As the distance closed to less than twenty zhang, four connected thatched huts came clearly into view.
Liu Feng's gaze passed over the Green-Clad Elder and looked inside the hut behind him, its door hanging open.
Among the everyday household items, a goat's head caught his attention.
The goat's head sat on the table, with an incense burner beside it, as if someone were making offerings to the head.
"The vine's snapped, the Green Vine's snapped... Second Master, Third Master, they're all gone." Behind Liu Feng, the Bald Bandit suddenly cried out in alarm.
"Hm?"
Liu Feng tore his gaze from the goat's head and realized with a start that Zhu Li and Shen Yushu should have been standing right in front of him.
But now, neither of them was anywhere in sight. What's more, most of the other bandits had vanished too.
"One, two, three!" Liu Feng turned around. Only three bandits remained behind him, including the Bald Bandit.
He looked at the Green Vine linking them together. At some point, it had quietly snapped. He couldn't tell whether someone else had tampered with it or one of their own had cut it.
The Bald Bandit and the other two exchanged glances. They saw the same fear in one another's eyes and hurried to crowd around Liu Feng.
"Fourth Master, how about we find a way down the mountain first?" The Bald Bandit's teeth chattered as he spoke.
They were all bandits who had licked blood from their blades, with plenty of lives on their hands. None of them feared death, but they feared this nameless terror.
"Outsiders, now that you're here, don't go back. Come over and eat some meat." The Green-Clad Elder smiled from halfway up the mountain.
Liu Feng ignored the Bald Bandit. His eyes flickered as thought after thought raced through his mind.
The next moment, all his Compound Eyes opened, and he became Twenty-Two Eyes.
With his field of vision expanded, he took in everything in every direction, centered on himself.
But no matter how hard he searched, he couldn't find Shen Yushu or Zhu Li.
"Hearing, sight, touch—all normal. Then what's abnormal... is our minds." Liu Feng suddenly understood.
It wasn't an illusion, nor was it the kind of mind-bewitching formation described in rumors. Most likely, some Evil Object had scrambled their minds.
Perhaps, at this very moment, Zhu Li and Shen Yushu were searching for him on this mountain just as he was searching for them, yet they simply couldn't see one another.
The worst possibility in Liu Feng's mind was now all but confirmed.
Eldest Senior Brother Pang Gang was on the verge of his second Metamorphic Rebirth. He might have had doubts about Insect Valley, or perhaps he already knew about its restriction.
To prevent anything from going wrong with his second Metamorphic Rebirth, and to keep himself from falling into Lu Huai's hands, Eldest Senior Brother had chosen an extreme path: he had tainted himself with an Evil Object, forcing the White Sun Sect to fight him for it.
"Fourth Master, Fourth Master, make up your mind!"
"Damn it, let's go up there and chop that old bastard down."
"Wait, I'll scout ahead."
Liu Feng stopped the bandit who had drawn his blade and was about to charge up the slope. Dense swarms of Gu worms surfaced along his arm.
When thousands of Gu worms hit the ground, they lined up in a row and crawled toward the mountainside.
The three bandits beside him watched as a "worm line" stretched out from Liu Feng's arm and slowly crept uphill.
"The Evil Object has scrambled our minds, but Gu worms have no knowledge or consciousness—only instinct. I refuse to believe they can be possessed too." Liu Feng's heart was heavy as he stared fixedly at the Gu worms advancing from beneath his feet.
More and more Gu worms spread across the ground, lengthening the black line. Liu Feng moved uphill along with it.
"Go, hurry and keep up with Fourth Master." The other three bandits didn't dare linger for even a moment, afraid Liu Feng would vanish if they looked away.
Halfway up the mountain, the Green-Clad Elder stared wide-eyed. Even after Liu Feng and the others came close, the four outsiders still hadn't disappeared.
"Huh, you've got the luck of a dog turd." The Green-Clad Elder stepped back, wary of the Gu worms crawling all over Liu Feng.
Seeing that they had made it to the mountainside, with the old bastard right in front of them, the three bandits' faces turned vicious.
"Old bastard, tell us what kind of Evil Specter has gotten into Shao Mountain!" The Bald Bandit stepped forward and pressed his steel saber against the Green-Clad Elder's neck.
"What Evil Specter? Some True Persons from the Daoist sect came to ferry us into immortality. Look in the pot. My son has shed his mortal skin and become an immortal."
"The pot?"
All four of them, Liu Feng included, turned to look at the kitchen the Green-Clad Elder had pointed to. A blazing fire burned in the stove, and the pot held a whole mess of skinned meat.
"You son of a bitch, you stewed your own son!" The Bald Bandit swore furiously.
Even the other two bandits, brutal as they were, had never seen anything so horrifying. Their steel sabers trembled in their hands.
Just then, they heard a woman sobbing nearby.
The Bald Bandit went to the hut and kicked the door open. Inside, a young woman in torn clothes was weeping.
That was all four of them needed to know. The old bastard hadn't just stewed his own son—he'd also violated his daughter-in-law.
Liu Feng told the three bandits to keep an eye on the Green-Clad Elder, then strode into the main room and fixed his gaze on the goat's head set out as an offering on the table.
With his Twenty-Two Eyes, nothing about the goat's head escaped his notice.
He stepped to its side and saw a small hole in the back of its skull. A talisman, pale and gleaming with grease, had been stuffed inside.
"A Human Skin Talisman! The White Sun Sect really did this."
"You, come over here and split open this goat's head." Liu Feng didn't dare do it himself, so he beckoned the Bald Bandit over.
The Green-Clad Elder panicked at once and suddenly shouted at the sky, "True Person, True Person, hurry and cast your spell to kill them all!"
"You lunatic, what True Person? Even if one showed up, Fourth Master would kill him." Outside, the two bandits looked up. There wasn't even a bird feather in the sky.
Each of them slammed a sword hilt into one of the Green-Clad Elder's cheeks, knocking out two of his teeth on the spot.
They did it partly to bolster their courage and partly to scare off any "True Person" who might really be hiding nearby.
In their hearts, they were terrified to the point of despair. The old man before them had gone stark raving mad, and they feared they might end up the same way.
Inside, the Bald Bandit split the back of the goat's skull with one stroke. The Human Skin Talisman fell to the floor.
Liu Feng looked closely and saw that, besides the runes, the Human Skin Talisman also bore a patch of filthy blood.
As he leaned in for a better look, the vertical eye on the back of his head blinked. The Bald Bandit suddenly went berserk and swung his blade at Liu Feng's neck.
Poison Qi stirred inside Liu Feng, setting off the Gu worms he had planted in the Bald Bandit's body.
Before the blade could come down, the Bald Bandit collapsed. His face turned black as he beat his own chest frantically with both hands.
Yet even as the Gu poison took effect, he continued glaring at Liu Feng with murderous intent.
At the same time, hatred welled up in Liu Feng's heart for no reason, urging him to finish off the Bald Bandit where he lay.
"The tainted blood on the talisman probably came from the Evil Object itself." Liu Feng shook his head, quickly suppressing the wicked thought.
He picked up the steel saber from the ground, used it to lift the Human Skin Talisman, and carried it into the kitchen, tossing it into the blazing stove.
Grease bubbled and spat on the Human Skin Talisman. The flames caught it, and the patch of tainted blood slowly vanished with it.
"True Person, True Person, hurry and cast your spell!" Outside, the Green-Clad Elder howled again.
Cursing, the two bandits with steel sabers instinctively looked up at the sky again.
When they had looked before, the sky had been empty, and they'd assumed the Green-Clad Elder was raving.
But when they looked up now, someone had appeared overhead without a sound!
The figure floated in midair like a kite. Its face, limbs, and even its chest rippled in the breeze. It was unmistakably a sheet of human skin.
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