Zhou Xuan withdrew his gaze and stopped looking at the Metal-colored Divine Statue overhead.
"Where's the monster?"
"It escaped."
Yang Zhen caught his breath, but he still had not recovered from the earlier tension.
"That thing rampaged through the residential district for almost fifteen minutes. After injuring a dozen or so people, its whole body collapsed downward, like water seeping into a crack in the ground, and it slipped underground through a fissure."
Zhou Xuan descended the last stretch of the Gangway, his boot soles landing on frozen earth.
"Did you pursue it?"
"We did."
Yang Zhen wiped the melted snow off his face.
"Four Golden Core disciples and I plowed through everything within three li of North City with our Divine Sense. We turned over three feet of soil and found nothing. Not even the slightest lingering trace of its aura. It was so clean, it was as though it had never appeared."
Second Brother crouched at the top of the Gangway, his hind legs dangling in the air. His dragon tail drooped down and swayed twice.
"Right, what about the Mortals it scratched? Did any demonic qi seep into their wounds?"
Yang Zhen shook his head.
"That's the strangest part. I examined every Mortal that thing scratched. Their wounds were just ordinary flesh wounds, with no demonic qi corrosion and no signs of erosion or assimilation. Applying Spirit Medicine stopped the bleeding. It was no different from being clawed by a wild beast."
Zhou Xuan stopped in his tracks.
It wasn't a demonic beast.
At least, it wasn't any kind of demonic beast they had encountered before.
The Skeleton Demonic Beasts of the Northern Lands, the demonic blood parasites, even those hate-filled aberrations spawned by the Extreme Bone Sect...
*Anything connected to demonic qi reacted to contact with