Ming Yi did not recognize, nor did he care about, the matching engraving on the jade amulet and the paper figure. The only target he had his eyes on was clearly that shifty, rat-faced man.
That man was his old enemy, a foe from centuries past whose grudge still filled him with unresolved resentment.
So, was Bai Ci going to give chase?
The answer, of course, was yes.
In fact, even without Ming Yi's explicit shout, the moment Bai Ci realized the shifty man was about to flee, she was already preparing to drift forward and pursue him.
From a professional standpoint, this man was an informant for the mastermind behind the scenes, holding critical clues. Letting him escape alive would inevitably lead to endless trouble, whereas catching and interrogating him might yield further leads, guiding her on how to break through the next impasse.
From a personal standpoint, this was the obsession and hatred Ming Yi had harbored for hundreds of years. It was the only time he had ever actively asked for something.
No matter how she looked at it, she had absolutely no reason to back down.
Unshackled by a physical body, her spiritual form was as light as the wind. She followed silently behind the frantically fleeing shifty man, maintaining a steady, moderate pace that kept his figure firmly in her sights.
The man had been utterly scared out of his wits. Keeping his head down, he ran wildly without daring to look back, charging out of the library district and heading straight toward a bustling four-way intersection ahead.
It was now mid-afternoon. The city's main thoroughfare was a teeming sea of vehicles and bustling crowds. Traffic flowed in an endless stream, traffic lights blinked in alternation, and pedestrians hurried along.
It was a picture of a bustling, lively mortal world.
As the light turned green, the pedestrian crossing signal chimed crisply. Countless pedestrians stepped onto the crosswalk as the flow of vehicles came to an orderly halt.
Right above this noisy street scene, hanging quietly in mid-air from the metal crossbar of the traffic lights, was a bizarre, slender figure.
It was an extremely emaciated, shriveled, and elongated figure. Its limbs were excessively thin and long, with dry, tight skin clinging closely to the bones, making it impossible to tell its gender or age.
Hanging from the traffic light crossbar, it looked like nothing more than a piece of preserved meat dried for years.
A mass of disheveled, pitch-black hair fell over its face, obscuring its features and leaving only an eerie, deathly blackness.
The strangest part was its clothing. The upper body wore a tattered yet unfaded red shirt, while the lower body was clad in pants that were half-red and half-white. The boundary between red and white was eerily distinct, as if sliced clean in half by something.
It hung suspended from the metal bar without any ropes or visible support, swaying gently with the wind in a stiff, uncanny posture.
This street had a massive flow of people, likely due to several nearby commercial complexes, with countless pedestrians rushing past.
Some looked up at the sky, others hurried along with their heads down, but not a single person noticed the bizarre ghost hanging directly over their heads. It was as if it were mere air, a nonexistent illusion.
Only Bai Ci, in her spiritual state, remained unaffected and could see it clearly.
It did not seem like an ordinary spirit.
It possessed no malevolent aura, no resentment, and no leaking yin energy, yet it remained firmly entrenched at the intersection.
The running shifty man had already rushed to the edge of the intersection. At that exact moment, the pedestrian light switched from green to red, and traffic began to move. It was not a safe time to cross.
The moment the traffic light changed, the dried-meat-like ghost on the crossbar suddenly moved.
Its body was as light as a withered autumn leaf as it drifted down from the several-meter-high crossbar, landing noiselessly on the ground.
Sometimes on its tiptoes, sometimes bending over, and sometimes crouching down, the slender phantom paused by everyone's ears for a few seconds.
Its purpose and the effect of its actions were unknown, and no one else seemed to react to it.
Soon, it arrived beside the shifty man.
The slender phantom was tall, standing a full head taller than the frantically fleeing man. Its long hair hung down, still covering its face, and its entire being exuded a deathly silence.
Standing extremely close, Bai Ci focused her hearing and finally caught a faint, slightly raspy, and completely flat whisper echoing right next to the shifty man's ear.
“The light is green. You can go now.”
A simple, plain statement, yet it carried an eerie, bewitching power.
The man, already completely panicked and fleeing blindly, lost all capacity for judgment. His mind was filled with nothing but the desperate urge to escape.
He did not realize that the light was actually red—a red light prohibiting crossing. Ignoring the surrounding traffic that had already started to accelerate, he suddenly bolted forward, running straight into the road.
At that very moment, a speeding black car came hurtling forward with a roaring wind.
Bang—
A heavy impact exploded, echoing across the noisy intersection.
The immense force of the collision sent the shifty man flying, his body tracing a textbook arc through the air before crashing heavily onto the asphalt several meters away.
Warm blood instantly pooled and spread from beneath him, dyeing a large stretch of the road red in a gruesome, shocking scene.
The intersection instantly descended into chaos as screeching brakes and gasps of shock rang out in unison.
Pedestrians stopped to stare, while the panicked driver scrambled out of the car to check on him, frantically dialing emergency services and the police.
A kind-hearted doctor who happened to be passing by stopped to assess the man lying in the pool of blood. Bai Ci drifted closer and listened in.
With his head askew, his breath gone, his eyes wide, and his pupils dilated, the shifty man had already stopped breathing and lost his heartbeat on the spot.
He was already dead.
As the man expired completely, a change occurred in the slender phantom still standing by the roadside.
The remaining red on the half-red, half-white pants on its lower body rapidly receded at a visible rate, turning into a deathly, pale white.
As the red faded and the white grew, not a fraction too much or too little, the crimson color of exactly one life was drained away.
Having absorbed this fresh human life, the slender phantom drifted into the air once more, carried by an invisible force back onto the traffic light crossbar above.
It hung there as before, swaying with the wind in deathly silence, quietly waiting for its next victim.
The shifty man was dead.
The clues had been severed with jarring suddenness.
In her mind, Ming Yi's voice echoed, thick with suppressed irritation and rage.
“What an awful time to die.”
After a frustrated click of his tongue came a rare, low murmur of complaint, every word laced with long-repressed anger.
“In a city this massive, guarded by the Heavenly Master Association and protected by local deities receiving incense offerings, they actually allow this kind of road-blocking, man-eating ghost to entrench itself at an intersection and harvest human lives at will. Those people are truly useless trash.”
He had lived for hundreds of years and kept the peace in Xiuxian County, and he had never seen such a lax, sloppy cultivation world and lack of discipline.
“What was that just now?” Bai Ci asked.
“A Foetal Feeder,” Ming Yi provided the name. “Don't let the word 'foetal' in its name fool you into thinking it has something to do with some wrongfully deceased infant.”
“It is because its consumption of humans has a set quota. Once it consumes a fixed number, its red clothes turn white—its blood-stained garments becoming a shroud—and it dissipates on its own.”
“The person who named it had a sick sense of humor, comparing this behavior to an infant. It is as if a fetus has absorbed enough nutrients and is finally ready to be born.”
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