The ritual site was located in a vast underground plaza, prepared by members of the Life Lady Cult.
The ground was covered in a web of intricate, intersecting mysterious scripts that Su Mingyao couldn’t make sense of.
After being transported all night, Su Mingyao and the others were in low spirits. Jiang Jingwu had struggled fiercely at first, but when he wouldn’t stop thrashing, they jabbed him with a sedative. He arrived at the site unconscious.
Though Su Mingyao was confident Luo Shang would come to rescue him—and that he absolutely wouldn’t die—in this moment, surrounded by hooded cultists and with the ritual ground littered in live sacrifices and all sorts of bizarre objects, he couldn’t help but feel afraid.
When would he get here?
Su Mingyao had never imagined a day would come when he viewed Luo Shang as his savior, eagerly awaiting his arrival.
Hurry…
He curled up on the ground, silently wishing for it.
The hooded figures around him gazed with fervent piety. Each clutched a small booklet and stood in precise formation.
Hurry…
The hooded man at the front raised his Holy Scripture and struck a strange pose, like an elaborate flourish. With him leading, the chanting began.
At first, it sounded like human voices. But as more joined in—overlapping rhythms, rising and falling tones, men’s and women’s voices blending—the chant swelled into a colossal torrent. Shadows of the sound danced in Su Mingyao’s pupils.
Human throats produced inhuman tones. The Spirit Chant coiled through the hall, echoing and resonating.
Across from Su Mingyao, the skeleton disguised as a Labrador faltered first. It let out a mournful wail, rolled in place, shed its dogskin disguise, and revealed itself as a skeleton with bones of uneven shades.
An undead creature! Had the aura density in this world advanced to the point where such anomalies could roam freely?!
The High Priest beamed inwardly at the sight of his offered sacrifice revealing its true form.
This raised their odds of communing with the Goddess of Life.
So what would correspond on the other side?
The High Priest glanced across, where Su Mingyao lay.
This sacrifice was likely an unawakened transcendent with ability-user potential. To travel alongside an undead that had mastered transformation techniques and feared no sunlight, his own potential had to be considerable.
He was still reveling in the thought when an enraged roar shattered the air.
The skeleton was furious.
Per its master’s orders, it had to fully embody a dog to avoid sparking panic.
Even when seized as a sacrifice, it had played the part of a helpless captured pup to perfection.
Yet these fools had dared attack it, stripping away its disguise and exposing it before everyone.
Wasn’t that a direct betrayal of its master’s command? Unforgivable!
It would slaughter them all!
“Quick—bind it!”
The skeleton lurched into motion, but the High Priest felt no alarm—only delight.
Their Spirit Chant alone could subdue most undead, yet this one still moved. Its quality exceeded expectations!
The High Priest dropped out of the chant. Now only a handful of elites remained aware; the rest of the believers droned on mechanically from the Holy Scripture, sustaining the Spirit Chant. Their spirits and minds had been sucked into the chant’s roaring current, trapped without release or reprieve.
What a joke. Did trash like that deserve the Life Lady’s blessings?
The lie that those nearest the front received the greatest gifts was just bait—to lure them into gathering sacrifices for the Life Lady Cult’s elite. In truth, these very pious believers were part of the offering!
Their desperate pleas would pry open the dimensional gate, bartering with that distant high-dimensional entity to bestow blessings upon the priests. That was the deal’s true core.
To reel in these fools, the cult had burned through blessings to showcase the goddess’s miracles. Now it was time to collect.
As for the cult’s growth after these believers perished? The High Priest never lost sleep over it.
Types like Sui Qiuming were everywhere. As long as despair lingered and human limits persisted, their niche would endure.
After all, the Life Lady was a genuine great deity. Her blessings were authentic miracles, not the scams peddled by other cults. With real power on offer, believers flocked in droves.
With a shout from the High Priest, the Spirit Chant erupted. Beams of light ropes shot up from the ritual platform’s surface, binding the charging skeleton in place. The pure white ropes constricted around its body with a sizzling hiss, sending plumes of black smoke billowing into the air.
The soulfire in the skeleton’s eyes burned a fierce, blazing red. It swayed violently under the tightening layers of ropes, crawling forward with desperate abandon, hell-bent on killing the man ahead who had foiled its master’s command.
Its struggles were so ferocious that the High Priest had no choice but to double down on the Spirit Chant to suppress it, leaving him no attention to spare for the believers below.
And at that very moment, chaos erupted among the faithful!
A covert infiltrator who had been lurking in their midst suddenly sprang to his feet. Shoving aside the mindless devotees around him, he bolted straight for the cluster of living sacrifices arrayed on the ritual platform.
Seizing the opening while the High Priest was fully focused on the skeleton, the infiltrator—Wen Yanjun—lunged forward toward the priests. He fished out the gun parts he’d disassembled and hidden across his body, snapping them together in seconds before unleashing a hail of bullets at the priests who were still in possession of their wits.
The believers surrounding them were useless now. Even if he knocked every last one unconscious, the Spirit Chant wouldn’t dissipate. The only way to save the victims was to take out the priests up ahead!
Wen Yanjun had no idea if his distress signal had gotten through or been intercepted, or whether reinforcements would arrive in time. But this was their best shot—a perfect chance to ambush while the High Priest and his priests were preoccupied with the ritual. It was the only play!
If they let this slip and the ritual completed, it was game over.
The Nine Tripods might safeguard Shenzhou’s lands, but what they were summoning was the real deal: a bona fide deity, Nü Yi, the goddess of all life’s growth, straight out of the historical records.
From the depictions of the Goddess of Life in their doctrines, combined with the powers on display, the think tank had concluded that the Life Lady Cult was most likely invoking Nü Yi—the figure who appeared in both the Spring and Autumn Warring States annals and the Huainanzi.
The ritual carried a 30% chance of outright failure, a 69% chance of establishing contact with the Life Lady and securing her bestowed blessings, and a razor-thin 1% chance of Nü Yi descending right then and there.
By that point, the living sacrifices would all be long dead. Aura was scarce in the modern world, after all, and the cult was converting the victims’ vital essence into spiritual energy to forge that divine channel.
Wen Yanjun had thought he could hold out and wait. But when he saw the people bound at the ritual’s edge beginning to slip into unconsciousness, he snapped.
The skeleton’s sudden rampage had handed him the perfect distraction.
Everyone’s phones and any dangerous items had been confiscated before entry into the ritual site. But Wen Yanjun had planned ahead, breaking his pistol down into parts and concealing them in decorative spots all over his body. He blended in seamlessly, then assembled it on the fly when the moment was right.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
As he closed in on the ritual array, Wen Yanjun squeezed off three rounds at the priests. He nailed two of them—one shot to the arm, and two straight into the High Priest’s gut.
Blood gushed instantly from the wounds, splattering onto the ground. The High Priest’s incantation faltered, and Wen Yanjun allowed himself a breath of relief.
But the High Priest merely lifted his head, his eyes brimming with contempt.
Even as he maintained the Spirit Chant to pin down the skeleton, he raised one hand and unleashed a glow of white light. In moments, his injuries knit themselves shut.
“Bind him,” the High Priest commanded with a sinister chill. “We can never have too many sacrifices.”
The nearby believers surged forward like zombies heeding a call, swarming to block Wen Yanjun’s path.
Su Mingyao could only watch it all unfold, bound so tightly he couldn’t flee. Unlike the skeleton, he drew no attention—and with the skeleton and Wen Yanjun stirring up chaos, scarcely any priests were watching him anymore.
Luo Shang… why hasn’t Luo Shang come yet?
If he showed up, everything could still be salvaged! Su Mingyao thought desperately.
How could he get a message to him… Right—if he faced mortal danger, Luo Shang would surely get the system alert. He’d rush over and save them all…
So how could he put himself in mortal danger right now?
His gaze fell on the porcelain vessel placed beside him.
Bang!
Su Mingyao hoisted his foot and smashed it down hard, shattering the vessel. Shards scattered across the floor. He squeezed his eyes shut and hurled his neck down onto one of the jagged pieces.
A severed carotid artery would mean death in just two or three minutes… Before I bleed out… you have to make it in time… Luo Shang…
He felt a chill as he saw his own blood spurting from his neck. Su Mingyao, his face splattered with blood, flashed a triumphant smile at the High Priest, who whipped around in horror.
What the hell was this?!
The High Priest nearly cursed aloud. Why had this perfectly fine sacrifice suddenly decided to kill himself?
This was a high-quality offering, nothing like those shoddy ones. He might even still be alive by the time the channel opened. Was there really any need for this?
Now the ritual was doomed to fail! With the two prime sacrifices ruined, how could the remaining dregs possibly impress that existence?
Unexpectedly, as Su Mingyao’s blood dripped onto the ground, a pale, glowing phantom began to take shape above the ritual array, gradually solidifying.
Bathed in the white light, the High Priest felt his spirituality rapidly replenishing. Suppressing the skeleton became far less taxing, a genuine relief.
“Life Lady, the great embodiment of Life has descended! Praise Life!” the High Priest cried out in a ragged voice.
Could the proper method really be bloodletting? he wondered, staring at Su Mingyao amid the pool of blood.
“Praise Life!”
The chants of adulation rose in waves. Despair filled Wen Yanjun’s eyes. Empowered by the Life Lady’s blessing, these cultists had grown stronger. He was surely going to die here.
And once they escaped, the next rituals would be even more grandiose, bloodier, and crueler…
Jiang Jingwu didn’t so much as blink, his gaze locked unyieldingly on Su Mingyao. Watching him take his own life sent a shock through his heart unlike any before.
His hatred for these cultists had now reached its zenith.
Meanwhile, his own life force continued to ebb away, his vision fading to black.
Was he destined to die here alongside Su Mingyao? he wondered.
Just then, Luo Shang—who had been critiquing a movie—received an alert: Su Mingyao’s life hung by a thread, and the plot was on the verge of collapse.
He shut off the notification without a flicker of expression and turned to his two teammates, who were engrossed in the film. “I’ve got something to handle. I’ll step out for a few minutes.”
“Need our help?!” β-62 shot her hand up at once.
“Even though I know you can handle it, senior brother, as your junior brother, it’s only right that I help with little things like this,” Chen Guyi added hastily.
He had lost all interest in the movie by now and just wanted to get out.
“It’s fine if you tag along. Let’s go.” Luo Shang laid his hands on their shoulders, and the three of them vanished in an instant.
~~~
The Goddess of Life was on the cusp of fully manifesting. The undercover agent had been exposed and seized for the blood sacrifice.
The skeleton remained pinned down, thin wisps of black qi being siphoned from its body to nourish the white shadow.
Despite the many upheavals along the way, everything was unfolding smoothly before him—better, even, than his wildest hopes. The High Priest couldn’t help laughing aloud.
At that moment, three unremarkable figures materialized in the void, positioning themselves before the still-indistinct shadow of the Goddess of Life.
