Chapter 45: The Holy Maiden's Injunction: Beat the Hell Out of Them!

Whoosh—

A gust of chilling wind swept past.

Wu Xiaoyou instinctively shrank her neck, trying to let her collar bring a trace of warmth to herself, but unfortunately, it was completely useless.

She looked at the old village chief leading the way ahead and Wu Wang, and the expression in her eyes became exceptionally complicated.

This little madman's behavior and actions were abnormal.

Last night, he used an AK-47 to threaten her.

This morning, he wouldn't allow anyone else to lay a finger on her.

It wasn't that Wu Xiaoyou doubted he had mental issues; after all, that fact had already been confirmed long ago.

She just felt that behind every bizarre action of his, there seemed to be some profound meaning, but she simply couldn't figure out the specifics.

"Keep walking straight up to the top and you'll see it."

The old village chief's voice sounded somewhat helpless.

He didn't want to bring these two people to this place at all.

Yet the other party threatened him with the lives of the entire village and also held the exact thing he desired most.

It was fine; he could endure it.

He had endured for two hundred years; he could manage a little while longer.

As long as he absorbed the aura of that existence and obtained the divine position of the Marriage God of the Underworld, wouldn't these two little brats be at his mercy?

"Cross this mountain! The world shall hear your voice!" Wu Wang was acting crazy as usual.

Yet his gaze grew increasingly cold.

As expected, this old bastard truly harbored malicious intentions.

Guesses were just guesses yesterday.

Nothing compared to the directness of the Abyss God's mental perspective right now.

The filth within the other's heart was laid bare without a single omission.

The three of them each harbored their own dark designs.

Before long, they reached the summit.

"Ah..."

Seeing the scene down on the other side of the mountain, Wu Xiaoyou instinctively covered her mouth to avoid letting out another gasp.

The other side of the mountain resembled a basin, presenting a sunken topography.

It was barren inside, devoid of any flora or fauna, and desolate to the extreme.

As far as the eye could see, there was only a pale white expanse.

Piles of bones that looked almost like mountains were glaringly striking, mixed with a few heavily decayed corpses that had not yet completely turned into skeletons. The sheer gruesomeness of it made Wu Xiaoyou's stomach, having just finished breakfast, start to churn violently.

"I'll only escort you this far. If you want to go down, I won't be keeping you company," the old village chief said coldly.

With that, he turned around and headed back toward the village.

[He cannot approach this place.]

[He desperately wants to leave.]

Wu Wang stared at the retreating back of the old village chief.

The psychological reactions displayed above his head left him somewhat surprised.

He hadn't expected there to be places in this village where this old bastard couldn't go?

"Hey... Are we really going to..."

Swish, swish, swish—

Before Wu Xiaoyou could finish her question, she noticed Wu Wang beside her directly sliding sideways down the slope.

Glancing at the black ghost shadows flickering from time to time within the piles of bones,

she gritted her teeth and climbed down after him.

"Strange, this degradation rate is much too slow, and the corpse stench is far too fresh. Old auntie, would you mind sharing how you all died?" Wu Wang squatted beside a not-fully-decayed corpse as if talking to himself.

Wu Xiaoyou forced down her nausea and approached.

She watched in horror as this guy actually kept flipping the corpses over, occasionally using gloved fingers to pick up remnants of flesh hanging on the faces, prying open lower jaws to inspect the interiors of mouths, and even directly reaching into chest cavities to check the decay of internal organs.

Where did he even get those gloves?!

No, wait, what on earth is he doing?!

This series of forensic autopsy actions by the guy made Wu Xiaoyou's scalp tingle.

In the end, she couldn't hold it in anymore.

"Blech!"

A rainbow spilled forth from her mouth, leaving a patch of mosaic on the ground.

"Done vomiting? If you're done, come ask these old aunties about their dying wishes. They might be a bit shy seeing a handsome young man like me." Wu Wang took off his gloves and discarded them with utter naturalness.

Putting everything else aside, he was extremely professional when it came to autopsies.

As a man who, after finishing medical books, had personally cut open his own chest nearly fifty times, Wu Wang's level of professionalism was not a bit inferior to most professional doctors.

He had discovered anomalies in the rate of corpse decomposition.

If there had been no Underworld Marriage Saintess last year,

then the most recent of these corpses should have been from two years ago.

Yet within the skull mounds, more than five corpses still retained some lingering flesh, and their internal organs were not entirely hollowed out.

Over so many years, according to the normal rate of decomposition, corpses exposed in the wild would have long since been reduced to mere bones, and if not buried deep underground, the bones might even have been dragged away by wild beasts.

Yet here they lay, quietly resting in place.

Maintaining the exact posture from when they were rolled down the mountain slopes.

Without the slightest trace of having been moved.

[Mental Power: 35 —> 32]

Wu Wang suddenly felt a wave of dizziness.

His mental power had unexpectedly dropped by a full three points.

Looking closely, his wrist had been grabbed by some pitch-black ghostly hand.

"Get your hands off me, you fiend!"

With a violent wrench, Wu Wang's dizziness subsided quite a bit.

However, Wu Xiaoyou's complexion beside him grew increasingly pale.

Shifting to the left for a moment, retreating backward the next.

As if dodging something.

"Abyss God, activate!"

Wu Wang rolled up his sleeves and once again gazed intently into the red vertical pupils.

A moment later, his eyes were stained with an eerie crimson.

Everything around them gradually grew clear—

Just like the forest the last night, countless black ghost shadows surrounded this place in a tight circle.

This time, the two of them were right in the middle of the ghost shadows.

Perhaps because it was daytime, their figures looked even more illusory, entirely lacking the substantive terror from before, replaced instead by an alternative kind of gloom.

"Can you tell me... how you died? Do you have any unfulfilled wishes?" Wu Xiaoyou's teeth chattered, making clacking sounds, as she forced down her terror and spoke out the questions Wu Wang wanted to ask.

It was true that she could see ghosts since she was a child.

But motherfucker, she had never seen over two hundred of them all at once!

Not fainting on the spot was already proof that Wu Xiaoyou's psychological fortitude surpassed ordinary people.

"Thirty years ago, that being awakened us..."

"Performing the underworld marriage is actually a sacrifice..."

"It wants to come down..."

"The village chief... defiled us..."

Dense, overlapping murmurs echoed through the valley.

Wu Wang's mouth twitched as he watched his mental power plummet rapidly.

In just a few short seconds, it dropped from 32 all the way down to a pathetic 5 points.

A nightmare-grade instance was truly terrifying to this degree.

If it were any normal player, they probably wouldn't even be able to communicate with the female ghosts upon finding this valley.

Every single sentence they uttered carried a certain degree of mental pollution.

A literal session of "speech therapy"!

"You chat for a bit, I'm going to go die for a moment."

Finding that Wu Xiaoyou was not showing any signs of being affected,

he left behind these words and quietly hid behind a skull mound.

He pulled out a dagger and pierced his own brain.

Instantly, his mind blew open and he felt much clearer.

"Come on! Let's keep chatting! Worst case, I just die again!"

About ten minutes later.

The surrounding murmurs grew sparser and sparser until they completely vanished.

After finishing speaking, that group of ghost shadows also silently disappeared in place.

Wu Xiaoyou, looking pale, walked around the skull mound to find Wu Wang and said with some uncertainty, "I know the beginning and end of the matter."

"Give me the details." Wu Wang rubbed his temples to sort out his thoughts.

All he had heard were fragmented mumblings.

Yet Second Sister seemed to have understood the female ghosts' words completely.

"They said that before the grand sacrifice every year, every underworld marriage saintess would be summoned to the ancestral hall by the village chief, and then..."

At this point, Wu Xiaoyou paused.

Her expression turned extremely unnatural, and her hesitant-to-speak demeanor looked somewhat indignant.

After a moment, she continued: "And then she would be defiled by the village chief. Although he didn't directly violate them, the man would use all sorts of unspeakable instruments in nearly torturous ways, tormenting them until they were on the verge of death."

"Finally, on the day of the grand sacrifice, their chests would be cut open, and their hearts removed to please the Underworld Marriage God."

"Dying with deep resentment, their corpses were abandoned in the wilderness and originally should not have been able to wake up."

"Until thirty years ago, some bizarre and powerful aura awakened them."

"Although their souls were still bound by the Underworld Marriage God and unable to leave this place, they gained a sliver of hope of breaking free."

"At the same time, they discovered the true purpose behind the existence of Underworld Marriage Village."

Wu Xiaoyou fished a stone out of her pocket.

Handing it to Wu Wang, she said, "Every year, the Underworld Marriage God manipulates the vessel of a saintess to perform underworld marriages with the villagers."

"Villagers who complete an underworld marriage are granted a chance to make a wish."

"Yet they don't know the price is their own souls!"

"The Underworld Marriage God intends to use the extreme resentment of the saintess each year, combined with the filthy souls 'voluntarily' offered by the villagers, accumulating little by little until it finally descends completely into the mortal world!"

Wu Xiaoyou's complexion grew increasingly pale.

She hadn't just heard the ghost shadows' accounts.

She had actually witnessed their miserable torture back then, the distorted and twisted expression of the village chief inside the ancestral hall driven by human desire, the greed in his eyes, and even the hellish future of the mortal world consumed by a sea of flames after the descent of the Underworld Marriage God.

Although she didn't know if it was an illusion,

everything was so real.

It made her shudder uncontrollably just to recall it.

After calming herself slightly,

she touched the pitch-black, bone-chilling stone in her hand.

Solemnly handing it to Wu Wang, she said, "They asked me to hand this to you, saying that you carry the aura of that being on you, and you should be able to fulfill their dying wishes."

[Memory-Cleansing Stone (Epic): A crucial plot item, cannot be stored in the inventory. Upon use against a target, it will erase the memories related to the instance target, including resentment, wishes, and everything else tied to those memories.]

[Remarks: Formed by the grief-stricken blood of the unjustly murdered saintesses' hearts, condensed with unyielding will.]

[Beat the crap out of those bastards for us! This is our defiance!]

[Related Targets: Underworld Marriage God, Zhang Jie, Wu Xiaoyou]

[Number of Uses: 2]

Wu Wang accepted the Memory-Cleansing Stone and revealed a resolute expression.

The aura of that being naturally referred to the Abyss God.

It seemed that the Abyss God's pollution had not only given the old village chief hope of replacing the Underworld Marriage God, but had also awakened this group of unjustly murdered victims.

No wonder their corpses hadn't completely decomposed.

As long as the sacrifices persisted, how could their sufferings decay?

"I'll take this job."

"The resistance and defiance of victims against feudal sacrifices, is it?"

"Just watch, I'll personally shove this stone straight down the Underworld Marriage God's throat and make it swallow."

"I'll also let Underworld Marriage Village know—"

"Human blood buns are not so easy to swallow down."