Tree Demon and Bat Demon (Seeking Readership)

Now that he had confirmed this town was haunted, and the ghost was likely no pushover, Dan Lei grew interested.

So Dan Lei had Yuna Ono take him to collect samples from the town's main water source first.

Dan Lei had a decent grasp of pharmacology. As soon as he got the water, he immediately noticed something was off—not a plague, but deliberate poisoning.

The poison was subtle, though. Given the medical conditions of a small town in this era, mistaking it for an epidemic was understandable.

If this were a typical righteous protagonist, they'd trace the water upstream to find the poison source, solve the townsfolk's drinking problem, and then hunt the ghost.

But Dan Lei didn't want to bother with that.

He wasn't some efficiency freak, and being a long-lived species in this life had made him a bit slow-paced.

Still, Dan Lei hated doing things that would lead to uninteresting and troublesome situations later.

Finding the poison source now—setting aside how long that would take—

Once the water was restored, the ghost in town, which had some skill, might just lie low.

After all, a plan to attack a town that involved poisoning might mean more than one ghost. Tracking them all down later would take even more time.

And if any slipped through the cracks, leaving a town he'd supposedly cleaned up still infested after he left, Dan Lei would find that embarrassing.

So Dan Lei chose a cruder approach.

After sampling the water, he found the town chief and made it clear he'd report the samples and what happened to the county government. If things went fast, relief water would arrive by tomorrow.

Dan Lei didn't question the chief much. Whether the chief was a ghost spy or not, the ghost would learn about him through someone in the town government.

So, as long as he headed toward the county government normally, a ghost would come to intercept him.

Then he could find out what was really going on in this town from the ghost itself.

So, after saying goodbye to the chief, Dan Lei immediately started moving toward the county government at a normal person's jogging pace.

But less than three kilometers out of town, just as the sun began to set, Dan Lei sensed something wrong with his surroundings.

As mentioned before, the town was surrounded by dense forests with canopies that blocked the sky. Ghosts could attack even in broad daylight.

And now, the forest was too quiet.

At some point, the birds and insects had gone silent. Even the natural sounds of a modern residential garden were louder than this, and the ghostly aura was thickening.

He didn't even need Sasaki Kojiro to warn him—Dan Lei knew a ghost was coming.

So he kept running and used telepathy to tell his Servant, "Sasaki, stay on standby for now. Only step in if I'm really in trouble."

Sasaki Kojiro had no objection. This was Dan Lei's own growth journey; he just needed to have his back.

And in his view, the ghost coming now wasn't qualified to threaten his Master.

Since Dan Lei couldn't pinpoint the ghost's exact location with his own senses, he kept running, pretending he knew nothing.

That way, the ghost would attack and reveal itself.

Sure enough, as Dan Lei ran through the dense forest, a tree root by his foot suddenly came to life, grabbing his ankle and tripping him.

Then, vines shot out from all directions, binding him to a tree. A female figure slowly emerged from the trunk—a gaunt, bark-clad female ghost who hugged him from behind and said, "What a unlucky guy, dying on a business trip out here. Young, already a high-ranking county official, and pretty handsome too."

As she spoke, a male ghost with bat wings under his arms and fangs in his mouth, looking like a vampire, descended from the sky and said, "Wife, don't get all hot over a handsome man. I'm thirsty—let me have a few sips before we decide how to eat him."

With that, the male ghost lunged at Dan Lei, who seemed to have passed out from the fall.

But as the male ghost pounced, Dan Lei muttered softly, "Water Breathing, First Form: Wind Variation, Hidden Thread Slash."

Suddenly, the bat-winged male ghost turned into chunks of meat midair. Looking back at where he'd just passed, bloody water threads were crisscrossed in the air.

Meanwhile, Dan Lei, still bound by the female ghost's vines, said openly, "Look, a dried-up piece of wood like you shouldn't be attacking people. Wouldn't it be better to just live off photosynthesis? Water Breathing, Sixth Form: Ice Variation, Polar Storm."

The moment Dan Lei finished, the female ghost felt like she was hugging a block of ice. Her body was already frosting over.

Dan Lei was using a modified version of Water Breathing.

With the Chí Ming Dragon Clan's water-control talent, he could do all sorts of tricks with water.

Generating water from his meridians' qi, cooling it with his magic circuits, controlling it with Cloud Chant—try a minus-seventy-degree ice storm around his body.

The branches binding Dan Lei instantly froze brittle and shattered into fragments with a light shake.

The female ghost hugging him from behind also broke into several pieces.

Both ghosts were now frozen chunks of meat. Dan Lei looked at them and said slowly, "Looks like you two were the only ones coming to ambush me. A tree ghost and a bat ghost—nice combo. Were you a couple before becoming ghosts, or did you get married after?"

But both ghosts had their mouths frozen shut and couldn't speak.

Dan Lei said sorry, then burned their mouths off with a fireball and continued.

"You should still be able to fix your mouths. Just tell me honestly what's going on in that town, and you'll suffer a little less."

As Dan Lei spoke, he swapped a bottle of mercury he'd bought in the city out of his backpack, poured it directly onto the ground, and used water manipulation to shape it into a Magic Suppression Array.

Within this array, all magical activity in the demons would be suppressed, manifesting as difficulty activating their Blood Demon Arts and a drastic reduction in their regeneration speed.

One had to understand that since Kibutsuji Muzan himself was a coward who bullied the weak, the demons he spawned from his starting point naturally couldn't be expected to have any backbone.

As long as they felt their once-invincible immortality vanish, these demons would spill everything they could to survive.

Sure enough, after their mouths were fixed and they experienced the loss of their immortality, watching Dan Lei use the Magic Extraction Array to steadily drain their bodies into ash, the two demons broke down.

What followed was a question-and-answer session.

Dan Lei quickly learned that the demon who orchestrated this town attack was Lower Rank Three, Sickle Leaf—one of the Lower Rank demons Muzan would later purge after the Mount Natagumo incident in the original story.

At this moment, he had gathered four demons, including the Tree demon and the Bat demon, to attack the town, and he himself was the doctor who claimed the water source was contaminated.

The reason for such an elaborate setup was mainly to prevent drawing the attention of a Hashira from the very start.

The Lower Rank demons all knew that as long as no Hashira came from the Demon Slayer Corps, ordinary members were just delivering themselves as prey—nothing to fear.

Moreover, Dan Lei also learned one piece of information: his own appearance had made Sickle Leaf suspect that the outside world was already doubting the town's severed communication, so the attack would begin tonight—or rather, it had already begun.