CH 43

Chapter 43 – The Human Realm

Reed Village was a small village at the fork between a river and a coastal area.

“Second Brother, wait for me! I’m scared!” A little girl in coarse cloth garments exclaimed with a pout, her face smeared with a bit of mud. She looked like she was on the brink of bursting into tears.

“Xiao Yue, don’t be scared. Look what I picked! I’ll give it to you once we get out of the Red Spirit Fruit Forest,” a strong and honest-looking boy replied. When he saw Xiao Yue stop in her tracks as if she was about to cry, he hurriedly flashed the item in his hand and dangled it around.

It was a Red Spirit Fruit which was emitting a dull golden glow. In the Red Spirit Fruit Forest, these golden Red Spirit Fruits were extremely precious and rare.

As if it worked like a charm, the pout on Xiao Yue’s face went away. But when she looked at the golden Red Spirit Fruit, she shook her head. “Second Brother, we secretly entered the Red Spirit Fruit Forest without letting Uncle Wang know, and even took a rare golden Red Spirit Fruit. Won’t he be mad?”

The boy furrowed his brows and replied, “If neither of us say anything, he’ll never know. Let’s hurry up. We’ll cut through the forest and come out from the side, then return to the village. There’s still quite a few li left in our journey to go.”

Xiao Yue was still hesitant. She looked around at the lush thickets of the Red Spirit Fruit Trees around her before saying, “I’m still a little scared. They say that Uncle Wang raised several vicious dogs in the forest. What if…”

As if confirming her worries, a grating howl cut through the air at that very moment, originating from the depths of the Red Spirit Fruit Forest. The fruit trees in their surroundings seemed to shake and quiver in response.

“Ahhh!! Second Brother, did you hear that?!” Xiao Yue cried out. Earlier, she had been tricked by Xiao Hu into coming into the forest to steal some Red Spirit Fruits. Now that she received such a scare, she stood rooted in place as tears welled up from her eyes.

When Xiao Hu heard the howl, his heart began to pound even though he knew that the vicious dogs wouldn’t harm the people from the village. He didn’t utter a single word, and he immediately began pulling Xiao Yue along in running towards the edge of the forest.

That side face of the Red Spirit Forest was surrounded by a fence, but there was an extremely well-hidden gap in the fence that Xiao Hu and his buddies had spent a tremendous amount of effort to make several years ago.

The Red Spirit Forest was the lifeblood supporting every person in Reed Village. Every family had spent dozens of years toiling within, and among the villagers, Uncle Wang was the person in charge of overseeing the Red Spirit Forest.

From their harvest, a large portion had to be given up to their superiors, but that extremely small remaining portion could be exchanged for money and food. It was enough to keep the 10 or so families in their village clothed and fed. Therefore, even if there were some naughty children occasionally stealing one or two fruits from the forest, Uncle Wang was very laid back about it. He knew about that hole in the fence on the side of the Red Spirit Forest, but he simply turned a blind eye to it.

However, these vicious dogs that he raised were seriously frightening. The origin of these vicious dogs was unknown. Some of the villagers said that they were granted to him from the higher-ups in order to protect the Red Spirit Forest. Each of them was about the height of a person, and their mouths were filled with razor sharp fangs, and if they even slightly bit down with their ferocious maws, they would be able to exert enough force to snap a person in half. The last time there were some thieves who were trying to steal from the forest, they ended up becoming appetizers for these vicious dogs.

It was Xiao Yue’s first time being in the forest since she had been tricked by Xiao Hu into coming, but she had long heard of these rumors about those vicious dogs. While Xiao Hu was grabbing her arm as they sprinted like the wind, she was getting more and more terrified the longer she thought about it. Another set of fierce howls could be heard at that moment, and her little face turned as white as a sheet.

The two of them ran for a while. Beads of sweat had formed on Xiao Hu’s forehead as he ran, and he wiped them off with his sleeve. When he gazed off into the distance, he smiled. “Xiao Yue, look! We’re almost at the hole in the fence. Just hang in there for a bit longer and we’ll be back at the village.”

When Xiao Yue saw that they were almost out, her expression relaxed a bit. She used her tender hands to mop the sweat on her brow which was mixing with the mud smeared on her face. Although the little girl’s face was a bit dirty, it didn’t subtract from her cuteness.

Once they made it past the fence, Xiao Hu took the Red Spirit Fruit, which was emitting golden light, and hid it tightly in his bosom. The two of them calmed down a bit before unhurriedly making their way towards the village.

“Second Brother, why is there not a single light on in the village?” Xiao Yue stopped, her face wrought with anxiety as she looked at Reed Village, covered in darkness.

The two of them had entered the Red Spirit Forest in the afternoon, and it was now evening. It was already getting dark, and by this time the village would normally already be bright with lantern light.

Xiao Hu gazed up at the silver light shining down from the three moons low on the horizon and muttered to himself, “The moons are already out, why hasn’t the village lit up any lanterns?”

They both stood panic-stricken at the entrance of the village in the pitch dark, not daring to venture in any further. When they thought of all the scary stories they had heard, they became even more frightened.

Xiao Hu turned around to look at his little sister, Xiao Yue, who was already at her wit’s end and was on the brink of sobbing. He forced himself to calm down by pinching his wrist. In a steady voice, he said, “Let’s go to Uncle Wang’s place first!”

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He stopped looking towards the lightless village, and pulled Xiao Yue along with him as he began heading towards the Red Spirit Fruit Forest which they just came from. But this time he was going to the front entrance, where Uncle Wang lived.

However, what frightened the two even further was that the several wooden houses that made up Uncle Wang’s residence were also completely dark, without a single lantern aglow.

“Second Brother, what do we do? Where should we go?” Xiao Yue’s eyes were filled with tears, but she was just barely managing to hold it in. The brother and sister pair had lost their parents when they were small, so they had always depended on each other for survival. Through the support of the people in the village, they had been able to steadily live out a poor but upright lifestyle.

Xiao Hu forced himself to calm down, knowing that he couldn’t lose his composure in front of his little sister. “Let’s first go into the village and take a look. Who knows, maybe they’re just sleeping early tonight so they didn’t bother to light the lanterns?” Xiao Hu said in a low voice.

The two of them didn’t have much choice. Aside from their house in the village, the two had nowhere to go. It was far too dangerous to spend the night in a deserted area outside the village.

Just as the two were about to continue talking, a shriek pierced through the silence from within the village. There was no way that this shriek could have been produced by a human. It was a strange, high-pitched screech, filled with bitter resentment.

Xiao Hu clutched Xiao Yue’s hand tighter. When they heard the shrieks continuing inside the village, they began to tremble and their faces turned deathly pale.

The strange shrieks eventually stopped, and Xiao Hu opened his mouth to speak. But suddenly, he saw Xiao Yue’s pupils shrink in terror, her face filled with incomparable horror. Her gaze was focused on something behind him, and her mouth was hanging slightly open, but she couldn’t produce a single sound.

Just as Xiao Hu caught on that something strange was happening, he heard the very same deafening, vengeful shriek right behind him! He wanted to turn around and check, but his vision went dark at that very moment, and he lost consciousness.

A woman with long hair suddenly appeared behind Xiao Hu. She opened her bloody mouth wide and completely swallowed Xiao Hu up in one bite. Although she could be described as a ‘woman’, it was only because she was wearing a ghastly white dress. Her facial features were nonexistent, and her entire face was instead occupied with just a large mouth, filled with rows of razor-sharp teeth.

Xiao Yue’s mouth was stuck hanging open, but she couldn’t make any sounds as tears began to streak down her face.

The woman was floating in the air, and she opened her pointy jaws wide. Just as the woman was about to swallow Xiao Yue and refine her soul, she suddenly stopped and looked fixedly towards a position high in the sky.

A scarlet-tinged beam of rainbow light streaked through the sky like a meteor, but it suddenly paused in midair and changed directions, going directly towards Reed Village where it landed right in front of the woman and Xiao Yue.

The light faded, and a man who looked to be around 30 years old was standing there, wearing a Daoist robe imprinted with a complicated seal. His body was basked in scarlet light, and when the light around him subsided, he saw the woman-like figure and Xiao Yue standing there frozen.

He furrowed his brows when he saw the women half floating in the air. Her entire body began to tremble and her razor-sharp jaws began to clatter. Her body language made it seem as if she was begging for forgiveness.

The Daoist didn’t glare at her any further and expanded his Dao Foundation stage sea of consciousness, which covered the entire Reed Village. He didn’t even blink when he saw the village littered with corpses, but when he saw the vicious dogs dead in the forest, his brows furrowed even deeper.

Tears were flowing endlessly down Xiao Yue’s face. She suddenly found that she could finally speak again, so she kneeled down on the ground, her mind completely blank. She sobbed, “I-Immortal, are you an immortal? Please take revenge for my brother, for my village, wuuuuu…”

The woman began to tremble even more intensely, not even daring to move an inch. The Daoist shot a sideways glance at Xiao Yue, speaking his first word since arriving here. “Fine.”

A light flashed in his hand and a crimson sword appeared, glimmering with a dazzling radiance against the backdrop of the night sky.

With a casual swipe, he drew a brilliant sword light which bisected the terrified woman floating in midair. Xiao Yue was also in its range, but before dying, she closed her eyes and welcomed the sword light.

The Daoist took out a dark green jade slip and muttered to himself for a bit as he deliberated on what to say. Then, he conveyed the information into it. “Reporting in to the Patrol Guard Hall of the Mountain of Law. Just now, I was doing a routine patrol, and about 23,000 li from the Eighth Mountain of the Zhuri Mountain Range, an Evil Spirit had appeared in the vicinity of an unidentified village. I hereby report that I have already exterminated it. This village has a Red Spirit Fruit Forest, which could be a supply of low-grade spiritual medicine for the sect, so I will also forward this jade slip message to the Botany Hall of Wenyuan Mountain. I recommend migrating people here to repopulate the village so they can cultivate the forest. I have recorded the location of the unidentified village in the map within the jade slip. I hereby respectfully conclude this as the third report for the routine patrol by Wang He of the Patrol Guard Hall.”

In the jade slip message, the deaths of nearly 10 or so families was hardly even mentioned. The only thing that somewhat related to it was the part where he mentioned, ‘I recommend migrating people here to repopulate the village so they can cultivate the forest’. In his eyes, and the sects’ as well, these lives were probably only tools to harvest the supply of low-grade spiritual medicine.

Once again turning into a beam of scarlet-tinged rainbow light, he shot off like a comet and gradually disappeared beyond the horizon. All that remained was the moonlight shining perpetually from on high, illuminating the disastrous chaos left behind in the village.