Blood-Soaked Soil

Listening to the other party's description, Sun Hang felt something stirring deep in his mind – it was the fragmented memories he had just absorbed from the three Saints. However, Sun Hang had forcibly sealed them away the moment he received them.

The memory fragments from just that one girl had already left him somewhat dazed. If the memories from all three of them surged up at once, the sense of dislocation and loss would be a devastating blow to Sun Hang's sense of self.

Sun Hang already had very few memories that "belonged to him." Now, with a large pile of memories that belonged to others but felt incredibly real, it was easy for him to fall into self-doubt...

Who am I really? Sun Hang? Han Ying?? A "Saint"? Or a member of a cult that worships "Lord Tai Sui"?

Rather than face such a risk, Sun Hang would rather choose to seal away all these memory fragments... and only interact with them after his sense of self was sufficiently stable.

"You two, and, you two." Sun Hang pointed to two more followers who were relatively burly. "Grab some tools and come downstairs with me."

Behind this residential building, there was an open space of about two hundred square meters. This was originally a green belt within the complex, but due to the unfinished construction, not only were there no plants, but even the most basic drainage system was not properly done. The path originally meant for people to walk on had long been covered by soil, and Sun Hang could easily imagine how messy this place would become on a rainy day.

"Where was the last place the Saint dug?" Sun Hang asked the two women.

They both pointed to the center of the open space.

In a cheap complex like this, the land area was very tight, and the distance between buildings was compressed to the extreme. This spot, sandwiched between two residential buildings, received almost no sunlight. The surface of the dirt ground and the bases of the two buildings were covered with a layer of moss of uneven thickness. Only the surface of the soil in the spot they pointed to was very clean, indeed looking like it had been recently disturbed.

"You two, dig up the soil there." Sun Hang directed the other two male followers who were holding shovels.

"We... we don't dare..." The two male followers shook their heads with grimaces. "Only Lord Saint can communicate with Lord Tai Sui. None of us have that ability. What if we anger Lord Tai Sui... I'm afraid, I'm afraid..."

"You're afraid of 'Tai Sui'?" Sun Hang asked.

Not only the two men, but the two women beside them also nodded repeatedly. "There was a follower before who, after being cured of his illness, wanted to leave the cult. He even threatened the Saint, saying that if he wasn't allowed to leave, his family would immediately report them..."

"And then?"

"The Saint told him he could leave. He walked out, and after just a couple of steps, he came back in with a look of terror on his face, then pushed open the window himself and jumped out... He died falling in this open space." One of the male followers said. "The Saint didn't let us collect his body... but the next day, the body inexplicably disappeared, not even a trace of blood was left."

"It was eaten by 'Lord Tai Sui'..." another male follower whispered. "The Saint said... that's called 'sacrifice'."

"So, are you going to dig or not?" Sun Hang asked again.

"But..."

"I'll ask you one thing: do you think 'Lord Tai Sui' is scarier, or... me?"

The two male followers immediately recalled what had happened upstairs and their faces turned ashen. One of them immediately nodded frantically, "We'll dig! We'll dig! But, can we ask you for one thing?"

"Speak."

"If 'Lord Tai Sui' gets angry, can you spare our lives?" he pleaded.

"I'll try." Sun Hang nodded slightly.

The two men, carrying their shovels, ambled over to the patch of land not covered by moss. The man who had just begged Sun Hang for protection took a deep breath, raised his shovel, and slanted it into the ground.

The tip of the shovel had just sunk into the soil when the man's expression suddenly changed. He froze there and said cautiously, "I... I think I touched something..."

"Don't scare me!" The other man instinctively took two steps back. "What did you touch?"

"It... it... it feels like I dug into flesh..." The man glanced at Sun Hang and trembled, "Can I pull the shovel out... and take a look?"

Sun Hang nodded.

The man held his breath and slowly pulled the shovel head out of the soil.

Apart from some loose soil clinging to the tip of the shovel, there was nothing unusual. But just as everyone else breathed a sigh of relief, a liquid like blood suddenly seeped out from the soil, instantly dyeing the soil around the shovel's opening a dark red.

"Ah!" The man's face instantly turned ashen. He dropped the shovel and fell to the ground, crawling backward with his hands and feet.

The two women let out screams and, terrified, retreated more than ten meters.

Sun Hang frowned, walked over, lifted the fallen man, and picked up the shovel from the ground.

The "blood" seeping from the soil was not much, only dyeing an area the size of a palm before it stopped spreading.

"When you used to watch the Saint cut Tai Sui meat, did it bleed?" Sun Hang turned to the two women in the distance and asked.

The two women immediately shook their heads like rattles.

"Tai... Tai... Lord Tai Sui... sh... should..." the young woman stammered, "n... not be this shallow..."

"Does this 'Tai Sui' thing move on its own?"

"...Don't know." The woman still shook her head. "What a complete Lord Tai Sui looks like... we've actually never seen it."

"Since the Tai Sui parasitizing your bodies could use mycelia to attack others, then the main body of the Tai Sui shouldn't be a piece of rotten meat that can be slaughtered at will, right?" Sun Hang recalled the file from seven years ago. The meatball temporarily designated "Wu Yi Qi Jiu" had no offensive capabilities – at least, according to the Investigation Bureau's file, it was described as "no offensive capability found, low threat level."

The cult organization used inanimate corpses to feed the meatballs. If a living person with unrestricted movement was thrown into the fish tank, they could easily break free from the entangling mycelia and step on the meatball to escape the tank.

Assuming "Tai Sui" and that meatball were the same type of Anomaly, how much could it have "evolved" in seven years?

Sun Hang signaled the two male followers to step back, then, holding the shovel, he walked forward. He aimed the shovel tip vertically at the bleeding opening and stomped down.

"Thwack."

Just as the male follower had said, the sensation at the tip of the shovel was not like breaking through soil – neither loose soil nor caked soil felt like this – but like cutting into tough leather.