Crimson Shadow Descends

Under the nourishment of the Reverse Cursed Technique, his bones made a teeth-grinding scraping sound and rejoined within two seconds.

Lu Ping slowly straightened, the bruise on his right arm fading at a visible rate.

He stared fixedly at the approaching curse users, a flash of madness flickering deep in his eyes.

At that moment, Shadow Wolf, directly ahead, was under the frenzied assault of four octopus shikigami. Its ink-black body had faded to the extreme, and its massive form was beginning to turn hazy and translucent like mist.

The shikigami and its caster were linked by heart and mind. Lu Ping could clearly feel the depletion and wail of cursed energy within Shadow Wolf.

He knew that to break the deadlock, he had to use unconventional means.

Lu Ping tilted his head slightly, his gaze sweeping over the shrine warehouse in the distance, where flames soared into the sky.

Through the vision provided by the Three Corpses within him, he saw a vast torrent of negative emotions rising there—an accumulation of hundreds of thousands of civilians over half a year, so immense it was impossible to look at directly.

Using the Three Corpses to forcibly devour such mixed and impure external resentment was indeed of limited help to his long-term growth. It could even leave impurities behind, like swallowing the worst fasting pills and prepackaged meals in a cultivation world—utterly lacking in nutrition, perhaps even harmful.

But at a moment like this, it could fill his stomach. It could save his life!

"Since you want to play big, let's see who gets stuffed to death first!"

Lu Ping roared viciously in his heart. He no longer restrained the Three Corpses' frenzied instinct to devour negative emotions, pushing the power of [Three Corpses Manipulation] to its limit in that instant.

In a flash, the Three Corpses within him began operating with a clear division of labor:

The fear of death and towering fury born from his desperate situation were continuously absorbed and transformed by the Blood Corpse hidden deep within his flesh, becoming the source of its transformation.

Meanwhile, the vast resentment outside, unleashed by tens of thousands of paper dolls and surging like a tsunami, was swallowed without restraint by the Azure Corpse—the embodiment of reason and desire—which turned into an invisible, heaven-devouring maw and tore it into his body!

"Boom!!"

The external negative emotions poured in too quickly, too violently. Lu Ping's eyes instantly filled with dense blood vessels, and even blood began to seep faintly from his seven orifices.

Two utterly different torrents of immense power rampaged through his body, on the verge of bursting his meridians apart completely.

At that life-or-death moment, the White Corpse, which had always acted as a lubricant, frantically reconciled the two forces.

Lu Ping sharply noticed that the pure white cursed energy of the Reverse Cursed Technique left on his body by Ieiri Shoko seemed to resonate in some marvelous way.

The White Corpse actually took it in of its own accord!

With the support of that reversed power, the two extreme forces from within and without truly achieved a strange yet perfect balance inside Lu Ping under the White Corpse's mediation.

"Shadow Wolf... transform for me!!"

Lu Ping suddenly brought his hands together, forming an almost twisted wolf-head seal. He poured that massive, nearly tangible mixed energy wildly through the shadows beneath his feet and into the shikigami that was about to collapse.

"Woooo—!!"

The once hazy, translucent Shadow Wolf suddenly let out a painful, piercing howl.

Under Shoko's stunned gaze, cracks began spreading inch by inch from the line of Shadow Wolf's spine across its originally black fur.

Instead of blood, dark crimson cursed energy as violent as magma poured from those dense cracks!

Its body began to expand wildly, shooting up from its original two meters to an astonishing three. The bones of its limbs stretched longer, becoming leaner and packed with explosive strength, while dark red bony spikes jutted outward from every joint, gleaming with a metallic sheen.

Most horrifying of all was its head. The black wolf head writhed violently as a red wolf head bearing six scarlet vertical pupils suddenly tore through the skin from the side of its neck.

It opened its blood-filled jaws, clamped down hard on the original black wolf head, and then devoured it, merging with it!

Then, all six deep crimson vertical pupils opened at once!

Behind it, its original wolf tail split eerily into three. With a light sweep, each tail tip condensed a spinning sphere of dark crimson cursed energy that radiated an aura of annihilation. From afar, they looked like three blood moons floating in the night.

[Shadow Wolf · Blood Corpse Form—Crimson Shadow]

It stood silently before Lu Ping, a faint layer of scorching blood-red mist spreading soundlessly through the five meters around it.

That was its exclusive ability—[Blood Mist]. The moment the low-grade cursed spirits wandering nearby touched the mist, their surfaces began to erode and peel away slowly but forcibly, like melting ice and snow.

"Th-this... what kind of monster is that? Is there something like this in the Ten Shadows? No, this isn't a normal shikigami evolution at all!"

Ieiri Shoko stared blankly at the dark crimson beast standing before her. Though a trace of wariness toward the unknown remained in her eyes, the heart she had been holding in suspense finally settled completely.

As a jujutsu sorcerer, she understood all too well what the words "nonlinear growth" meant.

Lu Ping had clearly crossed some boundary between life and death in that very instant.

During the previous department store mission, when Lu Ping had used Shadow Wolf to instantly kill the semi-Grade 1 cursed spirit's clone, he had obviously held back a great deal of his strength.

Looking at that broad back, an unprecedented expectation rose inexplicably in Shoko's heart.

If... if this guy could keep growing at such a terrifying rate, until he stood shoulder to shoulder with Gojo and Geto, stepping into Grade 1 or even reaching its peak...

Then the casualty rate on the technical college's missions would surely drop drastically, wouldn't it? And maybe... maybe I could sometimes leave that cold autopsy room and go out on missions with them, instead of always being left alone in the rear, watching them walk farther and farther away?

At that moment, the lonely and desolate healer saw, for the first time, a glimmer of hope that she might walk alongside someone else.

"Stop putting on an act! It's just at the end of its rope—tear it apart for me!"

The white-robed curse user leading the group felt his hair stand on end under Crimson Shadow's six cold blood-red eyes. Embarrassed into anger, he roared.

All four weak Grade 2 octopus shikigami howled at once, swinging their barbed tentacles toward Crimson Shadow with ear-piercing whistles.

But Crimson Shadow, having advanced into a semi-Grade 1 form, had already undergone a qualitative transformation in strength.

"Roar!!"

Crimson Shadow let out a long roar, leaving behind a crimson claw mark that spread burning scars across the ground. Its massive body turned into a blurred red streak and charged straight at them!

"Squelch! Squelch!"

Its physical power doubled in that instant. Its claws, carrying the digestive properties of the Blood Corpse, sliced through the two foremost octopus shikigami at the shoulders as easily as cutting tofu.

Dark crimson cursed energy, bearing terrifying corrosive and digestive power, clung to their wounds. No matter how the two shikigami struggled, the wounds not only failed to heal but began emitting streams of white smoke as their cursed energy was wildly "devoured"!

"Bang! Bang!"

Immediately afterward, the three tails behind Crimson Shadow lashed out independently like meteors, their dark crimson cursed-energy spheres striking the remaining two shikigami with perfect accuracy.

A violent explosion thundered out, and widespread burns instantly reduced the two shikigami to charred husks.

In a single exchange, the four shikigami that would have given ordinary Grade 2 sorcerers a massive headache were completely crippled by Crimson Shadow with overwhelming force!