The girl tremblingly reached out her hand.
The pure Blood Silver lay right beside her feet, radiating a soft glow in the moonlight.
To someone like her, who struggled for survival in the muck, this wasn't just money; it was hope.
"Take it."
Tang Wugui's voice was gentle, holding a hint of encouragement.
The girl swallowed hard, her fingertips touching the icy silver.
It was real.
No corpse poison, no resentment, just heavy, pure spiritual energy.
Her vigilance washed away instantly.
She clutched the silver tightly and was just about to look up to thank him and ask who this mysterious man was.
Just then.
"Now that the deposit is accepted, let's talk about another transaction."
The smile on the corner of Tang Wugui's mouth suddenly vanished.
Without warning, his left hand shot out from his sleeve.
The red thread that had just retracted now coalesced into an extremely fine blood needle.
The movement was lightning fast.
The girl couldn't react in time; she didn't even raise the hand holding the knife.
Pfft.
A soft sound.
The red thread precisely pierced the back of the girl's neck. That was the Celestial Pillar, the acupoint governing a person's fortune and destiny.
"Ugh!"
The girl's pupils dilated. She went rigid and knelt on the ground, the silver rolling away.
She wanted to shout, but her throat couldn't make a sound. She could only feel a cold foreign object drilling madly in along her spine.
"Don't move."
Tang Wugui stood behind her, making a grasping motion with one hand, his gaze becoming focused and greedy.
When that mother ore tried to erode her just now, Tang Wugui had seen it.
There was something wrong with this girl's body.
A normal person contaminated with so much corpse poison would have rotted away long ago, yet she was still alive.
The only explanation was that her body could accommodate massive amounts of evil energy and had become accustomed to this erosion.
In Tang Wugui's eyes, this was simply a walking treasury.
"Let me see what exactly is hidden in your body..."
Tang Wugui licked his lips, urging the red thread to drive straight in, piercing the defensive line deep in the girl's soul.
His original plan was simple: just like dealing with the mother ore, he would extract the evil energy from her body as well.
This would be a great supplement for him, and a relief for the girl.
But the moment the red thread pierced the core.
BOOM!
The greedy expression on Tang Wugui's face froze.
Through the red thread, he saw a massive seal.
Deep within the girl's frail body stood a wall composed of talismans, ancient and incredibly evil.
Behind the wall was a black ocean.
It was thick, undissolvable karmic retribution—divine punishment left behind from countless acts of defying fate!
"This is..."
Tang Wugui's pupils contracted, understanding instantly.
This karma wasn't the girl's own at all!
Every black wave bore the private seal of the same family; every wisp of a curse carried the rotten stench of high-ranking officials after indulging in debauchery.
She wasn't simply unlucky.
She was a special purpose vehicle, meticulously manufactured!
Someone had treated her as a sewer for risk isolation. They had stripped all the costs that had to be paid, accumulated by an entire family over decades or even centuries, and transferred them into her body through some secret art, like evading taxes!
This was a massive, off-balance-sheet black ledger not recorded in any book!
The scale of it, if uncapped, was enough to bankrupt and liquidate any major money house in the Great Shen Empire instantly!
"Damn it!"
Tang Wugui's face changed abruptly.
If it were ordinary evil energy, he would just swallow it.
But this sum... was highly toxic!
If left untouched, that seal could barely suppress the karma. But now, Tang Wugui's greedy stab had chiseled a hole right in the seal.
Creak—
A crisp sound came from within the girl's body.
The black ocean of karma found a vent and launched a frenzied counterattack along Tang Wugui's red thread!
"Go back!"
Tang Wugui roared low, his left hand instantly turning red-hot like a branding iron.
A wave of heat poured back into his arm along the red thread. His sleeve turned to ash, and the skin on his arm cracked inch by inch, oozing black blood.
This power was too strong!
With his meager cultivation, he couldn't withstand the impact of such massive karma!
He couldn't resolve this karmic debt right now! Once detonated, both he and this girl would instantly be blasted into powder by this immense causality!
"Seal!"
Tang Wugui made a prompt decision. He stopped devouring, bit the tip of his tongue hard, and sprayed a mouthful of essence blood onto the red thread.
The red thread used for plundering now became a stitching needle.
His hands flew, manipulating the red thread to shuttle back and forth at the crumbling breach within the girl's body, forcibly plugging the leaking aura back in.
"Haa... haa..."
Moments later, Tang Wugui yanked back his left hand and stumbled backward three steps, his face pale.
"Cough, cough..."
The girl kneeling on the ground coughed violently, gasping for air.
The girl didn't know what had just happened. She felt as if her soul had been grabbed fiercely by someone, the pain nearly making her faint, followed by a wave of relief.
She turned around in terror, clenching the broken knife, staring fixedly at this man who had suddenly attacked her.
"You... what do you want?"
Tang Wugui didn't answer.
He lowered his head to look at his still slightly trembling left hand.
The red thread on his wrist hadn't broken, but it had become dull and lusterless.
At his temples, a few more strands of silver hair appeared.
That emergency plugging just now had consumed a lot of the energy he had just devoured.
"A loss."
Tang Wugui sighed.
He looked up, his gaze complex as he looked at the girl.
This time, there was less contempt and more scrutiny in his eyes.
"I thought you just got yourself into a bit of trouble."
Tang Wugui shook his numb arm, slowly straightened his back, and a cold smile curled the corner of his mouth:
"I didn't expect you to be a bad bank kept externally by a top-tier wealthy family specifically for stripping away non-performing assets."
"You... what are you saying? I don't understand..."
The girl couldn't understand his words, only instinctively feeling danger.
"It doesn't matter if you don't understand. You just need to know one thing."
Tang Wugui pointed at her chest, his voice cold:
"Your body right now is like a powder keg. Inside isn't your life, but debts owed by some major family for several generations."
"If I had been a little greedier just now and this keg exploded, neither of us would even get the chance to go to the Elysium Den to be liquidated."
The girl was stunned.
She didn't understand about debts, but she knew something was wrong with her body: the excruciating pain since childhood, that weird constitution where she wouldn't die no matter how unlucky she was.
"So... you want to kill me?"
"Kill you?"
Tang Wugui scoffed.
"If I killed you, this massive debt would instantly default. The sky-filling creditors would immediately come knocking and raze everything within ten miles to the ground. I can't afford that consequence."
He walked up to the girl again. The girl wanted to retreat, but found her legs too weak to stand.
Tang Wugui picked up the pure Blood Silver that had fallen into the mud and handed it to her again.
"Your life is a precious thing right now."
"Besides, since you can carry so many toxic assets without dying, it shows your risk-resistance rating is extremely high..."
Tang Wugui narrowed his eyes, as if seeing some huge utilization value.
"Keeping you around... if I encounter difficult bones to gnaw in the future, I can throw them to you first to filter through once."
He stuffed the silver into the girl's arms, then turned and walked toward the outside of the mass grave.
"Follow me."
The girl looked at Tang Wugui's back, a blank look on her face:
"Go... where?"
Tang Wugui waved his hand without looking back:
"The seal inside your body is already leaking. I just temporarily plugged it."
"If you don't want to suddenly explode into rotten meat, follow me."
The girl hugged the Blood Silver, her knuckles white.
She hesitated between Tang Wugui's retreating figure and the silver representing hope, then gritted her teeth, stuffed the silver into the basket, scrambled up, and followed.
"I can't liquidate this general ledger..."
Tang Wugui glanced at the night sky, calculation flashing in his eyes:
"But I can teach you how to demand it back from that family."
"After all, they placed so much deadly toxic debt in your custody in violation of regulations..."
Tang Wugui's voice seemed exceptionally cold in the night wind:
"According to the rules, it's reasonable for us to charge them a little risk management fee... right?"