Chapter 65
Chapter 65
For some reason, time seemed to stretch endlessly in such a moment.
Countless images flashed through my mind.
Even the wind rushing past my ears became distant and indistinct.
All I knew was that the ground drew closer.
“I’m finished!”
I was certain I would smash into the hard concrete and be seriously injured, if not killed.
I had fallen to less than three meters above it.
At that critical instant–
Something happened.
Whoosh…
A rope shot from the canopy toward me like a nimble python.
No.
Perhaps the rope had already left the tree earlier and caught up to me only as I was about to strike the ground.
It wrapped directly around my waist.
My entire body stopped in midair.
With my limbs spread and my face toward the ground, I resembled a giant frog suspended in space.
Barely more than a meter remained beneath me.
Beads of sweat as large as soybeans rolled from my forehead.
Old Cao’s voice came from the canopy above, shaken by lingering fear.
“I made it in time! Xiao Wu, are you all right?”
Only then did my spirit seem to return to my body, and I recovered my senses.
I looked down at the rope around my waist.
It was Old Cao’s phoenix rope. He had cast it down the instant I fell and wrapped it around me.
From a physical perspective, the tremendous inertia of my fall should have made it extremely dangerous for so thin a rope to catch me by the waist.
The opposing forces would most likely have squeezed me hard enough to rupture my internal organs.
But nothing of the sort happened. I had not suffered the slightest injury and hung steadily in the air.
That was because Old Cao’s phoenix rope was no longer ordinary hemp.
After accompanying him through decades of carrying coffins, it had merged with his qi and become something equivalent to a ritual implement.
Using it resembled casting a spell, so naturally, it could transcend common sense and break the rules understood by science to a certain degree.
In response to Old Cao’s anxious question, I released a long breath of stale air.
“I’m fine! Old Cao, your timely rescue saved me from a terrible fall. Words can’t repay such a favor. I’ll remember it.”
“Ha ha! Don’t be so formal, Xiao Wu.”
As Old Cao spoke, the rope slowly lowered me.
I was barely more than a meter above the ground, so I soon landed and untied the rope from my waist.
With a swish, the far end retracted into the canopy.
Standing beneath the tree, I cupped my hands around my mouth and shouted upward.
“Did you handle the corpse that attacked me? And be careful when you and Uncle Yuan climb down.”
Yuan Fei answered in a rather dejected voice.
“The instant you shouted, I climbed toward the sound. I was still a little too slow. Master Cao moved faster and has already handled all three walking corpses.”
As he finished speaking, three dark figures dropped from the canopy overhead with a rush, guided by ropes.
They made me jump.
On closer examination, I saw three corpses bound tightly from head to toe in hemp rope.
They could not move. Even their eyes had obediently closed.
They looked no different from ordinary dead bodies. No one would imagine they were walking corpses capable of suddenly attacking a person.
The other end of the rope remained in Old Cao’s hand inside the canopy.
I had to admit, his skill with rope was excellent.
He could rescue a person and restrain corpse-fiends without neglecting either task.
Then Old Cao and Yuan Fei slowly climbed down and joined me.
Together, we examined the three bodies at our feet.
The saleswoman and cook who had hanged themselves the night before last posed no mystery. They had remained in the tree only briefly before being taken to the hospital morgue.
The low temperature there naturally prevented decay.
But the cobbler’s son had died several days ago, and Old Cao, Big Bull, and the others had personally carried his coffin and buried him.
By all reason, his body should have begun to rot.
Yet he too appeared to have died only recently and showed no sign of decay.
That meant he was advancing from an ordinary walking corpse toward a vicious corpse.
I kicked the body hard and cursed, “Good grief! No wonder this bastard was so vicious and hid in the leaves to ambush me. He was already stronger than the other two.”
When a person died, the body became a corpse.
If resentment disturbed that corpse, or some outside force stimulated and interfered with it so it could not rest, it transformed into a walking corpse.
That was the lowest type of corpse-fiend.
If a walking corpse advanced farther, it became a more powerful and sinister vicious corpse.
Miss Duan, whom we encountered while carrying her coffin, had been a vicious corpse at the very highest level.
The fetus in her belly had already taken form, making them equivalent to two vicious corpses acting together–a mother and child whose minds were perfectly connected.
Naturally, they had been extremely difficult to defeat.
Beyond a vicious corpse came a corpse that had transformed into baleforce, becoming a baleful corpse.
One could also reverse the words and call it a corpse fiend. Either way, it meant the same thing.
Years ago, my unlucky friend Wang Fei drowned after a river-log dragged him underwater, then became a corpse fiend.
Master later said that the river-log which seized him as a replacement might have been an old body lying beneath the river for many years. It may already have transformed into a baleful entity.
That made the corpse fiend formed from Wang Fei exceptionally powerful from the beginning.
He then immediately killed his own parents. The boundless evil energy created by that act gathered around him and made him unimaginably more vicious.
Put it this way: if Master had not arrived in time that night, my father, Huang San’er, the village chief, and the others who went to investigate would probably all have died inside Wang Fei’s home.
Not one of them would have survived.
In the worst case, the entire village might have perished.
When I learned recently how dangerous the situation had been, the memory filled me with lingering fear.
Thank goodness Master had been there.
Returning to the present, even the strongest of the three bodies on the ground–the cobbler’s son–was merely an ordinary walking corpse.
He was far weaker than Miss Duan.
But the problem was that none of these people had any reason to transform.
They had committed suicide because of their own personal troubles and should not have carried resentment.
It was strange enough that all three came to hang themselves from the Killer Demon Tree. After death, they had transformed, traveled here from different places, and hidden together in the tree.
What could possibly explain that?
The mystery defied understanding.
We had found the escaped bodies, but the questions before us only multiplied.
Yuan Fei asked, “Old Cao, how do you see this matter?”
“With my eyes,” Old Cao replied.
I fell silent.
I never expected the old man to be so fond of cold jokes.
Suddenly, my heart lurched and my scalp prickled.
A strange intuition surged through me.
It felt as if hidden eyes were secretly watching us from the darkness beside the nearby crossroads.
The sensation was so vivid that I blurted, “Who is it? Who’s over there?”
Old Cao and Yuan Fei both paused in confusion.
Yuan Fei looked in that direction. “What’s wrong, Young Brother Wu?”
“Watch out!”
Old Cao roared, seized Yuan Fei and me with either hand, and yanked us violently aside.
Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!
Something flew from the direction of the crossroads with tremendous force, whistling sharply through the air.
Thump! Thump! Thump!
Three piercing impacts sounded in almost perfect succession.
I spun around.
Three steel nails stood in a neat row in the massive trunk of the old huangjue fig behind us.
They had sunk completely into the wood, leaving only their tails to glimmer faintly beneath the yellow streetlamp.
My intuition had been correct. Someone truly was hiding there.
And that person had attacked us, throwing powerful steel needles over a great distance with some secret underworld technique.
“Catch him! He’s probably the person causing all this trouble from the shadows!”
Old Cao roared again and charged first.