Chapter 44: All Villains

Crawling out from the pool, Wu Chang did not act rashly, but instead checked his own condition.

Liu Shan’s claw strike had been a lethal blow, tearing a large piece off his cold-resistant fur coat, and even leaving four distinct white indentations on the earth lizard leather armor he had bought for 6,000 decayed silver coins.

If that claw had landed on his body, he had no doubt that Liu Shan could have torn some part off him.

He kissed his leather armor, marveling at the greatness of "pay-to-win."

The Year-End Sacrifice was already nearing its end; he had originally intended to use the opportunity of the Year-End Person losing control to legitimately find the evil spirit, solve the main and side quests in one fell swoop, and kill two birds with one stone.

Who would have thought that one who spends all day hunting geese would eventually get their eyes pecked by a goose.

As an old veteran who loved sneak attacks, he had been outplayed by an even older veteran.

Recalling the way Liu Shan had launched the attack just now, as well as how Liu Shan usually hid his true capabilities.

He could not determine if Liu Shan had been influenced by the aura of the evil spirit when he launched the attack, or if it was truly, as he claimed, just a routine to appease the evil spirit.

But the problem followed: if Liu Shan had been planning to attack him from the start, he had had many opportunities over these past few days.

Especially when Liu Wu was still around; if the two had joined forces, he really might have been overturned while being ambushed.

What made Liu Shan suddenly decide to strike at him? He closed his eyes, sorted through his conversation with Liu Shan in his mind, and then suddenly opened them.

Could it be because he wanted to investigate this cavern? After a simple check, he took a spare torch from his backpack and walked toward the source of the evil spirit’s aura.

No matter how much one guesses, it is not as good as seeing it for oneself.

Because of the errors in the Year-End Sacrifice, the evil spirit had become exceptionally active, and the overflowing evil aura was not hidden at all.

Following the evil aura, he went downstream along the underground river and soon arrived at the source of the evil spirit’s aura.

It was a huge circular clearing, with a giant eternal lamp lit above it, illuminating the underground space as if it were daytime.

Forty-nine locust trees were lined up, surrounding the outer edge of the clearing, isolating the inside from the outside.

In the center of the clearing, bones were piled up like a mountain—human bones.

Countless grievances floated above the bone mountain, releasing the evil spirit’s aura outward.

Although the grievances were independent individuals, each only at a pale red level, they were also a single entity, their resentment gathering into a deep red cloud.

It was the true form of the evil spirit.

The existence of the evil spirit was similar to the lingering ghosts in the Ghost-Crying Forest; they were all grievances, but Wu Chang could not directly see the scenes within their grievances.

The only difference was that Liu Wei and Liu Wu had obtained the Demon-Transformation Art and could use masks to control the lingering ghosts.

But the evil spirit inside the cavern had no constraints; they would indiscriminately attack everyone.

Sensing the arrival of a stranger, the red cloud of the evil spirit surged and surrounded Wu Chang.

Evil energy within the red cloud turned into rain, dripping onto the ground and making a hissing sound of corrosion.

Wu Chang’s intuition told him that he must absolutely not let that stuff drip on him.

He took out the Soul-Cleansing Command Flag, stepped out in a ritual pace, chanted the incantation, and a white mist was unleashed from the flag.

Wherever the white mist passed, the blood cloud rolled and shattered, and the blood rain evaporated and dissipated.

The Soul-Cleansing Command Flag was the natural enemy of existences like lingering ghosts and evil spirits; under this divine ability, the evil spirit had no power to fight back.

Moreover, after transcending the lingering ghosts, Wu Chang had gained two more points of energy; using his own energy combined with the footwork and incantations, the power of the Soul-Cleansing Command Flag was astonishing.

In just three minutes, the condensed red cloud was tottering, revealing the grievances within the red cloud to Wu Chang.

Wu Chang put away the flag, lamenting that Daoist Master Chiyuan truly had profound cultivation; he had seen through the nature of the evil spirit and lent him such a professionally suited magical treasure.

If not for this precious flag, dealing with lingering ghosts and evil spirits would surely have taken much more effort.

He looked toward the crack in the red cloud, wanting to see where this evil spirit had come from.

He chose a grievance with a deeper color, and as the scene within the grievance unfolded, a sight he had never imagined appeared before his eyes.

The scene began with Huaigu Village. The weather was perfect that day, and a group of unfamiliar villagers were working in the valley, the atmosphere peaceful and content.

However, in an instant, the winds and clouds changed; dark, oppressive clouds rolled in, and thousands of fierce mountain bandits arrived, stepping along with the shadows of the dark clouds.

The two leaders were very familiar.

One was Chen Peng, the village chief of Chen Village, and the other was Liu Shan, the current village chief of Huaigu Village.

Looking at them on ordinary days, he hadn't felt anything unusual, but seeing the two in the grievance now, Wu Chang felt he had seen their faces somewhere before.

After thinking for a moment, he remembered: when he entered the mountains, he had seen a batch of wanted posters with official seals in the black shop run by the Mountain-Blocking Ghost, and the wanted people were the Black Mountain bandits who had infiltrated the Hundred-Mile Huai Mountains.

The wanted portraits of the first and second leaders matched the two men perfectly in spirit!

And Liu Shan was actually the first leader of the Black Mountain bandits!

The two brought their men into the valley, and Liu Shan pointed at the crops growing well in the valley, saying, "This is indeed a treasure land, easy to defend and hard to attack; not only can we settle the brothers' families here, but it can also serve as a stable granary."

Chen Peng nodded, "It's good, it's just that there are too many people."

The men behind them understood and began to brandish their long blades at the villagers in the valley.

With a "whoosh," accompanied by the sound of the wind from the swinging blades, the scene in Wu Chang’s eyes went black.

Damn! Wu Chang recalled the scene he had just seen, wearing the expression of the "subway old man looking at his phone" meme.

He had always thought that Chen Village and Liu Wei were mountain bandits, and that the villagers of Huaigu Village were forced to cooperate with Liu Wei under duress.

He never expected that Huaigu Village was actually full of villains—no, to be precise, Huaigu Village wasn't even Huaigu Village, but the Black Mountain bandits occupying the magpie's nest.

He then flipped through a few more grievances, and the scenes recorded in them were roughly the same.

The day the Black Mountain bandits set their sights on Huaigu Village, the village suffered a catastrophic disaster.

The old and young of the entire village were slaughtered, and those who were dead or breathless were all moved into the mountains and buried.

There was one stubborn grievance that, while dying, heard Liu Shan setting up an array, claiming he would use their corpses as nutrients to supply this valley and make the valley have favorable weather.

This also explained why, despite both obtaining the Demon-Transformation, the Mist Demon could only stab himself—it was a crude Demon-Transformation.

Yet the two brothers, Liu Wei and Liu Wu, could set up a Ghost-Crying Forest to transform lingering ghosts.

He had been curious before how the two brothers could have comprehended such a complex method of lingering ghosts just from that ghost-drawn talisman without any diagrams.

Now it seemed this was a secret technique belonging to the Black Mountain bandits.

No wonder Liu Wu, upon learning that he could communicate with the wronged souls, said that as long as he saw the core of the Year-End Sacrifice, he would understand what the evil spirit really was.

No wonder Liu Wei, after being exposed by him as a mountain bandit, smiled and said that dying was not unjust.

The evil spirit—or rather, beyond the scenes of the true Huaigu Village villagers' lives in their grievances—also carried a segment of imagery in the blood-red last words.

That was shortly after they were buried, when the earth dragon turned over in the Hundred-Mile Huai Mountains, and several mountains collapsed.

This tremor not only shook out demon creatures that hadn't appeared for a long time, but also shook out the bottomless cavern beneath the hollow mountain.

The villagers' bones fell into the cavern, and under some inexplicable force, their grievances condensed into one, becoming the earliest evil spirit.

After seeing the experiences of the true Huaigu Village villagers, and then looking at that brief blood-red last word in the red cloud, everything became reasonable.

There were only two words in the blood-red last words.

【Revenge!】

Wu Chang held the Soul-Cleansing Command Flag, feeling hesitant in his heart.

Between the side quest and the blood-red last words, could they both be completed at the same time?

(End of chapter)