I Have Successfully Enslaved an Evil God!

Unfortunately, they had miscalculated one thing: he had not been descended upon by evil power. On the contrary, the Great Wilderness Immortal Scripture was still continuously devouring the Pollution Energy within the shadows—spiritual energy—and loading a mutated Boss Template onto him.

As the Aberrant Spiritual Root finished loading, it was as though the crack of a starting pistol had shattered the barrier between the real world and the energy dimension.

In the next instant, those restless Pollution Sources all rushed toward him, trying to invade this body. But they were swiftly repelled by the alarm sounding in his mind.

Soul contamination erosion detected. Firewall activating... Mental resistance verified... Contamination erosion blocked and expelled.

The Boss Template ruthlessly drew upon Shadow Power, powering the Soul Firewall as it continuously blocked, reflected, and expelled all manner of unfamiliar attacks.

He had truly embraced a contamination—an energy—and combined it with the soul-defense program—technique—of the Great Wilderness Immortal Scripture. In an instant, the two powerful forces had joined hands, placing him on the same starting line as the other Pollution Sources, and with far richer, more advanced experience, beating every last one of them to death!

At that moment, Yuan Zhu's soul seemed to be sheathed in a Dark Golden Bell Cover, ignoring every kind of Mental Pollution attack and standing firm as a mountain.

He had finally risen to his feet. Great Wilderness Immortal Scripture, well done.

When their soul invasion failed, the Pollution Sources turned around again. Using the sacrificial offering, Yuan Zhu, as a medium, they followed the invisible connections between him and the many believers, using those "talisman artifacts" as guides to launch an invasion.

These trash-fish humans had no Soul Firewall, much less a Boss Template protecting them. One after another, they met disaster. Under the contamination of Pollution Energy, their bodies erupted into violent mutations in an instant.

For a time, crazed laughter, screams, roars, and howls rose and fell throughout the hall without end. Beneath the warped illumination of scarlet candlelight, a masquerade ball of demons dancing wildly began.

At this moment, Yuan Zhu's passively activated Boss Template also caused power to erupt within him, his body swelling larger beyond his control.

The view through his eyes sank lower, while his spine was stretched longer by an invisible force. It did not hurt. Instead, it felt like stretching out sore limbs after sitting too long—numbly pleasurable, with a faint ache threaded through it.

Then his body involuntarily lowered itself toward the ground.

Looking down, he saw that his arms, shoulders, waist, abdomen... all of them were swelling, lengthening, thickening, and growing stronger. His bloodstained clothes burst apart. The dagger stabbed into his chest was squeezed out by writhing muscles, while finger-like buds of flesh sprouted from the wound, crossing and adhering to one another as it rapidly healed.

That cool sensation seeped through every pore in his body. Thick black bristles pierced through his skin, growing denser and denser. His palms stretched larger and broader, his five fingers becoming thick and powerful, likewise covered in clumps of black hair, while his nails turned into sharp curved blades.

As his field of vision continued to rise, his throat tingled in waves, and he could not help but let out a furious roar. "Roar!!!"

The tiger's roar exploded through the empty hall like thunder striking level ground, shaking the air and making the earth tremble.

As the pressure of the king of beasts spread outward, the believers in the hall felt challenged and answered with piercing shrieks.

These Evil Cultists, contaminated by different sources, also underwent transformations. Some tore open their cloaks and clothes amid wild laughter, stared at their own clawed hands covered in thick fur, and threw back their heads to shout, "Power! I can feel endless power! Right now, I! Am! Invincible!"

Then his head swelled violently, his mouth protruding and stretching longer. A pair of sharp antlers pierced out from inside his skull through his eyes, spraying blood as they grew and branched violently within his eye sockets. Next, the muscles in his arms proliferated at high speed, his body hunched and bent, and his legs turned into reverse-jointed limbs, transforming him into an upright monster with antlers and a wolf's head.

That antlered freak was only the beginning. Soon after, a fat, pot-bellied believer opened his mouth in a pained wail, his hands uncontrollably tearing open his skin to expose crimson, stringy muscle and subcutaneous fat. From his neck came an even more horrifying sound of bones snapping and chewing.

A structure that looked both like a wound and a mouth—an organ—appeared across the cross-section of his neck. It stretched longer and longer, spreading from his left shoulder blade to his right, then opening and closing wide to reveal layer upon layer of sharp teeth. Then it began to cry out, "Hungry! Hungry! I'm so hungry!"

There were also long-legged Crow monsters with twisted, bent skeletons, rapidly distorted faces, bird beaks, and black feathers covering their entire bodies... and candle-headed slime monsters whose flesh had melted, binding itself around blood candles and using them as core organs. One after another, they made their grand entrances.

Even the corpses that had lost all warmth and lain completely flat began to twitch and climb back up, forced to return to work.

Some corpses grew scales; some had their heads split open down the middle; some had their limbs melt and contract while their torsos stretched into serpentine forms; some had their skin, flesh, and blood absorbed by their bones, turning into ghastly white skeletons that clattered as they moved...

Compared to the giant tiger created by his own Boss Template, this crowd of grotesque, twisted, mutated monstrosities looked far more like demons and devils descended upon by an Evil God.

Their abstract art style was somehow even more outrageous than his!

Each of these monsters had lost its reason. They mumbled incoherent ravings, screamed or laughed madly, and made awkward movements with bodily structures that defied nature, turning the sacrificial hall into a genuine hellish demon's den. One extra glance was torment to the mind.

Seeing this unforgivable scene of evil, a sense of mission—slay demons and vanquish monsters, uphold justice on Heaven's behalf!—rose in his heart without him realizing it. He really wanted to kill these eye-searing pieces of trash!

Before Yuan Zhu could strike down the demons, the human-faced Crow covered in black feathers opened its beak, revealing a hole in its throat formed from layer upon layer of piled flesh-rings. Aiming at the fierce tiger Yuan Zhu had become, it unleashed a sonic assault that devastated the mind and soul.

Visible ripples spread through the air, mixed with the aura of an Evil God. They fanned outward in a brutal sweep over Yuan Zhu's position.

Mental assault received. Blocked.

The violent sound waves kicked up fierce gusts, making the black fur across the tiger's body ripple and surge. Sharp explosive ringing filled his ears, depriving him of his hearing for a moment as his brain buzzed.

But the enemy's strongest mental attack had failed. The Evil God's contamination was blocked by the restarted Firewall, and instead it enraged the other half-crazed, half-mad Pollution Demons nearby.

The Candle Demons, with candles for heads, blood vessels for bindings, and bodies molded from minced flesh, swiftly melted into semi-solid slurry of bone and meat. They slithered toward the Crow monster, and as they leapt, their bodies rapidly spread wide, transforming into nets of bloody flame to enlarge their capture area.

At that moment, a skeleton with clacking upper and lower jaws was also provoked. Waving its arms and legs, it pounced upon a skinless, headless blood-fat man nearby. It was immediately pinned down by an enormous bloody muscular hand swollen four or five times larger, then lifted high by the headless, flayed fat man and stuffed into the giant mouth coiled around his neck.

"Hungry... hungry... hungry..."

Layer upon layer of teeth chewed repeatedly, grinding half the skeleton's body into pulp before swallowing it into that bloated belly. The already swollen stomach expanded another full circle.

But not long afterward, dense white bone blades exploded and burst out from inside it, growing madly, branching and branching again like plant limbs. In the blink of an eye, they turned the flayed fat man into a skinned sea urchin of bone spikes.

Amid the chaotic melee, Yuan Zhu became the focal point of concentrated fire.

The many demonic monsters instinctively treated him as their priority target. All kinds of dishonorable, unimaginable, worldview-shattering filthy techniques came flying at him. Deceit, sneak attacks—everything.

Breath-stink storms, acid vomit, giant tongues shooting out, internal organs spraying... a torrential downpour of attacks struck head-on, forcing the fierce tiger to twist his body nimbly, dodging left and right. He simply did not dare meet them head-on, afraid of dirtying his smooth, glossy fur.

Not only were these demonic monsters crazed and brutal, giving the tiger no chance to counterattack, their assaults were also mixed with strange Mental Pollution. Even simple contact triggered a soul-contamination warning from the Great Wilderness Immortal Scripture. It was like Lü Bu holding a mop dipped in shit.

It was not that he could not fight them—it was that he did not dare touch them! He absolutely did not dare touch them. Perhaps this was the helplessness the Old Ones felt when facing an Elder Sign?

Fortunately, the Firewall that had come back online was reliable, blocking all spiritual erosion. But although he could not directly see the data of his Mana Value, which was covered entirely in question marks, he could sense it rapidly burning away.

He could not drag this out any longer.

At the same time, after round after round of dangerous contamination attacks, Yuan Zhu, transformed into a fierce tiger, was also burning with rage. He felt the anger and stifled frustration of being offended by mere trash-fish, while the beastliness born from a demon's instincts rapidly eroded his reason.

This was not the warping erosion of Pollution Energy upon his mind and soul. It was a demonic trait intrinsic to the Boss Template, a biological instinct written deep into his soul.

At the same time, he vaguely heard words like, "What spirit can serve you?"

Before he had time to think further, the pitch-black Tiger Demon raised its right paw high, gathered the demonic power within its body, and fiercely struck at the two-headed rat-man darting toward it.

The two-headed rat-man gave a strange cry and nimbly changed direction, dodging the blow. Then two more giant-headed rat-men answered the call, springing out from behind it and launching ambushes from three different directions. They were as fast as lightning, violently whipping their thin rat tails as they ran.

At the ends of those tails grew sharp, curved bone blades. Like tough long whips, they lashed violently through the air, breaking the sound barrier in an instant. Combined with the momentum of their charge, they directly unleashed triple sonic-boom cutting damage.

Feeling an intense threat, Yuan Zhu's heart tightened with danger. At the same time, an unfamiliar yet urgent female voice rang in his mind: 'Quick, use your innate divine ability, dummy!'

With that prompt, a thought stirred in his heart. He easily mobilized the cool aura darting chaotically through his body and rapidly gathered it toward his tiger paw.

Threads of demonic aura escaped from the tips of his coarse black fur, turning into a mass of black mist that wound around his claw tips as he struck down again.

This strike landed heavily upon the floor before the rat-headed monsters' tail-whips could descend.

In the next instant, rippling shadow patterns spread across the floor beneath the tiger's paw, expanding outward and dyeing the ground within ten meters around the black tiger pitch-black, yet without affecting the other monsters' ability to stand or tread upon it.

The attacks of the three semi-humanoid rat monsters shot in like lightning, their tail-whips lashing toward Yuan Zhu's spine, the back of his neck, and his eyes—three vital points.

But at the same time, three shadowy soft whips, their tips likewise bearing curved blades, shot out from the shadows beneath the rat-headed monsters' feet. Though launched later, they arrived first, colliding precisely with the monsters' tail-whips before tangling around them and wrenching them aside.

The attacks that should have landed on Yuan Zhu were instantly diverted, striking a lucky demonic monster nearby instead.

Crack! Crack! Crack!

After three whip-cracks that tore through the air, a One-Eyed Corpse Demon was sliced into several pieces and scattered across the ground.

Yuan Zhu also understood at once that the ability he had just used was none other than Ability 1: Shadow Manipulation, which had been obscured beneath layers upon layers of question marks.

Though he did not know what the Tiger Demon's original divine ability had been, after being altered by that unknown contamination, Ability 1 recorded in the Boss Template was now the ability to freely manipulate the Shadow Power represented by the refreshing aura within his body.

That special spiritual-energy source—the Pollution Source—deeply bound to the Aberrant Spiritual Root was likely some kind of contaminating concept representing shadows. As for the Evil God that this power pointed toward? Sorry, he had not felt a thing.

Yuan Zhu, who could freely control Shadow Power, was certain that behind him stood only the Boss Template, with no Evil God whatsoever. He was completely different from these pitiful puppets before him, whose bodies had been eroded and whose souls had been occupied by evil contaminating power.

If an "Evil God of shadows" truly existed, then perhaps his Mountain Lord Tiger Demon could also be counted among them—a newly risen minor Demon God that had formed a connection with the "Shadow Pollution Source."