By a dim light, he discovered that before the pursuers arrived, there was already a second person hidden in the forest.
That person was a woman dressed as though in wedding attire, drunkenly reclining on a bamboo tree, holding a wine gourd in her hand, pale as frost and snow. With drowsy eyes, she lazily lifted her eyebrows and said, "There are quite a few rebels who entered the forest tonight."
The Demon General swept his gaze around, and a strong wind rose in the forest, swirling up layers of green leaves like waves, revealing countless cold corpses hidden beneath the foliage. He knew then that this woman, who could serve Lord Shouhe, was no ordinary person.
An entire army’s force had just silently perished here, which indeed saved them the trouble of cleaning up.
As for that one who slipped through the net, just a half-grown child of Manxie, hardly an adult, it seemed that as soon as he entered the forest, he was killed by this woman.
Considering this, the Demon General felt too lazy to expend more energy searching and, with a wave of his arm, thanked the woman in red before leading his men away.
The Manxie youth felt incredibly lucky, having encountered such a terrifying woman yet managing to evade her sight while she was momentarily intoxicated.
Perhaps it was the Demon General’s pursuit that disturbed her drunken sleep.
A bamboo branch gently bent, her red garments fluttered like a cluster of ethereal cold fire drifting down.
She seemed unsteady, her slim figure almost frail under the red garment, her pale face in the night’s bamboo forest looking desolate and indifferent, her eyes cold and quiet, revealing no sign of drunkenness, like a perennial pool of still water.
A lifeless bamboo forest, a lifeless woman, corpses scattered everywhere, blood cold and congealed, it made the Manxie youth wonder if he had already arrived in the chilly Netherworld.
"Let’s go, Shou," the woman’s soft call oddly pulled him back to reality.
The Manxie youth saw a round-headed, chubby child roll out from behind the hem of her red dress. The child’s skin was pale, not like that of a living person, and his round eyes, almost devoid of whites, stared darkly in his direction through the night, then grinned, revealing a row of neat, eerie teeth, sending a shiver down his spine!
That little ghost had seen him!
His heart pounded like a drum!
The body of the Manxie youth tensed like a bowstring, like a small animal in its burrow, eyes glaring like a wild beast spotting a hunter.
The woman in red, wandering the forest with a wine gourd in hand, seemed to let something slip from her sleeve.
The quick-handed little ghost caught it with both hands, and under the youth’s horrified, wary gaze, that little thing waggled its bottom as it ran out of the bamboo grove, tossed a bottle-like object, and swiftly followed the woman.
The silhouettes of the large and the small quickly vanished in the misty bamboo forest.
The tight body of the Manxie youth slowly relaxed, and he carefully picked up the bottle, sniffed it, finding it filled with elixirs for restoring vitality.
He held the bottle in a daze, like a frozen little animal, timidly peeking out, and gazed distantly in the direction where the figures had disappeared, his expression bewildered.
As they passed West Hall, Yin Baishuang paused by the window, glancing coldly at the woman in white meditating with closed eyes on the windowsill, tapped on the window frame with her finger, and with a look of disgust said, "Come out, let’s drink."
The finely drawn lashes of Su Jing slowly lifted, her gaze tranquil as she looked up at her and nodded slightly, seriously saying, "I don’t drink mud wine."
Yin Baishuang’s disdain deepened as she replied, "I wouldn’t offer you mud wine either."