Chapter 475: Those Long Legs

Chapter 475: Those Long Legs

Of course, combat arrays like this were graded according to energy consumption and coverage range. The talisman array that they were currently deploying was the smallest model, having a radius of about sixty-seven meters. It required only seven array talismans to assemble.

Still, there was no way He Lingchuan possessed something like that. This set of talismans had been requisitioned from the county yamen by the constables, along with the profound crystals needed to power it.

Naturally, everything would have to be returned afterward.

Still, the sheer extravagance of it left He Lingchuan genuinely stunned.

In Yuan, for a county magistrate to casually approve the use of profound crystals to activate a combat array over what amounted to a local case would have been unimaginable.

From this small detail alone, one could see that Zhitian Township was filthy rich.

Now that the aberrant creature’s escape spell had failed, not only had its downward momentum been halted, but the portion already submerged seemed to have been locked in cement. It could neither sink further nor wrench itself free.

This was precisely the effect He Lingchuan had wanted.

After tracking it this far, he had all but confirmed that the aberrant creature under Mr. Mai’s command specialized in stealth and camouflage. That was how it had killed so many victims without anyone noticing.

But this ambush was his to control. All he needed was to set the right countermeasures.

After examining the slime left at the crime scenes, Jiao Yu and General Ling had both agreed that the culprit was a creature similar to a snail.

Such beings were notoriously slow-moving. If it relied on escape spells or techniques to compensate for that weakness, it made perfect sense.

Now that the prohibition array had pinned it in place and prevented it from diving underground, a slow-moving aberrant creature was nothing more than meat on the chopping block. They had all the time in the world to carve it up.

Only then did He Lingchuan step forward from the rear. His saber flashed like a streak of silk. When it struck the “herb warehouse,” a dense cascade of metallic echoes rang out.

He had just watched, with his own eyes, as the aberrant creature swallowed the entire storage building in one gulp. If he and Jiao Yu had reacted even a fraction slower, they would already be inside its belly.

The fight had been perilous from the very start.

Though it looked like he struck only once, the truth was that he delivered seven consecutive cuts in rapid succession, every single one landing on the exact same point.

A small crack appeared in the surface of the warehouse.

He pressed the attack. This time, Fleeting Life finally revealed its edge. With a dull thunk, it sank a palm’s depth into the shell.

He had to muster every ounce of strength to wrench the treasured saber back out. Once he drew it out, he saw that not a trace of blood stained its edge.

He was certain now that the interior beneath that hard shell was largely hollow, if not completely hollow.

The other party’s shell was thicker and harder than that of a turtle. Even with Fleeting Life’s razor edge, he had failed to injure its true body!

Dong Rui really made this?

He Lingchuan found it hard to believe.

If this aberrant creature’s so formidable, why hadn’t Dong Rui just ridden it out of Beijia himself instead of gifting it to them?

There has to be something strange at play.

However, he had no time to dwell on such thoughts. He Lingchuan pulled out a grappling hook and drove it barehanded into the wound his saber had created.

He pressed the mechanism. With a sharp metallic snap, the hook’s tips sprang open inside the hollow space and locked firmly into place.

He tossed the rope to a drillwind beast. The creature clamped it in its jaws and charged toward the nearest tree. True to its name, it moved with wind-piercing speed, circling five or six trees in rapid succession.

The thickest trunk it wrapped around measured nearly five meters in diameter.

This warehouse district had once been a forest. At the request of a tree monster, roughly a third of the original trees had been preserved, most of them towering giants.

The other constables hacked and chopped at the shell as well, but their weapons were far less effective. They could not even leave a scratch.

To everyone present, it was simply unbelievable.

Constables investigating cases carried origin energy with them. Against wild monsters and beasts, that should have given them an advantage. So they could only wonder as to what exactly was before them?

Only He Lingchuan knew that the monster puppets Dong Rui created typically had exceptionally high resistance to origin energy. Unless a true powerhouse from the State of Chiyan appeared in person, these few constables would struggle to inflict any real damage.

More than twenty men hammered away, the clanging noise almost like carpenters repairing a house.

Their efforts were actually not entirely useless. Before everyone’s eyes, the “herb warehouse” began to deform. In the blink of an eye, it transformed into a massive dark-brown shell nearly seven meters tall. Fine patterns covered its surface, resembling both natural markings and cryptic talismanic runes.

There was no longer any hiding it.

The familiar spiral pattern, now reduced a hundredfold, looked disturbingly similar to the snails they casually slurped down as food.

Xu Dayou blurted out, “A river snail?”

“So it really is a snail!” General Ling shot forward from behind and rammed Xu Dayou aside.

He had been rammed aside just in time.

Xu Dayou tumbled about three meters away, face-first into the dirt. A split second later, a massive claw shot out from beneath the shell and slammed down exactly where he had been standing.

Had he not moved, he would have been flattened into paste.

On the other side of the shell, two constables were not so lucky. They stood too close and were crushed into the mud before they could even scream.

“It’s got legs!” Jiao Yu had circled the creature several times earlier without finding a place to bite. Now that something edible had finally appeared, how could it let it go? It lunged like a starving tiger only to be lifted clear off the ground.

Another flash of lightning illuminated the scene, and everyone stared in horror at the aberrant creature before them.

Not only did the creature have legs, it had four long legs!

They bent forward like human legs, slick and glistening with mucus. The feet were broad and flat, with webbing between the claws.

At the same time, the aberrant creature extended its head from the shell. Its skull was square, its snout wide and rounded. Its enormous mouth split nearly to the back of its head, opening like a bottomless abyss.

Two long, thin antennae protruded from its brow, like needles or arrows.

Of course, it still possessed a snail’s body, mottled faint brown, nearly invisible in the dark. Its tail was thick and long, though the tip was missing as General Ling had snapped it off earlier in the porcupine nest.

Several constables gaped. “What kind of creature is this?!”

The State of Chiyan was known as a land of monsters, yet no one had ever seen such a grotesque aberrant creature.

It had a snail’s body and shell, yet with frog-like limbs and head.

Every part seemed mismatched, as if someone had forcibly stitched incompatible pieces together.

They could clearly see that the limbs and head extended from within its body like a snail’s tentacles, retractable at will.

Even General Ling froze. “Could it be a salamander?”

Had he not seen it with his own eyes, he would never have imagined the culprit behind the string of murders would look like this.

𝒻𝑟ℯℯ𝑤𝑒𝑏𝑛𝘰𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝒸𝑜𝘮

To terrify even seasoned monsters into bewilderment, He Lingchuan silently raised a mental thumb.

Dong Rui, Dong Rui. Only you could create something like this.

The aberrant creature suddenly opened its mouth. A red blur, too fast for the naked eye, shot out. A constable running about ten meters in front of it was yanked screaming into its maw.

“A tongue!” General Ling roared. “Don’t stand in front of it! It hunts with a flicking tongue!”

Now they understood that cavernous mouth. It was a frog’s mouth.

And like a frog, it swallowed its prey whole.

No one dared linger near its jaws. That mouth looked capable of swallowing ten men in a single gulp.

The monster puppet did not even chew. It swallowed and then braced on its hind legs.

He Lingchuan had never imagined how a creature as massive as a small hill could jump.

Now he found out.

The heavy shell likely weighed it down. It leaped forward rather than upward, rising barely two and a half meters before crashing down, shaking the earth.

The leap only covered about ten meters, which was far less impressive than a cliff ram’s bound, but it hopped in rapid succession. In moments, it had covered nearly eighty meters, leaving the prohibition array’s range.

The aberrant creature sensed freedom and plunged toward the earth.

If it could dive underground, it would be safe, and it could carry away an entire warehouse of self-heal herbs as rations.

It was only one step from escape, yet no matter how it forced itself downward, it could not sink.

But this time, it was not because of the array. Instead, it was because there was something behind it that was dragging it back.

The grappling hook He Lingchuan had embedded in its shell finally came into play.

One end was anchored in the snail shell, while the other wrapped around five or six massive trees, secured by a drillwind beast to the largest trunks nearby.

To dive, it would have to uproot those trees first.

The monster puppet strained, and the rope snapped taut. Two trees creaked violently, bark splitting under the pressure.

Its strength was monstrous, but the rope and hook were no less impressive.

The rope had been custom-made for He Lingchuan by Li Qingge, the Marquis of Songyang, using cloud brocade silk from burrow spiders in Demon Nest Swamp. It was light as air, yet extraordinarily resilient and elastic. Zhu Erniang herself could swing freely from a single strand.

As for the hook, it was Li Fubo’s proudest creation in three years. Even under such extreme tension, it had not broken.

At least, not yet.

Everyone watched anxiously, afraid the rope would snap.

“Jiao Yu, get back!”

The tiger withdrew reluctantly. Against a creature this size, its fangs and claws could not reach the core. He Lingchuan ordered, “Crossbows! Load and fire!”

Xu Dayou scrambled to his feet, slapped his hat back on, and pulled out a black-and-white short spike as a bolt. The others followed suit, aiming at the creature’s exposed flesh.

These were no ordinary bolts.

They were porcupine quills salvaged from Mount Yulun, and they were naturally laced with rot and filth. He Lingchuan had further coated each one with venom from burrow spiders’ poison glands, a gift from Zhu Erniang.