Chapter 249 – Happyland, Undying Husk Slaughters a Fifth Rank Foe, Enemy Right Beside You! - Part 3

Another month passed.

in a remote area within the south of Silkfloss Province, a figure in a green robe was fleeing at top speed, pursued by a dark silhouette. The two figures streaked across the wilderness, one chasing, one running.

The one being chased was an elder of the Holy Tree Temple, Mu Chen. Though he could usually fly, he seemed too badly wounded to do so now. His pursuer, shrouded in a haze of poisonous vapor, was clearly from the Black Lotus Cult.

“Mu Chen,” the dark figure called out, “the wise choose to serve the winning side. Why oppose the will of Heaven?”

“Cough... And you call yourselves Heaven?” Mu Chen spat.

“We fight alongside the Son of Heaven. If we’re not Heaven, who is?”

“Evil degenerates...must be exterminated!” Mu Chen retorted between wheezing coughs.

He was visibly exhausted, but his eyes glinted with confidence. He had lured Peng Ming, an elder of the Black Lotus Cult, out here to finish him off with a trap. Hidden nearby was another elder from the Holy Tree Temple, poised to strike. If the two of them attacked together, they could certainly bring Peng Ming down.

Before long, his accomplice revealed himself—Liu Wenlou, a fifth rank expert of the Liu Clan. Although the Liu CLan had once been aligned with the Jing Clan, they were currently joining forces with the Holy Tree Temple to fight external enemies. Mu Chen spun around and hurled what looked like a paperweight wreathed in green light. It tore through the air toward Peng Ming like a falling star.

From Peng Ming’s sleeve emerged a banner-like spirit artifact shrouded in dark energy. It opened like a piece of black cloth, enveloping the green light and muting it. Hissing corrosion echoed through the air as the cloth’s black sheen surged, trying to sap the paperweight’s power.

𝒻𝑟𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝑛𝘰𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝘤𝘰𝘮

Mu Chen grimaced. This paperweight was the first spirit artifact that Li Yuan had ever forged, very much a bottom-tier item. Perhaps only the earliest works of other new weaponsmiths could

rival

it. Still, his own source blood, like that of many fifth rank martial artists in the Holy Tree Temple, infused the artifact with self-repairing properties. It would be enough to hold out against the corrosive effect.

With a thought, he tapped into the link between him and the paperweight.

“Break!” Mu Chen commanded, flicking his finger. The black mist around the artifact tore open, letting the green light burst free once more, and the paperweight shot toward Peng Ming again.

Peng Ming still seemed unhurried. A petal-like shard, crimson at the edges and speckled black inside, floated out of his robes. It intercepted the paperweight, instantly expanding until it wrapped around the entire object. A fresh clash erupted between the black and green lights.

Mu Chen and Peng Ming exchanged several more blows. Neither held a clear advantage yet.

“Liu Wenlou, what are you waiting for?!” Mu Chen snapped.

At that, the Liu Clan elder stepped out from behind the trees, appearing as though he had just made up his mind. A fiery-red longsword flew from his hand. But instead of striking Peng Ming, it slashed straight at Mu Chen.

A cold wave of adrenaline surged through Mu Chen, but he was a battle-hardened veteran. The Liu Clan seldom ventured out to fight, and that put them at a disadvantage compared to him.

Sensing the danger, Mu Chen moved swiftly, dodging the blade as best he could. A small shield at his waist flew upward to intercept the sword’s slash.

BOOM!

He was slammed to the ground, sending dirt and gravel flying while billows of smoke and dust swirled around him.

Peng Ming threw Liu Wenlou a sidelong glance, silently cursing him as “useless.” Yet his face wore a pleasant grin. “Don’t let him escape.”

Liu Wenlou gave a cold chuckle. “He’s not going anywhere.”

In the swirling dust, Mu Chen remained unharmed, though inwardly stunned. He never could have guessed that the Liu Clan would betray them. After all, once Zhu Ban had cast his lot with the Black Lotus Cult, it was clear he planned to wipe out everyone in the Jing Clan’s camp, including the Liu and Guo Clan. Why would the Liu Clan side with them?

But then Mu Chen remembered. The Liu Clan was a more recent addition to the Holy Tree Temple, having joined a little over a century ago—around the time the Lotus Cult disappeared. That meant the Lotus Cult had been laying groundwork for a hundred years before finally reemerging. In that time, it was likely they’d planted more than a few spies in the major sects.

He clenched his jaw, scanning the area. He had to get this information out. Spotting a possible escape route, he gathered his resolve and prepared to break away.

Suddenly, his nostrils flared. Something smelled unbelievably good. A surge of pleasure coursed through him, as though he’d lost control of his body. Drawn by the aroma, he stepped out of the dust cloud, walking straight toward a small flowerpot set on open ground.

A single bright paper flower stuck out of the flowerpot, wavering gently in the wind and giving off a cold, eerie fragrance.

Mu Chen lurched toward it like a puppet on strings. But as he staggered forward, the flow of blood in his body suddenly surged, letting off a searing heat that instantly scattered the floral scent’s influence.

“What...what was I doing just now? Why am I even walking over here?!” He snapped back to his senses. That moment of disorientation, however, was enough for the green and black beams of light to slam down from above.

Mu Chen hastily raised his small shield to block, while simultaneously trying to summon back the paperweight he had thrown earlier.

BOOM!

The impact knocked him back two steps. He heard the cracking of bone in his arm, and faint fissures appeared on the shield. Though the paperweight did respond to his summons and came flying back toward him, it wasn’t quick enough to help.

With no other choice, Mu Chen abandoned the paperweight and pulled out a blade-shaped spirit artifact instead. As for his fractured arm, he paid it no mind at all. A fifth rank expert’s body healed with terrifying speed; bones that had just shattered were already knitting back together before his eyes.

The three darted through the wilderness, locked in a predator-and-prey dance. But among fifth ranks, regeneration was so rapid that you could only kill your opponent if you could out-damage their healing over time...or deliver an instant deathblow. Simply repelling someone of that rank was easy; truly finishing them off was another matter. Even if you reduced a fifth ranker to minced flesh, as long as their heart remained intact, they could revive.

That was why a spirit artifact capable of trapping a fifth ranker was far more dangerous than one that could wound them.

Unfortunately for Mu Chen, Peng Ming’s black petal was precisely such an artifact. All Mu Chen could do was try to flee. His wounds kept piling up, new injuries forming before the old ones could fully heal.

By dusk, Mu Chen found himself rushing through a narrow canyon, only to slam into something invisible. He bounced back, was yanked forward again as if caught in a spring trap, then came to a jerking halt in midair. A bone-chilling aura began creeping over his skin.

He froze. Reflecting on how Peng Ming and Liu Wenlou had chased him, he realized they’d been herding him here, step by step.

“So this is their trap...? What the hell is it?” Mu Chen focused and saw a transparent spider web sparkling before him. Its strands dripped with an icy malevolence. Hearing the sounds of pursuit overhead, he quickly released a surge of shadow blood.

“Mere child’s play,” he sneered.

Undoubtedly, this was another undying husk creation. But so what? Destroying it should be simple. Under the surge of his shadow blood, the web began to hiss and shrink away.

Mu Chen prepared to bolt, but then noticed something strange. Peng Ming and Liu Wenlou, hovering above, had paused in place. They just stared at him with an odd look on their faces.

A sliver of doubt rose in Mu Chen’s mind, but he suppressed it and tried to fly off. The instant he moved, he realized something was terribly wrong. He was stuck again; some new force was holding him fast.

Once more, he released his shadow blood, hoping to burn through whatever bound him, but this time it had no effect.

Mu Chen, who had survived countless perils over the course of more than a century, had never seen anything like this. Whirling around, he saw darkness flooding in behind him, and felt himself pressed against some ghastly, bone-chilling spider web.

This spider web was even more horrifying than the first. Its endless strands stretched inward, forming a tunnel into some underworld of phantoms, as though leading to the realm of the dead.

By freeing himself from the initial trap, he had only triggered something worse. From the depths of that ghostly passage, a dark shape scuttled forward with terrifying speed. It was a grotesque

spider

but not truly a spider at all.

At the center was a child’s torso, amputated at the limbs, with arms, legs, even vertebrae and human heads grafted onto it to form the spider’s

legs

. Each gruesome head chomped at the web, crawling across it in jerky strides, all of them converging on Mu Chen with shocking swiftness.

His heart nearly stopped, but his combat instincts forced him to spit out a mouthful of shadow blood, imbued with ancestral seal power that could even ward off ghosts.

Yet when his shadow blood splattered onto the nightmare spider’s body, it simply dried up on contact, congealing into a brittle scab that flaked to the ground in useless chunks.

Mu Chen’s pupils contracted in horror, but there was no time for a second move. The spider lunged, dragging him deeper along the web.

In the space of two seconds, Mu Chen vanished into the tunnel as though he were nothing but a normal human. All that remained were his futile screams, echoing once before dying away.

“He’s gone.” Liu Wenlou and Peng Ming alighted on the ground, gazing silently at the spot where Mu Chen had disappeared. After a moment, another figure stepped out from behind the rocks—a small, scrawny man known as Chang Qi, who last appeared in Northriver Prefecture.

Chang Qi moved his hands, and two faintly visible

ripples

of air returned to his palms.

Seeing this scrawny man, someone he could likely kill with a single finger, Liu Wenlou couldn’t help asking, “How did you kill Mu Chen?”

Chang Qi’s rasping voice held a cold sneer. “How I did it is my business, not yours. But since we’re on the same side, I’ll give you a hint. That

ghost spider

just now came from Happyland. And guess what, Happyland is right nearby.”

Happyland, nearby?

Liu Wenlou blinked. Surely he was joking. By all accounts, the large ghost domain of Happyland was nearly a whole prefecture away. And yet, here he was, calling it

nearby

.

He studied the frail man closely.

So this is an undying husk, truly unpredictable.

Without witnessing their bizarre methods, the Liu Clan might never have chosen to betray the Holy Tree Temple.

But now that he had seen enough of those supernatural beings in action, Liu Wenlou was convinced the five element powers like the Holy Tree Temple were bound to lose. They had never dealt with anything like this before, nor had they studied how to counter it.

He was certain Mu Chen could have survived. It was only because of some unknown factor, some missing piece of knowledge, that Mu Chen was killed so swiftly. In other words, it wasn’t raw power that killed him; it was ignorance. If Mu Chen had known how that thing operated, he might still have ended up trapped, but he wouldn’t have perished so quickly.

˙·٠✧🐗➶➴🏹✧٠·˙

Not long after, talk of Mu Chen’s death spread through the Cui Clan.

“Elder Mu is dead... Three fifth rank experts have already died in just half a year of war. The Guo Clan’s head and their patriarch were killed by Peng Mi, who used Zhu Ban’s quasi-domain. As for Elder Mu, nobody really knows how he died.”

“Didn’t Elder Liu go with him?”

“Elder Liu said the two of them fell into an ambush, and some

ghost spider

dragged Elder Mu away.”

“A ghost spider? What the hell is that? Did they wander into a ghost domain?”

“Even if they had, Elder Mu should’ve been able to escape, right?”

The crowd looked at one another in confusion, unease clear in their eyes. While some in the Cui Clan had secretly rejoiced when the Guo Clan’s powerhouses fell, the death of a formidable elder like Mu Chen signaled that something was going terribly wrong.

“It can’t be...” someone whispered. “What on earth is happening out there?”

Li Yuan listened quietly from the side. He had feared this all along. The Holy Tree Temple—an old, established power—wasn’t prepared for this new style of warfare.

Each ghost domain had its own rules and area of influence. Near Flowerpath County, for instance, an unlucky victim might randomly stumble into the carpenter’s workshop. But that was only within the territory it governed, which extended over Flowerpath, the wilderness, and a part of Gemhill. Any farther than that, and the carpenter workshop’s

grudge

wouldn’t be triggered.

So, in future battles, it was crucial to study the local ghost domains beforehand. That was the advantage of

knowing the terrain

. And the undying husks understood these ghost domains perfectly. While an undying husk alone couldn’t directly face high rank martial artists, they became terrifying allies when working alongside them, turning each ghost domain’s twisted rules into a weapon.

Li Yuan left the Cui estate and made his way toward his carriage. But the moment he approached his driver’s seat, he grew wary.

Originally, the driver’s combat power read 175~198, but now they showed 190~210—not a huge jump, but enough to mark him as a different individual. He was identical in height and build, wearing the same clothes, looking for all the world like the same driver assigned to him by the Cui Clan. If Li Yuan didn’t know firsthand about the rouge compacts that could reshape faces, bodies, and even change one’s gender, he might never have caught on.

It was obvious. This was an undying husk who was using his own

inhouse

infiltration item to slip into the Holy Tree Temple’s city stronghold.

Without exposing the imposter, Li Yuan climbed into the carriage. Inside, he found a letter.

Li Yuan, feigning casualness, asked, “Hey, how’d this letter get in here?”

The imposter driver sounded taken aback. “Master Li, I...I’m not sure. The carriage stayed inside the Cui estate the whole time, and nobody went near it.”

Li Yuan pondered briefly, then tossed the letter toward him. “Open it for me.”

The undying husk obediently tore it open and handed it back. Li Yuan gave it a quick scan.

“My dear son-in-law, my longing for you and Huayin grows by the day. Come join me, and let our family be reunited. If you wish to do so, someone will meet you at the Ginger Tavern at midnight.

-Zhu Ban.”

Li Yuan was certain Zhu Ban hadn’t written this. And the Ginger Tavern...apparently it, too, was compromised by these undying husks. After all, they were now flush with wealth—more than enough to buy back their own curses, allowing them to linger outside in human society as they pleased.

My wife’s general store really sells some handy stuff

Li Yuan mused.

Not only am I using it, so are these Lotus Cult infiltrators.

He set the letter down. Placing it inside his carriage, right where he’d find it, was clearly an intimidation tactic—a reminder that they could approach him anytime without him knowing.

Li Yuan glanced briefly at the disguised driver, tempted to snap his neck on the spot. But in the end, he held back.