Shining Zaf

The projection tilted its head.

“I’m not him?”

He lowered his head and looked at his own hands, then raised his eyes to Lin Mo.

“Then who am I?”

With that, he took a step forward.

The black aura within the altar crept along the ground, while the patterns carved into the walls darkened under its pressure.

“Then you tell me—who am I?!”

With every step he took, his face began to change. A moment ago, he had been someone Lin Mo recognized.

In the next instant, his brow sank, his nose grew more prominent, and his features shifted into another unfamiliar face.

He took another step, and it changed again.

Each face lasted only a brief moment, as if he were putting on one mask after another.

The longer Lin Mo watched, the more relaxed he became.

As expected, this was not the person Lin Mo knew.

That person had died alongside Yu Youhan in the underground laboratory that day.

The thing before him had merely borrowed his skin.

“Stop changing.”

Lin Mo raised his hand. Lightning in his palm pressed down on the black aura with sharp crackles.

“You can’t even figure out who you are, yet you still think you can use them to scare me?”

The projection stopped three steps away. The confusion on its face tore open slightly.

“Then you tell me—who am I?!”

“You’re no one.”

Lin Mo took half a step forward, his tone utterly even.

“You’re just a collective—a spirit of the dragon vein that has been corrupted and can in turn corrupt other things.”

The moment those words fell, a deep tremor came from the depths of the altar.

The so-called corruption was, in truth, the infusion of remnant souls and resentful energy into the dragon vein, followed by their fusion with baleful qi.

And the dragon vein was, in fact, the Ancestral Dragon.

The Ancestral Dragon was the dragon vein.

Originally, without this altar sealing away the baleful qi, the dragon vein could have purged the corruption on its own. However, the Chrysanthemum Sect had established both the altar and the formation, permanently locking the corruption onto the dragon vein.

Sensing that something was wrong, the Ancestral Dragon had severed this section of the dragon vein on its own. This allowed the corrupted spirit of the dragon vein to become independent, but it also left the spirit of this section unable to escape its fate of remaining corrupted.

Then, as a result of that corruption, the projection had been born.

But a projection was nothing more than a projection.

The projection’s face changed again.

This time, it no longer looked human. Its features writhed beneath its skin, like a mass of unsorted resentments fighting to crawl their way out.

“I’m not filth!”

“Whether you are or not isn’t decided by shouting.”

Lightning gathered in Lin Mo’s palm and swept outward.

The projection was blown apart. It did not even manage to complete its scream before vanishing.

At the instant it was annihilated, a rumbling roar came from beneath the ground.

The next moment, a long, mournful howl rose from the depths below.

That had not been the projection.

This was the true voice of the dragon vein.

In an instant, the entire altar shook. Stone fragments pattered down from above.

Dense black baleful qi pressed in from every direction. It churned along the grooves in the stone walls and pillars, converging toward Lin Mo’s position.

If an ordinary person stood here, they would go mad the moment they stepped through the entrance, let alone try to fight.

As for Zhang Gonglian, with his methods and abilities, he could probably think of a way to purge the corruption.

But that approach would be too crude.

The dragon vein had already been severed once. If it were damaged again, no one could say what stretch of earth qi might be affected, or whether the residents of the surrounding cities would suffer unforeseen consequences.

Lin Mo had no intention of gambling with that. After all, the people he cared about were all living on this land.

Lin Mo raised his hand and directly planted the Golden Light Spell in Zhafu.

Golden light shone through Zhafu’s skin, spreading along his blood vessels and bones. In the blink of an eye, it illuminated his entire body.

Zhafu looked as though he had entered Glitter Tiga mode, glowing brilliantly. It was obvious how powerful the Golden Light Spell on him was.

Lin Mo wasted no more time. He reached into the depths of the darkness.

When he grabbed the black aura, he forcibly pulled out a clump of viscous black sludge.

Broken soul-shadows, strands of resentment, and wisps of baleful qi were tangled together inside it. Separating them would be time-consuming and troublesome.

So Lin Mo did not bother separating them.

This thing was the corruption.

He turned his hand and slammed the clump directly into Zhafu’s body.

In the next instant, the Golden Light Spell bore down on it, pinning the rampaging corruption into a corner of Zhafu’s body.

Lin Mo grabbed another clump.

Zhafu remained expressionless. Under Lin Mo’s control, he could not even lift a hand. He could only watch helplessly as Lin Mo reached into the edge of the black waves again and again, scooped out the corruption, and stuffed it into his body.

Layer after layer, the golden light dimmed.

Zhafu, who had originally been dazzlingly bright, soon fell from Glitter Tiga to Composite-Type Zafu.

After a few more handfuls, his color changed again. His aura grew lighter, and his entire body began to float as if he were about to leave the ground.

Lin Mo glanced at him.

He had become Sky-Type Zafu.

The black waves continued to close in.

The grooves around the altar filled with corruption, while thin black lines extended from the ground, attempting to coil around Lin Mo’s feet.

Lin Mo stamped down. Lightning spread along the patterns, crushing every one of the black lines.

He looked at Zhafu.

If he stuffed in any more, this guy would be heading toward Dark Zafu.

Lin Mo pressed down with a fingertip and added another layer of the Golden Light Spell.

The golden light once again suppressed the corruption, and the glow around Zhafu was forced back to its former state, returning him—barely—to a dazzling golden color.

Sky-Type Zafu had transformed back into Glitter Tiga.

Zhafu had truly been put through the wringer.

“Hmm. There’s more than I expected. In that case, we’ll just have to see how much you can contain.”

A roar came from within the black waves.

As the corruption was gradually extracted, the corrupted spirit of the dragon vein finally could not sit still any longer.

A humanoid figure forced its way out atop the waves. Its features had yet to take shape, but it still managed to shout at Lin Mo first.

“You! What the hell are you doing?!”

Lin Mo paused.

That accent was thoroughly corrupted.

He raised his hand, grabbed another clump of black sludge, and pressed it into Zhafu’s body.

“Giving you a bath.”

The humanoid figure froze.

Lin Mo added, “Before the bath, we need to pull out the weeds and drive out the bugs. My hands are big, so bear with it. I don’t charge much.”

As he spoke, Lin Mo worked even faster, targeting only the outermost, loosest parts of the black waves.

This job required a certain touch.

Where the corruption was too deeply intertwined with the dragon vein, he could not tear it out by force. Doing so would damage the roots.

The stuff along the edges was like rotten skin peeling away from a festering wound. Scrape that off first, and there would be room to treat what lay underneath.

Inside the small, enormous wave, he dug and dug and dug.

This was not exorcism.

This was debridement.

It was neither pretty nor dignified, but it worked.

The black waves shrank by a ring.

The change was barely visible to the naked eye, but the spirit of the dragon vein could no longer endure it.

The humanoid figure threw back its head and shrieked. Its body contracted inward, ultimately compressing into a long black blade.

The instant the blade took shape, a bloody wind rushed toward Lin Mo’s face.

Lin Mo looked up.

The black blade came crashing down, and a fine crack split across the altar floor before it even reached him.

But he did not retreat.

His left hand held Zhafu in place, while the thunder in his right palm compressed into a single line and rose to meet the blade.

“Getting desperate?”

Lin Mo raised his arm to block.

Lightning collided with the black blade, and the piercing sound of friction scraped across the altar.

The black blade did not shatter.

Instead, face after face pushed out from deep within the blade.

The most prominent among them was Taira no Masakado.

His remnant soul was the strongest, so the spirit of the dragon vein had used him to forge the blade.

Wrapped in corruption, those remnant souls opened their mouths and screamed soundlessly, as if trying to crawl out from inside the blade.