Xiao Yu waved a hand, and the green mist enveloping the young woman swiftly dispersed, revealing what lay within.
An ugly corpse lay faceup on the stone platform. Fine silver chains wound around its body and limbs, several piercing straight through its chest and back to bind it tightly to the platform.
On closer inspection, its head was little more than skin and bone, with almost no flesh remaining. Its face was deathly gray, and a pair of enormous, scorched-yellow fangs protruded about an inch from its half-open mouth. It looked utterly terrifying!
Through the fine silver chains, coarse, stiff green hair could be seen covering its body, which gave off a thick corpse stench. The fingers of its sole remaining arm bore pitch-black nails two inches long.
This was the Corpse Fiend!
As its name suggested, a corpse fiend was a type of zombie. But it was far more formidable than an ordinary zombie and exceedingly difficult to deal with. Its entire body resisted metal weapons, and even Nascent Soul cultivators struggled to damage it. Without special methods, the only ways to destroy it were to slowly refine it with true flame or seal its soul using the Soul-Extraction Technique.
For a corpse to evolve into a corpse fiend was extraordinarily difficult. Not only did the cultivator need to have reached the Nascent Soul stage or higher while alive, but they also had to possess a wood- or Earth Attribute heavenly spiritual root.
Moreover, they needed to harbor extreme resentment before death, so that their soul refused to enter reincarnation and lingered near the corpse. Only after various fortuitous circumstances could the soul and corpse possibly merge and undergo refinement once more, forming a corpse fiend.
Furthermore, a corpse fiend was half human and half corpse, or rather, half