(two)

“Master, I—” Wang Qiuyang began weakly, but was interrupted by Zhou Ziqiu: “Please tell me what the current situation is.”

Wang Qiuyang nodded: "My child didn't come home a few nights ago. He told me he stayed at his friend's house. When he came back the next day, he started having stomach pain, headache, and vomiting. I took him to the hospital, but they couldn't find the cause. That night, he started having a high fever that wouldn't go down, and yesterday he was put on a ventilator."

As she spoke, Wang Qiuyang couldn't help but cry, clearly very anxious.

Zhou Ziqiu's expression changed.

Wang Qiuyang hadn't finished speaking when she said, "Someone told me my child might have been possessed by a ghost, so I—"

But Zhou Ziqiu interrupted Wang Qiuyang before she could finish speaking, and hurriedly asked, "How many days has this been going on?"

Wang Qiuyang did a quick mental calculation and said, "Today is the third day!"

Although Zhou Ziqiu's heart was still in his throat, he breathed a slight sigh of relief; there was still time.

Just from Wang Qiuyang's description, Zhou Ziqiu knew that this was a vengeful ghost stealing a soul. The vengeful ghost stealing a soul has a time limit. In the first few days, it will only make people feel unwell, but it is also evidence of gradually eroding the human body. As the degree of erosion deepens, the person will lose control of their body and eventually fall into a coma. Until midnight on the seventh day, when the yin energy is at its peak, the person's physical body will be completely occupied by the vengeful ghost, and the soul in the body will also be devoured by the vengeful ghost.

A vengeful ghost with a physical body is practically invincible. Because of the natural barrier of the physical body, some spells and talismans that attack spirits become ineffective. Nowadays, most spells and talismans are designed to attack spirits.

The fact that the vengeful ghost could erode the body so quickly is not only due to the strong yin energy in the hospital, but also because the ghost must have been an extremely powerful being, having lived for at least several hundred years.

“Take me to see it,” Zhou Ziqiu said seriously to Wang Qiuyang.

The hospital was filled with all sorts of ghosts, and the foul smell of the underworld was particularly strong. As he walked toward the elevator, a ghost child clinging to the shoulder of a nurse passing by tried to jump onto him. A blood-soaked ghost on a stretcher pushed in from outside bared its deformed fangs at him. As he rode the elevator, drops of blood were still dripping from the ceiling. He looked up and saw a ghost whose head had been severed, half-fallen off, hanging from its neck, its limbs twisted and contorted. The blood he saw was dripping from the severed head. On the almost severed head, dark eyes were looking at him and laughing, but when the ghost opened its mouth, blood dripped from it.

All of this is beyond the scope of human cognition, but Zhou Ziqiu is currently accepting of it all.

But when he reached the door of the intensive care unit and felt the terrifying and eerie atmosphere emanating from behind the door, a chill ran down his spine and his hair stood on end.

Through a wall, he saw the vengeful ghost that had almost completed its possession in just three days.

The vengeful ghost was clinging to the boy on the hospital bed. His waist-length, messy hair hung down, his face was deathly pale, his facial muscles were contracted downwards, and his eyeballs bulged forward from their deep sockets, almost bursting out of their sockets, dripping blood onto the sheets. His tongue was sticking out long, already reaching the ground, and his neck was twisted and so thin that it was no thicker than a finger. Compared to his head, it looked like a balloon tied to a string.

The vengeful ghost sensed his arrival, raised her head to look at him, and grinned maliciously. Her face became even more distorted, like a piece of wood haphazardly chopped with a cleaver. She grinned, her mouth so wide it reached her ears, and her teeth were incredibly sharp.

The overwhelming stench of decay and dampness from the underworld nearly suffocated Zhou Ziqiu, and mixed in with it was even the putrid smell of corpses.

The female ghost's shrill voice rang out, as piercing as fingernails scraping across a blackboard.

"Don't get in my way."

Wang Qiuyang stood beside Zhou Ziqiu. She didn't have the ability to see ghosts or the methods of ordinary Taoist priests, so she couldn't see the terrifying ghosts in the intensive care unit. She only saw that Zhou Ziqiu suddenly stood still beside her, his face a little pale.

"…master?"

The woman was getting anxious; if even the 'Green Lamp' couldn't help her, she would truly be at her wit's end.

Zhou Ziqiu was brought back to his senses by Wang Qiuyang's voice. With a cold expression, he quickly said to her, "Stay here," and then pushed open the door and walked into the intensive care unit.

Wang Qiuyang thought the master was going to perform a ritual, so he stood still and waited outside.

When Zhou Ziqiu entered the room, the pungent smell became even stronger. He covered his nose with his hand, but it was to no avail.

The female ghost, seeing his actions, seemed to have discovered something amusing and began to giggle, a sharp, piercing laugh: "You're covering your nose! You're actually covering your nose..."

As it spoke, it crawled towards Zhou Ziqiu, its hands and feet outstretched in opposite directions, moving quickly in a twisted and bizarre posture.

Having been exposed to this smell for a long time, Zhou Ziqiu has become quite used to it. He lowered his hand from his nose, coldly watching the female ghost crawl towards him. He made a grasping motion in the air with his right hand, and a slender black curved blade appeared in his hand, resembling a Tang sword.

Then, in the instant the female ghost lunged forward, he thrust the black scimitar into the center of her forehead, causing her to let out a shrill scream.

Even though she was severely wounded by the curved blade, the female ghost still chuckled, "Two days from now, I'll be just like you..."

Zhou Ziqiu said expressionlessly, "You will never become a human."

Enraged by these words, the female ghost let out a shrill scream and broke free from Zhou Ziqiu's curved blade: "Shut up! I can turn into a human!"

After saying that, he suddenly broke free from Zhou Ziqiu's hand and pounced on Zhou Ziqiu.

But Zhou Ziqiu immediately gripped the knife with both hands and slashed down, instantly splitting the female ghost in two.

Zhou Ziqiu sheathed his sword and said coldly, "Your skills are too shallow."

The ghost was invisible, so this move could only severely injure it but not eliminate it. However, it was enough to deter the female ghost. The female ghost now felt that the aura on the knife was extremely terrifying, full of sharpness, as if it could even split a mountain in two. She was a ghost, but she also felt fear.

But she still laughed shrilly, her form gradually dissipating: "Hahahaha, so what if you're powerful... my possession is irreversible..."

Zhou Ziqiu frowned, and just as he reached out to deliver another blow, the female ghost vanished. Then, the pungent smell in the room gradually dissipated, though it remained within Zhou Ziqiu's acceptable range.

He walked to Wang Lei's bedside and checked the boy's breathing. Although it was faint, it was still there. He breathed a slight sigh of relief and reached out to tap Wang Lei's forehead.

After making that gesture, Zhou Ziqiu went to the door and led Wang Qiuyang into the room.

Strangely, the boy, who had been deathly pale and unconscious, suddenly regained some color in his face. After a few moments, he opened his eyes, saw the person standing by the bed, and weakly called out, "Mom..."

Upon hearing the word "Mom," Wang Qiuyang immediately knelt by the bedside, tears streaming down her face, and grasped Wang Lei's hand, repeatedly replying, "Mom's here, Mom's here, Mom's here..."

"And this is...?"

Wang Lei twitched his finger slightly, pointing at Zhou Ziqiu.

Wang Qiuyang wiped the tears from his face haphazardly and introduced him to Wang Lei, saying, "This is Master Zhou. He's the one who woke you up. Hurry up and thank him."

"Thank you, Master Zhou..."

Although the woman outside the door couldn't see what was happening inside, she clearly heard Zhou Ziqiu's two emotionless sentences and subconsciously assumed that Zhou Ziqiu had already driven away the ghost.

But Zhou Ziqiu waved his hand and asked Wang Lei on the bed seriously, "What did you do three nights ago?"

Wang Qiuyang was taken aback: "Master Zhou, why are you asking this?"

"Do you know what's entangled with you?" Zhou Ziqiu said coldly.

Wang Lei shook his head.

"A vengeful ghost that has lived for hundreds of years."

Wang Lei and Wang Qiuyang's expressions changed immediately.

Zhou Ziqiu continued, "Vicious ghosts don't haunt people for no reason. They only haunt two types of people: those who caused their deaths and those who angered them."

Zhou Ziqiu looked at Wang Lei and said, word by word, "What did you do to anger this vengeful ghost?"

Wang Lei was speechless.

Wang Qiuyang was extremely anxious: "Leier, what have you done? Tell me quickly!"

"You don't have to tell me, but I need to tell you that the matter is not resolved. I'm just suppressing it now, buying you three days. In five days, it will still take over your body, and your soul will still be devoured by it."

Upon hearing Zhou Ziqiu's words, Wang Lei was so frightened that he immediately confessed what he had done.

“My friend and I heard that if you bang a bowl at a crossroads at midnight, you can see ghosts. We were curious, so we went to the traffic intersection on Xinhua Road and banged a bowl. He was scared, so he only let me do it. Nothing happened at the time, but I lost consciousness the next day.”

Upon hearing this, Zhou Ziqiu was puzzled.

What Wang Lei did was simply summon ghosts, attracting wandering ghosts from the roadside. This wouldn't anger the ghosts, and such ordinary methods of summoning ghosts usually only attract wandering spirits, not fierce ghosts with hundreds of years of cultivation.

Who has angered this vengeful ghost?

Wang Qiuyang, standing to the side, was practically furious with Wang Lei: "If someone's scared, then you do it yourself! Are you stupid?!"

"Mom! I never imagined ghosts really existed!"

Zhou Ziqiu's brows were furrowed.

Something's not right.

There is another person.

18:55:38