Divine Root Bone

As dusk fell, the last rays of the setting sun were completely swallowed up by the rolling mountains.

The entire valley where the Southern and Eastern Regions meet was instantly shrouded in thick, inky darkness.

The once vibrant and lively Shou'an Village seemed to have had all its vitality instantly extinguished by an invisible hand.

In just half an incense stick's time, every household in the entire village had its wooden doors tightly shut and its lights turned off.

There was no smoke from cooking fires, no human voices, no children playing, and no women gossiping.

Even the ancient chirping of insects, the sound of the wind, and the rustling of falling leaves in the mountains and fields disappeared completely at this moment.

Dead silence.

A heavy, chilling, and oppressive stillness pervaded the entire ancient village.

The Qingyun Sect members dispersed and stayed overnight as previously arranged.

Lin Wanqing was gentle and kind-hearted, while Su Qingyao, though aloof and wary, was by no means suspicious or bloodthirsty. The two women, both kind-hearted, rescued a girl suffering in the desolate forest. Seeing the girl's weak and pitiful state and her grateful kowtow, they had already lowered their guard. The two women then temporarily stayed in the girl's simple, rustic mud-brick hut. The fatigue of their days of travel overwhelmed them, and after a short rest, they sat cross-legged to meditate and slowly drifted into sleep.

The twelve inner disciples were divided into pairs and stayed at the homes of their neighbors around the village.

The villagers all had gentle faces and were very warm-hearted. They seemed simple and honest, with no ill intentions whatsoever. The disciples saw only kind scenes along the way, and the villages were peaceful and serene. Their guard gradually relaxed, and after days of travel and exhaustion, they fell into a deep sleep one after another.

Zhang Yang, however, lived alone in an abandoned house next to the girl's house.

The room was very small, with only a bed, a table, and a stool. The furnishings were extremely simple. The walls were mottled and cracked, and the thatched roof was old and blackened, exuding an atmosphere of poverty and isolation.

The room was completely dark, with no lights on.

Zhang Yang lay flat on the wooden bed, his eyes gently closed. His spiritual energy flowed quietly around him, and his solid foundation at the second level of Foundation Establishment steadily protected him. His divine sense spread out, silently covering the area within three zhang around him.

He was wide awake.

From the moment he stepped into Shou'an Village, an inexplicable sense of unease and coldness lingered in his heart, refusing to dissipate.

At first, it was just a vague discomfort.

But as time went by, the scenes from the daytime kept replaying, reviewing, and comparing in his mind like flowing water. Countless small doubts surfaced little by little, piling up layer by layer, making his mind increasingly heavy.

What first came to mind was the village's abnormally bizarre population structure.

From the village entrance, through the streets and alleys, all the way to the girl's home, there were hundreds of households and countless villagers coming and going, but as far as the eye could see, not a single person was over thirty years old.

The streets were filled with young children, teenagers, and mostly young men and women in their early twenties.

A few people who looked slightly older, only twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old, all had graying temples, dry complexions, and declining blood and energy, showing signs of premature aging and old age, as if most of their life force had been forcibly drained.

The lifespan of ordinary people is fifty or sixty years, while cultivators who practice Qi cultivation can live for a hundred years. This is the most basic common sense in the cultivation world.

In every village in the world, whether poor or rich, there are always elderly people with gray hair, passing down their knowledge from generation to generation, ensuring the continuation of life.

Only in this Shou'an Village are there no elderly, no long-lived people, and no people who live long lives.

From birth, the fate of every villager seems to be locked until they turn thirty.

What's even more chilling is—

The villagers coming and going had no doubts or fear whatsoever.

They work at sunrise and rest at sunset, are cheerful, gentle, content, and simple, living a peaceful and ordinary life.

But this peace and contentment are built on the strange fate of short-lived generations and no one dying a good death.

The more peaceful it seems, the more fake it is.

The more comfortable the place, the more sinister it becomes.

This is the first layer, a huge and eerie presence that permeates the entire village.

Then came the girl they had rescued.

They met by chance in the desolate forest in broad daylight. She was dressed in tattered clothes, covered in mud, and her face was streaked with tears. She knelt down and kowtowed heavily, leaving dark red marks on her forehead. Her voice was choked and broken, and she looked pitiful, as if she had survived a disaster and was terrified and helpless.

She tearfully recounted to everyone that she had gone into the mountains alone early in the morning to pick wild vegetables, but unexpectedly encountered two villains on the way. She was drugged and forcibly taken to the depths of the forest, where she was nearly raped.

At the time, everyone witnessed the heinous and inhumane atrocities committed by the villains, and saw the girl's gentle and pitiful nature and genuine emotions. Everyone felt compassion and no one had any doubts.

But as they spent time together, chatted, and entered the village, countless fragmented conversations pieced together revealed two irrefutable and completely contradictory fatal flaws that suddenly exploded in Zhang Yang's mind!

The first point is the complete contradiction between the ingredients and the explanation.

After the girl was rescued and returned home, she specially boiled water and cooked soup to treat them with the best food in her home.

It was a thin, bland vegetable soup, with finely chopped vegetable leaves, clear broth, and not a speck of oil.

During a casual conversation, Zhang Yang asked, "Do people in your village often eat these kinds of wild mountain vegetables?"

The girl's eyes flickered slightly, her expression hesitant, but she told him frankly and directly—

The soil and water in this village are cold and damp, and the wild vegetables in the mountains and forests are all astringent and cold in nature. The local people's stomachs are not tolerant of this, so for generations they have never picked and eaten wild vegetables in the mountains, and they have never stored such ingredients at home.

These words were spoken by the girl herself, and they are absolutely true.

But the only reason she was kidnapped and in danger was precisely—

"I went into the mountains alone at dawn to pick wild vegetables."

The logic is completely broken!

Since the villagers don't eat it, their families don't use it, and no one in the village picks it, why would she go alone into the dangerous, desolate mountains where two realms meet, where monsters and villains roam, to pick a wild vegetable that no one in the village eats?

The excuse was a lie from the very beginning.

It was a false reason she fabricated out of thin air.

The second instance involves deliberately concealing and erasing the tragic deaths of companions.

In broad daylight, in a clearing in the dense forest, everyone witnessed two villains at the fifth level of Qi Refining brutally murdering two young girls.

One person was tortured to death on the spot, his body lying on the ground, his eyes wide open in death.

One person survived by sheer luck—the girl who cried for help right in front of us.

Throughout the entire ordeal, from the moment she awoke crying, to her kneeling pleading for help, to her tearful account of her ordeal, to her recounting of her experiences, she never once mentioned the second woman who had suffered, let alone that she had died tragically on the spot.

She perfectly erased Ah Cui's existence.

Throughout the entire process, she only portrayed herself as someone who "suffers alone, escapes by sheer luck, and is helpless and pitiful."

It's understandable if someone is flustered, has a confused memory, or is emotionally overwhelmed and makes a mistake.

She led the way with a clear head, answered questions fluently and logically, but deliberately erased the crucial fact that her companion had died tragically.

This is not forgetting.

This is a deliberate cover-up.

This is a deliberate avoidance.

This is a perfectly crafted lie that was already in place from the very first moment we met them!

Having figured out these flaws, Zhang Yang felt a sudden chill in his heart.

Gentle, timid, grateful, innocent, helpless...

All those pitiful appearances were just an act, a facade.

This girl was not a pitiful person who died unexpectedly and escaped by sheer luck.

She deliberately appeared in that dense forest.

She deliberately waited for them to pass by.

She deliberately used herself as bait, using an extremely realistic tragedy to gain their sympathy and trust, and step by step led the Qingyun Sect group into this closed, eerie, and deadly Shou'an, where no one had lived past thirty!

Countless seemingly insignificant clues are strung together to reveal the chilling truth.

Why are all the roads leading to the village blocked by dense forest, making it impossible to find without a local guide?

Why is the entire valley isolated and cut off from the outside world?

Why do generations of villagers die young, and why does no one question fate?

Why is the entire village deathly silent and lifeless after nightfall?

From the chance encounter in the wilderness, to rescuing someone and guiding them, to staying overnight in the village, it was all a setup from beginning to end!

Just as Zhang Yang was calm and seeing through the layers of pretense, a chilling change was quietly taking place in the mud-brick hut next door.

The lights inside had already been turned off.

Lin Wanqing was kind-hearted and had been completely unsuspecting the whole way. Now she was sleeping peacefully and quietly.

Although Su Qingyao was aloof and vigilant, she was still young and exhausted from traveling for days. In addition, the village night seemed to have an invisible, dimming force permeating her mind, and she unknowingly fell into a deep sleep.

The room was completely quiet.

No one else was watching.

The gentle, timid, grateful, and kind girl stood quietly in the room.

In a short while, all her awkwardness, timidity, fragility, and innocence, like a human skin mask being peeled off, were gradually revealed.

Those eyes, which had previously been filled with tears, timidity, and pitifulness, were now completely devoid of moisture.

Instead, there was a deathly grayness, a cold indifference that did not belong to the living, and a numbness permeated with a century of death.

She turned her head slightly and glanced at the two female cultivators sleeping soundly on the bed.

Her youthful and delicate face had lost all warmth.

Then, she gently lifted her foot, stepped out of the wooden door of the small house, and stood alone in the dark and quiet courtyard.

The night wind was cold and silent, brushing against her hair.

The entire village was deathly silent. From the direction of the cemetery behind the mountain, a faint, extremely gloomy, and almost imperceptible gray-white death aura drifted over and gently swirled around her.

The girl stood with her back to the dark streets and alleys, and to the house next door where Zhang Yang lived.

Slowly, slowly, a wicked, eerie, and chilling smile appeared on his face.

The smile was faint, yet incredibly eerie.

There was no ferocity, no violence.

There is only one kind of indifference: to control everything and wait for the prey to fall into the trap.

She is not a victim at all.

She was the guide nurtured by this dead village.

For a century, all outsiders, cultivators, and travelers who have mistakenly entered this dense forest at the border of the two realms...

They were all lured into Shou'an Village by this illusion of gentleness, weakness, and pitifulness.

The night grew darker.

Deep within the layers of desolate graves on the back mountain, endless death energy slowly surged.

The white-clad figure, half-possessed and imprisoned by a malevolent spirit, struggling with a sliver of remaining clarity, still stood frozen between the tombs.

And within the village.

Countless fine, silky gray-white wisps of yin energy are quietly seeping out from the ground, from the streets and alleys, and from the cracks in the soil.

Silently and slowly, it coiled around every house in the village and every sleeping person.

tonight.

The century-old tradition of "Midnight Devouring of Life" in Shou'an Village will begin again.

Zhang Yang and his group were now completely trapped in the situation, with no way out.