"Found—you!"
The instant that voice rang out, a figure appeared silently on the stone wall behind Mao Zhen.
It looked like a child of seven or eight,
small and scrawny.
Its limbs were as thin as dry sticks.
But its skin was a sickly, deathly white.
Most horrifying of all was its face. That face did not belong to a child at all. It was the hideously ugly face of a middle-aged adult,
with no discernible sex.
It was so repulsive that merely looking at it made people feel physically ill.
It clung to the wall.
Its limbs bent backward at the joints, bracing against the stone.
Its neck had twisted a hundred and eighty degrees, leaving that middle-aged face upside down, staring straight at the back of Mao Zhen's head.
From beginning to end,
no one had seen how it appeared.
It was as though it had materialized out of thin air.
There had been no warning whatsoever.
The instant the voice sounded, Jiang Qiao had already raised his fist. Before anyone else could react, black lightning erupted!
Boom!
The lightning surged, impossibly fast.
It tore straight through space and slammed into the evil spirit.
In an instant,
the evil spirit's body came apart.
Like a porcelain vase struck by a heavy hammer, it shattered into countless fragments.
And yet...
Its body disintegrated,
but not a single drop of blood spilled.
There was no real flesh or bone. Like a snowman exposed to the sun, every fragment dissolved into nothingness.
It vanished without a trace.
But...
Jiang Qiao frowned and looked at Mao Zhen.
He was dead!
His executioner's saber clattered to the ground. Almost instantly, the vitality in Mao Zhen's body withered away.
He rapidly became a corpse.
There was even...
a faint stench of decay coming from