I am a human being, I am alive

"Hahaha."

The old woman laughed in a stiff and strange voice with clear pronunciation.

The old woman leaning against the ice wall did not move, nor did she feel angry or any other emotion. It was as if all her emotions had been erased over the past few decades, as if the person who had been talking to Jiang Jingyuan was just a soulless puppet.

The old woman slowly opened and closed her mouth, and a hoarse, low voice came out:

"Of course I am a human..."

She said, "I am... a living person..."

The old woman, whose side and cheeks were dimly illuminated by the blue light, turned her head intermittently, looking at the girl in white not far away. For the first time, she smiled and said, "Ghosts don't eat people, but people do need to eat."

Jiang Jingyuan suddenly felt creepy, and his lips moved, "So..."

"So..." the old woman said what she hadn't finished, "People can only eat ghosts."

The ice cellar was pitch black. The boundless silence and huge fear were like the legendary flood that overturned the world, drowning Jiang Jingyuan in an instant. Jiang Jingyuan froze and could not utter a word.

The old woman is a human being and is not afraid of blue light.

The old woman ate a lot of ghosts and underwent a mutation. The ghosts regarded her as one of the same species and would not attack her.

Jiang Jingyuan seemed to have caught a glimpse of a person's decades of darkness through these two short sentences.

"I was lucky. The blue flames of the lanterns were still burning brightly. I was trapped in the first ice cellar for a long time. Later, I used a magic weapon to trap a ghost and followed it out of the spatial crack. By then, I was very hungry. The pills and food in my storage bag were all gone, so I ate the ghost I had captured..."

The old woman's hoarse voice broke the silence, and she went on to answer Jiang Jingyuan's other question in detail: "After I ate it, I found that I no longer needed the blue light, but I still took the lantern. In the darkness, my eyes could clearly see the location of the spatial rift, and I came here and became trapped here."

"I don't know how long I stayed there. I tried many ways, but I couldn't get out."

"I went back and put the lanterns back, adding oil whenever the flames were about to go out, hoping that those who had come in would come here... maybe they would find a way out."

At this point, the old woman uttered another clear and melodious "Haha" and without turning around, she simply said, "You are the first one to come here to see me."

Jiang Jingyuan fell silent again.

The cold air in this ice cellar was so thick that a faint mist appeared. The cold mist was pervasive, vaguely separating Jiang Jingyuan and the old woman. The two figures, one standing and one sitting, were hazy. Neither of them moved at all, as if they had melted into the ice cellar and completely turned into two ice sculptures with details as fine as a hair.

After a long moment, Jiang Jingyuan, who was standing facing the ice wall, suddenly spoke up: "Did the previous twenty people come here at different times?"

The old woman laughed strangely, her body still motionless, and said in a tone that seemed to have a hint of joy:

“No…it’s…ah…”

Jiang Jingyuan moved, turning with the lantern in hand. The blue light swirled wildly with her movements, casting a young girl's shadow on the ice wall. Lantern in hand, she walked up to the old woman, the faint blue light completely illuminating her flabby face. Jiang Jingyuan looked at the old woman in front of her and asked slowly in a calm voice:

"It looks like both a human and a mouse. So what does a mouse actually look like?"

The old woman laughed softly and said nothing.

Jiang Jingyuan didn't expect an answer. The eyes of the girl in white were darker and deeper than the sticky darkness around them. She stared quietly at the old woman in front of her, every wrinkle of her face clearly visible, and said with certainty, word by word:

"'You' died a long time ago, committing suicide in the darkness."

"Who are you, then?"

Yes, this is what she had been feeling was wrong.

Sect members conduct training in groups, and they all have special means of communication with each other. It is very rare for people to get "lost" during training like Hua Simiao did.

In this era, there are very few independent cultivators. Even the rare independent cultivators with high cultivation levels are rarely arrogant enough to come to the mysterious Bai Zhou Mountain alone. Most of them will form a team, and it is not too late to turn against each other when there is a dispute.

As for those monks at the level of sect leaders and elders, they might refuse others' share and venture into Bai Zhou Mountain alone.

But this situation is too rare. Jiang Jingyuan feels that it is unlikely to be such a coincidence that more than a dozen lone fighters have come into this strange ice cellar one after another.

And twenty people is exactly the number of people that most sects would choose to form a team for training.

Jiang Jingyuan lowered his eyes and looked at the old woman, his face calm.

"Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha..."

The old woman who was sitting there in silence burst into laughter. Her laughter became louder and louder, and more and more eerie and inhuman. The clear and melodious human voice fell into Jiang Jingyuan's ears and turned into a shrill, evil laugh like that of a mouse.

The old woman's face bulged with laughter, as if the flesh beneath it were wriggling and changing. Her wrinkled face seemed to transform very slowly, and then in an instant, into the face of a giant rat...

Human face, rat face, human face, rat face, human face...

The face that seemed to be changing and yet remained unchanged was laughing hideously, madly, corrupted, and evil, making everyone who saw this scene temporarily forget the difference between a human face and a rat head.

The old woman laughed wildly, and Jiang Jingyuan did not attack. One was crazy and the other was calm. They were obviously two completely contradictory scenes, but they were squeezed into a small area of ​​blue light, which was twisted, weird, and unexpectedly harmonious.

The old woman, with a large gray rat head awkwardly placed on her human body, stopped laughing and let out a voice even hoarser than before, as if some ancient, sinister evil spirit was calling out at the top of its lungs from across time:

"Her name is Lin Li..."

Her name is Lin Li, and she is a genius of her generation.

But she was a very silent and dull person, one who focused on cultivation. Whether she was training or in the sect, she was always alone and didn't get close to her fellow disciples...

Until one day several decades later, she was assigned to an elite team to come to Bai Zhou Mountain for training.

This team was composed of twenty mid- to high-level disciples selected temporarily. Except for her, everyone else in the team had more or less experience of working together.

Although Lin Li was the leader designated by the sect, after going down the mountain, the leader actually became a slightly older senior brother - Lin Li was not dissatisfied with this, perhaps she simply could not have any other emotions. After all, she was dull by nature, and she felt that it was fine to follow the team quietly.

The team's apparent harmony was completely shattered five days after entering the ice cellar.

Twenty people were trapped in an ice cellar, a blue light flickered on and off, and extremely fast and slippery humanoid ghosts occasionally teasingly harassed them.

The twenty people who formed a temporary team actually didn't have much trust in each other. No one dared to rest, and no one believed in the "protection" their companions talked about. Everyone was afraid that if they relaxed, they would be thrown out by their companions to take the blame... The twenty people hadn't slept for five days, and all the talismans and pills they could use were used up. Finally, they couldn't help but start to feel irritable.

The most terrifying thing was that after another three days, their food was gone - after all, they were just a temporary team, and no one was willing to submit to anyone else. In addition, they had originally only wanted to gain some experience outside Bai Zhou Mountain, so they didn't prepare much food at all.

When there were other people around, the first thing they thought of was not ghosts - ghosts were still too filthy and disgusting for them, the disciples of the immortal sect.

What's more, irritability, pain, fatigue, anxiety...all kinds of complex emotions make them treat the people around them with full of malice.

But they believed that they still had a bottom line. If forced to do so, they were only prepared to kill one person - Lin Li, the arrogant and hateful genius who, in their eyes, disdained to associate with them.

Among so many people, there were groups of people they knew who were hanging out together, but Lin Li was the only one who was alone.

They all thought maliciously, wasn't Lin Li hailed as the sect's hope? Wasn't he the leader of their team, designated by the sect leader?

But why would this genius, this team leader, harm them to such an extent?

They recounted Lin Li's neglect of duty along the way and became more disgusted with her.

So, on the tenth day, nineteen people laid siege to Lin Li.

Facts have proven that Lin Li is an absolute genius, a prodigy. If she hadn't come to this ice cellar, she would definitely be the future backbone of the sect—

The internal conflict ended when Lin Li chopped off the third person's head with a knife.

The seventeen survivors stopped almost at the same time, maintaining their last bit of dignity and pride as disciples of the immortal sect. They took out the pot, cooked the meat, and then ate it whole.

Lin Li also ate, she was really hungry - this also made the other sixteen people hate her even more.

"How could she be so cruel? She killed her fellow disciple and then ate his body..."

"This person is so scary! He used to be so unfriendly in the sect. Could he just want to eat us? Oh my god, where did the Sect Master capture this monster? I never thought we'd live with such a monster for so many years... After we get out, I must go find the Sect Master with everyone else. It's too dangerous to have such a monster in the sect. The other fellow disciples will definitely be very scared!"

"This guy is so disgusting! This is his fellow apprentice, yet he killed him without blinking an eye... Tsk tsk, he even ate two bowls."

"Look at Lin Li eating so happily, as if she were eating some kind of delicacies. She didn't eat people often in the past, did she? It's all over, it's all over. We just had a fight, she must be holding a grudge against me. Will I be the next one to be killed?"

While feeling panic, they couldn't help but think with some gloating pleasure:

"Is this a genius? A pride? A man-eating pride?"

"Heh, isn't the result still no different from us? Oh no, she's much more evil than us, eating people with such relish!"

"The Sect Leader is truly insane. She treats a monster like a treasure and even talks about letting Lin Li inherit her legacy in the future... Humph, we should really let the Sect Leader see what she has done to all of us!! She should make her pay for the lives of her fellow disciples who died!"

Lin Li, having fought ten men alone, was already starving with hunger. He wolfed down his food, his mind blank, too busy to think. But the other sixteen were terrified. For a moment, they not only had to fend off the ghosts that appeared in the darkness, but they also had to be wary of Lin Li. Everyone was worried.

So, the second siege of Lin Li began when all three of them had finished eating.

This time, no matter how dumb Lin Li was, she knew that these people could not be kept. As long as they were alive, they would stab her in the back at any time!

Lin Li was seriously injured this time. As she waved the knife, she couldn't help but feel a little hesitant in her heart: she had been a loner for many years and didn't like to be close to others, but she didn't think she could endure the loneliness, solitude and despair of being trapped in this ice cellar indefinitely.

Lin Li left behind a junior brother whose strength was neither too strong nor too weak.

It cannot be said that she did anything right or wrong in this matter, because this junior brother actually has no ability to deal a devastating blow to Lin Li whether he is alive or dead - he is weak to Lin Li but not likely to be a drag.

This junior fellow was very young, and when he saw Lin Li didn't kill him, he immediately knelt down and kowtowed, admitting his mistake. Lin Li had observed him for a long time, and this person didn't intentionally or unintentionally let her block the damage when dealing with ghosts and monsters like before. Instead, he tried hard to cooperate with her...

So Lin Li felt relieved.

She felt a lot more relaxed.