Chapter 113
Chapter 113
Bai Su ran for all she was worth, with no idea how far she had gone.
She followed the reeds along the river all the way into the nearby forest. Only when it seemed she had finally shaken off her pursuers did she dare stop to catch her breath.
Huff, huff!
Still panting, she tried to spit out the strange fragment of black leaf so she could examine it more closely.
But then terror seized her.
Where was it?
“Where’s that piece of black leaf? It was huge! It was in my mouth just a moment ago!”
How could it have vanished?
She definitely hadn’t dropped it. Though she had been sprinting for her life, she had kept her mouth clamped tightly shut the entire way. Something might have gotten in, but there was no way anything could have fallen out.
Wait!
It suddenly dawned on Bai Su.
“Don’t tell me…I was so nervous and running so fast that I accidentally swallowed it?”
Panic surged through her. She carefully retraced her memories and focused on the taste in her mouth.
A faint sweetness lingered deep in her throat.
Her guess had been right. In her panic, she had clenched her mouth too tightly while fleeing and accidentally swallowed the fragment of leaf.
That only terrified her more.
She had no idea what the strange black object even was, and now it was in her stomach. What if it caused some horrible mutation in her body?
Bai Su might have been a spirit, but she had been raised by an upright feng shui master and considered herself one of the good ones, not some sinister, twisted creature.
She was deeply afraid of what the leaf might do to her. After all, power that increased too quickly usually came from wicked paths.
It wasn’t long before Bai Su began to feel something.
The black, leaflike fragment was taking effect.
Wave after wave of searing heat rose from her stomach and surged through every part of her body. Even her breath felt scorching hot, and the fur all over her body seemed ready to burst into flame.
“It hurts! It hurts! It hurts!”
Bai Su let out a piercing scream. Then she lost consciousness and collapsed to the ground.
She had no idea how much time passed.
By the time she woke, the sun was already high in the sky.
Bai Su looked around and discovered that she was lying in a pool of thick, ink-black sludge that reeked of blood and decay.
Startled, she hurriedly leaped out of the disgusting black ooze.
Yet that casual hop carried her more than fifteen feet.
“What’s going on?!”
Bai Su stared down at herself in astonishment. Something about her body seemed wrong.
The ground looked farther away than usual, while the grass and low shrubs around her appeared much shorter.
After only a moment’s confusion, realization struck.
“My body got bigger–much bigger! That’s why my strength, speed, and jumping ability have all increased too.”
She was stunned.
During the years she had lived with Mr. Bai, she had read books about strange phenomena and listened to him discuss many such matters.
She knew that once an animal awakened to intelligence and began cultivating arcane arts, the most obvious changes appeared in its body.
Sometimes its color changed. Sometimes its size, shape, or even the texture of its body changed. The exact transformation differed from one animal to the next.
These outward physical changes were also the clearest sign of how powerful an animal had become after awakening to intelligence and turning into a spirit.
The greater the change, and the farther the creature had departed from the ignorant animal it once was, the stronger it would be.
In Bai Su’s case, the change was her size.
Before swallowing the strange fragment of black leaf, she had been about twice the size of a normal rabbit. Her strength, speed, and stamina were comparable to those of the strongest hunting dogs.
Even without using any of her arcane arts, she could have fought a hunter’s dog head-on with nothing but her body.
That was the result of more than ten years spent cultivating under Mr. Bai and taking all kinds of precious medicinal herbs.
An ordinary rabbit spirit would never receive such treatment.
A wild rabbit spirit–unless it happened to be extraordinarily powerful–would still be killed in minutes if it ran into a veteran hunter armed with dogs and a shotgun.
Ordinary spirits should never be imagined as too formidable. In the end, they were only animals that had undergone an extraordinary transformation.
But now…
To Bai Su’s astonishment, she had grown as large as a full-grown farm dog.
Her body had grown several times larger in a single night.
Even more shocking, the aura within her had increased by the same amount.
That naturally meant Bai Su’s fighting strength had multiplied as well.
Her thoughtless jump just now had carried her more than fifteen feet because she hadn’t adjusted to her changed body yet and couldn’t control her strength.
“How is this possible?!”
Bai Su’s head rang as though thunder had exploded inside it.
“What in the world was that broken black leaf? How could eating it make me so much stronger overnight? How can something so unnatural even exist?”
Fear crept over her.
If eating something brought a person modest benefits, it was usually a nourishing food or a valuable medicinal herb.
If it brought significant benefits, it could be called a miraculous medicine.
If it brought tremendous benefits–like a centuries-old Changbai Mountain ginseng that could strengthen practitioners and spirits or even cure ordinary people of cancer and other diseases–then common folk called it an “immortal medicine.”
But a fragment of black leaf that could utterly transform someone overnight after being swallowed?
That was far more potent than any so-called immortal medicine. Even to a spirit, it radiated a strange and sinister aura.
Anything that lay so far beyond one’s understanding was bound to inspire fear.
“Am I going to turn into some twisted monster?”
The more Bai Su thought about it, the more frightened she became.
She ran deeper into the mountains, hastily dug herself a burrow, and hid inside to see what would happen.
For three days and three nights, Bai Su remained there, consumed by fear and anxiety.
In the end, nothing else happened to her body.
Only then did she cautiously emerge.
What shocked her most was that the tiny fragment of black leaf she had swallowed by accident had produced no side effects at all.
If word of such a terrifying effect ever spread, it would drive every thinking being mad with desire.
Living humans, spirits, ghosts, corpse-fiends…
Anything with intelligence would fight desperately to possess it.
Only then did Bai Su understand why those people had risked their lives fighting the River God–and why the wounded person had gone berserk trying to seize the black leaf.
Its power was simply absurd.
It was more than enough to send people rushing to their deaths one after another.
The one thing Bai Su still wondered was what role her master, Mr. Bai, had played in the whole affair.
But after what she had witnessed that night, she no longer dared return to the riverbank to investigate.
For the next two or three years, she lived in the mountains around Lianghe Town with that question still hanging over her.
Then, two years ago, Bai Su happened upon a hunter and his dog chasing a fox through the mountains.
By then, she was a fairly powerful spirit. Dealing with an ordinary hunter and a hunting dog posed no problem.
She cast a glamour spell that trapped the hunter in the disorienting illusion of walking endlessly in circles.
As for the dog, all Bai Su had to do was unleash the menacing aura of a powerful spirit. The animal immediately tucked its tail between its legs and fled.
That was how she saved the fox.
Bai Su soon realized that the fox’s belly was swollen. She was heavily pregnant and looked ready to give birth at any moment.
But she was also grievously wounded and clearly didn’t have long to live.
Though Bai Su possessed nearly human intelligence, she had retained her animal instinct for communicating with other creatures. From the pregnant fox’s cries, she understood that the mother was worried about the babies she was about to deliver.
After examining her, Bai Su decided she could use her power to force the cubs to be born early. Doing so, however, would exhaust all of the mother’s remaining vitality.
The fox might otherwise have clung to life for several more days, but the moment she gave birth, she would die.
In the end, the mother chose to deliver her child and perished when her vitality ran dry.
She had been nothing more than an ordinary animal, without intelligence like Bai Su’s, but a mother’s instinct still drove her to bring her baby into the world.
That baby was the little gray fox now standing before me–Huihui.
After helping him into the world, Bai Su took him in and raised him.
They called each other sister and brother, but in truth, their bond was more like that of mother and son.
Mr. Bai had left Bai Su some precious medicinal pills, and she still had some remaining. She gave them to Huihui and taught him a few of the skills practiced by spirits.
As a result, Huihui might have been only two years old by a fox’s reckoning, but the aura he possessed rivaled that of a spirit that had been intelligent for ten years.