Deep within the Beast Taming Mountain forests, inside a certain cave.
A bonfire was burning.
Beside the bonfire lay a few gutted small fish, roasting until oil sizzled on their surface.
"This is damn well bizarre! Didn't that Feng Wuji lose his Spirit Pet? What the hell was that cluster of black mist?" A man in black pulled off his mask, picked up a fish, and took a vicious bite.
Soon, the man in black frowned deeply. "Bah! This fish isn't fully cooked!"
"Be glad you have something to eat!" Another man in black nearby stood up. "I'm going outside to take a leak!"
"Old Five, watch yourself!"
"I know! I've got my weapon!" The man in black patted the weapon at his waist and strode out of the cave.
Just as he untied his trousers and was about to relieve himself, rustling sounds suddenly arose all around!
The sudden commotion made the urge to urinate that had just welled up instantly vanish.
"What's that sound? Wild beasts?" Old Five looked toward the source of the noise.
When he finally reached the vicinity of a cluster of bushes, Old Five saw the plants before him, and his face instantly turned completely pale.
"Ah!"
A miserable scream tore through the night.
The two men eating meat by the bonfire immediately jerked upright upon hearing it.
"Old Five?" The two men inside the cave sprang to their feet, the scraping sound of steel blades leaving their scabbards exceptionally grating.
The only response they received was the hollow wailing of the night wind through the treetops, accompanied by a bizarre whispering that sounded like countless fine needles scraping against tree bark.
On a silent night, such sounds were particularly clear!
"Damn it! Grab your gear!"
One of them let out a low growl, immediately grabbed a burning piece of wood from the bonfire to use as a torch, and walked toward the distance.
Along the way, they were exceptionally vigilant. The two brothers pressed their backs against each other, moving step by step toward the direction where their companion had vanished.
Their boots crunched on the fallen leaves with every step, sounding as though they were crushing the hard shells of some insect.
"Brother, do you think this place is haunted?"
"Damn it! Stop talking nonsense. The two of us are full of youthful vigor and righteous blood; any evil spirits would have to walk around us!" one of them cursed.
His Adam's apple bobbed as he shouted forward, "Old Five! Answer!"
His voice carried an unperceived tremor.
"Brother? Could Old Five have gone back?" the man holding the saber asked with a trembling voice.
In an unfamiliar place, humans felt an instinctive fear of the dark environment.
"Brother?" The man suddenly realized that his good older brother hadn't spoken for a long time.
When he turned back, he immediately saw that the torch had rolled to the ground at some unknown point.
"Brother!" Clutching his torch, he ran back stumbling and scrambling, but his foot caught on something and he sprawled ignominiously to the ground.
As the torch rolled away, its flickering light happened to illuminate the ground ahead, and the sight before him nearly stopped his heart!
Two corpses.
No!
Those were no longer corpses.
They were two skeletons wrapped in human skin.
The skin was pulled taut over the craggy skeletons, presenting an eerie, grayish-yellow waxen hue, like inferior parchment that had been stored for hundreds of years.
Their eye sockets had sunk into two pitch-black whirlpools, and their cheekbones protruded so high they almost pierced the flesh of their faces.
They were curled up in an extremely distorted posture, their limbs and joints bent backward as if twisted into dough twists by an invisible giant force.
Most terrifying of all were their expressions, which still maintained a look of horror.
"Ugh!" The man in black fell flat on his back, the scene before him scaring him out of his wits.
"Brother! Old Five!" He scrambled over, but the two men were already completely dead.
The man in black said in terror, "Blood... all their blood has been drained?"
"You're too noisy."
A chilling voice abruptly came from directly above his head, devoid of the slightest warmth.
The man in black snapped his head up.
The youth stood on a tree branch, his back to the pale moonlight.
The next moment, the youth leaped down from the branch. "Caught you!"
"Ghost!" The man in black wet himself as he scrambled backward, drawing his long saber to make a last-ditch fight.
The youth was none other than Feng Wuji. He glanced at the man in black. "Don't move, or you'll lose your life!"
"Huh?" Only then did the man in black notice that a massive swarm of mosquitoes was already hovering around him like a black ghost!
"If you want to end up just like them..." Feng Wuji crooked a finger at the man in black. "Come here!"
"Don't... don't kill me! I—I don't know anything!" The man in black glanced at the desiccated corpses on the ground and was scared out of his wits.
A reek of urine immediately permeated the air, but swept by the night wind, it eerie dispersed.
"Who sent you?" Feng Wuji's face was chillingly cold.
The man in black whimpered, "I—I don't know..."
Suddenly, he felt his left hand lose all sensation. Lowering his head, he saw that one of his arms was covered entirely in mosquitoes!
Soon, that arm actually shrank by a full circle!
The skin on his arm had also turned frighteningly pale!
"Who sent you?" Feng Wuji asked again.
The man in black finally cracked under the pressure. With a plop, he dropped to his knees. "We're a group of rogue cultivators who accepted someone's commission to fake joining the sect and come to Beast Taming Mountain to become Servant Disciples..."
"Can't you understand my words? I asked you, who!" Feng Wuji was losing his patience.
"I really don't know." Tears and snot covered the man in black's face. "We were Servant Disciples working as vegetable farmers in the Herb Garden. Early this morning, someone gave us a note... Yes, a note!"
Stumbling and scrambling, he hurried to the side of the man he called "brother" and began searching his body, soon pulling out a note.
Feng Wuji unfolded it and saw a single sentence written on it: "Take away the black coffin in the northwest corner, then throw it out in the wilderness to be burned."
Feng Wuji understood at once; it seemed someone was remotely controlling these four brothers!
"What did he promise you?" Feng Wuji asked.
"A hundred days from now... A hundred days from now, he'll give our group of four brothers one thousand Spirit Stones! We make our living on the edge of a knife anyway; back then, those Spirit Stones would have let the four of us live it up for quite a while! Spare my life, Senior Brother!"
Feng Wuji was silent for a moment. "You may go."
"Thank you, Senior Brother! Thank you, Senior Brother!" The man in black scrambled away toward the distance.
Yet the next moment, countless mosquitoes had already surrounded him.
"Senior Brother! Didn't you say..." The man in black collapsed onto the ground, unable to stand any longer.
Feng Wuji sneered. "I did spare you, but my Spirit Pet refuses to let you go. What can I do?"
He walked over, looked at the corpse on the ground, and immediately took its Storage Bag.
Just right to see what good things were inside the Storage Bags of these four men before heading back.
However, Feng Wuji was disappointed to find that the Storage Bags of all four men contained only miscellaneous items.
The Spirit Stones added up to just over thirty, along with some inferior pills, clothing, and hidden weapons.
It seemed this last man in black hadn't lied; the four of them really were independent vagrant cultivators taking commissions, with hardly any money, reduced to doing desperate work on the edge of a blade.
Just as Feng Wuji intended to head back, a prompt sounded in his ear.
[Rare insect tribe detected nearby!]