bookbashuk Chapter 1076 does not exist.
Chapter 1076 does not exist.
Su Wanwan walked behind the white wolf, its five tails trailing behind, the tips drawing shallow furrows in the sand. For the past few days, she had been pondering the cockroach's words—"Next time, it won't just be the two of us." She had thought about it for three days, but couldn't figure out exactly how many "not just the two of us" meant. Two? Five? Ten? A hundred? She didn't know. But she knew one thing—the thing behind the powerful demons like the cockroach and the grub was definitely far stronger than them, capable of making them willingly serve as pawns.
She wanted to ask Chu Yang, but he had been very quiet these past few days. It wasn't that he was deliberately silent; walking was too strenuous, and even talking in the desert consumed water, so everyone was trying to speak as little as possible. Even Sun Wukong had become much quieter; he had transformed his golden cudgel into a short stick and tucked it behind his waist to avoid carrying it on his shoulder and getting it scorching hot in the sun. He walked at the very front of the group, his feet never touching the sand, leaving only a shallow imprint on the surface, like a leaf fallen in the desert, easily blown away by the wind.
Tang Sanzang rode on the white dragon horse, holding a water pouch, feeding it a sip of water every now and then. The white dragon horse itself wasn't having any major problems; after all, it was a dragon, and the desert was no challenge for it. But Tang Sanzang felt sorry for it, so he fed it water twice as often as he did the white donkey. The white donkey noticed the difference, but it didn't protest. It just gave Tang Sanzang a look of world-weariness before continuing to walk with its head down.
On the fourth day at noon, the wind picked up in the desert.
It wasn't a gentle breeze carrying the scent of jujube blossoms; it was a dry, scorching wind, like a blast of hot air from an oven. The wind came from the west, carrying fine sand that stung their faces like needles. Su Wanwan pulled her sleeves up, covering half her face, leaving only her eyes visible. The white wolf tucked its ears behind its head, squinting and using its eyelashes to shield its eyes from the sand. The white donkey buried its head behind Chu Yang's legs, curling into a ball of grayish-white fur.
Chu Yang stood in the wind, his robes fluttering wildly, his hair half-undone and dancing in the breeze. He didn't squint or cover his face; he just stood there, gazing at the western horizon. What he was looking at wasn't the wind itself, but the scent within it.
There's an eerie feeling in the wind.
It wasn't just one demon, but many. Their scents mingled with the hot wind, like a mixed stew—some fishy, some foul, some sweet, some sour, some so thick they were almost imperceptible, others so faint they were barely odorous. They came from the west, from the depths of the desert, from behind those sand dunes that Su Wanwan couldn't see, like an impending sandstorm. It hadn't arrived yet, but the air was already thick with a suffocating, oppressive feeling.
Sun Wukong sensed it too. He reached behind his waist and grasped the golden cudgel. The cudgel lengthened in his hand, transforming from a short stick into a long one, then into a staff that reached his eyebrows, finally stopping at his preferred length. He didn't speak, but his expression gave the answer—the accumulated silence of the past few days was finally about to be released.
Tang Sanzang dismounted from the white dragon horse and handed the reins to Su Wanwan. He glanced at her, his eyes filled with entrustment, trust, and a hint of "if things go wrong, take the white wolf and the white donkey and go first." Su Wanwan understood the meaning, but she pretended not to, took the reins, and gripped them tightly.
On the western horizon, the sand began to dance.
It wasn't the kind of dance caused by the wind. Something was moving beneath the sand, creating ripples on the surface, like waves on water, but faster and more erratic. The ripples spread from the west, getting closer and closer, until eventually the entire desert seemed to be boiling, churning, rolling, and making that chilling rustling sound everywhere.
Then, the sand cracked.
The first creature to emerge from the sand was a sand python, its body a dull yellowish-brown, as thick as a bucket, and so long that its head was hidden from view, as its hindquarters remained buried. Its head was covered in rows of backward-curving scales, like armor, encasing its entire skull. Its amber eyes, with vertical pupils, shrank to slits in the sunlight. Its mouth opened, revealing four rows of inward-curving teeth, each as long as a finger, hooked like barbs. Anything bitten would only struggle deeper into the jaws, never able to escape.
The second thing to emerge was a humanoid creature, which Su Wanwan couldn't quite describe. It had a human body, but its limbs were disproportionate—its arms were too long, its fingers touching its knees when hanging down; its legs were too short, completely mismatched with its upper body; its head was triangular, like a snake's head, but topped with a tuft of grayish-white, withered hair. Its skin was grayish-green, covered with large and small wart-like protrusions, each tipped with a tiny, needle-like thorn. It wasn't wearing clothes, but its body was covered with a thin layer of mucus that shimmered in the sunlight, like something that had just crawled out of the water.
The third, the fourth, the fifth… Su Wanwan couldn't count them all. There were too many. They emerged from the sand, from behind the dunes, and from the heatwave, like the embodiment of a nightmare. There were sand foxes with wings, lizards with six claws, a shapeless, ever-changing black mist, spiders with human faces, and people with spider legs. Their lifespans ranged from hundreds to thousands of years, varying greatly, but their numbers were despairing.
The cockroach and the cricket walked at the very back.
The cockroach was still wearing the same black robe, but the dark red patterns on it were brighter than before, as if blood flowed within the lines. His hair was no longer gray-white, but pure white, like snow, like frost, like a color that only appears in extremely cold places. His eyes had changed too—the yellowish light had disappeared, replaced by two pure black, non-reflective pupils, like black holes. There was nothing inside, nothing could be seen, but when Su Wanwan was swept over by those eyes, she felt as if her soul was being sucked in.
The grub was a whole size bigger than before. Its body had swelled up, its muscles bulging out from under its short jacket, stretching the clothes taut, and the gaps between its scales were widened, revealing tender pink flesh underneath. It had more fingers, from three to five, each twice as thick as before, and the suckers at the tips of its fingers had also grown larger. The spines in the center of the suckers had increased from one to three, like three steel needles growing side by side.
The grub looked at Chu Yang and grinned. His jawbone clicked several times; this time it wasn't a dislocation, but rather the joint stretching—his mouth opened behind his ears, revealing all his teeth, densely packed like two rows of small saws.
"I told you, next time, it won't just be the two of us." The cockroach's voice came from the desert wind, neither too loud nor too soft, but clear and distinct.
Sun Wukong took the golden cudgel off his shoulder, gripped it with both hands, and held it horizontally in front of him. His eyes lit up—not with reflected light, but with their own, golden light, like two lamps, still dazzlingly bright under the desert sun. His fur fluttered in the wind, each strand glowing, golden light emanating from the roots, enveloping his entire body in a soft halo.
"I, Old Sun, have been waiting for you for a long time," he said.
The cockroach raised its right hand, its index and middle fingers together, and drew a circle in the air. The same action as before, but this time, after the circle was drawn, the entire desert fell silent for a moment.
In that instant, the wind stopped. The grains of sand hung motionless in mid-air. The heat wave froze. Time seemed to have been paused.
Then, all the monsters moved at the same time.
Su Wanwan had never witnessed such a scene in her life. It wasn't a fight, it was a massacre. It wasn't monsters slaughtering them, it was them slaughtering monsters. Sun Wukong's golden cudgel drew a circle in the air, and everything within that circle—the sand python's head, the spider's legs, the lizard's tail, a third of the black mist—was swept into fragments. Not just knocked away, but shattered into pieces. Those fragments floated in the air for a moment, then turned into black smoke and dissipated in the wind. Sun Wukong stood in the center of the fragments and smoke, his golden cudgel held horizontally in front of him, its surface covered in liquids of various colors—red, green, yellow, black—the owners of those liquids had been alive just moments before.
Chu Yang didn't use a weapon. His weapon was his hand. A winged sand fox swooped down from the sky, its claws reaching for his head. Chu Yang didn't look up; his left hand flipped upwards, the heel of his palm supporting the sand fox's chin, while his right hand's five fingers were joined together, the fingertips touching the sand fox's chest. The sand fox's body froze in mid-air, as if nailed to the ground by something, and then its body began to disintegrate from the inside—not explode, but disintegrate. Like a sand sculpture being washed away by water, starting from the chest, it spread outwards in concentric circles, first the ribs, then the spine, then the limbs, and finally the head. The whole process took less than a breath; the sand fox didn't even have time to utter a cry before it turned into a pool of slightly twitching fragments scattered on the sand.
The white wolf stood guard beside Su Wanwan, its jaws clamped onto the neck of a gerbil that had emerged from the sand. The gerbil was twice the size of the wolf, but the wolf's teeth were lodged in its most vulnerable spot in its throat. No matter how the gerbil struggled, shook its head, or scratched the wolf's face, the wolf wouldn't let go. Its mouth was torn, blood trickling down its white fur, dripping a string of dark red dots onto the sand, but it didn't release its grip. Its pale blue eyes were fixed on the gerbil's throat, its teeth sinking deeper and deeper until finally, the gerbil's struggles slowed and then stopped.
The white wolf released its mouth, took a few breaths, licked the blood from the corner of its mouth, turned around, stood in front of Su Wanwan, and continued to guard her.
Su Wanwan didn't make a move. It wasn't that she didn't want to, but that she couldn't. She was waiting. Waiting for the one who truly needed her intervention to appear. The cockroach and the grub remained motionless, standing on the outermost edge of the battlefield like spectators, watching their lesser demons being eliminated one by one by Sun Wukong and Chu Yang. The cockroach's expression remained unchanged, but the grub's mouth stretched wider and wider, as if watching a spectacular performance, each death of a lesser demon fueling his excitement.
The cockroach finally moved.
He didn't go to Sun Wukong, nor to Chu Yang; he went to Tang Sanzang.
His steps were slow, even deliberate, yet no one present—including Sun Wukong—not noticed his movement. Not because he was fast, but because he had "disappeared." His presence vanished from the battlefield—not merely receded, but completely disappeared. Su Wanwan's tail could no longer sense him, her nose could no longer smell him, her eyes saw him standing there, but all her senses told her: there was no one there, nothing there, it was empty.
This is the cockroach's true ability. It's not invisibility, not stealth, it's "non-existence." In the perception of its opponent, it has never appeared. It can stand in front of you, reach out and pluck your heart, and your body will not react at all, because your sensory system has not received its signal.
Tang Sanzang sensed it.
It wasn't his eyes that told him, nor his ears, nor his nose; it was his heart. Without him even realizing it, his heart skipped a beat, as if someone had struck a drum in his chest. That sudden jump made him instinctively veer half an inch to the left.
The cockroach's hand passed through his right chest.
It wasn't a penetration, it was a slash. The cockroach's five fingers—no, claws—transformed into claws the instant they touched Tang Sanzang's body. Black, sharp, blade-like claws—slashed from Tang Sanzang's right chest to his right shoulder, leaving five long gashes on his robe. The monk's robe beneath was also torn, revealing skin underneath. Five shallow white marks appeared on the skin, without bleeding, but clearly visible in the sunlight, like five parallel small snakes crawling on Tang Sanzang's right chest and right shoulder.
The cockroach's expression finally changed. Not with surprise, but with confirmation. He confirmed one thing—something was protecting the monk. Not a magical artifact, not a spell, but something more fundamental, something bound to the monk's life. That thing sprang out just as he was about to harm the monk, deflecting his claws and leaving only five white marks.
The cockroach wanted to retreat, but it couldn't.
Sun Wukong's golden cudgel had already come crashing down.
At the last second, the cockroach dodged to the side, and the golden cudgel grazed his left shoulder before slamming into the sand. The moment the cudgel struck the sand, the ground shook violently, and a crater three zhang in diameter exploded in the sand, centered on the tip of the cudgel. Sand flew outwards like water droplets, splashing all over the cockroach.
The cockroach's left shoulder was struck by the blow. It was just a sweep, but all the bones in his left arm, from shoulder to elbow, shattered. Not broken, but shattered. Shattered into countless tiny bone fragments, like shards of glass embedded in the muscle. His left arm hung limply at his side, like a wrung-out towel, utterly unsupported. (End of Chapter)