Our Melon

On the road ahead, Yan Li had rested for a while before raising the three-dimensional formation again. He seemed furious, and their pace only grew faster.

Perhaps some inexplicably terrible luck was at work. They traveled for quite a while, bypassing many narrow alleys where evil spirits gathered and killing a few stragglers along the way. They didn't find their first doll until they were about to enter the northern part of town.

Yu Xing had finally spotted it after continually scouting with his branches' perspective. It was perched on the branch of a withered tree.

Nanshui Town had, to put it mildly, terrible greenery. They probably hadn't developed any environmental awareness yet. Once they'd cleared a patch of land for a town, they'd simply built houses all over it.

If there were more trees, Yu Xing thought, finding the dolls would be several times easier. Even with his unusually powerful mental strength, constantly communicating with and controlling branches from another dimension was starting to wear him down.

By contrast, using the dead branches and trees that already existed as his eyes took no effort at all.

The former meant accepting the power that came with the offering of that eerie tongue, which inevitably required an additional expenditure of mental energy. The latter was simply a use of the Ghost Tree's curse, as effortless to him as walking on his own two feet.

The tree before them was dead. Its roots could no longer draw nutrients from the soil, its bark had turned white, and not a single leaf remained. Its claw-like branches held scattered patches of snow, and the doll was tucked into a snowdrift among the densest, most concealed branches.

Whether by coincidence or not, the evil spirits nearby had gathered around that tree, and there were quite