Chapter 66: More Painful Than Death

The High Priest believed he had spoken with utmost sincerity, but his words fell on deaf ears.

Not only was he ignored, the short-haired woman below even launched into a tirade, mocking both the Life Lady and him, dismissing him as nothing more than an ant.

That was too much to bear.

He turned his gaze to the leader of the trio hovering in the air—the young man standing at the forefront—and resolved to show them a thing or two. With a furious roar, the High Priest swung his fist.

The air whistled past the sound barrier in a thunderous sonic boom. At the same moment, the bizarre plants coiled around his body bloomed with even more vivid, dripping colors, as if eager to devour the flesh of anyone in their path. The Spirit Chant swelled into a mighty chorus, resonating through the entire Underground Cavern until it all thrummed as one.

“Make him pipe down,” Luo Shang ordered. He was focused on the white phantom before him, analyzing its Spiritual Essence.

“Yes.”

Chen Guyi unsheathed his sword.

All anyone saw was a streak of white light flashing before their eyes. Then the dust settled.

The High Priest’s mangled body parts tumbled down with the settling dust. Countless chunks of flesh rained from above, blanketing the Underground Cavern in a gruesome storm of blood and meat.

The once-aggressive plants collapsed to the ground one after another, twitching feebly a few times before going still.

The High Priest’s severed head rolled across the floor—and astonishingly, he was still alive.

He had no idea what had happened until the agony crashed over him, by which point he had already been reduced to scattered pieces.

What a sword! So fast!

Even after realizing he had been diced into chunks yet somehow retained his consciousness, the High Priest refused to give up. He could still sense every fragment of his body, linked together by invisible threads.

This must be the Life Lady’s power! Even torn apart like this, I haven’t died!

Straining with all his might, the High Priest tried to draw his flesh back together. He poured his spiritual power into regenerating the wounds, but the edges of every severed section were sealed by an impossibly sharp spiritual force. No matter how much power he channeled—even calling upon the divine might granted by his prayers to the Life Lady—he couldn’t breach that unbreakable seal.

Chen Guyi descended to the ground and planted his foot on the High Priest’s head just as it tried to roll away.

“Don’t move,” he said with a faint smile.

The High Priest shuddered in horror.

Bored out of her mind, β-62 wandered over to Chen Guyi’s side. Fungal threads surged up around her, swiftly weaving the High Priest’s body parts—everything but his head—into a single, grotesque whole. It took on the form of a headless Xingtian, a warrior denied his skull yet burning with rage.

“You planning to turn him into a Fungal Puppet? This one’s not top quality.”

Chen Guyi offered the reminder.

“Just messing around,” β-62 replied. She clenched her fist, and the High Priest’s headless body behind her mirrored the motion, fingers curling tight.

“It’s no big deal.”

The other priests, sensing disaster, had already scattered like frightened rats, bolting in every direction. None had made it out of the hall yet.

The nun who had once guided Sui Qiuming into the church was among them. She cursed her parents now for not giving her more legs to run on. Her body, enhanced by greater blessings than the others, was far stronger, putting her at the head of the pack—but it still wasn’t fast enough.

She had to get away from this place, away from the gaze of these demons!

Even the High Priest had been carved into bits. There was no way the rest of them could fight back!

These ritualists, who had so callously sacrificed living people in their ceremonies, now branded their attackers as the true demons.

They had mocked countless victims in past rites—those sobbing messes of snot and tears begging for mercy—smugly informing them that offering their lives to the Life Lady was the highest honor, and they should face it bravely.

It seemed they weren’t so eager to embrace death themselves, ready to cast aside their lives without a second thought. They simply hadn’t known the pain until it came knocking.

Sui Qiuming’s mother’s death had been no accident. Nor was his restoration to a normal human physique a gift from the Life Lady—it was a transfer of her vital essence.

The nun had sacrificed Sui Qiuming’s mother in the Ritual, funneling most of her life force to the goddess while diverting a sliver to patch up Sui Qiuming’s body, making him appear healthy. In the original scheme, he wouldn’t have survived the ceremony anyway, sparing him the agonizing decline that would follow. So what did it matter?

A tiny investment of life force for a devoted follower? Sound business.

But in this moment, the nun regretted it all.

Not her devotion to the Life Lady Cult. Not the countless lives she had ruined.

No, she regretted dragging Sui Qiuming into their fold. She should have let his terminal illness take him.

Then Sui Qiuming never would have presented such a prized sacrifice for the church’s Ritual. And these three terrifying figures trailing in the sacrifice’s wake never would have come.

Why on earth had they built the Underground Plaza so massive back then? Now she was in real trouble—unless she could sprint the hundred meters in five seconds flat, half the world-record time, there was no way she’d make it out!

The Goddess of Life’s blessing had merely elevated the Nun’s physical abilities to the peak of human potential; it hadn’t pushed her beyond.

“Block them?”

As the group of Priests bolted for the exit, Chen Guyi reached for his sword once more.

“I’ll take care of it.”

β-62 held him back.

“Time to test my new toy!”

She raised one fist, and the High Priest’s headless body behind her mirrored the gesture, lifting its own fist.

Then β-62 swung downward. Controlled by her, the headless corpse slammed its fist into the ground. The earth rippled outward from the impact point in concentric waves, churning up soil like frothing waves. Seismic tremors radiated in all directions—even S City’s seismology bureau picked up the bizarre readings and triggered an orange earthquake alert.

The blow hurled the fleeing Priests through the air, putting an abrupt end to their escape.

The High Priest’s severed head stared in stunned awe. He had never dreamed his body harbored such devastating power.

Most of the Priests were incapacitated, sprawled unconscious on the ground.

But a handful, bolstered by greater blessings from the Life Lady and thus far sturdier, weren’t toppled by the quake. Instead, the shock propelled them toward the plaza’s edge.

Almost there! the Nun thought, battling a wave of dizziness.

She’d gotten lucky in the chaos—her legs hadn’t snapped, she hadn’t blacked out, and the tremor had actually catapulted her to the brink of the Underground Plaza. Just a few more meters to freedom!

Two meters… one meter…

Any second now…

The Nun had never run faster in her life. With the exit so tantalizingly close, hope blossomed on her face, tugging her lips into an irrepressible smile.

I can make it. I will survive…

Clinging to that thought, she smashed headlong into an invisible barrier.

From the center of the plaza, Chen Guyi swept his gaze around and lowered his spell-casting hands.

“That punch of yours packed too much force. Without my barrier, the whole Underground Plaza would’ve caved in.”

“I know you wanted to play with your new toy, but easy does it—there are regular folks here,” Chen Guyi added.

β-62, realizing she’d gone overboard, pouted. She spread her hands in the prayer gesture used by the Lady of Life Church and murmured, “Burst.”

In an instant, milky-white fungal threads erupted from the bodies of the unconscious Priests littering the ground. The filaments pierced bone and muscle, weaving through joints to replace tendons. Then the threads puppeteered the corpses, marching them toward the plaza’s heart.

“Fungus… spores?”

Su Mingyao reflexively held his breath—then spotted the threads sprouting from his own chest and gave up the effort.

Fungi spread through airborne spores. The Short-Haired Woman must have dispersed them from the start; inhaled unknowingly, they’d allowed her to seize control. Even if the Priests had stayed conscious, their bodies would have betrayed them, compelled to approach.

Judging by her antics, that seismic punch really had just been her messing around. Su Mingyao pieced it together in silence.

“Sharp instincts,” β-62 remarked, catching Su Mingyao’s aborted breath with a grin.

“You’d make it through the early rounds in the Reincarnation Space—a real prospect. Your world’s way off the beaten path, but the talent here’s surprisingly solid. I figured the Deputy Captain’s existence burned through all its luck, but out pops another with genuine player potential.”

The Short-Haired Woman’s praise rang high, but it brought Su Mingyao no joy.

The long-haired sword-wielder was still eyeing him intently, sending a chill down his spine—as if the man had pierced straight through him to whatever lurked behind. At last, Chen Guyi nodded and looked away.

“Found you.”

In that instant, Luo Shang thrust his hand through the white phantom, his arm vanishing into it as though punching into another realm entirely. His fingers closed around something.

A piercing scream burst from the phantom, reverberating in every ear. The Life Lady’s Devout Believers lay comatose from their earlier collapse, but the newly roused living sacrifices twisted in torment, blood trickling from mouths and noses.

Even Chen Guyi and β-62 furrowed their brows, turning toward the source.

The sheer agony in that cry shattered Chen Guyi’s transparent barrier in a cascade of fragments, revealing a second layer shimmering with golden light beneath.

Luo Shang reached into the white phantom and yanked out a blurry, indistinct object shaped like a gnarled tree root. It twisted and shrieked in his hand, desperately trying to break free, but it failed every time. For some inexplicable reason, it couldn’t escape the young man’s slender, pale fingers, which seemed forged from unyielding steel.

“So you’re just this pathetic thing, lording it over everyone here as a god,” Luo Shang said. With a sharp crunch, he silenced its screams and slammed it onto the ground right in front of the High Priest’s severed head.

“God… Goddess… Great giver of life…”

The High Priest’s head quivered uncontrollably. Bound to it by the ties of faith, he instantly recognized the limp, half-dead form that the hovering youth had flung down—it was the very deity he worshipped!

Luo Shang’s actions were simple and direct, devoid of β-62’s or Chen Guyi’s elaborate flourishes, yet they struck with far greater force.

He… what manner of being was he? He had torn the god out with his bare hands and left it half-dead with a single squeeze…

Terror gripped the High Priest like never before—not even when he’d been reduced to just a head.

Could the short-haired woman have been telling the truth? She really was a god, and the “Deputy Captain” she served was a god among gods, one who could slay other deities with ease!

Why, then, had he ever dared utter those foolish words about recruiting someone like that?

Now, the High Priest only hoped the long-haired youth would bring his foot down hard and shatter his skull in one go. A swift end like that would be a mercy.

Because he knew all too well that survival wasn’t always a gift.

There were countless ways to suffer agonies far worse than death.