Gu Hui smiled without another word, shouldered his pack, and left the eatery.
He knew that amid this vast sea of people, his meeting with the wandering fortune-teller had been nothing more than chance.
Yet he did not realize that this seemingly ordinary encounter, and Zhou Yixian's words with their mingling of truth and falsehood, had already lent an unseen layer of mystery to the road ahead.
He stood on the bustling streets of Three Creeks Town, gazing over the tightly packed rooftops toward the mist-shrouded mountains to the south.
Bloodsucking fiends? Spirits causing trouble? Or... villains from the Demonic Cult?
He stepped into the southbound stream of travelers. The road ahead was destined to be anything but smooth.
And that slippery fortune-teller, Zhou Yixian, along with the bizarre tales he told, might one day cross his path again in an unexpected way.
For now, he was merely an ascetic cultivator seeking his way through the vast mortal world.
After leaving Three Creeks Town, Gu Hui traveled south. The farther he went, the more apparent the faint, unsettling sense of oppression in the air became.
It was not a change in the spiritual energy, but an aura... of deathly silence interwoven with hatred, draped like an invisible veil over the villages and wilderness along the way.
Travelers and merchants on the main road had grown noticeably scarcer. Most hurried along with fear on their faces, and their conversations largely revolved around horrifying rumors of "bloodsucking monsters."
Based on his inquiries along the way and the scattered clues Zhou Yixian had provided, Gu Hui narrowed his search to the vicinity of a village called Mountainback Market, a hundred li to the south.
It was said to be one of the first places where strange incidents had occurred, as well as one