Starting with a beautiful woman's private doctor

Chu Nan sidestepped the twisted hand, its fingertips brushing past his throat, bringing with them a gust of wind carrying a damp, putrid smell.

He shifted his feet and circled behind the shadowy figure, then used the momentum of his turn to strike the back of the opponent's neck with his right elbow.

Without the aid of true qi, Chu Nan used 50% of his strength in this elbow strike. Even a martial artist who had mastered external martial arts would be knocked down on the spot if hit by it.

The sensation of the elbow striking the target was like being plunged into a viscous liquid; the force was dispersed, diluted, and swallowed up bit by bit by the gray mist.

The shadowy figure's neck snapped forward with a cracking sound.

Then it turned its head back.

It's not the kind of thing that breaks and then heals itself; it's something that's been forcibly twisted back together!

The cervical spine, beneath the skin, resembled a snake being turned inside out, its joints rotating one by one, producing a series of dense, crisp cracking sounds that were particularly jarring in the deathly silence of the dense forest.

The shadowy figure tilted its head, its scarlet eyes drawing two dark red arcs in the mist, and a gurgling laugh emanated from deep within its throat.

It seemed to be enjoying the process of toying with Chu Nan.

Chu Nan took two steps back and shook his right hand.

The sensation of the injection still lingered on my wrist—like putting my hand into a tank of stagnant water that had been sitting for who knows how many years, with a layer of sticky oily film floating on the surface.

He glanced down at the back of his hand; there were no wounds on his skin, but it was covered with a few wisps of extremely fine gray mist.

The gray mist moved slowly between his fingers like living things, trying to penetrate his skin through his pores.

Chu Nan activated his Lotus True Qi in his palm, and with a flash of golden light, the remaining gray mist was evaporated, emitting a hissing sound.

The shadowy figure stopped laughing, its scarlet eyes fixed on the fleeting golden light in Chu Nan's palm. It leaned back slightly, as if re-examining its prey.

Then it opened its mouth, stretching all the way down to below its ears. There was no tongue or teeth in its mouth, only a cloud of gray mist, thicker than its body, slowly swirling inside.

Something was moving deep within the fog; something tiny was wriggling and making rustling sounds.

Then, more scarlet lights appeared in the fog.

A pair of...

Three pairs...

Seven pairs...

Fifteen pairs...

They emerged one after another from behind the trees, from underground, and from the depths of the fog, each one exactly like the dark figure before them.

Twisted joints, excessively long limbs, and a mouth that stretches to the ears.

Their steps were so synchronized, like puppets controlled by the same hand, that they surrounded Chu Nan.

There were no footsteps on the muddy ground, only the crisp cracking of joints twisting.

"hiss--"

The next second, fifteen dark figures pounced at the same time.

The air was torn apart by a series of sharp screeching sounds, making eardrums buzz.

Chu Nan swung his right fist, and the force of the Heaven-Slaying Hammer blasted the two black figures in front of him into pieces. However, the gray mist spun in mid-air and reformed into a human shape without slowing down.

With a slap of his left palm, he sent three dark figures flying from the side. When they landed, their bodies were still twisted, and they used their limbs to brace themselves against the ground and stand up again.

The gaps in front, behind, left, and right were filled by one dark shadow after another, and the moment each shadow was repelled, another one took its place.

A dark shadow approached from behind, its two excessively long arms coiling around Chu Nan's neck like pythons.

Chu Nan grabbed the arm and swung it forward, knocking the two dark figures charging at him to the ground.

But the arm itself suddenly disintegrated into gray mist in his palm, slipped through his fingers, and reformed two steps away.

More shadowy figures pressed forward during this gap.

They no longer tried to defeat him individually, but instead piled on top of him, one layer at a time.

The first dark figure to pounce was crushed by its companions, turning into gray mist that seeped into the next layer.

All the gray fog and limbs were slowly merging together, like a pot of black asphalt solidifying.

Chu Nan shattered one layer, only for another to press down on him.

His field of vision was being compressed, shrinking from all directions to three feet, then to within an arm's length, until finally only a faint sliver of moonlight remained above his head.

The gray mist seeped into the edges of his protective aura, making a continuous hissing sound, as if it were repeatedly wiping his protective aura barrier with a corrosive liquid.

Deep in the dense forest, under a crooked old tree, a figure leaned against the trunk, arms crossed.

Moonlight filtered through the leaves, illuminating the jade bracelet on his wrist and reflecting a faint blue halo.

A slight smile played on his lips. From the moment Chu Nan stepped onto this street, the illusion had already been set up.

Chu Nan is currently enveloped by layers of mist puppets formed from his own evil thoughts within the illusion he created.

He could sense that the mist puppets were merging. The mist cocoon formed by the fusion of fifteen evil thoughts was enough to trap an ordinary grandmaster inside, draining his true energy bit by bit by the gray mist, leaving him no room to struggle.

"That's all..."

He raised his right hand, spread his five fingers, and prepared to form a hand seal to completely seal the mist pupa.

Fog them up, lure them in, surround and kill them, then it's over.

It's always the same ending; the only difference is who gets surrounded and killed.

However, just as his fingers were halfway through pinching, a golden light pierced out from the gap in the mist pupa.

Then came the second, the third, and more than a dozen golden beams that simultaneously shot out from every crevice of the mist cocoon, illuminating the layers of dark shadows from within.

The twisted limbs began to disintegrate under the scorching golden light, and the gray mist was evaporated before it could even surge. Hissing sounds erupted simultaneously from the gaps in the mist cocoon.

"boom!!!"

The mist pupa expanded violently for a moment, then exploded.

A giant nine-petaled golden lotus blooms in the center of the dense forest.

It was over ten feet tall, and each petal was formed from pure golden true energy, slowly rotating in the air.

The once overwhelming gray fog surged and receded as if it were being burned under the light of the golden lotus, and the clearing in the dense forest that had been covered by the black tide was illuminated again.

A person stood in the center of the lotus, his robes billowing with true energy, surrounded by countless tiny golden specks of light.

Those were fragments of lotus essence left over from breaking through the mist pupa, slowly dissipating under the moonlight.

The smile of the person observing from the shadows froze.

He straightened up, his back away from the tree trunk, his right hand still in the hand seal position, suspended in mid-air, but his fingers had forgotten what to do next.

He had met grandmasters and personally killed three of them in the waters where the East Sea and the West Sea met.

But none of those grandmasters could unleash such a level of true energy within his misty chrysalis.

The golden light did not break the illusion from the outside, but rather tore apart the fifteen evil thoughts that had been condensed into mist puppets from the inside.

This is not a trick, but... a crushing defeat!

Only then did he realize why he had always felt uncomfortable with this young man when he was at the Xu residence.

It wasn't because Chu Nan sensed anything, but rather because his body instinctively perceived a force that was being deliberately suppressed.

The grandmaster, in his early twenties, was younger than any of his peers he had met in the East Sea, and even more composed than the young master of the Xuanbing Palace in the West Sea, who was hailed as a once-in-a-century genius.

Chu Nan raised his head, his gaze piercing through the dissipating gray fog and landing precisely on his hiding place.

"Stop playing these pointless tricks behind my back, come out here... Li Guanqi!"