The formation's core

Ye Qianfan heard the urgency in the Daoist's voice.

He hurriedly swung the large saber in his hand, hammering it again and again into the hard earth at the center of the altar!

Clang!

Clang, clang!

With flesh and blood filling it out, this body really was much easier to use!

And Ye Fu was extremely cooperative. Every time Ye Qianfan swung the saber down, he could feel Ye Fu's tentacles helping him, adding their strength to his own!

With the two inhuman beings working together, this body soon dug a pit in the center of the altar!

The little mound of dirt grew higher and higher!

The soil was full of sticky brown clumps.

Who knew how many people had died on this altar for even the soil underneath to have soaked through and changed color!

Luckily, Ye Qianfan had no sense of smell!

Otherwise, just how overpowering would that stench have been?

Crack!

Just then.

Ye Qianfan's saber seemed to have struck something hard, and its tip rang out with the sound of metal striking stone!

"Found it!" The Daoist heard the sound too and cried out in delight, "Dig with your hands! Get it out!"

"All right."

Ye Qianfan quickly tossed the saber aside and scraped away the dirt beneath him with his hands.

After feeling around a few times, he touched something cold and hard in the soil. He dug it out and saw that it was a Bagua Mirror made of wood and crystal, with the eight trigrams drawn across its face in cinnabar or something similar.

Ye Qianfan examined it from every angle, but he simply couldn't see anything special about this Bagua Mirror!

But the instant he dug the Bagua Mirror out of the altar...

He discovered that the entire altar was seeping blood, like a bowl of water that had cracked open. It was a shocking sight, and the red blood quickly spread in every direction.

By the dim firelight inside the cave, Ye Qianfan saw the blood quickly soak back into the parched ground.

As the blood slowly disappeared...

The sense of restraint on Ye Qianfan's body faded along with it. The altar seemed to have lost its effect!

"Let's go!"

The Daoist's voice was full of joy. "This altar is ruined! I can finally leave this place!"

"Let's get out of here right away!"

"And another thing..."

"Once we're out, you promised to take me back to the Puppet Sect. You'd better not go back on your word!"

"..."

Ye Qianfan listened to the Daoist's rambling without answering.

He merely jumped down from the altar. But just as Ye Qianfan was about to head out of the cave, he felt himself kick something!

Jingle, jingle~

"That sound!!!"

The instant Ye Qianfan heard it, his eyes lit up!

Because it sounded just like the clinking of his favorite thing!

"Money!"

Ye Qianfan hurriedly bent down and picked up a long string of copper coins. They were not only covered in black slime, but also smeared with some red liquid and other sticky muck coating the entire string.

But to Ye Qianfan, who had been poor for far too long, money was money, however filthy it was!

"This... there must be at least a hundred copper coins here!"

He weighed them in his hand.

From the weight alone, Ye Qianfan immediately judged that there were about a hundred wen in copper coins!

A hundred wen?

A hundred wen!!

"Isn't this the fucking money I dropped?"

Ye Qianfan suddenly remembered where those hundred wen had come from. Wasn't this his pay for exploring the cave?

He let out a deep sigh. "Got excited for nothing!"

"Hahaha..."

The Daoist burst out laughing inside Ye Qianfan's belly. "Someone didn't even realize he'd dropped his own money, then spent all that time getting excited about finding some, only for it to turn out to be his own! Are you trying to make me die laughing?"

"Fuck..."

Ye Qianfan cursed under his breath.

But as he looked at the money in his hand, an idea suddenly occurred to him.

Since he could recover his own money, couldn't he also find Ye Fu's money, or even the money belonging to the vagrants who had come along to explore the cave?

The instant that thought arose, he could no longer suppress the urge to hunt for treasure!

Ye Qianfan quickly picked up a nearby torch and searched the sodden ground with his head lowered. Soon, he found a filthy set of clothes. Judging by the style, they probably belonged to old man Fu.

He picked them up and put them on.

They fit perfectly!

The paper puppet the Daoist had built was much larger than Ye Qianfan's original body, with the build of an adult.

It wasn't built like Ye Qianfan, whose original body had only been that of a teenage boy!

That had made everything inconvenient.

But this adult height made things much easier!

Jingle, jingle!

However...

As soon as Ye Qianfan put on Ye Fu's clothes, some things fell to the ground.

Ye Qianfan glanced down. There was Ye Fu's pay, along with a black pouch.

The pouch felt slightly heavy in his hand!

He hurriedly loosened its drawstring and saw the two crescent-shaped Divination Blocks Ye Fu had used earlier to consult the gods, along with a wooden plaque and several taels of silver pieces!

The silver pieces probably totaled four or five taels!

But to Ye Qianfan, who had been going hungry ever since arriving in this world, this was already a fortune!

After all, one tael of silver was worth a thousand wen!

Apparently...

Ye Fu was pretty rich!

Of course, that was measured against the average in the slums outside the city.

"And what's this wooden plaque?"

Although Ye Qianfan had obtained Ye Fu's memories, those memories still needed a trigger before he could recall them.

It was just like how a person wouldn't replay their entire life in their mind every day. They had to open the refrigerator and see an apple before remembering that they'd bought apples yesterday—the same principle.

Ye Qianfan took out the wooden plaque and examined it. Ye Fu's name was written on it, along with his status and a stamped seal.

He flipped the plaque over, and when he saw the large characters on the other side...

He immediately burst into laughter, unable to contain his delight!

"It's a city entry permit!"

"It's actually an entry permit for Fog City!!"

All the memories of Ye Fu having been a city resident, then fleeing Fog City after offending someone powerful, flooded into Ye Qianfan's mind at once!

He didn't know whether Ye Fu deserved pity or contempt.

He had once enjoyed privileges that the vagrants outside the city wouldn't dare dream of in their entire lives. Yet the wretched old man hadn't cherished them. With no dignity befitting his age, he'd gone around plucking flowers and teasing the grass, chasing women until he had utterly ruined his good life.

Now he'd even ended up stripped of his senses, neither human nor ghost!

"A city entry permit?"

The Daoist sounded puzzled. "What's that? Why do you need a permit to enter a city?"

"Too many people," Ye Qianfan grumbled. "When there are too many people inside the city, naturally they don't welcome outsiders."

"Besides, if everyone could enter the city whenever they wanted, who would risk their lives for the bigwigs inside?"

"Who would do this lowly, life-threatening work for those Patrol Soldiers just for a bite to eat?"

"You can't expect the city bigwigs to do it themselves, can you?"

"True!"

The Daoist nodded thoughtfully. "Everything in this world has a reason to exist! Some things may look quite unreasonable, but they still have their own reason for existing. This is what it means to say that all things have their Dao!"

"Be quiet. I don't want to hear you preach!"

Ye Qianfan stuffed the two long strings of coins into his belt, then carefully returned the wooden plaque to the pouch and tucked it close to his body.

From now on, he would be one of those city bigwigs too!

Let's see who would dare look down on him now!

Hmph!

Shhh, shhh, shhh~

But just as Ye Qianfan was planning to search elsewhere for more money...

That scraping sound came from the cave outside again, as though something was being dragged across the ground. It was much louder than the sound Ye Fu had made while crawling!

The moment they heard it, Ye Qianfan and the Daoist spoke in unison. "The Mountain God?"

"Wasn't the Mountain God already dead? How could he come back to life?"

Ye Qianfan was shocked.

But the Daoist frowned. "These Human-Faced Bugs usually come in pairs, one male and one female. The big female may have discovered that the Mountain God is dead and come out to take revenge!"

"Hide, quickly! Conceal your presence."

The Daoist hurriedly shouted from inside Ye Qianfan's belly, "Whatever you do, don't let it discover you!!!"