Willow tugged at Door Plank and whispered, "I keep feeling like someone's watching us."
Her instincts were sharper than the others'. Door Plank instantly tightened his grip on his greataxe. "Ahead or behind?"
"Can't tell. Sometimes it appears, sometimes it vanishes." Willow hummed softly. "Right now, it's behind us."
"We're being hunted," He Lingchuan said, having heard it as well. "These things move through rock walls as if through thin air. Any guesses who it'll strike first?"
Xu Chun replied offhandedly, "A rope always snaps at the thinnest thread."
Hearing this, everyone glanced at the wounded man wrapped like a mummy. The latter froze, his steps faltering instinctively.
Right at that moment—
A pair of claws surfaced from beneath the ground, clamped around his ankles, and yanked downward violently!
The stone beneath his feet seemed to turn into soft, churning mire at the exact same moment. Dragged down, he sank in up to his calves!
Just as he cried out in terror, He Lingchuan swept over, his blade cleaving into the ground right alongside the man's shins.
The ground was indeed soft and yielding.
The blade drove straight in, slicing through something with a texture entirely distinct from both stone and mud.
The thing thrashed violently, fighting with the frantic power of a hooked fish flopping in water.
In the blink of an eye, he slashed down on both sides of the wounded man's legs.
When Fusheng was drawn back up, a drop of green blood slid from the tip.
A hit.
Door Plank seized the chance to yank the wounded man upward.
The leg the wounded man had pulled back faster slid out smoothly, but two toes on his other foot remained trapped in the stone.
Once the monster retreated, the ground solidified almost simultaneously.
He Lingchuan saw the deed through, swinging his blade to carve his toes free.
Everyone saw a ghostly claw severed cleanly at the wrist clinging to the wounded man's ankle, green blood dripping incessantly from it.
The ambush had come without warning; before the shaken casualty could even process what happened, he was already out of danger. But the rest hardly had time to breathe a sigh of relief, for ahead of them, countless shadowy figures were charging in!
Xu Chun's jaw tightened as he shouted a warning: "Bone puppets incoming!"
He Lingchuan finally got a look at what these bone puppets were. They resembled mannequins fashioned from bone and mud—varying in size and grotesque in form. Their outer crusts were stony yet uneven, leaving stark white bones exposed in places.
Their frames were not made entirely of human bones; He Lingchuan even recognized the craniums of wild boars, mountain deer, pythons, and even rats. Cobbled together haphazardly, several kinds of skulls sometimes adorned a single puppet, devoid of any aesthetic sensibility.
Evidently, the ferry ghost whelp pulling the strings lacked suitable materials and had to make do with whatever it found—or perhaps the aesthetic sense it inherited from its mother was simply abysmal.
Yet there were truly vast numbers of them.
Xu Chun hadn't exaggerated; these bone puppets were a surging swarm. Watching them rush forward like a tidal wave was enough to unnerve any ordinary man.
Moreover, these things feared neither bleeding nor death, throwing themselves forward with relentless ferocity.
Crucially, ahead of the bone puppets ran a man in wild panic, screaming at the top of his lungs when he caught sight of He Lingchuan and the others: "Help me! Save me!"
The patrolmen were astonished.
Wasn't this Wang Xu, the vice squad leader of Duan Xinyu's team?
He too was covered in blood and filth, panting as he rushed up before them.
He Lingchuan asked him, "Where's Duan Xinyu?"
"Dead! They're all dead!" Wang Xu rasped. "The whole squad is gone! Two monsters attacked us!"
"Two?"
He Lingchuan and Xu Chun exchanged a look.
From the look of it, the ferry ghost whelp that had attacked Xu Chun's squad earlier had abruptly retreated to reinforce its sibling and overrun Duan Xinyu?
Willow spoke up suddenly. "And now our opponents are two as well!"
One lurked elusively, capable of turning solid rock into mire; the other was the youngest sibling, skilled in molding clay puppets and donning mud armor.
In other words, the final battle was at hand.
Everyone tightened their grip on their weapons.
Then, the puppet army crashed into them, locking everyone in chaotic combat!
Xu Chun had combat experience. He acted first, tossing several wooden plaques onto the ground. Palm-sized, they balanced upright on their own the moment they landed, releasing concentric ripples of light that swept across the floor.
The light covered a broad area, virtually spanning the entire narrow passageway, and any bone puppet stepping into its glow slowed to a crawl like an old ox hauling a broken cart.
A slowing spell took effect.
Door Plank slammed his shield heavily against the ground.
Centered on the shield, a shockwave rippled out in all directions, shattering more than a dozen puppets at the front into pieces.
Not so tough after all.
Yet the fragments strewn across the ground quickly converged on their own, piecing themselves back together into new bone puppets—only uglier and more grotesque than before.
Xu Chun yelled, "Smashing them is useless! We need to immobilize them!"
He Lingchuan glanced down at the blade in his hand. Without anyone noticing, only the puppets he cut to pieces failed to reassemble.
Why was that?
Was it because of its Void Breaker trait?
Fusheng could cut through formless, incorporeal entities. But He Lingchuan wasn't sure if these bone puppets counted as such.
Willow snapped in annoyance, "Why didn't you say so sooner!"
She took several steps back, drew an arrow from behind her back, nocked it, and loosed it with a sharp twang.
The arrow's target wasn't the puppets, but the ground beneath their feet.
Frigid mist spread from where the arrowhead struck, gluing the bone puppets' feet to the floor before creeping upward...
About a dozen breaths later, more than a hundred puppets standing on the frozen ground were turned into motionless ice sculptures.
"There, frozen solid, aren't they?" Willow kept a deadpan expression, but her heart was bleeding. This was a frost arrow she had bought from a swindler on Yunling Island; a single arrow cost ten taels of silver!
How much fine wine could ten taels buy! Even if the arrow's effect was undeniably superb.
Xu Chun spun around and bolted. "Fall back! This won't hold them for long!"
Willow objected, "Hey, this should easily last an hour."
Back then, the swindler on Yunling Island had thumped his chest and swore that the frost rune on this arrow would hold for two hours even in the dog days of summer.
"You think my squad didn't try freezing them?" Xu Chun's face showed not the slightest relief. "It will melt! In this bizarre mine shaft, even solid ice thaws out! Look—"
He pointed at the rock wall. "Look here!"
The frost arrow was truly formidable; even the rock walls had accumulated a layer of frost.
Yet right before their eyes, the white frost was slowly fading, turning into trickling drops of water.
Melted? Melting this fast?
Seeing more bone puppets pursuing from further back, the patrolmen took the hint and turned to run.
He Lingchuan understood now. In this bizarre mine, the bone puppets and ferry ghost whelps could likewise draw energy from the rock walls, making both regeneration and thawing effortless.
Talk about an unfair home-field advantage.
Unless they escaped the mine shaft, they had no truly effective way of dealing with the puppets.
Not to mention two monsters were still eyeing them greedily from the shadows.
Just then, a member behind Xu Chun suddenly called out, "Wait, aren't we down a person?"
Everyone jolted and began counting off.
Sure enough, the count stopped at ten.
One person was missing.
He Lingchuan swept a gaze across them, his heart sinking. "My squad lost someone."
The wounded man was still safe and sound, but the patrolman who had been supporting him earlier had vanished.
"I cut both arms off that monster earlier—did it regenerate them that fast?"
At that moment, a figure darted out from the dark passage ahead, shouting, "He's a ferry ghost whelp! Don't trust him!"
Everyone jumped in surprise. Looking closer, they found it was Duan Xinyu!
This man was drenched in blood, his left arm hanging limp at his side, and the person he was pointing at was He Lingchuan.
"Me?" He Lingchuan pointed at himself, utterly baffled.
"Get out of the way! Don't get in the middle of this!" Duan Xinyu glared past him with fire in his eyes. "It ate Wang Xu and took his place!"
Wang Xu, standing behind He Lingchuan's left shoulder, stepped forward and shouted, "No, no! That thing is the ferry ghost whelp! I saw it eat the captain with my own eyes!"
The patrolmen were dumbfounded. With a powerful enemy behind them and another comrade missing, did they really have to play a guessing game now?
Willow tossed two seeds of thief mustard onto the two men. After watching for several breaths, she declared, "Neither changed color."
At her words, everyone unanimously took two or three steps back, putting distance between themselves and their companions.
The failure of the thief mustard meant the ferry ghost whelp wasn't something it could detect.
By extension, the test performed earlier on Xu Chun and his three survivors was also useless.
A whelp could just as easily be hiding among the four of them.
Perhaps that also explained how a patrolman had vanished without a sound.
He Lingchuan looked back down the tunnel and heard the approaching footsteps of the bone puppets. They were out of time.
"Both of you claim you saw the whelp eat the other with your own eyes?"
Wang Xu's eyes were bloodshot. "The captain suffered a terrible death!"
Duan Xinyu spat in rage. "Bah! I watched with my own eyes as that monster chewed off both your arms and ate them! First the left, then..." Yelling to that point, he choked, unable to continue.
The memory was simply too horrific.
He Lingchuan nodded. "We will avenge our comrade." Before the words fully left his mouth, he drew his blade!
The others only saw a flash of blade light like a bolt of white silk. Wang Xu leaped back seven feet just in time, furious and shocked: "Why do you believe him?!"
He Lingchuan's sleeve arrow had already launched. With a thud, it plunged into Wang Xu's chest, the arrowhead blossoming inside. "Because your blood is green."
As he spoke, he closed the distance, yanking hard on the grappling cord to pull the creature toward him, following up with a reverse slash toward its neck!
The spray of blood blasted out by the hooked arrow was indeed emerald green.
The other patrolmen harbored no further doubts and surged forward to attack.
If they broke this thing, the army of bone puppets behind them would be nothing more than rubble and clay, entirely useless.
"Wang Xu" sneered coldly, opening its mouth to spew a jet of green sludge directly at He Lingchuan.
It came fast, furious, and in a massive torrent.
Both had been closing in at high speed. Seeing no way to dodge, He Lingchuan could only raise an arm to shield his eyes.
A searing agony ripped across his face as though hit with concentrated acid, and He Lingchuan couldn't help but cry out.
Well, he had indeed been splashed with strong acid.
The innate ability of the whelp they had slain in the stomach sac had actually been inherited by this youngest sibling.
Yet the blade in his hand didn't waver for an instant.
But "Wang Xu" seized his wrist in an iron grip and slammed him violently toward the ground!
At the same time, a pair of claws reached up from beneath the floor, locking firmly around He Lingchuan's ankles and dragging him downward with terrifying force.
Both ferry ghost whelps struck in tandem with flawless coordination. Instead of picking on the weak, they aimed straight for the backbone of the group—He Lingchuan!
Kill this man, and the rest would lose heart; the group would collapse on its own.
Chapter 311