ahead, he would have been sorely tempted to kick her right then and there.

"No one needs to be afraid. There's nothing to fear from these things—they're completely harmless..." Seeing everyone staring at him with strange expressions, Chu Bubai had no choice but to force a smile and explain.

At that, everyone nodded. That much was beyond doubt—after all, Feng Hongyu had plunged headfirst into the thing's belly and it still had not reacted in the slightest. Otherwise, if it had been aggressive, Feng Hongyu would long since have been gnawed clean.

"Brother Chu, just what is this thing, anyway? It's downright creepy to look at!" Guo Dengtao could not help asking. Even knowing the thing was harmless, simply looking at it made one's heart quail.

"They are nothing more than spirit beasts that had formed a primordial spirit. When their bodies died, their primordial spirits naturally could not be preserved either, so they gradually faded away with them, leaving nothing that could be called a mind. Yet they still retain the instinct to survive, and so they linger in their rotting corpses like wronged ghosts—which is what gives rise to the eerie sight you see. In truth, they are quite harmless." Chu Bubai explained to them all.

"So that's how it is." Everyone nodded. They were all Golden Core cultivators; the notion of a primordial spirit was naturally familiar to them, and Chu Bubai's explanation was reasonable and well-founded enough to make sense.

To cultivators, talk of wronged ghosts was nothing out of the ordinary. If a primordial spirit existed, then the wronged ghosts of common folklore existing as well was hardly strange, for the two were in essence the very same thing. Was not the ghostly creature clinging to Wei Zhao proof enough of that?

After hearing Chu Bubai's explanation, Feng Hongyu, who had nearly been frightened out of her wits, finally came back to herself. But she no longer dared to mock and jeer at others with her earlier arrogance. Head down, face red, she set about cleaning the filth off herself.

And Huang Xiaotao, nestled in Wei Zhao's arms, could not help but breathe a sigh of relief. What people fear most is the unknown; now that the phenomenon could be explained, there was nothing left to fear.

Wei Zhao, meanwhile, was lowering his head in thought, pondering whether Chu Bubai's explanation could really be trusted—when all at once a voice rang out in his mind: "He is lying. Don't fall for it!"

"Hm?" Wei Zhao had not heard that voice in so long that he froze for a moment. Then, startled and delighted, he reacted: "Senior Ghost!"

"That thing is no spirit beast's primordial spirit at all—it's a ghost cultivator!" The ghostly creature cackled in his mind. "What you see before you was most likely made with a low-grade demon head's soul-refining art—defective ghost-talisman demon heads refined from low-grade spirit beasts. But he did get one thing right: this thing really does have no killing power." (To be continued.) R527