Unlike anything Zhou You had encountered before.
In his experience, when this thing—he could only call it that for now—spread, it left flesh and blood everywhere, with entrails strewn across the ground. Even at the very least, it caused all sorts of unnatural changes.
Yet.
Right now.
Here.
"There was nothing."
A heap of indescribable things had indeed crawled out of the Golden Armored Guards, and Chen Shuo, the palace attendants, and the guests had indeed melted together. But once those things fused, they vanished without a trace. As far as the eye could see, there were only panicked survivors, elegant pavilions, golden halls, and magnificent glazed tiles.
Apart from the discarded clothes and armor, nothing remained.
And yet Zhou You could sense their presence. They were in the palace, in the water, in the food. They even slipped through every pore of his body, burrowing inward and gradually becoming desire itself, before turning him, quite naturally, into an "object"...
"What the hell!"
Zhou You shuddered and swept out a cloud of Baleful Mist, finally shutting out that skin-crawling sensation.
There had actually been two invisible sinister objects in the Blood Rain Record: the sect's "guardian spirit beast" and the last remnant of the Wood Lord. But the former merely concealed itself, while the latter had dissolved into the word "silence" itself. Both still revealed their true forms when hunting.
This thing, though...
As Jing'en had said, it was a thought, a concept. He could neither see nor touch it, but it was undeniably here!
Damn it, the Black Book said the difficulty would increase, but it never said it would get this ridiculous. How long had I even been back? How had I already run into something this far beyond the rules?
*In any other scenario, this would be