While I was chanting a curse, the system said I was Xiao Yan?

The gunshots gradually faded in the empty auditorium, the last echo sliding up the curve of the dome and disappearing into the huge crystal chandelier.

The auditorium fell completely silent.

Tianyan stood still, the muzzle of his M1911 still emitting blue smoke. At his feet lay a dozen or so corpses, blood seeping from their bodies and pooling into a dark red lake on the marble floor.

The air was thick with the pungent smell of blood, which mixed with the smell of gunpowder to create an indescribable and nauseating odor.

The light from the crystal chandelier shone on the corpses, on their vacant eyes, and on their expressions in their final moments.

There was fear, resentment, confusion, and the disbelief that remained on Shigeru Sonoda's face as he lay dying.

"Done."

Tianyan put the gun back into his storage ring, his eyes behind the Yaksha mask swept across the hall, and he looked away. Just as he was about to step away, he suddenly felt an inexplicable chill rise from the soles of his feet.

It wasn't murderous intent, nor hostility, but a more primal, instinctive alarm, as if something was slowly emerging from the depths of darkness, from the resentment of those who had just died.

He sensed it.

The air in the auditorium began to thicken, as if something unseen was condensing in it. The lingering smell of blood, the resentment still clinging to the dead, the despair and fear that erupted in their final moments—all of it seemed to be grasped by an invisible hand and converged towards a point in the center of the auditorium.

That spot was exactly where Shigeru Sonoda's body was located.

Black mist emanated from each corpse, wisps of it like tiny snakes, winding and swirling in the air before merging into the increasingly thick black mist above Sonoda Shigeru's body.

The black mist was churning, condensing, and taking shape, like a heart that was gestating something, beating slowly and rhythmically.

"Tch, it still happened."

"A curse cast into a cursed spirit before death..."

Tianyan curled his lips and muttered something in a low voice, his tone not showing surprise, but rather a sense of something strange.

He knew what was going on.

Negative emotions in humans are nourishment for cursed spirits. When an ordinary person dies, if they have strong negative emotions before death, such as fear, despair, resentment, or hatred and curses towards a specific person, these most intense emotions before death are the most fertile soil for the birth of cursed spirits.

In addition, everyone has more or less curse power within them. At the moment of death, these emotions may condense and take shape under the influence of curse power, generating curse spirits!

Here, more than a dozen people died at the same time, all harboring intense fear and resentment towards him before their deaths. Coupled with the fact that the Panxing Sect was a cult steeped in negative emotions for a long time, the convergence of these resentments almost inevitably led to the formation of a cursed spirit, and this spirit was strong enough to give birth to a powerful cursed spirit.

He closed his eyes and sensed the black mist that was gathering.

It's at level two, but it's not fully formed yet.

"They really know how to pick their timing."

Tianyan opened his eyes and sighed. The level two curse spirits couldn't cause any trouble in front of him, but the problem was something else: the curse power was impure.

He used a pistol before so that he wouldn't have to use his magic, not to save energy. In fact, using magic was more convenient. Magic can actually achieve the "perfect crime" because ordinary people can't see magic.

However, in the eyes of a sorcerer, after using sorcery, a sorcerer will leave behind "residue" at the scene. These are traces of the flow of sorcery, just like a person's fingerprint, which is different for each person.

If another sorcerer comes here, the user can be traced back through the remnants. Although he has changed his appearance and is wearing a mask, the remnants cannot be hidden.

What he did today—killing more than a dozen fanatics of the Panxing Cult—was bound to cause some trouble if the higher-ups in the sorcery world found out.

Therefore, from the very beginning, he tried to avoid using magical powers.

Use guns, not techniques.

Use physical attacks, not magical attacks.

"Then this is the only option."

He reached for his waist, intending to take something out of his storage ring, but stopped halfway through.

He remembered.

Guns are useless against cursed spirits. A gunshot to a person will kill them, but a shot to a cursed spirit won't even break its skin.

The bodies of cursed spirits are not made of matter; they are beings formed from cursed power. Physical attacks have little effect on them. As cursed spirits are cursed, they can only be completely destroyed by cursed power, so he uses spells to exorcise them.

Tianyan stood there, watching the increasingly complete cursed spirit, and his lips twitched.

"So that means... we still have to use incantations?"

"Never mind, as long as those people don't have any traces of my curse power on them, it's fine."

Tianyan took a deep breath, raised his right hand, and cursed power surged from his palm. Black iron-colored bone spikes pierced through his fingers, transforming into a bone blade about half a meter long. The blade was as thin as a cicada's wing and gleamed with a cold light under the chandelier.

He did not wait for the cursed spirit to fully take shape.

The black mist was still gathering, and the black heart was still beating, but the Heavenly Flame had already moved!

He took a burst of speed, his foot creating a shockwave on the ground, and he shot out like an arrow, so fast that he left only a blurry afterimage in the air.

The bone blade sliced ​​through.

Silently.

The still-forming black mist was split in the middle, like a piece of cloth cut by a knife, and rolled to both sides. A sharp screech came from the black mist, like the cry of a baby, or the sound of metal scraping against glass, so piercing that it made one's scalp tingle.

The heatwave didn't stop.

His body flipped in the air, and the bone blade slashed down again from another angle, horizontally, vertically, and diagonally, one strike after another, each faster than the last. The bone blade weaved through the black mist, and with each slash, black liquid sprayed out from the still-forming body, landing on the ground with a hissing, corrosive sound.

The black mist churned violently, and the heart-like core shattered, reformed, and shattered again under the cutting of the bone blades. The cursed spirit was still struggling; it hadn't even had time to see the world clearly before it was being dismembered.

Tianyan's final strike was a downward slash, the bone blade cutting into the black mist from the bottom and exiting from the top, tearing the still struggling black mist in two completely.

"grumble!"

A short, sharp scream, as if it had been cut off.

The black fog began to dissipate.

The resentment emanating from the corpses and the negative emotions condensing in the air were like kites with broken strings, scattering in all directions, becoming fainter and thinner, until they finally disappeared completely into the air.

On the ground, the dozen or so corpses still lay there, blood still seeping out, but the sticky, suffocating feeling had disappeared.

The air in the auditorium became clear again.

Tianyan sheathed his bone blade, crouched down, and where the black mist had dissipated, lay something on the ground. It was about the size of a thumb, irregularly shaped, and had a warm, milky-white sheen on its surface, like a piece of jade that had been carefully polished.

"First level, Abundance."

He reached out and picked up the crystal core, weighing it in his hand and feeling the faint, continuous energy pulse inside.

"It's just in time to replenish what we used up before."

He put the crystal core into his storage ring, dusted off his hands, and straightened up.

He heard a series of unhurried footsteps behind him, the 'clatter' of slippers on the marble floor, before they stopped three or four meters behind him.

"Hey, you little skeleton."