Song Zang had originally been having quite a lot of fun with his performance.
Being held by Yin Chen, having his head patted and being gently comforted, cuddling intimately together amid the bizarre, hellish surroundings… all of it was really just their usual mutually willing interaction.
But after cuddling for a while, Song Zang suddenly felt that the surroundings had become a little too quiet.
He secretly swept his gaze over everyone and abruptly realized that his own behavior seemed far too normal… so normal that it stood out in a very abnormal way.
Aside from Yin Chen, who was absorbed in cuddling him, and Lan Yu Heng, who had forcibly closed her eyes and entered a state of self-protection, every other player looked wrong.
They had all fallen into some strange, absent state at the same time, staring blankly at the otherworldly scene before them, their bodies stiff and motionless.
It was as though they had truly been captivated by the bizarre spectacle. They could not tear their gazes away, could barely even close their eyelids. Their minds and consciousness seemed to have drifted somewhere beyond the sky, as if at any moment they would be sucked into the black mire and become one with the filth multiplying madly inside it.
“Yin Chen, look at them…” This time, the panic and tears in Song Zang’s voice contained a little more genuine emotion. “What do we do?”
Yin Chen was not panicked at all. Instead, he boldly suggested, “Knock them all unconscious one by one, then beat them awake again. How about that?”
Song Zang stared at him in shock. Before he could speak, Lan Yu Heng hurriedly interrupted, “Boss, wait. Don’t be impulsive. My pendants should work.”
“They really work?” Yin Chen raised an eyebrow. “Then why are they all standing there like logs?”
“…Ahem. I haven’t mastered the craft yet, so there’s a slight delay in activation. I probably connected some detail incorrectly. Give it a moment.”
Lan Yu Heng was a little embarrassed. Fortunately, she did not remain embarrassed for long. The ox-heart pendants hanging from everyone’s chests suddenly reacted together, emitting an eerie, ominous black-red glow.
The fresh congealed sheep blood carefully sewn inside the dried ox hearts suddenly burst through them. Bloody liquid flowed everywhere, scorching the shriveled □□ outer skin into strange gray powder that drifted deep into their noses.
Elio’s Note: The □□ is already missing in the Chinese source. It refers to the unidentified dried skin used in Lan Yu Heng’s protective pendant, so the gap is preserved rather than silently inventing a creature or material.
The rank animal odor mixed with the smell of rust, carrying even the faintest trace of cow dung and crushed grass. Like a shot of adrenaline, it brutally dragged everyone back into reality.
One after another, the players returned to their senses. Their legs simultaneously went weak, and they collapsed onto the ice, gulping down air.
“My god, that stinks. But it’s somehow fragrant and stinky at the same time… Heaven… thank you, Mother Nature, for your bounty.”
Xu Wei Ran was the first to recover completely. The trembling fear in his eyes looked almost tangible. He hugged the pendant tightly and took a deep breath of its odor. The effect was outstanding.
He turned toward Lan Yu Heng and weakly asked, “Sis, can you eat this ox heart? I’m kind of craving it.”
Lan Yu Heng’s expression became strange for a moment. She stopped him. “Don’t. The sheep blood inside is raw. For all we know, it’s carrying medieval parasites. The pendant isn’t ruined yet. It can resist evil spirits, so just keep wearing it.”
“Fine.”
Xu Wei Ran looked regretful. Li Ming, meanwhile, stared resentfully at the completely unresponsive cross in her hand. Her legs were still too weak to stand, and she squeezed it with the disappointment of someone watching iron refuse to turn into steel.
She openly began urging, “God, where are You? Are You all right? Your most faithful believer is fighting for You in the deepest reaches of Hell… Have You seen our suffering?”
The cross remained completely unresponsive.
But Yin Chen’s stomach suddenly reacted.
Gentle milky-white holy light slowly emerged from beneath his clothes. It transformed into a slender halo and floated lightly onto Li Ming’s black veil, illuminating her delicate features until they appeared even gentler and more sacred, almost unreal.
Li Ming froze. Then she suddenly felt her entire body fill with pure, healthy strength. She shot to her feet and experimentally walked a few steps in either direction.
The black slurry illuminated by the halo’s afterglow began boiling. The flesh masses approaching the edge of the ice emitted bizarre, agonized howls. The sounds resembled no animal found anywhere on Earth and were almost impossible to describe in human language, piercing and grotesque beyond measure.
Li Ming stared blankly for a moment. She raised a hand and lightly brushed at the lingering milky-white radiance around the halo. Tears welled in her eyes as though she were overwhelmingly moved. “O my beloved Heavenly Father…”
She had barely spoken half the sentence when Yin Chen pressed a hand against his lower abdomen and interrupted gloomily, “This is the Holy Son’s work. Don’t thank the wrong person.”
Li Ming immediately corrected herself without the slightest hesitation. “O thank You, my Messiah, Lord of all peoples, first morning star in the heavens…”
“That’s more like it.”
Yin Chen nodded in satisfaction, blatantly protective of his baby.
Although the angel-like halo did indeed damage the filthy flesh masses to some degree, while also soothing people’s minds and dispelling fear, danger remained everywhere.
As the players’ conversation grew louder, the two flesh-red tentacles busy feeding finally noticed the “foreign organisms” again.
The holy light made them wary, preventing them from acting rashly. Amid wet glorp, glorp sounds, one of the thick tentacles bent downward and gathered the almost mindless little tentacles into its embrace, shielding them inside its bulging, blue-veined “arms.”
That was right. This enormous tentacle actually possessed the conscious will to protect its young. Song Zang immediately became even more vigilant and retreated farther away.
The tentacles that had invaded his dream world had never developed minds like this. Their intelligence had not even surpassed that of giant deep-sea octopuses whose genetic limits remained unbroken.
Hell truly deserved to be called a fertile breeding ground for evil and filth. If these tentacles hidden at the center of the earth ever reached the human world, they could easily slaughter humanity to extinction. Even the strongest witches and bishops would be powerless against them.
“I’ll kill all of them and see what happens.”
Studying the tentacles’ tense posture, Yin Chen raised his saber and prepared to attack without further discussion… only for Lan Yu Heng to stop him yet again.
“We can try cooperating with them once first and clear out this disgusting black slurry.”
Yin Chen was clearly itching to attack, but reluctantly stopped his blade. “How?”
“A large-scale group spell. Use the Hell magma stones as the casting foundation and fuel, drive all the water molecules out of the lake, and vaporize them.” Lan Yu Heng had clearly planned this in advance.
She had not collected all those stones merely to use them as lamps.
Every player could just barely cast the Seven Great Mage Spells recorded in the Devil’s Bible, the ones that supposedly carried no side effects.
Their individual aptitudes differed, so the results when casting alone might be disappointing. But if everyone combined their power into a single large-scale spell, the result would be entirely different.
“That witch Gina treats you so well. She barely even acknowledges me anymore, and I’m supposed to be her subordinate,” Xu Wei Ran sighed.
Lan Yu Heng was already pulling Zhang Ming Shen along to draw a magic array over the ice. Hearing this, she rolled her eyes with remarkable agility. “You really think she’s some great philanthropist?
“She knew from our first meeting that she couldn’t beat me. Feeling guilty was one thing, but more importantly, she knows how to read the room and wants to stay alive. As long as it doesn’t damage her own interests, she’ll hand over whatever knowledge I ask for. She’s been playing the emotional card with me from beginning to end, and I’ve spent several days acting along.”
“…My mistake, Sis. I thought she was madly in love with you.”
“She just hates men. She isn’t a lesbian, I guarantee it.” Lan Yu Heng efficiently finished the formation and clapped her hands. Then she called everyone over. “Form a circle and hold hands. When I give the signal, everyone recite the spell together. I’ll control the spell’s direction.”
Song Zang obediently hooked his fingers around Yin Chen’s right hand. Lan Yu Heng casually grabbed his other one. Yin Chen did not appear particularly bothered and was mostly curious about what would happen next.
The players neatly formed a circle, only to suddenly realize something everyone had collectively overlooked.
Mr. Butler was gone!
“No, seriously, where the hell is he?” Lin Xing looked around. He could not see the butler anywhere, but did not dare keep staring around for long and quickly pulled his gaze back.
“He was following behind me when we entered, carrying the baby Rachel gave birth to. He told me not to make noise. After that, I don’t know what happened,” Yin Chen answered calmly. “He’s an interesting person. He probably has plans of his own.”
Lan Yu Heng was impatient by nature. “Then forget about him. Hurry up. I’m counting down. Three, two, one…”
The obscure, tongue-twisting incantations began resonating faintly. Their voices transformed into a deep stream of light that converged through the pendant on Lan Yu Heng’s chest, descended, and flowed into the complicated, elaborate magic array.
Red light exploded outward. Black slurry churned and foamed, while the surrounding gray-black rocks trembled and sent dust flying. The flesh-red tentacles shrank back warily, trying to force their young deeper into the black slurry, apparently seeking shelter there.
But they had made a serious mistake. This spell was specifically targeting the bottomless lake of black slurry.
Glug, glug…
Crack…
The thick ice fractured inch by inch beneath the artificially created heat, rising and sinking while the boiling liquid released a stench so extreme it was almost impossible to endure.
It smelled as though a corpse had been left to ferment and rot in a bathtub for three months, then tossed into a can of fermented herring and mixed thoroughly, coated in a thick layer of mold and spoiled vomit, and finally thrown into a swill bucket that had been baking beneath the sun for more than ten days.
The turbid stench penetrated everything. Everyone instinctively stopped breathing, feeling as though one more inhalation would cause their lungs to melt and mutate, infected with lethally toxic mold.
But Lan Yu Heng had to breathe. She still needed to maintain the spell’s stable trajectory.
Her lips had turned pale, and the burden clearly weighed heavily on her. Yet her center of gravity remained perfectly steady. Her little goatskin boots wedged firmly between chunks of ice, supporting her body as she continued reciting the incantation with crisp precision.
BOOM!
The depth of the surging black slurry began dropping rapidly. The densely packed flesh masses were literally cooked by the heat, rupturing and disintegrating into an eerie flushed-red color. The small tentacles driven deeper into the lake suffered an even worse fate. They became soft, overcooked, and bursting with juice. Thick bright-red liquid surged upward into wave after wave of bloody foam, spreading almost to the lake’s edges.
By the time the flesh-red tentacles realized something was wrong, the shattered ruins of the dead city of Jerusalem had already revealed part of their outline. The tentacles trembled furiously. The two enormous limbs raised waves of black liquid and suddenly struck toward Lan Yu Heng with tremendous force…
They missed.
Yin Chen solved the problem with two strikes. One horizontal slash cut them across the middle, and one vertical slash sliced them thinner. The tentacles were divided into several chunks of flesh in midair, twitching helplessly.
Bright-red fluid scattered in every direction like rain, drenching everyone struggling to maintain their balance atop the floating ice.
Only Song Zang’s vision suddenly went dark when Yin Chen instantly stripped off his long coat and threw it over his head, leaving him completely untouched.
Lan Yu Heng spat out a mouthful of blood. Then she dumped a bag of blood-red gemstones out of Zhang Ming Shen’s backpack, threw them into her mouth, crunched them apart, and swallowed every last piece.
“Holy shit, what are you doing?!” Xu Wei Ran’s pupils practically shook.
Lan Yu Heng had no time to answer him. Standing at the eye of the magic array, she continued hoarsely chanting an extended, upgraded version of the obscure spell.
Zhang Ming Shen stood beside her with a grave expression. Every time Lan Yu Heng’s body began trembling, his lips would move slightly…
Song Zang watched their interaction and suddenly felt that something was strange. He focused, listened carefully, and actually heard a deep male voice as faint as a mosquito.
“You’ve become a little stronger.”
“You’ve become a little stronger again.”
“You’ve become a little stronger than before.”
Three times in succession. Every sentence came from Zhang Ming Shen’s direction.
Song Zang widened his eyes and tugged Yin Chen’s sleeve. “Wait, Brother Zhang isn’t mute?”
“He’s a Word Spirit. Forgot to tell you.” Yin Chen curved his lips. “Unless necessary, he doesn’t speak. Every sentence he says becomes reality. The price is lifespan, plus the potential backlash from stronger targets. If he talks too much, he’ll die horribly.”
Elio’s Note: Word Spirit refers here to Zhang Ming Shen’s spoken-word ability: what he says becomes reality, at the cost of lifespan and possible backlash.
“I see… That’s incredible.”
“Incredible? Not as incredible as me.”
Song Zang had just learned something interesting and could not be bothered arguing. “Yes, yes. Not as incredible as you.”
Zhang Ming Shen truly used this ability extremely rarely. Important powers should naturally be reserved for crucial moments, used to support trustworthy friends and companions. He and Lan Yu Heng had long since agreed to keep the Word Spirit as an emergency safeguard so that overwhelming expenditure would not end in failure at the last moment.
Using the ability three times was enough to help Lan Yu Heng endure the dual exhaustion of body and mind and continue stabilizing the magic array.
The black slurry began disappearing even faster than before. Unknown organisms hidden inside the filthy mire grew restless under the threat and launched suicidal attacks one after another. Flesh masses slammed wildly into the underside of the rapidly melting floating ice, breaking hole after hole through it. Young tentacles dragged black slurry through the openings and emerged, blindly attacking the players above through pure instinct.
Fortunately, only Lan Yu Heng could not afford to be disturbed. Everyone else joined forces to support her, eliminating hazards and killing every strange monster that tried to approach.
The sacred halo above Li Ming’s head was not meant for attacking or expelling anything. Its purpose was to drastically weaken the causeless 【extreme terror】 inside the players.
At the very least, the ridiculous spectacle of two grown men hugging each other, collapsing with weak legs, and sobbing from fear would not happen again.
Yin Chen handled the two severed giant tentacles. Their instinct to protect their young only made them fiercer. They fought while wounded, refusing to retreat even after being chopped into countless chunks. Yin Chen had nearly reduced part of them directly into minced meat, yet laughter still lingered in his eyes and his voice remained bizarrely gentle.
“My baby is so smart.”
Song Zang felt goosebumps rise. He suspected the holy light was giving Yin Chen some additional maternal-instinct bonus, perhaps deliberately caused by the baby inside him… Standing behind Yin Chen, he aimed his gun toward the edge of the ice and specifically shot the flesh masses repeatedly attacking it.
A single bullet could pierce more than a dozen lymphatic monsters stuck together. The silver bullets’ burning effect was extremely obvious. Blinding blood-red flesh churned and boiled, releasing a nauseating stench.
Song Zang had to lower his breathing rate to avoid fainting from the smell. He suddenly felt human blood smelled almost sweet by comparison. Even the festering Earth Mother from the previous instance seemed kind and benevolent now.
Impossible to imagine, impossible to understand. How could something this disgustingly foul exist in the world?
Fortunately, the unbearable environment was about to end. Lan Yu Heng finally finished the incantation, and only now did the true effect of the large-scale magic array officially begin.
Everything she had done until now had actually been intended to gather the players’ enormous collective energy and concentrate it entirely into herself.
The mere heat leaking from the process had already caused the black slurry to boil without stopping. That alone demonstrated how immense and heavy the accumulated energy truly was.
The crumbling, hole-riddled ice suddenly tightened and solidified into one enormous, indestructibly smooth plane. The magic array, previously cracked and mottled, reconnected from beginning to end and emitted an overwhelmingly dazzling red radiance that covered everything and lit the entire space.
Amid the violent shaking of the earth, a deafening boom rang out. The floating ice abruptly hovered in midair for three full seconds before plummeting downward at tremendous speed.
“HOLD ON!!!” Lan Yu Heng screamed her final instruction, then collapsed from exhaustion. She desperately grabbed Zhang Ming Shen’s clothes to keep gravity from throwing her away.
Xu Wei Ran’s hair flew wildly. One arm hooked over the edge of the ice while his other hand raised an iron shovel and repeatedly smashed it against a tentacle. His voice was absurdly excited. “Holy shit, this is really magic!”
That was right. The instant the array officially activated, three-quarters of the pitch-black lake was vaporized outright. The sight was staggering.
The total area of Jerusalem exceeded one million square kilometers. The entire thing had previously been occupied by black slurry, but now only a shallow river remained, flowing along the bottom of the dead city.
The enormous ice sheet crashed onto the shattered ruins and finally broke into pieces. The players were flung in every direction and each found their own foothold… hanging from chimneys or pointed rooftops, none daring to recklessly explore downward again.
Although most of the black slurry was gone, the monsters had not all died. Twisted flesh and tentacles crawled everywhere. Even after being cooked by magic until they were boiling red and half dead, they still could not suppress their instinctive drive to reproduce.
Tender red flesh masses continued writhing together, overlapping one another and using the final explosive force of their remaining lives to create even more foul-smelling lymphatic replicas.
“I’m fucking amazing,” Lan Yu Heng muttered while sitting atop the chimney of a ruined house.
Zhang Ming Shen gave a goofy little smile and nodded in agreement. Then he rummaged through his backpack and handed her several more blood-red gemstones, prepared for emergencies.
Immediately afterward, he took out the Divination Coin again and casually tossed it by habit. The silly smile instantly disappeared from his face. “Mmph!”
The reverse side faced upward. Great Misfortune!
Yin Chen stood on another rooftop holding Song Zang and saw the coin’s result perfectly clearly.
He immediately tightened his grip around his saber and rapidly surveyed their surroundings, gaze turning cold. “Look east. Around thirty kilometers away. There’s a monster.”
“Bro, I don’t think my eyes can see thirty kilometers…” Lin Xing asked shakily. “What the hell is over there?”
“Lucifer? It has an ugly pair of black wings, a goat’s head, and the body of a black python. It’s extremely shriveled and chained to the ground. Very ugly.”
Yin Chen was not entirely sure what the monster was either, but compared with the foreign tentacles whose stench seemed capable of blotting out the sky, this creature looked downright familiar and friendly.
“Great Misfortune isn’t necessarily irreversible. Boss, I’ll take the front with you. Everyone else stays behind?” Lan Yu Heng sounded weak, yet was still eager to charge forward.
Yin Chen did not refuse. He only added, “Li Ming and Song Zang come too.”
“What about me? Wife, I don’t feel safe letting you go.” Xu Wei Ran anxiously grabbed Li Ming.
Li Ming ruthlessly shook off his hand. “I have God’s protection. You? If you follow us, I’ll be even more worried.”
“Hahaha… fair point.”
Song Zang had no objections. He stood obediently nearby and seriously observed the distant sight. His eyesight was excellent too, and compared with Yin Chen’s careless description, Song Zang paid more attention to details no one had mentioned yet.
For example… those wings were twisting and writhing in an extremely unnatural pattern, occasionally spasming and trembling. A crooked six-pointed star had been drawn over the black goat’s head, yet its face looked remarkably human, and someone had even smeared its lips with a shade of lipstick fashionable among medieval noblewomen.
That was strange. Extremely strange. Song Zang immediately thought of a certain ruthless, beautiful woman who did whatever she pleased: his convenient stepmother.
Song Zang knew perfectly well that Lady Medisa was absolutely not a normal human. He had previously suspected she might be a naturally born monster or a visitor from beyond this world.
But even if she was a monster, how many monsters existed who would put lipstick on the face of a fallen angel?
After all, in the especially repressive social climate of this era, a woman wearing lipstick could be regarded as inwardly wicked, deliberately tempting men into depravity, or even suspected of privately summoning evil spirits.
One careless accusation of witchcraft could get her tied to a stake and burned alive.
While Song Zang sank into thought, Yin Chen had already casually hoisted him up and begun racing through the ruins, leaping from roof to roof as they rapidly advanced.
Wind screamed past Song Zang’s ears while the distant true body of the fallen angel gradually became clearer.
Song Zang could see perfectly well that the mark was absolutely cinnabar carelessly smeared on the creature’s lips. Medisa was extremely suspicious! He had examined her lipstick at close range before and remembered the color very clearly.
It had been mixed from various toxic red pigments but smelled faintly of honey. Even in the depths of winter, the color payoff and moisturizing effect were surprisingly good.
“Yin Chen, I think my mother might be Lilith. Do you believe me?” Growing increasingly wary, Song Zang hurriedly whispered into Yin Chen’s ear.
“I believe anything you say. Don’t worry.”
“Don’t brush me off. I’m serious.”
“All right. I’ll pay attention.”
By the time Yin Chen finished answering Song Zang, the four of them were less than five hundred meters from the fallen angel’s true body.
Zhang Ming Shen’s prediction had been accurate. There was danger, but the danger did not seem to come from the demon itself… Rather, it came from the parasitic monsters hidden inside its body.
The enormous wings were scarred and devastated. Thick black-and-white liquid flowed between broken feathers. The goat head’s eyes were dull and lifeless, while unknown organisms repeatedly struck against the membranes of its pupils from inside, making them bulge and sink.
The gaunt, shriveled lower body of the black python coiled layer upon layer into an enormous disk nearly ten stories tall. Yet beneath those dry gray scales covered in black slurry, countless tiny, evil unknown things seemed to be gestating, merely waiting for the right moment to break free.
Yin Chen stopped at last and, with reasonable caution, mocked, “God’s son ended up this pathetic?”
Song Zang, however, had no attention to spare for that, because the sheet of parchment he had specifically brought into Hell suddenly began writhing inside his pocket all on its own.
That was right. It was the copied image of Lady Medisa’s private seal, the phoenix and the rooster-headed, snake-bodied monster joined into a ring… The parchment had originally been dead material, yet now it seemed to have been granted life by an unknown force. It struggled frantically, trying to escape from Song Zang’s pocket.
Warm moisture spread across his trouser leg. The parchment seemed to have begun bleeding, tearing itself apart as fresh threads of granulation tissue grew from it. A sharp pain suddenly pierced Song Zang’s thigh, as though his flesh and blood were being forcibly sucked away. His heart tightened, and he used all his strength to pin the restless thing down.
A terrifying instinct told him that if the parchment completely escaped his control, only then would the situation truly become uncontrollable.
Even if it literally ate away his thigh, he absolutely could not let it escape!
“Song Zang, you’re bleeding! Stop pressing it, let go!”
Yin Chen instantly noticed something was wrong. Without allowing discussion, he dropped to one knee and grabbed Song Zang’s thigh to inspect it. But this time Song Zang refused to cooperate at all. His face white, he planted his foot against Yin Chen’s knee and stubbornly fought him.
“No. Wait a little longer! It hurts so much…”
Song Zang bit his lip as tears ran down his face. Yin Chen simply decided to knock him unconscious, but just as he was about to move, his expression abruptly changed.
The system panel had appeared.
【Clear Requirement: Obtain the gift of His supreme knowledge (2/3)】