The man kicked a tree apart.
Immediately after, his right leg came down like a vertical hammer.
Qiu Meng rolled to the left, finally finding an opening to apply the potion to the break in her right arm. The fierce pain subsided a little—it could barely treat a fracture… though she couldn’t do anything too strenuous.
Meanwhile, the man used the Noble Sword to accelerate himself, closing in on her in an instant.
The firelight cast his dark silhouette.
Qiu Meng immediately dodged in the opposite direction.
The blade split the ground open.
The longsword lodged itself in a stone beneath the soil.
The man let go of the sword and continued attacking with his fists.
Qiu Meng kicked off a tree trunk and forced herself to leap into the air. The man’s fist struck the big tree, and the entire tree burst apart from the middle.
In midair, Qiu Meng switched to the Wind Magic Stone and aimed her Sleeve Crossbow at the man.
Fwip!
The bolt struck his right shoulder.
She landed, rolled, and used the momentum to pull the Noble Sword back out.
The man yanked out the bolt, his gaze turning icy.
“Can you… please just hurry up and die?”
He began to gather his strength.
Qiu Meng raised her sword, forcing herself to observe.
His takeoff position was meant to predict her evasion.
So she didn’t move.
Just as she expected, the man struck empty air, blasting apart the dirt less than three steps to her left.
The next instant, he braced his hands on the ground, spun upside down, and swept his legs around like a wheel of blades. Qiu Meng dodged twice in succession. He used the momentum to strike the ground, leap up, draw the Dagger from his waist, and thrust forward at extreme speed.
There was no way to take this move head-on.
Qiu Meng instinctively braced to counter.
But she suddenly understood—he wasn’t aiming at her body. He was aiming at the hand that held her sword.
So she let go of the sword.
The man’s Dagger struck the sword’s hilt, and the blade was knocked away by the sheer force.
As he prepared to launch his next attack, Qiu Meng raised her Sleeve Crossbow.
The crossbow’s muzzle pointed at his face.
Fwip.
The bolt pierced through his throat.
The man staggered back, clutching his neck, raising a hand to try to use Healing Magic.
Qiu Meng switched to the Fire Magic Stone and fired three shots in a row.
Two bolts struck his chest; one hit the hand casting the spell.
He couldn’t even let out a scream. He collapsed straight to the ground.
Qiu Meng didn’t approach immediately.
She fired two more bolts into his legs.
Flames burst open, and flesh and blood shattered and splattered everywhere.
Only after confirming he was thoroughly dead did she slowly slide down to sit against the tree trunk.
She searched him and found the Black Magic Box on his body.
Inside were 20 Points.
10 of those Points bore the Bloodstained Mark.
When those Points transferred into her Magic Box, the Bloodstained Mark also remained on her Points record.
Qiu Meng stared at that ominous red, her palms slick with cold sweat.
“…”
She assessed her injuries.
Her right arm had barely been stabilized by the potion, her leg wound still throbbed, and her crossbow bolts were almost gone.
She had to find a place to rest.
But just as she tried to stand, applause came from the darkness.
Clap.
Clap.
Clap.
Qiu Meng instantly gripped her sword hilt and looked toward the sound.
A Priest stepped out of the shadows.
Her Priest robes were not the usual white-and-gold of the Holy Council, but black interwoven with red. Fine Runes were stitched into her cuffs, and her eyes were deep crimson—devoid of any luster whatsoever.
She opened her mouth and began to speak:
“Little girl… all alone, taking a life at midnight—why is that?”
Qiu Meng said nothing.
‘The mantis stalks the cicada, unaware of the oriole behind…’
She thought this in her heart, but her lips didn’t move in the slightest. The Priest in the distance gave her scepter a light twirl.
The scepter let out a low, despairing hum.
Then, Magic coalesced into four wolves.
They made no sound of breathing, simply staring at Qiu Meng without blinking.
“See—”
The Priest bent down, and with the tenderness of a mother stroking an infant, gently petted the scruff of one of the wolves.
“These children, how well-behaved they are.”
Qiu Meng’s pupils contracted slightly.
‘These Monsters… she’s the one controlling them.’
“…Yeah. They really are cute.”
Even as she said this, she was secretly measuring the distance to the Priest with her eyes, preparing to attack directly with the Sleeve Crossbow.
“So—”
The Priest straightened up, slowly walked over, extended a hand, and said:
“Could I ask you to hand over the Magic Box and make your exit peacefully?”
The answer she received was the sound of something tearing through the air.
At the very instant the bolt left the string, Qiu Meng’s wrist was already anticipating the landing point of her next move—but that arrow had already sunk precisely into the Priest’s frontal bone, passing clean through her skull.
But what happened next was a sight Qiu Meng had never in her life been prepared to witness.
The Priest’s head shattered in a strange manner.
It wasn’t an ordinary death.
It shattered.
Half of the head dropped to the ground, the jawbone already nowhere to be found. The remaining cranial fragments and their still-warm contents spilled across the grass, giving off a faint glimmer that should not exist inside any living body.
Acid surged into Qiu Meng’s throat. Stomach acid churned in her gullet.
Then, those hands moved.
Qiu Meng watched as that body that had lost half its head, with a calm so horrifying it defied belief, reached out both hands, caught the pieces of its skull on the ground, aligned them with the neck cavity, and fitted them back in place.
Black Magic seeped from the gaps between the limbs and bones, like threads spreading through the reversal of time. The wound closed at a visible speed under Qiu Meng’s gaze… only, it was not healing.
After it had healed, the lower half of the face no longer had a mouth. No oral cavity.
In its place was an eye.
A single enormous, moist eye, filled with some kind of ancient, far-reaching wisdom, embedded where the jaw should have been. The color of its iris was an unfathomable purple-black, and its pupil was vertically split. Inside that split pupil were countless tiny eyeballs.
At the same time, the skin on both sides of the Priest’s cheeks swelled, tore, and reassembled.
After emitting a sound like melting, two mouths grew there. Their lips dripped with blood as they stretched wide in Qiu Meng’s direction.
The Priest slowly extended both hands.
The two wolves made no sound at all.
They merely twitched rapidly.
Flesh and blood, as though unraveled by invisible hands, peeled away from beneath the fur, transforming into two streaks of deep red light that sank into the Priest’s chest.
That body absorbed them. The two wolves lying on the ground had become nothing more than a layer of skin.
Then, that face returned to normal.
“So then—”
Her voice rang out once more, still that gentle, still that delightfully chilling tone, as she said:
“May I ask you not to blaspheme a Deity?”
Qiu Meng was too nauseated to organize any words at all.
Then, she noticed the Priest spreading her wings.
Pitch-black wings.
She remembered her mother once saying that the Celestial Wing Tribe possessed wings as white as holy light, revered by the Holy Council as Deities—miracles that walked the mortal world, incarnations of light and order…
‘What the hell… is this…?!’
Her legs began moving before her consciousness issued any command. It was an instinct more ancient than reason—a response engraved into human genes before humans ever learned to walk upright, the body’s innate reaction to something it could not comprehend.
But the firelight was gradually devoured, and the darkness around her began to grow and expand.
Tentacles peeled away from the void, black and wet, and on each one’s surface, eyes grew.
Those eyes were unequal in number and size; some were only as big as a thumbnail, others as wide as a human face. All of them were open. All of them stared at her. They did not blink, they had no focal point, yet they carried a certain craving—constantly observing, pondering, studying her.
Qiu Meng began to run at full speed. The adrenaline surging through her body made her forget her exhaustion.
Two tentacles reached out from beneath the Priest’s skirt. The ram Demihuman’s corpse, still not dealt with, was swallowed by the darkness emerging from under that skirt. What followed was a sound that could split soul and spirit apart.
The sound resembled a meat grinder, yet not quite. It was as if it were singing… As the sound grew louder, large quantities of dark tissue flowed out from the hem of the skirt, and some nerves twitched on the ground.
For the first time, Qiu Meng truly grasped the other meaning of the word “Deity.”
Deities are never cruel, because cruelty requires emotion as a prerequisite.
Deities merely exist, and existence itself is enough to drive one mad.
She ran with all her might, desperate only to flee this grotesque, twisted monster.
Her eyes flicked past the old trees, and she noticed that eyes were beginning to seep from the bark of some.
From the gaps in tree knots, eyes grew out like sprouts, fixing themselves tightly on the direction of her escape.
‘Why has it come to this…!’
Qiu Meng gritted her teeth and squeezed her forearm hard.
Pain came from beneath the skin—sharp and real.
None of this was an illusion.
She took a deep breath and didn’t stop running.
“Number 3▇…”
That voice surged from every direction at once, speaking with a recitation like a machine:
“Why are you running so fast? Why must you flee?”
“And yet… everyone has been so good to you—no matter how many times, they allotted you the number you love… why? Why do you run away?”
She clamped her hands over her ears, trying to block out that voice, but it made no difference.
“Hey… You once said that, as a big sister, you would teach me—”
Then, another voice appeared.
It was the kind of sound produced only by signal lag distortion or a broken tape.
“—But instead you cut my ▇limbs▇▇▇eyes▇▇sulfur▇… using▇blood▇▇holy▇▇▇▇soaked▇ and reused… ▇▇skin composing your▇▇—”
The sheer volume of information those words carried exceeded what human neurons could bear in a normal functioning state. The voice made blood begin to drip from the corners of her eyes.
Then, not just her—the trees began to bleed as well.
As if the trees themselves had finally remembered what they had once witnessed. Those memories leaked out in liquid form from the wood fibers, ran down the trunks, and converged into dark red rivulets in the soil.
In the sky, a great many crows appeared.
Crows from nowhere blotted out the moonlight, circling beneath that twisted night sky. What they emitted was not the cawing of crows, but some kind of eerie laughter.
That laughter made it difficult for Qiu Meng to breathe.
A mechanical, regular sound came from some direction that did not exist—like a ventilator, like a countdown, like some life-sign monitoring device being kept in operation…
“Drip… drip…”
Qiu Meng couldn’t stop herself from recalling her mother’s stories over and over.
The Celestial Wing Tribe had pure white wings▇▇, by the ▇oly Council rev▇red as deities-ming?—— ▇ight▇▇ZhiXXXXU—— shi g ng▇…— ?%!
Afterward, the memories began to be patched together.
“▇▇▇▇3▇▇▇7▇… I▇▇▇ an empty shell▇▇▇▇… wi▇▇ed…?”
That more ancient voice resounded once again, except it had turned into decibels that the brain could not process. Only a shred of information could be confirmed.
The ground beneath her feet began to collapse in a slow, creeping manner, as if the earth itself had come alive.
On the distant lake, a Tower was rising from a lakebed that should not have existed… covered in moss, covered in ▇limbs, using hooks▇▇ to ▇▇, displaying some▇▇ in the moonlight.
She looked at her bolt quiver.
Nearly empty.
Qiu Meng gripped her sword hilt tightly and noticed a Cemetery not far away. She hurried over and hid behind a tombstone, pressing her shoulder against the cold stone surface, gasping for breath.
“We…”
The Priest’s voice surged again, but this time, that voice no longer belonged to the Priest alone.
“have been waiting for you”
“waiting waiting waiting”
“waiting—”
“waiting waiting waiting waiting waiting waiting—”
The words began to stutter like a frozen computer.
Words lost their capacity to function as vessels, becoming pure vibrations that pounded directly against every nerve ending inside Qiu Meng’s skull. No matter how she pressed her ears, she couldn’t block the transmission of that voice.
She knew full well… that covering her ears couldn’t stop these sounds, yet she still pressed down and did not let go.
The sky slowly began to warp, taking on the shape of a vortex.