Chapter Eighty-Six: The Strange Cold

The butcher’s knife rose, sweeping the sky with a blinding flash of blade-light.

Within that glare, the skeleton slowly crumbled into dust, while Fang Mu’s hand did not pause for a moment.

Yet, strangely enough, no corpse-searching technique was triggered, as though the skeleton before him were not something sinister at all.

“I’m so scared... I’m so scared...”

From the place where the throat bone should have been, a small fragment of bone let out a shrill cry.

Fang Mu pondered for a moment. The butcher’s knife in his hand slowed slightly, and his other hand reached for the bone that was making the sound.

Silence...

Still no response from the corpse-searching technique. The bone Fang Mu had grabbed trembled, continuing to emit that eerie voice.

The canyon remained unnaturally dark. Suddenly, a vibration came from the bone in Fang Mu’s hand.

He looked down, only to find that the bone had vanished from his grasp without his noticing when it happened.

“It’s so dark... I’m so scared...”

The strange cry sounded again from afar. Fang Mu looked up and saw a bone floating up and down in midair, precisely the one he had been holding just now.

Whoosh!

The bone turned into a streak of afterimage and plunged into the darkness at a distance, leaving only its voice fading farther and farther away...

Fang Mu lifted the butcher’s knife and pursued the sound once more.

The darkness seemed like a beast hungry for human flesh. Aside from the golden radiance around Fang Mu, everything else was swallowed by pitch-black gloom.

The eerie voice grew farther and farther away, until it finally vanished.

Fang Mu stopped and frowned into the darkness around him.

Something was wrong. Very wrong.

If this was truly something sinister, then why did the corpse-searching technique have no effect? Yet if it was not sinister, why did such a chilling scene keep appearing before him?

The more Fang Mu thought about it, the more contradictory it seemed. He had never encountered anything like this before.

“Hee-hee-hee... Big brother, are you lost?”

As Fang Mu was lost in thought, a voice suddenly rang out.

He abruptly lowered his head. In the golden light, he saw a pale boy crouching at his feet.

The boy was white as paper from head to toe, wearing clothes made of paper. On his face were two purple circular marks, like blush.

Looking downward from the boy’s face, Fang Mu saw a polished white bone embedded in his neck.

As the bone trembled, another voice drifted out.

“Hee-hee-hee... Big brother, come on, come with me...”

The boy faced Fang Mu with his ghostly white face, his neck twisting sharply to one side at an angle a normal person could never manage. It bent all the way toward his chest, rotated one hundred and eighty degrees, and became an upside-down head.

A smile touched Fang Mu’s face.

“All right. But big brother likes to play games with the dead.”

The butcher’s knife rose, and the storm of blade-light engulfed the boy. In the blink of an eye, only his torso and head remained.

The boy, now stripped of his limbs, did not scream. The upside-down head made a clicking sound as it began slowly turning back.

Fang Mu extended a hand...

Still no prompt.

He swung his knife horizontally. The boy’s neck snapped cleanly in two, revealing that piece of bone.

The remaining parts of the boy were shredded by the butcher’s knife, and the bone flew out. Fang Mu caught it in one grasp.

“What exactly are you?” Fang Mu asked, frowning as he squeezed the bone.

Once again, the corpse-searching technique had not been triggered. Could it really not be something sinister?

The bone trembled, then vanished in a way Fang Mu could not begin to understand.

Far off in midair, it appeared again, only to disappear into the distance.

Fang Mu rubbed his thumb against his forefinger and once more chased after the direction in which the bone had vanished.

He wanted to see what, exactly, this thing was.

...

This time, no voice arose from the darkness. In its place came a series of murmurs so low and deep that their meaning could not be discerned.

The murmurs were dense and countless. Whether heard one by one or all together, they conveyed nothing intelligible.

Instead, standing within the darkness and those murmurs, Fang Mu felt cold all over.

This cold was not the chill of fear, but a physical cold.

Even with the Golden Body Art enveloping him, Fang Mu still felt his entire body growing icy.

“Even the Golden Body Art can’t stop it?”

Suspicion rose in Fang Mu’s heart.

The double-layered Golden Body Art possessed formidable defensive power, yet it still could not resist this cold sensation. Fang Mu grew more and more curious about what kind of evil presence lurked here.

The farther he walked into the darkness ahead, the more intense the cold became.

Within that chill, Fang Mu’s mind began to grow somewhat sluggish.

He stopped, brought his hand to his mouth, and instinctively breathed out.

It was a habit formed long ago: whenever it was too cold, he would unconsciously exhale into his hand.

Fang Mu looked at his empty palm and fell into thought.

No mist.

The cold was indeed not coming from outside.

If he continued any farther, Fang Mu even suspected he might be frozen to death.

This was an unprecedented predicament. No sinister force showed itself, and no one came out to face him head-on. He had strength to spare, yet there was nowhere to use it.

Though he had stopped, that did not mean the cold would no longer deepen. It only meant that, compared with walking forward, the rate at which it intensified had slowed considerably.

“Hu...”

His consciousness growing increasingly dim, Fang Mu could not help but crouch down.

“Damn it!”

Crouched on the ground, with the butcher’s knife braced against the earth, Fang Mu forced himself up with difficulty.

His joints had gone stiff from the cold. Holding the butcher’s knife, Fang Mu began to move in the darkness.

“Cold?” he said, slashing as he spoke. “Let me see just how cold you can be!”

Blade-light burst forth in all directions as Fang Mu pushed the Butcher’s Blade Technique to its very limit.

With no target to strike, he swung purely by instinct and intent.

Around Fang Mu, the dense web of blade-light was like a fishing net, dyeing the surrounding darkness a fierce crimson.

The cold still remained, and his swinging gradually slowed.

“Calm down.”

Fang Mu took a deep breath.

The greater the danger, the more he needed to remain calm. He struggled against the bitter cold and began to think.

“If this cold isn’t coming from outside, then it must be coming from within.”

Fang Mu sheathed the butcher’s knife and opened his collar.

“This is...”

A black humanoid figure had appeared on his chest. It looked horrifying, prickling the scalp just to behold it. As Fang Mu opened his clothing, the figure continued twisting and writhing.

With every convulsion of the black shape, Fang Mu could clearly feel the cold intensifying.

He tried taking a few steps. The black figure twisted even more violently, and the cold grew sharper still.

“Under the skin on my chest?”

Fang Mu stared at the black human-shaped mark on his chest, drew out the butcher’s knife again, and a trace of coldness appeared in his eyes.

Now that he had found the source, there was no need to waste time. You like hiding under the skin, do you? Then I’ll dig you out.

He raised the butcher’s knife. In a flash of blade-light, he slit open the skin over his chest. The black figure vanished without a trace the instant the surface was cut.

The cold vanished at a similarly furious pace, disappearing in the blink of an eye.

As true energy circulated through him, the wound on his chest stopped bleeding.

Fang Mu looked toward the darkness ahead, tightened his grip on the butcher’s knife, and stepped forward...

“No matter who you are, just don’t let me catch you...”

His voice drifted far into the darkness, lingering in the distance.