Putuo Prefecture was a land of chaos. There were no ordinary residents here.
Every pair of eyes was fierce. By day, people disguised themselves as harmless and honest folk; by night, they transformed into robbers and bandits, blocking roads to murder travelers and breaking into homes to loot them.
They even gathered in howling mobs to abduct large numbers of people, herding them together to torment, dismember, and cultivate evil arts.
The moment Zhou You entered Putuo Prefecture's border, he came upon a massive pit containing ten thousand corpses.
Countless bones were piled at the bottom. The earth was a stringy slurry of blood; every step sank into a bloody hollow, and when he lifted his foot, countless blood threads clung to his sole. Vast patches of hair and human skin had been pressed together into felt-like masses.
Such scenes were rarely seen elsewhere, because even if no one in the nearby cities, villages, or towns cleaned up, the God of Release Cult would step in to burn the corpses rather than leave them exposed in the wilderness.
But the God of Release Cult in Putuo Prefecture differed from those elsewhere. Their main trade of burning corpses had been set aside for years, replaced by fighting evil martial artists.
"Caw! Caw! Caw!"
The vast flock of crows circling overhead occasionally scattered to forage. Whenever one found a chunk of rotten flesh that had yet to dissolve, the others swarmed over it, fighting and tearing at it. Black feathers wheeled and drifted down everywhere in the sky.
Near the pit of ten thousand corpses, a transparent giant hand shot into the heavens. It seized the flock of crows and clenched fiercely, instantly crushing several hundred of them.
In broad daylight, it rained a mixture of minced flesh, filthy blood, and clumps