Chapter 191: Human Porcelain

"Brightly, the blue flowers are swaying in the sky light."

"Vast, the smoke and clouds are vast, the dragon swims..."

The boy whispered the sacrificial chant to the Snake God, walking along the light gray path between the scorched rice fields. This was the road from the highway to Yanglao Village. The first half was straight, and the second half was winding. A simple land temple made of cement bricks sat on the dividing line between the straight and the winding.

Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe knelt down in front of the land temple. The small temple was empty. The land god who was sitting in it last time he came was gone.

The land god of Yanglao Village was called "Taiwei Xiyi Mr. Zhenjun Wuwei Zhenliang Dadi" by Ji Taimei's grandmother. Such land temples were not only on the road into the village, but there were also several in the village. However, Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe remembered the land temple under the old ginkgo tree on the north side of the village most clearly.

"Right, that ginkgo tree..." Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe stood up, patted the grass ash on his knees, and a flash of inspiration flashed in his mind.

For an outsider, Yanglao Village

First, there are a large number of long-lived elderly people in the village who are withered and sickly, yet refuse to die.

Second, on the north side of the village grows an old ginkgo tree that requires over a dozen people to barely encircle.

According to what Ji Taimei's grandmother said before she died, this ginkgo tree was struck by lightning on the day of the Dragon Boat Festival three years ago. At noon that day, the sky was cloudless, when a sudden clap of thunder exploded out of thin air, and a bolt of lightning struck this ginkgo tree squarely.

The thunder ignited a fire, and from that day on, the heart of the ginkgo tree began to burn. The fire in the heart burned the entire trunk hollow from the inside out, and it has been burning for three years, until today.

Recalling the events from back then, Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe felt as if he had found the source of that fire.

"This fire is very strange... even I have been affected by it," Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe whispered to himself.

Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe still remembered how he had just now desperately rushed into the fire, flipped open the almanac, and even summoned the true form of the Serpent God to go head-to-head with the fierce ghosts in the raging fire, to the point of putting himself in peril.

Without scouting, without thinking, without any hesitation, he had rushed straight into the flames like a reckless brute.

This is not something he would do; this is not the style of "Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe." Given Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe's personality, he would never have made such a reckless and impulsive move. He should have stopped the car as soon as he saw the fire from afar on the highway.

Get out of the car, then observe from a distance, collect information from the groaning snakes in the sea of fire and the drivers and passengers caught in the fire on the highway, analyze it, and then decide what to do next—advance slowly, or go back to find Lan Shiwen and invite the Plague God.

Bold yet cautious—that is Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe's style of doing things, not rushing headlong into the flames like a brainless brute.

"Fire can affect a person's emotions, and it also affected my judgment... The moment I saw the flames, I lost most of my reason, rushing forward desperately like a moth to a flame," Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe recalled the situation from before, feeling a chill in his heart.

If it weren't for the Thought Steel Seal that forced him to believe he was "Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe" resisting the assimilation of the flames to a certain extent, he wouldn't even have had the chance to reveal the true form of the Serpent God to struggle in his final moments before being forcibly assimilated into another person by that virus-like fire.

Crack—

It was the sound of something shattering.

The sound came from under his feet. Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe looked down and saw that he had stepped on a piece of broken porcelain that had come from nowhere.

The porcelain was smooth, and its pure white color was outlined with tiny freckles, like a shy girl's cheeks. Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe picked up the porcelain piece he had crushed and saw that it was imprinted with a row of pitch-black, dense eyelashes, and the slightly curved depression beneath the eyelashes looked like... an eye socket.

Yes, an eye socket. Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe took a deep breath, looked far toward Yanglao Village, which had already burned into ruins at the end of the road, and placed the broken porcelain piece with the eyelash print on the ground.

There were more porcelain pieces buried in the ashes by the roadside, as well as some broken bones. Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe silently recited the chant for sacrificing to the Serpent God, patiently picking up the porcelain pieces one by one, shaking off the dust, and placing them on the ground with the logic of assembling a puzzle.

Before long, a white porcelain human face with red lips, white teeth, and a ferocious expression appeared before Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe's eyes.

Although it was reassembled from broken porcelain, this face covered in cracks still looked vivid and lifelike, with lively features; even the angry expression looked like that of a hot-tempered guy with a red face and thick neck.

Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe recognized this face, from the purgatory where the fire burned his body.

"At that time, all the snakes had their features melted by the flames; a great fire burned all their appearances into the same face. Even I was infected by the flames, with my personality and consciousness on the verge of melting."

Melting, assimilation—this is the essence of the fire.

The raging fire is only the external manifestation of this strange event; the meme infection that spreads virally in the form of fire is its inner essence.

All living things that touch the fire will have their personalities melted, their appearances changed, and be assimilated from the inside out into the same person. Finally, they become the appearance before his eyes, fired into pieces of strange porcelain with red lips and white teeth, shattered all over the ground.

"Fortunately, this fire won't be able to burn today at least. Whether it is burning or assimilation, both are violating taboos." Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe stood up and kicked the white porcelain face he had painstakingly assembled into pieces.

Such broken porcelain pieces could be seen everywhere on the wasteland where the fire had receded. Those identical faces might belong to the snakes groaning in the fire, or perhaps to the drivers and passengers stuck on the highway; Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe couldn't be bothered to distinguish them.

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Taking advantage of the fact that there will be no more fire today, Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe needs to make a trip to Yanglao Village as soon as possible.

Approaching the village entrance, lying beneath a charred tree stump was a stone tablet inscribed with the three characters "Yanglao Village." The dark gray stone body had already been cracked by the high temperature, and the character "Lao" (Prison) in Yanglao Village had split in half from the middle.

"..." Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe bypassed the split stone tablet, and what met his eyes was a stretch of gray-white broken walls and ruins.

Most of the houses in Yanglao Village were mud-brick tile houses with timber structures. A great fire had ravaged the load-bearing wooden beams, leaving only a ground full of broken tiles and crumbling walls made of mud. The open-air coffins that were once common in the village had also turned into glowing red charcoal. The gray-white tone was the main theme here, and the upward-swirling heat brought up warm embers, gently brushing against Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe's face.

Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe climbed onto a two-story reinforced concrete building, his gaze sweeping over the faint fire and embers, landing on a conspicuous large tree in the distance.

The remaining fire on the ginkgo tree had not yet gone out. The tree's lush green leaves had been burned away, leaving only a half-section of a hollow, thick tree stump standing in place, occasionally spitting out a spark or two of dry heat.

"That is the source of the fire." Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe frowned, somewhat hesitant about whether he should approach so rashly.

When Ji Taimei took a car into Yanglao Village, his mother had left several instructions in a letter to him, two of which were as follows:

【4. Before they discover you, you must find something as soon as possible, something that can kill 'them.' It is hidden in this village.】

【5. When your grandfather was still alive, the only clue he left was 'the depths.' He hid that thing in the depths of Yanglao Village. That is a place that cannot be reached by human power, but you must reach it, no matter what method you use or what power you borrow.】

"So, what could 'that thing' left to him by Ji Taimei's grandfather, which is claimed to be able to kill a Gridder, be?"

Although he asked himself, Seeing Seeing Ning Zhe vaguely felt that he had already found the answer to this question.

(End of chapter)