She walked slowly, her steps as heavy as those of a puppet pulled along by strings.
The smile froze on Bu Le's face.
An indescribable chill shot up from his tailbone to the back of his skull.
The icy aura permeating the air left him without even the strength to summon his Martial Soul.
"S-Senior..." Bu Le's voice trembled with tears, his teeth chattering.
Snake Granny still said nothing. She merely stepped forward mechanically.
Five meters, three meters, one meter.
That deathly pale, lifeless face was now right before Bu Le's eyes.
Bu Le thought, I'm done for! She's going to kill me!
Yet the attack he expected never came.
That icy aura brushed past his side.
Bu Le went rigid. He realized that Snake Granny had not attacked him at all. Instead, she passed him and slowly circled around behind him.
Bu Le froze in bewilderment.
The footsteps behind him stopped. That cold aura lingered at his back, with no further movement.
"She... she didn't kill me?"
Bu Le's mind raced, seemingly finding an explanation.
"That's right! I was so respectful just now, and I'm only a lowly Soul Ancestor. Senior Snake Granny must think killing me would dirty her hands!"
"She just let me go like a fart!"
The wild joy of escaping certain death instantly flooded his heart.
Bu Le's taut nerves abruptly relaxed. He even wanted to turn around and kowtow to Snake Granny again to thank her for sparing him.
Still rejoicing, he prepared to straighten his bent back.
Suddenly, he felt his field of vision rise without warning.
It was not the rise that came from standing upright. His entire viewpoint had broken free of gravity and was floating upward.
"What's happening? Why am I flying?"
For a moment, Bu Le's mind went blank.
He instinctively rolled his eyes downward. At that sight, his soul seemed to plunge into a bottomless abyss of ice.
Below, on the dimly lit tiled floor.
A headless corpse dressed in his shabby clothes stood motionless, still bent forward in a respectful bow.
Not a drop of blood gushed from the severed neck. Only a layer of cold, bluish-black energy spread across the cut.
Behind that headless corpse stood the pitch-black Ghost Shadow bearing Chao Tianxiang's head.
The Ghost Shadow's stick-thin hands, covered in livid corpse spots, were holding something.
"That's my body?" Bu Le finally understood.
He had not flown up. His head had been plucked off!
Fear-utter, overwhelming fear-instantly drowned every thought he had.
He opened his mouth, desperate to let out an agonized scream, desperate to call for help.
But without vocal cords or lungs, his head could only open and close its mouth in vain, unable to produce even the faintest whisper of air.
The Headless Paranormal Shadow held Bu Le's head. Those hollow eyes belonging to Chao Tianxiang coldly surveyed the sleazy face twisted with terror.
It seemed to find that this head did not meet its requirements for a puzzle piece.
The Headless Paranormal Shadow casually tossed it away.
As though discarding a piece of worthless trash.
Bu Le's head slammed onto the dusty tiles and rolled several meters before striking the feet of a plastic mannequin.
The last despair of his life remained in those wide, staring eyes.
Douluo Continent.
The Sky Screen projected this utterly horrifying scene across every stretch of sky, withholding nothing.
Inside a remote, run-down tavern outside Suotuo City.
A rough earthenware bowl was smashed against the floor.
His eyes bloodshot, E Kao stared fixedly at the Sky Screen and slammed his fist into the greasy wooden table, cracking it in several places.
"Damn it! Damn it all!" E Kao clawed at his hair in anguish, his voice filled with regret.
"We were too hasty! Why didn't we wait before using that chance to send a hint!"
Across from him, Tianya looked just as dejected. He gulped down a mouthful of cheap ale, the harsh liquid making him choke until tears streamed down his face.
"Who could've known that paranormal entity could change heads! We used the hint to tell Bu Le that the entity was on the Third Floor. We had no way to tell him that Snake Granny was now that very entity!"
"Bu Le died for nothing, without even getting his Martial Soul out. What the hell was that!"
Both men were sick with regret.
Not because of any deep brotherly bond, but because they had lost their only hope of obtaining the opportunity to become gods.
Meanwhile, at Shrek Academy in the Heaven Dou Empire.
The training grounds were utterly silent. Every teacher and student had been shaken by Bu Le's bizarre death.
Amid that oppressive, deathly silence.
"Hahahaha!" A sudden burst of fervent laughter shattered the quiet.
Yu Xiaogang abruptly stepped forward, his eyes gleaming with an almost manic confidence.
"Did everyone see that!"
Pointing at the Sky Screen, Yu Xiaogang loudly proclaimed his brilliant insight.
"My earlier deductions were on the right track. They just need a slight adjustment!"
"The three so-called rules that world gave us at the beginning were a complete fraud! They were a smokescreen that world put out to mislead us!"
Yu Xiaogang surveyed the silent teachers and students with the air of a peerless strategist.
"Look at Bu Le. He clearly did nothing but bow respectfully. And what happened? He was still brutally murdered!"
"What does that prove? It proves those rules are false! Those paranormal entities don't need any conditions at all. They actively attack humans!"
Yu Xiaogang delivered his conclusion with absolute conviction.
"So the only rule for surviving in that world is never to count on luck!"
"The moment you encounter a paranormal entity, you must strike first. Blast it to death with your strongest Soul Skill, or turn around and run!"
The Shrek teachers and students around him exchanged glances.
They felt that something about Yu Xiaogang's words seemed wrong.
After all, both Mad Rhino and Meng Shenji had met gruesome deaths precisely because they attacked first.
Yet faced with the fact that Bu Le had been killed without any warning, they could find no grounds to refute him for the moment.
Meanwhile, in the shadows.
Tang Hao cast a cold glance at Yu Xiaogang as he pontificated, his eyes filled with disdain.
"Idiot."
Tang Hao could not resist muttering the insult. He then paid that clown no further attention.
His eyes, deep as an abyss, remained fixed on the replay of Bu Le's death on the Sky Screen.
"Something's wrong," Tang Hao thought as he worked through it.
"This paranormal entity's power is terrifying. Plucking off a Soul Ancestor's head is effortless for it!"
"If that's the case, why didn't it attack directly from the front? Why go to the trouble of deliberately circling behind Bu Le?"
Tang Hao was not the only one.
Spirit City, the Papal Hall.
Bibi Dong sat high upon her throne, her breathtakingly beautiful face shrouded in icy severity.
"Circling behind him?" Bibi Dong murmured.
"Although the way these paranormal entities kill is brutal and seemingly impossible to counter, the Knocking Ghost showed that they follow some kind of rigid procedure."
"This entity didn't kill from the front. It only acted after circling behind him. That was definitely not an unnecessary movement."
Bibi Dong abruptly tightened her grip on the Pope's Scepter.
"Could it be that this entity's condition for killing is that it must stand behind its target?!"
On the outskirts of the Star Dou Great Forest.
Dragon Duke Meng Shu watched the Sky Screen, but as the head of his family, he had not been completely consumed by emotion.
"My old girl..."
Meng Shu gritted his teeth, replaying the moment of Chao Tianxiang's death over and over in his mind.
"She sensed the chill behind her just now, and her head was plucked off as she was about to turn around."
"It was the same with Bu Le. The entity didn't act when it walked up in front of him. It only killed him after circling behind him."
"Behind them! This entity's rule is being behind a person!"
Meng Shu abruptly raised his head, his bloodshot eyes fixed on his granddaughter in the split-screen view, still running down the fifth-floor corridor outside the Storage Room.
With their keen powers of observation and combat instincts, the greatest experts on the Douluo Continent.
Had already begun to glimpse the Headless Paranormal Shadow's rule for killing.
But they remained limited by their ignorance of the paranormal's true nature.
They did not know that this entity already possessed the mind of a living person.
Under a living person's control, rigid rules would become the deadliest traps.