The Villain Saint is my secondary account

Although the silver-haired girl's slightly charming smile stirred Li Cheng's heart, the pain of losing money tormented his soul.

More importantly, he still couldn't understand why he kept losing—they were clearly playing the rules of Blue Star's card games, weren't they?

"Excuse my impertinence, Your Excellency, is this really your first time playing this?"

"Maybe I just got lucky." Ella waved her hand, a sly smile playing on her lips. "Want to try again?"

She discovered that tormenting her best friend seemed to bring her some unexpected pleasure.

"For the sake of my loyalty to you, please leave some living expenses for the poor believer, Your Majesty." Li Cheng reluctantly took his leave, climbed to the front of the carriage, and patted another player who was driving the carriage outside. "Old Hu, let me drive. Go and deliver to Your Majesty... go and play with Your Majesty for a while."

"Hey, boss, I was just about to call you... Look what's that up ahead?" But Old Hu frowned slightly and pointed ahead on the road.

Li Cheng narrowed his eyes slightly. In his line of sight, at the end of the road shrouded in layers of mist, there seemed to be several tall shadows.

The shadows resembled large trees growing abruptly on the road, but their withered and gnarled branches seemed to be draped with thick willow catkins, swaying slowly with the mountain breeze.

Li Cheng swallowed hard. With the fog in the valley gradually thickening, he felt something was amiss.

"Slow down." After saying that, Li Cheng turned to the back of the carriage. "Brothers, grab your weapons. Xiao Deng, tell the vehicles behind to report their numbers!"

"What happened?" Ella also crouched down and came to the front of the carriage.

The beautiful face that suddenly appeared and the faint lavender scent emanating from the girl made Li Cheng momentarily lose his composure. However, he quickly slapped his forehead and turned back slightly to give Ella a view of the front of the carriage: "Your Holiness, I'm not quite sure what's in front of me... but I feel a little uncomfortable seeing those things."

Ella's crimson eyes reflected the distant mist and the tree-like shadows, and she immediately realized what was happening.

When Li Cheng and his group arrived at the town entrance, the town mayor had already ordered the guards to lower the corpses down, but Ella, who was in the car, could clearly see the corpses hanging from the trees.

"Second carriage, no abnormalities!" "Sanctuary carriage, no abnormalities!" "Third carriage, no abnormalities!" "Fourth carriage, no abnormalities!"

A series of shouts came from near and then faded into the distance, but fortunately, the five carriages were not in any trouble.

As the convoy drew closer, the sight that appeared caused a slight change in the expressions of the players.

Those were trees laden with corpses, looking like strings of dried meat drying in the valley.

Some of the corpses impaled on tree branches were still slowly dripping blood, looking from a distance like a drizzling rain of blood in a white mist.

"My God, what happened..." Li Cheng swallowed hard. If he weren't still in front of the Holy Maiden, he would have instinctively cursed.

Even though it's supposed to be the morning with the least miasma in the Sharp Howling Mountains, the rising fog seems to be consciously gathering and gradually enveloping the roads.

Directing a convoy to turn around in poor visibility is difficult, but forcing it through the forest of corpses is clearly even more unwise.

“Your Holiness, should we turn back first? Something feels off ahead.” Li Cheng first asked Ella for her opinion in a low voice.

“You can take charge, Mr. Li.” Ella nodded gently, and she did not recommend that everyone head directly into the obviously eerie forest.

Li Cheng immediately instructed Xiao Deng to signal the carriages behind to turn around, while he told Lao Hu, the driver, to return to the carriage. He then put on a pumpkin-shaped helmet, sat on the horse, and steered the carriage around.

After some effort and coordination, the entire caravan slowly turned around in the not-so-wide valley, with Li Cheng's carriage still leading the way on the way back.

As he urged his horse forward slowly, he watched the eerie and grotesque forest of corpses gradually disappear into the mist behind him, his unease growing stronger.

Suddenly, Li Cheng, who was riding on horseback, felt as if something had brushed against his hair.

The faint touch sent shivers down his spine. He slowly raised his eyes and saw a drop of thick blood on the tip of his nose.

Above their eyes was a mangled corpse, impaled on a tree branch.

The toes swaying in the wind were clearly the thing that had just brushed against his hair.

Grass.

Li Cheng cursed inwardly. He looked around and realized that the convoy, which he had been directing and should have been heading in the opposite direction, had somehow somehow driven into that eerie forest of corpses.

The carriages passed under the trees where the corpses hung, and the swaying feet of some of the lower-hanging corpses even lightly touched the roof of the passing carriages, making a slight thud.

Chapter Nine: A Close Call

Li Cheng was horrified; his hand gripping the reins trembled.

But as the guild leader, he had to remain calm.

"Xiao Deng, make sure the carriages behind stay close and don't fall behind. Then, report the numbers regularly, every half minute. Don't find it troublesome." He turned around and continued to give orders, "All brothers, keep a close eye on the outside. Report any situation immediately."

Given this bizarre situation, the convoy couldn't stop; they had no choice but to grit their teeth and see if they could get through this suddenly appearing forest of corpses.

Faint calls of numbers rose and fell, echoing in the quiet valley.

Noticing Li Cheng's nervousness, Ella, who was sitting in the carriage, reached out and gently patted his shoulder. "Don't worry, I'm here."

The voice, as light and melodious as a lark's, instantly dispelled the gloom that shrouded Li Cheng's heart, just like the warm sun, and the bone-chilling cold in the misty air seemed to disappear as well.

Your Majesty the Holy Maiden!!!

Li Cheng's eyes welled up with tears. Although they were the ones responsible for protecting Ella, his sense of security was immediately filled after hearing Ella's comforting words.

Looking at those mangled corpses again, although I still felt disgusted, my fear lessened considerably.

Leaving aside Li Cheng's complex psychological changes, Ella's thoughts at this moment were much calmer.

She watched the caravan turn around and head. In her understanding, she should have a strong resistance to mental or illusionary spells, but she didn't notice anything amiss before the caravan entered the Corpse Forest.

This is a bit strange.

In addition, Ella noticed the corpses hanging in the trees, whose clothes, though badly damaged, were still of various kinds.

From miners to businessmen, the still-dripping, not-yet-completely-coagulated blood indicates that the tragedy here had only recently occurred.

If we go any further, we might be able to find the culprit.

As they were thinking this, a familiar shriek rang in their ears again, especially clear in the silence.

"Woo——"

Along with the chilling sound, Ella noticed that some of the corpses hanging from the tree seemed to tremble suddenly.

As Li Cheng drove, he looked at the road ahead shrouded in mist, unaware that a withered arm was slowly reaching down from the milky white fog above his head, its fingernails, stained with mud and blood, about to touch his head.

While cautiously observing what was ahead, player Xiao Deng glanced at Li Cheng and then his eyes widened: "Boss, you're on top of me!"

Li Cheng immediately looked up and saw those withered fingers right up to his face. In just a moment, his face would be torn apart by those sharp fingers.

However, the next moment a slender little hand grabbed that withered wrist.

Ella leaped out of the carriage in an instant, grabbed the withered hand that fell from the sky, and yanked the strange thing with the arm attached to it down from the air. With a powerful over-the-shoulder throw, she slammed it flat onto the ground in front of the car.

Damn it! ?

The shock in Li Cheng's heart finally came to its senses; everything had happened too fast in the blink of an eye.

He didn't even know whether he should be terrified of the moment he brushed with death or amazed by the saintess's sudden burst of wild martial arts skills.

"Clatter, clatter, clatter..." A dense sound, like beans being poured from a bamboo tube, echoed around. The limbs of the corpses hanging from the treetops trembled grotesquely, and the entire forest of corpses seemed to come alive at that moment.

Grotesque fissures split open on their blood-soaked arms, and dark tentacles swayed as they grew from the flesh, looking from a distance like clumps of black hair wriggling on a corpse.

"Prepare for battle!" Before he could even be surprised by what had just happened, Li Cheng immediately roared and commanded his men to engage in battle.

Countless corpses fell like dumplings being dropped into a pot, some even smashing through parts of the carriage roof. Their flailing arms and狰狞 faces came face-to-face with the players inside the carriage in a thrilling manner.

The entire convoy was thrown into chaos. Li Cheng put on his pumpkin helmet, drew his two-handed sword from his back, and jumped to Ella's side.

He was preparing to fight the monstrous corpses with black tentacles growing from their bodies when he suddenly saw an even larger black tentacle burst from the ground beside the carriage. The huge tentacle swatted at the monstrous corpses in front of him like flies, turning them into several piles of rotten flesh against the mountainside.

Li Cheng couldn't help but look at Ella behind him, only to see the silver-haired girl smiling and nodding at him. In her small raised palm, a continuous stream of black sludge flowed down like a waterfall, spreading and eventually covering the ground beneath the entire convoy.

Then, like black flowers blooming around the convoy, countless dark and enormous tentacles grew out of the mud. Some swept away the surrounding monster corpses like garbage, sending them flying to the mountain walls on both sides, leaving pools of blood. Others reached into the carriages, precisely finding the monster corpses that had fallen into the carriages, and picked up these uninvited guests, throwing them outside.

The trees laden with corpses were naturally smashed to pieces by the wildly flailing tentacles, and the road shrouded in mist suddenly widened.

In a state of panic and fear, the players gripped their weapons tightly, watching as the monstrous corpses attacking from all directions were easily flattened into mincemeat by the giant tentacles like insects. They were suddenly filled with a sense of bewilderment, as if they had drawn their swords and looked around in confusion.

"Great Holy Light, grant peace to all living beings." Freya waved her staff in the carriage, using holy light magic to soothe the frightened horses.

As the carriage moved forward, the mud on the ground seemed to come alive, following it like a shadow. Tentacles rooted in it formed a black, impenetrable wall, making it impossible for the strange corpses within several meters to even get close.

"This is incredible, Your Majesty." Having witnessed Ella summoning tentacles to fight Evans in the Sanctuary Square, Li Cheng wasn't so surprised by these enormous, dark tentacles. However, he was somewhat at a loss, having just been on the verge of battle only to be turned into an infant in swaddling clothes, tightly protected by the Holy Maiden. "Your fighting power is truly exaggerated; it feels like we have no chance to even lift a finger."

“If needed, I can let a few in for you to practice on,” Ella said with a smile.

She actually wanted to let some in, because she discovered that the things she killed didn't reward her with universal points!

But she had encountered these tentacled corpses before—the grotesque corpses that Ye Xiao encountered in the ancient tomb, which were deformed after being attached to tentacles, were very similar to these things.

However, when Ye Xiao transformed into a beast, he would casually smash some of the monster corpses and get general points. But now, Ella is sweeping through these monster corpses here and doesn't get any rewards at all!

In fact, she had already noticed some clues. For example, every time a mission was triggered, it was Ye Xiao's side that triggered it. Except for that special memory mission, she had never received a mission trigger notification.

Ella had always thought it might just be a coincidence, but now that she saw she wasn't getting any rewards for clearing monsters, she was finally certain that the system wouldn't give any rewards for Ella's actions.

Chapter Ten: Still Wanting More

Although it was a rip-off, it was within expectations.

Ella pondered that if she could farm rewards, she could probably bankrupt the system by running out and conquering all the ruins.

But it also left her somewhat disappointed, as there was no positive feedback from fighting monsters.

"Anyway, everyone's already drawn their swords, why don't we warm up a bit?" Ella kept urging the bewildered Li Cheng. As long as she was keeping an eye on him, nothing would go wrong. But these monsters were practically free experience points, and it would be a waste for her to just take them all down like this.

If all else fails, she'll use her tentacles to tie up these monstrous corpses and deliver them to her buddies to kill.

“Well, it’s not impossible…” Li Cheng looked at Ella’s beautiful, rosy eyes, but his own eyes were clear—he still couldn’t understand what Ella meant.

“I heard from Mr. Ye that you visitors from another world get some kind of reward for killing monsters.” Seeing that her brother really had no sense of reason, Ella had no choice but to be blunt. “But killing these things is meaningless to me, so I was thinking, why don’t you give it a try?”

"Huh? Oh!!!" Li Cheng slapped his forehead, finally realizing what was happening.

The waves of monstrous corpses relentlessly attacking in this eerie and oppressive environment... seems like a perfect opportunity to farm general points!?

Of course, this can't be blamed on him. Li Cheng usually has a very open mind. In his previous life, he taught Ye Xiao many bizarre player techniques—such as finding the location of reward items by accepting tasks from unscrupulous merchants, and then stealing the rewards in the middle of the night.

However, Li Cheng's mind always sluggish when Ella was around, and the terrifying atmosphere and pressure from just now were too intense, so his brain simply didn't think in this strange direction.

But now that his mind has been opened, his focus has finally shifted from fear to the players' rich creativity.

If it weren't for the fear of being slapped into the ground by a tentacle and being beaten up by his brother Ye Xiao, Li Cheng would have had the urge to pick up the Holy Maiden's cute and petite face and take a bite. "Holy Maiden, my admiration for you is as boundless as a surging river."

Ella got goosebumps from her best friend's gaze, quickly waved her hand, and slipped back into the carriage.

Li Cheng then told the players to get off the vehicle. The members of the Seven Stars Society gathered on one side of the convoy, and the huge, waving tentacles indeed parted to let in a gap, letting in one after another the strange corpses that were shaking their heads, which were then flattened by the group.

Seeing the harmonious scene of players ganging up on the monster corpse, Ella wondered if this could also be considered a form of teamwork in some way.

It even reminded her of Plants vs. Zombies, a game she played many years ago.

It has to be said that figuring out how many to bring in at once to clean up as much as possible without posing too much danger to everyone is a real art that requires some thought.

After several rounds of this, the tense atmosphere gradually turned into a more cheerful one. In fact, when people looked at those strangely moving corpses, they even had a comical feeling, like a street dance crew.

As the convoy moved forward, after about a hundred or so monsters had spawned, the new monsters that had appeared in the mist finally stopped appearing, and even the menacing trees had disappeared.

The vast white fog gradually dissipated, revealing the original appearance of the yellow earth road.

"Huh? That's all?"

Looking at the increasingly expansive view, Li Cheng and the others were somewhat bewildered.

……

While the Seven Stars Society members were still enjoying themselves, Ye Xiao had already followed the galloping Cerberus over the mountain and through the layers of forest to the edge of a cliff.

Below the cliff face are sheer, knife-cut cliffs, with a huge mine pit leaning against it. The grayish-brown cave walls are spiraling ramps that descend in circles, with scattered wooden ladders and simple miners' huts scattered along the ramps.

Ye Xiao had been to the gray gold mine before in his previous life, but this was the first time he had ever seen the entire mine from the top of the cliff.

Logically speaking, there should be miners working here day and night, as well as guards patrolling and monitoring their work.

But for some reason, when Ye Xiao looked around, the vast mine was completely empty.

“The smell is down there,” Cerberus said in a low voice. “Strange, and then another source of the smell suddenly disappeared.”

Could it have been snatched away by a stray dog ​​on the roadside? Watching the Dark Owl Eunice spread her wings and land on the branch in front of her shoulder, Ye Xiao thought for a moment, but for the sake of not having his face scratched by this bird, he decided not to voice his brilliant guess.

Unable to descend directly from the cliff face, Ye Xiao had no choice but to tie his horse to a tree trunk and then venture along the edge of the cliff into the dense jungle.

"Isn't the smell coming from down there? Where are you going?" Seeing Ye Xiao bend down and walk into the bushes, Greta looked reluctant. "I don't want to go into those dirty bushes."

"It's too steep here, we need to find a way down the mountain," Ye Xiao said helplessly.

"Tsk." The little maid stepped forward, grabbed Ye Xiao's arm, and then jumped off the cliff.