Yin Chen stopped scolding him. He gestured for Lan Yu Heng to take Li Ming and continue exploring ahead, while he remained beside Song Zang and carefully supported his waist as it trembled from the agony.
“Are you about to pass out?” Yin Chen asked softly.
Song Zang shook his head.
“But it hurts so badly you can’t talk?”
“…Mm.”
Yin Chen frowned slightly. He was not particularly good at comforting people, so he could only make his voice as gentle as possible. “Don’t force yourself. If you can’t speak, then don’t. I’ll stay with you… Want a hug?”
Song Zang’s eyes had gone completely red. Aggrieved, he nodded and immediately fell into Yin Chen’s warm embrace.
The scent of mint mingled with the stench of tentacle blood. It was not pleasant, but it made him feel extraordinarily safe.
It hurt. It hurt far too much.
Song Zang was extremely good at enduring pain. He did not know why, but his tolerance for it was frighteningly high. Physical torment usually meant very little to him. But this pain was genuinely different.
There was the strange, overwhelming agony of some unknown existence scraping his bones and drinking his marrow, slowly devouring him. Sharp neural pain spread rapidly from the nerve endings toward his brain… and his brain itself was already under an unbearable burden.
Obscure knowledge that made absolutely no sense was being violently and forcefully shoved into the depths of his cerebral cortex, piling up without end.
Song Zang stared at his Resistance value. The tiny question-mark symbol flickered repeatedly between dim and bright. His consciousness rose and fell with its light, sometimes clear and sometimes dark, chaotic beyond measure. He had to use every ounce of effort merely to remain rational enough to think about what was happening.
Even when he vaguely heard Yin Chen’s voice, almost every word seemed separated from him by a hazy veil. Song Zang could only respond little by little through instinct.
He discovered that God truly did love him.
At the very least, when God had poured knowledge into his mind, He had absolutely used the gentlest, least harmful method possible. Song Zang would rather bleed from all seven orifices another hundred times than put his brain through pain this bizarre and impossible to escape again.
Fortunately, after an unbearably long and difficult struggle, Song Zang finally found a way to rapidly stabilize himself.
He forcibly stuffed all the unfamiliar knowledge pouring in from nowhere into the farthest corners of his mind, sealed it completely, and firmly refused to recall any of it unless absolutely necessary.
The remaining pain finally dropped to a tolerable level. It no longer tormented him so badly that he could not divide his attention or maintain his sanity.
“Song Zang, I’m going to open your pocket now and take a look. Is that okay?”
Yin Chen’s cautious voice reached his ears. Song Zang instinctively raised his arms and hugged Yin Chen’s rigid body tightly.
“Mm… I-I’m okay now.”
The tension in Yin Chen’s back quietly eased a little. He lifted Song Zang’s blood-soaked right leg with extraordinary care. “If you can talk, that’s good. Does it still hurt?”
“Mm.”
“It’ll hurt more when I lift this fabric. It’s stuck to the wound. If you can’t endure it, bite me. Bite as hard as you want.”
Yin Chen instructed him gently, and Song Zang had no intention of being polite. His head was spinning and his vision blurred. Before Yin Chen even started, Song Zang bit directly into the warm, tender flesh on the side of his neck.
Yin Chen finally curved his lips and ripped away the blood-soaked fabric as quickly as possible. “Hiss. Your teeth really are good.”
Song Zang genuinely did not hold back. His canine sank deep into the thin, cold-white skin, leaving a spreading bruise. Yin Chen did not care in the slightest. His gaze remained fixed entirely on Song Zang’s miserable leg, his tone cheerful and indulgent.
That was right. Cheerful.
As long as he felt Song Zang biting down hard on him, Yin Chen developed the wonderful illusion that the two of them were sharing the pain.
Sharing Song Zang’s pain felt much better than standing by and watching him suffer alone. This level of intimacy was not something just anyone could have. Yin Chen suppressed the unfamiliar heavy bitterness rising in his chest and focused entirely on the emotion worth enjoying.
After all, if he lost emotional control right now and ran outside to wildly chop things apart, he would only create a situation even worse than the present one. There would be no point.
Yin Chen suddenly felt that he had grown as a person. He carefully supported Song Zang’s trembling right leg and began cleaning away the slick, bizarre material bit by bit.
The ordinary brown-yellow parchment had apparently been transformed by some hidden power into a mass of red-and-white crumbs. The sticky fragments clung tightly to Song Zang’s wound. The wet, shredded leather and paper scraps gave off a strange odor. It was not foul. Instead, it carried the smell of blood and living flesh.
The fragments themselves were easy to clean away. But the thin granulation tissue beneath them… was another matter.
The tips of the sprouts had already burrowed into Song Zang’s tender flesh, using him as nourishment to strengthen themselves. At the same time, however, they seemed to be the only channels through which the 【knowledge】 was being transmitted.
Yin Chen discovered that all of them were still alive. He violently tore several apart, yet they stubbornly remained wrapped around nearby blood vessels, dense as vines, entwined and parasitic, extremely difficult to peel away.
“Does your leg hurt the worst? What exactly does it feel like?”
Song Zang released Yin Chen’s neck and gently stroked the clear, blood-seeping bite mark he had left there. Aggrieved, he complained, “My head hurts the most, but… before, they were eating my bone marrow.”
“Would burning them work? Or an exorcism method?” Yin Chen lowered his eyes in thought. “I don’t want to treat you with insects. It isn’t very hygienic.”
“That won’t work. They aren’t evil spirits. The rose heraldry never activated.”
Song Zang even began suspecting the sprouts had no malicious intent at all. They were simply acting according to instinct.
Their earlier frenzy of consuming his marrow and nutrients might merely have been necessary to maintain the stability of the 【information-transfer channel】.
As long as he could digest the burden inside his mind and process that heavy, incomprehensible knowledge, the writhing sprouts woven through his flesh would no longer have any reason to exist.
The moment Song Zang thought of this, he immediately told Yin Chen his theory.
Yin Chen was seriously disinfecting his thigh. He had specifically spent points on two bottles, one alcohol and one iodophor. Without hesitation, he opened both and poured them directly into the torn flesh.
He plucked one sprout and examined it closely. “If your theory is correct, then you need an enormous amount of Resistance. You need to replenish large quantities of Resistance in a short period of time to provide enough energy and protection for your brain.
“Until we’re completely prepared, you absolutely cannot touch that knowledge on your own… unless you want to eat your own grilled brains.”
Song Zang obediently listened. His wet black lashes, heavy with tears, drooped as he accused in a soft, lonely voice, “I’m already this pitiful and you’re still frightening me.”
“…You still have the energy to act shamelessly. Looks like you really aren’t hurting anymore.” Yin Chen laughed softly. “If you’re unhappy, bite me again. The right side this time. Make them symmetrical.”
Song Zang lifted his misty black eyes. “You’re really letting me?”
“Hurry up. Once you’re done, I’m going to chop that demon apart and stew it in your iron pot.”
“Okay~”
Song Zang was satisfied. He wrapped his arms around Yin Chen and left another mark on the opposite side of his neck. The bruised red caused by bleeding beneath the skin stood out sharply. Yin Chen cooperated throughout, watching him with a half-smile. “You look weak, but you’re surprisingly strong.”
Song Zang pretended not to hear. He summoned the iron pot and set it down, looking innocent. “Go chop it up. Xu Wei Ran and the others should arrive soon. I won’t be in danger. I’ll wait here.”
“Mm. Keep your gun ready. Don’t touch the wound. Don’t be stingy with bullets.”
Yin Chen pinched his face and lectured him for quite a while before finally leaving with his saber, still visibly reluctant.
Because next, there might be a battle of some size.
Logically speaking, the true body of the fallen angel banished into Hell should have been frozen at the center of Jerusalem, sealed inside ice for a thousand years and unable to move. He was not dead, merely in long-term dormancy. His soul could still move freely, making him the one and only King of Devils in Hell.
But Jerusalem, after being occupied by the lake of black slurry, had already been corroded into utter ruin. There was no trace of ice anywhere.
Only a long chain lay loosely around the fallen angel’s body like some kind of joke. It could not restrain him, much less the parasites inside him.
Following the crude path Lan Yu Heng had cleared, Yin Chen stepped onto the fallen angel’s enormous black python tail and steadily climbed upward over scales nearly half as wide as his own height.
Beneath his feet, lymphatic flesh masses quietly wriggled between the scales. Above his head, densely packed unknown organisms moved through the enormous black wings, causing them to spasm and sway from time to time.
The perfectly respectable Demon King of Hell, once the cherished “right wing of God,” the one and only radiant morning star at the time of Creation, had now been completely parasitized and consumed by foreign life, reduced to a hollow corpse controlled by others.
How had he fallen into such a state?
And how could something in this condition possibly possess the power to attack Heaven and imprison God?
Yin Chen remained silent and thoughtful. Following Lan Yu Heng’s slippery footprints, he walked directly into the fallen angel’s exposed chest cavity.
That was right. Lucifer was a stitched-together monster. Goat head, python tail, but an upper body broadly resembling a human man, with pale, smooth skin and breathtakingly beautiful musculature, like a classically handsome Greek man.
Unfortunately, Lan Yu Heng had violently punched through those perfect chest muscles, leaving behind an enormous, horrifying opening that conveniently allowed the players to enter and explore.
The organs inside his chest had long since shriveled and hardened after soaking in filthy black slurry for years. Yet they stubbornly retained their original shape and showed none of the deeply ominous mold or black spotting seen elsewhere.
The most horrifying thing, however, was not the black slurry. It was the enormous ovary hidden inside the massive atrium.
The ovary resembled a honeycomb. It had eaten countless tiny holes through Lucifer’s dried heart. Layer upon layer of monster eggs were packed inside, some round, some square, their forms completely irregular. Their only common trait was that every one of them was wet, sticky, plump, and elastic. Like diseased white lymph tumors and virus-mutated tissue, they parasitized the inside of the heart and continued spreading outward.
The windpipe and esophagus were completely clogged with wet eggs, preventing Lan Yu Heng from exploring upward. The excretory opening of the coiled python lower body was not a particularly appealing exit either.
The snake flesh had long since been eaten completely clean, cruelly stripped until not even scraps remained. Only a thick outer layer of skin prevented the entire structure from collapsing.
The enormous hollow interior of the python had filled with viscous black slurry. Newly born little tentacles happily swam inside it, breeding separately from the flesh-and-egg ovaries inside the upper body’s heart. The two populations did not interfere with one another.
Lan Yu Heng strongly suspected the python tail probably contained another tentacle nest, but she was truly exhausted now. Her temples throbbed, and she had absolutely no desire to use magic again.
She wrapped a strip of cloth around her eyes, crunched hard gemstones to replenish herself, summoned her cane, and brutally stabbed straight through the left atrium, enjoying the visceral satisfaction of physical combat.
Meanwhile, for reasons she could not understand, Li Ming discovered that she moved through Lucifer’s body like a fish in water. Any small tentacle that suddenly lunged out to ambush her was casually crushed beneath her foot. Any writhing flesh mass that approached her cooked until bright red and collapsed, unable to continue attacking on its own.
It was almost as though… she knew this shattered demonic body intimately. As though she had returned to some happy old home. Even if she could not completely control it, the place naturally maximized her chances of survival.
Peaceful, comfortable, at ease. It was an extremely strange and inappropriate feeling.
Li Ming clenched the cross, digging her nails into her palm until blood emerged, reminding herself that she absolutely could not lower her guard.
But the problem was, she genuinely moved through this body with ridiculous ease.
Lan Yu Heng was fighting back and forth against the fleshy egg-honeycomb inside the heart, red liquid and shredded meat spraying everywhere. Li Ming merely experimented by tugging on the thick windpipe and somehow triggered the body’s remaining “immune counterattack system.”
After a violent tremor, Lucifer’s windpipe and esophagus spontaneously ignited. They convulsed, collapsed, and curled into a closed ring, trapping every tender flesh mass clogging the passage… then used a suicidal method to destroy themselves along with the parasites, burning everything into black ash.
“O my God…” Li Ming made the sign of the cross, staring in astonishment.
“What happened?”
Yin Chen happened to enter at that moment, just in time to witness the spectacular sight of the ring rapidly catching fire.
“It killed itself… I-I don’t know. I don’t know what I did either.”
Li Ming’s eyes were almost too wide to close as she stammered.
“Don’t panic. Speak slowly. There isn’t any danger right now.”
“…Okay.”
Li Ming took a deep breath and tried to describe her bizarre experience as specifically as possible. The completely unprovoked sense of safety kept overriding the vigilance demanded by her instincts. The two incompatible sensations collided inside her and could easily leave someone confused.
She truly did not know what to do. She was even worried she would gradually relax completely and lose herself in this dangerous depth of Hell.
“You’re the only person who feels this way, correct?”
“Yes. And I’m certain it has nothing to do with the halo the Holy Son gave me. God’s protection feels gentler. It would never be this forceful and overbearing…”
Yin Chen studied her thoughtfully from head to toe in her old-fashioned nun’s habit.
She was small and slender, swallowed by heavy black robes and veil, like a child secretly wearing an adult’s solemn clothes, or like someone stuffed into a loose, cumbersome black sack. The whole image looked deeply mismatched.
If he wanted to put it more extremely, Yin Chen even felt that Li Ming was fundamentally unsuited to being a nun. She had spent the entire instance diligently reciting lines appropriate to her role and knew the Bible backward and forward, but none of it came from genuine faith.
That was what Yin Chen thought, and he said it without the slightest concern. “Maybe you were never supposed to be a true Catholic nun. Maybe inside this asylum, a nest controlled by Satanists, your destined role was to become the mother of demons.”
“…Huh?” Li Ming’s eyes widened yet again.
“Think carefully. Back at the asylum, where did the tentacles and mold actually come from? One hundred percent from the deepest part of Hell, from Jerusalem.
“Right now we’re standing beside the monsters’ nest. We’re standing inside Lucifer’s chest. Everyone else feels awful… except you. Inside the fallen angel’s body, things happen exactly as you wish. You can do whatever you want.”
Li Ming answered blankly, “I wouldn’t say I can do whatever I want. I just feel comfortable. Like I’ve come home.”
“Would a normal person feel at home in Hell? Even I don’t.” The longer Yin Chen thought about it, the more likely the theory seemed. “No wonder your name is Li Ming.”
“…My name is related too?”
“Lucifer has another epithet: Son of the Dawn. Some traditions also call him a descendant of the ancient Greek goddess of dawn.”
Whether that goddess truly existed was difficult to determine, but the title “Son of the Dawn” appeared in all kinds of religious material.
Elio’s Notes: Li Ming’s name, 黎明, literally means “dawn.” The chapter is playing with that name alongside Lucifer’s morning-star / son-of-dawn imagery, remixing religious and later literary traditions rather than presenting a single doctrinal account.
“In other words, from a certain perspective, you may currently be standing on your own son’s ribs. What an astonishingly fierce mother,” Yin Chen remarked with a half-smile.
Before Li Ming could recover, Lan Yu Heng’s voice exploded from the shriveled heart chamber. “Will you two stop standing there chatting?! This damn thing is replicating itself! Get over here and help me kill it!”
“Coming, Sister Lan!”
Li Ming instantly perked up, lifted the cumbersome robe, and jogged toward her. Truthfully, standing in front of Yin Chen made her uneasy. She was afraid one careless sentence might infuriate the big boss. Staying farther away was much safer.
Yin Chen was in no hurry to help. He lazily followed behind, watching Li Ming’s behavior with interest.
Li Ming was not weak at physical combat either. Her entire body was hidden beneath black robes, so she had no fear of the filthy, sticky liquids. She drew a machete with her left hand and raised an iron shovel with her right, floating toward the heart like a black sack armed for murder.
It looked somewhat ridiculous. Li Ming really was not suited to being a nun.
Before she even reached Lan Yu Heng, her foot caught on a thick, raised artery along the heart and she fell flat on the ground.
The shovel flew from her hand, folded in half in midair, and snapped. The crystals Lan Yu Heng had packed into the handle scattered out and landed directly across the white ovary that was frantically writhing and reproducing.
BOOM!
The crystals’ energy erupted to its maximum. Black-red fire ignited without wind, burning the newborn lymphatic flesh masses until they blackened and rotted… Then every one of them died.
Lan Yu Heng froze. Her expression turned strange as she pulled off her blindfold and carefully examined Li Ming. “Girl, what the hell are you? Possessed by a lucky koi?”
Elio’s Notes: In Chinese internet slang, a koi can mean someone associated with extraordinary good luck. Lan Yu Heng is joking that Li Ming seems to have become a walking lucky charm.
Yin Chen did not look surprised. He lazily said, “Sister Pudu was designated as the Holy Mother, so she has good fortune. Anyone who intends to kill her becomes extremely unlucky. Li Ming was designated as the mother of demons, so on her son’s territory, whoever she wants dead simply dies.
“Compare the two side by side. The logic is extremely simple.”
As he spoke, he raised his saber and deliberately stood within Li Ming’s halo. With a few swift cuts, he shredded the enormous parasitic ovary inside the left ventricle and opened a hole through the muscular septum, revealing an equally crowded nest inside the right ventricle.
Once Lan Yu Heng and Li Ming crossed through the opening, Yin Chen stood opposite them, wiped the filthy mucus from his blade, and calmly asked, “Li Ming, I want to borrow your son’s heart. I’ll cut off only half for now and use it to supplement Song Zang’s nutrition. Any objections?”
“…Huh? No. No objections.”
Li Ming was still dazed and did not quite believe such a ridiculous possibility. Her confused gaze wandered across the giant’s chest cavity as she stubbornly tried to conduct more experiments.
Yin Chen had no interest in minor details. His main objective was finding Song Zang something to eat, something rich in calories and nutrients that could rapidly replenish his weakened body… What could possibly be better than the heart of the world’s first devil?
Once Li Ming gave permission, Yin Chen immediately began cutting, removing the entire left ventricle intact.
“You keep fighting. I’ll be back soon.”
After saying that, he casually dragged the enormous organ away as though pulling an entire five-bedroom villa barehanded. The visual effect was astonishing.
Song Zang had already started eating.
He limped around nearby, searching for whatever had caused the parchment to mutate while collecting “stranded” little tentacles and flesh masses. He tossed everything into the iron pot and let it do whatever it pleased.
Was Jerusalem dangerous? Song Zang walked around alone for five minutes without encountering a single attack. Aside from half-dead immature visitors from beyond, he found no living creature whatsoever.
The danger level of this dead city at the center of the earth almost seemed lower than the wildly varied tortures of funnel-shaped Hell.
The only nest currently creating danger was the fallen angel’s endless true body.
So Song Zang experimentally circled closer. Neither the python tail nor the human upper body caused any reaction, but the bright cinnabar-red mark on the goat’s head began emitting an extremely faint glow as he approached.
That was right, faint. Almost imperceptible. But the wound on Song Zang’s leg immediately became active again. The sprouts regained their vitality, writhing and tightening through his flesh by instinct, producing wave after wave of tearing pain.
In that instant, Song Zang immediately thought of an experimental countermeasure.
He forcibly squeezed out several tears, rubbed the token and purple gemstone ring Medisa had given him, then spoke softly in an aggrieved, tearful voice. “Mother, it hurts so much. Save me.”
Medisa herself did not appear.
But the faint glow from that lipstick mark abruptly intensified. It transformed from dim light into dazzling brilliance, blood-red radiance surging around Song Zang’s body and lingering without fading.
The sharp pain gradually disappeared. Song Zang pretended his legs had gone weak and collapsed trembling to the ground, biting his lip in terror, curling into himself and shedding pitiful tears.
In truth, the bloody light was nowhere near as frightening as it appeared. It was warm and scorching without hurting him, wrapping Song Zang in a powerful embrace and forcibly suppressing the sprouts’ activity. It simply could not completely drive them out of his flesh.
Somewhere beyond his perception, Song Zang felt a faint itch on the top of his head. His wet cheeks were pinched, squeezed, and kneaded, then someone planted a vigorous kiss on him from afar. His thick lashes were heavy with tears, but beneath the heat of the red radiance they gradually dried and became light again.
Once every trace of physical discomfort disappeared, the red glow slowly faded too.
Song Zang even discovered that after receiving that kiss… aside from the hazy region where the unknown knowledge had been stored, his dizzy mind had completely cleared. He felt energized enough to solve difficult mathematics problems for hours.
Lady Medisa really treated him very well. Although her method of pouring knowledge into him had been far too forceful, Song Zang could not really blame her.
After all, that mutated parchment should have escaped on its own and flown toward some unknown destination. It had never been meant to rot grotesquely inside Song Zang’s flesh and take root as a parasite.
Perhaps Medisa had another objective, but through a strange series of accidents, the knowledge had been forcibly trapped in Song Zang’s hands.
“Mother? Is that you?”
He looked at the outrageously bold lipstick mark and asked in a trembling voice.
No one answered.
But having a mother rub his head and pinch his cheeks really was an extraordinarily novel, subtle… unfamiliar experience.
Song Zang rose blankly to his feet as a strange excitement bloomed inside him. Since his condition had mostly recovered, of course he needed to hurry and eat more to replenish the energy he had exhausted.
Yin Chen switched to an ordinary knife and sliced thick pieces from the heart muscle first, tossing them into the iron pot one by one.
In one corner of the silent, ruined dead city, the aroma of food rose continuously. The scene carried an oddly warm domestic atmosphere.
Aside from the goat head no one was watching.
It was quietly splitting open. A crack rapidly expanded along the skull’s midline, concealed deep beneath the goat hair.
There was no brain matter or nervous tissue beneath the crack, no physical organ at all. Only a boundless dark abyss leading somewhere unknown.
Inside the abyss, a sleeping eye was slowly awakening.