Chapter 123: The Human Skin Drum (27)

"Are you asking me to reason with you?" Tang Mu cast a look of contempt at the woman. "I am the reason!"

The red threads in Tang Mu's hands swarmed toward the woman as if they were bottomless. Yet, even though the woman was being pricked until she looked like a hornet's nest, her spectral body showed no signs of dissipating.

"Damn it!" Though the spectral body hadn't vanished, the pain was very real. In the instance, while one possessed a spectral form, the sensation of pain remained intact. Consequently, Tang Mu’s actions had touched a nerve—a fatal taboo for the woman.

"I will make you wish you were dead! Rest, Life, Injury, Stasis, View, Death, Shock, Open! Arise!" the woman chanted.

"It’s the Qimen Dunjia! Watch your defenses."

Centered around the woman's stone statue, eight identical statues representing the directions of Qian, Kun, Zhen, Gen, Li, Kan, Dui, and Xun erupted from the ground.

"If the Auspicious Gate is countered, fortune does not arrive; if the Ominous Gate is countered, the danger does not stir. If the Auspicious Gate supports, great benefits arise; if the Ominous Gate supports, disaster is hard to avoid. If the Auspicious Gate attacks the palace, fortune is thwarted; if the Ominous Gate attacks the palace, the situation becomes even more dire."

Qiao Yuan was also chanting under his breath.

Lu Zhengqing looked bewildered. "What are you muttering about?"

"The incantations of the Qimen Dunjia," Qiao Yuan replied. "I played an instance before called 'The Hanging Tomb.' It was filled with Taoist alchemy and Feng Shui techniques. If you don't know the basics of Feng Shui, or even how to identify the simplest directions like Qian and Kun, then 'The Hanging Tomb' would have effectively notified you that you were dead."

"What? The game even involves this?" Lu Zhengqing was horrified. "Thank goodness I never encountered that one."

Qiao Yuan ignored him and looked at Tang Mu. "Do you know how to read the positions?"

"What is difficult about that?"

Tang Mu was not an ordinary girl interested only in cosmetics and clothes. She had also studied esoteric arts. "Gen is the Gate of Life, and Kun is the Gate of Death. The Gate of Life resides in the Gen Palace of the Northeast, and the Gate of Death in the Kun Palace of the Southwest. Both belong to the Earth element. However, the Eight Trigrams are divided into the Pre-Heaven and Post-Heaven arrangements."

"If it were the Pre-Heaven arrangement, Gen would be in the Northwest. Only in the Post-Heaven arrangement is it in the Northeast. Can you tell if this Qimen Dunjia follows the Pre-Heaven or Post-Heaven arrangement?"

"Since the Zhou Dynasty, it has been the Post-Heaven arrangement... Northeast!"

Almost the moment Qiao Yuan finished speaking, the red threads in Tang Mu's hands surged toward the woman's stone statue in the Northeast. But a second before the threads touched the statue, the eight statues began to rotate around the woman. They spun faster and faster, until, to the eyes of Tang Mu and the others, only blurred afterimages remained.

"Damn it, now it's impossible to tell which is which."

Meanwhile, the woman laughed with arrogant madness. "Hahaha, die! Die here! How lonely I have been in hell by myself. Now that you are here to keep me company, I won't be bored anymore! Hahaha!"

As she laughed, a dark purple liquid overflowed from the belly of the central stone statue, slowly covering the Grass Hall Temple. Soon, there was nowhere left to stand.

"Watch out for that dark purple liquid!" Xingwen suddenly shouted. "That liquid can melt you. It will fuse you into this instance forever, and you will never be able to escape!"

"Do you know how to break it?"

Xingwen bit his lip, seemingly hesitant.

Seeing Xingwen’s hesitation, the woman’s manic smile turned cold. She cast a chilling look at him, a warning that if he dared to reveal the method to break the formation, she would make him pay dearly!

But Xingwen was an NPC with his own agenda. When this madwoman lost her mind, she stopped following the script entirely, leaving the other spirits staring at the sky in frustration, clutching their own scripts. Xingwen felt that when this woman went crazy, she didn't care about her fellow spirits at all. Just now, she had truly intended to kill him.

Driven by that "intent to kill," Xingwen had no intention of making things easy for her.

"Sister Ying consumed a great deal of spectral energy catalyzing the xenogeneic. Opening the grand formation ahead of schedule today has drained even more. The energy she has accumulated over hundreds of years is actually nearly spent. If you can break the formation today, she won't even last until the seventh day."

"Xing! Wen!" Sister Ying spat out each word, her eyes filled with murder.

However, Xingwen ignored her completely. A soldier who doesn't want to be a boss is not a good spirit. If he could finish off Sister Ying, he would become the boss of this instance! Wouldn't all the underlings in this dungeon have to follow his commands? Just thinking about it was worth celebrating.

"Forget the formation patterns. Breaking the central eye is what matters. Just shattering the belly of the woman's stone statue isn't enough. You must destroy the entire statue from top to bottom! It carries the power of faith from all the ghostly villagers in Luo Gate Village. Only by destroying its foundation..."

Before Xingwen could finish, the group launched a frenzied attack on the stone statue. They used everything they had. In an instant, a barrage of various weapons and techniques rained down upon the statue.

The most conspicuous, however, was the Fatty. He pulled two bundles of dynamite from his bag, lit them both, and cast a wicked grin at Sister Ying.

"I find your personal weapons quite unimpressive. They’re all flashy but useless. Take a look at your master's dynamite! I guarantee this will give you a taste of trouble, you little beauty!"

He tossed the lit dynamite toward the statue. But Sister Ying merely sneered in disdain. With a wave of her hand, the dynamite flew back toward the players.

"Fatty!" the players cursed in rage.

Tang Mu was quick-witted. Her red threads swiftly wrapped around the dynamite and lashed it back onto the woman's stone statue. In a heartbeat, the fuses were nearly burnt to the end.

Everyone breathed a sigh of relief, but then someone raised a hand.

"I have a question."

"Speak!"

"What is the blast radius of this dynamite?" Could it be like the previous one, capable of blowing the players' souls into nothingness?

"Damn it, run!" the Fatty shouted in panic. "The blast radius of this dynamite is twenty meters..."

"Boom!"

The dynamite exploded. The stone statue was blown to pieces. Flying dust filled the air, and the players at the center of the blast were thrown seven or eight meters away. Had the power of the dynamite the Fatty unleashed this time not been less than the one that cost him his entire savings of over a million points, no one present would have survived.

"Ptooey! Damn it, that fall hurt like hell!"