Chapter 157: Anomaly
On the grayish-white eyeball, a pitch-black pupil like a mass of thick ink was slowly expanding.
The emotionless line of sight was calm yet eerie; merely meeting it brought a horrifying feeling.
Some eerie attack was brewing, and as the pupil expanded, the light in Zhang Qian’s line of sight was gradually darkening.
It could be foreseen that once the darkness in the eyeball occupied the entire eyeball, Zhang Qian might completely lose the ability to see things, turning into a blind person.
“An ability related to line of sight…”
Without hesitation, Zhang Qian launched an attack before this change could fully take effect, wanting to strangle this unknown attack in the cradle.
As the wound on his hand accelerated in expansion, part of his true qi was diverted, no longer providing protection, and instead began to awaken the ghost face ability.
A pale mask interspersed with bluish-black hues quickly appeared; Zhang Qian’s icy cold line of sight pierced through the mask, clashing with that eyeball.
In just an instant, the confrontation had already decided a winner.
In front of the ghost mask, which could be called certain death attack, this eyeball of unknown origin had no room for resistance and was instantly defeated.
The pupil expanding in the center of the eyeball suddenly halted, then contracted continuously from coin-sized back inward, stopping as a black dot invisible to the naked eye.
The entire eyeball seemed covered by a layer of thin gauze, dull and lifeless like a dead fish’s eyes, devoid of that indescribable eerie vitality.
The somewhat out-of-control ghost hand also recovered to normal, twitching violently as if just awakened, causing the eyeball between its fingers to drop to the ground.
The eerie sense of peeping had already vanished, and the light in the room returned to normal.
But Zhang Qian’s mood showed no relaxation; instead, he looked at the dead person’s head in front of him with some confusion.
Clearly, the eyeball had fallen into a brief deadlock due to the attack, yet this severed limb ghost seemed unaffected, its struggling intensity not diminishing in the slightest.
“Squelch—”
With Zhang Qian’s action, the eyeball on the carpet offered no resistance, making a sound under his foot before rolling gurgling to the side.
Though the entire eyeball did not burst, it did not counterattack either.
“The attack worked, but it only worked on this eyeball?”
“Is there such a trick? Abandon the attacked part to shield off the attack’s influence. Doesn’t that mean countless chances for mistakes? Such a fierce ghost is too cheating…”
Among the supernatural events Zhang Qian knew, no such case had appeared.
Otherwise, suppressing a ghost wouldn’t be so easy; one would have to consider if it might suddenly shed its tail to escape or launch a sneak attack this way.
“If it were really that simple, given this severed limb ghost’s posture of wanting to escape, this thing should have already thrown away the head and fled directly.”
Unless this head, unlike the eyeball, could not be separated and abandoned.
Zhang Qian was momentarily stunned, then realized, “Rather than saying this is a part split off from the fierce ghost, it’s better to say the eyeball and severed limb ghost are originally two fierce ghosts.”
“Two fierce ghosts staying together without interfering with each other, the eyeball even able to stay obediently in the severed limb ghost’s body, waiting for a chance to attack me…”
Such a thing probably wouldn’t have a second instance in the entire supernatural circle, right?
After all, fierce ghosts don’t care about the type of attack target—whether human, fierce ghost, or even animal—as long as the rule is triggered, it becomes the attack target.
And besides their unique attack conditions, most fierce ghosts share a universal condition of not being touchable.
Putting two ghosts together, the final result could only be them confronting each other until one side prevailed.
Even if their supernatural powers were evenly matched, they could at most achieve balance in the confrontation, endlessly battling forever.
But looking at these two fierce ghosts, they clearly weren’t confronting each other; the ghost eye even seemed somewhat parasitic on the severed limb ghost, becoming part of it.
This was somewhat similar to Yue Linhai’s puzzle theory, but fundamentally entirely different.
Puzzle theory is two or more fierce ghosts fusing to form a brand-new, even more powerful fierce ghost.
The current situation was more like a disabled person wearing a prosthetic limb—able to satisfy use, but the two ultimately not a whole.
This was an anomaly that broke the rule.
Zhang Qian’s eyes narrowed as he looked at the somewhat swollen belly on the fierce ghost’s body.
“There’s only one way to break the rule…”
“Some even more powerful strength overrides the old rule, achieving a new rule.”
This fierce ghost was indeed interesting; who knew what thing was hidden inside the belly.
The mask on his face quietly faded, more true qi poured into surrounding and blocking the fierce ghost’s supernatural power.
But the wounds already sustained could not be reversed; instead, under the supernatural power’s corrosion, they grew larger.
Like a dam cracked with gaps, once the liquid seeped out, filling it became somewhat too late.
Fortunately, the time Zhang Qian needed wasn’t long.
Not long after, the bulge on the fierce ghost’s neck silently vanished.
The ghost hand finally crawled over this long distance, delving deep into the fierce ghost’s body.
But the situation here was not as clear as imagined.
Inside the fierce ghost was not ordinary organs like viscera, but an immensely huge cavity.
The size of this cavity was impossible to estimate, as there was not a shred of light around, making boundaries indistinguishable.
After Zhang Qian focused his mind on the ghost hand, he could only feel it suspended in a calm ocean, the surroundings terrifyingly quiet, without the slightest movement.
Gradually, the ghost hand began to sink.
More and more of it became soaked; in just a few seconds, Zhang Qian felt as if he had been pulled into seawater under an iceberg.
The bright room was replaced by some darkness, a suffocation suddenly arising in his heart.
In this dark sea, all supernatural seemed to lose effect.
When Zhang Qian realized something was wrong and wanted to withdraw, he found he couldn’t pull his attention back from the ghost hand’s perception.
No…
Effortfully opening his eyes, a pair of pale hands abruptly appeared before him.
What entered this sea domain was not only the ghost hand, but also himself.
The true qi on his body had failed for some reason; he couldn’t even sense the ghost hand’s position.
Cold, helpless.
At this moment, Zhang Qian was like an ordinary drowning person, trapped in an unfathomably deep strange water domain, not knowing how to survive.
Darkness stretched endlessly in all directions; only by the faint light from an unknown source could he barely make out his spread-open five fingers.
Besides that, there was nothing else.
Direction seemed to have lost meaning here; Zhang Qian only felt as if he had entered some weightless state, unable even to distinguish which side was the water surface.
