Respect aside, Miko hadn't forgotten she faced the same dilemma.
What should she do?
Eat or not eat?
Gritting her teeth against the nausea, Miko slowly picked up a fishball from her bento box with her chopsticks.
Just then, that long tongue suddenly extended from the shadows again, darting towards the fishball between her chopsticks with lightning speed.
"Eh!"
Caught off guard by this sudden attack, though Miko maintained her calm expression, her right hand trembled slightly.
Fishballs were slippery to begin with and difficult to grip properly.
With Miko's hand shaking like this, the fishball immediately slipped from between the chopsticks, falling towards the dust-covered ground.
Plop...
The almost inaudible sound of the fishball hitting the floor was like a starting pistol in a hundred-meter race, instantly triggering changes in hundreds of evil spirits.
"You can see us!"
"You can see us!"
"You can see us!"
Watching the writhing, twisted evil spirits roaring with bone-chilling voices, Miko turned tearful eyes to Ye Xing and stammered:
"S-sorry... I..."
"It's fine."
Ye Xing waved his hand, glanced at his phone, and smiled.
"You lasted forty-seven minutes and made it to this floor, even reaching the bento-eating stage. You've done well. Now..."
He set down his bento box, stood up, brushed the dust off his clothes, and walked slowly to stand before Miko. Facing the hundreds of restless evil spirits, his smile faded.
"...It's my turn."
As the words left his mouth, Ye Xing pressed his palms together. To Miko's astonishment, a wisp of black mist slowly extended between his hands, eventually forming a pitch-black, guardless weapon resembling a Tang sword.
Pointing the blade at the hundreds of evil spirits before him, he said calmly:
"Come."
"You can see us!"
The hundreds of evil spirits crowded together, their mouths emitting vicious snarls as they lunged at Ye Xing.
"Spear."
Facing this hellish scene, Ye Xing merely whispered a single word. A black spear materialised in his left hand.
Then, adopting a perfect javelin-throwing stance, he hurled the spear with all his might.
"Huff..."
The terrifying force behind the black spear allowed it to pierce through dozens of evil spirits in succession, creating a momentary void in what had been a surging black tide of malevolent entities.
Without missing a beat, Ye Xing calmly reversed the grip on the sword in his right hand when an evil spirit with a gaping, black-Qi-spewing maw lunged at his neck. He drove both the blade and the creature's twisted head straight into the concrete floor.
He even found time to explain to Miko Yotsuya, who was standing behind him.
"When dealing with evil spirits, piercing through the head is most effective. Most can be eliminated this way. But to be absolutely certain, it's safest to crush them into powder and watch them dissipate as black Qi."
Miko stood utterly speechless, frozen in shock.
Every swing of Ye Xing's black Tang sword—even a glancing blow—instantly reduced evil spirits to dust, erasing them without a trace.
Some faster spirits managed to evade the blade and close in on him.
But it was all futile.
No matter how horrifying their forms, the moment they neared Ye Xing's body, black spikes erupted from him, impaling them just like his sword strikes—vanishing them into nothingness.
"Is... is this Ye Xing's true power?"
Miko's golden pupils trembled with disbelief as she took in the scene before her.
This bore no resemblance to the exorcism tales she'd heard.
This wasn't banishing evil spirits...
This was slaughtering them.
A brutally efficient display of overwhelming force.
Ye Xing: "Almost got ambushed by these bastards. Good thing I'm just built different."
Stand, Gate of the Great God, Great Golden Dragon, Advent of a World of Flowering Trees—mid-fight power-up.
No injuries, right?.JPG
As hundreds of evil spirits rapidly dwindled—either slain or devoured by Ye Xing—an eerie chorus of whispers, as if from a crowd, suddenly emanated from the stairwell.
Miko couldn't discern a single word.
Yet the instant she heard it, every hair on her body stood on end. Her school uniform clung to her back, soaked through with cold sweat.
"Th-that's..."
"Whoosh!"
Like a speeding train passing by, a gust of wind swept through the area.
A monstrous creature—thick as a python, its head split by a vertical slit containing a single glowing eye—slithered into the hall from the stairwell at terrifying speed.
"What the fuck?!"
Even Ye Xing blinked in surprise at the sudden apparition.
"Why does this thing look so much like a peni—"
Before he could finish, the python-thick monster's head-slit parted, revealing rows of gleaming, razor-sharp teeth.
The eerie whispering grew louder.
The creature—whether to call its gaping maw an eye or a mouth was unclear—shot forward like an arrow loosed from its bow, viciously lunging at Miko Yotsuya, who stood nearby.
Confronted by this sudden assault, Miko was utterly petrified, her thoughts grinding to a halt. All she could see were those twin rows of approaching fangs and that vertical pupil brimming with boundless malice.
"Tch, no choice then."
Watching the monster pounce towards Miko, Ye Xing's expression turned grave for the first time. Setting down the black Tang sword formed from evil spirit power, he thrust his right hand forward and commanded in a low voice:
"Manifest."
As these words left his lips, Miko saw an enormous, deathly pale hand with black talon-like nails materialise instantly before her.
"This... this is the same one I saw on the train last time..."
She recognised this grotesque hand as the very same apparition she'd encountered during her previous train journey. So this was another one of Ye Xing's "abilities"?
While Miko processed this, the hand's black talons had already plunged deep into the serpentine evil spirit's body. What erupted wasn't blood, but billowing black mist. The snake spirit thrashed its head violently, clearly experiencing excruciating pain.
Ironically, Ye Xing winced in sympathy as he clenched his right fist.
Why did evil spirits insist on taking such... uncomfortable forms? He could practically feel phantom pains in certain regions himself.