A bellow reminiscent of clashing metal erupted.
Everyone inside and outside of the cabin went quiet. Their ears rang incessantly as the color went out of their faces.
An expert!
Taken aback, Su Jingxing turned to look outside the door.
The comer was muscular, but not particularly tall—he was standing at about 1.7 meters tall.
He donned an ordinary martial arts suit, and a long saber dangled from his waist.
As he walked, his aura was stable and converged.
His facial features were ordinary, but his eyes were intimidating, and his gaze was as sharp as blades. No one dared to look him in the eye.
"Hello, Team Leader Wu."
"We have been waiting for you, Team Leader Wu."
"…"
Without any encouragement, the crowd that had converged outside the door made way for the comer.
Everyone—regardless of gender— wore ingratiating smiles as they regarded the comer with fear and admiration.
Wu Anxun!
He was the leader of Forestry Town's Security Team, and a seventh-grade expert!
Unlike the obese Forestry Station Head, Wu Anxun was the true stabilizing force of Forest Town—the guardian of tens of thousands of mous of forests.
When Su Jingxing went to find him earlier, he was told that Wu Anxun was still cultivating in seclusion.
To his surprise, Wu Anxun had now shown up on his own.
…
As soon as Wu Anxun appeared, everyone's gaze immediately fell on him.
Wu Anxun had a piercing gaze and a sullen expression. Before he even stepped into the cabin, Head Wang rushed to greet him ingratiatingly. "Younger brother Wu, have you come out of seclusion? Sigh. I'm so sorry that this trivial matter ended up disrupting your cultivation."
Su Jingxing and the rest of the crowd watched them in silence.
Without a doubt, Head Wang was a man who knew when to bow his head.
Even though Wu Anxun was in charge of everything in town—except the security team—people did not look down at him for groveling to a seventh-grade martial artist, since he was only an ordinary person.
"Are you the one stirring up trouble?"
Wu Anxun ignored Head Wang and turned his cold gaze on Gu Bo.
"I… I wasn't stirring up trouble," said Gu Bo with audible nervousness.
The pressure exerted by Wu Anxun was way stronger than the likes of Zhou Hongsong and Head Wang.
As though to encourage himself, Gu Bo swallowed some spit.
"I just thought the wounds on these corpses looked strange," he said, trying his best to maintain composure.
He then walked over to the nearest corpse, squatted down, and pointed to the curled part of the winding sheet—beneath that lay exposed two chunks of dead flesh that had been pieced together. Gu Bo's face grew solemn. "Team Leader Wu, please take a look at the point of traumatic amputation and tell us, whether you think this was caused by the fangs of beasts, or the impact of weapons!"
Frowning, Wu Anxun took a few steps forward and studied the point of traumatic amputation.
Suddenly, his expression changed. Dashing forward, he flung off the entire sheet.
"Ah!"
The crowd at the door shrieked and backed away.
This reaction was provoked by the sight of the corpse which was now exposed to full view; over ten pieces of cut-up human flesh had been badly put together to somewhat resemble a human.
This wasn't their first time seeing the horrific sight, but they were terrified nonetheless.
What a dreadful scene!
Had Su Jingxing not been around so many corpses lately, he would not have dared to look at it either.
However, he was more curious about Wu Anxun's reaction than the terrible state of the corpses.
At this moment, the seventh-grade expert's face was ashen, and his piercing eyes seemed as though they were literally about to shoot daggers.
Swish!
After scanning the corpse, he suddenly took a step forward and stripped the winding sheet off another corpse.
Then, without stopping, he exposed the other corpses.
Swish! Swish! Swish!
In a moment's time, he had removed all the winding sheets from the corpses.
Ten incomplete corpses lay exposed in the air.
Wu Anxun, face ashen, scrutinized them one by one.
During this process, not a single person inside or outside the room spoke, and they silently waited for Wu Anxun to finish his inspection.
Su Jingxing was also waiting for the result.
Unexpectedly, from the corner of his eye, he noticed that Zhou Hongsong's body was trembling violently.
What's going on?
"Is he afraid of something?"
Stunned at first, Su Jingxing then fell into deep thought.
After Wu Anxun finished examining all the corpses, Gu Bo broke the silence with a soft cough. "What do you think, Team Leader Wu? Was it the work of 'Corpse Puppets'?"
Corpse puppets?
After freezing for a moment, Su Jingxing's expression changed drastically. "Are you serious, Team Leader Gu?"
The people outside the room were also in an uproar.
"What? Corpse Puppets? Really?"
"Impossible. No one from our town ever died in the wilds, so how could there be Corpse Puppets?"
"I don't buy it either! It couldn't have been a Corpse Puppet!"
"Team Leader Wu, is what he said true?"
"…"
The crowd was in a mess, with people shouting and yelling non-stop.
Intense fear was written on their faces.
Corpse puppets!
The meaning of those words was certainly not to be taken lightly, for it hinted at something even scarier.
Extraterrestrial Devil Insect!
To be precise, it was a type of Extraterrestrial Devil Insect named "Corpse-raising Insect".
About eighty years ago, a group of extraterrestrial visitors invaded Earth Star.
They were known as 'devil insects'!
These insects of various species had differing abilities, but what they shared in common were terrifying lethality and destructive power. Ever since they landed on Earth Star, they have managed to stir up a series of disasters.
Among them was the Corpse-raising Insect.
Humans named them as such because of the ability they possessed—
their eggs could burrow into and assume control of human corpses, causing them to rise from the dead as corpse puppets!
These puppets were incredibly powerful.
Their dead flesh could not be pierced by swords and spears, their sharp claws contained immense power, and their speed when running matched that of a cheetah. Moreover, these beings were even more savage than barbarians.
If an ordinary person encountered one of these, they were as good as dead.
In a one-on-one scenario, even a ninth-grade martial artist had to flee.
Only eighth-grade martial artists could barely contend against it.
After arriving on the Earth Star, 'Corpse-raising Insects' relied on this ability to quickly bring about countless bloodbaths, and there were many cases where whole cities got wiped out by Corpse Puppets.
Against tens of thousands of Corpse Puppets, even a first-grade martial artist had to run away with his tails between his legs.
The terror of Corpse Puppets eventually forced human nations to dig up corpses from underground and burn them into ashes.
Every corpse was to be incinerated, and there were no exceptions.
As a result, the crematorium became an important official department overnight.
Every city needed it to function.
Under the strict laws of the nations on Earth Star, anyone who died must be sent to the crematorium to be cremated!
Anyone who performed cremations in private would face harsh punishments if discovered.
In the early days when the law was just implemented, many people wishfully thought that the eggs wouldn't always be able to seek out the bodies. Thus, they burned dead cattle and passed the resultant ashes for human ashes, then secretly buried the human corpses that were still intact.
In the end, Corpse-raising Insect Eggs sought out every last one of them.
No one knew how they found the bodies, or why they targeted human corpses exclusively.
All people saw was Corpse Puppets crawling out from underground and going on massacres.
If the ten-man Mountain Patrol Team of Forestry Town really died to a "Corpse Puppet", it meant that someone had died recently and was secretly buried underground!
Who could it have been?
…