Chapter 45 Ancient Ghost General

A fine drizzle began to fall over Old Locust Tree Village.

Standing beneath the ancient locust tree, Pan Shuai lowered his head in silence.

He pulled out a cigarette and lit it quietly.

However, because of the heavy rain, the cigarette quickly became too soaked to smoke.

Pan Shuai casually tossed away the cigarette butt, suddenly lunged forward on one knee, grabbed Lu Li by the collar, and cursed furiously, "You fucking died just like that?! How the hell am I supposed to explain this to your parents?! Go fuck yourself..."

By the end, this grown man nearing thirty spoke with an unmistakable sob in his voice.

No one dared to speak, and the atmosphere at the scene turned deeply sorrowful.

Xingtian, whose expression had originally been numb, sighed, stepped forward, squatted down, and persuaded, "Let's figure out a way to lay him to rest in peace first. Besides, those urban legends have probably already infected someone among us."

Xingtian thought he would feel happy, but he did not.

Lu Li was dead, which meant this world was far more dangerous than the previous Tier-A world he had experienced.

Moreover, he remembered the look Lu Li gave him when letting him go.

There was no grief, but he actually felt a bit heavy-hearted.

Therefore, one must never form personal connections with the people inside a mission world.

As long as one treated them simply as game NPCs, such feelings would never arise.

Xingtian smiled self-deprecatingly.

Yet precisely because they were human, it was impossible not to feel...

"Yeah." The moment urban legends were mentioned, Pan Shuai instantly regained his composure.

Though the pain still lingered, this was hardly the time for grief.

He turned back and gave orders, "Go find three body bags. Their corpses cannot just be left out in the rain like this."

"I agree that they shouldn't be left in the rain, but why can't someone give them an umbrella?"

A voice suddenly rang out not far from Pan Shuai's ear.

And it was a voice he knew far too well!

He whipped his head around, and sure enough, there was Lu Li's handsome face, wearing a smile!

Pan Shuai's mind went completely blank, and he instinctively threw a punch forward.

Lu Li was startled and similarly raised his arm out of sheer reflex to block.

He did block it.

And yet he didn't.

Pan Shuai's fist indeed struck Lu Li's arm, and Lu Li felt virtually no force behind it—comparable at best to a casual tap from an ordinary person.

The very next moment, however, a heavy impact struck the right side of his face, as if he had taken a direct punch right to the cheek!

Lu Li's head was even forced to turn to the left by the kinetic force to cushion the blow.

He rubbed his reddened cheek, turned back, and asked, "Young Master Pan, what the hell was that?"

"My supernatural ability is the power of imagination, specifically making the other person imagine things. The conditions are harsh and too complicated to explain all at once, but my personal cue is to perform an action, letting the target's imagination fill in the result. Generally speaking, it always works—though too exaggerated scenarios won't fly. There's one prerequisite, however: I must make physical contact with the other person."

To put it simply, he would throw a punch and let the target imagine what consequences that punch would bring.

What Lu Li had imagined was that he failed to block the punch and took a direct hit to the face.

Therefore, even though he had blocked the punch, the moment his arm made contact with Pan Shuai's fist, the latter activated his ability, causing Lu Li to take a blow to the face based entirely on his own imagination.

This ability was quite terrifying, though somewhat uncontrollable.

And it undoubtedly came with heavy limitations, but since Pan Shuai didn't elaborate, Lu Li didn't press.

After briefly explaining his ability, Pan Shuai immediately pressed on, "Old Lu, what's going on with you? Just now, you genuinely stopped breathing, and even your pupils began to dilate. You were definitely dead!"

Lu Li smiled. "That was just an illusion, also the result of my own ability."

"I see." Pan Shuai had a sudden epiphany and stopped questioning further.

He had previously guessed that Old Lu's ability involved interfering with the five senses to create hallucinations.

Thus, he assumed that thinking Old Lu was dead earlier was merely a hallucination on their part.

He then moved on to the most pressing issue. "Old Lu, what happened after you were dragged away by the Pen Spirit and the others? According to our accumulated experience, urban legends shouldn't possess self-awareness."

Lu Li pulled out a cigarette, lit it, took a drag, and then stubbed it out on the ground. "They indeed don't have it. They're being controlled."

Pan Shuai was stunned. "What?!"

The information density in Lu Li's statement was too high; he needed a moment to process it.

After a few seconds, he asked, "Old Lu, do you mean to say the urban legends are being controlled by someone?"

"They are indeed controlled, but probably not by a 'person'."

"A ghost?"

"More or less, but far more terrifying."

Lu Li rubbed his head and asked, "Did you guys find any useful clues in this village? I keep feeling like I've forgotten something."

"Not yet." Pan Shuai pulled Lu Li up. "Do you have any clues?"

"Dong—the mastermind behind those urban legends should have the surname Dong, though I can't quite remember how I got this piece of information." Lu Li looked back at the hundred-meter-tall ancient tree. "And since the entity is a ghost, it might be as ancient as this tree. I suggest you conduct your investigation while simultaneously having headquarters check when this tree was planted."

"Alright." Seeing that Lu Li was fine, Pan Shuai turned back to instruct the others to continue searching Old Locust Tree Village.

Whatever questions he had could be asked in private later.

A short distance away, Xingtian, who had just quietly retreated, was discussing the next course of action with his four companions.

"Captain, what's our next move?"

Xingtian glanced stealthily toward Lu Li's group. Seeing that no one was looking their way, he analyzed, "The situation Lu Li encountered is definitely not as simple as he claims, but he clearly hasn't obtained the core clue, otherwise our mission prompt should have indicated completion.

"Besides, I've realized there's a trap in this mission."

"What trap?"

"In the mission description," Xingtian said with a solemn expression. "The description is 'Guide the Supernatural Bureau to learn the truth behind the urban legends,' but what if the Supernatural Bureau doesn't learn the truth from us? Does this mission count as a success or a failure?"

The expressions of the other four descendents shifted slightly.

They genuinely hadn't considered that angle.

In truth, it was quite simple to understand, much like the distinction between targeting and non-targeting cards in Yu-Gi-Oh.

"In short, everything concerning the mission is best understood strictly according to the text description, not through our own interpretations."

Xingtian gave his final conclusion. "Therefore, I believe this is a trap hidden within the mission prompt. If we truly just sit back and wait, once they discover the truth on their own, our mission will result in failure."

"Then what should we do? We don't even know the truth ourselves; how are we supposed to guide them?" someone asked in confusion.

"Search the village!" Xingtian gritted his teeth. "As long as we find the clues before them and guide them afterward, it'll work! Everyone, stop holding back your special methods. I suspect this belongs to a high-difficulty mission world, where the difficulty often lies in unpredictability and urgency! And that's precisely the situation we're in now!"

"Understood! Captain, we'll follow your lead!"

"Then let's move out!"

Half an hour later—

"Team Leader, we found it!"

Pan Shuai, who was chatting idly with Lu Li, snapped to attention and asked, "What did you find?"

"There's a basement in the ancestral hall! When we went in, we found numerous bamboo slips and books! They record village chronicles dating all the way from over a thousand years ago up to the present!"

"Good!"

Energized, Pan Shuai prepared to head over, but Lu Li suddenly grabbed his arm.

Pan Shuai turned back, only to meet Lu Li's grim expression.

"Young Master Pan, have them carry out those bamboo slips and books, and let's fall back immediately!"

"Fall back?" Pan Shuai was startled, his expression changing the next second. "Did you sense something?"

A shrill, miserable scream echoed from the distance.

Lu Li sighed. "I'm afraid leaving won't be so easy now."

His fragmented memories had finally returned.

"Wang Quan!!!"

Among the five-member descendent group, a handsome young man named Fang Bie stared ahead in utter horror.

There, blocking their path, was a towering, heavily armored knight mounted on a massive crimson warhorse.

The four hooves of the warhorse beneath the knight blazed with eerie blue flames, and its eyes burned with the same ghostly fire.

The knight itself stood well over two meters tall, clad in a hundred-fold embroidered crimson Sichuan robe, crowned with a triple-forked purple-gold hair-binding coronet, and wielding a colossal, bone-chilling Halberd of Heavenly Fang.

Its face was that of a ghastly white skeleton, with ghostly green flames burning within its pitch-black eye sockets.

Dripping blood fell from the giant halberd in its grasp.

And right beneath the hooves of the spectral warhorse lay a headless corpse.

A short distance away, the face of their original companion's severed head was frozen in a final expression of utter astonishment.