Skin Wraith

Shen Ye ignored her, led An Ning to the middle of the convoy, and clapped his hands.

Everyone poked their heads out of their vehicle windows and turned their attention to him.

"I'm going into the village to look for supplies in a bit." His voice wasn't loud, but in these surroundings, everyone heard him clearly.

"Anyone who wants to come along can get their own weapons ready."

"But before we go in, I want to make two things clear. First, I, Shen Ye, make no guarantees about anyone's safety. If you get yourself killed, I won't be responsible."

"If anyone holds me back, don't blame me for showing no mercy."

He swept his gaze over their varied expressions.

"Second!"

"Whatever you find belongs to you. That's an ironclad rule of the Dawn Convoy. I won't demand that you hand it over for any reason! Of course, if a Sequence Awakened clears out threats for you, you'll have to pay a fee for that."

At those words, the eyes of the convoy members, already dizzy with hunger, lit up.

No sharing supplies. Everyone would get by on their own ability.

Didn't that mean that as long as they followed Shen Ye into the village, anything they found would be theirs? He could no longer demand that they hand it over as a "protection fee."

"I'm in."

"Me too!"

"Count me in!"

Soon, a dozen or so men jumped out of their vehicles carrying wrenches, iron rods, and fruit knives.

Even a few women joined the crowd, holding battered wooden clubs they had picked up somewhere.

Shen Ye glanced at their weapons. They were all ordinary metal tools; there wasn't even a decent blade among them.

He said nothing. He knew perfectly well that even guns couldn't do any real damage to the Eldritch unless the wielder was a Sequence Awakened or the weapon was a Weird Object.

After a nod, Shen Ye turned and headed toward Qianxing Village.

An Ning followed close behind him, with a crowd of more than twenty people trailing after her.

The first house beside the village entrance was a two-story red-brick building.

The large iron door on the ground floor stood ajar. Even from four or five meters away, they could smell the stench of decay seeping out.

Shen Ye held the Ghost Head across his body and pushed the iron door open with his left hand.

The hinges gave a shrill screech.

The living room was dark, its curtains drawn, with only a few faint strands of morning light squeezing through the gaps.

What looked like a human skin lay spread across the floor in the center of the room.

Shen Ye took a closer look and confirmed that it was a perfectly intact human skin without the slightest trace of blood.

The entire skin was as shriveled as a sheet of paper that had been crumpled and flattened again. Its limbs twisted at unnatural angles, while its features still retained the contours they had possessed in life.

Its eye sockets were two empty holes, its mouth stretched into a silent circle.

Before Shen Ye could move, the human skin stirred first, fluttering in the air.

It swelled up from the floor.

First, its chest rose slightly. Then the entire skin slowly expanded as though someone were pumping air into it.

Its facial features swelled along with it, and its hollow eye sockets turned to meet Shen Ye's gaze.

"This is a Tier One Skin Wraith."

An Ning's voice came from behind him. Her pupils had already turned deep purple.

"After a Man-Eating Tree Spirit drains someone's blood while they're alive, Eldritch power contaminates the corpse, turning it into a bloodthirsty monster.

"These Eldritch are very weak at first. They attack by clinging to people, gradually dissolving their flesh and blood and sucking them dry."

Shen Ye moved before she could finish. Dark red patterns instantly spread across the Ghost Head's pitch-black blade.

A dark red flash swept over the newly inflated human skin as the blade cleaved downward.

The Skin Wraith let out a shrill hiss and collapsed like a punctured balloon, rapidly turning into a heap of dark gray powder that dissipated across the floor tiles.

[Killing Points: +24]

But the danger hadn't passed. Three more Skin Wraiths had drifted out of a corner of the living room at some point: an elderly person, a woman, and a child.

Shen Ye lunged forward again. Three strikes fell, slicing all three Eldritch in half as easily as chopping vegetables.

[Killing Points: +24] [Killing Points: +25] [Killing Points: +28]

The entire fight lasted less than ten seconds. Shen Ye had dealt with all four Eldritch.

The convoy members behind him stood stunned for two seconds. Then, when An Ning said, "There are none left here,"

they immediately scattered in a swarm and began rummaging through cupboards and chests.

"There's rice in the kitchen!"

"I've got two packs of dried noodles here!"

"Hands off! I told you, I found it first!"

Shen Ye paid them no attention. After looking around and finding nothing of value, he turned and left, taking An Ning toward the next house.

Just then, several people in the group quietly took bone cleavers and kitchen knives from the house's kitchen, hid them beneath their clothes, and slipped out the back door amid the confusion.

Zhou Rong was one of them.

He was thirty-two that year, with neatly cropped hair, dark skin, and thick muscles bulging along his arms.

Before the apocalypse, he had worked as a general laborer at Zhao Biao's construction site. He had plenty of strength, but he was always trying to shirk work and cut corners, earning frequent scoldings from his superiors.

After getting his hands on a bone cleaver in the kitchen, his restless heart began stirring again.

Shen Ye killed those Skin Wraiths with one strike each, like he was chopping vegetables. Couldn't I do the same? he thought.

Those things look scary, but they're not all that tough.

Once I clear the Eldritch out of a house myself, won't all the supplies inside be mine to do whatever I want with?

The more he thought about it, the more pleased he became. He couldn't hide the smile on his lips.

As he walked, he hefted the bone cleaver in his hand.

It was pretty heavy.

One strike with this would surely be just as effective as the straight saber in Shen Ye's hand.

He climbed over the low courtyard wall, crept more than two hundred meters along the village road, and stopped in front of a three-story house.

Its exterior was clad in off-white ceramic tiles, with red floor tiles laid outside the main entrance. In a remote backwater like this, it certainly belonged to a wealthy family.

Zhou Rong didn't enter through the front door, afraid any noise would attract someone else's attention.

If someone showed up to fight him for the supplies, wouldn't all his work be for nothing?

He quietly circled around to the backyard, climbed over the wall, and cautiously pushed open the ground-floor back door.

It was dark inside.

An icy chill instantly enveloped him, as though he had stepped straight from a thirty-degree day into a subzero cold-storage room.

He shivered, his grip on the bone cleaver tightening involuntarily.

There was nothing in the living room.

A layer of dust covered the rosewood sofa. An empty cup sat on the coffee table, and the clear glass pot still held half a pot of moldy tea.

He was about to breathe a sigh of relief when he caught sight of the guest room doorway to his right. His whole body froze.

A dark figure stood there.

Only when his eyes focused did he see that it was a human skin, shriveled like a piece of old cured meat.

Its hollow eye sockets faced him, and a slit opened where its mouth should have been, as though it were smiling.

Zhou Rong's heart began pounding, but the memory of Shen Ye killing them with a single strike quickly calmed him.

Zhou Rong, what the hell are you scared of? This thing's just a paper tiger.

Think about what Shen Ye would do.

After that silent pep talk, the fear in his eyes turned to ferocity. He tightened his grip on the bone cleaver, charged forward, and swung straight at the human skin's neck.