Chapter 124

Chapter 124

Whether it was fortunate or unfortunate, the surviving townspeople had seen the little Fiends running in one direction and followed them out of the city. As a result, they escaped any further harm.

But when they looked back at Nine Worlds County, now reduced to ruins, despair settled over every face.

The county had once held nearly twenty thousand people. Fewer than five hundred had survived the disaster.

There should have been far more. Some residents had never married, after all, and had taken no part in drowning children.

The constable’s wife was one of them. Now he held her lifeless body in his arms and howled at the sky.

“Why? Why did this happen? I bought a Talisman! Why did she still die?”

His family had not had much money, so he could afford only one Talisman. He had secretly tucked it into his wife’s clothes, hoping it would keep her safe.

Yet the little Fiends had bitten her to death all the same.

“Stop talking about those talismans!” the scholar shouted, his own face twisted with grief. “They were a fraud! Wearing one only made you die faster!”

Had the scholar not reacted quickly and thrown his Talisman away, he would have died too.

“Mother!”

He collapsed into sobs.

The Talismans Wushenzi sold them were nothing but useless scraps his disciple had scribbled at random. They had no effect on Fiends whatsoever.

Worse, they came from the Three Hearts Temple.

The little Fiends had been murdered because of that temple. Naturally, they hated everything associated with it. Anyone carrying one of its talismans became their first target.

At the same time, the children drowned by their own families had suddenly transformed into little Fiends. Their relatives, completely unprepared for an attack from within the household, had almost all been killed.

No one had imagined the Three Hearts Temple was a fraud. It had not merely cheated them out of their money. It had cheated them out of their lives.

Now they bitterly regretted refusing to listen to Liu Ye sooner.

“Lord Liu, please help us!”

“Yes, Lord Liu! Please save us! We’ll kowtow to you!”

The survivors dropped to their knees and knocked their foreheads against the ground again and again. Liu Ye was the only hope they had left.

His heart grew heavy at the sight. As the county’s magistrate-the official responsible for its people-he bore some responsibility for this outcome too.

“Everyone, rest assured. As your magistrate, I promise I will keep you under my Protection!” Liu Ye declared with righteous conviction.

The survivors were overjoyed. They kowtowed even more fervently.

Yet the instant Liu Ye made that promise, they all felt an inexplicable chill crawl down their backs.

“Lord Liu, perhaps we should go to Jingcheng first,” Eunuch Wu suggested. “An event of this magnitude must be reported to His Majesty.”

More importantly, Eunuch Wu had connections in Jingcheng. Lord Liu truly possessed remarkable abilities. He might be somewhat unreliable, but a man with such power was certain to earn the emperor’s favor.

“Sure!”

Liu Ye agreed immediately. His fun in the real world had ended far too soon. Now he could enjoy himself properly in the game world.

…

At the same time, John and the others had also stopped the little Fiends in the real world-although their method was rather unusual.

“Amazing! The director is incredible!”

“As expected of our director. Who says women are inferior to men?”

“Director, I want you to have my babies-ow!”

Swan upended an entire bucket of marbles over the man’s head and knocked him flat.
That was right. They had stopped the little Fiends with the same sort of games: shooting marbles, making string figures, slapping folded paper cards, and more.

“Hmph. The dignified director of the Fiend Investigation Bureau crawled around on the ground shooting marbles and slapping paper cards. What a disgrace,” John said as he dusted the dirt from his clothes.

“Exactly. Most undignified,” Xiaoshuai agreed while brushing off his knees.

“And cheating while playing children’s games at her age? Absolutely shameless.”

No sooner had they spoken than a chill touched their backs.

They turned and found Frog staring at them with open contempt.

“You two have some nerve. You were the most excited ones every time a game started. You practically bounced over there, bragging that you were bronze medalists in the Asian Under-Five Marbles Championship. Then you lost every single match. If the director hadn’t turned things around, we’d all be finished.”

The two men’s old faces reddened. Both coughed and pretended nothing had happened.

John gave Xiaoshuai a disdainful snort.

“Weren’t you a bronze medalist? How could you be so useless?”

“I competed when I was twelve! You have the nerve to criticize me? You said there was no possible way to lose such a simple game, and you did even worse than I did.”

“How was I supposed to know marbles were so different from pool?”

While they argued, every little Fiend vanished at once.

“Looks like Brother Liu succeeded,” John said.

Swan and the others finally relaxed. Being watched by so many little Fiends had placed them under crushing pressure.

Then their expressions changed.

Their memories of what happened earlier were suddenly turning hazy.

They knew a major disaster had occurred in Huicheng, but none of them could remember what the disaster had been.

“I see. Brother Liu must have traveled through time,” Xiaoshuai said first.

“It probably happened during a mission in the Fiendish World.”

This was not the first time they had encountered something similar. The mission in Liuxi Village was one example.

After that mission ended, John investigated Liuxi Village in the real world.

The name itself was unremarkable. Many villages shared it.

What drew his attention was Wang Weiwei. She had not died after being taken into the estate.

John had merely obtained one Memory Fragment, and the Fiend cut off his arm for it. Wang Weiwei, by contrast, had clearly stepped onto a path that should have meant certain death, yet she survived.

The light released by her jade pendant at the end had also been deeply suspicious.

John therefore had someone investigate her ancestry. He discovered that her great-grandfather was the elder brother of Fang Xiaoqian-the Fiend they knew as Xiaoqian.

Eventually, he located the village from their mission.

It had become a forbidden zone.

According to people who had entered, the Fiends there did not kill humans. They tortured them instead-by fastening iron plates onto their fingernails, for example.

John therefore suspected that missions spanning different eras could alter the real world. What had just happened only strengthened that theory.

In other words, if they had chosen to help Steward Wang, the Fiend appearing in the present would have been Steward Wang after completing the ritual.

After working through the implications, John turned to Swan.

“Director, don’t let your guard down. The Legend of Nine Worlds Mountain contains more than this one story.”

The miscellaneous book he had once dismissed as a collection of horror stories recorded far more than a single legend.