Chatting along the way yet remaining vigilant, the five of them arrived on foot before the gates of General Town.

The town gates stood wide open. Inside, the night was deep and the town was utterly silent.

After walking a hundred paces, Zheng Xiu suddenly rubbed his ear.

"Something feels... off."

Zheng Xiu frowned.

After a moment, Feng Bei glanced up at the sky, her delicate brows knitting together. "It’s too quiet," she said softly.

At first, Yue Yan and Dou Xie didn’t think anything was wrong. It was only logical for a town to be quiet in the dead of night. But when Feng Bei pointed it out, Yue Yan focused on the town’s atmosphere and realized the silence was truly bizarre.

Right now, there was no sound besides the wind. They had walked several hundred paces without hearing so much as a single dog bark. The silence was profoundly strange.

CREAK!

CREAK!

One after another, tightly shut doors swung open.

Shambling figures emerged from behind the open doors.

The five of them stopped in their tracks. The sudden turn of events before them was, by any measure, highly unusual.

In the blink of an eye, more and more people emerged from houses, from alleyways, from lofts, filling the once-empty street. Within moments, the deserted street had become bustling and extraordinarily "lively."

But this particular brand of liveliness sent a cold chill down the spines of Zheng Xiu and the others.

The townspeople’s eyes were squinted into crescents, and the corners of their mouths were stretched forcefully toward their ears, holding a bizarre, exaggerated "smile." Their stiff expressions were like lifeless masks pasted onto their faces. They showed no signs of life; they were less like Human beings and more like puppets, like the walking dead.

"Hee hee hee—"

"Heh heh heh—"

"I’ve come for you..."

"Come have a cup of hot tea, honored guest!"

"Hee hee hee!"

The bizarre laughter spilled from the townspeople’s stretched smiles, echoing from all directions. In an instant, the quiet street was filled with deranged cackling, enveloping the entire city in a "festive" yet hellish atmosphere.

The crowd surged, scrambling over one another as they lunged for the group.

Yue Yan, Feng Bei, Zheng Xiu, and Chu Susu instinctively took a few steps back, leaving a bewildered Dou Xie standing alone at the front.

It almost looked like Dou Xie was leading the charge.

In the blink of an eye, the crowd tackled Dou Xie to the ground. Their faces still frozen in those eerie smiles, they reached out and started choking him.

"Mmph—argh—"

Dozens of people instantly swarmed and pinned Dou Xie down. He barely managed to pull out a textbook, but before he could recite a single line, his hand-copied book was snatched away by an eager, old brothel courtesan and tossed out of the crowd.

Under the dark mass of bodies, Dou Xie could be heard screaming, groaning, whimpering shyly, crying painfully, and struggling. It was impossible to tell what exactly was happening to him.

The other four watched in silence for a moment. In truth, Zheng Xiu and Feng Bei had already sensed that while the townspeople looked bizarre, they were in fact living people. Dou Xie, however, had taken it upon himself to confirm their theory with his own body.

"They’re... alive!"

Seeing that Dou Xie was about to be stripped naked and his virtue lost, Zheng Xiu charged into the crowd. With a flurry of kicks and punches, he scattered the bizarre townspeople, plucked Dou Xie out like an eagle snatching a chick, and leaped onto a nearby roof. 𝚏𝐫𝚎𝗲𝕨𝐞𝐛𝕟𝚘𝐯𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝗺

Yue Yan leaped onto the roof as well, carrying Chu Susu. Chu Susu’s eyes were sharp; she reached out, and with a flick of her wrist, Dou Xie’s lost hand-copied book appeared in her hand.

"What’s going on?!"

Dou Xie had been pinned down and groped by the mob for a while. Though the ordeal was low on actual damage, it was extremely high on humiliation. Mortified, he glared down at the surging crowd on the street, looking thoroughly dishevelled. He was furious mostly because he felt he had been taken down in a single exchange, losing face for the Ye Weiyang Constellation.

No one else asked that question.

This was clearly a Miracle Technique cast by a Miracle Master.

What they needed to figure out now was who, and what kind of Magic.

"Something’s wrong. Let’s get out of the city first!"

Zheng Xiu made the call instantly, and Feng Bei nodded in agreement. The townspeople were being controlled by some unknown Miracle Technique, but they were still alive. Unless it was an absolute last resort, none of them wanted to commit the heinous act of slaughtering civilians.

Suddenly, Zheng Xiu’s [Intuition] triggered, and every hair on his body stood on end. He whipped his head around. There, atop the very gate they had entered through, a figure in black stood, though none of them had seen him appear. He wore a skull mask painted with seven-colored markings, which looked exceptionally sinister in the dark night.

The mask strongly resembled the face paint of a street Actor.

The instant Zheng Xiu turned, the colorfully masked man in black gave a sinister laugh and drew a strange weapon from his waist.

The weapon was nearly three feet long and looked like a pair of giant scissors, its surface glinting coldly.

The black-clothed man swung the "scissors" in an arc before him. The night itself seemed to part like a sheet of paper, easily sliced in two. The sundered darkness formed two sharp, gray curtains of light that shot toward Zheng Xiu and Feng Bei.

The masked man had clearly come prepared, using the townspeople as a distraction to launch a sudden attack amidst the chaos. The gray curtains of light moved with incredible speed; in the instant Zheng Xiu had sensed the danger and turned, they were already upon him.

The bizarre state of the controlled townspeople made Zheng Xiu wary of taking the attack head-on. ’Miracle Techniques are, by their very nature, unpredictable. There are countless variations, making them impossible to guard against. Facing a Miracle Technique without understanding its secrets is never a wise move.’

"Feng Bei!"

Zheng Xiu and Feng Bei had built a solid rapport on their journey together. He only needed to shout her name; Feng Bei reacted instantly, extending her palm toward him.

SMACK!

Zheng Xiu and Feng Bei slapped palms, using the opposing force to push off and spring apart. The gray curtain of light passed between them, seeming to slice the entire town in two and separating them.