Chapter 22

On the first day of the incident in Lesser Willow Village, the town's constable office was already mobilized. Believing the crime to have been committed by an Evil Cultivator, the coroner examined the mummified corpse and declared that it did not appear to be the work of a human. Zombies, he noted, had to bite in order to drink blood, yet there was not a single wound on the body. Furthermore, the blood-sucking cultivation techniques practiced by Evil Cultivators always left behind residual spiritual energy in the corpse; no one could execute such techniques without using spiritual energy, since the very essence of evil arts is to convert external matter into spiritual energy for one's own use. The constable office was astonished. They interviewed every villager in Lesser Willow Village, only to be told that no strangers had visited the village recently. A thorough search of the entire village yielded nothing unusual. Yet every single day, people died in the village—sometimes one, sometimes two. They all died in the same manner: their entire supply of blood vanished out of thin air. Moreover, every villager showed signs of blood loss, suggesting that perhaps within a few days they would all perish in the same way.