Chapter 18: The Female Ghost (Part Two)

Kou Li turned around abruptly and saw a maid standing timidly behind him. He recognized the young woman—she was the squirrel girl he had encountered back at the Rouge Pavilion.

At this very moment, however, the squirrel girl's attire and demeanor were drastically different from what he had seen at the brothel that day. Clad in a red quilted jacket, with her hair styled in double buns and wearing small black satin shoes, she lacked her usual boldness and fiery attitude, resembling a frightened, worldly-inexperienced rabbit.

Kou Li frowned. He could not tell whether she was human or a ghost, but one thing was certain: she was completely out of her mind. He was dressed in a night-prowling outfit with a masked face; what normal person would mistake him for a guest?

Murderous intent surged in Kou Li's eyes, and the demon blade even hummed, spurring and inciting his desire to kill. Yet a moment later, with a twist of his wrist, the blade instantly slid back into its scabbard. "Please lead the way, miss."

"Yes, honored guest," the squirrel girl said, her head lowered so low it seemed as if she had no neck, as she took small steps to lead the way. Bizarrely, however, she seemed to be greeting empty air.

"Good day, Sister Baiying."

"Sister Luohua is here to do the laundry again today."

"Sister Xu, be careful, don't walk too fast."

"Sister Rouge, stop arguing with the Third Madam all the time. Look at the injuries on your back."

A thought stirred in Kou Li's mind. Sister Rouge—could it be the Rouge Tiger?

The sole reason he sheathed his sword was not because she was a little beauty he knew, but rather because the moonlight cast a shadow of her figure on the ground beneath her.

Ghosts cast no shadows—at least, not in Kou Li's understanding.

Therefore, he did not mind following her to see what kind of trick she was playing.

The night was deep, the moonlight hazy, and a young beauty talking to herself against the empty air was abnormal no matter how one looked at it.

Rarely, Kou Li felt his palms grow slightly damp. Of course, given his level of body tempering, this was merely an illusion.

"Guest, this is the master's study. Master, the guest has arrived."

The dilapidated wooden door before him creaked as it slowly opened on its own. The light seemed to be completely blocked out, making the interior look like a pitch-black abyss, within which only the vague outline of a figure could be seen.

"Guest, please enter."

Kou Li tensed all over. A sudden realization struck him: after the former Viceroy stepped down from his post, on his way back to his hometown, he seemed to have been betrayed and tracked down by pirates, resulting in his entire household being brutally slaughtered.

So, who on earth was that figure inside?!

"Guest, it's time to go in," the squirrel girl said without turning her head.

Kou Li kept his gaze fixed on her. At that very moment, a dark cloud drifted across the sky, and her shadow slowly vanished.

Then, her body gave a slight sway, and she finally turned her head.

What kind of face was that? There was no skin or flesh left; bare bone was wrapped in grim, blood-red muscle fibers. The flesh in the center had been scraped away, the nose was gone, and the lips had been sliced off. With no teeth left, her tongue hung out unobstructed, bubbling blood from her mouth. Suddenly, she cracked her mouth open and burst into a weird, cackling laughter.

Without a second word, Kou Li unleashed a burst of chilling light with his Dōjitsukiri Yasutsuna, slashing from head to foot. While her head split into two halves, the blade met only empty air afterward, as if it had only sliced through clothes.

Sure enough, once the clothes were cut open, the interior was completely hollow.

From within the split halves of the head, a ball of white mist slowly drifted out, evoking a familiar sensation in Kou Li—the exact feeling he had experienced in the Soul-Lost Valley!

A flurry of dense footsteps rang out simultaneously.

A gust of cold air suddenly blew against the back of Kou Li's neck. His body had failed to react beforehand, but relying on sound to determine position, he executed a kick combining the stance of the Dipper-Pointing Kui-Xing with snapping kick momentum. Like a scorpion flicking its tail or a rear-firing cannon, he unleashed an explosive strike backward!

Yet where his foot landed felt like kicking into the freezing depths of a deep spring; an icy, heavy sensation rapidly spread upward along his ankle.

At this life-or-death moment, Kou Li made a decisive judgment. He hurled the bean-sized Ice-Soul Bead behind him while simultaneously executing a reverse slash with his explosive blade. A crisp snap, mingled with the subtle cracking sound of spreading frost and the twisting, explosive force of the blade, burst forth all at once.

A piercing, miserable scream echoed from behind him, while Kou Li's legs went weak, almost causing him to drop to his knees.

A thin layer of frost covered the top of his feet, though this was not the reason for his instability. The final bit of power from the Ice-Soul Bead had been fully discharged onto the ghostly entity behind him.

Though his internal martial arts were at the epitome of mastery and his vital energy and blood circulated like heavy spheres of lead and mercury, a distinct sinking and dragging sensation occurred when the energy flowed to his right foot. Although internal introspection revealed nothing missing, something had clearly been extracted.

Kou Li could not help letting out a shout. The nine-section vital force rolled like a pulley, linking head to tail and exploding section by section. The roiling of his vital energy and blood instantly accelerated tenfold, and his entire body's tendons, bones, skin, and flesh instantly twisted into a single cohesive force. With a heavy stomp, the ice crystals shattered into fine powder, mud splashed across the ground, and his body shot forward like a lightning bolt.

Charging past the corridor, the figure of a woman in a red dress spun out. With a flash of his blade, he decapitated her instantly. A jet of black sludge spurted directly from her neck, crawling entirely with large white maggots.

The wall surface suddenly shifted, extruding a bizarre facial feature. It was the face of an elderly man, opening its mouth to bite at his neck.

Kou Li's hair stood on end. His shoulder blades instantly bulged like hammers. Following the blade with a tiger-style elbow strike, twisting the blade hilt with eagle claws, his shoulders urged his elbows, and his elbows urged the blade. A dual explosive force of gunpowder strength erupted as he swung his blade like an axe, his arms and elbows instantly thickening and swelling. Wherever he slashed, the wall exploded with flying mud and stone, revealing a hole the size of a human head.

The human face vanished, and Kou Li understood one thing: changes that the body could perceive could be countered with boxing techniques, but for things the body could not perceive, mortal flesh and blood were useless.

Kou Li did not retrace his steps. He possessed relatively deep experience in dealing with such entities and knew that encountering this kind of existence meant escape was simply impossible.

However, demons possessed physical forms and could be dealt with by slaying them, whereas ghosts lacked physical forms. He had not yet conceived a method to counter such creatures.

Yet, recalling the bizarre change in his leg earlier, Kou Li realized that the accelerated circulation of vital energy and blood could, to a certain extent, resist the opponent's attacks.

The secretive changes in the Rouge Pavilion, the bizarre squirrel girl, the dense footsteps, the dark shadow in the study, the annihilated former viceroy family—scene after scene vaguely connected themselves into a single thread in Kou Li's mind.

With this thought, Kou Li did not retreat; instead, he advanced, walking back the way he had come. Soon, he spotted the corpse whose head he had split open. Using the tip of his blade, he pushed aside the skull to reveal a shriveled, withered old face, resembling human skin pasted onto a skeleton, from which one could faintly discern the head of an elderly woman.

Under Kou Li's gaze, the sunken eye sockets suddenly snapped open. Before it could move, he brought his foot down, smashing the entire skull to pieces, sending its eyeballs bouncing off into the unknown.

The pattering of footsteps behind and in front resumed, rustling as if crawling directly across the human heart.

This disturbance was entirely inescapable, even if Kou Li blocked his ears, creating an exceptionally unsettling sensation.

Then, the chill on his body resurfaced, as if something had been drained away, though the intensity was far lower than before.

As his vital energy and blood continued to circulate and his figure kept dodging, this coldness gradually lost its effect on him.

This made him realize that within the entire estate, there should only be a single entity of the fierce-ghost class.

A whimsical idea struck Kou Li: if ghosts fed by absorbing this substance from within the body, what would happen if they ate too much? Would they choke?

No sooner said than done. With his internal force perfected, the four extremities fulfilled, the breath-channeling method, and the twelve-fold bamboo-joint force all fully activated, a continuous series of bone-twisting explosions sounded, followed by the rushing-torrent sound of circulating vital energy and blood. Ten times, twenty times, thirty times faster—his skin turned as red as glowing iron, wisps of smoke drifted away, and his body swelled nearly a circle. Engorged with blood, his tendons and bones seemed about to burst through his skin, and a thick, pungent smell of blood permeated a radius of ten zhang.

Although this state was supremely rigid and yang, unfavorable for sparring or combat, it represented the absolute limit of training, the pinnacle of internal martial arts, and the apex of bodily operation under this state.

The footsteps suddenly multiplied, seemingly all attracted by this thick scent of blood.

Suddenly, an intangible hand pierced through his skin and flesh, plunging into Kou Li's shoulder like a pipe sucking out the intangible essence within his body.

In that very instant, the ghost emitted a silent scream. A puff of black smoke rose from the point of contact, its figure flickering in and out of visibility. Right at that moment, Kou Li's blade flashed past, as if slicing through something.

"Demon blade, we've reached this point, it's about time you showed some demonic aura," Kou Li's gaze condensed as the out-projection capability of the wordless scroll was fully unleashed onto the bluish blade.

Seemingly provoked by Kou Li, or perhaps enticed by the power of the wordless scroll, the demonic blade's inherent demonic power was drawn out. A black river deer swam up and down the blade, and a series of indistinct serrated teeth suddenly appeared along the edge.

When Kou Li slashed at the formless ghost once more, the serrated teeth ground up and down, and the ghost was seemingly swallowed whole, falling completely silent.

The dense footsteps quickly became the targets of Kou Li's slaughter; wherever he passed, no ghost could block his path.

As for that most ferocious white shadow, it seemed to have been injured by the explosion of the Ice-Soul Bead and never appeared again.

Finally, when the first rays of the great sun's light shone into the courtyard of the separate manor, all the ghosts, illusions, and corpses vanished completely, as if the night he had just experienced were merely an illusion.

Yet Kou Li knew that this was by no means an illusion: there was a female ghost within the residence, and the Rouge Tiger shared an extremely close connection with this ghost.