Of course, tactical formations like this came in various tiers depending on their energy consumption and area of effect. The set of formation talismans the group had deployed was the smallest model, covering an area only twenty zhang across and requiring just seven talismans to assemble.
He Lingchuan could not possibly possess such items; the bailiffs had requisitioned this set from the county office on loan, along with the profound crystals used to power it.
Naturally, it all had to be returned after use.
Yet such an ostentatious display of wealth still gave He Lingchuan quite a shock.
A mere county magistrate could sign off on profound crystals just to activate a tactical formation—something completely unthinkable in the Yuan Kingdom.
From this small detail alone, it was clear that Zhitian Township was truly rolling in wealth.
Now the monster's escape art had failed. Not only was its downward sink arrested, but the portion of its body that had already sunk into the ground seemed trapped in concrete, unable to pull free.
This was precisely the result He Lingchuan and the others had sought.
Tracking it all this way, he had basically determined that Mr. Mai's monster specialized in stealth and disguise, which was how it had slaughtered so many victims without anyone noticing.
However, since the initiative in this ambush lay in his own hands, all he had to do was make targeted preparations.
After examining the mucus left at the crime scene, Jiao Yu and General Ling had both agreed that it was a creature akin to a snail.
The most distinctive trait of such creatures was their sluggish movement. Thus, using escape arts to compensate for that weakness made total sense.
Now that the prohibition formation pinned it in place, unable to submerge, this slow-moving monster was meat on the chopping block; they could take all the time they needed to butcher it.
Only now did He Lingchuan emerge from behind, his blade gleaming like a bolt of white silk. Yet when it struck the storehouse, it produced a rapid cascade of overlapping clangs.
Just moments earlier, he had watched with his own eyes as the monster swallowed the herb warehouse in a single gulp. If he and Jiao Yu hadn't reacted with lightning speed, they would already be sitting in its stomach right now.
The fight had been perilous from the very start.
Though it looked like a single slash, seven strikes had connected in immediate succession, every blow landing squarely on the exact same spot.
A small crack split open on the storehouse.
He Lingchuan pressed his advantage. This time, Fusheng's unique quality finally took effect; with a dull thud, it sank a palm's depth into the surface.
Putting all his strength into it, he yanked the precious saber back out, finding not a speck of blood on the blade.
What was more, he was certain: inside the hard shell was empty space!
This thing was harder and thicker than a turtle's shell. Even with Fusheng's keen edge, he hadn't reached its actual body!
Had Dong Rui really built this? He Lingchuan could scarcely believe it.
If this monster was so formidable, why hadn't Dong Rui ridden it out of Beijia back then instead of giving it away to someone else?
There had to be something strange going on!
The present situation left no time for idle thoughts. Reaching out, He Lingchuan grabbed a grappling hook and shoved it by hand straight into the wound gouged by Fusheng.
He pressed the catch, and with a click, the talons snapped open inside the hollow interior, anchoring firmly within the wound.
Tossing the attached cord to a wind-boring beast, the creature clamped its jaws around it, burst into a charge, and darted to the nearest large tree. True to its name, it moved with the speed of boring through the wind, looping around five or six trees in rapid succession.
The thickest tree measured nearly one and a half zhang across.
This warehouse area had originally been a timber forest. At the request of the tree demons, about a third of the woodland had been preserved, most of it comprising colossal trees.
The other bailiffs were hacking and slashing away as well, but their weapons lacked such potency; they couldn't even leave a scratch on the shell.
To everyone present, this was utterly inconceivable.
Bailiffs worked with origin power on hand, which naturally gave them an edge when dealing with wild mountain monsters. But what was this monstrosity?
Only He Lingchuan knew that the demon puppets crafted by Dong Rui possessed high resistance to origin power. Unless an eminent master of the Chiyan Kingdom arrived in person, these few bailiffs stood little chance of dealing any substantial damage to it.
The clanging and banging of these two dozen men sounded more like they were repairing a house.
Yet their assault was not entirely futile. Before everyone's eyes, the storehouse contorted and, in the blink of an eye, morphed into a hard shell two zhang tall. Its dark brown surface bore intricate markings that looked both like natural patterns and arcane runes.
It had laid its cards on the table, shedding the disguise.
Scaled down a hundredfold, that familiar spiral shell closely resembled the food they slurped down on ordinary days...
"A river snail?" Xu Dayou blurted out.
"A snail, as expected!" General Ling bolted from behind, knocking Xu Dayou out of the way.
It was fortunate the giant sheep was sharp-eyed and quick on its hooves. Though Xu Dayou tumbled over a zhang away and ate dirt, a massive claw suddenly swung out from beneath the snail shell and slammed down with a heavy smack right where he had been standing.
Had he not moved, he would have been smashed into a meat patty.
The bailiffs on the other side of the giant shell were not so lucky. Two had been standing too close, and were crushed together into the mud without even having time to scream.
"This thing has feet!" Jiao Yu had circled it several times earlier unable to find a place to sink its teeth. Now that something biteable had finally appeared, how could the tiger let it go? Lunging in a ferocious tiger pounce, Jiao Yu was instead dragged right off the ground.
Another bolt of thunder illuminated heaven and earth, and everyone stared at the creature in utter shock.
Not only did it have feet, but four very long legs!
Long, slick, glistening legs that could bend forward like human limbs, ending in broad, flattened paws with webbing between the claws.
At the same time, the creature poked its head out of the hard shell. Its skull was square, its snout broad and rounded, and its massive mouth stretched all the way behind its head, opening like a bottomless abyss.
Projecting from its brow were two antenna-like tentacles, slender and long, resembling needles or arrows.
Of course, it still had a snail-like body marked with faint brown spots that were barely noticeable in the dark, along with a thick, long tail whose tip was missing—having severed its own tail to escape after General Ling pinned it with his horns inside the porcupine den.
Several bailiffs gaped. "What kind of monstrous thing is this?!"
Chiyan Kingdom was a land of demons, yet none had ever seen a monster so bizarre.
It clearly bore the body and hard shell of a snail, yet possessed the limbs and head of a frog.
Nothing about it was in harmony; it was as though someone had forcibly cobbled the parts together.
Everyone could see plainly that the limbs and head had extended out from inside its body, much like a snail extending its tentacles, and could retract back inside at any moment.
General Ling was dumbfounded as well. "Could it be a salamander?"
Without seeing it with his own eyes, he never could have imagined in his wildest dreams that the culprit behind the serial murders looked like this grotesque freak.
To frighten even demons into looking like gaping bumpkins, He Lingchuan mentally gave a thumbs-up: *Dong Rui, oh Dong Rui, only you could create something like this.*
Seeing what the creature looked like only confirmed that this was indeed Dong Rui's handiwork.
Just three zhang ahead of the monster, a bailiff happened to be running past holding a torch. Thinking the creature was immobilized, his dodging had been a fraction too slow. To his horror, the monster suddenly opened its maw, a red blur flashed past faster than the eye could track, and the bailiff vanished into its mouth with a drawn-out shriek.
"Its tongue?!" General Ling bellowed. "Stay away from its mouth! The thing hunts by shooting its tongue!"
Now they finally understood the purpose of that gaping mouth—it was clearly a frog's maw.
However a frog caught its prey, that was how this creature devoured people.
The crowd scrambled out of the way; no one dared linger anywhere near its jaws.
With a mouth that large, stuffing ten men inside at once wouldn't even look crowded.
The demon puppet swallowed the bailiff without even chewing. Immediately after, its hind legs pushed off hard, and it leaped into the air!
He Lingchuan had previously been unable to imagine how a beast as bulky as a small mountain could possibly jump, but today had certainly opened his eyes.
Likely weighed down by the massive shell on its back, the monster actually lunged forward, rising barely eight feet off the ground before crashing down and making the earth boom beneath it.
Though it seemed thunderous, the leap only covered three zhang—inferior even to a rock sheep's midair bound.
Yet it bounded forward in rapid bursts, covering twenty-four or twenty-five zhang in the blink of an eye. This took it beyond the bounds of the escape-art prohibition formation.
Sensing this instinctively, the monster prepared to plunge headfirst into the earth.
As long as it could sink, it would be safe, and could take the entire storehouse of prunella spikes along with it as rations for a long time to come.
Yet its triumphant escape fell short by a single step.
Carrying its momentum, the monster tried desperately to sink, but still could not descend.
It was not the formation acting upon it, but a force dragging from behind, checking its advance.
The grappling cord He Lingchuan had embedded into its shell had finally done its work.
One end of the grappling cord was lodged deep in the snail shell, while the other end wound around five or six trees, tethered tightly to the grandest trunk by the wind-boring beast.
If it wanted to submerge, it would have to yank those massive trees down first.
The demon puppet heaved again. The cord snapped taut, and the trunks of two massive trees creaked and groaned under the strain, a ring of bark tearing right off.
The creature possessed terrifying strength, but the cord and grappling hook were also of exceptional quality.
The cord had been newly crafted for He Lingchuan by the Marquis of Songyang, Li Qingge, its main material replaced with the cloud brocade He Lingchuan had acquired in the Demon Nest Swamp.
This was the finest spider silk produced by burrow spiders: weightless as air, yet boasting astonishing tenacity and elasticity. With just a single strand of this silk, Zhu Erniang could suspend herself from a tree and swing about at will.
And her bulk was not much different from this demon puppet's.
Thus, He Lingchuan had absolute confidence in its tensile strength—after all, anything produced by Zhu Erniang was guaranteed to be top caliber.
As for the grappling hook, it was Li Fubo's proudest creation, claimed by the master himself to be his finest work in the past three years. Subjected to such extreme strain by the demon puppet, it still did not snap.
Well, not yet.
Naturally, the onlookers watched with bated breath, terrified that with one more burst of strength from the puppet, the slender cord would snap with a pop.
"Jiao Yu, get back!"
Hearing the command, the tiger withdrew. The beast was too immense; its fangs and claws couldn't inflict vital damage on it anyway.
Only then did He Lingchuan shout, "Load the crossbows, quick! Empty as many volleys into it as you can!"
Xu Dayou snatched his cap off the ground, slapped it on his head, and fumbled out a black-and-white quill, fitting it into his crossbow like a bolt. His men followed suit one after another, raising their crossbows to aim and fire at the creature's soft flesh.
When it was tucked inside its hard shell earlier, nobody could do anything to it. But now, with its head and hindquarters exposed and its body so huge, how could anyone miss?
These were no ordinary bolts—they were porcupine quills He Lingchuan had collected from the foot of Mount Yulun!
The porcupine quills inherently carried rotting, foul venom, and He Lingchuan had personally enhanced them by coating each one with venom from the burrow spider glands Zhu Erniang had gifted him.
Chapter 467