Chapter Eighty-Seven: The False Yan Xian and the Strange Fragrance

Tiger Leap Gorge was still utterly dark. Ever since Fang Mu had driven away the cold, the surroundings had fallen silent again, leaving only an endless blackness that no eye could hope to measure.

As he walked, Fang Mu suddenly stopped and looked back.

Tap... tap... tap...

A string of footsteps sounded from the darkness behind him. The gorge was deathly quiet, and the abrupt rhythm stood in stark contrast to the surrounding blackness, each step seeming to press directly on a man's heartbeat.

"Footsteps..."

Fang Mu took hold of the pig-slaughtering knife in his right hand and walked toward the source of the sound.

He had barely taken two steps when the footsteps in the darkness paused, and a voice suddenly rang out.

"Brother Fang, why are you here?"

Fang Mu focused his eyes and saw someone he knew emerge from the darkness: Yan Xian.

Yan Xian came out of the gloom, his clothes in complete disarray, torn here and there, a sorry and miserable sight.

The moment he saw Fang Mu, he let out a long breath and visibly relaxed.

"Hurry up and move. There's danger behind us!" Yan Xian said urgently, glancing back again and again.

Fang Mu frowned. "Where did you go? What's behind us?"

Yan Xian looked tense. "I don't know either. I was suddenly separated from you. There are things behind us that can devour blood vitality, and I can't find their physical form. Let's run first and see if there's any way to deal with this up ahead."

Fang Mu glanced at the darkness behind Yan Xian, then at Yan Xian's disheveled clothes and bedraggled appearance, and nodded before turning to lead the way.

The two of them walked one after the other through the gorge. Yan Xian stared at the golden glow around Fang Mu and rubbed his eyes.

"Brother Fang," Yan Xian said, squinting, "could you put away that golden light for a moment? There doesn't seem to be any danger right now, and my eyes are about to give out."

Fang Mu had been leading the way in front; hearing this, he stopped and said simply, "All right."

He withdrew the Twin Golden Body Art, and the golden light vanished, plunging the surroundings once more into darkness.

After deactivating the art, a faint smile curved Fang Mu's lips.

Without the radiance of the Twin Golden Body Art, the entire gorge was left with nothing but darkness and the sound of footsteps.

"Brother Fang."

In the darkness, Yan Xian walked up behind Fang Mu and said, "I feel like... uh—"

He had only gotten halfway through his sentence before stopping. A flash of gold swept past...

The Twin Golden Body Art once again enveloped Fang Mu, illuminating the darkness around him.

A heavy blade stopped at Fang Mu's chest, blocked by the Twin Golden Body Art.

"You..." Yan Xian had barely uttered a word when he saw a slaughtering knife appear above his head.

The knife, bright with reflected light, swept down from above. Yan Xian's head flew high into the air, yet no blood spilled.

At the severed neck, there was only a bottomless darkness.

Fang Mu extended a hand, and it passed effortlessly through Yan Xian's chest.

The notification sound did not come. The corpse-searching art still had not been triggered.

Yan Xian stared blankly at Fang Mu, then the corners of his mouth slowly lifted into a grotesque smile.

Fang Mu shook his head. "A pity."

In truth, ever since Yan Xian appeared, Fang Mu had felt that something was off.

The first time Fang Mu had met Yan Xian in the shop, Yan Xian had asked for another slash, simply so the wound would be symmetrical.

From that moment on, Fang Mu had felt that Yan Xian was obsessive-compulsive, and to an extreme degree at that.

A man like that was now dressed in such a chaotic fashion that even a normal person would feel uncomfortable looking at him, yet Yan Xian himself seemed to feel nothing at all. That was suspicious.

Of course, this had only been a suspicion. But when Yan Xian told Fang Mu to withdraw the Twin Golden Body Art, Fang Mu had formed a plan to lure him into revealing himself.

As expected, the instant Fang Mu deactivated the Twin Golden Body Art, Yan Xian attacked.

From the wound and his behavior, it was clear that this Yan Xian was a counterfeit.

The flying head dissolved into nothingness, and the body without a head likewise vanished, as if it had never existed at all. Everything returned to its original state.

Looking at his empty left hand, Fang Mu thought to himself, Why is it that I still can't trigger the corpse-searching art?

From the bones he had encountered at the beginning to the fake Yan Xian before him now, if these things were not uncanny, then it truly made no sense at all.

Their bizarre forms, and their strange postmortem appearances, were not characteristics a human could possibly possess.

Fang Mu felt as though he had walked into a dead end. If they were not uncanny, then what were they?

Just as he was pondering this, a strange fragrance drifted over.

It had appeared abruptly, carried from far away, and in the deep darkness there was no way to see where it came from.

"Is it starting again?" Fang Mu frowned slightly, lifted the pig-slaughtering knife, and walked toward the source of the fragrance.

The deeper he went, the stronger the scent became, until at last it was so thick it made the whole body feel uneasy.

Fang Mu walked a little farther, then stopped as he looked ahead.

Not far in front of him was a mountain of corpses and a sea of blood.

Under the light of the Twin Golden Body Art, countless bodies had been piled up in layer upon layer, with blood seeping out through the gaps between them.

Those corpses were scarlet all over, and wisps of white vapor rose from them, mingling together and floating in midair. Fang Mu finally understood where that fragrance had come from.

Hum...

Just after he discovered the mass of corpses, the ground began to tremble.

The corpse mountain ahead was shaken loose by the vibrations and slid down, thudding onto the ground.

Then a chilling scene unfolded.

The densely packed corpses, like rotten flesh without bones, rose crookedly and unevenly from the ground.

If it had been only one corpse, that would have been one thing. But when every inch of sight was filled with standing corpses, the scene became both shocking and terrifying.

After a brief pause, the mass of corpses rushed toward Fang Mu.

They moved swiftly, and under the illumination of the Twin Golden Body Art, the bodies behind them stretched on endlessly, with no end in sight.

Blood and water splashed in all directions as they ran, and in the blink of an eye they were less than five yards from Fang Mu.

Fang Mu raised the pig-slaughtering knife, ready to strike, when the corpse swarm ahead suddenly stopped.

The air fell silent, and the motionless corpses began to change.

Starting from their scalps, a long crack appeared, extending along the head and splitting each face cleanly in two.

The heads were divided by that crack, and a strange fragrance drifted from the seam. Then the corpses turned into wisps of blue smoke and vanished.

The fragrance instantly spread through the entire gorge, leaving Fang Mu slightly dizzy.

That dizziness lasted only a moment before disappearing without a trace.

The fragrance vanished as well, coming and going in an instant.

Fang Mu looked down and found that even the blood on the ground had disappeared; the earth was clean and bare.

"What is this supposed to mean? And that's it?"

The situation was exceedingly strange. The fragrance had appeared only briefly, brought with it a mass of corpses, and yet the corpses had been all thunder and no rain, turning to blue smoke in an instant without affecting Fang Mu at all.

"Could it be that this wasn't the main thing?"

A thought surfaced in Fang Mu's mind. The moment it did, he suddenly realized something.

He was hungry.