Chapter 59: Finding a Way Out

The headless entity stood shirtless, its bulging muscles rippling with raw power.
Just by looking at that physique, one could tell it was a male entity.
Its neck had been cleanly severed, leaving an exceptionally smooth cross-section.
Xia Tianqiong located the position of the esophagus and began stuffing gold ingots into it, one after another.
He kept shoving them in until he had fed it over seven hundred taels, by which time tens of thousands of headless entity clones had been summoned into the surrounding area. Only then did a change finally occur.

The headless entity in the puddle moved its arm, and the rules of power that had been sealing it suddenly fluctuated violently.
With a loud splash, the puddle burst apart, and the headless entity stood up.
"Human, thank you for helping me break the seal. I will let you off this once as a reward."
The headless entity had no mouth; its voice emanated directly from its belly.
Seeming in great haste, it quickly dropped those words. Before Xia Tianqiong could even reply, it leaped violently into the air, soared into the sky, and vanished from sight.
The moment it disappeared, all the summoned clones vanished as well.

Muddy water splashed all over Xia Tianqiong's face, but he paid it no mind. He looked up at the sky where the headless entity had vanished, lost in thought.
"Could the exit be up in the sky? If another anomaly flies up into the sky next time, can I grab onto it and let it take me out as well?"
Things were about to get interesting.
To test his hypothesis, Xia Tianqiong began destroying seals everywhere.

Meanwhile, Liu Zhongjun outside was having a stroke of terrible luck.
Back in the warehouse, barely ten minutes after the zombie entity had departed, another wisp of eerie light emerged from the Seal-Guarding Chessboard.
It landed on the ground, transforming into a robust and towering headless entity.
"Has anyone seen my head? Could someone be so kind as to help me find it!"
These entities had been sealed for too long, and upon finally emerging, they were all impatient to taste fresh blood.

Liu Zhongjun's expression turned increasingly grim, though he did not panic. He raised a hand and pointed at a man dressed in black. "I found your head. It's him."
"Young Master Liu, what are you doing? Don't frame me!"
The pointed man in black looked flustered, retreating in terror. He didn't understand the rules and had no clue what was happening, but he sensed that Young Master Liu was trying to get him killed.
The headless entity strode toward the man in black. "So it was with you. Hurry up and return it to me."
While saying "return it to me," it immediately resorted to snatching it.

With a palm as broad as a cattail fan, it grabbed the fleeing man, forced his head down, and twisted it, cleanly snapping it off.
The other two men in black suddenly turned and bolted. They finally realized that even if the headless entity didn't kill them, Liu Zhongjun would eventually trick them to death.
Liu Zhongjun did not run; he stood his ground steadily off to the side.
The headless entity cradled a bloody head and mounted it onto its own neck.

That head still bore the frozen expression of fear the man in black had worn before death, looking utterly wretched.
The moment the head made contact with the headless entity's neck, a bizarre phenomenon occurred.
Countless slender, fleshy tendrils suddenly sprouted, establishing a connection with the head.
Previously, its eyes had been wide open in death with lingering resentment, but the very next instant, the eyeballs rolled and regained their vitality, and a voice issued from its mouth.
"This isn't my head. Even though you found the wrong one, you still helped out, so I'll let you off this once!"

Having said this to Liu Zhongjun, the headless entity turned its gaze toward the two fleeing men. "They didn't help me. They deserve to die."
With that, it took large strides and gave chase.
The two men in black had already sprinted out of the warehouse, but before they could clear the courtyard of the warehouse company, the headless entity caught up to them.
It promptly wrung off both of their heads, devoured their bodies, and finally strung their heads together with a rope, hanging them around its waist.
This fellow seemed to have a hobby of collecting heads.

Back in the warehouse, Liu Zhongjun was deep in thought, trying to devise a countermeasure. Continuing like this was definitely not an option.
He understood the death rules of most sealed entities, seeing as it was his Liu family that had sealed them one by one over the course of a thousand years.
It was precisely because of this understanding that he knew how perilous the situation was.

While Liu Zhongjun was deep in thought, two more entities broke their seals and emerged in succession.
Fortunately, those two were relatively easy to deal with, and he managed to escape with his life both times.
However, the one that broke its seal next was the Hanged Entity.
The moment Liu Zhongjun laid eyes on it, his entire body tensed up, and the shadow of death instantly gripped his heart.

The death rule of the Hanged Entity was very simple.
It would invite you to hang yourself alongside it. If you refused, it would hang you to death directly.
If you agreed, it would conjure three identical ropes out of thin air and let you choose one.
Each rope represented a different hanging duration: five minutes, ten minutes, and fifteen minutes.
A normal human would die after four to six minutes of oxygen deprivation. Five minutes was right on the borderline—you might die, or you might survive. Even if you survived, it would cause severe brain damage.
Therefore, even if one were extremely fortunate and selected the rope representing the shortest duration, the probability of death remained extremely high.
This was a death rule that tested both sheer luck and breath-holding endurance.

"Little brother, keep me company..."
The voice of the Hanged Entity was soft, delicate, and exceedingly pleasant to the ear.
It had wanted to say, "Won't you keep company and hang yourself with me?", but unfortunately, before it could finish speaking, Liu Zhongjun vanished from the spot with a whoosh.
This was not teleportation; rather, his physical body had drilled into the chessboard space.

As the master of the Seal-Guarding Chessboard, Liu Zhongjun could enter with his consciousness, which naturally meant he could also enter with his physical body.
It was just that entering with his physical body was extremely hazardous.
Under the constraints of the rules, unless he killed or sealed Xia Tianqiong, his physical body would be unable to leave the chessboard space either.
This was why he had always sent in only his consciousness previously and never dared to bring his physical body in lightly.
Yet, failing to enter now was not an option; otherwise, he would be hanged to death by the Hanged Entity.

Meanwhile, somewhere amidst the desert, Xia Tianqiong was leading the orange cat in search of the next entity.
Suddenly, the orange cat halted, turning its head to look to the right.
"Meow!"
"What? The person wearing the white suit has appeared?"

Xia Tianqiong was immensely surprised. Earlier, when he had the orange cat search for Liu Zhongjun's true body, it hadn't been able to sense anything. Why had it suddenly picked up the trace now?
No matter; since he had been found, he would go catch him.
Picking up the orange cat, he instructed it to point a direction. Xia Tianqiong immediately executed a Shadow Teleport, and whenever there were no shadows around, he used the Heaven-Connecting Rope.
This made traveling at high speed much easier.

Five or six minutes later, he returned to the forest where they had first appeared.
From afar, he spotted Liu Zhongjun stepping on the Head-Entity and flying off into the distance.
Liu Zhongjun had long since sensed that Xia Tianqiong was pursuing him and had been fleeing all the while.
However, the speed of the Head-Entity paled in comparison to Shadow Teleport and the Heaven-Connecting Rope; eventually, he was caught up to.

"Friend, shall we talk this over?"
Seeing Xia Tianqiong swinging over from the sky via the Heaven-Connecting Rope and closing in by the second, Liu Zhongjun finally panicked.
"What is there to talk about?"
Xia Tianqiong sensed that this man's demeanor was amiss; the arrogance of preferring self-detonation to admitting defeat was gone.
Instead, he looked rather flustered.

A thought struck him, and he probed, "You never used your true body before, which is why you dared to detonate yourself. Now that your true body is here, you're afraid to die, aren't you?"
As soon as those words were spoken, the panic in Liu Zhongjun's eyes became even more pronounced, a reaction instantly captured by Xia Tianqiong.
He continued probing, "Why did your physical body come in? Is it because I broke the seals and caused the entities to escape, forcing you to come in and stop me?"

Liu Zhongjun nodded hastily. "The entities you released pose a grave threat to society. Though you and I have our grievances, we shouldn't drag innocent people into this. That's why I came to talk to you. We can consider ourselves acquaintances through conflict—there's no need to drag this out. How about we call a truce and shake hands?"
"Heh, do you really think I'd believe your words?"
Xia Tianqiong stared fixedly at Liu Zhongjun's face, observing his every micro-expression.

"The Hanged Entity was just released by me, and your true body appeared right after. Isn't that a bit too coincidental? I'm guessing your true body was outside before and only came in because it felt threatened, am I right?
When the zombie entity escaped, you should have known that I mastered the method to break the seals. Logically speaking, to prevent me from breaking more seals, you should have just let me out.
Yet you didn't do that, which implies you have no way of letting me out either. This must be tied to some sort of rule.
And now that you've been caught by me and your life is threatened, you still haven't left this space immediately. Obviously, you're just like me—once your physical body enters, you can't simply leave as you please."

As Xia Tianqiong laid out his deduction step by step, Liu Zhongjun stood dumbfounded, his complexion turning uglier by the second.
The reasoning was completely flawless!
He truly hadn't checked the almanac before going out today; how on earth had he managed to provoke such a freak?
"Everything you're saying is completely groundless. If you want to leave this place, you must listen to me, otherwise you'll be trapped here until you die."

Liu Zhongjun still stubbornly refused to admit it, gambling that the other party could not guess the method of escape!
To his surprise, the moment he finished speaking, he saw Xia Tianqiong smile faintly.
"I've seen plenty of similar rules. Wanting to leave isn't actually that difficult, is it?"