Its face was hidden behind a helmet, but unfathomable darkness seeped through the gaps. Greasy shadows, like a cat's whiskers or an octopus's tentacles, reached out from within the helmet, as if searching for something.
But before it could find anything worthwhile, a shrill whistle sounded in the air nearby.
"The target has appeared!"
"The demonic beast is here!"
Centered around Xuanming Valley, large numbers of Red Armor Guards—wary and patrolling the surrounding area—immediately converged on the place where Split Demon had appeared.
They shouted their battle cries as lines of flame, formed from tiny characters, coursed and burned across their armor. The patterns faintly linked into a massive military formation, dyeing the surrounding forests a deep red.
Meanwhile, in what had once been Xuanming Manor and was now the Red Armor Guards' encampment, beams of spell light blazed to life, illuminating everything within a ten-mile radius as bright as day and exposing every demon and specter.
The Red Armor Guards' overwhelming numbers and the spirit light that revealed demons forced this Demon Person to abandon its investigation and once more conceal itself in the shadows.
As a Split Demon of the Great Heavenly Demon "Xiuming," it was skilled in techniques related to blood and vitality. It should have been able to find An Jing's aura right away.
But An Jing had suddenly vanished for three days, forcing it to lurk around Xuanming Valley. Then Da Chen's soldiers arrived to purge the lingering poison of the Heavenly Demon and surrounded it.
Even with the body of someone it had devoured serving as a "shell" to conceal its demonic aura, the Demon-Monitoring Array was enough to restrict its movements. Just like now, even when it had found a few clues, it had no time to follow them up.
The Demon Person