Ji Li saw the wrist plunged into his chest, saw the hatred contained within every wrinkle on the Old Woman's face, and at the same time, he saw a petal drift lightly down before his eyes.
At the instant that hasty hand became a blade and stabbed straight toward his heart, it froze completely just half an inch from it.
Crack!
A faint sound of a fingernail splitting, too soft for anyone to hear, rang out with the beat of the Ghost Heart. It then spread like a virus, reaching the ten fingers, the palm and back of the hand, before finally spreading to the Old Woman's body.
From frenzied murder to shattering into nothing, the Old Woman took only one second.
A second earlier, she had held every advantage. She had just reached an unsolvable level and could have torn Ji Li apart without restraint.
Yet the next second, like those seven huge vats, she became a shattered vessel in rapid, successive, sudden bursts.
The cause was merely a petal that had fallen out of thin air.
In this dark corpse-hiding alley, the Old Woman's distinctive decayed odor—neither that of a corpse nor of rot—reached its strongest point just before she vanished. Yet with her disappearance, it was swept away by the cold wind in the blink of an eye.
Ji Li's plain white robe, stained with blood, fluttered softly in the wind. Broken roof tiles clinked across the ground. Only that petal, under his gaze, drifted lightly in, then drifted lightly away.
Until the man raised his head toward the narrow strip of sky and sighed.
"Looks like you still refuse to see me..."
Once the rule had been broken, was there still a way to deal with this ghost?
The answer was no.
But once it became