Chapter 1801: Strange Residents

He widened his eyes, and then his feet slipped, falling flat on his back on the stone beach.

The pebbles on this stone beach were of different sizes and very uncomfortable; some were larger than coconuts, and if anyone accidentally hit them, the back of their head could have a big hole.

But this farmer seemed to feel no pain at all, climbing up and running into the woods.

That kind of panic was as if everyone standing on the opposite shore of the lake was an evil ghost.

How could Bai Ziqi ignore this anomaly? With a wave of his hand, three people rushed over to capture the farmer.

A strange thing happened: three strong men couldn't catch a thin farmer!

This farmer looked like he had no cultivation or martial arts, just an ordinary person. According to reason, he should be as easy to press as a chicken. Who knew that he waved his hand and pushed the strong man to stagger! "Hmm?" Bai Ziqi frowned. This farmer had neither technique nor supernatural power, just pure strength. 【1

With everyone watching, the Cloud Envoy of the Tiangong and the Heavenly God were both looking on! The man couldn't take it anymore and stopped holding back; he spread his arms and applied a naked choke, intending to strangle the farmer until he had no strength left to resist.

At first, the farmer was indeed strangled until his eyes rolled back, instinctively trying to pry the burly man's wrists apart.

The man's wrists were twice as thick as his own, yet no one expected that he would actually be able to pry them apart!

The burly man growled repeatedly to encourage himself, using every ounce of his strength, yet he was still being pushed further and further apart by his opponent.

Two practitioners on the side couldn't bear to watch any longer and threw out a Demon-Binding Rope, tying the farmer up tightly.

To have to use a magic treasure to deal with a country bumpkin from the village—this was truly the height of absurdity.

As a result, the farmer flew into a rage, and the Demon-Binding Rope was almost stretched to the point of snapping.

Seeing that the situation was turning bad, another person hurriedly added a second one, only then managing to subdue him and drag him forcibly before Bai Ziqi.

During this process, the farmer kept shouting and screaming.

His lips moved quite quickly, but the trouble was that no one present could understand him! With the language barrier, everyone just heard him babbling incoherently.

Dragged before Bai Ziqi, he suddenly shut his mouth, his face turning pale, and he kept shrinking backward.

This was a display of extreme fear.

Bai Ziqi knew his appearance wasn't exactly handsome, but it hadn't reached the point of scaring people to death. So, what exactly had this person seen? "Look at the reflection in his eyes!" The gray parrot shook its wings, flew behind the farmer, and bumped into the back of his head.

The man stumbled forward, and the scene in his eyes was magnified into a phantom image, floating before Bai Ziqi—

A Yaksha, with dark blue skin, covered in scales, a flat nose, protruding mouth, fangs, and vertical pupils.

The fierce appearance was intimidating.

Such a hideous monster would terrify anyone who looked at it up close.

Bai Ziqi stared at it, and it stared back at Bai Ziqi.

Bai Ziqi tilted his head, and it tilted its head as well.

So, in this farmer's eyes, this was what Bai Ziqi looked like? He pointed at Bai Shi on the side: "Look at him."

The farmer couldn't understand, so the guards on the side twisted his face to look directly at Bai Shi.

Looking at the phantom image in his eyes, Bai Shi appeared as another Yaksha, with gray hair, a hooked nose, dark red sticky skin, and a slightly smaller build.

Letting the farmer look at others yielded the same result; the people he saw would automatically deform, turning into the appearance of Yakshas.

But Bai Ziqi also noticed that these Yakshas looked somewhat blurry, and the scales weren't refined, like puppets with somewhat crude craftsmanship, but the fierce and terrifying aura made up for it a little.

"Human vision is nothing more than light playing tricks," the gray parrot said. "The Thousand Illusions or the Kong Jiaxiang Sect has cast a layer of illusion over all of you, so this farmer thinks you are monsters."

But Bai Ziqi had no way to clarify, because the two sides did not share a language.

"Why a Yaksha?" Since it was an illusion, why couldn't the farmer see something else; why did it have to be a Yaksha? In the Kong Jiaxiang Realm, those who came out of the Upside-Down Lake to kill and eat people, and those who fought against the Tiangong's forces, were also Yakshas.

As it turned out, after they crossed the lake into the real world, they themselves had turned into the appearance of Yakshas in the eyes of the locals.

This kind of inversion was chilling to think about.

Bai Ziqi lowered his head and saw that the ring on his hand was not glowing. This also indicated that it had not detected any supernatural powers or disguises.

If it wasn't magic at work, why did this farmer see them as Yakshas? He was in the middle of thinking when the farmer suddenly flew into a rage, broke the Immortal-Binding Rope, and turned to run toward the woods.

He was very fast.

Bai Ziqi said casually: "Kill him."

Bai Shi drew his long spear and thrust it at the farmer's back.

His aim was incredibly precise; the spearhead flew in and out, piercing the farmer through the heart in a flash.

The man let out a scream and fell to the ground, dead on the spot.

Bai Seventeen picked up the Immortal-Binding Rope from the ground and saw that the broken ends were indeed traces of being forcibly snapped, and he couldn't help but be surprised: "A farmer, where did he get such strength?"

Bai Ziqi's expression grew even gloomier: "You should be asking, how could an ordinary person with a pierced heart scream so loudly?"

The farmer's final scream before death rang through the clouds, startling the ravens in the forest. Even someone with plenty of breath couldn't mimic that, let alone a dying man. Just this one mountain farmer made everyone feel that something was not quite right.

Just then, Bai Shi held up the Silver Pearl Fruit and said: "My lord, the fruit's glow has disappeared."

Ever since they came ashore, the glow of the Silver Pearl Fruit had been getting weaker, and now that a quarter of an hour had passed, the light was gradually fading away. Even for the Silver Pearl Fruits on the branches, the time limit had been reached because the sky was bright.

The Silver Pearl Fruit, no longer glowing, looked just like a large pear.

This meant they couldn't go back to the Kong Jiaxiang Realm. Bai Ziqi gave a hum: "Go to the town ahead and take a look; these places are all not right."

The gray parrot asked him: "What do you mean?"

"The reality and the Kong Jiaxiang Realm of this Upside-Down Sea have a combined population of over two or three hundred thousand mortals. Have the Immortal caves captured by the Divine Venerable in the past ever sheltered so many mortals?"

"Never," the gray parrot said without thinking. "So-called Immortals are mostly loners; those who can amount to something have at most a few hundred mortals to serve them. Entering the Upside-Down Sea Kong Jiaxiang Realm this time, seeing tens of thousands of living people on the island, I was also a bit surprised."

"Is it spiritual energy that restricts the number of people in the cave?"

"Of course." There were many other reasons, but Bai Ziqi had hit the key point, and Miaozhan Tian followed his lead: "The spiritual energy of a cave is precious; it's not even enough for the Immortal's own use, so why would they be willing to share it with mortals?"

Bai Ziqi then pointed to the sand table: "Even if the Upside-Down Sea can gather the spiritual energy of the Flash Gold Plain for its own use, isn't it excessive for the Thousand Illusions True Person to keep hundreds of thousands of mortals in his own cave? Even if he wanted to serve the entire Kong Jiaxiang Sect, three or five thousand people would be enough."

"Thousand Illusions isn't that kind-hearted; these hundreds of thousands of people must have another use."

Bai Ziqi hesitated to speak. As the saying goes, raise an army for a thousand days to use it for a moment, but why raise so many mortals for so many years? The gray parrot saw it: "Speak if you have something to say."

Bai Ziqi still hesitated for a moment before saying softly: "According to the Divine Venerable's judgment, is this truly the present world?"

He certainly believed in Miaozhan Tian's divine power. However, didn't the fact that He Xiao was connected to the Great Fanghu escape Miaozhan Tian's divine eyes back then?

Although the Eye of Truth is powerful, it is not absolutely impossible to deceive.

Not to mention that the one they were dealing with this time was an ancient Mirage Immortal whose temperament, methods, and cultivation were unfathomable! The gray parrot didn't make a sound, as if lost in thought, then suddenly flapped its wings and flew toward the farmer's corpse on the ground.

When it stood on a branch and looked down, a small, single-eyed phantom appeared above its head, the eyeball turning twice before suddenly turning red! It then shot out a red light, enveloping the farmer's corpse.

Everyone watched without blinking.

At first, there was nothing unusual about the corpse, but the Eye of Truth blinked twice, and the red light turned deeper, a bright red like blood.

Anyone could see that Miaozhan Tian had increased the investment and improved the divine power of the Eye of Truth.

Under the illumination of the red light, the farmer's corpse became increasingly transparent from the outside in.

Not only the skin and clothing, but even the muscles, internal organs, nerves, and bones inside the body were revealed.

With the blessing of the Eye of Truth, everyone briefly possessed the power of X-ray vision.

"Wrong!" the gray parrot suddenly said. "This is not the soul fire of a living person!"

Under the red light, the people of the Tiangong could indeed see a small wisp of flame flickering inside the farmer's skull, but it was growing dimmer and dimmer.

"In the eyes of my Eye of Truth, the soul fire of a living person is pale yellow. The stronger the soul power, the heavier the color."

After saying this, the Eye of Truth changed direction and shone directly at Bai Shi. The latter subconsciously raised his hand to block it, but once he was enveloped by the red light, others could see deep yellow flames active in his brain.

Comparing the two, everyone saw the problem: the wisp of flame in the farmer's mind was dark blue!

Bai Ziqi understood: "A person is born with body and soul matched; the soul fire is nourished by the life furnace, and only then does it have self-awareness. This is called a living soul."

He looked again at the farmer's dark blue soul fire: "This is... a dead soul?"

"Correct!" Miaozhan Tian's tone carried anger. "This is not a living person at all!"

As soon as the words fell, the corpse on the ground melted in the red light.

It was like a wax figure melting in fire, or like ice and snow melting; the farmer's corpse collapsed and, right before everyone's eyes, turned into a puddle of clear water on the ground.

Once its essence was seen through by the Eye of Truth, it could no longer maintain itself and finally revealed its true form.

"Water shell!" Bai Seventeen said in shock. "He, he and the Yaksha have the same body!"

The Yaksha was a product concocted by Thousand Illusions, and this farmer was too.

"The soul fire is dark blue; even if you didn't kill him, he couldn't last long in the world." But Miaozhan Tian couldn't say for sure how long it would take for these dead souls' soul fire to dim until it completely dissipated; after all, this was the Upside-Down Sea, and no one knew what Thousand Illusions had done to these dead souls.

Bai Ziqi frowned: "But looking at this person's behavior, he didn't seem to know he was a dead soul."

The farmer's reaction to seeing the Tiangong's team was the reaction of a living person fearing a Yaksha.

Just then, the squad sent out to find the whereabouts of the Kong Jiaxiang Sect returned and reported quickly.

As it turned out, they hadn't found the Kong Jiaxiang Sect's team, but they had discovered another set of strange tracks in the woods by the lake.