Chapter 20
Chapter 20
[The ghosts that feed on carrion were refused passage by the ferryman of the River of Forgetfulness. They can only wander the mortal realm, for only here can they find corpses to consume. Whenever hunger drives them to the brink, if they fail to hunt down prey, they have no qualms about devouring their own kind. To them, the flesh of their brethren is a rare delicacy – rotting meat steeped in untold quantities of toxins.]
The Carrion Ghost was feeding.
Once a newly awakened ghost successfully fed, it would gain even greater power.
This Carrion Ghost was far more difficult to deal with than the Rakshasa they had encountered last time. If this had been Xie Qingling at the beginning, barehanded and with nothing to rely on, she would have died at its hands more times than she could count.
Watching the Carrion Ghost devour its companions with terrifying speed, Xie Qingling drew her brows into a deep frown. Unfortunately, she had no means of attacking from a distance. From where she stood, it was already too late to rush over and stop it.
Ye Anran also sensed that something was terribly wrong.
She plucked out four of her black needles and pinched them between her fingers, then fired them all at once.
Four Carrion Ghosts died at once and dissolved into wisps of green smoke. But it was not enough.
Compared with the rate at which they were eliminating the Carrion Ghosts here, the creature over there was clearly swallowing them much faster.
In the space of an instant, the mutated Carrion Ghost gobbled down seven Carrion Ghosts in rapid succession.
Its body ballooned, reaching a height of more than ten meters in the blink of an eye.
Its enormous frame punched straight through the ceiling, leaving the slab between two floors wedged around its waist.
A blue-black head sprouted from its neck. It still had no features, only an enormous mouth occupying its face. More than a dozen arms jutted haphazardly from its body, making it look both bizarre and horrifying.
The Carrion Ghost roared, then lowered its head and looked down at Xie Qingling and Ye Anran. Afterward, it lumbered toward the two tiny humans.
Every step of its massive body made the teaching building quake violently. Its body, jammed between the floors, acted like a saw. With each stride came a grating screech as it sawed the floor slab clean in two!
Cement dust showered down, exposing the steel rebar buried within the concrete.
The mutated Carrion Ghost had not yet reached Xie Qingling and Ye Anran, but it had already demonstrated the power it had gained through evolution.
The five skeletons Xie Qingling had summoned immediately converged on the Carrion Ghost.
This time, however, the Carrion Ghost let out a piercing shriek. The massive shock wave hurled all five of them away.
These skeletons were no longer capable of contending with a Carrion Ghost whose power had surged after successfully “feeding.”
“Run!” Xie Qingling shouted. “Split up!”
Ye Anran did not question her decision. She chose the direction opposite Xie Qingling’s and ran for her life.
There was only one Carrion Ghost. Faced with two humans fleeing in different directions, it could only choose one.
It chose Xie Qingling.
The Carrion Ghost raised an enormous foot and lumbered after her.
Its strength had increased, but its speed had diminished. It moved much more slowly now, buying Xie Qingling a little room to breathe.
Xie Qingling ran farther and farther, crossing from the west wing to the east, then climbing from the third floor to the fourth. Just as it seemed she was about to escape its grasp, the Carrion Ghost released a furious roar.
Then it raised more than a dozen palms at once and brought them all crashing down against the floor with tremendous force.
In that instant, the load-bearing walls began to tremble. Even the sturdy concrete floor cracked apart in an instant like a spreading spiderweb.
The ever-lengthening cracks raced all the way beneath Xie Qingling’s feet. Chunks of concrete tumbled down, and the floor under her was no longer stable.
Xie Qingling stepped into empty air and fell straight through.
Everything happened too quickly. Before Xie Qingling could find anything to brace against, she plunged through a crack in the fourth floor and crashed onto the third.
The exposed rebar tore a gash across her wrist so deep that stark white bone showed through. Bright red blood immediately splattered across the floor.
The rich scent of blood drove the already berserk Carrion Ghost into an even greater frenzy.
Its eyes reddened with ravenous hunger. Following the scent to where the blood smelled strongest, it tore apart every hard, obstructive block of concrete in its path with a pair of hands as it advanced.
Before long, the Carrion Ghost had covered roughly five meters, and half of the teaching building’s east wing had been thoroughly demolished in its wake. The walls on the third and fourth floors leaned at an angle, looking as though they might collapse at any moment.
The Carrion Ghost pressed forward and finally reached the heart of the area where the scent of blood was strongest.
But by then, Xie Qingling was nowhere to be seen.
There was no one there, only a pool of bright red blood left on the floor.
The Carrion Ghost shrieked and pounded its chest and stamped its feet in fury.
Keeping her body low, Ye Anran was also gradually approaching the spot where Xie Qingling had fallen.
Of course Ye Anran had seen the enormous commotion over here just now.
She had also smelled the heavy scent of blood.
Ye Anran’s first reaction was to find Xie Qingling, who had lost so much blood, and treat her wound as soon as possible.
But when she finally reached the place where Xie Qingling had fallen, she encountered the same problem as the Carrion Ghost – Xie Qingling was nowhere to be found.
Where had she gone?
Judging by the large pool of blood on the floor, she had to be badly injured.
Why would she still run off in that condition?!
Did she want to die?!
Ye Anran went numb with disbelief.
She tried to contact Xie Qingling through her earpiece, but Xie Qingling’s bracelet had not yet been granted the necessary access, so there was no way to reach her.
Just as Ye Anran was wondering whether she should report a death to the Director, Xie Qingling appeared.
She was drenched in blood and looked as though she had just been fished out of a pool of it.
“Oh!” The moment Ye Anran saw her, her grief turned to joy, and she raced toward Xie Qingling.
She needed to close the distance before she could heal her.
But Xie Qingling seemed not to see her at all. Instead, she charged straight toward the Carrion Ghost.
She held a transparent glass container in one hand. Something was inside it – tiny white granules that looked a little like grains of millet.
Xie Qingling raised the glass container high, then flung all the tiny white objects inside at the Carrion Ghost.
The white objects scattered across the Carrion Ghost’s blue-black body –
And did absolutely nothing.
The scene Ye Anran had imagined, in which Xie Qingling single-handedly turned the tide, never happened.
Not only did it fail to happen, but Xie Qingling immediately spun around and yelled at her, “Run! It’s coming after us!”
Ye Anran: “…”
What sin had she committed to end up fighting ghosts here with this unreliable rookie?
Clenching her teeth, Ye Anran ran while healing Xie Qingling. When she saw the wound on Xie Qingling’s arm, so deep that white bone was clearly visible, her brows knotted and she could not help roaring, “You are far too reckless! You’ve lost so much blood – you could go into shock and die! Why are you still running at a time like this? You should stay put, find somewhere safe to hide, and wait for me to come save you!”
God, Ye Anran had lost count of how many times she had already called her reckless.
Xie Qingling, meanwhile, remained perfectly calm, as though she were not the one who had been injured. “It’s fine. I still have at least a minute before I go into shock.”
“…” Fine, she was the professional. Good for her!
Ye Anran could not help rolling her eyes. At the same time, she cast Rejuvenation and saved Xie Qingling’s life.
Her wound healed, but the bloodstains covering her did not fade. Xie Qingling remained a little figure drenched from head to toe in blood, a horrifying sight to behold.
Behind them, the Carrion Ghost felt it had been made a fool of. It brushed at those tiny, inconspicuous white objects on its body, then resumed its advance, continuing its pursuit of the two hateful humans!
As Ye Anran heard the shriek rapidly closing in behind her and smelled the rotten stench already filling her nose, her face went paler and paler.
“Head higher! Get to the roof!” Without looking back, Xie Qingling swiftly made her decision.
The two wove through the ruined remains of the east wing, leaping from exposed rebar to half-collapsed walls. They quickly climbed onto the rooftop.
The Carrion Ghost was still below.
The small distance they had temporarily opened up made them a little safer.
But at that moment, instead of continuing to run, Xie Qingling came to a halt and turned around to face the Carrion Ghost head-on.
She looked very much as though she intended to have a proper fight with it.
She was crazy! Completely crazy!
Was Ye Anran going to die here alongside this lunatic rookie?
Ye Anran could not fathom Xie Qingling’s intentions at all. Nothing Xie Qingling did was within her control, and the whole situation was making her head throb. Gritting her teeth, she said, “We’re definitely finished!”
“With the strength of two green rookies like us, there’s no way we can defeat this Carrion Ghost,” Ye Anran muttered.
“We should find a way to hang on until the Director arrives.”
As a support specialist who had never once imagined fighting a ghost this way, Ye Anran was under an incredible amount of pressure.
It was time to give up on attacking the Carrion Ghost.
One of them specialized in control and the other in healing. Neither was a damage dealer. For the two of them, delaying the Carrion Ghost as long as possible while waiting for reinforcements was the safest course of action!
But Xie Qingling said, “No. What you should say is that it’s doomed.”
“…Huh?” What was she talking about?
“Look at the Carrion Ghost below,” Xie Qingling said.
Ye Anran followed the direction of her finger. The Carrion Ghost was standing on the fourth floor’s open-air walkway, baring its teeth at them.
Those tiny specks of white still dotted its blue-black skin.
Wait. Something was wrong.
That was not the important part.
Why had the Carrion Ghost that had been relentlessly hunting them stopped chasing?
Not only had it stopped chasing them, but it remained rooted in place, looking as if it were… scratching an itch?
No, it was not merely scratching an itch.
The Carrion Ghost released furious, frustrated roars from time to time, but on closer listening, its rage was also filled with unbearable pain.
Ye Anran stood in astonishment and peered hard in the Carrion Ghost’s direction. It was spinning endlessly in place, the dozen or so hands on its body ceaselessly… beating itself?
Ye Anran froze, then asked Xie Qingling, “What did you scatter on it?”
“Maggots. More precisely, fly larvae,” Xie Qingling said. “This is covered in one of our forensic medicine courses. By taking advantage of flies’ carrion-feeding habits and observing the four stages of their development from the eggs they lay on a corpse, we can infer the victim’s time of death.”
Ye Anran felt as though she had grasped something.
She murmured, “Right, maggots feed on decaying flesh. In traditional Chinese medicine, maggots are also used to treat necrotic wounds. They can clean them even more thoroughly than cutting the dead tissue away by hand…”
“Those maggots are dead now.”
Xie Qingling dropped to one knee and pressed one hand against the ground.
In a low voice, she said, “Which means this is my home turf now.”