Chapter 394: The Psychic Energy Fluctuation of the Witch Type

On the lawn in front of the Tang City Museum, beneath the bronze sculpture of flying birds and auspicious clouds, Mao Sanyou leaned against the stone base of the sculpture, gazing at the sky, surrounded by cigarette butts scattered all over the ground.

His mood was complicated at this moment.

On one hand, he trusted Old Xu, the veteran operator who had served in Tang City for over ten years, and his investigation results.

On the other hand, he found it hard to believe that the recent chaos in Tang City was caused by Gou Meng being attacked by an unknown force, losing control of her psychic energy in a fit of frenzied revenge, and then falling into corruption.

“Shh-shh-!”

Just as Mao Sanyou was deep in thought, the sound of footsteps stepping on the grass came. He turned his head to see Shang Nanxing walking over gracefully, sitting down beside him, and waving two fingers at him.

“Give me one too?”

Seeing this, Mao Sanyou picked up the cigarette pack at his feet, pulled out a cigarette and handed it to Shang Nanxing, lighting it for her. Watching her exhale smoke, he opened his mouth, just about to say something, but Shang Nanxing spoke first.

“After this, the three of us might have to split up. There’s something I’ve always wanted to ask you. I’m afraid if I don’t ask now, I won’t get another chance,” Shang Nanxing said.

Mao Sanyou was stunned for a moment, then grinned, “Wait, don’t tell me you’ve got a crush on me?”

“You’re overthinking it.” Shang Nanxing rolled her eyes at Mao Sanyou and said calmly, “What I want to ask is, why have you stayed in Tang City all this time? I’ve always been curious about that.”

“I’m here to repay a favor, Old Xu is here for his belief, but what about you?”

From Mao Sanyou’s resume, he came from an ordinary family. After the nights grew long, he began to show psychic potential. During a haunting attack incident, he was discovered by an operator, recruited into The Midnight Watchers Society, drew a Spirit Pattern, became a reserve operator, and was eventually assigned to Hua City.

His background was nothing special, his abilities weren’t particularly outstanding, and he seemed just like the vast majority of utterly ordinary operators in The Midnight Watchers Society.

But…

He just happened to choose to stay in Tang City. Such a decision was truly baffling.

“Don’t you know me by now? Of course it’s to slack off!” Mao Sanyou answered with a laugh.

“Slack off, huh…” Shang Nanxing muttered to herself, taking a deep drag on her cigarette and slowly exhaling a wisp of white smoke toward the sky, where light snow was falling.

It can’t be just to slack off, right? Why did he really stay here? Shang Nanxing wondered.

After hunting down the first jar of pickles, Lu Yibei and Gou Meng returned to the Four Seasons Hotel in Tang City, planning to get back to work tomorrow.

A boy who looked too weak to truss a chicken and a little girl who seemed utterly harmless, wandering the danger-ridden city in the middle of the night, was just too conspicuous.

Rather than aimlessly searching the city for haunted artifacts, it was better to follow Professor Ma to the lab tomorrow.

The research team had made good progress in recovering artifacts recently, already collecting quite a few suspected items awaiting identification. If luck was on their side, Gou Meng might easily harvest several haunting core entities tomorrow.

Lu Yibei sent Gou Meng back to the room Professor Ma had arranged for her, set up Paper Cicada Immortals around both her room and her own, then returned to her own room, lay on the bed, emptied her mind, and immersed herself in a Dream.

“Ancestor, what kitchenware was reforged from the Pure Lotus Sword?”

After finding Qing Ji’s figure on the ruined, deserted rooftop, Lu Yibei got straight to the point.

Although when Gou Meng recounted her experience of being stabbed by kitchenware for the second time, Lu Yibei’s urge to laugh kept twitching her paralyzed facial muscles, making her expression spiral out of control.

But in the end, through Gou Meng’s halting words, she understood what Gou Meng was trying to say.

Gou Meng suspected that the people who attacked her possessed a fruit knife reforged from fragments of the Pure Lotus Sword.

Qing Ji turned around, his face full of surprise. “Do you have a lead?”

After hearing that the token of his and Lu Yanzhi’s love had been lost, he had been so angry he wanted Lu Yibei to summon the spirits of Lu Yuebo, Lu Bayi, and Lu Ming, those three unfilial descendants, to give them a good scolding and ask where the fragments of the Pure Lotus Sword had gone.

But Lu Yibei, worried her identity would be exposed, tactfully refused Qing Ji’s request.

Besides, Great-Grandfather would definitely blame Grandfather, Grandfather would blame Father, and Father would blame her.

Wouldn’t she be the one to suffer in the end?

Pulling her thoughts back, Lu Yibei nodded at Qing Ji. “Mm, I got word recently that someone is using a fruit knife of astonishing power. I suspect it might be a fragment of the Pure Lotus Sword, so I wanted to ask.”

“Hmm…” Qing Ji thought carefully for a moment. “There’s a Wenwu knife, a Sang knife, a carving knife, and a table knife used for slicing fruit and cooked meat. That might be the fruit knife you’re talking about.”

Could it really be a fragment of the Pure Lotus Sword? Lu Yibei grumbled inwardly, then pressed on, “Ancestor, what’s the last one?”

“Ferule.”

Ferule? That’s considered kitchenware? Lu Yibei was stunned for a moment, tilting her head in confusion. “Ancestor, what is the ferule used for in cooking?”

She’d hung around her father’s kitchen since childhood, watching him cook all sorts of dishes.

Though Western cuisine might use such items for measuring, Chinese cooking often relied on intuition and experience. A hundred people could make the same dish a hundred different ways, and fifty of those would taste pretty good-no ruler needed, let alone a ferule.

“…” Qing Ji looked at Lu Yibei, silent for a few seconds, then pointed expressionlessly at the tip of his own nose. “That was what your great-great-grandmother used to deal with me and my son Yuebo.”

After saying that, he paused for a few more seconds and sighed with deep melancholy. “Ah! I roamed the martial world for over a decade, drank with the Fairy of Tianshan, slept with a senior sister from the Great Pure Palace, and in the end, I fell into the hands of a little kitchen maid…”

Lu Yibei, “…” She hadn’t expected her ancestor to have such a rich life and love history. No wonder great-great-grandmother had specially prepared a ferule…

Just as Lu Yibei was secretly picturing great-great-grandmother wielding a ferule to discipline Qing Ji, his voice suddenly drifted into her ears.

“Speaking of which, granddaughter-in-law, isn’t it about time to start practicing?”

Lu Yibei, “???”

Before Lu Yibei could react, Qing Ji launched a sneak attack.

A dazzling light burst from his palm, sweeping up a fierce wind as he struck hard at Lu Yibei.

Terrifying power, speed beyond the naked eye, and astonishing technique all fused into this blow. In an instant, a thunderous boom erupted.

And so, amid the deafening roar, the Hundred-Armed Giant power simulated by psychic energy erupted through Lu Yibei’s entire body, shattering her bones with crackling sounds.

She exploded-her upper body flew straight off, still trailing half her internal organs, like some kind of dark, sadistic-kid-sister kite…

“Granddaughter-in-law, don’t be afraid. The more you die, the more you’ll be able to control it. To learn how to control this power, I died so many times! Hahaha!”

Before losing consciousness, Lu Yibei heard Qing Ji say this to her.

Qing Ji wasn’t lying. Before he successfully simulated the operation of the Hundred-Armed Giant’s power, he had blown up his own body at least a hundred times.

….

Five minutes later.

Lu Yibei opened her eyes once more, staring blankly at the ink-black sky. She wiped the cold sweat from her forehead and lay motionless on the ground like a corpse.

“Shasha-shasha-“

She heard footsteps. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Qing Ji approaching. A shadow flickered in her gaze, and without hesitation, she released her psychic energy’s suppression of the Hundred-Armed Giant’s power.

Then…

Just as Qing Ji strode over, eager to begin a new round of torment, Lu Yibei’s body suddenly exploded with a bang, as if someone had cast a corpse explosion spell.

The crisp crack of high-frequency air vibrations overlapped with the thunderous roar of lightning and fire, indistinguishable from each other. A shockwave erupted out of nowhere, blasting in all directions and turning into a fierce hurricane.

It was like dozens of shells exploding right in front of him. Qing Ji’s vision went black, and he collapsed to the ground.

Lu Yibei, who had sacrificed thirty thousand to kill a thousand enemies, had her head swept up by the shockwave, floating into the sky. Looking down at the blood-soaked rooftop, where the air currents surged like a tsunami, bone and blood fragments flying, radiant with light, a line of poetry flashed through her mind.

“The east wind at night brings a thousand trees into bloom. And blows down, stars like rain…”

5:57 a.m.

Lu Yibei bid farewell to Qing Ji, left the Dream, and woke up on the hotel bed. He stared blankly at the ceiling in the darkness for a moment. Feeling the sticky discomfort of dried sweat on his body, he frowned slightly and got up to head to the bathroom.

“Squeak-!”

With the soft sound of the faucet turning, hot water soon rushed over Lu Yibei’s skin, filling the bathroom with a hazy mist.

Basking in the hot water, Lu Yibei closed his eyes, carefully recalling the psychic energy fluctuations and the operation of the Hundred-Armed Giant’s power each time he was ambushed by the Ancestors or blew himself up to take them down with him. At the same time, he kept replaying Qing Ji’s words in his mind.

“Don’t copy me-or rather, don’t just blindly copy me. It’s useless.” Qing Ji had warned him when he noticed Lu Yibei imitating his psychic energy operation to manifest the Hundred-Armed Giant’s power.

“Think about it. When you first learned The Diagram of the Gentleman Sword of Taihe from me, aside from laying your foundation, did I really teach you anything about swordsmanship?”

Very little. Most of it I figured out myself, especially the survival techniques and footwork… Lu Yibei thought.

Although Qing Ji’s swordsmanship was exquisite, as Lu Yibei memorized his movements, he always felt a subtle sense of discord and discomfort, and would subconsciously adjust to a state that felt most natural to him.

“Everyone’s arm length, stride, height, weight, even psychic energy fluctuations are all slightly different. Other people’s experience can be a reference, but you can’t just copy it.”

“What you need to solve now is the trouble inside your body. If you can’t figure out your own way to control it, even if you temporarily master it, you’ll be planting hidden dangers without realizing it.”

My own way…

But what’s special about my psychic energy fluctuation? Lu Yibei wondered.

He really wanted to shout, “Ancestor, I’ve got it!”

Then return to the Dream and properly pay his respects to the old man.

But reality slapped him hard and told him, “You little brat, what have you figured out?”

Although after one round of completion, Lu Yibei was already very familiar with the characteristics of the mythical type’s psychic energy fluctuation, and had even developed various uses for his innate skill,

Now that the mythical type haunting’s core entity had fallen silent, he suddenly realized how little he knew about the witch type’s psychic energy fluctuation.

Without mastering the characteristics of the witch type’s psychic energy fluctuation, he couldn’t use it to simulate the operation of the Hundred-Armed Giant’s power, and thus couldn’t safely expel the Hundred-Armed Giant’s power from his body.

As he pondered, Lu Yibei’s consciousness suddenly grew hazy, just like when he’d dreamed of the “little girl selling Alchemical Bombs” by Lotus Seed Lake.

He dreamed that the most beautiful little princess living under the sea was allowed to rise to the surface on her fifteenth birthday to see the world.

As soon as she reached the surface, the little mermaid saw a handsome young man fall overboard in a storm, on the verge of death. She risked everything to save the prince, but since she didn’t belong on land, she had to leave.

From then on, the young man’s face often appeared in the little mermaid’s mind. She would secretly surface, following the fleet to watch the young man standing on the deck. She felt she had fallen in love with him.

Finally, she made up her mind and went to the terrifying sea witch, trading her most precious, beautiful voice for a potion to become human.

The night before taking the potion, the little mermaid surfaced again to secretly watch the young man.

The young man noticed the little mermaid and exclaimed excitedly, “It’s you?”

He actually recognized me? The little mermaid panicked, shyly nodding her head.

And then she…

Was caught by the young man named Zheng He1 and made into three dishes of merfolk.

Of all the people to fall for, why pick the most famous eunuch? In a daze, Lu Yibei complained inwardly.

In a wave of bone-chilling cold, Lu Yibei suddenly woke up, eyes snapping open, only to find that at some point the hot water from the showerhead had frozen into ice.

The moment he opened his eyes, a sharp icicle brushed past his nose, flew over his abdomen and unmentionable parts, and smashed onto the bathroom floor, shattering into icy shards.

Balls, once lost, never return.

Startled, Lu Yibei jumped back, staring at the icicles hanging from the showerhead, sucking in a cold breath.

“Hiss-! That was close!”

What the hell? What’s going on? Is this the characteristic of the witch type’s psychic energy fluctuation?

But is it meant to cut off someone’s future, ruin their childhood, or something else?

Maybe it’ll take some deeper research to find out… Lu Yibei thought, his mind growing darker as he considered suitable experimental targets.

For example… maybe grab a couple of readers to try it out?

“Ha, that’s way too edgy. I’m not a novel protagonist, where would I get readers?” Lu Yibei mocked the strange idea that popped into his head, then set his sights on Gou Meng’s pickles.

Before the pesky little sister devours them, let me experiment a bit first. That shouldn’t be a problem, right? Lu Yibei thought.

Footnote:

1. Zheng He (郑和): Zheng He, a court eunuch, was the great admiral and explorer of Ming Dynasty.