Chapter 58 Failure of the Divine Statue

Following Ma Wenwen's gaze, Le Dong swallowed hard.

"No... it can't be..." Le Dong felt his heart beating furiously. He shook his head violently, trying to banish the terrifying thought from his mind. "Look at him... he has a shadow, he can speak, and he can move! Could you be mistaken? Besides, we still have the divine statue with us!"

Clutching at this thought as if it were a straw to save his life, Le Dong hurriedly turned and walked to the back of the van.

He had to see that divine statue with his own eyes—the entity capable of suppressing all evil spirits!

"Splash!"

The moment he opened the trunk, a large volume of accumulated water surged out, splashing all over his trouser legs!

Le Dong froze.

He looked up and realized that the rubber weather stripping on this beat-up van's trunk had aged and worn out long ago. Having been pelted by the torrential rain for so long, rainwater must have leaked inside!

An intensely ominous prehension chilled Le Dong to the core.

Trembling and past caring about the dirt, he reached out and rummaged through the pile of soaked debris in the trunk, finally locating the Zhong Kui divine statue secured right in the middle!

However, the blanket wrapping the statue was completely soaked through, heavy, and felt cold and sticky to the touch.

Le Dong's heart drummed like a war drum. He took a deep breath, and with trembling fingers, he grabbed the edge of the soaked blanket, peeling it back layer by careful layer...

When the wrapping was finally stripped away to reveal the head of the crude wooden carved divine statue inside, Le Dong's pupils violently contracted! The blood in his entire body seemed to freeze in an instant!

The statue's eyes, which were originally bright and fierce, glaring wrathfully at demons...

At this moment, were reduced to nothing more than two blurred, bleak, and lifeless...

Ashen white!

Such a bizarre mutation made Le Dong nearly cry out.

This is...

A terrifying thought flashed through Le Dong's mind—no wonder Ma Wenwen could sense the chilling yin energy; could it be that the divine statue had lost its efficacy?!

Le Dong's heart hammered wildly, cold sweat silently drenching his back. He turned his stiff neck and looked toward the front of the van.

There, Cai Kun was completely oblivious, leaning close to Li Gang and gesturing toward something inside the engine compartment.

He didn't dare shout out this news; if Li Gang truly wasn't human, Cai Kun would be finished!

Forcing down the scream rising in his throat, Le Dong acted as nonchalant as possible as he crept over to Ma Wenwen's side, lowering his voice and speaking at a rapid-fire pace:

"Master Ma, the statue! The statue's eyes... have turned ashen white. Has it... has it lost its efficacy?!"

As soon as these words were spoken, Ma Wenwen's face beneath the gauze visibly stiffened. He leaned forward slightly, his voice tinged with incredulous shock and doubt:

"The eyes... ashen white? How... how could that be..." He was clearly just as bewildered.

"Is there any other abnormality?" Ma Wenwen asked urgently, his fingers unconsciously tightening around his cloth bag.

Le Dong quickly glanced back at the statue. "No, just the eyes. The rest of it... seems the same as before."

"Why only the eyes..." Ma Wenwen muttered to himself, plunging into a brief moment of chaotic thought.

The eyes... the eyes!

A flash of inspiration struck Le Dong. He suddenly recalled the eerie behavior of Fan Biao in the dead of night!

"The strip of cloth!" Le Dong abruptly grabbed Ma Wenwen's arm, his voice trembling even more from agitation. "During the night, Master Fan... tore a strip of cloth off the statue's eyes! Could it be... could it be because of that missing cloth?!"

Upon hearing this, Ma Wenwen was equally shaken. "A strip of cloth? There was a strip of cloth over the eyes? Master... Master never mentioned this!"

His voice was laden with confusion and uncertainty, yet the bizarre mutation of the statue right before them was an iron-clad fact.

"Now... we can only guess that without the protection of the cloth, the eyes were eroded by rainwater... the statue might have truly lost its power, otherwise..."

As Ma Wenwen spoke, he looked toward Li Gang at the front of the car, his implication self-evident.

"Don't get too nervous. Maybe the statue hasn't failed, but we must use Li Gang to test it first!" Hearing Le Dong's ragged breathing, Ma Wenwen offered words of comfort.

With that, he groped around his cloth bag, pulled out a yellow talisman paper, and shoved it into Le Dong's hand.

"Use the Yang fire talisman. My eyes are damaged, and I don't dare rashly cast spells to sense the yin energy for fear of alerting the enemy. You... you wait for an opportunity, sneak around behind him, and paste this talisman onto his back! If he is an evil spirit, the talisman will react!"

Looking at the thin slip of talisman paper in his hand, Le Dong felt it weighed a thousand pounds, his palms slick with cold sweat.

He was supposed to sneak up and slap a talisman on an old man who might be a ghost?! This was practically a death sentence! Yet, looking around, Cai Kun was completely clueless, Lin Xun was still observing from afar, and Ma Wenwen was blind... it seemed it had to be him.

"I..." Le Dong's throat felt parched, an instinctive urge to refuse welling up inside him. But looking at Ma Wenwen's tense face beneath the gauze, and catching a glimpse of the entirely defenseless Cai Kun, he swallowed the words back and nodded with difficulty. "Fine... I'll try it!"

Taking a deep breath, he forced himself to calm down, then took small steps forward.

"Master Li, about these piston rings..." At the front of the car, Cai Kun was enthusiastically describing the vehicle's condition. Noticing Le Dong approaching, he waved him over. "Dongzi, take a look too... Master Li insists it needs a major overhaul..."

Le Dong grunted an acknowledgment and casually circled around toward Li Gang's back as if nothing were amiss.

He held his breath, stepping with extreme lightness like a cat walking on thin ice, every step feeling as though he were plunging deeper into an abyss.

He stared fixedly at Li Gang's old, oil-stained work jacket on his back, his fingers gripping the talisman paper trembling slightly from excessive exertion.

Close... getting closer...

Le Dong's heart leaped into his throat, the muscles in his arm tensing as he prepared to slap the talisman down with lightning speed—

"Master Li," a cool, calm female voice suddenly rang out, shattering the suffocatingly tense atmosphere.

Le Dong's movements abruptly stalled, and he turned his head in startled dismay.

He saw that Lin Xun had somehow walked over to the dust-covered old desk in the corner.

With her back to everyone, she picked up a dust-laden photo frame from the tabletop, casually wiped it with her sleeve, and lowered her head to examine it closely. Her voice wasn't loud, but it carried clearly across the silent auto repair shop:

"How is... the business of your repair shop?"

Li Gang was bent over, inspecting the engine. Hearing this, his movements seemed to pause for a fraction of a second before he rasped out a reply: "...Fairly decent."

Lin Xun placed the photo frame back onto the tabletop, but her fingers didn't leave. Instead, she slowly and inquisitively traced them across the oil- and dust-covered surface.

Suddenly, her fingertips paused over a dark brown stain, rubbing it gently.

"Oh?" Her voice remained completely level. "Judging by the thickness of this dust... did Master Li just return today, or have you... been living here all along?"

Li Gang's stooped back seemed to stiffen for a split second. He slowly raised his head, his cloudy eyes turning toward Lin Xun as he answered in a low voice: "I... have always been here."

"Always been here?" Lin Xun's voice suddenly turned chilly. She slowly turned around, raising the finger she had just used to trace the desk—its tip stained with a dark brown substance that had clearly dried into a crust.

She rubbed her fingertips together and asked in an almost indifferent tone:

"Then has Master Li... been injured recently?"

Her sharp gaze swept over Li Gang, then pointed precisely toward the desk, and finally flickered toward several cluttered corners nearby: "On this workbench, and over there... and over there... why are there so many dried bloodstains?"

Le Dong followed the direction of her finger, and his heart abruptly stopped beating!