"Alert those yet to arrive. A ghost king is on a rampage! Surround the perimeter! Make sure it hurts no civilian!"No one knew or bothered to know, what was on the ghost"s mind when she flew towards the highway.
The spirit hunters only knew they had to follow and hunt her. They only remembered that in the hallway just now, the ghost"s unpredictable attacks had hurt several fellow disciples, one still in a coma with his body frozen stiff.
In their mind, she was nothing more than an evil spirit who appeared at a residential area and forced a fellow disciple to chant a city-wide summon.
A spirit that refused the summon of the underground? Who cares about its tragic backstory? Does this world lack ghosts with sad backstories? Must be exorcised! Purge if it had evolved into a higher-tiered malicious thing that hurts people!
The Red Lady was more or less aware of what was running in the heads of her pursuers, hence she didn"t bother communicating with them. Every spirit hunter was the same anyway, adopting the same ideology.
In reality, the female ghost king was not entirely weakened by Jiang Li so if she wanted to fight to the death, it would be doable to take half of the enemy forces to h.e.l.l with her.
But she was a spirit who had yet to resolve her obsession.
To stay, that was the only option for her. To accomplish that, she had to flee from the cultivators even at the cost of being struck by several attacks and getting incapacitated.
On the fifty-first time that a charm hit her on the back and caused an uncomfortable, painful ripple coursed through her soul. She unknowingly thought of Gu Mochou who had obviously abandoned her. Then, for some reason, the words of the other ghost king played in her mind.
"Get her!"
The shout from behind woke her up from the stupor.
The Red Lady took another turn, jumped into a manhole, and melded into the shadows to shake off her pursuers.
However, despite losing sight of the female ghost king, Fan Zheng and the others did not leave.
"Brothers and sisters, we can"t let the filthy thing escape! It has already killed a few people. We can"t allow it to run amok anymore!"
"We split up into two groups!"
"Stay strong! The enemy must be weak after our collective attacks. Once a team finds it, immediately alert the other team so we can finish it quickly."
They scoured the area. Those injured temporarily retreated to heal themselves, but they soon bounced back.
There were about a dozen of them which, when considered seriously, was a puzzle since it was unbelievable that many spirit hunters could gather that fast.
Then again, it became entirely possible if, in the first place, their appearance here was a calculated move of the villainess.
When Gu Mochou decided that summoning the Maoshan disciples was her Plan C, or rather…. Before kidnapping Zhan Rong to provoke her ghost king, she set up some backdoors in case the arrays she would use fail their purpose.
She made sure the news about the uncanny pa.s.sing of the deceased "victims" of Fan Zheng"s company would reach the ears of the Maoshan pract.i.tioners. To accomplish this, the villainess specially instructed the Red Lady to leave some of her ghostly aurae in a morgue holding one of them.
As predicted, because it uncovered the tracks of an extraordinarily powerful ghost, many spirit hunters took a trip to the city, sent by the sect master. Even Fan Zheng received word from his master.
Their goal was to investigate if the deaths were due to the energy drinks and other food products or because of supernatural intervention.
They didn"t know they conveniently fulfill the villainess" goal which was to create cannon fodders out of them.
Things led to the current situation.
But an accident just happened midway which led to the Red Lady being hunted. Even now, the sect people were relentlessly searching for the ghost lady, half-convinced that she was the murderous thing that they had to punish. Zhan Rong"s pet ghost who was the real target of Gu Mochou"s scheme was not at all harmed. He was not even dragged into the most minor conflicts between the female ghost king and the cultivators.
Speaking of this pet ghost, after leaving Zhan Rong"s house, Jiang Li was next spotted in the backseat of Gu Mochou"s car.
It happened when the villainess was busy watching Fan Zheng cross the street with a sword sheath disguised as a violin case strapped on his back.
Jiang Li still wore the ugly attire, but he was masking his presence so the villainess would not detect him. It seemed this time, he didn"t intend to frighten the woman. He knew that it would not work the second time since the villainess was quite sharp and perceptive. And it was not like he was planning to exploit his fake ident.i.ty again.
In but a moment, the ghost teleported to the pa.s.senger seat. There was no sound made, no airwaves generated, and no weight added in the seat. Because he suppressed his presence to the minimum, to the point of spending some points, the girl still hadn"t noticed him.
He silently looked at the driver next to him and finally, a change happened.
Gu Mochou who was driving madly in the driver"s seat suddenly became paralyzed. She had no idea at first because her brain process simply froze at the part where she was envisioning the Maoshan people ganging up on the daring ghost who impersonated a judge.
It was only when her eyes accidentally flickered to her right side that she caught sight of the pa.s.senger that should not be there, dressed in a black official garment.
Her heart turned cold. When she realized her body completely refused to listen to her brain"s command, it was already too late for her to chant any spell. The slight curve ahead illuminated by the traffic sign registered in her sight.
The blinking red warning all vehicles to stop reminded her of one of the most favorite tactics of ghosts to take revenge on a hated foe riding her or his vehicle.
A road accident.
"Argghhhh!!!"
As if fate could not wait any longer to make her fear come true, a few seconds that felt like years to her pa.s.sed and a loud explosion reverberated in the place. Gu Mochou"s stolen car crashed against the utility pole. Her body flew outside before rolling a few times on the side of the road, looking extremely miserable.
The blast got her not only because she was paralyzed, but because as a cultivator whose major was talisman making, she had lesser resistance to fire. Moreover, she was at the center of the explosion, or more accurately, trapped at the center.
In fact, even the act of throwing herself out to survive was at the mercy of the evil spirit.
"Bas…tard…"
A girl"s furious voice floated in the air and into the ghost"s ears. The word was spat out with great difficulty.
Before falling unconscious, she had confirmed that he was that enemy, the one who made her life difficult for almost seven months, and now, the one who might claim her life for good.
Seeing Jiang Li"s blurry but obviously emotionless face as he silently looked down on her badly battered self, Gu Mochou s.h.i.+vered. As she pa.s.sed out, embraced by the coldness of the night, she felt drowned in deep unwillingness, fear, and indignation.