Stranger Danger

Chapter 522: There’s Someone On Your Shoulder

“Hmm?” Ye Qing frowned. They go to bed in the morning? I’ve never heard of such a culture before.

Now he understood why everyone in Longevity Village was up and about during midnight. It was because they slept during the day!

But what did he mean by not leaving the house during daytime? Usually, people were advised to stay indoors during nighttime. Why was this flipped around again?

It was strange. Too strange.

“But why can’t we go out during the day, Old Mu?” Ye Qing voiced his doubt.

“Because... that is the law of Longevity Village!” Ye Qing wondered if it was his imagination, but the old man’s voice sounded a little odder and eerie than normal. “In any case, never go out during the day!”

Having said that, Mu Qing turned around and walked straight toward his room. Ye Qing had more questions to ask, but the old man ignored his cries almost as if he couldn’t hear them. He was gone in just a moment.

Ye Qing hesitated, but he ultimately did not try to stop Mu Qing. After all, he couldn’t predict what kind of consequences such an action might bring, not to mention that the Mu Family had never shown an ounce of malice toward him. He didn’t want to endanger them unless absolutely necessary.

It was almost daytime anyway. Whatever oddity that was afflicting this village would soon reveal itself. There was no need to start something unnecessary.

Having made up his mind, Ye Qing sat cross-legged on the bed and entered a meditative state. At the same time, he spread out his demonic thought like a web and paid close attention to his surroundings.

By now, his spiritual power was strong enough to spread his demonic thought across one-fifth of Longevity Village, and his senses were telling him that the whole village had fallen silent. If it was as noisy and lively as a market before, now it was as silent as death itself. If it wasn’t for the villagers’ slow breathing—and even then, their breathing was so quiet that he could mistake them for the dead—he would have thought that the village was dead.

That wasn’t all. As time passed, and the darkness slowly gave way to light, Longevity Village slowly began to transform. As if it was in a time-lapse video, the village began falling apart in real time. The buildings started looking old and dilapidated, chunks of the walls began falling off its main body, the roof tiles began cracking or powdering into dust, and dead grass was everywhere. It looked both desolate and bleak.

The room Mu Qing had prepared for him was undergoing a transformation as well. Dust bunnies began to spawn like crazy, cobwebs appeared all over the place, the table, the chairs and his bed were covered in mold, and the air smelled of something rotten. The wisps of light shining through the lattice windows only made the decay clearer.

“Strange!”

Ye Qing was wondering what was going on when suddenly, his eyebrows shot into his hair. The next moment, he disappeared and reappeared in front of Mu Qing’s room.

He didn’t step inside because he knew that the husband and wife were already gone. In fact, every villager in Longevity Village had disappeared as if they never were. He knew this because they had all vanished from his demonic thought without warning, though he had no idea how they disappeared or where they went. One moment they were there, and the next, poof.

“What is going on here?”

He could not fathom Longevity Village’s transformation at all, the villagers’ sudden disappearance even more so.

“Let’s head out.”

Ye Qing made up his mind to leave after thinking for a moment. Although Longevity Village’s transformation was strange to say the least, and Mu Qing’s warning implied that he would be in danger if he left the place, his intuition also told him that this was probably his best chance of finding Yi Pin.

More importantly, he was confident that he was strong enough to handle any danger.

As soon as he stepped out of the building, he was blasted in the face by a strange gust of air. The sky was bright, but for some reason, it didn’t feel warm or inviting like the morning sunlight should. Instead, it felt cold, biting, and discomforting.

“Hmm? There’s someone here!”

Suddenly, Ye Qing sensed an unfamiliar man entering his sensory range. Ye Qing immediately took off in his direction and appeared in front of him a few breaths later.

The man was caught off guard by Ye Qing’s sudden appearance as a matter of course. Seemingly embarrassed by his own reaction, he yelled, “Who are you?”

Ye Qing paid him no attention, however. Standing about six meters away from him, Ye Qing stared at the man with a severe look on his face. Specifically, he was staring at the space above his head.

A few seconds of tense silence later, when the man realized that Ye Qing wasn’t going to answer his question, he raised his voice even further, “What are you looking at?”

This was not the time for a classic, “I’m looking at you. Whatcha gonna do about it?” So Ye Qing ignored the question and asked a question of his own, “Can’t you see it?”

“See what?” The man blurted uncertainly and anxiously. In fact, he noticed that Ye Qing was shooting him a strange look from the very beginning.

“I guess you can’t,” Ye Qing muttered to himself.

The man swallowed visibly but forced himself to yell again, “What on earth are you talking about, boy? Stop acting enigmatic and give it to me straight already! I’m not scared!”

“If you’re not scared, then why are you shaking?” Ye Qing smirked a little before turning serious. “Would you believe me if I tell you that a creature is crouching on top of your head?”

He wasn’t joking. The reason he was staring at the man so intently wasn’t because he was strong and definitely not because he was handsome. It was because a humanoid Stranger was crouching on top of him.

The Stranger possessed the shape and size of a human child, though it looked anything but cute and innocent. Its skin was bluish black in color, its face looked ancient and wrinkly, its hair was patchy white, its beard was longer than the length of its head, and its bloodshot eyes were filled with greed, madness and anomaly.

Right now, the child was hugging the man’s neck with both arms, and its long beard was stuck inside his brain like tentacles. However, the man couldn’t seem to feel it at all.

While Ye Qing watched the child-like Stranger, the Stranger too was staring at him. If there was any doubt that the emotions brimming in its bloodshot eyes were greed and hunger, the saliva trickling down the corners of its mouth was the decisive evidence. Ye Qing could barely control his disgust when the saliva trickled down its beard and into the man’s brain.

The man blanched when he heard Ye Qing’s words. He subconsciously waved his hands over his shoulders, but of course he couldn’t feel anything. From Ye Qing’s perspective, he saw the man’s hands passing through the child Stranger’s body almost as if it was just an illusion.

Knowing that one’s senses weren’t always reliable, the man produced a stone mirror from his Nature’s Shell and pointed it toward himself.

The stone mirror was a Strange Artifact named the Stone Mirror. Despite its bland name, it was a bonafide Hatred-class Strange Artifact. It could illuminate Strangers and traces that were usually invisible to the human senses.

The Stone Mirror revealed nothing, however. Thinking that Ye Qing was lying to him, the man let out a sigh of relief and raged, “Why did you trick me?”

“I’m not tricking you. I’m telling you the truth,” Ye Qing replied while examining the child-like Stranger curiously. When the man produced the Stone Mirror just now, he clearly saw a flash of disdain on its face. This reaction seemed to suggest that the child-like Stranger was an intelligent Stranger. “Make no mistake, you’re the blind one between the two of us.”

Unable to hold back his anger any longer, the man yelled, “You are courting death!” And leaped into the air. Then, he kicked up his legs repeatedly while aiming at Ye Qing’s heart.

“Serial Heart Piercing Kick” [1]

Ye Qing watched the incoming attack with calm and indifference. Right before the flurry of kicks would hit him, he waved his hand like he was brushing aside the clouds. At that moment, the flurry of kicks suddenly vanished into nothing, and the man hit the ground in an unceremonious fashion. His eyes were filled with shock and disbelief.

“You... you...”

In his senses, Ye Qing’s vigor was weak, and his energies barely perceptible. It was why he thought that Ye Qing was just a novice who had accidentally stumbled upon Longevity Village. From the start he never thought that Ye Qing amounted to anything.

Then, the young man dispelled his astral qi and force with a simple flick of the hand. A boy? How could he ever have made such an obvious mistake? He was obviously an old monster!

Cold sweat appeared on the man’s forehead as Ye Qing declared, “I told you that you’re as blind as a bat. Do you believe me now?”

He took one step forward and loosened his control a little. A torrent of energy immediately flooded out of his body and washed over the man, crumbling his energies and suffocating him where he sat. Pale as a sheet, the man hurriedly begged, “Yes, yes! This junior’s the blind one! Please have mercy and forgive me this once, senior!”

The torrent of energy didn’t stop. The man shook like a leaf as his face grew paler and paler. Just when he thought he was dead, the pressure pinning him to the floor abruptly disappeared, and Ye Qing said, “Taking action against a pitiful Astral Refiner like you would only sully my reputation. Rise.”

1. This martial art was mentioned before, though I don’t remember what chapter. The long story short is that it’s a simple and common martial art. ☜