Chapter 095: Descended from the Heavens
What? A corpse puppet?
The Yunhai Plaza annual celebration was under way, and more than a hundred thousand people were there.
And now a corpse puppet had appeared?
“False alarm?”
That was the first thought that flashed through Su Jingxing’s mind after he saw the message.
But he quickly dismissed it, because the sender was the City Guard Office.
The number was indeed the emergency notification line.
“The Captain and the others are in danger!”
That was Su Jingxing’s second thought after seeing the two words, “corpse puppet.”
Gu Bo, Kong Dabao, and the others were still at Yunhai Plaza. With a corpse puppet appearing at this moment, Gu Bo’s group was instantly thrown into deadly peril.
Including the more than a hundred thousand people in the plaza and the nearby streets, all of them were now facing the threat of death.
“This is great!”
That was Su Jingxing’s third thought as he stared at the words “corpse puppet.”
Because if a corpse puppet appeared, killing it would give him an excellent chance of obtaining a Martial Practice Card.
With a Martial Practice Card, he could rapidly master the Breath-Concealing Art of the Ghost Serpent and the energy-control chapter of the Giant God Saber!
Three thoughts flashed through his mind in an instant.
The next second, Su Jingxing took his cloak and mask from his palm space, put them on in a flash, pushed off the ground, and used the Eight Steps Soaring Dragon technique to shoot into the sky.
...
Yunhai Plaza.
By now, the place was in utter chaos. Screams, roars, cries of pain, and wails rang out everywhere.
Before the celebration had even reached its halfway point, a corpse puppet had burst out of the mall.
The moment it appeared, it tore more than a dozen people apart.
The blood-soaked, savage, horrifying scene was broadcast on the giant screens on both sides of the plaza, shocking everyone.
In an instant, the more than a hundred thousand people fell into disarray, scattering in all directions, their screams piercing the heavens.
The security staff at the plaza and the public order team stationed on-site had not even made a move before they were swept apart by the panicked crowd.
Gu Bo, Kong Dabao, Feng Tiejian, and the others were no different. Before they could even react, they were carried along by the screaming, terrified masses, fleeing in every direction.
When Kong Dabao passed a corner, someone behind him shoved him, and he twisted his ankle on the spot, falling hard to the ground.
In the midst of the panic, he had no time to cry out in pain. Dragging his leg, he scrambled quickly across the floor, hid in a corner, and pressed himself tight against the wall. He let the crowd rush past him and did not dare move or make a sound.
“Roar—”
A bestial howl slowly drew nearer.
Disheveled-haired, hunched over, and madly slaughtering, the corpse puppet hunted the fleeing crowd like a leopard, leaving broken limbs and severed bodies in its wake.
The nauseating stench of blood drifted through the air, spreading across the entire plaza.
“Don’t come over, don’t come over, don’t come over...”
Kong Dabao, pressed against the corner and too frightened to move, stared fixedly at the corpse puppet, praying over and over in his heart.
Yet the more he prayed, the closer it came.
“What do I do? What do I do? What do I do?”
Kong Dabao trembled all over. His heart pounded so violently it felt like it was trying to force its way up his throat, and his eyes were filled with despair.
Fifty meters, thirty, twenty, ten...
Closer, ever closer!
Bang!
A thunderous boom suddenly exploded in the sky.
The despairing Kong Dabao instinctively looked up.
In his field of vision, he saw a massive, translucent fist mark of silver and black breaking the air as it fell from above.
Boom!
The earth shook, and dust rolled skyward.
Under Kong Dabao’s stunned gaze, the descending silver-black fist imprint struck the corpse puppet dead on, hammering the monster, controlled by the resurrected corpse worm egg, into the ground.
The terrifying force smashed out a crater roughly three meters in radius, with cracks more than ten meters long radiating from its edge.
One of those cracks happened to scrape right past Kong Dabao’s foot.
Kong Dabao stood rooted to the spot, stunned into stillness, forgetting everything.
He could only stare blankly as a figure drifted down from the sky, his eyes vacant, his silence filled with shock.
...
[Detected a corpse. Collect?]
“Yes!”
[Detected a corpse. Collect?]
“Yes!”
[Detected...]
...
So many people had died that wherever the corpse puppet passed, there were broken bodies everywhere.
Su Jingxing descended from the sky, and before he even landed, collection prompts were already flashing past in rapid succession.
While answering them, he drew closer to the crater where the corpse puppet lay.
[Detected a parasitic corpse worm. Collect?]
“Yes!”
His expression remained unchanged as Su Jingxing looked down into the pit at the corpse puppet.
At this moment, the corpse puppet’s body, once so hard it was impervious to blades and spears, had been shattered into pieces.
One year of cultivation in Heavenly-Stepping True Qi was roughly equal to a thousand jin.
Su Jingxing had been afraid of accidents just now, so he had burst out with all his cultivation, mobilizing sixty years of true qi in full and gathering it into his fist, releasing it through the Hundred-Step King Fist.
One year was about a thousand jin; sixty years was nearly sixty thousand jin, and then multiplied sevenfold.
That was almost four hundred thousand jin of force!
Falling from two hundred meters in the air, with gravity accelerating the impact, no matter how hard the corpse puppet’s body was, it could not withstand the blow and shattered on the spot.
Even so, this corpse puppet, clearly transformed from a woman, still had not died.
Half of its face remained, and its mouth was still opening and closing, biting at the air.
Its pale eyes erupted with endless deathly intent.
“An outer-world demon insect...”
Muttering under his breath, Su Jingxing did not linger. He tapped his toe and rose into the air again, using the Eight Steps Soaring Dragon technique to shoot up into the clouds.
Amid a dragonlike howl of slicing wind, his figure vanished into the horizon.
On the plaza below, the crowd that had fallen behind, screaming in terror and fleeing desperately, stood rooted to the spot, staring up at the sky in a daze. For a long while, not a single person made a sound.
Too fast.
From the corpse puppet’s appearance to its frenzied slaughter, from the thunderous boom in the air to the moment it was crushed by one fist, the entire sequence took no more than five minutes.
In those five minutes, no one knew how many had died in the corpse puppet’s claws.
The people who had escaped calamity were now overwhelmed with emotion, and toward the corpse puppet, and toward the expert who had appeared in time to save them, they did not know how to express what they felt.
Hundreds of people just stood there, faces blank, stunned into silence.
Only when the sound of helicopters came from overhead, and more than a dozen figures rapidly rushed in from the rooftops of the buildings around the plaza, did the crowd finally snap back to awareness.
The next moment, cries broke out all at once. The hundreds who had narrowly survived collapsed to the ground, weeping, shouting, and screaming as they vented the many emotions surging within them.
The experts from the Martial Suppression Office, led by Li Linzhou, came to the edge of the corpse puppet’s crater.
A group of people gathered around the pit, more than six feet deep, and looked down at the corpse puppet broken into more than ten pieces at the bottom, its mouth still opening and closing, and fell silent.
...
At the small courtyard at the foot of the mountain, Su Jingxing landed and had just taken off his cloak and mask when the phone in his pocket began to ring.
He took it out and answered.
“Xiaosu, where are you now? Are you still at Yunhai Plaza?”
“No, I just got home,” Su Jingxing replied.
The call was from the manager in charge of the crematorium’s corpse recovery team.
“That’s good, that’s good.”
The manager on the other end let out a slight sigh of relief, then hurriedly said, “A corpse puppet appeared at Yunhai Plaza, you know about it, right?”
Without waiting for Su Jingxing to answer, the manager continued, “The corpse puppet has already been eliminated. Headquarters has given orders for us to go to Yunhai Plaza immediately, transport the bodies back to the crematorium, and burn them...”
“I’ll head to the intersection right away!” Su Jingxing cut in.
Beep-beep.
The call ended.
Su Jingxing no longer hesitated. He put away his phone and returned the cloak and mask to his palm space.
Then he took out the card taken from the corpse puppet, held it in his hand, and walked outside while reading the information.
Martial Practice Card.
Just as expected, it was indeed a Martial Practice Card.
And the duration was exceptionally long as well, astonishingly sixteen years!
What was going on?