The wind in the valley had turned restless.
Yu Sheng did not know what was happening, but he could clearly sense the atmosphere saturating the entire foreign domain beginning to shift. It was difficult to put into words; if he had to describe it, it felt as though...
The entire valley was slowly coming alive.
The distant woods were stirring, the mountain ridges were stirring, the earth was stirring—and from the sky overhead came a chilling, famished gaze that made his scalp crawl.
He noticed Hu Li trembling beside him. The fox-demon girl clutched the food in her hands in a white-knuckled grip, her face pale with terror. She tilted her head back to look at the pitch-black night above, shuffling behind Yu Sheng step by step while muttering softly under her breath. Only when she drew close did Yu Sheng hear the words she kept repeating:
"This is how it was when the immortal died... This is how it was when the immortal died..."
"What's going on now?" Irene asked in a rush. The little doll grew tense as well, hugging the kitchen cleaver to her chest with every fiber of her body taut. "Do you know something?"
Hu Li did not answer. She seemed to have slipped back into a daze, doing nothing but repeating that same sentence over and over.
Before long, neither Irene nor Yu Sheng had time to worry about Hu Li's condition.
Yu Sheng sensed that familiar aura materializing nearby. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw an entity swiftly coalesce in the shadows near the edge of the ruined temple. Deformed, swollen meat multiplied and layered upon itself, sprouting bizarre limbs that looked hacked from an assortment of living creatures. Dozens of ravenous eyes opened across the monster's surface, while fangs, sharp teeth, and torn mouthparts broke through between them, venting a guttural, murky snarl.
Entity-Hunger had finally appeared near its prey.
"Holy crap!" Irene yelped. "That thing is hideous!"
"Watch out for sneak attacks! Every limb on its body can mutate, and it can sprout tentacles and tails out of nowhere!" Yu Sheng warned immediately before turning to Hu Li. "Just protect yourself for now. You're too deeply corroded by this thing to fight it."
Hu Li was in no state to do anything. Even after the monster emerged, she remained staring at the sky in terror. Hearing Yu Sheng's words, however, she gave a dazed nod and scooped up the food scattered on the ground as she retreated. Still, she dared not pull back too far, as if terrified that something might happen to him.
"How are you planning to fight this?" Irene whispered. In the distance, the monster paced back and forth, seemingly waiting for something with eerie patience. Its hesitation only made her more uneasy. "Don't tell me you're just going to charge in with your bare fists and throw basic punches. You didn't even bring a weapon when you came over! At least I've got a kitchen cleaver."
Yu Sheng knew full well he had brought no weapons. He had tested it before: most of the monster's anatomy was harder than stone. Even if he swung an axe and hacked off a softer chunk of hide or flesh, the damage was negligible at best. From the start, he had never planned to carry a conventional weapon. For an ordinary person who had never received any combat training with bladed arms, charging in with a kitchen cleaver—or even a legendary Dragon-Slaying Saber—meant you were far more likely to chop yourself first.
He had prepared a different method of inflicting harm.
"We stick to the plan we discussed at home. You restrict its movements with your threads," Yu Sheng said rapidly. "I'll charge in and tear an opening in it. Keep an eye out. If I mess up, grab Hu Li and run immediately—don't worry about me. Hu Li has a way of surviving under that thing, and Hunger won't actively chase you..."
Irene blinked. "Uh, and then what?"
"We meet up after I revive and try again. That thing has to die eventually."
"You bastard! So you really are going with that brute-force nonsense again, aren't you? We agreed you'd try not to use 'resurrection' as a basic attack!"
"Hey, that's what 'trying' looks like," Yu Sheng shot back, but his brow furrowed as he watched the monster. Something felt off. "Why isn't it attacking?"
Irene shared the same suspicion. "It feels like it's stalling on purpose, waiting for something... Does this thing actually understand tactics?"
"Then we definitely can't let it wait," Yu Sheng said through gritted teeth. "We hit first!"
The moment the words left his mouth, he charged straight toward the monster. Almost simultaneously, Irene rolled off his shoulder with nimble grace and extended her right hand toward the beast. The instant her feet touched the ground, the doll's eyes turned pitch-black. Countless fine, dark threads radiating a bizarre, sinister chill erupted from her hands, sweeping across the space like a wildly expanding spiderweb!
Every strand avoided Yu Sheng's trajectory. Moving through the blossoming network of thread, he accelerated, his strengthened body trailing an afterimage through the air as he lunged at the hideous, flesh-bound colossus.
The monster finally moved. It seemed momentarily taken aback by its prey's proactive assault, yet it swiftly countered. A wicked claw rose high above the behemoth's back and slammed viciously downward, cutting off Yu Sheng's charge.
In that split second, Yu Sheng felt that miraculous anticipation wash over him again.
He felt which muscles on the creature's body were tensing, sensed its murderous intent and the true focus of its gaze, and foresaw a tentacle whipping around from behind the claw to seal off every possible escape route in the next instant...
Whether an illusion or not, his anticipation felt even sharper than before. He began to realize that this was not spiritual intuition at all.
Having recently awakened genuine spiritual intuition and experienced how it worked, he could tell that what he saw and felt while anticipating the monster's movements was entirely different.
When he perceived the monster's actions in advance, it was practically from a first-person perspective.
The thought flashed across his mind in an instant. Yu Sheng closed the final few meters in the blink of an eye as the giant flesh-claw crashed down.
Yu Sheng made no move to dodge. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the black threads streaming from behind him converge midair. In the next breath, countless dark lines wrapped around the monster's limbs, piercing through claws, tentacles, and gaping mouths like bone-chilling phantoms.
Cold, numb, sluggish—it felt as though his very thoughts were being riddled with holes, his soul wrapped layer by layer in a freezing web...
An overwhelming tide of negative sensation rushed in. For an instant, Yu Sheng seemed to see a vision: he was trapped in a web, bound by countless threads piercing his limbs, while at the edge of the web, a red-eyed silhouette lurked in the dark, crawling toward him in a grotesque, monstrous crawl...
"Yu Sheng! Don't zone out! I can't hold it much longer!"
The sudden shout jolted Yu Sheng awake. He looked up to find the flesh-and-blood behemoth frozen in an awkward posture at the center of the dense black threads, their taut ends looking ready to snap at any second under the strain.
With no time to ponder the vision he had just experienced, Yu Sheng threw himself toward a spot beside the monster's flank. During the precious seconds Irene had bought him, he gripped a strand of black thread with one hand, reached into empty air with the other, focused his concentration entirely, and pulled backward—
A doorway materialized out of thin air, its surface rippling with phantasmal light.
Conjuring a doorway from nothing took far more focus and time than opening a physical door. Yu Sheng needed a relatively stable environment to concentrate and complete the process. Watching the monster's trembling limbs and the black threads beginning to splinter, even a few seconds felt like an eternity.
Though lately, an "eternity" was about as long as a lifetime lasted for him anyway.
The next second, with the sound of a door swinging open, the phantom doorway flew wide.
It was larger than any door he had ever opened before—large enough to shove the entire monster inside.
Blinding, searing flames poured from within, illuminating a vast swath of the ground around them.
On the other side of the door was a churning lake of magma.
That was a surprise Yu Sheng had stumbled upon during his countless door-opening experiments.
He had no idea where that place was; he only knew it held boundless molten rock and surging infernos, like a landscape straight out of hell.
Entity-Hunger was powerful, but its primary threat came from mental corruption and the conceptual force of hunger it commanded. As for the physical vessel it took upon manifesting—compared to the rule itself, it was hardly indestructible.
It could be roasted.
And if it didn't roast through, he would just turn up the heat.
"Throw it in!" Yu Sheng roared at Irene.
"On it!"
Chapter 49