Chen Miao dismounted and looked at the two halves of the corpse on the ground, neither of which had shed any blood.
He reached out with his foot and rolled the thing's upper half over.
When he saw its face, his brows drew together.
He had not seen the thing from the front earlier and had assumed it was an animal.
After all, its black fur and build resembled the apes he had seen on wildlife shows.
But one look at its face told him he had been wrong.
Where a monkey's face should have been, there was a human face.
It wore a half-smile, with bright red lips and a slightly open mouth full of sharp teeth.
Chen Miao crouched, took out the dagger he had seized earlier, and prodded around the edges of the face. Soon, he spotted stitch marks hidden beneath the fur. Faint though they were, he still recognized them.
"The Corpse-Sewing Art?"
Chen Miao looked around. Apart from a sparse patch of woods to his left, there were no village buildings nearby. Where this thing had come from remained a mystery.
But he soon thought of something. After opening the book and seeing a newly completed side story, he stopped worrying about whether a Corpse Stitcher might be nearby. A completed chapter meant the current incident had reached its conclusion.
That meant this "Man-Faced Ape" probably had not been deliberately placed here by a Corpse Stitcher to cause trouble.
"Did it escape, or was it just something a Corpse Stitcher practiced on?"
Chen Miao thought the latter was more likely. The chances of a corpse escaping a Corpse Stitcher were far too slim.
Without lingering, he mounted the paper offering and continued toward his destination.
Five minutes later, he finally arrived nearby.
He had not