The pitch-black candle was still burning with a crimson flame.
Su Wu blew hard at it, but it did not go out.
Instead, as he blew, a cold, sinister presence tried to slip into his mouth.
Fortunately, his Fiend Hand fanned a gust across the flame, finally extinguishing the Black Candle.
Holding the ordinary candle with its orange flame, he brought it close to the extinguished Black Candle.
The orange flame suddenly licked the Black Candle's wick. A tiny orange-red flame flashed to life atop it, then billowed outward, instantly illuminating an area twenty or thirty feet around them!
Standing in the orange-red glow, Su Wu immediately felt streams of warmth scurrying through his body like mice.
Wherever those currents passed, his skin took on a golden-red sheen. Even the cells inside his body seemed to be multiplying, dividing, and growing!
This was no illusion!
In barely a dozen seconds, his hair had grown about a centimeter longer!
The growth of his hair was the most obvious outward sign.
Inside, Su Wu felt his physical strength rising rapidly. He seemed to have endless energy, his poor state of health swept away in an instant, leaving him brimming with vigor and vitality!
He turned to look behind him.
Jiang Yingying's hair had also grown considerably without her noticing.
Her cheeks were rosy and her eyes shone, a stark contrast to her earlier listlessness.
Even Emergency Can, cradled in her arms, had acquired a metallic sheen on every feather. His sharp black beak gleamed darkly, and the comb atop his head had become a more vivid, fiery scarlet!
Once lit with the orange flame from the Little Temple, the Black Candle dramatically improves the physical condition of living creatures within its light?!
Is that improvement temporary or permanent?
Su Wu carefully observed the changes in his body under the candlelight. He soon discovered that the Black Candle's orange flame had given him the greatest boost during the first dozen seconds.
After that, his physical condition still improved slightly, but by less than one percent of the initial increase.
Then he extinguished the Black Candle.
The warm currents flowing through him slowly faded.
But the feeling of strength filling his body and his newfound vigor did not disappear with them.
-Once lit with an orange flame, the Black Candle permanently improved the physical condition of living creatures within its range!
The improvement was most pronounced during the first dozen seconds of using it.
After that, the rate of improvement plummeted.
It was roughly equivalent to the boost he received from eating half a Whole Roast Lamb while empowered by the Strongman Spellmark.
With this effect, could the Black Candle be brought into the Secret Treasury Domain and used as an offering, or even as an implement for Binding?
Su Wu put the Black Candle away.
He kept the ordinary candle burning, preserving the flame he had brought out of the temple.
The Black Candle, lit from the temple's flame, could improve the physical condition of ordinary living creatures.
Could it also suppress fiends other than the Eye Fiend?
That was what Su Wu intended to test next.
He had excluded the Eye Fiend from his experiments because, while the Black Candle was burning earlier, the red lanterns had risen into the sky once.
The Black Candle's light had mingled with the red glow of the lanterns without producing any special reaction.
"How do you feel?
"Does it feel like you've gotten a lot stronger?" Holding the candle, Su Wu walked toward the car behind him as he asked Jiang Yingying.
Jiang Yingying hesitantly nodded.
"That's no illusion.
"This candle really did improve your physical condition." Su Wu opened the driver's door and got in first.
After him, Jiang Yingying hesitated a moment, then climbed into the back seat.
The car started up again and sped toward unfamiliar territory.
Inside the car, Jiang Yingying also gathered her courage and began talking with Su Wu.
"Ding-dong! Ding-dong! Ding-dong!"
After talking with Su Wu, Jiang Yingying finally put some of her misgivings to rest.
She relaxed against the seat, only for the phone in her pocket to suddenly begin chiming with one notification after another.
The sounds drew Su Wu's attention as well.
She gave him an apologetic look and took the phone out of her pocket, then saw a stream of messages popping up on the screen.
"Little Tiger invited you to join the Boyu No. 3 Work Group."
"Wang Zhiyou invited you..."
"Huang Zhicheng invited you..."
Jiang Yingying frowned. She did not recognize a single one of the people inviting her to some work group.
She unlocked the screen and opened the social media app.
But the chats she saw were completely different from those on her own account.
A group chat called "Fishing Guys";
the Peaceful Garden Tenants Group;
Outdoor Fishing Guys' Gear Encyclopedia...
Jiang Yingying was certain she had never joined any of the groups on the screen or added any of those contacts as friends!
What was going on?
Had her phone caught a virus?
Instinctively, she tapped into her profile.
There, to her shock, she saw that the username was "Biscuit-Eating Young Master," and the account ID was completely different from hers!
How had her phone logged into someone else's social media account for no reason?
Jiang Yingying finally realized what had happened.
Just then, Su Wu asked her, "What's wrong?"
"Noth..." She tried to log out of the account, but no matter what she did, she could not find the logout button. All she could do was watch helplessly as invitation after invitation flashed across the screen.
An inexplicable fear rose inside her.
What was happening felt deeply unnatural.
"I don't know how, but my phone logged into someone else's WeChat account, and now I can't log out no matter what I do..."
She pressed her lips together and instinctively turned to Su Wu, hoping he might have some advice.
"Is the WeChat username Biscuit-Eating Young Master?"
Su Wu turned the steering wheel, a premonition already forming in his mind.
So the Trapped Corpse Fiend really wasn't that easy to shake off...
"Yes-huh?" Jiang Yingying looked up at the rearview mirror. Certain that Su Wu could not possibly see her phone's screen through it, she was astonished. "How did you know?"
"Because Biscuit-Eating Young Master is my account." He gave a wry grin. "Another fiend is tracking me through the phone you're carrying.
"To be safe, you'd better throw it away."
"Ah!"
Startled by his words, Jiang Yingying hesitated with the phone in her hand. Then she opened the window and threw it out.
The wind tore the "ding-dong, ding-dong" of its notifications into fragments.
The car passed through a bustling commercial street.
Countless vehicles stood at all angles across the road.
Not long after Jiang Yingying threw out her phone, lights began flashing inside the pockets of the headless corpses in car after car.
As the black Cruze passed, all kinds of notification sounds began ringing out from those vehicles in succession.
"Little Tiger invited you to join the Boyu No. 3 Work Group."
"Wang Zhiyou invited you..."
"Huang Zhicheng invited you..."
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