Chapter 4253 — A Bizarre Sight
The Blossom Guardian · Page 2 of 2
Wham! In the utter stillness, Huang Xiaotao's scream rang out with peculiar shrillness, instantly startling a great dark flock of birds into flight not far off. It came without the slightest warning and gave everyone a severe fright.
A closer look showed they were nothing formidable—just ordinary carrion crows and the like. To spirit beasts this place was a graveyard; save for those whose time had come, no spirit beast would come to such a place.
"Are you insane! Screaming out of nowhere like that—if you're such a coward, are you trying to scare the rest of us to death!" Feng Hongyu had gone pale as a flower too, and once she recovered her wits she unleashed a torrent of abuse at Huang Xiaotao.
She was not the only one; Guo Dengtao, Wang Feng, and the others all wore grim expressions as well. The surroundings had been deathly still before, without a stir, and none of them had expected so many carrion crows to be lurking in the dense forest. Under the night sky, those pairs of eyes glinting with a faint ghostly light made one feel like a corpse being eyed by them—it sent a chill straight down the spine.
"A ghost..." Huang Xiaotao called out, her voice trembling, then buried her head in Wei Zhao's chest, her whole body shaking and shivering without pause.
However strong-hearted one might be, she was still a frail girl after all! Wei Zhao smiled and, his heart aching for her, gently stroked her back. But when he followed the direction of her pointing finger and looked, his expression froze at once.
Whether the miasma overhead had thinned with the coming of night, or whether this place was simply too eerie and chilling, at this moment a blood-red moon hung clearly above their heads, its light even brighter than in the daytime—except that it was tinged with a faint bloody hue, and one could even catch the stench of blood and rot.
Bathed in that blood-red moonlight, not far ahead, a scene of utter bizarre and sinister wrongness brought Wei Zhao and the others to an involuntary halt.
A spirit beast resembling a rhinoceros from the mundane world had its head drooping limply to one side, its neck twisted at a grotesque, appalling angle, connected to its massive body by only a thin layer of skin.
Its huge head dragged along the ground, leaving a long smear of dark red blood, while a hole the size of a half-grown man gaped in its flank; the intestines and organs within had spilled out across the ground, and even now they were still dripping blood...
Whether from imagination or not, even across a distance of some forty meters, Wei Zhao and the others could clearly smell the acrid stench of gore emanating from it.
Had that been all, it would have been bad enough—one could pinch one's nose and endure it. But the crux of the matter was this: the creature, in such a state, was somehow not yet dead!
That head dragging on the ground was, astonishingly, devouring something with a ferocious snarl. A closer look revealed that what it chewed was the very intestines and organs that had spilled from its own belly. It gulped them down in great mouthfuls, blood bubbles frothing at the corners of its mouth all the while...
At the same time, several carrion crows nearby were fighting over those intestines and organs, some even snatching them straight out of its belly. Whatever spirit beast this was, it paid them no heed at all, only gnawing away at its own entrails spilled across the ground. (To be continued...)