Chapter 419: Danger At Every Step

“Argh!”

The grab didn’t injure his shoulder, but Ye Qing felt so much pain that his face was contorted, and veins were bulging on his forehead.

“Heavenly Demon Captures The Soul”

Gritting his teeth, Ye Qing clenched his fingers and knocked the space in front of him. A ripple of demonic thought immediately washed out and destroyed all of the silhouettes attacking him, turning back into fog.

“Heavens, these damn shadows are quite dangerous.”

It took a couple deep breaths before Ye Qing’s face finally returned to normal. His complexion was pale though.

As it turned out, the silhouettes attacked the soul, not the body. When the silhouette grabbed his shoulder, he felt like his soul was being torn apart. The pain was such that he would prefer if the silhouette had ripped his arm off his sockets, not to mention that the attack had also inflicted a small amount of corruption inside his soul.

Besides that, the silhouettes seemed immune to conventional weapons and even astral qi. It could only be damaged by spiritual power.

Had he known this, he would’ve made preparations for it. What a “great” start this was.

“Bloody bitches. I can’t believe they didn’t tell me something this important. If only I can just leave them in the fog...” Ye Qing cursed under his breath.

The idea had entered his mind as soon as Longing mentioned that they would lose their way as soon as they entered the fog. If necessary, he could just leave them in the fog and escape.

It was just a fleeting thought though. He wasn’t actually planning on doing it. For one, it was possible that Longing was lying to him. Even if it was true, he still couldn’t leave this fucking place because of the fog. He would be pissing off the only people who—assuming they were telling the truth—might be able to release him from this hell.

Tempted as he was, Ye Qing ultimately pushed down the desire and marched on.

Now that he knew how the silhouettes functioned, they no longer constituted a threat to him. Every time one or more of them got close, he could destroy them with the “Heavenly Demon Captures The Soul”.

Unfortunately, the fog grew thicker when he got to the second floor. The number of silhouettes lurking in the fog were steadily increasing as well. Ye Qing frowned. Although the silhouettes weren’t difficult to handle, it was going to take forever to get to the orlop deck at this rate. Moreover, Longing mentioned that some of the silhouettes were stronger than most. It would be bad if he killed too many of them and caught the attention of a powerful silhouette.

“Oh right. Maybe I can do it that way?”

Suddenly, a light bulb appeared on Ye Qing’s head. Longing also mentioned that the fog was only interested in living things—or more accurately, the life force present in all living things. If he isolated his life force, then he shouldn’t attract their attention anymore.

Having made up his mind, Ye Qing produced a pair of cloth shoes from Nine Heavens. It looked old, dusty, and tattered. There was even some soil clinging to its fabric.

Something wasn’t right about the soil though. For one, it reeked of deathly energy. Two, it appeared on Ye Qing’s hands as soon as he touched the shoes.

After Ye Qing put on the pair of cloth shoes, patches of soil slithered up his legs rapidly until it covered his whole body. It wasn’t long before he looked like a zombie who just climbed out of the ground.

The cloth shoes were named the Grave Dirt Shoes. Despite its rather unpleasant name, it was a bonafide Hatred-class Strange Artifact. He had obtained it from the

jianghu

warriors he tricked and killed at Luo Shui.

As its name implied, the Grave Dirt Shoes were a pair of shoes that were covered in grave dirt. Anyone who wore it would slowly be covered in grave dirt. Its deathly energy was very effective in concealing one’s life force, and in that sense it functioned the same as the Burial Shirt Of The Dead. However, its concealment effect was much stronger.

Of course, its side effects were that much worse. Its deathly energy wore away at the wearer much faster than the Burial Shirt Of The Dead. If the wearer didn’t possess the tool or resilience to resist its eroding effects, then they would be buried and turned into a grave.

Ye Qing had kept this Strange Artifact because he fancied its ability to conceal one’s life force. Now, it had finally come into use.

As expected, the silhouettes immediately lost interest in him after his life force was isolated. So long as he didn’t intentionally block their way like a nuisance, they wouldn’t pay any attention to him.

Delighted at the success, Ye Qing avoided the silhouettes and slowly made his way toward the first floor.

He was standing on top of the staircase leading to the first floor and about to take a step when suddenly, he recalled something. Then, he gingerly withdrew his right leg.

When he jumped up the second floor earlier, he clearly remembered the stairs being on his right, not his left. Something was off.

“Heavenly Demon Captures The Soul”

Ye Qing tapped the space in front of him, and the staircase slowly faded away like a mirage. As expected, it was an illusion created by the fog. Had he taken that step, he would’ve fallen right off the floor... and into the gaping maw of a Stranger.

Yes, there was a Stranger lying in ambush on the first floor. Through the thick fog, Ye Qing saw that it had a humanoid body. However, it had four legs instead of two arms and two legs. It looked like a square-shaped, four-legged bench the way it was crouching on all fours with its belly facing upward.

The Stranger’s belly was split open from the belly button all the way to the neck. Inside that crack was rows and rows of sharp teeth. The lazy bastard was waiting for its prey to fall right into its stomach.

“Phew...”

Ye Qing broke out in cold sweat. The maw gave him a bad, bad feeling. If he fell into it, chances were he wasn’t going to come out again.

“No wonder Longing said that the illusions and hallucinations are the greatest danger of it all, not the Strangers.”

Ye Qing rubbed his nose and shelved the sliver of arrogance that had been affecting his judgment. He had been perceiving his surroundings with his demonic thought this whole time, but the fog still almost caught him off guard. He thought that his demonic thought would be able to suppress any and all illusions he might experience inside the fog, but clearly he was mistaken. The fog was even more anomalous and dangerous than he thought.

The problem was that not everything he saw with his eyes or felt with his demonic thought was necessarily true or false. The mixture between truth and falsehood, reality and illusion made him so much more susceptible to being tricked. One misstep, and he might never live to see tomorrow’s sun.

“Should have known better. I nearly misstepped both figuratively and literally,” Ye Qing chided himself softly.

Luckily for him, the Stranger on the first floor didn’t notice him for some reason. Ye Qing hid a sigh of relief before turning around and leaving toward the opposite direction.

... Or at least, he tried to. No matter how hard he looked, he was unable to find the staircase in his memories.

“Should I... jump?”

Earlier, he had jumped up the second floor using his movement art. So long as he chose a spot that wasn’t the bench Stranger to jump down, he should be fine.

“Alright!”

Ye Qing picked a spot with the least number of silhouettes and jumped over the handrail. But as soon as he plummeted toward the ground, the scenery before his eyes abruptly transformed into a bottomless abyss.

The wind howled beside his ears, and he felt chilled to the bone as weightlessness gripped him. Helplessness, panic and fear assaulted him all at once.

He knew this was yet an illusion, but the sensation was so real that it was impossible not to feel afraid.

One breath, two breaths, three breaths...

At first, Ye Qing thought the illusion would end very quickly. After all, there was only so much height between the first floor and the second floor. It would take him one or two breaths at most to reach the floor. But dozens of breaths quickly passed, and still he was plummeting toward the abyss. As if that wasn’t enough, he was moving faster and panicking harder by the second.

𝑓𝑟𝑒𝘦𝓌𝑒𝑏𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝘭.𝒸𝘰𝑚

“Heavenly Demon Captures The Soul”

Realizing that something was amiss, Ye Qing executed his martial art and shattered the abyss like glass. After the illusion faded, he realized that an unnaturally long, boneless arm was wrapped several times around his waist.

At the end of the arm was a milky, feminine palm, and at the center of the palm was an eye staring intently at him. The eyes were blinking and transmitting intermittent bursts of filthy light into his eyes non-stop.

On the other end of the arm was another arm. It looked like the Stranger was made of two conjoined arms. The other arm was wrapped around a pillar on the second floor and swinging him back and forth like a yoyo.

“What the hell is this?”

No wonder he couldn’t reach the first floor no matter how long he waited. This piece of shit was screwing with him!

Luckily for him, his senses told him that the arm was pretty weak despite its bizarre ability. A burst of force was all he needed to break the arm wrapped around his waist into several pieces.

The eye at the center of the palm widened in abject terror. It tried to escape, but a pair of demonic lotuses appeared in Ye Qing’s eyes. A moment later, the Stranger’s eyes exploded into pieces as well.

The Stranger still wasn’t dead, however—or maybe it was a combination of three different Strangers? In any case, the second arm wrapped around the pillar realized that it was in grave danger and slithered into the fog like a snake. It was gone in the blink of an eye.

This time, Ye Qing landed on the first floor without any issue. He looked back at the spot where the second arm had disappeared to and exhaled slowly.

He wasn’t expecting to run into yet another Stranger soon. Just how many Strangers and anomalies were hiding inside this fog? He would have to be even more careful from now on.

He pushed his feelings to the back of his mind and began moving toward his destination as Longing had instructed him. The entrance to the lower decks was located at the stern, and this time, he executed “Heavenly Demon Captures The Soul” once every few steps. Despite this, it still took him a full incense stick to reach the door, a distance of two dozen steps at most.

This was because he kept deviating from his path even though he was moving in a straight line inside his mind. He had no choice but to waste a tremendous amount of time and expend a lot of spirit to adjust his direction again and again.

The fog was even thicker after he stepped out of the central hall. If before he could see three to six meters away from him, now he could see nothing but white, plus the dark silhouettes still walking here and there inside the fog.

He kept to the ship’s railing and carefully made his way toward the stern. If things were normal, he would’ve covered such a short distance in less than a second. But once again, it took him over half an hour to finally reach the entrance.

“This is troublesome.”

Ye Qing frowned for the umpteenth time when he arrived at the entrance. It was because the place was jam-packed with silhouettes.

While his Grave Dirt Shoes isolated his life force and prevented him from being detected, there were so many silhouettes blocking the entrance that it would be near impossible to slip in. What should he do?

Some quick thinking later, Ye Qing threw out a Shaping Talisman. The Shaping Talisman would transform into him and emulate his energies for a short time, so he could use it to lure the silhouettes away.

It worked. As soon as the fake Ye Qing raced down the deck toward the bow of the ship, the mindless swarm immediately gave chase. The massive crowd blocking the entrance was gone in the blink of an eye, allowing Ye Qing to dash out of his hiding spot, reach the entrance, and open the door.