Curse!

The boundless, eerie blood-red light enveloped not only Feng Buzhi's body, but Wang Chen's corpse as well.

As if an illusion had appeared, the cold, broken brick walls before Feng Buzhi's eyes became walls of dark-red flesh.

Those walls seemed alive, faintly radiating warmth as blood flowed continuously within them.

Ordinarily, normal people would see only a chaotic blood-red image. But Feng Buzhi had reached the Subtle Realm and could interpret the eerie to some extent.

In his eyes, the Eerie Whisper had formed this lifelike scene.

Countless savage, eerie arms rose from the ground, constantly tearing at Wang Chen's corpse.

Suddenly, Wang Chen seemed to come back to life.

More precisely, Wang Chen had transformed into something eerie and come back to life.

Dozens of arms tore at Wang Chen's face, making him reveal an eerie, wicked smile.

"I won't let you go! I absolutely won't let you go!"

Wang Chen's words became bone-chilling Eerie Whispers that surged into Feng Buzhi's mind.

Feng Buzhi's expression remained unchanged as he stared directly into Wang Chen's eyes.

At that moment, Wang Chen also realized that Feng Buzhi seemed able to see him.

Under Feng Buzhi's cold gaze, Wang Chen even felt a strange emotion—fear.

He did not know why, but even after becoming something eerie, he still felt fear.

How was that possible?

Wang Chen grew furious, wanting to release the boundless rage within him.

Unfortunately, he no longer had the chance.

Countless flesh-and-blood arms seized his body and dragged him downward.

At some unknown moment, a deep, pitch-black passage had appeared in the ground, carrying a faint, dim blood-red glow within it.

Dragged by countless arms, Wang Chen fell into it.

Wang Chen struggled desperately to break free from those arms, but he could not do so at all. He could only let out hoarse, heart-rending cries.

Suddenly, Wang Chen's cries stopped as he fell. The next moment, he burst into crazed, wicked laughter.

Before Feng Buzhi's eyes, Wang Chen's appearance changed. Demon horns grew from his head, and terrifying scales spread across his body...

Faintly, Wang Chen's curses and threats drifted up from the passage below.

In the end, the eerie, unfathomable passage closed, and the ground returned to its appearance as a floor of flesh.

Feng Buzhi also understood what that passage had represented—the Abyss.

Feng Buzhi withdrew his gaze, and two drops of cold sweat involuntarily trickled down his forehead.

Those two drops of cold sweat were not because Wang Chen had turned into a demon and threatened him with curses of vengeance.

Rather, while he had stared into the Abyss just now, his will had wavered, and he had felt an urge to leap into it.

The scene changed once more.

At some unknown point, the arms on the flesh-covered ground had vanished. Instead, countless eyes and mouths had appeared on the walls.

All those eyes stared at him, filled with fury, hostility, contempt, disgust...

Before long, those mouths began to speak.

"You are guilty!"

"Slaughtering your own kind is an unforgivable crime!"

"You betrayed the Human Race!"

"Die!"

"Guilty!"

"Traitor of the Human Race!"

"Unforgivable!"

As the mouths spoke, Feng Buzhi raised a hand and wiped the cold sweat from his forehead. He was still immersed in the terror of having stared into the Abyss.

Compared to that, the stares of these eyes and the words of those mouths were nothing.

Under the gazes of those countless eyes, Feng Buzhi calmly said, "I am not guilty."

With Feng Buzhi's words, every mouth around him fell silent at once, while the eyes watching him shifted away one after another and no longer looked at him.

Countless eyes closed in succession and vanished into the flesh walls, while the mouths that had appeared alongside them gathered together, forming an incomparably enormous mouth.

"Perhaps you are not guilty, but you killed your own kind. You must atone!"

The enormous mouth spoke.

After that, the enormous mouth and the surrounding flesh walls collapsed and dispersed, and all the surrounding illusions vanished.

Only Feng Buzhi's body remained wreathed in a faint blood-red halo, which soon merged into him.

He had to sacrifice the heads of one hundred Monsters at the town's central square before the blood-red halo on him would disappear. That was the content of his atonement.

As the blood-red halo merged into his body, a somewhat noisy whispering arose in his mind, but it did not affect him much.

Feng Buzhi stepped forward and pulled the silver axe embedded in Wang Chen's corpse free.

The instant he removed the axe, Wang Chen's corpse immediately turned into a pool of foul-smelling rotten flesh and scattered across the ground.

After briefly examining Wang Chen's decayed corpse, Feng Buzhi said softly, "It seems Wang Chen truly turned into some kind of eerie Monster after his death."

The shadow in the distance seemed stunned and did not move at all. Only when Feng Buzhi headed toward the door to return did it seem to snap back to its senses and drift before him.

The shadow said, "It looks like you have already been cursed, and have temporarily endured it.

"Your spiritual realm has reached the late stage of Subtle, so that is not difficult.

"But this is only the first step. The curse on you will drive the Monsters in the mist even more frenzied. The Monsters in the mist during the day will become like those at night, while the Monsters at night will become even stronger.

"Furthermore, Monsters wielding eerie powers may appear in the mist and attack you.

"If you wish to escape this curse, you must..."

Halfway through speaking, the shadow suddenly clutched its head again.

Its memories contained much about the curse, yet the most crucial part alone was missing—it had forgotten how to lift the curse.

Seeing this, Feng Buzhi said, "I must sacrifice the heads of one hundred Monsters at the Town Crystal to atone. I am not guilty, but I did kill a member of the Human Race, so I must atone."

The shadow said in surprise, "How did you know how to lift the curse? I don't think I told you."

Feng Buzhi said, "They told me."

The shadow asked doubtfully, "They? Who are they?"

The shadow looked utterly confused. It seemed those earlier illusions had been visible only to Feng Buzhi.

Recalling the eyes and mouths that had appeared on the flesh walls, Feng Buzhi said, "They should be the humans who guarded this town with you. You once seemed to mention that something happened to this town and it was abandoned. Can you tell me how this town came to be abandoned?"

The shadow shook its head somewhat blankly, then quickly told him what it knew.

There were no changes of seasons in this town. Outside the town, it was forever autumn. The withered trees seemed to have leaves that never finished falling. Before Feng Buzhi's group of humans arrived, nearly every day here had been the same, so the shadow did not know how much time had passed.

But there was one thing the shadow could be certain of: before this town had been abandoned, it had once operated continuously.

It seemed to follow a yearly cycle, generating a group of humans every year.

The shadow had once thought this ruined town was completely broken, but a few days ago, it had suddenly begun operating again...