Chapter 246
Chapter 246
“All right. I’ll tell you, but you alone may listen.”
John nodded, picked up his phone, and walked off to one side.
Guiwa’s voice came through the receiver.
“It was a dark and dreadful day…”
Eighteen years ago…
At the time, Black Cow Village had not yet been called Black Cow Village. Village Chief Grandpa had made a breakthrough in strength after a certain incident, so Guiwa suggested finding a place where they could invite some friends and celebrate.
That day, they ate hot pot and sang songs as they celebrated.
Then a meteor suddenly streaked across the sky.
Boom!
Something crashed straight into their cooking pot.
The assembled Fiends peered inside and discovered a tiny baby.
“Ah-da!”
The baby raised his little hands and stared at them with sparkling eyes, a huge smile spread across his face.
“What’s this, old-timer? Is this the main course you ordered?”
The speaker was a black ox. Laughing loudly, he reached out to grab the baby and eat him. Then…
Crunch…
“He bit off Old Black Ox’s finger in a single bite. Do you know how shocked we were? We could tell that he was human! A human had just bitten off the finger of an old Fiend who had assembled more than ninety Taboos. Can you imagine how we felt?”
John had nothing to say.
“And that wasn’t even the most terrifying part…”
Losing a piece of himself enraged Old Black Ox. A Fiend’s physical integrity was crucial to its strength. Once part of its body was lost, making further progress became exceedingly difficult.
So he picked up the baby and swallowed him whole.
They thought that was the end of it. But before long…
“Crunch, crunch, crunch…”
“What’s that sound?” the Joyous Funeral Fiend asked in her soft Jiangnan lilt.
The assembled Fiends turned toward Old Black Ox. His face twisted in agony as he clutched his stomach and rolled across the ground.
“It hurts! It hurts!”
In the space of a single breath, Old Black Ox stopped moving. His belly began to writhe, and finally, the baby tore straight out through his abdomen!
“Ah-da!”
The baby gazed at them with sparkling eyes, as though they were all playing some kind of game.
“We were completely stunned. Old Black Ox was second only to the Village Chief in strength, yet he died without even understanding what had happened. Not even the Village Chief could have done that. So we decided to combine the power of every Fiend present and kill him. But the result…”
Guiwa’s sobs came through the phone.
“The Daoist Fiend was a famous figure even in the Inner World! He carried Fiendish Items all over his body, and no Fiend of the same level was his match. But the moment that brat touched them, every last one transformed into a ritual artifact. Do you know what it feels like to be surrounded and kicked by more than a hundred high-level ritual artifacts?
“Then there was the Hundred-Child Fiend Mother. She thought that since she was a Fiend Mother-the natural bane of every infant in the world-she had nothing to fear from him. So she went over and tried to kill him with her Taboo. The result… Sigh. She died horribly.
“And there was the Withered Wood Old Buddha. He never said a word and never even tried to kill the baby. His only mistake was his hairstyle. There was no reasoning with that brat-he grabbed the hair and yanked it out one strand at a time. Tore every strand out by force! The old Buddha practiced a vow of silence, and that brat actually made him break it.
“He drank the Joyous Funeral Fiend’s river of blood like fruit juice, ate my clones as snacks, and treated the Village Chief’s smoking pipe like a toy. Eventually, we couldn’t take it anymore and tried to run. But…”
Bang! Bang! Bang!
The Fiends attempting to escape discovered in horror that they could not leave. Whenever they moved beyond a certain distance from the little devil, a burst of white light blocked their path and a scorching sensation spread through their bodies. The pain pierced all the way into their souls.
No matter how much they had experienced, they could not withstand such torment.
“In the end, the Village Chief discovered that the sensation disappeared whenever the little devil was happy. The moment he became upset, the white light tortured us. Can you imagine it? We were ancient Fiends who had lived for centuries, even millennia, yet we had to dance for his amusement!”
“Pfft!”
Guiwa fell silent.
“You just laughed, didn’t you?”
“Ahem, no. I have a sore throat. Please continue.”
“There was nothing we could do. We couldn’t leave, so we had no choice but to settle there. That was how we founded the village. To commemorate Old Black Ox, the first one to die, we named it Black Cow Village.”
After hearing Guiwa’s story, John immediately thought of something. What if they sacrificed a portion of humanity, then had Brother Liu wipe out every Fiend…
“Now that you’ve heard my story, you must be thinking about using Liu Ye to exterminate us, aren’t you? Don’t tell me you believe that brat’s power only targets Fiends. He was born rotten. Only doing good deeds can suppress that terrifying white light. If he does something evil, the consequences are catastrophic-the white light multiplies in strength.”
They had learned all of this through experiments paid for with their lives!
“Wait!”
Another voice came from behind John. He turned and found the Driver and the other Fiends standing there.
With the exception of the Building Manager, all of them had come. They had seen Guiwa’s message and immediately realized something was wrong. After calling Uncle Bai, they had been sent to find John.
“Back at the school, Brother Liu saved me, but the white light still grew stronger!” Yellow Hair said.
At the time, he had thought he was doomed.
“He must have killed a Fiend then, right?”
Yellow Hair fell silent.
“In that brat’s eyes, Fiends and humans are the same. The only difference is that killing a Fiend makes the white light grow slowly, while killing a human makes it grow quickly. And when he was a child, the white light didn’t work on Fiends alone. I’m telling you, now that he has returned to childhood, the white light’s old power will definitely return too. A single passing thought from him could cause an enormous disaster! Losing a province’s worth of humans would be the least of your worries. If his strength increases again, not only will your human world suffer-our Inner World will be finished too!”
John said nothing.
Neither did the Driver and the other Fiends.
How had this suddenly become a world-ending crisis? Most absurdly of all, the one threatening to end the world was a human.
The greater problem was that they had no way to contact Liu Ye inside the mission.
They exchanged glances. In the end, only one option remained.
…
Inside the mission world, Xiaoshuai stared blankly at the message before him. The livestream had a private-message function.
“…And that’s the situation. So the heavy responsibility of saving the world now rests on your shoulders,” John said from the other end.
Xiaoshuai fell silent.
“Are you people out of your minds?! I’m just auxiliary staff! I even used to belong to the Illuminati! Why are you dumping a burden this heavy on me?! The pressure is off the charts!”