"You really think I'm stupid?" Su Kun glanced at him sideways and snorted. "Haven't you heard that you can't judge a book by its cover?"

"I have. When I first met you, I deeply realized the essence of this saying," the master nodded and said, "Because you actually look quite clever."

Su Kun: "..." Someone please kick this old man out!

"Master, you must be hiding something from me. Every time you mention your junior fellow apprentice and that fatuous emperor in front of me, you always look very awkward. I can see that!" Su Kun narrowed his eyes and poked the master's waist with a finger.

"Pei!" The master deflated, jumped back angrily and shouted, "How dare you!"

Su Kun: "Feeling guilty, huh? Deliberately raising your voice to bluff..."

The master, whose thoughts had been seen through: "..."

Xiang Ge, who had been quietly observing from the side, twitched his mouth: "..." Great, another quail. The three lined up beside him, regardless of age, all had worrying emotional intelligence. Even Geng Zimo could barely be considered okay.

Seeing the master's look of "No matter what, I'm not telling you anything!", Su Kun felt very aggrieved. But staring and asking wouldn't get him anywhere, so he had to change the subject. Pointing to the door of the ICU, he said, "That Zhang Yi inside, are you confident he can recover?"

The master glanced at him, then turned to Xiang Ge and said, "Fortunately, your employee was possessed by that evil spirit for a short time. From what I see, that spirit had probably just occupied his body for a little while before being severely rejected, so it fled. Plus, he himself is also a tough one, so I have stabilized his soul and his life is not in danger."

Xiang Ge knew that since the master said this, there must be a twist. So he didn't interrupt and continued waiting for the master to speak.

Sure enough, the master glanced at the ward door and continued, "It's just that the evil spirit had been around for quite some time after all, so the yin energy and resentment on it are too heavy. There is still some lingering impact on your employee's body, which I can't eliminate in a short time. He'll have to recuperate slowly on his own.

"But this isn't a big deal. When he wakes up, his condition will be similar to having a cold - feeling dazed, weak all over, tasteless mouth, and prone to drowsiness. This state will last for at least one to two months, or up to one to two years. It will have some impact on his daily work, but nothing major."

"Okay, thank you for your help." After hearing the master explain the full situation, Xiang Ge nodded and said, "I will have someone temporarily transfer him to a less busy department and move him back to his original position after he recovers. After all, this happened in the company dorm, so we won't let him lose his job due to his subsequent condition."

The master stroked his beard, looking quite approving of Xiang Ge's approach.

"Saving a life is the best outcome." Su Kun hurriedly took the opportunity to flatter the master, "Master, you are indeed a true expert!"

The master looked very pleased.

"Experts are often magnanimous, not petty, have a chivalrous spirit, and will kindly answer juniors' sincere questions-" Su Kun said in a fawning manner, "So please tell me what you've been hiding from me!"

"..." After a few seconds of silence, the master turned his face, "I happen to be one of the few petty ones."

Refusing both soft and hard tactics, bad review! QAQ

Su Kun persisted in pestering him a few more times, making the master so annoyed that he couldn't help sighing, "Ah- you brat! I have my reasons for not telling you. The main thing is that it's all in the past now. The impact it should have had, it already had. The results it should have caused have all happened. You're living a stable life now, everything is going smoothly for you, so why insist on making trouble for yourself?"

Xiang Ge: "..." This will only make Su Kun even more curious, and won't achieve anything else. =_=

Because the emotional intelligence of this old man and young guy was really beyond criticism, the boss Xiang Ge, after taking a call, took Geng Zimo and said goodbye to the two, "Sorry, there are media and paparazzi outside. They've been blocking for over an hour and can't hold out much longer. I'll go resolve it, please excuse me." With that, he hurried across the corridor and turned out.

Geng Zimo didn't really want to leave. He dragged his feet and took forever to turn the corner, probably still hoping to hear some gossip. In the end, the boss, who had walked to the corner and looked back, grabbed his wrist and pulled him out.

So in this small corridor outside the ICU, only the anxious Su Kun and the equally anxious master remained.

The reason for Su Kun's anxiety was simple. As Xiang Ge had thought, the master's words not only failed to calm his bouncing curiosity, but made him even more eager to know what the matter was.

He mulled over the master's words in his mind again and again, going over them several times, and felt that there was a lot of information-

First, the master basically admitted that he was indeed hiding something from Su Kun.

Second, the master said that the matter had already passed, meaning it was not something that happened now or recently. Thinking back, the master had been acting strangely for more than a day or two.

The first time he met him, the master's reaction was abnormal, as was Granny Camphor Tree's. Although they had explained before, and he had temporarily accepted their story, it was only temporary, because at the time there was no good way to refute what they said. Now it seemed that they probably didn't lie, but definitely didn't tell the whole story.

In that case, did this happen even earlier? But he didn't know the master and the others at all back then...

Moreover, the master said that the impact it should have had and the results it should have caused had all already happened, which meant that it was definitely not a pleasant matter and had led to some bad consequences.

Su Kun twitched his mouth. He had never been so logical even when writing argumentative essays in middle school. But if the master wouldn't speak, there was nothing he could do except feel more and more itchy at heart the more he thought about it.

As for the master's anxiety, it was for another reason-

He checked the time on his phone. It had been over half an hour since he called Granny Camphor Tree and Mo Bao. The high-speed rail from Li City to H City took only an hour and a half. If they drove that broken van over, it would definitely be much faster than the high-speed rail. They had probably arrived for quite some time by now.

According to their usual habits, they would only contact and provide an update on the situation when things were mostly resolved. Unless they encountered something unexpected, they rarely called to inform anyone during the process. By now, those two had probably already led a group of lesser demons recruited from who knows where, and were wandering around H City. Who knows what they might have discovered or how many fights they had already been in.

As for Gu Yan, who had been guarding near the base camp of the evil spirits all along, he had already devoured several appetizers.

Among the group, he was the only one idle here, unable to do anything. For a master who lived an exciting life dealing with ghosts and demons every day, this situation was really making his hands a bit itchy.

However, the old man was still the old man after all. Compared to Su Kun, he only scratched for a while before self-regulating and self-soothing, calming down again.

His method of self-regulation was very simple - just think of someone more miserable than himself - a certain boss deep in the spirit mountains, enduring successive blasts of mysterious thunder, who had cultivated three lovers.

Just as these two were sitting on the bench in the hospital corridor, each pondering their own thoughts, in a narrow alley on the north street of Huiwen Building in the west of H City, Gu Yan in his ghost state ran into two other ferocious and resentful evil spirits.

Previously, after sending the paper crane to the masters, he remained cautious and continued to investigate the situation around the lairs of those evil spirits.

He patrolled back and forth several times between Huiwen Building and that old residential area, keeping an eye on the movements of the evil spirits in the lair while sweeping up the stragglers in the surrounding area.

Those evil spirits were far more troublesome than he had imagined. Except for the one that had possessed someone earlier, even though the others had existed for a long time, they did not date back to the Qin and Han dynasties. Among the remaining ones he saw, the oldest few were dressed in styles tending towards the Tang and Song dynasties, but their cultivation levels were not low.

Fighting such evil spirits one-on-one was not difficult for Gu Yan, but dealing with such a large group while preventing them from escaping and rampaging in the city during the fight was challenging. This was definitely not something he could properly resolve by relying on his strength alone.

But none of this was the most troublesome part. What Gu Yan found most problematic was the formation that had gathered these evil spirits together in this abandoned old residential area.

Judging from the state of those ghosts and Gu Yan's own feeling when approaching, this formation had a special attraction for spirits on one hand, causing the surrounding spirits to involuntarily want to gather towards the center of the formation.

On the other hand, it seemed to also have a certain suppressive effect on these spirits. Whenever Gu Yan got a little closer, he felt a force pulling him to drift into the formation, while at the same time, another force was pressing down on his shoulders and dragging his legs downward, as if he was carrying a heavy sack.

Moreover, the spirits within that formation all seemed a bit listless, with quite a few of them even too lazy to move, just huddling together in a jumbled mass.

Gu Yan actually couldn't quite figure out whether the person who created this formation deliberately produced this effect or if it was unintentional. If it was deliberate, then what was the purpose of creating such a formation?

He had been wandering around this place for a long time, but had not seen any suspicious figures resembling the masters' junior brother appear in this old residential area. He also wanted to get closer to see if the formation would have any less obvious effects on that group of evil spirits. However, he couldn't do that for now, because he was also a ghost, just like those drawn into the formation.

This formation worked on those guys, which meant it was equally applicable to him.

So he could only maintain the best safe distance, steadily circling around the edge of the entire formation over and over again.

This realization made Gu Yan feel a bit impatient and slightly irritated inside. This spelled misery for those spirits who directly ran into Gu Yan and delivered themselves to be abused.

And right now, there just so happened to be two.

The clothes worn by those two ferocious ghosts tended towards the common styles of the Song Dynasty. They were shrouded in dark miasma and resentment, and a pungent smell of blood and a strange odor similar to the possessing evil spirit from before assaulted the senses upon approach, extremely unpleasant. Their cultivation was definitely not low, but still far inferior compared to the one from the Qin and Han period.

Even that one was dealt with by Gu Yan, let alone these two.

If it took Gu Yan quite some time to handle that Qin and Han evil spirit from before, then this time, the two combined probably wouldn't even take half as long as the previous one.

Gu Yan looked at the two evil spirits with a deadpan face, his eyes showing no sense of threat, and then, before they could raise their hands, he flashed between the two spirits at a speed that left no time to react. His hands spread out like eagle claws with a heart-gouging and lung-ripping ferocity and ruthlessness, instantly tearing open half of the bodies of those two evil spirits.

Shrill and unwilling screams squeezed out from the throats of those two evil spirits, like wringing water from a towel, going from high to low, from strong to weak, until finally, there were only intermittent, painful gasps left.

Gu Yan flipped his hands, and the two severed arms he had torn off turned into countless black fragments and mist, eagerly surging into the meridians between his wrists in strands.

Unlike humans, even with half their bodies torn off, those two could still move, just unable to balance, so they ran in a stumbling manner, their expressions pained and movements chaotic. They probably also knew they had provoked someone not to be trifled with, so they turned their heads and wanted to pass through the walls of the narrow alley, taking twists and turns to shake off Gu Yan.

However, Gu Yan didn't give them this chance at all. Just as they crashed towards the moss-covered wall, he once again lunged forward at an extremely fast speed, his hands digging right into their backs from behind. Thus, these two ghost spirits, just like the female ghost in the hospital hall before, were smoothly slurped into Gu Yan's body.