The entire sect is obsessed with love, but I'm the only one who's truly insane.

A gasp broke the silence.

"Oh no! The Moonlight Vine is gone! The Moonlight Vine is gone! The Moon Goddess's blessing is gone!"

Then came the sound of wailing and crying.

Tao Xian trembled all over, his chest heaving, but upon hearing the voice, he sneered, then cursed through tears, "It's good that it's gone, it's good that it's gone."

Lin Du suddenly asked, "Aren't there any unfamiliar faces among them?"

"Yes, there are some," Tao Xian barely managed to suppress his emotions, "a few of them don't look very familiar."

Lin Du made a note of everything, intending to look for clues later.

Cultivators have long lifespans, and there are countless industries they can develop and escape routes to take over several hundred years.

She handed the spirit vine to Granny Ma, asking, "Granny, how many clones can one vine create?"

"Having more main forces will weaken them; usually, there are two."

Granny Ma took the spirit vine and immediately ignited a ghostly blue flame in her hand, burning the storage bag and its contents to ashes.

Lin Du hesitated, wanting to speak but then stopped himself. That storage bag also contained several hundred spirit stones!

"What about the seeds inside those villagers?"

"I can develop medicine to kill that thing. The older ones are too deeply rooted to be eradicated, but the younger ones can still be saved."

"Please, Granny Ma..." Lin Du paused, "...save them."

Granny Ma gave her a deep look. "When do you plan to kill him?"

Lin Du met the old man's eyes frankly and said, "After Mo Lin removed the Gu poison."

Granny Ma knew she was clever, so she just smiled.

"I have one last question, please tell me, Mother-in-law."

"The men were planted with seeds to drain their life force; those with good spiritual roots were taken away. All the women were left behind to reproduce. But what about the women chosen as brides?"

"Demons devour souls to nourish their spirits. I gave him a new body that day, but I had no way to heal his wounded spirit."

"Those two girls were both born at an inauspicious time, so their yin energy is particularly strong."

Lin Du seemed to be deep in thought. She wondered why, even though he had a new body and no longer needed to eat flesh and blood to sustain himself, the man still committed evil deeds. It turned out that his spirit was damaged.

"So that thing originally only wanted the spirits of girls born at the hour of Yin?"

"Indeed, vitality is a good thing, but in theory... such a shortcut is too risky for the long years of cultivation."

"Can the seeds of the spirit vine control human fertility?" Lin Du asked again.

"No, but the spirit vine seeds will stop growing in winter, and the man who has the seeds planted will have the best yang energy in winter."

Lin Du suddenly realized something, "So... the reason they were forced to give birth one after another wasn't half due to the control of the spirit vine?"

The cries behind him grew closer. Granny Ma stared at Lin Du for a moment and said, "I told you, you've gotten yourself into big trouble. The most troublesome thing in the world isn't offending a powerful person, but offending a bunch of fools."

"The demons don't see this as trouble; only you bunch of idiots are afraid."

Lin Du lowered his eyes. "I know."

Of course she knew.

Granny Ma clapped her hands and turned her head, "See? I told you, she's a fool too."

You can't raise two different kinds of people from the same rice.

Tao Xian surprisingly agreed with Granny Ma's words.

The voices were getting closer and closer. Lin Du suddenly raised his hand and quickly swept away all the tattered white robes. Then, he quickly grabbed his fan and pretended that nothing had happened.

"It's all the fault of those few outsiders!"

"What will become of our village?"

"Without the protection of the moon goddess, we will all die!"

"They are demons, they must be demons!"

A group of people followed the tire tracks and found them, carrying various farm tools. The village chief was also holding a strange magical artifact.

"Look! It's them, it really is them! They killed so many people!"

"They are heretics!!!"

"The Moon Goddess must have felt that we were harboring evil spirits, which is why she left in anger."

"If we kill them and offer them as sacrifices to the moon goddess, will she calm down?"

"They look so dignified and otherworldly, but they're actually wolves and tigers!"

The Supreme Sect has always been the foremost righteous sect, yet it has come to be branded as a demon.

Several stones were thrown at the three members of the Wushang Sect, but fortunately, all three managed to dodge them.

Lin Du raised his hand and pressed his head, which was throbbing from the noise, then walked up to the crowd and stared intently at them with his dark eyes.

The village chief was leading the way. When he met those dark, deep eyes and that pale face where the veins on his forehead were clearly visible, he subconsciously took a step back.

Lin Du, suppressing the emptiness and fatigue of his spiritual sense, spoke, "Village chief, you've come at the right time. Come and see if this corpse is someone from your village."

Her voice was calm, so calm that it seemed she completely ignored the angry and desperate villagers, as if those "evil" and somewhat chaotic swear words weren't directed at them.

The village chief instinctively followed her gaze and looked at the row of corpses.

Suddenly, the village chief's pupils contracted as he looked at the youngest man among them, "Brother!!!"

Mo Lin was about to stop the villagers who wanted to attack when he heard this, he paused, and his big eyes trembled in fright.

What surprised him was not the village chief's address of "brother," but rather how his junior uncle could even foresee this, and why he wanted to expose the matter.

Suddenly, an old man exclaimed, "That's not him! That's the one who was taken away that year! I remember his face!"

Lin Du blinked. Sure enough.

She slowly smiled, then casually pulled out a silver mask. "Do you think we are demons?"

The silver mask, long since washed clean by the rain, covered Lin Du's face. Then she tilted her head, revealing half of her face, and said in a chilling tone, "Really, how presumptuous."

The villagers were all taken aback.

"Isn't that...isn't that the mask of the Moon Goddess's messenger?"

Mo Lin's large eyes clearly showed a hint of surprise. So that's why Lin Du had picked up the white robe and mask earlier.

Lin Du, having gone this far, decided to go all the way and said, "I have raised you for five hundred years. Now that our time has come, I have come in human form. After those children who went out die, I will bring them back and allow their souls to return to their homeland. From now on, you should take care of yourselves."

As she spoke, she turned to look at Mo Lin and Xia Tianwu, "Bury them."

The crowd stared at the person before them in astonishment and uncertainty. No one knew who was the first to kneel down, but soon one after another, they all knelt down with a thud.

"Moon Goddess, please forgive me, Moon Goddess, please forgive me."

"May the Moon Goddess continue to bless our village."

Lin Du lowered his eyes to look at the group of dark heads, chuckled, then his tone suddenly rose, filled with rage, "I've been feeding you all these years, but you've really disappointed me. Look at you now, how can you be considered devout believers? You're just... parasites."

The pressure of spiritual energy poured out, causing everyone to tremble like leaves.

The cloud-patterned boots stopped in front of the village chief, who hesitated for a moment before kneeling down. Lin Du leaned forward slightly and lowered his voice, "You should know, right? Why are those girls forced to keep giving birth? They have no value other than childbirth."

She recalled the memories in the pregnant woman's soul: any woman who turned eighteen and had not yet been chosen by the Moon Goddess would be divided up among the men of the village.

They were communal wives, tools for reproduction; they had no other identity.

The more children a child is born, the more food the moon goddess will bestow upon them.

Lin Du could sense the despair and confusion deep within the pregnant woman.

Xinya had heard stories about the outside world from passersby, but she was faced with men who treated her like a utensil or even a discarded item.

"It was clearly your own offering that was made voluntarily, not at the request of the Moon Goddess, wasn't it?"

Lin Du made his conclusion in a soft voice.

The village chief trembled, then knelt down, banging his head on the ground, "Moon Goddess, please forgive me, Moon Goddess, please forgive me."

"It's just been like this all these years. We thought, we thought, that this is the rule that the moon goddess gave us."

Lin Du sighed, suddenly losing the will to say anything more.

Over there, Mo Lin and Tian Wu had already buried the person and erected a blank wooden sign.

Summer was chanting the Rebirth Mantra, and the talisman in his hand silently flickered with flames. A west wind blew in, scattering the talisman's ashes.

"May all beings be saved and reborn quickly! May all beings be saved and reborn quickly!"

The group left Qinglu Village in this bizarre way, with the villagers following behind them with a mixture of respect and fear, but none of them daring to stop them.

As they approached the village entrance, someone suddenly broke through the dense crowd of villagers and rushed forward from behind, shouting, "Moon Goddess!"

A somewhat familiar face appeared before Lin Du, its dark, grape-like eyes gleaming with tender affection. "Moon Goddess... so you gave me flowers last night. If you're leaving, you'll take me with you, won't you?"

Lin Du stared silently at the girl before him, then his gaze fell on the moonflower in her palm, and he froze for a moment.

Even Granny Ma was taken aback.

Lin Du raised his hand to his forehead, thinking, "What does it mean to lift a stone only to drop it on your own foot?"

That's right.