Chapter 137: The Ghost Tower

"Damn, that's intense." I let out a knowing, lecherous smirk that only men would understand.

Just as I was about to leave, my eyes darted around. Maybe I should take a look; I might even learn a trick or two. I placed my hand on the window, channeled a light ripple of magical energy, and the lock clicked open. I pushed the window, pried the curtains open a sliver, and peered inside with excitement.

In an instant, however, a jolt of shock went through me. My expression froze and turned grave.

Inside, a couple in their thirties was engaged in the act of procreation. Yet, they hadn't even removed their clothes, moving with a frenzied, chaotic intensity. They were vocal in their passion, but their faces were completely blank and expressionless. This bizarre sight sent a chill down my spine. How could this be?

I watched for a long while. The man began to grunt deeply, sounding as if he were about to reach his climax, yet his face remained as stiff as a statue, his eyes dull and vacant. Soon after, he collapsed onto the woman, motionless, and their heavy panting began to subside.

I frowned, flicked my finger, and sent a bolt of magical energy through the air, striking the man in the back. But this strike, which should have caused a person immense pain, failed to elicit any reaction from him at all. I knocked on the window, but the two inside remained equally unresponsive.

"Something's wrong. This is truly sinister," I thought. Pearl Town was definitely more than just haunted.

...

Hu Xiaoyu hid in the darkness, watching a man possessed by a ghost mutilate himself in a frenzy, his body drenched in blood. She didn't rush to intervene, waiting silently like a hunting leopard.

The man began to dig frantically with his bare hands in a patch of wasteland outside the door. Before long, he unearthed a corpse that had been dead for only a few days. Then, something that made Hu Xiaoyu feel nauseated occurred: the man, possessed by the malevolent spirit, began to devour the corpse like a madman, tearing off chunks of dead flesh and swallowing them greedily.

Hu Xiaoyu suppressed the urge to end the man’s life and continued to wait.

When the corpse had been gnawed beyond recognition, a ghostly shadow suddenly drifted out from the top of the man’s head. It let out a shrill, mocking cackle as it hovered nearby. The man suddenly snapped to his senses, staring blankly at the body before him. He let out a mournful wail: "Mother, I'm not human..."

Immediately, he slammed his head against a large rock nearby. The sound of a fracturing skull echoed through the air, and he slumped over, lifeless.

Hu Xiaoyu gripped her ritual sword tightly, her nostrils flaring, betraying her inner struggle. She could have stopped this tragedy. But if she had acted, she would never find the source of these spectral entities.

Seeing the man die, the dark spirit let out a triumphant cackle and vanished into thin air.

Hu Xiaoyu shook off her negative emotions. A lotus-shaped compass appeared in her hand; its magnetic needle flickered before pointing in a specific direction. She followed its lead.

This spirit was different from ordinary ghosts. Usually, spirits leave a trail of ghostly aura, making them easy to track. But this one was different; its trail appeared here one moment and there the next, leaving no trace. Fortunately, Hu Xiaoyu was well-prepared. Her White Lotus Compass was a high-grade artifact of her sect; otherwise, she would have struggled to track it.

Hu Xiaoyu pursued the spirit out of Pearl Town, but her footsteps suddenly halted as she stared at the vast ocean before her, stunned. She looked down at the exquisite compass in her hand and found the needle spinning wildly, having completely lost the direction of the spirit.

The last trace of the spirit had pointed toward the sea. Any experienced Yin-Yang practitioner knows that ordinary ghosts cannot enter the water unless they are drowning spirits. Even then, drowning spirits generally cannot go ashore and must remain in the water. The problem was, this spirit was clearly not a drowning spirit, yet it had vanished toward the ocean.

Hu Xiaoyu took a deep breath, a layer of magical light enveloping her, and dove into the seawater.

The water was pitch black, but by channeling power into her eyes, she could see clearly. She dove deeper, discovering that this stretch of ocean was quite strange. Although coastal areas near human settlements usually lacked large schools of fish, this was different—she couldn't see even a single small fish. The sea felt like a dead zone, devoid of all life.

As she dove deeper, the water became bone-chillingly cold. This cold penetrated her magical defensive layer, reaching straight to her marrow, forcing her to increase the intensity of her protective barrier. It wasn't the temperature of the water itself, but the fact that the sea was saturated with dense, malevolent Yin energy.

Suddenly, she spotted a rift on the seabed—a deep-sea trench, something unheard of so close to the shore. Hu Xiaoyu hesitated, but then entered the bottomless rift, immediately feeling waves of deathly stillness surrounding her. More importantly, she still hadn't seen a single living thing, not even a shrimp.

Then, a faint, eerie green light appeared in the depths of the rift, resembling ghost fire in the water. As she approached the glow, she felt a shiver of terror.

It was a giant tower, a hundred meters tall, consisting of thirty-three stories, each emitting a ghostly green radiance. From within the tower came the sound of shrill, mournful wails.

Hu Xiaoyu hid behind a stone pillar on the seabed, her heart racing with excitement. "So this is the source of the hauntings in Pearl Town. All those spirits must come from this eerie underwater ghost tower."

The tower looked as if it had stood there for countless years. Hu Xiaoyu examined some broken stone pillars near it and felt she had uncovered the truth: the tower had been sealed here long ago, but as the formation decayed over the years, the sealing power vanished, allowing the spirits inside to wreak havoc. Now, she had to go back and bring Qin Feng to see this.

Hu Xiaoyu turned, ready to leave. But at that moment, the ghostly green light from the tower surged out, instantly engulfing her, and she vanished into the glow.

...

I had circled Pearl Town, but aside from that couple, I found nothing strange—mostly because no one in the town was awake at this hour.

"Where is Hu Xiaoyu?" I muttered to myself. The town was so small; I had circled it completely and hadn't run into her.

Suddenly, my eyes locked onto two bodies outside a residence. One was covered in blood, its skull shattered, while the other had clearly just been dug up and gnawed beyond recognition. I stepped closer, narrowing my eyes.

The blood on the corpse was still fresh, and looking at the stains on the nearby rock, it was clearly a suicide by impact. The other was an elderly female corpse, and if I wasn't mistaken, the young man had gnawed on it.

"The Yin energy hasn't dissipated. The young man was possessed. While possessed, he mutilated himself, dug up this corpse, and ate it... then the spirit left him, he regained consciousness, and in his horror and inability to accept what he had done, he smashed his head against the rock." I guessed this was likely what happened.

It seemed Hu Xiaoyu must have gone off to track the possessing spirit. I took out my dark-wood compass to locate her.

"Huh? Can't get a fix." I raised an eyebrow, a hint of worry creeping into my heart. There was no reason I couldn't locate her if she were nearby, unless there was magnetic interference where she was.

I searched for a long time until I reached the seashore. After circling around, I found a simple concealment formation. Breaking through it, I saw some of Hu Xiaoyu's belongings, like her phone.

"Damn, that woman didn't jump into the sea, did she?" I exclaimed. It was just a spirit—was it worth jumping into the ocean for?

Wait.

A wave of intense unease washed over me. I took off, flying into the sea.

At that moment, Hu Xiaoyu was trapped in a sealed space within the ghost tower. No matter how she attacked the surroundings, it was useless. Beneath her feet lay a thick layer of bone fragments. That wasn't the problem, though. The problem was that above her head, a massive slab of rock was slowly descending. The surface of this giant rock shimmered with an eerie light, and it was impervious to all her attacks.