When that pair of grayish-white, unfocused eyes "looked" over, Yu Xing felt an indescribable chill instantly pierce the air, stabbing straight into the depths of his soul.
It wasn't a physical cold, but a deeper kind of erosion originating at the level of cognition.
The old woman's withered body no longer seemed like an individual in its own right. It had become a window.
A window leading to some terrifying entity.
Through her, what Yu Xing "saw" was not merely the distorted master bedroom and the illusion of the Blood Moon outside the window. He seemed to perceive the Blood Moon itself—not an astronomical satellite, but a huge, cold, living body filled with a malicious gaze!
Countless mad ideas, chaotic whispers, and fragments of knowledge enough to make any rational creature collapse surged toward his consciousness like an invisible tide, carried through the old woman.
This pollution... differed from the mental pollution he had felt from the artworks in the gallery. It was more primitive, grander, and even more... "high-ranking."
It targeted the observer's underlying cognition of the world and the universe, attempting to distort the very foundation of their existence.
An ordinary person—even an experienced diviner—would probably have already fallen into madness, or had their mind completely warped by its self-protective mechanisms, just like Mingzhu of Nanshui Town.
But Yu Xing only furrowed his brows slightly.
As a "tree" whose essence was closer to the very concept of a curse, his mode of existence was already different from that of conventional life. Even so, pollution of this tier still made him feel a trace of "discomfort," like sensitive roots touching an overly turbid water source.
He needed more effective "filtration."
With a thought, several illusory, pitch-black tentacles, hovering between existence and nonexistence, quietly slithered out from the shadows behind