Letting You Stand By Was for This?

The blood-and-flesh ghost's face was blurry, and perhaps it didn't even have a mouth, but everyone present heard a faint, almost imperceptible laugh.

The ghost tossed the tattered red cloth into the air. Its fragments fluttered down like living things, light as feathers.

The sound of a suona horn drifted through the howling wind, as if coming from inside a muffled jar. It felt very far away.

It also left everyone feeling a little dazed.

Yu Xing looked up and saw the corpse of the person who had burst into a rain of blood slowly melting. The skin dissolved, gradually becoming a blurry mass of flesh and blood.

The ghost stood in place, flailing its limbs as if dancing.

Everyone was stunned.

For some reason, the deductions who had been ready to drive the ghost away or kill it were frozen in place. They couldn't move or even look away, and could only stare blankly as the blood-and-flesh ghost... slowly grew human skin.

Then the scraps of red fabric, drifting down like feathers, landed one by one on the ghost, like the pieces of a tattered outfit.

The blood-and-flesh ghost—no, it was a human-skin ghost now—still had no features. Its limbs moved stiffly, much like the puppets in a marionette show Yu Xing had once seen.

Only the puppets in a marionette show were pulled by strings from behind the stage. This human-skin ghost, on the other hand, had appeared right before everyone's eyes—and killed someone.

As everyone stood dazed, the suona's muffled notes suddenly burst free of their confines and rang through the heavens. They sounded like accompaniment for the ghost's dance, and also like a bell jolting the deductions awake.

Yu Xing's eardrums throbbed with pain, as if the sound were about to blow the top of his