Ye Yun walked forward slowly, cautiously examining Wang Fu's condition. The old steward's breathing was steady. Only a pinpoint-sized red mark had appeared between his brows, the skin around it an unnatural blue-gray. Even more bizarrely, when Ye Yun lifted Wang Fu's eyelids, he found that his pupils... had turned into narrow, vertical slits!
"Yin wind!" Zhao Hu suddenly cried.
A bone-chilling wind swept through the courtyard without warning, carrying faint, broken sobs. Every lantern went out at once, and the moonlight was swallowed by dark clouds that had gathered who knew when. In the pitch-black darkness, Ye Yun clearly heard scraping sounds closing in from all sides—like countless snakes slithering across the flagstones.
"Stay alert!" Yan Xiao Liu's voice rang through the darkness. The constables quickly formed a circle, standing back to back. The metallic rasp of blades leaving their sheaths rose all around them.
Ye Yun, however, remained where he was. His martial artist's senses caught a familiar, icy aura—it was the little girl who had disappeared! In the absolute darkness, he saw a small figure crouched on the eaves, clutching that eerie cloth doll. Even more chillingly, the doll's button eyes reflected a faint phosphorescent glow as they stared fixedly toward the western wing!
Yan Xiao Liu's pupils contracted sharply in the darkness. His right hand instinctively settled on his saber's hilt. He stared hard at the shadows beneath the western wing's eaves, his Adam's apple bobbing. "You... don't see it?" His voice was dry as sandpaper scraping against itself.
Everyone followed his gaze. Zhao Hu even raised a fire striker. In its wavering light, the stretch of eaves was empty, save for a few dead leaves spinning in the wind. But everyone could feel a bone-chilling cold pouring from that direction, as if countless icy hands were stroking the backs of their necks.
"Sixth Brother, don't scare us..." Fatty Zhang's voice trembled. Beads of sweat as large as beans dotted his forehead. "There's nothing there..."
Yan Xiao Liu didn't answer. He only turned to look at Ye Yun. Moonlight slipped through a gap in the clouds, casting mottled shadows across his face. Ye Yun gave the faintest nod and lightly rubbed his thumb against his saber's hilt. That tiny gesture made Yan Xiao Liu's heart sink to the bottom of his stomach.
"There really is a little girl." Ye Yun's voice was soft, yet it struck everyone like a heavy hammer. "About six or seven years old, wearing a faded blue cotton dress and holding an old cloth doll."
A deathly silence fell over the courtyard. The iron ruler in one of the Wang family servants' hands clattered to the ground, ringing crisply against the flagstones. The servant who had been rescued suddenly dropped to his knees and slammed his forehead against the ground. "It's the eldest young lady... the eldest young lady who threw herself down the well thirty years ago! Please spare us!"
Ye Yun furrowed his brow. He noticed that when Yan Xiao Liu circulated Essence Qi to his eyes, a faint blue glow appeared along the edges of his pupils. And because Ye Yun had taken a Qi Condensation Pill, he could see the wavering figure clearly: the little girl floated three feet above the ground, the button eyes of her cloth doll reflecting an eerie phosphorescence. Her lips curled into the same uncanny smile as the dead man's.
The Essence Qi of a Ninth Rank martial artist can strengthen the senses. The others haven't reached that rank, so they can't see this yin entity.
As if to prove him right, the little girl suddenly grinned. The terrifying smile stretched almost to her ears, making Yan Xiao Liu stumble half a step backward. More horrifying still, when she moved, the temperature across the entire Wang Mansion plunged. Everyone's breath turned to white frost in the air, and even a thin layer of ice formed on the ground.
"Quit your tricks!" Yan Xiao Liu forced himself to stay calm, drawing his saber a few inches from its sheath. The moonlight reflected off its blade suddenly turned blood-red, revealing a pale child's face beneath the eaves. There was no white in its pitch-black eye sockets, only two pools of black liquid that kept welling up and dripping down its cheeks, corroding tiny pits in the ground.
Zhao Hu suddenly let out a scream, and the fire striker in his hand went out with a sputter. He frantically slapped at his right arm. "Something's grabbing me!" His official uniform's sleeve tore open as if ripped apart by an invisible force, revealing five livid purple scratch marks. The flesh around the wounds began to rot at a visible rate, giving off the stench of rotting meat.
Ye Yun saw it clearly—the little girl had floated up beside Zhao Hu, her withered fingers slicing across his arm like knife blades. More horrifying still, the wounds seeped not blood but a viscous black liquid, exactly like the black mist that had poured from Wang Fu's seven orifices.
Seeing this, Yan Xiao Liu gritted his teeth and charged at the blurry figure, saber in hand. The Essence Qi of a Ninth Rank martial artist flowed along the blade, drawing out a faint blue arc of light. "Show yourself!" His saber slashed toward the girl's neck, only to stop dead three inches away. The little girl slowly raised her right hand and lightly touched the blade with one deathly pale finger.
Clang—!
The sharp clash of metal made everyone's eardrums ache. To the others, Yan Xiao Liu's saber had stopped in midair for no reason, then been flung back by an invisible force, splitting his palm. Blood trickled down the hilt. But in Ye Yun's eyes, the instant that seemingly slender finger touched the blade, a spray of ghostly green sparks burst forth!
"How can this be..." Yan Xiao Liu stared in disbelief at the three hair-thin cracks in his blade. He endured the pain and charged forward again. His saber techniques suddenly turned fierce, drawing on the Nine Waves Form personally taught by Chen Qingzhou. A cascade of blade light enveloped the little girl's figure.
Ye Yun narrowed his eyes and watched closely. In a dimension invisible to ordinary people, every one of Yan Xiao Liu's strikes passed right through the little girl's phantom body, as if cleaving through empty air. But whenever the blade touched that mass of gray mist, it stirred a slight ripple—like a pebble dropped into still water.
There's a chance! Ye Yun's heart stirred. Physical attacks had almost no effect, but Essence Qi really could affect yin entities, if only a little. The discovery reminded him of the method for controlling a blade with qi recorded in the latter half of the Flying Feather Knife manual in his Storage Bag.
Yan Xiao Liu suddenly cried out in pain. The little girl's claws raked across his left shoulder. His official uniform tore like paper, and the flesh beneath instantly turned a livid purple. Worse still, threadlike black matter began spreading from the wound across his body, burrowing into his meridians like living things.
Everyone present fell into utter panic. To them, Yan Xiao Liu looked like a madman swinging his saber at empty air, while one terrifying wound after another appeared on his body out of nowhere. Fatty Zhang trembled as he pulled out a protective talisman, while Li Si kept rubbing black dog blood onto his blade—even though none of them could see where the enemy was.
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