Do You Know White Bone?

Under the dim yellow moonlight, within the deathly silent alley, time seemed to freeze.

Jiang Ziang clutched the pottery jar, his entire body rigid, his breathing nearly coming to a standstill.

His spiritual energy was coiled tight. He stared deathly at the insect-faced woman who had torn the Pursuing Soul Envoy apart with her bare hands, his heart pounding violently.

However, that terrifying woman, who should have been the focus of his attention, was not focused on Jiang Ziang at all.

Her heterochromatic eyes gazed unblinkingly at the late uninvited guest, Jian Huaishuang.

And Jian Huaishuang was likewise scrutinizing her.

Only Jiang Ziang’s gaze darted back and forth between these two eerie existences who had appeared out of nowhere and were now confronting each other as if no one else were present. His mind was a complete blank.

One was a terrifying woman, half-human and half-insect, who had shredded a third-stage Pursuing Soul Envoy with her bare hands.

The other was a man in paper clothes who had appeared soundlessly, carrying a massive sword on his back and a face as cold as ten-thousand-year-old ice.

Either one of them brought him an unspeakable sense of absolute suppression, stemming from the disparity in their very forms of life.

Jian Huaishuang’s gaze did not linger long on the pile of shredded meat on the ground; his steady eyes were locked firmly onto Piao.

Unlike Jiang Ziang, who could only sense a suffocating aura of power, Jian Huaishuang saw things at a much deeper level.

Indeed, this woman’s body was wreathed in a greedy aura identical to the one beneath the Soul-Suppressing Tower in the center of Kushi City.

It was a primal desire that viewed all things as food, as if famine itself had taken physical form, filled with a madness that sought to devour everything.

But that was not all.

Inside that greedy aura, another force was entangled.

It was a cold, venomous ghostly resentment, filled with indignation and hatred. This resentment was equally powerful yet clearly demarcated from the greedy aura. The two were like two irreconcilable vipers, biting madly within the woman’s body, fighting for dominance.

Two vastly different yet equally tyrannical forces had reached such a terrifying balance within a single living being.

For any other cultivator, even a seventh-stage old monster, their soul would have long since been torn to shreds by this conflict, turning them into a mindless demon driven only by slaughter.

But the woman before him, aside from a trace of chaos in her heterochromatic eyes, had a core that was incredibly stable.

Jian Huaishuang’s gaze narrowed slightly as he perceived a third force.

It was an extremely faint yet incomparably resilient power, like a dense and gentle net, firmly wrapping her soul—which seemed ready to collapse at any moment yet remained exceptionally strong—and guarding it within.

This power belonged neither to greed nor to resentment.

It was warm and vast, carrying a sense of divinity that transcended worldly matters, as if a thread of compassion had been lowered by a god from the nine heavens.

Jian Huaishuang could never mistake this power!

That was... the aura of a Soul-Shaping Pill! It was the power of a god!

Back in the City of the Wrongfully Dead, when he was on the verge of collapse and his soul was about to be completely assimilated by ghostly energy, it was the Soul-Shaping Pill bestowed by that Lord that had pulled him back from the edge of oblivion.

That vast, inviolable divine power that came from a god and reshaped the soul was something he had personally experienced more than once; it was already etched into the depths of his soul.

This woman... had she also received the Lord’s grace?

Just as Jian Huaishuang’s heart was trembling with shock, Piao, on the opposite side, also recognized a certain aura on him.

Jian Huaishuang believed in Chen Zhou. As an evil spirit, it was inevitable that his body would be stained with Chen Zhou’s deathly aura.

Although this deathly aura was restrained to the utmost by its master and mixed with Jian Huaishuang’s own aura, its origin was something she was extremely familiar with.

It was the aura of 'White Bone'.

The two of them were like two cats, beginning to communicate by scent.

Piao’s half-face covered in insect carapace remained unchanged, but a trace of confusion and hesitation appeared on her human half.

Ugly Hag had taught her to be polite when meeting strangers and to greet acquaintances.

But... how was she supposed to greet someone who was a stranger, yet an acquaintance of an acquaintance?

For the first time, her simple, black-and-white logical system encountered an interpersonal problem that required complex processing.

After hesitating in place for a moment, Piao suddenly remembered something and fished a slightly worn-out booklet from her robe.

Piao began flipping through the pages, searching entry by entry for observation records on how to greet strangers.

On the side, Jiang Ziang was already watching with wide-eyed shock.

He could not understand the situation at all. A monster that had been ferociously powerful just moments ago, shredding a Pursuing Soul Envoy with her bare hands, was now actually flipping through a book to look for information like a schoolchild?

Finally, Piao seemed to find the answer.

She put away the booklet, looked up, and stared seriously at Jian Huaishuang, asking one word at a time:

"Do you... know White Bone?"

Her voice was clear, yet it carried a non-human flatness, devoid of any emotional color.

White Bone?

Jian Huaishuang was taken aback.

For the first time, a trace of bewilderment appeared on his permanent ice-cold face.

That name... in all the world, probably only that Lord himself and the few closest to him would dare to address him so directly by name.

He remained silent for a moment before asking in equally concise language: "...Are you referring to the Bone God?"

"Mhm." Piao nodded. Feeling that her expression wasn't clear enough, she added, "He is called the Bone God."

A strange silence fell over the alleyway once more.

An introverted, socially anxious, and simple-minded insect-hybrid monster.

A taciturn man of few words who was an evil spirit.

They stood beside the shredded remains of a corpse, engaging in a 'greeting' using the driest possible language, leaving the bystander completely bewildered.

Jiang Ziang’s worldview suffered an unprecedented impact at this moment.

He felt like his brain was no longer enough.

What kind of plot development was this?

Can’t you two look at the situation?

I’m still standing here as a living person, and a Pursuing Soul Envoy from my sect is lying dead on the ground, yet you two are just chatting as if no one else is here?

Anger and confusion intertwined in his heart, finally manifesting as a question he nearly blurted out: "Wait, sister, aren't we in the middle of a fight..."

However, he had barely started speaking when Piao interrupted him.

Piao turned her cold compound eye toward him and said something in that flat, waveless tone that caused Jiang Ziang’s mind to completely short-circuit.

"Is it that people aren't allowed to chat while fighting? Oh, I’ll remember that.

But I’m not a person."

She seemed to be stating a very simple fact, her gaze clear and earnest.

"So, I can do things that don't fit human logic."

She paused, then pointed at Jian Huaishuang.

"He isn't a person, either."

This was a joke told by the Bone God when he had bestowed the Soul-Shaping Pill upon her and explained the ways of the world.

But for the simple-minded Piao, it had become one of the core principles of her perception of the world. She had neatly recorded it on the first page of her booklet and recited it daily.

If one is not human, one does not need to follow human logic.

Simple, direct, and effective.

Jiang Ziang opened his mouth, but not a single word came out.

He felt like a mortal who had accidentally wandered into a chess match between gods and demons; he couldn't understand a single rule of the board.

Just then, a sudden change occurred!

"Nngh..."

A groan of pain drifted out from the dilapidated mud hut.

Piao’s face, a mixture of contradictions, instantly changed color. For the first time, she showed emotions called urgency and worry.

"Mother!"

She cried out, no longer caring about Jian Huaishuang or Jiang Ziang. She spun around violently, about to rush back into the house.

At the same time, Jiang Ziang also sensed it.

The life-fire of the old woman in the house, which was already like a candle in the wind, suddenly dimmed at this moment.

The copper poison within her body had expanded to the extreme, like a volcano suppressed to its limit, ready to erupt at any second.