Lost in the Otherworld

She had just propped Officer Huang and Fat Jun up on the ground when she yelled into the sky, “You useless bum! You owe me new shoes!”

“I got it, hurry up. It’s really about to get away,” Tengu’s voice was still languid, completely devoid of urgency.

White Rabbit quickly crouched, placing both hands on the ground.

"Leap!" With a push of her legs, she shot upward in an instant.

Officer Huang felt a gust of air ripple outward from White Rabbit, so strong he couldn’t open his eyes. When he finally could, she was gone, leaving only two deep footprints and a cracked patch of concrete in the courtyard.

In less than two seconds, White Rabbit had rocketed to a height of a hundred meters.

She had timed her jump perfectly, reaching just the right altitude to meet the skull as it continued its ascent.

"Hello!" she casually greeted the skull, then swung her bat in a flawless overhead strike. “Home run!”

The swing was so forceful that White Rabbit was propelled another two meters upward by the recoil.

Meanwhile, the skull, after taking a heavy blow, plummeted like a meteor, crashing into the center of the dried-up pond in Gujia Village, forming a large muddy crater.

Moments later, the skull slowly floated out of the pit, its cranium cracked and jaw severely dislocated, but it still wasn’t "dead" and tried to escape.

Wu Dahai, standing by the pond, dressed in his ambiguous punk or alternative leather getup, casually brushed his broom-like hair back with both hands and grinned with a flash of confident white teeth.

"The Zodiac's Lightning Rat, ultimate technique—" he leapt two meters into the air, fist aimed at the skull in the mud pit, "Super Thunder Fist!"

In truth, there was no lightning from Wu Dahai's fist; the thunder came from the sky.

To Gao Yang's naked eye, the space around the pond dimmed for half a second before the entire area was engulfed in a web of tiny lightning sparks. They crackled and snapped as they spread toward the pit, and in the next moment, several thick bolts of blue-white lightning, as wide as telephone poles, struck the skull.

“Boom, boom, boom, boom—”

The night sky lit up as bright as day.

When Gao Yang regained his senses, Tengu was already descending slowly to the ground.

He could no longer hold on, his body went limp, and he collapsed with Qing Ling in his arms.

In his fading consciousness, he vaguely heard Wu Dahai’s excited voice growing closer, “It’s done! Wow, there really is a rune circuit on its body!”

“Wu Dahai, next time can you just finish it cleanly? All those flashy poses are giving me a headache,” came White Rabbit’s disdainful remark.

“What do you know? It’s called a sense of ritual!”

"Being a wannabe is a disease—it needs treatment."

"Hey, someone here’s about to die," Tengu’s voice chimed in.

"Let me see, wow... how pitiful!" A little girl's soft voice echoed.

"Guys, there’s another one inside," said a heavily nasal male voice.

"That’s just a mindless beast, forget it," Wu Dahai replied.

"It’s not a beast... It’s my friend... Save... him..." Gao Yang wanted to say more, but his eyelids grew unbearably heavy, and consciousness slipped away.