Chapter 12

Chapter 12

I glanced to either side. Sure enough, this wasn’t the valley entrance where we’d made camp earlier. The mountain path here was much narrower, with cliffs leaning in from both sides, leaving only a thin strip of sky overhead.

“No, seriously, how did they do this?”

I couldn’t wrap my head around it. We’d set up the formation. Hua Yuling had released her spirit gu insects, and the Golden Cicada Gu inside her wasn’t exactly easy to mess with either. So how had they managed to move our tent here without any of us noticing?

This was way too unscientific, right?

Hua Yuling said, “When science doesn’t make sense, can you try metaphysics? What were those two things just now? Zombies?”

“No. Zombies have stiff limbs. They don’t regenerate severed limbs, and they definitely don’t vanish into thin air.” I tightened my grip on the sword and used it to push aside the vines. “There might be something hidden behind these vines.”

Pale moonlight shone on the reddish-brown mountain wall, revealing a deathly white face, a sunken skull, and bulging eyeballs. It was the male corpse from earlier.

“Fuck!”

I jumped back in fright.

I’d thought those two had some profound ninja-like secret art for hiding themselves. Turned out they had just been hiding behind the vines.

The mountain wall slanted inward, so the vines hanging there were like a curtain, with quite a large space behind them.

The male corpse let out a creepy “kekeke” laugh and reached his right hand toward my Peach Wood Sword. Only then did I realize that the infant arm from earlier had already grown into a strange-looking tentacle.

The tentacle split into two in midair. One hand seized my sword, while the other coiled around my waist. It was so fast that my vision blurred, and the sword in my hand disappeared. The male corpse wrapped me up and nimbly climbed upward along the vines.

My head slammed into the mountain wall, leaving me dizzy and seeing stars, while a violent twisting pain shot through my waist. Gritting my teeth, I reached out with one hand and clung desperately to a branch.

With my other hand, I wiped some blood from my neck, formed a Vajra Seal, and struck the tentacle hard.

And then… nothing.

My fingers felt like they’d hit a wall of bronze and iron. They nearly snapped. I screamed, my face turning even paler than that male ghost’s.

“Qiao Moyu!” Hua Yuling and Jiang Haoyan shouted my name from below, both of them frantic as they yanked at the vines. “Where are you?”

“I’m fine!”

The more dangerous things got, the clearer my mind became.

I ignored the tentacle around my waist and pulled a Half-Tael Coin from my pocket. The Half-Tael Coin was the first currency Emperor Qin Shi Huang promoted across the entire empire after unifying the realm. It also ranked first among the Great Five Emperor Coins and contained an extremely powerful force of yang metal.

I flipped the copper coin over, pinched it between my index and middle fingers, chanted the Golden Light Mantra, then slashed hard at the vines.

Metal overcomes wood. The moment the vines touched the copper coin, they snapped apart with a clean crack, and the male corpse and I both fell from the air to the ground.

When I hit the ground, I realized the female corpse had fallen too.

Only, she was lying facedown and motionless, with a puddle of yellow blood spreading around her. She looked like she was already dead.

A legend suddenly flashed through my mind.

Deep in the desert, there was a kind of evil creature called a Sand Ghost.

They moved in packs at the bottom of cliffs, releasing wind and sand to confuse passing travelers and make their vehicles fall. After that, they would occupy the victims’ bodies.

Because of the nature of sand, they didn’t fear water or fire. Even if their limbs were cut off, they could draw power from elsewhere and grow them back.

And the newly grown limbs were closest to the primal essence of sand. For a short time, they didn’t fear Daoist arts.

In other words, if I wanted to kill a Sand Ghost, I’d either have to do what that female ghost had done and make it drink my blood directly, damaging its internal organs so badly it couldn’t regenerate…

Or I was screwed.

If only its limbs were injured, it would just keep growing new ones, and the freshly grown parts would be immune to my Daoist arts. There was no way to fight that.

One was already hard enough to deal with, and Sand Ghosts lived in groups.

At that thought, I sprang up from the ground with a kip-up.

“We can’t beat them! Run!”