The organization I founded has been exposed by the reborn!

"arrive."

Su Yu pushed open the car door and got out, his black trench coat swaying gently in the night wind.

He gazed calmly at the large courtyard nestled deep in the wilderness, his expression composed and unhurried.

The car doors opened one after another, and Qin Xinran, Feng Gang, Zheng Qiang, Shen Lesheng, and Zhou Tian followed closely behind as they filed out.

The shoes made a crisp "rustling" sound as they stepped on the dry weeds that were more than half a meter tall.

The night wind swept through the wild grass, bringing with it a pungent, musty smell and the acrid stench of unburnt paper money.

Although there was still a wall separating them, the magnetic field in the air, formed by supernatural forces, was already pouring out like a tide.

Even Zhou Tian, ​​who had awakened the S-rank [Judgment Angel], felt a shivering sensation on his skin the moment he stepped into this area.

That was the body's instinctive tremor in the face of the eerie.

"This place..."

Feng Gang's rough hand touched the bald head, his expression unusually tense: "Just this biting coldness alone is more than twice as strong as that art academy!"

"The surrounding electronic signals are attenuating precipitously."

Zheng Qiang glanced at the detection terminal on his wrist and added in a low voice, "The electromagnetic field has been distorted into a closed loop, and our communication with the outside world has been completely cut off."

"And the soil beneath our feet."

Shen Lesheng squatted down, grabbed a handful of grayish-black dry soil and crushed it in his palm. His dark golden eyes narrowed slightly: "All the moisture in the ground of the entire compound has been drained. The soil is loose like ashes in an incinerator, without a trace of life."

"The shadow behind the door is also problematic; the space feels unnaturally stretched."

Qin Xinran stared sharply at the two vermilion doors covered with yellowed seals, and whispered a reminder, "Everyone, be careful!"

Faced with the unknown Class D ghost, none of them dared to relax, remaining vigilant and observing their surroundings.

Su Yu withdrew his gaze from the courtyard and turned around.

The ordinary face created by the clown mask showed no emotion, only calmness and profundity.

He calmly swept his gaze over the five men standing guard before him: "Ready?"

"Ready, Chief," Qin Xinran replied first.

"Be prepared at all times, boss!" Feng Gang and the others responded in unison, their eyes filled with vigilance against the unknown, but even more so with the fighting spirit to face a powerful enemy under their leader's command.

"Let's go then."

Su Yu said no more, turned around and stepped onto the moss-covered stone steps, walking towards the heavy door covered with seals.

……

"Creak—"

The heavy, vermilion-lacquered wooden door made a harsh, dry scraping sound under Su Yu's palm.

The yellowed seals affixed to the door crack snapped instantly, and scraps of paper mixed with years of dust fell down.

The door opened wide to both sides, revealing a deep, thick darkness that seemed to have no bottom.

There was no wind behind the door, but a putrid smell mixed with rotten wood and mold wafted out.

Su Yu was the first to step over the heavy stone threshold, which was nearly half a meter high and covered with dark green moss.

Qin Xinran and her group of five maintained a tight formation, their footsteps extremely light, and filed in.

Behind the gate is the front courtyard of the compound.

This is a spacious courtyard.

Directly in front of the courtyard stands a dilapidated brick-carved screen wall, three meters high.

Most of the reliefs on the screen wall have peeled off, but you can still vaguely make out a few strangely shaped ancient opera figures.

In the dim light, the carved faces were mottled and incomplete, their lines distorted, as if silently watching every living person who crossed the threshold.

……

However, at this very moment...

"call--"

A chilling gust of wind suddenly rose from the flat ground.

The heavy, vermilion-lacquered gate slammed shut behind them with a loud bang.

Inside the courtyard, countless black paper money that had been rotting in the mud was swept into the air by the gale, swirling and scattering, turning into a sky full of black fluff that obscured the view.

The wind carried the smell of unburnt incense and the stench of rotting paper, and felt like ice shards scraping against the skin.

From the deep corridors on both sides and between the broken eaves and tiles, a dense cacophony of scratching and rubbing sounds emanated.

Accompanying this was a series of shrill, piercing laughs mixed with wheezing breaths.

"Hehe... giggle..."

Laughter came and went, echoing back and forth across the empty courtyard walls, carrying a chilling sensation that seemed to seep straight into one's skull.

next moment!

"Shhhh—!"

A sudden burst of dense paper-rubbing sounds erupted from the gaps between the blackened beams overhead and the cracked mud walls on both sides.

Several eerie figures swiftly crawled out of the shadows.

It was a strange existence, like a paper effigy of a child.

Their bodies are flat and thin, covered with brittle, yellowish, coarse white paper, and their limbs clearly show the outline of reverse joints where thin bamboo strips have been forcibly bent.

Its movements were stiff and contorted, yet it crawled as fast as a venomous spider, weaving upside down through the cracks in the screen wall and the mottled mud wall, its joints emitting a harsh rustling sound.

These monsters had pale faces with bright red circular cinnabar smeared on their cheeks, and their lips were stiffly sealed with red thread.

They gripped rusty, blackened paper-cutting knives tightly in their hands. Their eye sockets had no eyeballs, only two roughly drawn black pupils made of cheap ink. They hung upside down from above, staring straight down at the six people below.

At the same time.

The moment the monster appeared, a page of the "Book of Strange Things" in Su Yu's hand silently turned.

A screen of light came into view...

[Name: Paper-made Opera Boy (Puppet Ghost Slave)]

[Ability 1 - Origami Body (Passive)]: The body possesses the unique flexibility and lightness of extremely yin white paper. Completely immune to physical blunt force trauma and falls; the bamboo-like joints can be folded in reverse and flattened at will, thereby significantly reducing external force and minimizing the impact area.

[Ability 2 - Upside-down Stealth (Passive)]: Ignores the constraints of gravity. Can move upside down through vertical walls, beams, and ceilings, crawling rapidly and silently throughout the movement.

[Disadvantages: Lacking substantial flesh and organs, it can reassemble itself by simply shattering the paper-like outer shell, relying entirely on residual yin energy for movement; its actions depend entirely on the internal yin energy connection points, precisely shattering its core (between the eyebrows or throat) to instantly erode it from the inside out.]

[Description: Not independent vengeful ghosts, but rather the vengeful spirits of apprentices who died tragically in a theatrical troupe in the old days. After being corrupted by the abyss, they were sealed into puppet-like creations made of white paper and bamboo frames. They completely lost their former minds and became the lowest-ranking pathfinders and cleaners of the theatrical troupe's main ghosts, driven only by their obsessions, responsible for tearing apart any living person who trespasses into the theater before the main performance begins.]

【…】

As they watched the eerie paper figures hovering overhead and lunging at them, and heard the grating friction of bamboo and wood and the strange laughter, the pupils of the group shrank slightly, and a chill ran down their spines.

But in the next moment, after overcoming their instinctive fear, they almost subconsciously mobilized the energy within their bodies.

"court death!"

Feng Gang roared, his muscles tensing.

His powerful blood and qi surged instantly, and a layer of blazing, domineering red yang flames erupted on the surface of his fists. The bluestone slab beneath his feet sank slightly, and he was about to leap up and smash his fists.

Shen Lesheng's dark golden eyes flashed with a fierce light as he raised his right hand.

The dry, shriveled soil around them trembled violently, and large swaths of yellow sand rose into the air, threatening to condense into a sandstorm that tore through the air and forcibly shredded and buried the paper figures in the entire area alive.

Behind Zhou Tian, ​​golden light burst forth, and sacred golden feathers rapidly solidified in the void, with countless sharp holy blades poised to strike.

When faced with a crisis, the first reaction of these individuals, who lacked practical experience, was to use their strongest methods to indiscriminately kill.

Stop.

And just as the three were about to launch their attack...

Su Yu's voice suddenly rang out.

He raised his hand, stopping the crowd from attacking, and said:

"It would be a waste to use large-scale combat techniques to bombard this kind of low-level ghost slaves in a group."

"Not only will it waste physical and mental energy, but the massive energy fluctuations will also prematurely awaken the vengeful spirit hidden deep within, needlessly increasing the variables."

Su Yu stood with his hands behind his back, watching the paper puppets that had already leaped into the air and were rushing towards him wielding bone knives.

"Paper puppets have no physical organs. The simplest way to fight against such creations is to destroy only the strange nodes that maintain their movement."

The words fell.

Su Yu's right hand was slightly open.

There was no earth-shattering thunder, nor any blinding glare that swept across the land.

The originally violent and domineering [Five Thunder Orthodox Method] was compressed to its extreme under his precise micro-management of his immense mental power.

"Crackling sound."

Dozens of fine, deep purple electric sparks, as thin as hair, suddenly crackled from the tips of his five fingers.

These tiny purple electric needles are refined and pure, radiating an extremely powerful and yang energy to dispel evil.

Su Yu waved his hand casually.

Dozens of purple lightning bolts silently pierced the air, leaving behind barely perceptible illusory light trails, precisely penetrating the brows, throats, and limb joints of each paper figure in mid-air!

"laugh!"

The sound was so faint that it was almost inaudible.

The instant the Supreme Yang Purple Lightning penetrated the node, the Extreme Yin Meridians within the paper body were instantly and completely detonated.

The dozen or so paper-mache children that were flying through the air suddenly stopped.

next moment.

Fine purple sparks shot out from the joints of the bamboo strips inside their bodies, spreading rapidly from the inside out.

The entire paper body crumbled and weathered in an instant, disintegrating into countless harmless gray-white fragments and charred bamboo sticks, which fell into the mud.

The acrid smell of burning mixed with a faint ozone scent of thunder in the air completely tore apart the previous decay and deathly silence.

[Ding! Successfully defeated the paper puppet child! Organization experience points +10!]

[Ding! Successfully defeated the paper puppet child! Organization experience points +10!]

【…】

The courtyard has returned to quiet.

The five people behind him silently dispersed the energy they had gathered in their palms, looking at the scattered ashes on the ground in front of them, their hearts churning with turmoil.

Shen Lesheng's dark golden eyes were filled with undisguised shock.

As an awakened being of the natural elements who can manipulate sand, he understands better than anyone the difficulty of controlling destructive energy.

Thunder is extremely powerful and violent; if one is not careful, it will explode outwards.

But the leader not only compressed this violent destructive power into a fine needle, but also instantly and precisely annihilated more than a dozen moving targets.

Not a single bit of energy was leaked.

This kind of micromanagement of power was completely beyond his imagination.

On the other side, Zhou Tian's chest rose and fell slightly, and the gold in his eyes flickered uncertainly.

He possesses the instincts of an S-class Judgment Angel, enabling him to sense all evil and malevolence.

But in that sudden attack, even he couldn't quickly detect the Yin energy veins on each paper figure.

But the moment the leader made his move, he had already found the core of all the monsters.

This extraordinary insight and fighting instinct impressed him.

Qin Xinran, Feng Gang, and Zheng Qiang exchanged a glance, their eyes conveying unspoken respect.

As the earliest core members to join Dawn, they had experienced practical training at the art academy and honed their skills repeatedly in the gravity chamber and training grounds at headquarters. They thought they had mastered their supernatural abilities sufficiently.

But it wasn't until they witnessed Su Yu's effortless micro-management that they truly realized that simply piling up destructive power was only the most basic application.

When facing vengeful ghosts, the precise and restrained control that Su Yu possesses is what they need to pursue.

……

With all the paper dolls resolved.

The "Book of Strange Things" in Su Yu's left hand floated silently above his palm.

On the cover, the tightly closed blood-red eyeball suddenly opens, and an eerie red light appears deep within its pupil.

"Buzz—"

A condensed crimson beam of light erupted from the blood-red eyes, instantly enveloping the remaining wisp of Yin energy from the paper child on the ground.

[Ding! Successfully added the ghost servant—a paper-mache opera boy!]

[It is stripping it of its core rule-making capabilities...]

[Congratulations, host! You have gained the ability: Upside-down Stealth (Rank F, Passive)!]

[Ability Effect: The host can ignore the constraints of gravity. They can move rapidly and silently along vertical walls, beams, and ceilings.]

Feeling the newfound lightness and balance within his body, Su Yu calmly withdrew his gaze.

He then looked at the members and asked, "Did you all understand?"

"Understood, Chief," Qin Xinran replied in a low voice first.

"Understood, boss!" Feng Gang, Shen Lesheng, and the others nodded in unison, their expressions solemn.

"If you understand, then restrain your breathing and remain vigilant."

Su Yu stepped over the charred bamboo strips and ashes scattered on the ground, his boots crushing the remaining ash with a soft thud: "Let's go."

The group of six quickly tightened their formation and advanced deeper into the courtyard along the dark corridor draped with tattered white banners.

……

As you turn the corner of the long corridor, a series of strange noises suddenly emanate from the beams overhead.

More than a dozen pale paper figures leaped out from the eaves and cracks in the walls, their bone knives slashing down with the wind, blocking all escape routes from all directions.

This time, all the team members stared intently at Su Yu, carefully watching his every move.

"Observe their take-off angle and the flow of yin energy."

Su Yu continued walking, calmly raising his right hand and casually flicking his fingers.

"Crackling sound."

More than ten thin, deep purple lightning bolts shot out from his fingertips, silently piercing the dimly lit corridor.

The next moment, each bolt of lightning, as if equipped with a locator, precisely pierced the forehead and throat of each paper figure.

The dozen or so paper children in mid-air suddenly froze, and before they even hit the ground, they were burned and weathered from the inside out by the purple flames, scattering into a sky full of charred debris and bamboo ash...