"So I finally found intelligent life, huh?" Wang Yuan stood still until the very last strand of white mist was absorbed from the corpse in front of him before he started to slowly hover forward again.
The white mist was being consumed too rapidly, even if he didn't go under the sun, even if he stood still and did nothing, the white mist was still constantly being used up.
"If other ghosts really exist, I really can't imagine how they can live" while hovering, Wang Yuan was also thinking: "Could it be because this is a low-magic world?"
If Wang Yuan didn't coincidentally connect with the 13 crows mentally and regained his consciousness, if the crows hadn't mutated and could help him hunt for other lifeforms, his white mist would've already ran out several times over. He really couldn't understand how the other non-sentient ghosts would be able to survive.
As for the group of humans, Wang Yuan didn't plan on contacting them right now, because there was a huge hurdle that he still hadn't overcome: communication.
This was a different world, and even though those humans looked Caucasian, without DNA-testing each of them, there was no guarantee that they were the same human race that Wang Yuan knew, and the language that they were speaking was also one that Wang Yuan had never heard before.
"From their reaction, it seems they hold a negative attitude towards the crows" Wang Yuan noticed that the expression those people made after noticing the crow wasn't the joy of finding prey, but rather it was unadulterated disdain.
"A total of 8 specimens, they would pose a certain level of threat to the crows" Wang Yuan didn't dare to act recklessly and risk losing any of these 13 crows, before being able to mass-produce mutated crows, all of his actions had to be extremely discreet.
…
The wilderness at night was full of danger, not only were there various nocturnal animals out to hunt, but human eyesight was also hugely limited. A man without fire was never going to wake up to see the next morning.
The hunting party of 8 were gathered around a campfire in a heavy, dejected mood. For some reason, the number of game they could find this year was pathetically low, even after three days of hunting, the prey they caught could only manage to feed themselves, how were they going to finish the village's mission?
"Don't think too much about it, everyone should quickly go to sleep now. We'll go in a bit deeper tomorrow and definitely find more prey" the bearded man, Dax, consoled the party.
Everyone nodded and quickly went to sleep around the campfire, only the young man Comoros didn't really know what to do. This was the first time he went with the hunting party, a complete newbie who couldn't do anything but make mistake after mistake on the way here, in addition to the lacking spoils of their trip, Comoros was feeling a sense of self-blame.
"Maybe it will be better tomorrow" Comoros consoled himself, closed his eyes and fell asleep.
Naturally, he didn't know that not too far from where they were, Wang Yuan was hovering in place. The information he could gather from the crows was very different compared to 'seeing' things through his own field of cognition, so he had some new findings.
He found that there was also a thin layer of white mist around the bodies of these people, but unlike the kind that he could absorb, this white mist contained a bit of will from their owners, and when Wang Yuan tried to come closer, he discovered that the white mist surrounding him and their white mist were neutralizing each other.
"What is this? Yang essence?"
Wang Yuan had never seen white mist existing around the bodies of other animals before, so he didn't know if this was unique to humans, or if these particular humans were special in any way.
He commanded a crow to fly over the camp from above and rained some 'justice from above'. As the white substance fell, Wang Yuan used his weak interference force to change the trajectory of that substance, directly aiming for the face of one person while making sure that a little bit fell into both his mouth and nose.
The man immediately woke up, cursing both the bird and his misfortune, but didn't shout out loud. He told the night guard what happened before standing up, taking a torch and headed for the river stream a bit further away to wash his face.
On the way, he felt his head to be a bit heavy but didn't pay much attention to it, thinking that he only had a bit of a cold. When he confirmed that the water stream was clean enough, he cupped some water in his hand to wash his face.
All of a sudden, he felt something approaching him from behind. Sensing trouble, he immediately stood up and wanted to roll away, but as soon as he did, he felt light-headed and wasn't able to put any strength into his body.
A jet black pair of claws accurately pinched his mouth and made sure that he couldn't call out for help, while several other crows caught his limbs and pinned him down. Despite struggling with all his strength, he couldn't escape from the crows' strong grip.
Wang Yuan looked at the fallen human from a different world, observing that as the man became weaker and weaker, the layer of willful white mist around his body also became weaker until it basically didn't exist anymore.
An uncontrollable desire came out from Wang Yuan's soul, telling him to immediately kill that person.
Without hesitation, Wang Yuan ordered the crows to act; as their razor-sharp beaks pecked again and again at his neck, the man's throat was torn open and killed him in mere seconds.
A huge amount of white mist escaped from the man's body. There was so much here that the amount Wang Yuan managed to absorb in a few seconds was enough to last him for a whole day, and even more was still coming out.
At this point, Wang Yuan suddenly had a flash of memory, memory of when his soul was still unconscious.
When he first appeared, he was able to feel that about 40-50% of himself had disappeared and the rest would soon follow, it was thanks to the huge amount of white mist that came out from his own dead body that kept him from dissipating right away.
At the same time, a bit of memory belonging to this person was slowly absorbed and combined with Wang Yuan's soul.
Aside from the white mist, there was also a bit of aura that felt very similar to the cool aura from the crows that went into his soul, constantly healing Wang Yuan's soul. However, there was something else that was mixed with this cool aura.
"Why did I have to die? Why am I the one who died?"
"I still want to live, let the others die!!"
The clearest part of what he absorbed was this person's memories before death, together with various emotions: anger, grudge, unwillingness, fear, as well as a deep love and hatred for life itself.
"My field of perception and interference force have both greatly increased, and I can now kind of understand this place's language" sensing the dead man's memories and his own soul becoming complete, Wang Yuan excitedly thought: "So this is the correct way for a remnant soul to level up"
"If I kill the other seven people, would that be enough to fully replenish my soul?" the white mist that surrounded Wang Yuan's soul reacted to his emotions and began to turn a bit red.
The memories and emotions of the dead man were eroding Wang Yuan, giving Wang Yuan the thought of massacring the other people to calm his excitement down, but Wang Yuan quickly omitted those foolish thoughts.
If it was my unconscious self from before, maybe I would have followed this thought and randomly commit genocide in the surrounding area.
But thanks to the support of the 13 crows, Wang Yuan was now conscious and rational. He knew that if he kept on killing by following this impulse, he would quickly fall back into an irrational ghost that only knew how to kill. That was why he was forcefully holding back his impulse to kill.