The gray fog grew thicker and thicker, pressing the shrubs on both sides so low they could not raise their heads.
The stench of blood in the air was so thick it seemed ready to congeal, and even the fabric of their Jujutsu High uniforms had absorbed a faint layer of dampness.
Lu Ping and Kamo Chitsubaki stepped through the mud, drawing closer and closer to the flesh-and-blood Great Serpent at the village entrance, pieced together from dozens of corpses.
The corpses' pale skin and frozen expressions took on an unreal texture under the dim firelight.
"Hey, there's hell ahead."
A weak woman's voice suddenly came from the ground without warning.
The voice was faint and strained by ragged breathing, like a thread of spider silk lingering in the wind, ready to snap at any moment.
Kamo Chitsubaki's body instantly tensed.
Her right hand curled loosely, and the beads of blood at her fingertips had already begun to twitch uneasily.
Lu Ping turned his head, his gaze falling on a puddle at the edge of the corpse pile.
A middle-aged woman lay there.
Despite the blood on her face and her mutilated limbs, her originally dignified and beautiful features could still be seen.
Her long black hair was scattered in the bloody water, while filthy blood and broken strands covered most of her forehead.
She leaned against a charred wooden stake, her face as white as paper. Every breath sent a great deal of dark red foam spilling from the corners of her mouth.
"You two... hurry and leave. It's dangerous here."
The woman struggled to raise her eyelids. Her somewhat cloudy eyes looked at Lu Ping's uniform as she spoke in broken intervals.
As she spoke, she began coughing violently. Great clots of blood flowed down her chin to her collarbone, and her life force was rapidly draining away at a visible rate.
Kamo Chitsubaki did not approach immediately.
She remained where she was, her sharp gaze sweeping like a blade through the surrounding ruined walls, broken fences, and gaps in the rubble. Yet she sensed no trace of a cursed spirit or curse user.
Temporarily safe.
Only after confirming that did Kamo Chitsubaki step forward and crouch beside the woman.
She extended two slender fingers and placed them against the other woman's neck, where the carotid artery was already cold as ice.
"Hold on."
Kamo Chitsubaki gritted her teeth and suddenly flipped her right palm.
The crimson blood at her fingertips instantly transformed into fine strands, densely covering the enormous wound in the woman's abdomen, deep enough to expose bone.
Using Blood Manipulation to apply a pressure bandage.
The blood belonging to Chitsubaki began to coagulate wildly the instant it touched the wound, forming a hard dark-red scab at incredible speed as it tried to force the spilling organs and blood back into her body.
However, less than a minute later, Kamo Chitsubaki's brows knitted together.
She could no longer feel the woman's heartbeat.
A faint red glow flickered at her fingertips.
Through the blood left inside the woman's body, Kamo Chitsubaki could clearly sense that her heart had completely stopped beating, and every blood vessel in her body had fallen into absolute stillness.
"Damn it... her internal organs are shattered."
Kamo Chitsubaki withdrew her hand, her expression turning grim.
She rose to her feet and looked at the woman, whose eyes had closed and whose life had completely faded away. Her voice was low.
"She can't be saved. Even if Ieiri Shoko were here, she couldn't pull someone with a shattered heart back from death's door. Besides, the conditions here are too poor."
Lu Ping had remained silently standing two meters away.
When he had first approached the woman, he sensed a faint, somewhat mixed trace of cursed energy lingering within her body.
However, in the extreme despair of Snakebone Village, where the entire village had been massacred, it was reasonable for ordinary people to produce brief fluctuations of cursed energy from fear and pain.
What made him feel a little strange was how clean the woman's emotions were in the face of death.
There was none of the mad screaming of ordinary villagers before death, no venomous resentment, and no hysterical desperation to survive.
There was only the calm that came from accepting death.
Lu Ping looked at the corpse on the ground and lightly flicked the bow with the fingers of his right hand, producing a low, muffled hum. He said nothing more.
Kamo Chitsubaki shook off the blood scabs clinging to her fingertips.
She turned toward Lu Ping in his pitch-black uniform, an unprecedented seriousness appearing on her heroic features.
"Lu Ping, listen carefully."
Kamo Chitsubaki looked at Lu Ping and said earnestly,
"Judging from the current situation, the danger level of this mission would absolutely rank among the top three of every battle I've experienced since becoming a sorcerer."
The distant forest rustled in the wind like ocean waves, as if countless figures were whispering among themselves.
"Once we enter the village and start fighting, I may not have the time to look after you at all. Your talent is indeed outstanding, but talent doesn't equal immediate combat strength. If you're afraid now, honestly retreat beyond the Curtain I set up, return to Jujutsu High, and bring reinforcements. No one will laugh at you. As long as you stay alive, you'll eventually become a sorcerer capable of handling curses of this level alone."
Chitsubaki's voice carried a chill in the wind.
She remembered an assignment from when she had still been a Grade 2 Sorcerer.
At the time, their captain had been high-spirited, but had died because he underestimated the battlefield's strange dangers. In the end, she was the only survivor, unable to bring back even a single intact corpse.
Since then, Kamo Chitsubaki had grown used to taking on missions alone.
This deliberate warning was less about advising Lu Ping than about calming the shadows surging in the depths of her own heart.
Lu Ping's expression did not change in the slightest. He had been watching the surrounding environment all along.
Now, he was the first to notice something amiss and spoke up.
Facing the drifting gray fog, he slowly raised his right arm. The Piercing Ox Horn Bow carved a cold black arc through the air.
"Senior Kamo, instead of worrying about the future, why not look at what's in front of us?"
The boy's voice remained calm, carrying a steady composure that put people at ease.
Before his words had even faded,
A dense rustling abruptly merged into a single wave from the village ruins ahead.
Boom!
A half-collapsed wooden house was suddenly smashed apart from within by brute force, sending countless charred splinters flying in every direction.
Immediately after, a bizarre shadow like a black tide came flooding madly out from inside the village.
There were so many low-grade cursed spirits that they made one's scalp go numb.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Grade 4 Cursed Spirits, Fly Heads, with compound eyes, crowded together in the air and emitted piercing buzzes. The muddy ground was covered in densely packed Grade 3 Cursed Spirits, Crawlers, with human faces and a reeking stench.
Like lunatics, they charged toward the village entrance without any order. Some that ran too slowly were even trampled into pulp by their own kind behind them.
And amid that black tide were three enormous Grade 2 cursed spirits with countless deformed limbs.
These curses were not targeting Lu Ping and Chitsubaki at all.
Their ugly faces were filled with pure terror. Their frantic flight looked as though they were desperately fleeing some horrifying existence awakening in the deepest part of the village, something that was about to devour them all.
"Tch, disgusting!"
Kamo Chitsubaki reacted the instant Lu Ping warned her.
She drove her legs forward and took three huge strides, her hands rapidly forming seals before her chest.
Blood Manipulation · Crimson Blood Shield.
Blood burst from her body alongside an eruption of cursed energy, forming a crimson shield one meter ahead of her from countless rapidly spinning strands of blood.
The Fly Heads charging at the front were instantly sliced into black fragments that scattered through the air the moment they touched the blood-red shield.
Bang, bang, bang!
The tide of cursed spirits slammed violently into the blood shield, producing muffled sounds of tearing flesh.
Behind Kamo Chitsubaki's heavy black combat boots, Lu Ping had already drawn the Piercing Ox Horn Bow to a full moon.
A dazzling gleam erupted from his previously calm eyes.
The Three Corpses inside him let out piercing shrieks as the surrounding resentment surged. Torrents of cursed energy poured without restraint into the crude arrow.
He did not aim at the monsters before him.
The boy's arm lifted slightly, the black arrowhead pointing straight into the sky as he released the string.
Thrum!
The dull vibration of the bowstring was like a heavy hammer striking everyone in the chest.
The arrow, formed purely from condensed cursed energy, exploded the instant after it disappeared into the thick fog overhead.
An incomparably violent shockwave swept out madly from behind the crimson shield like an inverted ripple, carrying overwhelming force.
Rumble—
Wherever the shockwave passed, the densely packed low-grade Fly Heads and Crawlers did not even have time to scream before they were blasted apart by the terrifying air vibrations, reduced to fragments of cursed residue filling the sky.
Amid the chaotic mass of shattered flesh, Lu Ping's right hand became an afterimage once more.
One arrow, two arrows, three arrows.
Three sharp whistles tearing through the air rang out almost at the same time.
Pfft! Pfft! Pfft!
The three massive Grade 2 cursed spirits that had tried to flee around the side under the cover of their own kind did not even have time to swing their sharp limbs before their grotesque heads were simultaneously pierced head-on by arrows carrying violent cursed energy.
Their heavy bodies crashed into the mud and dissolved into wisps of black smoke.
In less than two minutes, the cursed spirit tide that would have driven an ordinary Grade 2 Sorcerer to despair had been completely wiped out through the pair's seamless coordination of offense and defense.
The concentration of cursed residue in the air reached a critical point at that moment, even condensing into threadlike gray mist in midair and continuously gathering toward the center of the village.
This was not a good sign.
It was the prelude to something larger and older being born amid these ruins, using this residue as nourishment.
"Go."
Lu Ping put away his bow. Without sparing the mess on the ground a glance, he strode over the fence stained red with blood and took the lead into the thick fog at the village entrance, his black figure instantly swallowed by it.
Kamo Chitsubaki turned the remaining blood shield ahead back into blood and drew it into her body, then glanced at the figure before her.
Maybe I can try trusting this boy just once?
She did not hesitate and silently hurried after him.
Their footsteps soon vanished into the thick fog and firelight deep within the village.
At the village entrance.
The middle-aged woman who had been leaning against the charred wooden stake, whom Kamo Chitsubaki had declared dead.
Her tightly shut eyelids suddenly twitched faintly.
Then, the corners of her mouth curled upward in an extremely eerie smile on that paper-white face.
Stitch marks flickered in and out beneath the blood on her forehead.
"Hit the jackpot."
Before you continue