Dead Soul Beasts Are Good Soul Beasts

"Then what happened?"

Jiang Ming's voice remained calm, but his gaze sharpened slightly.

"Then it couldn't be stopped."

"The third, the fourth, the fifth... Sometimes one person would vanish every ten days or half a month. Sometimes people disappeared for several days in a row."

"More than a dozen people have gone missing altogether—some were gathering herbs in the mountains, some chopping firewood, some hunting."

"There was even a half-grown girl. She only stayed playing at the village entrance a little too late, and when she headed home after dark, no one ever saw her again."

The village chief's voice began to tremble.

The surrounding villagers sighed one after another, their expressions caught somewhere between fear and numbness.

"I've lived seventy years and never seen anything like this... I don't know what's on this mountain, but that thing can't be human."

An old hunter leaning on a cane spoke with a tremble.

Jiang Ming fell silent for a moment.

Soul Beasts were Soul Beasts!

Beasts were beasts!

Beasts ate people!

There was no such thing as whether they looked human or not!

If one truly wanted to tell whether something was human or beast,

one had to look at its actions!

Judge deeds, not intentions!

Even if it wore a beast's form, if it stepped forward when humans faced danger, then it was human!

If it looked human but consorted with Soul Beasts and betrayed its own race, then it had committed the grave crime of betraying its people!

Kill without mercy!

"Which direction had the most disappearances?"

Jiang Ming continued asking.

"Ox Horn Gully."

Several elders exchanged glances and pointed east as they spoke over one another.

"Head east. The most people vanished around Ox Horn Gully."

"I counted. Of the dozen or so people, at least half disappeared over there."

"Just last month, Hunter Wang's apprentice Erzhuang vanished there too."

"That lad was strong as an ox. Usually, even three or five men couldn't get close to him, but he just disappeared without a trace. No one even heard a sound."

An old man missing his front teeth said.

"Young man, let this old fellow give you one more word of warning—no birds have been singing in Ox Horn Gully lately.

"You mustn't go there. That isn't a place for people."

The old hunter leaning on his cane suddenly lowered his voice.

"The mountain god must be angry!"

"I reckon Ox Horn Village must have done something wicked and suffered retribution."

"Same here!"

The surrounding villagers all chimed in, the fear on their faces entirely genuine.

"People vanish into thin air halfway down the road, and even their footprints abruptly stop."

"Where did they stop? On hard ground or soft mud?"

Rather than responding to the talk of the mountain god's wrath, Jiang Ming asked a question that left everyone stunned.

"I think it was soft mud!"

The village chief answered hesitantly.

"So that's how it is!"

Jiang Ming's eyes flickered.

"What are you asking all this for?"

"Young man, don't tell me you're thinking of..."

The old man missing his front teeth stared at Jiang Ming suspiciously.

"This may have been done by a Soul Beast."

Jiang Ming's tone was mild.

The moment he said this, the entire crowd fell silent.

To ordinary people who had lived in mountain villages all their lives, the words "Soul Beast" meant the same thing as "monster" or "evil spirit."

They might never have seen a Soul Beast with their own eyes in their entire lives.

But the horrifying tales they had heard from storytellers—of Soul Beasts devouring people and slaughtering villages—were enough to make them too frightened to put out their lamps at night.

"Young man, you absolutely can't go! It's a man-eating Soul Beast!"

"You're still so young. There's no need to throw your life away!"

The village chief's expression changed as he grabbed Jiang Ming's sleeve.

"I'm a Soul Master."

"There are some things that need to be done."

Jiang Ming looked at the withered, skinny hand clutching his cuff, then spoke calmly.

The village chief's hand froze.

Gasps rose from the crowd.

The villagers looked at one another, and the way they looked at Jiang Ming immediately changed.

Their previous worry and skepticism became a complicated mixture of awe and disbelief.

To them, Soul Masters were figures of legend, beings capable of flying through the sky, vanishing into the earth, overturning rivers, and churning seas.

How could one possibly appear in this godforsaken poor mountain gully?

"You... Sir..."

"Are you truly a Soul Master?"

Even the village chief's voice shook, and his form of address changed without him realizing it.

Jiang Ming did not answer. He merely raised his right hand slightly.

A thread of silver-white light flashed across his fingertips and vanished.

Though faint, everyone present saw it clearly.

It was the simplest release of Soul Power, but it was enough to prove everything.

"Heavens..."

The village chief released his sleeve. His lips trembled for a long while before he finally squeezed out those three words.

Jiang Ming nodded slightly to everyone, then turned and headed out of the village.

Behind him came the villagers' overlapping voices.

Some said he might have been sent by Spirit Hall.

Some said they were saved now.

Others prayed quietly, begging the heavens to let this young man return safely.

"Young man... be careful! That place is truly cursed!"

The village chief's aged voice cut through the clamor as he shouted at Jiang Ming's retreating back.

Jiang Ming neither turned around nor answered. He merely raised his right hand and waved behind him.

It was as though he were saying he understood, or perhaps that there was no need to see him off.

Ox Horn Gully was roughly five or six li from the village. For a Soul Master, that distance was no more than a quarter-hour's journey.

The closer he got to Ox Horn Gully, the more wrong the surroundings felt.

At some point, the chirping of birds and insects abruptly vanished, and the forest became so quiet that only his own footsteps and breathing remained.

The wind passing through the treetops sounded especially muffled, while a faint earthy stench hung in the air.

Jiang Ming slowed his pace, spreading his spiritual power outward like a dense spiderweb.

Before long, he found something unusual.

On a patch of soft mud, he found several footprints.

Their shape resembled tracks left by some large canine.

The paw pads were broad and thick, with claw marks at the tips of the toes.

They were more than three times larger than ordinary wolf tracks.

But what truly made Jiang Ming frown was the distance between the prints.

Each footprint lay at least five zhang from the next.

What did five zhang mean?

A giant beast the size of a rhinoceros taking a single stride of five zhang, and on soft mud at that...

Either it had been running at astonishing speed, or its gait was inherently abnormal.

Jiang Ming crouched down and reached out to touch the mud at the edge of the prints.

The mud was fresh. The grains along the edges were still moist, and the collapsed marks were also recent—at most two days old.

He pushed his fingers into the depth of the print, testing the firmness of the soil beneath...

Strangely, the mud directly below the footprint was abnormally loose, as though something had hollowed it out from below. With the slightest press, it sank in.

Underground!

Jiang Ming's pupils contracted slightly.

Instead of spreading his spiritual power so far out, he concentrated it within a radius of three zhang beneath his feet, scanning the underground activity again and again.

Silence.

Too silent.

Then he heard it.

It was an exceptionally faint sound, coming from ten zhang beneath his feet. It sounded like soil being compressed as some enormous creature slowly moved underground.

The sound came and went, sometimes far away, sometimes close.

It seemed to be circling around him, and yet also testing his reaction.