# 1127
Chapter 1127
Greedy Vengeful Soul
An Qingyu frowned as she looked back in the direction they had come from.
A faint rustling sound echoed from the deep, lightless crevice behind them, as if something was slowly approaching this place.
Lin Qiye's eyes narrowed. He reached out to grasp An Qingyu's shoulder, while his other hand drew the White Slash at his waist half an inch from its sheath. A faint glow flickered, and the two figures instantly vanished into the void.
In the black-and-white intertwined world of the void, Lin Qiye pulled An Qingyu into the mountain's rocky interior. Both of them held their breath, silently staring at the dim road behind them.
Rustle, rustle...
A moment later, a pitch-black figure stumbled closer.
By the faint red light, they could make out a gaunt man with skin stretched tight over protruding bones. His bare upper body showed ribs clearly defined beneath pale flesh, like a skeleton wrapped in skin. His lower half wore a tattered pair of black pants. At this moment, he was crawling on all fours like a dog.
His eyes were hollow, as if he possessed no consciousness of his own. As he crawled forward on hands and feet, he opened his cracked mouth, appearing to mutter something.
In the void, An Qingyu shot Lin Qiye a look and asked in a lowered voice:
"Is that a vengeful soul?"
Lin Qiye gave a slight nod.
Hell was, after all, a place used to torment the souls of humans who had committed sins during their lifetimes. When hell still existed, it had imprisoned countless human vengeful souls. Now that hell was empty and the demons were gone, after the war of the gods, quite a few vengeful souls must have survived, wandering about in the underworld.
This emaciated man before them had no physical body—he was merely a soul that had been wandering in hell for who knows how long.
Just then, the hollow gaze of the approaching man suddenly focused on a certain spot in the mountain's rocky wall. His dog-like body shuddered, and then, as if driven mad, he lunged forward and sprinted toward that location.
The direction he was heading happened to be near where Lin Qiye and An Qingyu had hidden themselves in the void. Seeing the vengeful soul charging over like a madman, Lin Qiye instinctively gripped the White Slash in his hand tighter, his eyes blazing with killing intent!
But before Lin Qiye could exit the void and deliver a fatal blow to this vengeful soul, the man suddenly threw himself to the ground, cradling a pigeon-egg-sized stone in the corner of the rocky wall, his face filled with excitement and madness.
It was only at this close range that Lin Qiye finally made out the words coming from the man's mouth:
"Gold... it's gold! So much gold... such a huge piece of gold!"
Just then, the man actually tilted his head back and opened his mouth wide, clutching that massive stone and frantically trying to shove it inside.
The stone was far too large, completely stretching open his cracked mouth. Blood trickled down from the corners of his lips, dripping onto his skeletal upper body. The sharp edges of the stone tore open his lips, ripping the flesh with gruesome wounds. Yet even so, the man continued to stuff it into his mouth with maddened desperation, as if feeling no pain at all.
Witnessing such a grotesquely bloodied scene, both An Qingyu and Lin Qiye in the void furrowed their brows simultaneously, a chill running through their hearts.
After successfully getting the stone into his mouth, the man strained to crane his neck backward, seemingly trying to swallow it into his stomach. But the stone simply got stuck in his throat, neither going up nor down. His contorted face finally twisted into one of agony.
There he knelt on the ground like a dog, his ten fingers clawing frantically at the surface of his neck, leaving trails of blood. After struggling for a long time, he finally collapsed face-first onto the ground and lay motionless, as if dead.
Just as An Qingyu thought everything was over and was about to speak, Lin Qiye gave him a look and shook his head.
One second, two seconds, three seconds...
Suddenly, the man's "corpse" on the ground stiffly rose back up. Still on all fours, with hollow eyes, he looked around. Whether it was the blood at the corner of his mouth or the stone wedged in his throat—both had vanished without a trace, as if they had never existed.
"Gold... where's the gold... I want the big gold..."
Muttering to himself, he dragged his withered body along the mountain crevice, slowly moving forward until he disappeared from the sight of Lin Qiye and the others.
Once he had gone far enough, ripples of void surged, and Lin Qiye and An Qingyu stepped out one after another. They stared at the man's retreating figure, lost in thought.
"The vengeful souls in this hell are truly terrifying..." An Qingyu recollected the scene just witnessed and couldn't help but say.
"That was probably the torment inflicted upon his soul by the demons of hell when his soul was dragged down here," Lin Qiye said thoughtfully.
"He mistook stones for gold, driven by greed to search frantically. Yet he ignored the relatively smaller 'gold' pieces, always fixating on the oversized 'gold.' So every time, his greed exceeded what his body could bear, and he died in torment... After death, he would be resurrected, beginning another round of his search, eternally drowning in pain.
His original sin in life must have been greed."
"So his soul is being choked to death by stones over and over again through countless ages?" An Qingyu shook his head. "What a vicious method."
"Now isn't the time to worry about these vengeful souls." Lin Qiye glanced toward the depths of hell, his brow furrowed tightly. "Though I don't understand why the exploration ship sailed into the deepest part of hell, Brother Drag—the lonely man is trapped inside, injured. Jiang Er has also lost contact... The longer we delay, the more critical the situation becomes."
An Qingyu nodded grimly. The two quickly ran forward along the mountain's fissures.
...
Hell, the deepest region.
Towering black mountain peaks stretched endlessly beneath the deep red sky. In a corner of one such peak, a blood-soaked figure stumbled and hid inside a concealed cave, leaning against the wall for support.
Shen Qingzhu dispersed the air barrier around his body that had been blocking the ashes. He pressed his face against the cave's entrance, glancing at the dense swarm of demons circling above the mountain peak. His expression grew increasingly grim.
He had erected the air barrier for two reasons: first, the dense floating ashes were obscuring his vision during his escape; second, because when he had first touched the ashes, he felt an itchiness in his palm, making him suspect that these ashes contained toxins.
Shen Qingzhu clutched the wound on his waist and abdomen, sliding down to sit against the mountain wall. His face was deathly pale.
"What kind of godforsaken place is this..." Shen Qingzhu cursed under his breath.
He pulled a cigarette from his chest and held it between his lips, about to light it. But after seeing the demons swirling outside, he sighed helplessly and put the cigarette away.
The hand pressing against his waist wound relaxed slightly. Gushing blood flowed profusely—a gruesome wound that nearly ran completely through his entire waist, like the mark left by some massive beast's bite. In agonizing pain, the corners of Shen Qingzhu's mouth twitched upward.
At the rate he was bleeding, it probably wouldn't be long before he bled out and died.