Rescue

"We were still too late!" Huai Yi stood at the cliff's edge, panting from the run. He gritted his teeth and looked down into the pitch-black depths.

Somehow, the light that had been approaching them had vanished without a sound. Bai Xi, however, had acted as though he'd gone mad. When he'd turned and seen the two of them, he'd looked as if he'd seen a ghost, then taken off running and said a bunch of incomprehensible things.

Running off was bad enough, but of the four directions, he'd ignored the other three and chosen the one with the cliff. They'd immediately gone after him, but they were still too late.

"Scritch."

"Scritch."

A strange sound came from behind them, like something crawling across the snow. It was moving fast. Jiang Cheng and Huai Yi followed the sound and saw a huge shadow hurtling toward them.

Along with the biting wind came snow and ice.

The enormous shadow was, of course, the Starving Ghost. But with the cliff behind them, there was nowhere to run. Jiang Cheng suddenly understood what it was after: it meant to drive their group into a dead end.

Bai Xi had probably sprinted toward the cliff because he'd fallen into an illusion. The moment he mistook the light for his teammates, he'd been trapped in the Starving Ghost's illusion.

He wasn't stupid. He was just too attached to his companions and too consumed by guilt, and that had been his undoing.

But there was no time to dwell on that now. They had no chance of outrunning the Starving Ghost. Jiang Cheng glanced at the cliff behind them and spotted a relatively gentle slope along its side. "We're going down!"

A snowstorm swirled around the enormous Starving Ghost, leaving only a blurred silhouette visible.