Preliminary Exploration of Snakebone Village

The thick gray fog grew denser, pressing down on the bushes on both sides until they seemed to bow their heads.

The stench of blood in the air was so viscous it felt as if it were about to clot, and a faint dampness even clung to the fabric of the Jujutsu High uniforms.

Lu Ping and Kamo Chitsubaki stepped through the muddy water, drawing closer step by step to the flesh-and-blood great serpent at the village entrance, which was pieced together from dozens of corpses.

The pale skin of the bodies and their frozen expressions took on an unreal texture beneath the dim firelight.

"Hey, the path ahead is hell."

A weak woman's voice came without warning from the ground.

The voice was very soft, accompanied by heavy gasping, like the final thread of a spiderweb lingering in the wind, ready to snap at any moment.

Kamo Chitsubaki's form instantly tightened.

She half-closed her right hand, and the beads of blood at her fingertips were already beginning to pulse uneasily.

Lu Ping turned his head slightly, his gaze falling beside a puddle at the edge of the corpse pile.

A middle-aged woman lay there.

Even with bloodstains on her face and missing limbs, one could still tell that her original features had been dignified and delicate.

A mop of long black hair was splayed out in the bloody water, and filth and stray locks obscured most of her forehead.

She was leaning against a charred wooden stake, her complexion as white as a sheet of paper, and with every breath, a large amount of dark red foam spilled from the corners of her mouth.

"You two... hurry up and leave, it's dangerous here."

The woman struggled to lift her eyelids, her somewhat turbid eyes looking at the uniform Lu Ping wore as she spoke intermittently.

As she spoke, she coughed violently, and large clumps of bloodstains flowed down her chin to her collarbone, her vitality fading away at a speed visible to the naked eye.

Kamo Chitsubaki did not immediately go over.

She stood in place, her sharp gaze sweeping like a knife blade across the surrounding broken walls, damaged fences, and gaps in the ruins, yet she sensed no aura belonging to curses or curse users.

Temporarily safe.

Having confirmed this, Kamo Chitsubaki took a step forward, half-squatting beside the woman.

She extended two slender fingers, resting them on the other woman's carotid artery, which was already as cold as ice.

"Hang in there."

Kamo Chitsubaki gritted her teeth, the palm of her right hand turning over abruptly.

The bright red blood at her fingertips instantly transformed into slender threads of blood, densely covering the massive, bone-deep wound on the woman's abdomen.

She used Crimson Blood Manipulation to apply pressure and bandage the wound.

The blood belonging to Chitsubaki began to solidify frantically the moment it touched the wound, forming a hard, dark red scab at an extremely rapid speed in an attempt to forcefully block the unceasingly gushing viscera and blood back inside the body.

Yet, after barely a minute had passed, Kamo Chitsubaki's brow furrowed tightly.

She could no longer feel the other person's heartbeat.

A faint red glow flickered at her fingertips.

Through the blood left inside the other person's body, Kamo Chitsubaki could clearly sense that the woman's heart had completely stopped beating, and the blood vessels throughout her body had plunged into absolute stillness at that moment.

"Damn it... the internal organs are shattered."

Kamo Chitsubaki withdrew her hand, her expression rather ugly.

She stood up, looking at the woman who had already closed her eyes and completely lost her vitality, her voice somewhat low:

"There's no saving her. Even if Ieiri Shoko were present, it would be impossible to pull someone whose heart has already shattered back from the brink of death. Not to mention the conditions here are far too poor."

Lu Ping had been standing quietly two meters away.

When he first approached the woman, he had sensed a wisp of somewhat chaotic, impure cursed energy lingering within her.

However, in the extreme despair of Snakebone Village where the entire village had been massacred, ordinary people generating brief fluctuations of cursed energy due to fear and pain was a reasonable phenomenon.

What made him feel a trace of oddity was that the woman's emotions in the face of death were far too clean.

There were none of the frantic screams, malice, or hysteria about surviving that ordinary villagers displayed before death.

There was only a kind of calm that came from looking past death.

Lu Ping looked at the corpse on the ground, tapping his right-hand fingertips lightly against the bow body, producing a muffled low chime, yet he did not say much else.

Kamo Chitsubaki shook off the residual blood scabs from her fingertips.

She turned around, looking at Lu Ping in his pitch-black uniform, a rare, unprecedented seriousness surfacing on her spirited face.

"Lu Ping, listen up."

Kamo Chitsubaki looked at Lu Ping, speaking earnestly:

"Judging by the current situation, the danger level of this mission can definitely rank in the top three among all battles I've experienced since becoming a sorcerer."

The distant mountain forest rustled in the wind like ocean waves, as if countless figures were whispering in secret.

"Once we enter the village later and a fight breaks out, I might not be able to spare a hand to look after you at all. Your talent is indeed very good, but talent does not equal current, immediate combat power. If you're feeling scared right now, honestly retreat outside the Curtain I set up, head back to Jujutsu High to fetch reinforcements, and no one will laugh at you. As long as you stay alive, sooner or later in the future you will grow into a sorcerer capable of resolving this level of curse alone."

Chitsubaki's voice grew somewhat chilly in the wind.

She recalled a field mission from back when she was a Grade 2 Sorcerer.

The team leader at the time had been full of high-spirited vigor, yet had sacrificed his life due to underestimating the bizarre nature of the battlefield, ultimately leaving only her to survive, unable to even bring back a complete corpse.

Ever since then, Kamo Chitsubaki had grown accustomed to bearing missions alone.

This deliberate reminder, rather than advising Lu Ping, was more akin to pacifying the churning shadows deep within her own heart.

Lu Ping's expression held no ripples whatsoever; he had been continuously monitoring the surrounding environment.

At this moment, he was the first to spot the anomaly and spoke up to warn her.

Facing the drifting gray fog, he slowly raised his right arm, and the Piercing Ox Horn Bow swept a cold black arc through the air.

"Senior Kamo, instead of worrying about the future, you'd better look at the present."

The youth's voice remained calm, even carrying a reassuring steadiness.

Before his voice had faded.

In the village ruins ahead, a dense, rustling sound suddenly merged into one.

Boom!

A half-collapsed wooden house was abruptly shattered from the inside by brute force, countless charred wood chips scattering in all directions.

Immediately following, a bizarre shadow resembling a black tide surged frantically from deep within the village.

They were low-level curses in numbers that made the scalp tingle.

Hundreds and thousands of Grade 4 curses, Fly Heads, which possessed compound eyes, crammed together in midair, emitting a harsh buzzing sound; on the muddy ground, dense swarms of Grade 3 crawlers emitting a foul stench and bearing human faces crawled everywhere.

They rushed toward the village entrance crazily and without formation, some of the slower ones even being trampled straight into minced meat by the same kind behind them.

And in the center of this black tide, there were also mixed in three massive Grade 2 large curses possessing countless deformed arthropods.

These curses were not targeting Lu Ping and Chitsubaki at all.

Their ugly faces were plastered with pure fear at this moment, and their panicked, fleeing expressions were just like things desperately escaping from some terrifying existence awakening deep within the village—an entity about to swallow them all whole.

"Tch, truly disgusting!"

Kamo Chitsubaki reacted the instant Lu Ping issued his warning.

Her legs exerted explosive force, and her whole body leaped forward three large steps, her hands forming seals rapidly in front of her chest.

Crimson Blood Manipulation: Crimson Blood Shield.

The blood within her body surged forth with the eruption of cursed energy, transforming in the empty space one meter ahead into a crimson shield composed of countless high-speed rotating blood threads.

The Fly Heads charging at the very forefront were instantly sliced into scattering pitch-black debris across the sky the moment they touched the blood-colored shield.

Bang, bang, bang!

The curse tide smashed heavily against the blood shield, producing muffled sounds of tearing flesh.

And behind Kamo Chitsubaki's thick, black combat boots, Lu Ping had already drawn the Piercing Ox Horn Bow into a full moon.

Within his ordinarily flat gaze, a brilliant, piercing radiance erupted at this moment.

The Three Corpses inside his body emitted sharp screeches due to the surge of surrounding resentment, and surging cursed energy poured unreservedly into the crude arrow.

He did not aim at the monsters before him.

The youth's arm lifted slightly, the pitch-black arrowhead pointing straight into the high sky. Release.

Boom!

The muffled vibration of the bowstring struck like a heavy hammer against everyone's hearts.

The arrow, condensed purely from cursed energy, burst apart the very next moment it plunged into the thick fog above.

An intensely violent shockwave, like an inverted ripple, swept out frantically from behind the crimson blood shield with overwhelming momentum.

Rumble—

Wherever the shockwave passed, those dense low-level Fly Heads and crawlers didn't even have time to utter a scream before being directly and forcibly shaken into scattered remnants of cursed energy filling the sky by the terrifying atmospheric vibration.

And amidst this chaotic minced flesh, Lu Ping's right hand once more transformed into a blur.

One arrow, two arrows, three arrows.

Three sharp sounds of breaking air rang out almost simultaneously.

Thud! Thud! Thud!

Those three Grade 2 large curses that had attempted to skirt around the flanks under the cover of their own kind to escape didn't even manage to brandish their sharp arthropods before their menacing heads were pierced straight through simultaneously by arrows carrying violent cursed energy.

Their heavy bodies crashed into the mire, transforming into wisps of black smoke that dissipated.

In barely two minutes, this wave of curses—enough to drive ordinary Grade 2 sorcerers to despair—was ruthlessly and completely wiped out through the seamless cooperation of their offense and defense.

The concentration of residual energy in the air reached a critical point at this moment, even condensing into thread-like gray mist in midair, which began to continuously converge toward the center of the village.

This was no good sign.

It was the prelude to something vaster and more ancient about to be born within this ruin by utilizing these nutrients as nourishment.

"Let's go."

Lu Ping put away his longbow, not sparing the debris-littered ground a single glance, and strode forward, taking the lead to cross the blood-stained fence as his black figure instantly plunged into the thick fog at the village entrance.

Kamo Chitsubaki turned the residual blood shield ahead back into liquid to absorb it back into her body, glancing at the figure in front of her.

Perhaps she could try trusting this youth before her for once?

Without hesitation, she silently quickened her pace to follow.

The sound of their footsteps quickly vanished into the thick fog and firelight deep within the village.

At the village entrance.

That middle-aged woman who had originally leaned against the charred wooden stake and whom Kamo Chitsubaki had judged to be dead.

Her tightly closed eyelids suddenly twitched slightly.

Following that, on her paper-white face, the corners of her mouth suddenly curved upward in an extremely eerie fashion.

Stitches were faintly visible beneath the bloodstains on her forehead.

"Jackpot."