Chapter 147: Ulterior Motives

This place felt vaguely familiar. I glanced around and spotted a withered, three-headed giant snake lying on the ground, its tail pinned down by massive iron chains.

It was the very spot where the three-headed giant snake had been located! We had come around from a different direction!

Hadn't that three-headed snake possessed Yun Mutian's body? Why was it still lying here, safely pinned down?

Its three heads hung limply against the ground, completely motionless, as if it were dead, and the cyan flames on its snake heads had vanished.

Could it be that this creature's possession wasn't like those of the two-headed snakes, but more akin to soul possession?

That made sense. Otherwise, a physical body of that immense size could never have been crammed into a human.

Suspended directly above the iron chain that pinned the snake's tail was an enormous wooden stake, inverted and driven downwards! Because the ceiling here was higher than at the entrance, I hadn't noticed it before.

This stake was pitch black and covered in strange runes. Although it lacked the iron chains and cloth strips of the stakes we had seen earlier, one could instantly sense that it was utterly malevolent. Even from afar, a dense aura of evil coiled around it!

One look at this thing told you it was no ordinary object; this must be the true eye of the formation!

"That is the eye of the formation," Tu'e confirmed, validating the suspicion in my mind.

After wandering around for so long, the true eye was right above the three-headed snake! The person who set this up was truly ruthless; even if we had known from the start, there would have been no way for us to interfere!

Suddenly, I noticed a person lying in the corner. That person had extraordinarily long hair and lay motionless on the ground—it was the woman we had seen at the very beginning!

Sure enough, that person was also a possessed corpse! But why hadn't I seen that massive snake carcass when I first encountered the possessed woman? I could never understand it.

"Heh, just as I expected, that three-headed snake body is nothing more than a 'vessel.' The person who created this place intended to forge precisely something like this from the very beginning!" Guo Sangong said, looking at Yun Mutian.

Did this old bastard mean that this possessed Yun Mutian was the ultimate forged form?

That was simply too outrageous! The creator's initial goal had been to craft the ultimate possessed corpse through soul transference?

If I hadn't seen that long-haired woman at the beginning, I might have believed it! That three-headed snake had been capable of possessing human bodies for a long time; the figure wandering the mountains every night must have been that possessed woman.

"What a pity. The forging process took far too long. The creator did not live to see its success, leaving the very final step uncompleted," Guo Sangong said, casting a meaningful glance at Tu'e.

I looked at him vigilantly. This old man was never on the righteous path to begin with; he had only cooperated with Old Man Ma earlier out of sheer necessity, and I had no idea what he was up to now.

"The snakes above have all come down, and there's no telling when they might crawl over here. You'd better figure out how to deal with them, unless you want to end up buried down here with us!" I said.

Guo Sangong glanced at me, snorted, and said dismissively, "If I hadn't let some snakes in, how could we have delayed Old Man Ma? With his abilities, those snakes wouldn't have reached this place anyway. Besides, even if they came over, they wouldn't enter this chamber. You brat are falling short by miles; I can't fathom why that old man took you on as a disciple!"

The old bastard still found time to insult me!

It turned out he had deliberately triggered the formation's eye to let those snakes in—what a vicious heart! Didn't he care about the lives of Yang Guangyu and the others? Yang Guangyu had paid good money to hire him, after all. Even without professional ethics, for the sake of the money, there was no need to go this far. Was this old man willing to forgo even his payment?

Ignoring me further, he looked at Tu'e and demanded, "How do you seal the possessed spirit?! How do you make it break away from the snake body entirely and attach to a human body?"

So this was the final step he had been talking about! If that was the case, it made sense. Although the three-headed snake could possess human bodies, it had never been able to stray far from this place; at best, it could only wander the mountains at night, while its true physical body remained here, unable to leave permanently.

If one could truly make it sever its connection to the snake body and attach solely to a human host, that would indeed be terrifyingly powerful!

"I don't know," Tu'e replied with his habitual honesty.

Guo Sangong sneered. "There's no need to put on an act. I noticed something was deeply amiss with you from the very beginning. While I don't know why that old man tolerates you, do you really think he hasn't suspected your background? I won't meddle in your affairs, but you'd better know what's good for you!"

Judging by his words, he already had a clear idea of Tu'e's origins, and Old Man Ma must have had his suspicions as well.

All along, other than telling me to be wary of Tu'e and warning me that Tu'e and I were not cut from the same cloth, Old Man Ma had never said anything more. The reason he was so guarded must have been because he had already found his answer!

Even though I knew he must have had his reasons for keeping quiet, I still felt a lingering sense of resentment. Tu'e had helped me out a great deal after all, and I didn't want to think the worst of him. Since Old Man Ma had already guessed the truth, why didn't he just tell me straight out?

Once this matter was over, I was going to demand a proper explanation from him!

"I don't know," Tu'e said, frowning.

With a gloomy face, Guo Sangong flatly refused to believe him. "You refuse to talk? Then I'll just have to use another method to make you speak! And I can test the power of this thing at the same time!"

As he spoke, he raised his hand. Clutched in his palm was a small bell. Muttering incantations under his breath, he began to ring it. The sound of the bell was remarkably soft, completely disproportionate to its size, yet it came in endless, rolling echoes, as if it could hook and capture one's very soul.

Yun Mutian, who had remained motionless all this time, finally stirred and slowly turned around. The cyan fire on his chest had vanished, replaced entirely by a strip of yellow talismans.

Suddenly, he lunged toward us with terrifying speed, completely different from his previous sluggish state!

"Watch out!" Tu'e cried, grabbing my shoulder and swiftly dragging me aside to dodge.

Yun Mutian slammed into the exact spot we had occupied a moment before, his mouth wide open in a ferocious biting posture!

If that fellow managed to take a bite out of you, God only knew what state you'd end up in. Those two gruesome corpses we saw earlier were likely the prime examples!

If those two people had truly been killed by this creature, I became even more suspicious of Guo Sangong's true intentions! He was clearly capable of manipulating this monster just as he was doing now, yet he had allowed it to harm people. Don't fucking tell me it was because this was his disciple's corpse, so he couldn't bring himself to act beforehand!

Yun Mutian turned toward us and let out a few raspy coughs. Following the coughs, an eerie cyan ghostly light began to shimmer around him, exactly like the illumination we had seen when we first dropped down here. A bad premonition gripped my heart—this situation spelled nothing but trouble!

I looked left and right. The previously dim surroundings were now shrouded in a source-less cyan glow. Though it looked bright, it made one's blood run cold, exuding an indescribable, bone-chilling terror—a strange, unfamiliar freezing sensation quite different from ordinary yin energy, which I had sensed earlier without fully realizing its nature!

"Don't get entangled, find a way out," I said to Tu'e. Suddenly, sensing something was wrong, I turned my head—the space beside me was completely empty. Tu'e was gone!