Those eyes were like sothing out of a horror film, no matter which angle you viewed them from, they radiated a heavy malice.
Even though he felt no negative emotion at all, seeing the Palace Master’s appearance inevitably brought words like sinister, wicked, and fiendish to mind.
“This look might be fine for fighting, but if I had to use it in daily life, I’d definitely need sunglasses.”
He carefully studied the Palace Master’s appearance, when he suddenly felt sothing odd in his chest.
He quickly pulled open his robes to look and found, over the skin of his heart, a black tattoo.
The tattoo depicted the branches and leaves of so plant. They looked a little withered and twisted around each other, as though wrapping around sothing.
Suddenly, the black leaves etched in the tattoo shifted slightly, revealing a sliver of the object they enclosed.
Lin Xun jumped in surprise. He then leaned closer to study it carefully.
The thing wrapped inside only showed a faint outline, but it seed to be a teardrop-shaped object… sothing like a flower bud?
“What the hell is this thing?!”
He quickly dispelled the shell materialization, returning to his original appearance.
After taking off his T-shirt to check again, there was nothing unusual on his chest.
A thought rose in Lin Xun’s mind, he would materialize the other shells to see.
Among the other shells, only those with the Fire-Worshipping prefix had similar tattoos on their chests.
Shells like the President, the Earth Giant, and the Little Dragonkin showed no abnormalities.
Compared to the Palace Master, the other Fire-Worshipping shells had tattoos that were clearly smaller in area and not as strikingly black.
After observing the Master Instructor, Chunin, Courtesan, and Vermillion Envoy shells, Lin Xun ca to a conclusion.
The stronger the shell, the more vivid the tattoo appeared, and the thicker the branches.
In shells like the Courtesan and the Envoy, the tattoo was so small and faint that if Lin Xun hadn’t deliberately looked for it, he could have easily overlooked it.
And in all these shells, the tattoo’s branches and leaves were withered to varying degrees.
The most withered was the Envoy shell, followed by the Chunin shell… The Palace Master’s shell had the most luxuriant branches.
Lin Xun speculated that the tattoo’s branches would gradually wither over ti as he possessed a shell longer.
Among all the shells, only the Palace Master’s tattoo had grown sothing like a ‘flower bud.’
The other shells probably lacked enough nourishnt in their branches to generate a ‘bud,’ and with their gradual withering, it was likely they never would.
As for whether the Origin-Tracing shells had branch tattoos, Lin Xun had yet to obtain such a shell and could not say.
He thought for a while, then suddenly had a flash of inspiration.
“…Even if I don’t have an Origin-Tracing shell, I do have the Snow Woman.”
The yokai Snow Woman bore the Origin-Tracing prefix, making her a proper Origin-Tracing shell.
With that thought, Lin Xun once again possessed the Palace Master shell and summoned the shikigami Snow Woman in the real world.
It was worth noting that summoning and recalling a shikigami both required him to be in the Palace Master shell.
If he abandoned the Palace Master shell, it would an giving up the shikigami that belonged to it.
Relying on the shell’s residual mory, Lin Xun shook the Purifying Wand in one hand, ford a seal with the other, and chanted an obscure incantation in a strange, guttural pronunciation.
Very soon, a graceful figure materialized in the bathroom.
The snow-white kimono outlined the woman’s ample chest and slender waist, while her long ice-blue hair draped to her hips. Her deep blue eyes were filled with reverence.
The woman showed a ek, obedient deanor. She bowed low and spoke softly. “Dragonborn Lord, what would you have Snow Woman do? Please give your command.”
The language the Snow Woman spoke was unlike any Lin Xun had ever known.
Strangely, he could understand it perfectly, and it felt as familiar as his native Chinese.
It seed the mory lingering in the ga shells wasn’t only related to combat.
“Take off your clothes.”
Lin Xun said it in Chinese first. When he saw her look puzzled, he repeated it in the foreign tongue.
Upon hearing it, the Snow Woman’s pretty face turned red, but she still obediently did as told, rustling out of her pure-white kimono and the undergarnt beneath.
Sure enough, over her full, fair chest was also a black tattoo, with branches just as lush as the Master Instructor’s.
“All right, put them back on.”
“Ah?”
The Snow Woman had been curiously inspecting everything in the bathroom, finding everything she saw fresh and strange. When she heard Lin Xun, she let out a puzzled sound.
She had thought the Dragonborn Lord intended to summon her to warm his bed, and hadn’t expected it to end after only this one step.
She felt a subtle relief mixed with an even subtler trace of regret.
But she still obeyed, picking up her clothes and putting them back on.
“When did the tattoo on your chest appear? Was it there from birth, or did it appear later?”
“Do other yokai have the sa kind of tattoo?”
‘So the Dragonborn Lord just wanted to look at this, not summon to his bed…’
The Snow Woman’s expression grew serious. She solemnly reported everything she knew.
All yokai had this kind of tattoo. The location of the tattoo was the place where the yokai’s Dragon Embryo power gathered.
When a yokai manifested its true form, the tattoo wouldn’t necessarily be over the heart, but it would always be at the Dragon Embryo’s locus. Its size wouldn’t differ much from when in humanoid form and was easy for people to overlook.
These branch tattoos were not present from birth. Rather, they gradually beca more luxuriant as the Dragon Embryo’s power grew.
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