Mythology Returns! Starting with Folklore and Strange Tales

Chapter 123 The Long-Awaited Idol

Seeing him open his eyes, the other person immediately handed him a clean cornbread, a smile appearing on his weathered old face: "We don't have anything good, but this coarse grain cornbread isn't too hard to chew. Please eat some to fill your stomach."

"Thanks!"

Zhang Wei has not yet reached the point of complete fasting.

Otherwise, the prospective master wouldn't have deliberately prepared dozens of bottles of fasting pills in his sachet.

However, with his body open and full of energy, the Qi he draws from the outside world can compensate for some of the body's depletion. Moreover, given his current constitution, as long as he eats his fill once, even if he doesn't eat for a month or two, it's the same as a normal person eating two meals less a day. He might feel a little listless, but it won't be a big problem.

But then again, seeing the old man's cautious and apprehensive manner, as if afraid of being rejected, he wouldn't do anything to spoil the mood.

Of course, it's not made in the real world; it doesn't contain pumpkin puree, milk, powdered sugar, or anything like that.

Plain coarse grain steamed buns are very rough.

Having been left on the road for so long, it had long since dried out and become as hard and unchewable as a brick.

But Zhang Wei still ate bite by bite, and looking at the smiling old man and the starving people around him who were watching with bated breath, Zhang Wei smiled back.

They were all refugees fleeing from famine, so there was no need for any extra preparations.

After finishing this simple breakfast, while the temperature was still not too high, they slowly began to move forward again.

However, the number of corpses along the roadside was increasing.

Big ones, small ones, some were at least buried by the roadside, but were later dug up.

Some of the skulls had obvious traces of burning from flames, and Zhang Wei even saw signs of gnawing on some of the small skulls.

Although he had already taken precautions in advance with the [Evil Rat].

But along the way, he saw not just one or two, but hundreds and thousands, even wild dogs and rats, grazing on the remaining bones as if no one was there, completely ignoring Zhang Wei and his group, showing no fear of wild animals towards two-legged creatures.

Some of the rat dogs, seeing them pass by, promptly picked up the bones beneath them and hung far behind them.

They looked as if they were waiting for one of them to collapse so they could have a bite of fresh meat!

Zhang Wei would not keep these man-eating monsters alive.

The bloodthirsty aura swept across the land like a torrential downpour of pear blossoms, piercing through all the rats and hounds in its flight, their dying cries echoing across the wilderness...

After doing all this, he seemed to breathe a sigh of relief, but when he turned around, he saw the starving people staring longingly at the corpses of the rat dogs, swallowing hard, but mindful of their own safety, they could only keep walking forward, looking back every few steps.

Even now, everything before him still makes him feel as if a fire is burning inside him.

Is it a preconceived bias against the Later Jin, or the indifferent attitude of the old woman towards making use of waste, or perhaps it's the corpses along the way and the hungry people yearning for food before her?

Perhaps all of these reasons are true.

As if a raging fire was burning within him, Zhang Wei became increasingly silent on the way. Seeing this, the entire starving crowd also became eerily quiet. The group just kept their heads down and walked forward, and the harmonious atmosphere of before was gone.

In a village not far from the official road but long abandoned, Zhang Wei could see a dilapidated little temple in the village from a distance.

He left a few talismans for the starving people, instructing them to circle around and catch up as soon as possible if they found nothing, before he immediately took flight and flew straight towards the small temple in the village.

Ten seconds later, Zhang Wei landed.

The temple is a very ordinary old-fashioned small temple.

The earthen wall, less than the size of a room, encloses the four sides. The two wooden doors that should have been in the middle have disappeared. Through the doorway, which is about the height of a person, one can clearly see the dilapidated state of the temple, with the offering table collapsed and the statues of gods broken.

Of course, it wasn't completely abandoned.

Of the dozen or so clay statues scattered around, one was still intact, while most of the others were damaged and their divinity was long gone. The worst off was the main altar in the temple, where the statue that should have been tall and majestic had been pushed to the ground for some reason, and its clay body was scattered into pieces of different sizes on the altar and the ground.

Zhang Wei looked up at the plaque above the temple gate.

Having weathered the elements and lacking maintenance, the wooden sign can only be vaguely discerned as the first character "八" (eight), while the two or three characters that should have followed are worn away and illegible.

If an ordinary person saw it, they would instinctively think it was an abandoned temple and would walk away from it at first glance.

But this was the first temple that Zhang Wei had seen after a long time since the wedding silhouettes, a temple where divinity remained and where people could offer incense and make sacrifices.

I didn't see them at all in the previous [Evil Rats] story. Not long ago, the small village that had been freed from the drought demon only had an ancestral hall, but Zhang Wei wasn't of the same surname and therefore couldn't be worshipped because he had no official status. As for the household gods that every family had...

I didn't see any, not a single one.

Even the positions that should have belonged to the Earth God and the Kitchen God were replaced by the shrines of Bai Erniang and Huang Sanye in that village.

Putting aside whether these deities possess any spiritual power, Zhang Wei's current status alone would prevent him from offering incense and sacrifices to these unrecognized, unofficial wild gods.

Therefore, he did not linger in that village.

But now, this temple statue with a faint glow can't possibly be disgusting him with wild gods like before, right?

Upon entering the temple, I went straight to the relatively intact statue of the deity.

What comes into view is a lifelike stone sculpture of a cat in a crouching hunting pose.

And just then, a subtitle appeared before Zhang Wei's eyes:

[A gloomy cat-and-tiger statue]

One of the common agricultural gods in folk worship, often associated with Shennong (the progenitor of agriculture), Houji (the god of the five grains, the agricultural official of Shun, the ancestor of the Zhou people, named "Qi", enfeoffed in Tai), and Tianjun (the ancient god of fields who was in charge of farmland management).

Post station: Symbolizes the spirits of field dwellings (post), roads (post), and boundaries (borders), ensuring the order of farming.

Cat and Tiger: Cats and tigers that prey on field mice and wild boars, protecting crops from animal damage. Dike: Guardian deity of flood control dikes.

Shuiyong (water ditch): a deity who manages farmland irrigation and drainage.

Insects (deities that drive away pests such as locusts and borers, later evolved into "Locust God" or "General Liu Meng" living in the same temple, called Jiaping in the Xia Dynasty, Qingsi in the Yin Dynasty, Dala in the Zhou Dynasty, and later evolved into the Eight La Gods).

Because the temple is abandoned and lacks worship, its spiritual power has been tarnished and it has lost its efficacy. A simple offering may awaken the spirit of the cat-tiger god and provide some assistance to the traveler. Offerings: salt, fish.