Yu Daohan listened, utterly confused: "Did you encounter standing corpses?"
Su Lai slowly shook his head. "If it were just simple standing corpses, there would still be a chance to retrieve them. But there are more below."
Before Su Lai could finish, Zhu Futing and Ma Meiling walked over.
"Master, what's down there?" Ma Meiling asked Su Lai.
Su Lai looked at Ma Meiling, his expression becoming grave. He tightened his grip on the wooden stick.
Yu Daohan also sensed Su Lai's sudden tension and instinctively reached for the Kang Long Jian at his lower back.
"Master, what exactly is the situation below?" Zhu Futing asked, growing anxious.
Su Lai immediately dropped his serious expression and shook his head. "Today is not a good day to deal with water. We can only retrieve it tomorrow."
Hearing Su Lai say this, Zhu Futing felt relieved. "Since Master says we can't retrieve it today, we'll have to wait until tomorrow."
Zhu Futing knew that rushing such matters was useless; they could only wait.
"Then, Master, please be sure to retrieve my son." Ma Meiling urged, tears already welling up in her eyes.
Zhu Futing, seeing Ma Meiling's emotional state, comforted her. "Meiling, it's hard for anyone when a son is gone. Master said we'll retrieve him tomorrow."
Ma Meiling nodded. "Then we'll trouble you, Master."
"This is my duty, and I will do my utmost," Su Lai replied.
Watching Zhu Futing and Ma Meiling leave and eventually disappear from sight, Su Lai finally breathed a sigh of relief.
"Su Ge, what exactly is at the bottom of this fishpond that scares you so much?"
Yu Daohan was puzzled. With Su Lai's strength, what kind of evil entity hadn't he encountered? Why was he so terrified today?
"Dead bodies!"
After a long pause, Su Lai finally uttered two words.
Yu Daohan was speechless. Of course, he knew there were dead bodies.
Before Yu Daohan could speak, Su Lai continued, "More than two hundred dead bodies!!"
"More than two hundred dead bodies!?" Yu Daohan repeated in disbelief.
Even Zhou Fu beside them was shocked, unable to believe his ears.
"Su Ge, you're not joking, are you? Or did you misjudge?" Yu Daohan didn't believe it at all.
More than two hundred bodies – what kind of concept was that? Even two hundred pigs would be astonishing, let alone two hundred bodies.
Su Lai became agitated. "Do I look like I'm joking? My eyesight is so good that if a fish swims past my eyes, I know what kind of fish it is. Let alone living people."
Zhou Fu looked at Su Ge. "I'll go down myself and see what's happening."
Yu Daohan didn't disbelieve Su Lai, but this was simply unimaginable. Even a top expert from the Black Ranking wouldn't have witnessed such a scene.
Before Zhou Fu could stop him, Yu Daohan had already dived into the water.
While Yu Daohan's swimming skills weren't as professional as Su Lai's, they weren't too bad.
As Yu Daohan swam deeper, the visibility in the water was worse than above, but he could still see the situation clearly.
As he neared the bottom, Yu Daohan saw countless figures standing densely. Upon closer inspection, they were indeed corpses standing on the ground. Some of the bodies were already badly decomposed and emitted a dark aura.
"What terrifying things are being kept here!!"
Yu Daohan's heart pounded with extreme tension. He looked at the corpses below in disbelief, his hand instinctively reaching for the Kang Long Jian at his lower back.
Just as Yu Daohan was about to approach for a closer look, he saw the corpses turning their heads and smiling eerily at him.
Their rotten mouths revealed rows of black teeth, sending shivers down his spine.
Yu Daohan swallowed hard. The oppressive feeling was more terrifying than a three-thousand-year-old great demon. His body instinctively propelled him upwards.
Breaking the surface, Yu Daohan gasped for fresh air and then quickly swam towards the shore.
Zhou Fu pulled Yu Daohan ashore. Yu Daohan sat down on the ground, panting heavily. His body couldn't stop trembling. Even as the top-ranked expert on the Earth Ranking, he had never witnessed such a scene.
"This is not something we can handle," Yu Daohan shook his head.
Su Lai didn't reply but asked instead, "Yu Ye, do you think Ma Meiling killed these people?"
Yu Daohan shook his head, denying it. "Impossible. How could Ma Meiling, a woman, kill so many people? Even if she were from the martial world, she couldn't kill over two hundred people at once. It would take considerable effort to kill two hundred pigs."
Su Lai nodded. He had the same thought. Although he didn't know who the masked man in black was last night, it definitely wasn't Ma Meiling or the masked man. The former was a woman, and the latter was injured by Yu Daohan with a chopstick. Someone with such strength wouldn't be injured by a chopstick thrown by Yu Daohan.
"What do we do now?" Yu Daohan asked.
"Let's abandon this task. The difficulty is too high," Su Lai shook his head. This was beyond their control.
Yu Daohan nodded. They couldn't risk their lives for money. The corpses below had all undergone corpse transformation and gained malevolent energy. If this were on land, it might be manageable, but in the water, even the top-ranked expert on the Heaven Ranking might not be able to resolve it.
"Su Ge, why don't we leave tomorrow? Let's stay here tonight," Yu Daohan said, looking at Su Lai, who was smoking a cigarette.
Su Lai understood Yu Daohan's meaning and smiled. "Honestly, I was thinking the same thing."
Truthfully, Su Lai was very curious about who the person was that had killed over two hundred people.
Yu Daohan grinned. Although he hadn't fully recovered from his shock, this also made him curious about who this formidable figure was.