After the Immortal Disappeared

Chapter 474: Chapter 473: Long Legs

Of course, these Battle Arrays came in several grades based on their energy consumption and coverage. The set of Array Talismans they were using was the smallest version, covering an area with a radius of only twenty *zhang* and requiring just seven Array Talismans to assemble.

Hee Lingchuan couldn’t possibly possess something like this. The Officials had borrowed this set of Array Talismans from the county, along with the Profound Crystals needed to power it.

Of course, it had to be returned after use.

But such an extravagant display of wealth still left Hee Lingchuan stunned.

A mere County Magistrate could, with a stroke of his pen, approve the use of Profound Crystals to activate a Battle Array. Such a thing was simply unimaginable in the Yuan Kingdom.

This small detail alone showed that Zhitian Village was practically rolling in money.

The monster’s Escape Technique was now disabled. Not only was its descent halted, but the parts that had already submerged were stuck fast, as if encased in concrete and impossible to pull free.

This was exactly the effect Hee Lingchuan and the others had wanted.

Having tracked it all this way, he had basically concluded that Mr. Mai’s monster specialized in stealth and camouflage, allowing it to kill so many victims without a soul noticing.

However, he held the initiative in this ambush. All he had to do was prepare a targeted countermeasure.

After examining the slime at the crime scene, Jiao Yu and General Antelope had both confirmed it was a snail-like monster.

The most prominent feature of such creatures is their slow movement. It stood to reason, then, that it would use an Escape Technique to compensate for this weakness.

Now that the Forbidden Array had pinned it in place, preventing it from submerging, the slow-moving monster was meat on the chopping block. They would have enough time to butcher it at their leisure.

Only then did Hee Lingchuan reveal himself from the rear. His blade flashed like a bolt of silk, but striking the medicine storehouse produced a rapid series of metallic clangs.

He had just watched with his own eyes as the monster swallowed the medicine storehouse in one gulp. If he and Jiao Yu hadn’t reacted so quickly, they would be in its stomach right now, too.

The battle had been perilous from the very start.

It looked as though he had only struck once, but it was actually a chain of seven blows, each one landing precisely on the same spot.

A small crack appeared on the storehouse.

Hee Lingchuan pressed his advantage. This time, the Floating Life Blade finally activated its special property, sinking a palm’s-width deep with a solid THUD.

He had to use all his strength to withdraw the Treasure Saber, but its blade was clean, without a trace of blood.

And he was certain of it—’The inside of this hard shell is empty!’

’This thing is harder and thicker than a turtle’s shell! Even with the Sharpness of my Floating Life Blade, I still haven’t managed to harm its actual body!’

’Was this really made by Dong Rui?’ Hee Lingchuan found it hard to believe.

’If this monster is so incredible, why didn’t Dong Rui use it to escape from Beiga himself? Why give it to someone else instead?’

’There must be something fishy going on!’

But the situation allowed no time for contemplation. Hee Lingchuan grabbed a Hook Claw and jammed it into the gash his Floating Life Blade had made.

He pressed the mechanism, and with a soft WHIR, the prongs of the claw splayed open within the hollow shell, anchoring it firmly inside the gash.

He tossed the rope to a Wind-Drilling Beast, which caught it in its mouth. It then charged toward the nearest large tree. Moving with all the speed its name implied, it looped the rope around five or six trees in quick succession.

The thickest of these trees was nearly one and a half *zhang* in diameter.

This warehouse area was originally a timber yard. At the request of the Tree Demons, about a third of the forest had been preserved, most of them massive, sturdy trees.

The other Officials were also hacking away at it, but their weapons were nowhere near as effective; they couldn’t even leave a scratch.

To everyone present, this was simply unbelievable.

Officials always used Primordial Power when on a case, which gave them a natural advantage against Mountain Demons and Wild Beasts. But what was the deal with this thing?

Only Hee Lingchuan knew the truth: Demon Puppets created by Dong Rui had a high resistance to Primordial Power. Unless a true master from the Chiyan Kingdom arrived, these few Officials would have a hard time inflicting any substantial damage.

The twenty-odd men kept clanging away, sounding more as if they were renovating a house than fighting a monster.

But their attacks were not entirely useless. Before everyone’s eyes, the medicine storehouse began to transform. In the blink of an eye, it had become a hard shell two *zhang* tall, its dark brown surface covered in fine lines that looked like both patterns and runes.

The charade was over; it was done pretending.

Those familiar whorls, if shrunk a hundredfold, would look just like a certain food they often ate...

Xu Dayou cried out, ”A river snail?”

”It really is a snail!” General Antelope shot forward from behind, knocking him flying.

It was a good thing the general had such sharp eyes and swift hooves. Though Xu Dayou was thrown over a *zhang* away and ended up eating dirt, a giant claw suddenly shot out from under the snail’s shell and SLAMMED down right where he had been standing.

If he hadn’t been moved, he would have been turned into a meat patty.

The Officials on the other side of the giant shell weren’t so lucky. Two of them had been standing too close and were crushed into the mud without even having time to scream.

”It has feet!” Jiao Yu had circled the shell several times earlier, unable to find a place to bite down. Now that it finally saw something it could sink its teeth into, how could it possibly let the chance go? It lunged like a hungry tiger, only to be lifted off the ground.

Another flash of lightning illuminated the scene, and the onlookers stared at the monster before them, their faces pale with shock.

Not only did this thing have feet, it had four long legs!

The long, slimy, glistening legs could bend forward like a human’s, and they ended in wide, flat feet with webbing between the toes.

At the same time, the monster poked its head out from the hard shell. It had a squarish head with a broad, rounded snout. A huge mouth stretched all the way to the back of its skull, opening up like a bottomless abyss.

Two long, thin, antenna-like feelers protruded from its forehead, resembling both needles and arrows.

Of course, the creature still had the body of a snail, its surface covered in faint brown spots that were hard to see in the dark. It also had a thick, long tail, though the tip was missing; it had shed its tail to escape after General Antelope pinned it with his horns in the Porcupine Den.

Several Officials stared, dumbfounded. ”What the hell is that thing!”

The Chiyan Kingdom was known as a land of Demons, but no one had ever seen a monster this bizarre.

It had the body and shell of a snail, but the limbs and head of a frog.

Every part of it was mismatched, as if someone had forcibly cobbled it together from different creatures.

Everyone could see clearly that its four limbs and head extended out from its main body, just like a snail’s eyestalks, and could be retracted at any moment.

General Antelope was also stunned. ”Could it be a salamander?”

If he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes, he could have wracked his brain forever and never guessed that the true culprit behind the string of murders looked so utterly grotesque.

Hee Lingchuan gave an inward thumbs-up. ’To create something that could leave even Demons looking so utterly clueless... Dong Rui, oh, Dong Rui. That’s you, all right.’

Seeing the monster’s appearance, he was now more certain than ever that this was Dong Rui’s handiwork.

An Official holding a torch happened to run past, just over three *zhang* in front of the monster. Thinking the creature was immobile, his movements were a little slow. But the monster’s mouth suddenly snapped open, a red shadow flashed past—too fast for the naked eye to follow—and with a long, drawn-out scream, the Official vanished into its maw.

”Its tongue?” General Antelope shouted. ”Don’t stand in front of its mouth! It hunts by shooting out its tongue!”

’So that’s what the huge mouth is for. It’s clearly a frog’s mouth.’

This thing ate people the same way a frog hunts its prey.

Everyone scrambled to get away. No one dared to linger near its mouth.

That massive mouth looked big enough to swallow ten men at once without a problem.

The Demon Puppet swallowed the Official without chewing, then powerfully pushed off with its two hind legs and leaped into the air!

Hee Lingchuan had never been able to imagine how a clumsy, mountain-sized monster could possibly jump. Now, he was getting an eye-opener.

Perhaps because its hard shell was so heavy, the monster actually lunged forward more than upward. It was airborne for less than eight *chi* before it landed, shaking the ground with a thunderous BOOM.

Though it landed with what seemed like thunderous force, the leap had only covered a distance of three *zhang*—less than that of a leaping Rock Sheep.

But it leaped again and again with frightening speed. In the blink of an eye, it had covered twenty-four or twenty-five *zhang*, putting it outside the range of the Tunneling Technique Prohibition Array.

The monster sensed it was clear and immediately tried to plunge into the earth.

Once it was underground, it would be safe. As a bonus, it could take the Prunella-filled storehouse with it as rations for a long time to come.

But its great escape fell short by a single step.

Carried by its own momentum, the monster tried desperately to sink into the ground, but found it couldn’t.

It wasn’t the Array. A force was pulling it from behind, stopping its descent.

The Hooked Rope that Hee Lingchuan had embedded in its hard shell had finally taken effect.

One end of the Hooked Rope was now anchored in the snail shell, while the other was wrapped around five or six large trees, tied securely by the Wind-Drilling Beast to the trunk of the most massive one.

To successfully burrow underground, it would first have to pull down all those trees.

The Demon Puppet strained again. The rope went taut, and the trunks of two of the trees groaned, a ring of bark snapping off them under the pressure.

The thing was incredibly strong, but the rope and Hook Claw were of equally fine quality.

Lord Songyang, Lil Qingge, had recently crafted the rope for Hee Lingchuan, switching the main material to the Cloud Brocade he had acquired in the Demon Nest Swamp.

It was the highest grade of Spider Silk, produced by the Earth Cave Spider. Light as air, its toughness and elasticity were utterly astonishing. Second Madam Zhu could suspend her entire body from a tree with just a single strand and swing freely.

And her body was not much smaller than this Demon Puppet’s.

Hee Lingchuan was therefore quite confident in its strength. After all, anything made by Second Madam Zhu was guaranteed to be of the highest quality.

As for the Hook Claw, it was one of Li Fubo’s proudest creations, which he himself had called his best work in the past three years. It hadn’t broken even when subjected to such extreme tension by the Demon Puppet.

Well, not yet, anyway.

Naturally, the onlookers watched with their hearts in their throats, terrified that with one more heave from the Demon Puppet, the thin little rope would just SNAP.

”Jiao Yu, come back!”

The tiger retreated at the command. The creature was simply too large; Jiao Yu’s sharp teeth and claws couldn’t inflict any real damage.

Only then did Hee Lingchuan give the order: ”Crossbows, now! Hurry and let it have a few more rounds!”

Xu Dayou snatched his hat from the ground and put it on, then fumbled for a short, black-and-white quill, loading it onto his crossbow like a bolt. His men all did the same, then raised their crossbows and fired at the monster’s soft body.

Before, while it was hiding in its hard shell, no one could touch it. But now, with its soft body exposed and offering such a massive target, how could anyone possibly miss?

These were no ordinary bolts, but Porcupine quills that Hee Lingchuan had collected from the foot of Yulun Mountain!

Porcupine Quills naturally carried properties of rot and foul toxins. Hee Lingchuan had enhanced them further by hand, smearing each one with venom from the Earth Cave Spider’s poison glands, a gift from Second Madam Zhu.