Chapter 349

Compared with Ascenders who feed ghosts with their bodies, Empowerment-holders who use the power of fierce ghosts in an indirect way have many benefits: they often do not need to bear the price brought by the backlash of rules, and there is no core rule struggle between Ascenders to fight to the death, because they have not embarked on that 'path of ascension' that spirals upward from the beginning.

It is precisely because of the spiraling upward characteristic of the path of ascension and the core contradiction of rule defects that for a long time, except for family clans connected by blood ties, suspicious Ascenders have found it difficult to give birth to large-scale organizational associations.

Empowerment-holders do not have such troubles. The so-called 'when the granary is full, one knows etiquette'. Without fierce ghosts urging their lives behind them, they can naturally maintain relative decency for a long time.

But the way Empowerment-holders indirectly use rules is not perfect. For example, at this very moment, in front of Lan Shiwen, who has calculated the unintentional, they exposed their biggest shortcoming.

——Weak.

In front of the 'absolute' power of Ascenders who feed ghosts with their bodies, Empowerment-holders are too weak.

If mortals are no different from ants when facing eerie things, then Empowerment-holders holding empowerment props are at most slightly more evolved ant acid compared to mortals.

Are there threats? Naturally, there are, but to say how big this threat is, it's really not that big. Empowerment-holders' means can at most bully mortals who are also ants. Facing serious Ascenders, especially top Ascenders like Lan Shiwen, they have no power to fight back.

Tradition, win!

Xia Yubing watched Lan Shiwen walk to the center of the room, put the gun on Betang's head, and confiscated all the remaining empowerment props on him. Thus, another shortcoming of Empowerment-holders was exposed—their power highly relies on external objects, and once they are disarmed, they are nothing.

After doing this, Lan Shiwen cast his gaze on Ji Boying, who was drinking tea slowly on the side.

"Except for this suit, I have nothing on me." Ji Boying said with a smile.

"Then take off your clothes." Lan Shiwen said lightly.

Ji Boying was stunned for a moment, then shook his head with a wry smile, took off his coat, untied a beige stand-up collar, front-opening linen short shirt he was wearing inside, folded it, and handed it to Lan Shiwen: "Still couldn't hide it from you."

"Thank you for your cooperation, I hope you can continue to cooperate later." Lan Shiwen nodded. Two *Zhen* snakes straightened their pale spines, crawled onto Betang and Ji Boying along their trouser legs, and their ribs, which were opened one by one, were like the eight legs of a spider, holding the two of them firmly in their arms, their cold lips sticking to their ear roots.

Regardless of the pain of the ribs piercing into the chest cavity, Betang opened his eyes wide, looking at Mei Lin, who was sitting on the sofa with her head down without saying a word, full of disbelief.

Lan Shiwen did not make a move against Mei Lin.

"So it was you, it was you who betrayed us..." Betang gritted his teeth: "Why? What benefits did the Kyushu people give you to make you betray the family that gave birth to you and raised you?"

Mei Lin still kept her head down without speaking.

Lan Shiwen inserted the pistol behind his waist without saying a word, freed his hand, and punched Betang in the lower abdomen. The intense pain made his face bloodless, and his features were distorted.

"You can talk to me later, friend, I'm very happy to chat with you." Lan Shiwen patted Betang's face, collected the empowerment props on the table one by one, and only left two bronze mirrors numbered 3 and 7.

After doing this, Lan Shiwen said 'see you later' indifferently, and left the room with the two people bound by the *Zhen* snakes.

As the door was closed with a *crack*, the human bone snakes covering the floor receded like a tide, leaving only three blood-stained headless skeletons that had been eaten clean of flesh and skin, and a mess on the ground.

Only then did Xia Yubing breathe a sigh of relief and slumped on the sofa, lingering in fear: "What was that just now, it was too evil..."

A pale dead man's head, dragging a long and winding snowy white spine with bloodshot eyes behind its neck, and those ribs that were baring their fangs and claws were like spider legs. It made her physically uncomfortable, even more underworld than the stone statues in Zanjü Town.

"That thing is called a *Zhen* snake, a thing that becomes after a person dies and then dies again."

Ning Zhe flapped his wings, landed on the sofa, and returned to his original appearance, his gaze falling on the two bronze mirrors upside down on the table.

Sensing Ning Zhe's arrival, Mei Lin raised her head abruptly, her two bloodshot eyes staring straight at him: "I did as you said, I did as you said, where is the Young Lady? Can you really save her? You'd better not lie to me, Kyushu person, can you really save her from that state of walking corpse?"

Xia Yubing was stunned: "What is she talking about..." Ning Zhe picked up the bronze mirror numbered '3', played with it as if nothing had happened, and said unhurriedly: "Whether I can save her, and to what extent I can save her, does not depend on me, but on you."

Mei Lin slapped the table with both hands: "What do you mean by this?!"

"Literal meaning." Ning Zhe turned the bronze mirror upside down on the table again and smiled: "Your attitude is so anxious, and you didn't even hesitate to betray your accomplices to make this deal with me, which shows that the girl named Pulu Meiliya is very important to you, and it's not just generally important, so... what is your relationship?"

"None of your business!" Mei Lin gritted her teeth: "I don't want to talk to you about these things, can you fulfill your promise?"

"I've already said it, this doesn't depend on me, but on you." Ning Zhe shook his head: "Answer my question first. What is your relationship with Pulu Meiliya? How much do you know about her?"

Mei Lin was about to slap the table, but heard Ning Zhe say: "This is directly related to whether your Young Lady can come back, and how much can come back, so I advise you to answer seriously."

Hearing this, Mei Lin, who was like a mother leopard just now, immediately subsided, and her whole mood became low: "I watched her grow up."

Ning Zhe raised his eyebrows: "Go on."

Xia Yubing also sat beside Ning Zhe with a melon-eating expression.

Seeing that he wouldn't give up until he got the answer, Mei Lin, who was worried about Pulu Meiliya's safety, had to suppress the anxiety in her heart and tell the story:

Mei Lin is the child of a maid, that is, the illegitimate daughter of a big family often seen in novels, but her father is not a noble, but an outsider son-in-law who married into the Fulimmisslet family. Therefore, this illegitimate daughter not only has no bloodline and inheritance rights of the Fulimmisslet family, but is also hostile and disgusted by her father's legal wife, and almost died in an accident shortly after she was born.

If it weren't for her father's secret protection, she probably wouldn't have lived to adulthood at all.

According to Mei Lin, her father was once a cannon-fodder criminal thrown into an eerie event to test the rules. He was originally bound to die, but relying on his hard psychological quality, thinking ability, and some luck, he actually survived from that eerie event and harnessed the rules to become an Ascender, so he was absorbed into the family by the Fulimmisslet family in the way of recruiting a son-in-law.

It is precisely because of the identity and value of an Ascender that her father could have a certain right to speak in the family as a son-in-law, and tried his best to protect her, an illegitimate daughter without the family bloodline, so that she could grow up hard in the scrutiny of many alternative eyes.

The price was that the maid who gave birth to her disappeared forever.

In 2003, when Mei Lin was 12 years old, her father's legal wife, the noble lady, also gave birth to a daughter. That was her half-sister, the legal young lady with the noble family bloodline: Pulu Meiliya Fulimmisslet.

"I don't know if it was out of the lady's bad taste or my father's own consideration, I was arranged to be by the Young Lady's side as a personal maid. From the day she was born, I was responsible for taking care of her daily life, eating and living together every day, inseparable no matter what I did, until now."

"Later, my father died because of the backlash of the rules, and the ghost he harnessed before his death was also imprisoned. After losing my father's protection, I thought I would be eliminated by the lady, or at least expelled from the family. After all, she has never liked me. But what surprised me was that my sister liked me very much. After hearing that she was going to be separated from me, she cried loudly in front of her mother. The lady is cold to outsiders, but she is very doting on her daughter, so I stayed."

"She doesn't know I'm her sister, but she is my most important sister."

Mei Lin thought for a while and said: "Perhaps this is the reason why my father sent me to the Young Lady's side?"

"Previously, in Shenyu Valley Prison, that unlucky prison guard named Yan Yukuan was also deleted by Fen Wu and brushed again, and then implanted with a part of Fen Wu's memory. He thought he was Fen Wu and chased me all over the prison."

Ning Zhe nodded with satisfaction: "A very good answer, then... congratulations, she will come back."

And she will come back very 'complete'.

As for whether the person who comes back is the person herself, or a similar flower, that is a philosophical question.

Ning Zhe hates philosophy, he thinks philosophers are all contrarians.

(End of chapter)