Yan Si said, "Believe you, my ass. Believe I'll get sliced up like a mango..."
Suddenly, Yan Si fell silent, his brows lifting slightly.
All at once, his shoulder felt a little sore.
It wasn't the ache of lactic acid buildup after exercise. It was a strange sensation. If he had to compare it to something, it was like someone had pressed a block of ice at twenty below zero against his shoulder blade, the chill seeping into his marrow thread by thread. Drowsiness washed over him like a tide, weighing down his eyelids.
His eyes curved into a smile, and he pressed his fingers against his shoulder.
"Ah... I get it..."
There were no ghosts. This old house from a bygone era was gloomy, but he had lived here for over a decade in his previous life and had never seen a real ghost. That left only one possibility-
"A cursed spirit's here..."
He couldn't see it. His cursed energy stat was 0. He was a "monkey" through and through-worse than a "monkey," even.
Yan Si was a transmigrator without a trace of cursed energy. He lacked the basic prerequisite for seeing cursed spirits. But his hundredfold-enhanced five senses had granted him another kind of "sight." His sixth sense told him it was there.
The sixth sense was a strange thing.
He could feel that something was wrong.
"How many points of cursed energy do I need to see cursed spirits?" Yan Si asked.
[6 points.]
The system answered.
"Okay, got it."
Yan Si nodded, his expression perfectly calm.
He walked over to the table and used his teeth to undo the gauze wrapped around his left palm. The wound still hadn't scabbed over and was oozing clear fluid, a dark red gash crawling across his pale palm. He picked up the bloodstained fruit knife from the floor and wiped it against his trouser leg. The blade flashed coldly in the afternoon sunlight.
Then, without hesitation, he cut a fresh line of blood along the old wound.
"Hss-"
In that instant, countless snow-white specks of static exploded across Yan Si's vision.
Agonizing pain shot from his palm into his arm like a high-voltage current, burning along his ulnar nerve to his cervical spine before erupting into a mushroom cloud in his cerebral cortex. The agony sawed through the bones of his palm, bit by bit. His hundredfold pain sensitivity amplified every nerve signal to hellish proportions. He could distinctly feel the progression as his skin, fat, and muscle were sliced apart layer by layer.
His heart rate instantly shot up to a hundred and eighty. His blood pressure soared, his vision darkened, and a roar filled his ears.
But a second later, a cold, mechanical force spread from deep within his heart, forcibly pushing his heartbeat back into the normal range and dragging his consciousness away from the brink of shock.
[Pain Immunity]-passive triggered. [Points +7]
Yan Si leaned against the edge of the table, gasping for breath. Cold sweat dripped from his chin onto the floor. His face was paper-white, deep tooth marks scored his lips, and uncontrollable, trembling whimpers escaped his throat.
The pain squeezed out another two tears.
"Ha... haa..."
Ten seconds later, he recovered.
He raised his hand and looked at the fresh red cut in his palm. Then he suddenly extended his index finger and jabbed it hard into the wound.
"Urgh..."
[Points +2]
He jabbed it again.
[Points +1]
A third jab.
[Points +0.3]
"Diminishing returns?" Yan Si's voice shook with pain, yet he chuckled softly. "Repeated damage to the same wound gives exponentially fewer points... interesting. In other words, if I want to farm points efficiently, I need to create fresh wounds."
He lifted his head and looked at the system panel.
Current points: 18.5
"Raise my cursed energy to 9," he said.
[Confirmed. 18 points consumed. Cursed energy: 0 → 9. Remaining points: 0.5.]
A warm, unfamiliar energy suddenly rose from his abdomen, like a swallowed mouthful of strong liquor. The warmth spread through his blood vessels into every part of his body before finally gathering in his eyes.
Yan Si blinked.
The world changed.
Something now crouched in a corner of the room that had been empty before.
Because Yan Si had come into contact with the cursed spirit, the system marked it with a few red words in his field of vision.
[Grade 4-Grade 3 Cursed Spirit]
It was a cursed spirit. Grade 4, or barely touching the threshold of Grade 3.
It was a mass of black sludge forcibly kneaded together, with countless tiny, translucent bubbles drifting across its surface. Every bubble that burst released a thread of sickeningly sweet, rotten stench.
It had no fixed shape, but an enormous bloodshot eye grew from its body, staring fixedly at Yan Si-or rather, at the attraction within him that was as fatally irresistible to cursed spirits as a poppy.
"So that's what you look like." Yan Si tilted his head, his deep purple eyes glimmering with pleasure in the dim room. "So ugly. Disgusting."
"Why even live?"
His gaze enraged the cursed spirit.
[Cursed spirit's desire to attack you: 150%]-constitution effect active.
"Hiss-"
The cursed spirit let out a piercing shriek. The sound lay beyond the range of human hearing, but Yan Si's hundredfold-enhanced hearing caught it with perfect clarity. It was sharp, like fingernails scraping glass, yet also like the wailing of a baby being strangled.
Muffled and hoarse. Horrible to listen to.
It lunged at him, its black body stretching through the air into a twisted whip, moving blindingly fast and stirring up a foul-smelling gust.
Yan Si stood still.
His hundredfold-enhanced five senses had sharpened his ability to track movement to inhuman levels. In his eyes, the cursed spirit's movements had slowed down countless times over. He could see the direction of every drop of slime flung from its surface and even predict where it would land three-tenths of a second later.
"Left, a little low, haha..."
Yan Si murmured the words.
Then he clenched his right fist.
He coated it in a thin layer of cursed energy.
Strength: 15.
(The average person's baseline was 5, which meant his muscles had three times the explosive power of an ordinary person's.)
Physical strength: 3.
(This meant his bones and tendons were pathetically fragile and couldn't withstand much recoil.)
So, no meeting it head-on. I need a precision strike.
Head-on would be fine, too. Hurt enough times, and you get used to pain. It's just that severed hands and feet are hard to put somewhere, and hard to piece back together.
The instant the cursed spirit reached him, Yan Si turned sideways. The movement was tiny, yet it was just enough to avoid a direct hit from that mass of black sludge.
His right fist shot out from a bizarre angle, swift and precise, driving straight into the weakest part of the cursed spirit's body.
Bang!
A dull thud rang out.
It wasn't the sound of flesh colliding with flesh, but the explosive report of something being violently shattered.
Before the cursed spirit could even let out a second shriek, its entire body swelled abruptly, then burst into countless flecks of black ash. The ash hung in the air for an instant before turning into wisps of black smoke and vanishing in the sunlight.
Nothing remained.
Yan Si withdrew his fist. A faint sting came from his knuckles-the explosive burst of force had made his finger bones give a faint creak under the strain, too.
[Points +2]
But he paid it no mind.
He looked at his hand and suddenly smiled.
"Woohoo~"
"Fun~"
[Successfully made a cursed spirit know pain. Points +0.2] [Current points: 2.7]
Yan Si shook out his hand, walked over to the window, and pushed open the old wooden frame. April sunlight poured in without restraint, falling across his face and making the vermilion dot between his brows glow an even deeper red.
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