Screech!
Chen Miao's car stopped not far from the Yin-Yang Breaker Shop.
After getting out, Chen Miao checked the time.
4:35.
He opened Notes on Achieving Divinity in the Mortal World. Nothing had changed yet.
If anything changed, it would probably happen when Chen Miao entered the shop, or if Zhong Fa noticed him beforehand.
So Chen Miao would keep Notes on Achieving Divinity in the Mortal World in his hand along the way, constantly watching for changes.
But that left him with only one hand to carry everything else.
Besides the incense sticks, Chen Miao now had an unfinished Peach Wood Sword as a weapon.
After some thought, Chen Miao decided that using both would be safer. He would put up with the inconvenience.
Tucking the Peach Wood Sword under his arm, Chen Miao took four incense sticks out of the book and lit them, then held the Peach Wood Sword in his right hand as well.
Only after finishing his preparations did Chen Miao head toward the Yin-Yang Breaker Shop, book in hand.
Anyone who saw him like this would definitely think there was something wrong with his head.
After all, it was 4:35 in the morning. There was a little light, but trying to read and study by it?
Not a chance in hell!
Besides, with the Peach Wood Sword and incense in his other hand, he looked every bit like a cosplayer who had lost his mind.
But Chen Miao didn't care what anyone thought. Compared with his life and the funeral home, what did it matter if people laughed at him?
As he approached the shop step by step, Chen Miao checked the book in his hand more and more often.
Yet even when he was only two meters from the shop's door, nothing in the book had changed.
That was both good and bad.
No changes meant Zhong Fa hadn't noticed him, but it also meant Chen Miao couldn't foresee what would happen next.
Of course, there was another possibility: Zhong Fa wasn't in the shop at all!
After a moment's hesitation, Chen Miao continued forward.
He had come this far. How could he stop here?
When Chen Miao stood half a meter from the door, he was just considering whether to kick it open or peek through the crack first.
The door opened by itself!
His pupils contracted sharply. Chen Miao abandoned any thought of checking the book and immediately began reciting the Descending the True Evil-Subduing Incantation.
"Radiant and blazing, the sun rises in the east..."
By the time he was halfway through the incantation, the door had opened completely.
Chen Miao dropped the book, transferred the incense sticks from his right hand to his left, and thrust the unfinished Peach Wood Sword straight ahead with his right.
If he wasn't strong enough, he would strike first!
Whether a human or a ghost came out, the wooden sword could hurt them.
What Chen Miao hadn't expected was for a face he had parted with only recently to appear before the sword's tip.
Whoosh!
Zhong Cai dodged the head-on strike, then stared at Chen Miao in astonishment.
"It's me!"
The incantation cut off abruptly.
"What are you doing here?"
They stared at each other, and Chen Miao lowered the Peach Wood Sword.
Looking at the sword and incense in Chen Miao's hands, Zhong Cai asked, "Here for revenge?"
Chen Miao neither confirmed nor denied it, taking a step back.
"Are you going to help that senior fellow disciple of yours?"
Zhong Cai shook his head.
"There's no helping him now. Come in and see for yourself."
With that, Zhong Cai turned and walked inside.
Chen Miao picked up the book from the ground and checked it, a little puzzled.
"Still no changes?"
Putting the book away, Chen Miao looked at the four half-burned incense sticks, and his heart ached at the waste.
Because the incantation had been interrupted, the spell had failed, and the incense smoke he had gathered had dispersed on its own.
That meant Chen Miao had used up half an ultimate attack before the fight had even begun.
But this wasn't the time to worry about a little incense. Chen Miao stepped into the shop.
The moment he entered, Chen Miao froze.
Directly opposite him was an overturned altar table. A spirit tablet hung on the wall above it, and a corpse lay beneath it.
Zhong Fa's corpse!
Chen Miao looked at Zhong Cai in shock.
Zhong Cai's expression darkened.
"It wasn't me. I only got here five minutes before you. The door was open when I arrived, and this was what I found inside. That Leaping Hopping Corpse probably killed him."
"The Leaping Hopping Corpse?"
Chen Miao took a few steps closer and finally got a clear look at the wounds he had seen in the surveillance footage.
Several claw marks scored Zhong Fa's chest, all filled with a black, gelatinous substance!
"What is this?"
"Corpse poison. The Leaping Hopping Corpse had already wounded him before he lured it to your place."
"He was wounded by the Leaping Hopping Corpse? Wasn't it a zombie he raised himself?"
Seeing Chen Miao's confusion,
Zhong Cai explained his theory.
"He probably lost control of it after refining it into a Leaping Hopping Corpse. But he couldn't accept having created one without accomplishing anything, so... he lured it to your place."
At that point, Zhong Cai asked curiously, "Did Zhong Fa have a grudge against that person in your funeral home's cold storage? Why else would he wait until he got there to smash the lotus lamp?"
Chen Miao was speechless. He wanted to ask Zhong Fa the same thing: what on earth had the Tianmen Funeral Home ever done to him?
After failing to cause trouble time and again, had he still insisted on dragging someone down with him as he died?
As for why he had lured the Leaping Hopping Corpse to the cold storage, that was easy enough to explain. It was where Chen Miao had previously helped the twins pass on!
"I think you should give that question some thought later. I knew Zhong Fa. He never lifted a finger without something to gain. He wouldn't do this for no reason. Either you offended him somehow, or he was acting on someone's instructions."
"He wouldn't do all this for no reason unless he'd gone mad."
At Zhong Cai's words, a name immediately sprang into Chen Miao's mind.
The Fushou Funeral Center!
If the Tianmen Funeral Home had a conflict or a grudge with anyone, that was the only possibility.
Who else would go out of their way to pick a fight with a funeral home?
But that was only his guess.
"That's the situation here. I've already contacted someone. Are you staying here, or..."
As Zhong Cai spoke, he saw Chen Miao glance at the book he had been holding.
Then he heard a low murmur of chanting.
"You..."
Before Zhong Cai could wonder what Chen Miao was doing, he saw incense smoke rise from the four sticks that hadn't finished burning.
The instant the smoke appeared, it swept past him and shot straight behind him!
Turning around, Zhong Cai looked in the direction the smoke had gone and followed it.
As soon as he entered the room, he saw all the smoke slip beneath the bed.
An inhuman scream rang out from under it.
Whoosh!
He held a Spirit-Sealing Talisman between his fingers and pointed his Peach Wood Sword beneath the bed.
But even by the time Chen Miao entered, he hadn't seen anything emerge from under it.
"That thing should be dead already. See what's under the bed."
Chen Miao's tone surprised Zhong Cai a little.
But he didn't understand the Incense-Burning Method. He had only heard of it before.
From the time they had spent together, Zhong Cai felt Chen Miao wasn't someone who made baseless claims.
He immediately put away the talisman and reached out to lift the bed.
But when he lifted it, it wouldn't budge.
"There's a mechanism!"
Watching Zhong Cai search for the switch, Chen Miao stayed where he was and looked at the book in his hand instead.
The moment the incense smoke had failed to enter Zhong Fa's body and flown toward the bedroom instead, he had already seen the book's contents change.
"Chapter two · Afterword · Little Ghost"
Before you continue