The viewers in the livestream who usually loved to talk trash the most fell into an eerie silence for a few seconds.
Only then did the bullet comments erupt like a switch had been flipped.
【H-Holy crap?】
【What just happened? Where's the monster outside the door?】
【It's gone, actually gone. I replayed it; it was swallowed by the black mist.】
【What is this black mist? It feels so terrifying, like it can devour everything. I can feel the bone-chilling cold even through the screen.】
【I have goosebumps. This thing is even scarier than the inn itself.】
【Its destructive power must be at least equivalent to an A-rank offensive item, right?】
【A-rank? Think bigger. I feel like this thing is even more sinister than some of the A-rank items I've seen.】
【Where's the person who said the streamer let it go to her head earlier? Come out and speak up!】
【Did our Bling Bling let it go to her head? No, she's terrifyingly strong! Even the ghosts are afraid!】
【My goodness, who can even tell the difference between the streamer and the dungeon Boss now?】
【Other rookies: Please, ghosts, don't kill me. This rookie: Who allowed you to interrupt my meal?】
【I'm seriously impressed. Every time I think she's reached the limit of absurdity, she manages to top it in the next second.】
【Me too. Seriously, is the streamer even human? Can a human be this strong?】
【With this kind of strength, why is she still considered a rookie? She could easily go toe-to-toe with the top 100 on the Peak Leaderboard.】
【Haha, let me tell you a joke: Shocking! Is it a moral decline or a distortion of human nature? A rookie streamer actually wiped out an entire inn of ghosts all by herself!】
【So what exactly is the streamer's Talent? I'm so curious.】
【Don't ask. If you do, the answer is that Lady Witch is omnipotent.】
Cen Yao couldn't see these bullet comments.
All her attention was currently focused on the feedback returned by the black mist.
Dark element.
Devouring, corroding, suppressing, and transforming.
This was the most dangerous and unstable of all the elemental magic she currently mastered.
It could devour ghosts, pollution, and curse residues, and even convert a portion of that power into purer energy to feed back to the caster.
It sounded powerful. In reality, it was indeed ridiculously strong.
But the problem was that it consumed a massive amount of mana.
If the devoured target wasn't strong enough, or if the convertible power within them was too chaotic, the mana consumed would far exceed the energy recovered, making it a losing trade.
Even more troublesome was that the dark element possessed a certain degree of corrosiveness.
Using it too much would make the caster's emotions irritable and cold, and they might even develop a dependency on devouring.
Therefore, Cen Yao did not want to use it unless absolutely necessary.
But right now, she was the Witch in the Rapunzel dungeon. She had to act like her.
A Witch whose meal had been interrupted, whose territory had been encroached upon, and who had been provoked by a minor ghost banging on her door would certainly not swallow her anger.
She would be angry. She would punish. She would let all those blind fools know that a Witch's door was not something they could just knock on whenever they pleased.
The black mist churned and continued to spread outward.
Five wisps of the densest black mist did not leave. Instead, they dispersed to Cen Yao's front, back, left, right, and above, like five silent hounds, firmly protecting all her blind spots.
The remaining black mist rushed into the inn like excited dogs let off their leashes.
Cen Yao could even sense a trace of bizarre excitement from their movement patterns.
She fell silent. The dark element didn't seem very proper either.
Soon, the first scream echoed from downstairs. Then came the second, and the third.
A wardrobe door burst open with a bang, and something was dragged out from inside by the black mist.
The faces in the portraits shrieked silently as the black mist wrapped around their necks, forcefully dragging them out of their frames.
On the second-floor corridor, the child ghost who had been bouncing a ball tried to run while clutching its ball. But the moment it turned around, its ankle was ensnared by the black mist, and it was dragged backward up the stairs with a whoosh.
The owner of the pale finger from the third-floor door crack was also dragged out.
Its body was extremely long, like a stretched wax figure, its limbs dragging limply on the ground. As the black mist dragged it along, it tried to claw at the floorboards with its fingernails, throwing up sparks all the way, but it still couldn't escape.
The last one to be dragged up was the landlady.
She was still draped in that tattered, dark cloak, but this time, she no longer possessed the sinister composure she had shown behind the counter.
The black mist wrapped around her neck, wrists, and ankles, dragging her all the way from downstairs to the fourth floor.
Her face, wrinkled like tree bark, was corroded with large patches of black spots. Her cloudy eyes stared fixedly at Cen Yao, fear finally surfacing in their depths.
In moments, all the ghosts and monsters in the entire inn had been dragged over by the black mist.
The corridor was packed with all sorts of bizarre, grotesque figures.
There were headless ones, those with severed legs, some with half their bodies covered in rose roots, and even a humanoid monster that seemed to be pieced together from over a dozen arms.
They were tightly bound by the black mist.
Due to the devouring and corrosion of the dark element, their soul bodies were gradually fading, and black, smoke-like mist was rising from them.
The phrase "wailing like ghosts and howling like wolves" was vividly illustrated at this moment.
Cen Yao listened for three seconds, and her temples began to throb again.
She already had a headache from the door banging, and now these things were screaming like a hundred broken gongs holding a meeting.
It was deafeningly noisy.
She raised her wand.
“Silence.”
An invisible ripple rippled through the corridor.
In the next second, all the shrieks stopped abruptly.
The wide-mouthed ghosts still maintained their wailing postures, but they couldn't make a single sound.
The world was finally quiet.
Cen Yao's mood visibly improved by a fraction.
The black mist churned and condensed behind her, finally forming a tall, domineering black throne.
The armrests of the throne resembled two coiled snakes, while the backrest looked like layers of unfolding dark thorns.
The mist solidified into a physical entity, with tiny streaks of black light constantly flowing through it, as if the throne itself were alive.
Cen Yao lifted her skirt and slowly sat down.
Her purple Witch's Robe spread across the black throne, the starlight at the hem faintly visible through the dark mist.
She leaned against the backrest, resting her chin on one hand while her other hand lay casually on the armrest.
The shadow of her hood obscured her eyes.
Yet, the less they could see her expression, the more oppressive her presence felt.
She looked down at the group of ghosts suspended in the corridor by the black mist, her voice as cold as ice.
“Do you still want to live?”
The ghosts couldn't make a sound, so they could only nod frantically.
The landlady nodded the fastest.
Her withered neck shook so hard it looked as if it was about to snap.
Beside her, a ghost whose head wasn't sewn on securely also nodded desperately. As a result of nodding too hard, its head fell off with a roll.
The head rolled all the way to Cen Yao's feet, face-up, its eyes still rolling in panic.
Cen Yao looked down. She frowned in disgust.
The black mist was very sensible, immediately wrapping around the head and swallowing it sideways.
It was gone.
The ghosts witnessed the headless ghost's soul body instantly fade by a large margin, and they immediately froze.
Those who had been nodding frantically just now no longer dared to make any large movements.
Each and every one of them was extremely cautious, keeping even their trembling tightly restrained.
Cen Yao withdrew her gaze.
“So you all want to live.”
“Very well.”
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