Why the old man? What was he doing next door?
The question sank deep into Mo Fan's mind and locked itself there—buried under the crushing exhaustion that followed the severed link.
Trapped in a brain that was one overload away from a complete shutdown.
He had no processing power left to untangle the conspiracy playing out on the other side of the wall.
Mo Fan bit down hard, tasting blood, and poured every last scrap of his remaining consciousness into 003's body—flooding it like a dam breaking.
Throwing himself back into the life-or-death struggle against Venerable Miasma Dust at the village ruins.
Meanwhile, outside in the side courtyard...
The figure Mo Fan had braced himself against like it was a peerless assassin closing in for the kill—was standing in front of the neighboring guest room, legs shaking like leaves in an autumn wind.
It was the kindly old village head of Linshui Village. He was gripping a dim, foul-smelling oil lamp with both hands, his knuckles entirely white.
This was never supposed to be his job.
He was a broken-down early Qi Condensation mortal—a mere puppet in Venerable Miasma Dust's grand scheme.
He knew the village was laced with a massive illusion array. He knew the wandering cultivators lured here would eventually become consumable raw material for his master's cultivation.
But the one who handled the "guiding" and "harvesting" had always been Fang Tong, that cold-blooded enforcer. The village head's role was simple: play along, act the peacemaker, and stay out of the way.
but now, everything had gone to hell.
The ancestral hall had been stomped flat by a bone colossus that appeared from nowhere. The array nodes and spirit tablets his master had spent years meticulously cultivating were destroyed in an instant.
Worse—Fang Tong, that useless wretch, had gotten his right arm sheared off by the same creature. He was finished.
And at the village entrance, his master was locked in a furious battle with that monster.
His master's cultivation was already dangerously unstable and required regular consumption of cultivators to sustain itself.
Less than half an incense stick ago, a harsh spiritual decree had arrived—an order to immediately "guide" the wandering cultivators in the side courtyard, the ones already deep in the illusion, to his master's location.
The master needed fresh cultivators' blood essence and soul force. Urgently.
Enough to force himself back to the true strength of peak Foundation Establishment.
How did it come to this?
The old village head stood shivering outside Wu Feng and San Niang's door. He was just an early Qi Condensation cultivator. A mortal, practically!
And he'd been shoved into doing this deadly errand.
If Mo Fan could have activated a god's-eye view to see this scene right now, he probably would have coughed up blood on the spot.
He had nearly suffered brain death from instantaneous overload, all because of this shaking old man.
Gulp.
The village head swallowed with extreme difficulty, listening to the sounds coming through the thin wooden door.
Ragged, animal-like panting. Unhinged, crawling laughter.
He knew what it meant. The array's "cooking time" had been reached.
The two prey inside had thoroughly degenerated into madmen ruled by their desires.
Die or be killed... if I don't bring them over, Master will absolutely burn me alive as a sky lantern when he gets back...
The old village head drew a long breath. His withered hand reached out, trembling, and slowly pushed open the unlatched door.
However, fatal disasters often hide within the smallest of mistakes.
Creeeak—
The door gap opened. In the faint glow of the special oil lamp in his hand, the old village head saw what was inside the room.
Wu Feng and San Niang were on their knees on the floor. Clothes in disarray. Eyes blood-red. Drool running from the corners of their mouths.
They were clawing and grabbing at empty air, making frantic tearing and hugging motions.
Their deranged, demon-possessed appearance looking ten times more terrifying in the dim light than any actual ghost!
"AH—!"
Raw terror seized the old man's fragile heart. He gasped. His already-trembling legs buckled violently.
CRASH!
A sharp crack of shattering ceramic exploded in the dead-silent side courtyard.
The special oil lamp—the one designed to shield against the illusion—hit the hard bluestone floor.
The ceramic shattered, and the black oil inside, reeking and acrid, splashed outward in every direction.
The flames leapt up with a whoosh, illuminating the entire guest room in lurching, unsteady light.
The sudden sound and fire hit the room like a meteor striking a still lake—and shattered whatever fragile equilibrium had existed.
For the two robber cultivators inside, who had long been deeply eroded by the illusion's grip...
They had been drowning in the ecstatic fantasy: they had successfully counter-killed Lu Xiaoqi, seized countless heavy treasures, and mastered a supreme demonic art. They were celebrating.
Now the suppressing lamp was broken. The scents were disrupted. The firelight stabbed at their eyes.
And the world in front of them underwent an extremely bizarre, grotesque secondary distortion.
"Immortal masters—spare me! Please, spare my life!"
The terrified old village head ignored the spreading fire. He scrambled and crawled to his knees, kowtowing frantically toward the two in the room, crying and shouting tearfully.
"It wasn't my fault! It was the demonic bewitchment—my master forced me to come!"
But those desperate, wailing words—filtered through Wu Feng and San Niang's completely corrupted cognition—became something else entirely.
In their warped hallucination, the figure kneeling on the floor wasn't the village head.
It was Fang Tong.
In the illusion, "Fang Tong" was on his knees before them, sobbing bitterly and begging for his life.
While frantically pulling out massive handfuls of crystal-clear spirit stones and rare treasures radiating brilliant light from his robes, trying to buy back his miserable existence.
"Ha! I knew it! That old fox was hiding more goods!"
Extreme greed obliterated the last shred of their humanity in an instant.
Wu Feng and San Niang lunged like two starving wolves that had caught the scent of blood—eyes blazing with a terrifying green light.
Forgetting even to use spells, relying entirely on pure cultivator physical instinct, they threw themselves forward!
"HELP—SOMEONE HELP—!"
The old village head's final, miserable shriek was swallowed immediately by the frantic biting and tearing frenzy.
And filtered through their hallucination, the tooth-aching, nauseating crack of the old man's breaking bones and his screams transformed—into the extremely pleasant, bright chime of spirit stones clinking together.
The stench of blood became the exotic fragrance of heavenly materials and earthly treasures.
A hair-raising horror played out in the firelight.
With a sickening, tearing crack, San Niang, using her immense strength, wrenched a section of blood-soaked calf bone free from the ruined corpse with her bare hands.
Her face was intoxicated.
Cradling the bloody severed bone tightly in her arms, her fingers gently stroked the stark white bone splinters still threaded with shredded flesh.
Wearing a look of deranged, tender, perverted fascination.
"Husband, look..."
San Niang's eyes were glazed over, her voice soft and murmuring.
"This old miser was hiding it deep... this is premium, century-old red sandalwood... we could sell this for a sky-high price..."
"Yes... it's all ours now."
She turned her head, her face flushed with the deep satisfaction of revenge fulfilled and returning fully loaded.
"Husband, tell me, once we have all these treasures—should we go to the Dragon Capital, or should we..."
Squelch.
The words died. A dull, wet sound—a sharp blade punching through flesh—cut off her beautiful vision for the future without warning.
San Niang's body went completely rigid. She looked down, staring in disbelief at her own chest.
A cold, narrow black dagger—quenched in dark purple venom—had been driven into her from behind without any warning at all, punching straight through her heart.
The cold tip emerged from her front chest, dripping warm blood.
Wu Feng's Life-Bound Hidden Weapon. The one he never went without.
"Hus... band?"
San Niang turned her head back with immense difficulty.
What she saw was not the husband who had shared hardships and committed murder and robbery alongside her for years.
It was Wu Feng's face—completely unrecognizable. Veins bulging hideously. Eyes so red they looked ready to bleed.
In Wu Feng's utterly collapsed, Qi Deviation hallucination...
The figure in front of him wasn't San Niang at all! It was the master! That towering, terrifying old monster who was trying to snatch away his peerless demonic art and his floor full of heavy treasures!
"So you're that bullshit master?!"
Wu Feng's rationality had completely collapsed.
He wrenched the dagger hilt in a frenzy, screaming at the empty air, spittle flying all over San Niang's face.
"Like hell! It's MINE! These heavenly treasures are MINE! ALL OF IT IS MINE!"
"San Niang! San Niang, where are you?! Come out! I killed him! Come loot the treasures!"
He drove the dagger viciously, deeper into her heart—and in the exact same breath, called her name out into the empty darkness with desperate, earnest longing.
The rapid drain of her life force, and the absolute agony of her heart being pierced, hit San Niang like the most potent sobering medicine imaginable.
It shattered the array's shackles in an instant. The illusion peeled away like a broken mirror, piece by piece.
The mountains of gold and silver—vanished. The supreme demonic art—vanished. Her vision finally restored its clarity.
She looked down at what she was cradling so tightly against her chest—the so-called "premium red sandalwood." It was a mortal man's severed calf, soaked in blood.
She raised her eyes.
She looked at the husband in front of her—the man gripping the dagger hilt dead tight, driving a blade through her heart.
While screaming her name into the empty darkness, his face looking like a possessed demon.
In this final moment of life, her face—the face of a woman past her prime, who had spent a lifetime scheming—held not a shred of complaint.
Only a single clear tear. And a trace of sad, pathetic regret.
People die for wealth. Birds die for food.
They had schemed their entire lives, living in the shadows like rats in a sewer. And in the end, they had died to the greed buried deepest in their own hearts.
She said nothing. She even tried to lift her hand—to gently stroke Wu Feng's maddened face one last time.
But sadly, accompanied by the fading of her life force, she found it difficult to even maintain the motion of raising her hand.
She could only sink—still holding that so-called "red sandalwood"—quietly, without a sound, into the messy pool of blood on the floor.
"YES! I DID IT!"
Wu Feng kicked the "master's" corpse aside and threw his head back with a wild howl that didn't sound human.
The violent stimulation sent his spiritual energy into an uncontrolled spiral—surging and crashing through his meridians in reverse.
The adrenaline spike brought on by this Qi Deviation gave him a false, delirious sense of absolute omnipotence!
"My demonic art is complete! I am at peak Qi Condensation! HAHAHAHA! San Niang, San Niang, where are you?! Come see! Come see what I've done!"
He turned, still gripping the blood-dripping black dagger.
Those crimson, deranged eyes cut through the burning firelight and locked dead onto the wall next door—the guest room belonging to Mo Fan.
In Wu Feng's completely shattered perception, where only slaughter and greed remained...
Behind that tightly shut, rotting wooden door lay the final, supreme heavy treasure he needed to seize now that his demonic art was complete!
Treasure... mine... all mine...
Dragging the bloody dagger across the floor, step by step, a hair-raising, sinister grin splitting his face—Wu Feng walked toward Mo Fan's room.