Let Me Explain, Fairy
Chapter 1078 - 675: Life Spirit Dead Zone

Chapter 1078: Chapter 675: Life Spirit Dead Zone

After seeing the things Li Junwu spoke of with his own eyes, Xu Yuan fell silent.

The sunlight filtered through the reconstructed city defense canopy and entered the city, as though draped in layers of murky shadow, robbing everything of its colors. Light and dark seemed to lose their meaning, and the entire prefecture city resembled a faded painting.

The giant crater that scarred the city like a festering wound had been smoothed out. The walls were no longer broken. The obliterated districts reappeared, and the citizens who should have perished stared blankly around, bewildered.

As his gaze swept across the city, Zhenxi Prefecture City appeared to have reverted to the moment before the battle began, as if everything they had experienced was nothing but a fleeting dream.

Yet at the center of it all was Mu Nuo, whose body remained shattered and incomplete. Her pitch-black eyes, without a trace of white, were far from fully open, but her grotesque transformation had already begun to spread...

The whole city was distorting before she had even fully awakened. Wasn’t this oppressive aura a bit too overwhelming?

The scene practically felt like the final boss making her grand entrance.

As the one who unleashed this monster himself, Xu Yuan found that he wasn’t as tense at the moment as he had imagined he might be.

To his embarrassment, the reason seemed to come down to the sense of assurance brought by the Lord of the Ancient Abyss.

If it had been any other world boss from Cangyuan Chronicles—whether the Barbarian King or the Great Desert Waist Spirit—Xu Yuan might have hesitated when facing this ominous little demon. Mu Nuo’s current display was already starting to feel a bit overpowered.

But Emperor Bai was different.

This guy was a world boss whose difficulty rivaled that of the Prime Minister’s father.

A silhouette surrounded by dragon shadows stood proudly in the void. Even at the heart of the grotesque distortion, the filthy shadows all around couldn’t touch him in the slightest.

Perhaps due to the surrounding anomalies, Emperor Bai didn’t strike at Mu Nuo again immediately. He simply gazed calmly at her body, which was reforming like drifting paper.

Taking advantage of this pause, Xu Yuan began to investigate various districts of the ghostly city spread beneath his feet.

Though Emperor Bai was holding the fort on the main battlefield, Xu Yuan couldn’t guarantee Mu Nuo wouldn’t attempt a sneak attack. He had to prepare in advance by gathering intelligence.

As Origin Qi spread along the patterns, Xu Yuan controlled a Yuan Qi Serpent to infiltrate one of the districts Mu Nuo had restored. Numerous details surfaced in Xu Yuan’s mind.

This reconstructed street was solid—not an illusion—and its materials were identical to those of a regular street. All were composed of green clay.

Curiosity arose.

Green clay, while not particularly valuable, wasn’t an ordinary material either. Its crafting process was rather complex. How did Mu Nuo bypass these procedures to recreate green clay?

Could this really be time manipulation?

Glancing at the vast and untouched prefecture city for a fleeting moment, Xu Yuan dismissed this absurd notion immediately.

Impossible. If Mu Nuo truly wielded such power, she could single-handedly eradicate a military formation of ten thousand soldiers.

But then how exactly did Mu Nuo recreate this green clay?

Ghost Domain?

As the offspring of Yin Ghosts, Mu Nuo possessing a Ghost Domain wasn’t odd.

But she wouldn’t know the crafting process of green clay. It would be akin to using a 3D printer in one’s past life to print a nuclear warhead, only to find out it actually detonates.

As soon as these tangled thoughts arose, Xu Yuan stopped himself abruptly.

No need to overthink this. If the Dao Domains of cultivators could utilize rules of reality to manifest themselves, Yin Ghosts’ Ghost Domains could distort these rules and turn illusions into reality.

The green clay materialized here might well be Mu Nuo twisting some kind of rule.

As this thought lingered in his mind, the Yuan Qi Serpent gently expanded its force. Cracks began to form on the street surface.

And what happened next immediately validated Xu Yuan’s hypothesis.

The cracked ground, akin to memory alloys from his past life, sealed itself at a visible speed.

Silently noting this detail, Xu Yuan had the Yuan Qi Serpent burst forth, snagging a previously deceased bandit and hurtling him skyward.

A moment later—

The bearded bandit was dragged to Xu Yuan’s side.

Already deceased, the bearded man struggled and pleaded hysterically, yet under the suppressive force of a Saint’s Origin Qi, he was unable to move even a single eyelid.

The dead objects conjured within the city had already been tested. Next, Xu Yuan planned to test these "living" beings resurrected by Mu Nuo.

Surging Origin Qi poured forcibly into the man’s body, instantly revealing its interior to Xu Yuan’s senses.

The meridians, Dantian, heartbeat, and flesh—all functioned like those of an ordinary living human. Yet it remained unclear whether this man was a self-aware "person" or merely a puppet controlled by Mu Nuo.

And... what if he were made to die again?

This thought had barely surfaced—

Crack—

The man’s neck twisted instantly to a ninety-degree angle, his head dangling limply like a broken ragdoll.

As a Martial Apprentice of the Bone Tempering Realm, such trauma was undoubtedly fatal. And under Xu Yuan’s observation, the vitality within the man’s body dissipated as quickly as that of any ordinary mortal. Yet just as the bandit completely perished once more, Xu Yuan witnessed an incredibly eerie phenomenon.

The deceased bandit began to lose color across his corpse. His skin, flesh, and blood turned shriveled and blackened, eventually vanishing into a shadowy wisp.

With the Saint’s eyesight, this transformation occurred in an instant. But what startled Xu Yuan even more was that, almost immediately after the bandit’s body disappeared, another bearded man materialized from the district below.

This new incarnation seemed to retain his memories from earlier. After resurrecting, he looked around in confusion, glancing tremblingly toward the sky. Meeting Xu Yuan’s gaze for but a split second, he fled desperately into a nearby house...

As Xu Yuan prepared to reel this man back for further study, Li Junwu’s voice suddenly rang from the Government Office:

"Changtian, did you figure out what’s happening in the city?"

Suppressing his impulse to delve deeper, Xu Yuan turned around. Li Junwu had already approached, leveraging the City Defense Array’s power, and spoke quickly:

"It seems these resurrected citizens aren’t puppets."

"Why?" Xu Yuan frowned and asked.

Li Junwu’s voice was hoarse and somber:

"Since last year when I settled in Zhenxi Prefecture City, I’ve become familiar with some local shops and townsfolk. Their habits after resurrection are almost identical to what I knew of them. If they were puppets, such realism would be impossible."

Her voice grew slightly hurried as she continued:

"The city defense canopy has been reopened, and the damaged formation pattern routes have been reconstructed. However, I seem to have lost control over parts of the Formation. Worse, the reconstructed sections are actively eroding the remaining parts of the array."

Xu Yuan wasn’t surprised that Li Junwu couldn’t control the reconstructed Formation, but the fact that it was eroding residual formations provided him with new information.

"Mu Nuo seems intent on turning this entire prefecture city into part of herself."

Li Junwu froze for a moment, her beautiful eyes widening slightly:

"There’s a spellcraft that can achieve such a thing?"

Xu Yuan glanced at the Origin Qi patterns spreading from his right hand and replied softly:

"Don’t be too nervous. This is just Mu Nuo’s Ghost Domain; it hasn’t fully matured yet."

"Ghost Domains can turn illusions into reality?"

"You didn’t know?"

"What?"

"..."

Xu Yuan paused in silence for a second before resigning himself.

It was akin to how most countries in his past life lacked a complete industrial system, and even those that had one often possessed significant gaps.

Though Zhenxi Prefecture had considerable martial strength, its foundations were too shallow, leaving many crucial pieces of intelligence unknown.

What Xu Yuan considered common knowledge was due to his esteemed status within the Prime Minister’s Mansion. His "common knowledge" would often be top-secret information elsewhere.

After briefly explaining in simple terms, Li Junwu’s face immediately conveyed disbelief, the kind that said, "How in the world does something like this exist?"

She looked absurdly naive and utterly adorable, leaving Xu Yuan momentarily speechless.

But such was the nature of humans; they could not comprehend things beyond their frame of understanding.

Without paying further attention to his trusty ’brother’s’ shock, Xu Yuan swiftly organized the intelligence he had gathered.

The citizens in the city had indeed been resurrected—within Mu Nuo’s Ghost Domain—with their pre-death personalities and memories intact.

Perhaps it was his current position, but upon discovering this fact, Xu Yuan felt no fear about the situation. Instead, a spark of greed ignited within him.

In that instant, he suddenly understood the mindset of those figures in films who unleash apocalyptic viruses or trigger crises involving rogue AI.

When the potential benefit is substantial enough, humans can easily overlook risks.

Mu Nuo was the kind of existence that made one forget risks entirely.

In his past life’s ordinary world, despite humanity’s limited abilities, they never ceased exploring death and immortality. In the supernatural present, cultivators had pursued such mysteries for thousands of years, yet their efforts always ended in failure.

Now, though, within Mu Nuo’s Ghost Domain—

The boundary between life and death had blurred.

Just as those cultivators from ten thousand years ago researched Ghouls in the dead Underground Palace, Xu Yuan wanted to capture this little demon and use her as a living specimen to probe the boundary between death and life.

Even if he failed, incorporating her abilities and using this endlessly resurrecting Life Spirit Dead Zone on the Black Scale Army could potentially overturn the very fabric of contemporary warfare!