The Mysterious Card Maker: Starting with Zhang Jiao's Deification

Warm, viscous liquid dripped onto Lin Fan's body.

A fishy, ​​foul odor filled my nostrils.

He struggled to open his eyes and was met with a huge dog face, its two dark blue eyes darting around in their sockets like ghost lanterns.

"Grass......"

Lin Fan shuddered and tried to struggle and run away, but found that he was being held in the dog's mouth, his body dangling in the air and swaying back and forth.

This scene reminded him of a mother bird carrying food back to feed her chicks; did this mean he was being treated as food?

He frantically searched his body, but Zhang Jiao's card was not with him. Logically, once his mental energy was exhausted and the battle was over, the card should have returned to him.

But right now he doesn't have a single usable card. He can't very well release the [Black-faced Demon].

He couldn't even bear to imagine two monsters fighting over him. One of them would eat him in half.

Lin Fan hung in mid-air, his limbs dangling haphazardly, having completely given up struggling.

"Damn, women are all unreliable, especially beautiful women. Wuji's mother was right, we saved her..."

Lin Fan muttered to himself under the dog's mouth, already prepared to become food.

"I'm listening!" a voice suddenly came from the dog's back.

Lin Fan's heart skipped a beat; there was someone on the dog's back!

Qin Muyao poked her head out, looking down at him. She raised an eyebrow and continued, "I'm not like you, abandoning my brother. You should thank him for leading that strange thing in another direction."

"If it weren't for your brother risking his life, we wouldn't be alive." Qin Muyao looked at Lin Fan with a hint of disdain. "Now that you're awake, you can leave on your own."

As she spoke, Qin Muyao jumped off the Bone-Eating Hound and patted it.

The Bone-Eating Hound released its grip, and Lin Fan fell to the ground with a "plop".

Qin Muyao stood in front of Lin Fan, who was lying on the ground, and looked down at him: "I promised your brother I'd bring you out, and I've done that. Now you're on your own."

Lin Fan struggled to sit up, supporting himself on the ground. He hadn't expected Qin Muyao to protect him all the time. In this treacherous tide, everyone was in danger. The fact that she had brought him out of that dangerous place was already more than enough.

What Lin Fan didn't know was that Qin Muyao's coldness stemmed from her displeasure at his abandonment of his brothers. Had she known that he was the one who saved her, she wouldn't have acted this way.

At that moment, a beam of light slowly drifted from afar and condensed in Lin Fan's hand to form [Great Teacher Zhang Jiao].

In his vision, a strange eye pattern full of thorns flashed across the card, but quickly disappeared. Lin Fan rubbed his eyes, thinking it was just a blurry vision caused by overexertion of his mental energy, so he didn't pay much attention to it.

A crack running through the card is clearly visible.

Lin Fan immediately activated his spiritual power, and the figure of a yellow-robed Taoist appeared, his robes disheveled, his face pale, and he looked quite disheveled.

"Old Zhang, are you alright?" Lin Fan shook the card in his hand and pointed to the crack on the card.

"It's alright. Fortunately, your spiritual energy was still in the card, which is why I was able to hold on until now," Zhang Jiao said weakly. "However, I'm also quite badly injured and need to rest for a while."

As soon as he finished speaking, his figure faded away and returned to Lin Fan's hand as a card.

Qin Muyao stared at him for a while, then suddenly asked, "That Taoist priest, did you summon him?"

Lin Fan looked up at her and nodded.

She paused for a moment, then looked down at Lin Fan.

"I thought, I thought you lost..." Qin Muyao didn't continue, her gaze falling on the cracked Zhang Jiao in Lin Fan's hand.

She then rummaged through her bag and pulled out a small bottle, handing it to Lin Fan.

"Card repair fluid?" Lin Fan asked, as if confirming.

He had seen this stuff before when buying cards; it could quickly repair cards and restore them to their original strength. However, just this small bottle cost tens of thousands of yuan. He had no idea why this person in front of him had suddenly become so generous.

"Yeah, use it quickly. If you don't fix it and problems remain, your card will be useless."

As she spoke, Qin Muyao snatched back the small bottle, unscrewed the cap, and poured it directly onto the cards.

Lin Fan watched helplessly as the repair fluid dripped down the card and onto the ground, his heart aching with pain. He knew that a few drops could repair the damage on the card, but to pour out the whole bottle was just too extravagant.

"That's enough, that's enough, it's all dripping on the floor."

Qin Muyao ignored Lin Fan's words, poured out the entire bottle, tossed the empty bottle aside, and clapped her hands: "Okay, now we'll just have to wait for him to recover slowly."

Lin Fan looked down and saw that the crack had become much shallower, leaving only a faint mark. Sure enough, there's a reason why expensive things are expensive.

The cards have a self-repair function; as long as the "spirit" inside is not dead, ordinary damage can be slowly restored.

"Where did you get this card? This kind of humanoid monster is very rare on the market. If you hadn't put it back into the card, I would have thought it was a person."

"I just did it." Lin Fan didn't hide it. After all, she had just saved him, brought him away from that dangerous area, and given him a whole bottle of repair fluid. There was no point in hiding it.

"You did it yourself? You still have humanity, you can think, and you even covered your retreat?" Qin Muyao looked at Lin Fan with a complicated expression, her face full of disbelief.

"Your card..."

Just as she was about to say something, a commotion of voices came from afar.

"Miss Qin!"

"Miss Qin!"

"Mu Yao..." Several flashlight beams pierced through the eerie fog, swaying back and forth, indicating that someone was rushing towards them.

As the hurried footsteps approached, a figure rushed out first, followed by several burly men in black uniforms.

The leader was a middle-aged man in a suit, whose face was full of anxiety and anger.

The person visibly relaxed upon seeing Qin Muyao, but the next second, their face hardened.

"Qin Muyao!"

Upon seeing the newcomer, Qin Muyao shrank back like a child who had done something wrong, awkwardly drawing circles on the ground with her toes, and said in a low voice, "Second Uncle..."

"Do you even know what's going on outside?!" The middle-aged man strode over, pointed at her nose, and started yelling, "A ghost tide! It's full of strange things! You went in alone, you've got some nerve!"

"Second Uncle, what brings you here?"

"How dare you say that? You're a constant source of trouble. If it weren't for your second aunt watching your live streams, I wouldn't even know you'd run into the Ghost Tide."

Qin Muyao shrank back and muttered softly, "How did you find this place?"

"Luckily, I had marked your card with a location tag beforehand."

"No." Qin Muyao turned the Bone-Eating Hound into a card and looked it over in her hand.

The middle-aged man took the card, focused his mental energy, and an eye-shaped mark appeared on the back of the card in his hand.

"Um?"

Lin Fan's gaze fell on the mark, and he suddenly froze.

Just now... something similar seemed to appear on the corner card? But thinking back carefully, the pattern seems a little different. Was it just my imagination, or...?

He subconsciously touched the card in his pocket, his fingertips brushing against the card's surface, using his mental energy to search for it, but he found nothing.

Did I just see things?