After finishing off the Three Immortals, Yue Shi immediately set off to cause trouble for the Ximen family.
The highway leading to Thousand Faces City was spacious, its surface cracked into irregular slabs with weeds growing through the fissures.
The snow leopard lay across his shoulders, its tail hanging down and swaying gently with his stride.
As the night breeze blew past, Yue Shi found himself in a reasonably good mood. Slaughter was inherently pleasurable to him, and he had even gained something from the encounter.
Suddenly, the sound of flapping wings echoed from a distance. It was clear and sharp, grating against the silence of the desolate wasteland.
Yue Shi looked up to see a colorful parrot flying toward him from ahead. The feathers on its wings shimmered with a metallic luster.
The parrot's flight path seemed hesitant. It first landed on a distant rock, tilting its head to observe Yue Shi for a few seconds before hopping a few steps closer, then hopping back again—repeatedly testing the waters.
The snow leopard pricked its ears, its tail ceasing its sway as its eyes locked onto the parrot, pupils narrowing into slits.
Seeing that Yue Shi wasn't angry, the parrot took another step closer and opened its beak. However, what came out was not a bird's cry.
It was a humble voice transmitted through a remote transmission spell: "Respected Excellency, please forgive my sudden intrusion. I mean no offense; I simply wish to discuss a certain matter with you."
Yue Shi looked at the parrot with a hint of interest.
The parrot's wings trembled slightly, and its speech quickened, as if desperate to pour out everything it wanted to say before it could be crushed in the next second.
"The news of your conflict with the Ximen family has already spread. Some of my associates and I do not quite approve of the Ximen family ourselves. Therefore, we wish to cooperate with you. We can provide intelligence, supplies, and manpower. All we ask is that while you are dealing with the Ximen family, you could take care of a few small troubles for us along the way."
Yue Shi asked, "And who are you? Rivals of the Ximen family?"
The parrot hesitated, its claws scratching restlessly against the rock. "I hope you can understand, but it is not convenient to reveal our identities at this moment. The Ximen family has eyes and ears everywhere, so we must be cautious. Once the time is right, we will certainly come to apologize in person."
Yue Shi narrowed his eyes. "Intelligence? What kind of intelligence can you provide? I have no interest in the Ximen family's melodramatic household gossip."
Thinking it had persuaded Yue Shi, the parrot's voice turned joyful. "Of course not gossip. We have information on the Ximen family's defensive layout, the guard rotation schedules for their forbidden zones, and even the travel patterns of the patriarch, Ximen Aotian. As long as you are willing..."
"Sounds good," Yue Shi said in a gentle tone. "Keep talking. I'm listening."
The parrot relaxed further, folding its wings and standing firmly on the rock as it began to rattle off the resources it could provide.
Weapons, medicine, connections, funding, and even some dirt on the core members of the Ximen family.
Yue Shi rested one hand on his knee, his fingers curving slightly. Wisps of an extremely sinister and evil aura, invisible to the naked eye, seeped from his fingertips and spread soundlessly across the ground.
That power crawled along the road like a black snake, reaching the base of the rock where the parrot stood before gradually coiling around its claws.
There was no point in killing a mere remote transmission puppet. Yue Shi intended to follow this thread and find the person behind it.
The power of Utmost Evil seeped into the parrot's skin, tracing back along that faint, nearly imperceptible spell link like a virus, crawling toward the other end.
"Ximen Aotian actually doesn't like his children at all; he even intends to stifle them... Bzzz..."
As it reached that point, the parrot's voice suddenly glitched, the final syllable turning into a harsh burst of static noise.
Yue Shi put on a confused expression as if he couldn't hear clearly, though his demeanor remained gentle.
In the next second, the parrot's body began to bulge strangely. Dense tumors swelled beneath the skin of its feathers, its beak twisted, and a murky fluid seeped from the corners of its mouth. Its eyes turned into two cloudy glass beads, within which something was squirming.
"Gah!"
The parrot let out a shrill scream, sounding like a human being shriek from the depths of their throat while being skinned alive.
Bang!
The parrot exploded, its fragments twisting in mid-air into various deformed claws, eyeballs, and heterologous embryos. They continued to wriggle after hitting the ground, only losing their vitality after several seconds.
Yue Shi brushed the dust from his shoulder. "They certainly ran fast."
The spell link on the parrot had been severed by the other party at the final moment of corruption.
The opponent was alert and had disconnected immediately upon noticing something was wrong. Unfortunately for them, a small portion of the power of Utmost Evil had already crawled across the link—enough to give them a taste of hell.
The snow leopard glanced at the parrot's remains, and Yue Shi reached out to pat its head. "Parrots don't taste good."
...
In the basement of an old residential building.
The walls were covered in soundproofing wards, their lines glowing with a faint spiritual light in the dim environment.
A few simple wooden tables were pushed together, holding a bronze mirror, a compass, and talismans, along with several cups of tea that had long since gone cold.
There were five people in the basement, standing in a semi-circle with their eyes fixed on the bronze mirror in the center.
The surface of the bronze mirror reflected a long-haired man holding a snow leopard.
Kite sat cross-legged on the floor, his hands pressed against both sides of the mirror as he channeled mana to hold the wards around the rim. His lips trembled as he silently maintained the remote transmission spell, negotiating with Yue Shi.
"Ximen Aotian actually doesn't like his children at all; he even intends to stifle them..."
Just as Kite reached that sentence, the image in the bronze mirror suddenly flickered. Yue Shi's face remained gentle in the mirror, but cold sweat instantly soaked Kite's back.
He felt it—something was crawling through the bronze mirror. It was cold, sinister, and evil, as if countless tongues were licking his soul and burrowing into his flesh.
"No, he's trying to kill me!" Kite suddenly pulled his hands back. His palms slid off the edge of the bronze mirror, his fingertips pulling away several long, thin threads of mana that snapped with a sharp crack.
Kite moved extremely fast, taking less than half a second to completely sever all connections with the bronze mirror.
Unfortunately, it was still a bit too late.
Starting from the tip of his right index finger, Kite's skin turned a grey-green color, looking like rotting wood infected by mold. His fingernails loosened from the roots and fell off, revealing the tender pink flesh beneath.
That tender flesh only existed for an instant because something new grew out from the nail beds. Black, curved dead branches extended from the wounds on his fingertips, growing longer and thinner by the second.
"Ahhh!"
Kite screamed, his body falling backward as the back of his head slammed against the floor.
His right hand was twitching, and those black branches flailed wildly with his spasms, sweeping across the ground and leaving deep gouges.
"Kite, what happened?" The middle-aged man closest to him rushed over, reaching out to support him.
"Don't touch me! Stay away!" Kite hissed, his voice distorted as if two people were speaking at once.
His right hand had become completely unrecognizable. His fingers had turned into twisted branches, his palm into a tumor-like mass, and the deformation was spreading to his wrist and continuing up his forearm.
A cluster of pustules exploded from his shoulder, the pus splashing against the wall with a hissing, corrosive sound.
Rate on N.U.
