One of the White Sun Evil Sacrifice's greatest secrets.
For generations, the White Sun Holy Mother had never actually been a woman.
Rather, it was always a man with a woman's appearance.
Only the true core members knew this secret—and even then, they had to be core members who had personally welcomed the White Sun Holy Mother into the world.
When choosing a vessel, the matriarch of the household had always been important, but she was merely a pretext, serving as the final sacrifice.
Choosing a vessel for the White Sun Holy Mother's descent had never been easy.
Only after they had secretly developed to a certain extent, and when natural and man-made disasters struck, would they reveal themselves. Only then could they rapidly expand the number of believers, relying on that enormous population to conduct layer after layer of screening until they might finally find a vessel suitable for the Holy Mother's descent.
This time, with natural disasters descending, they had originally planned to go to Great Li.
Its population was vast, and it was close to the Wasteland where the red sun had once appeared in the sky, making it far more suitable than their backup choice, Great Zhen.
But this time, Great Li's Eastern Palace had apparently lost its mind. It had begun taking in refugees regardless of cost, while senior officials of the court had even issued military orders and personally gone to provide disaster relief.
Liu Xin had been so furious that his face turned pale. He cursed Great Li's Eastern Palace for being insane for several days straight. All their painstaking planning had thus collapsed without a fight.
Great Li did not even know that it had unwittingly smashed decades of the White Sun Evil Sacrifice's efforts to smithereens.
Left with no choice, they could only implement their backup plan and come to Great Zhen.
Taking advantage of the natural disaster, they activated the measures they had planted beforehand, sowed discord, and fanned the flames. Great Zhen, already a powder keg that would ignite at the slightest touch, was pushed into civil war. Meanwhile, along Great Zhen's border, they swept through dozens of cities with lightning speed.
There were already refugees here. On top of that, refugees came pouring in from the north, driven by the weather and warfare. They intercepted all of them, and the numbers were not necessarily fewer than in the original plan.
Grand Priest Liu Xin personally traveled among the cities, afraid that this backup plan would not be enough to screen out a suitable vessel.
Fortunately, luck was still on their side. They found a family that completely met their requirements.
That youth called White Dog, if washed clean, his tangled hair and beard trimmed away, and his rough, cracked skin restored, was born with a man's body and a woman's appearance.
As for Sister-in-law Li, she fit the requirements even better. She had strangled her own husband with her bare hands just so her children could have something to eat. After reciting the scriptures, someone like her would only grow more devout. She was the most suitable final sacrifice for the descent.
At last, they had selected suitable candidates. After bringing them back and applying a little guidance and coercion, everything was completed smoothly.
Liu Xin even felt that it had gone far more smoothly than last time, and was even more perfect.
When the Holy Mother descended, blood transformed into clothing, while thorns transformed into jade—a wondrous omen.
This time, the Holy Mother might truly reach the Tenth Order, or even higher.
This was already the most perfect occasion in nearly a thousand years.
White Dog slowly opened his eyes. His dilated pupils gradually contracted, while countless strange Runes drifted and fluctuated before slowly fading away, turning into the natural color of his irises.
The White Sun Holy Mother had descended.
He looked at Liu Xin, prostrate on the ground, and his brows drew together slightly.
"You are... Liu Xin?"
The Grand Priest raised his head, joy shining across his face, and nodded repeatedly.
"Holy Mother, it is I. I am this generation's Grand Priest. It has been fifty-eight years, four months, and six days since the Holy Mother last descended.
"This subordinate has not dared slacken for even a day. I have planned day after day, waiting for the moment to arrive so I could welcome the Holy Mother's descent.
"Now is the time, and it is an unprecedented opportunity."
Some time later, the White Sun Holy Mother wore a white robe, while the crown of thorns on his head had vanished. Draping his long hair over his shoulders, he reclined against a low couch, naturally exuding the air of an immortal descended to the mortal realm. Majesty and melancholy interwined within him, creating a feeling that made people want to draw near, yet fear to offend him. In merely this short while, that sensation had grown increasingly intense.
Liu Xin stood below him with a slight bow and recounted everything that had happened over the past several decades. It was impossible to explain it all in a short time, so Liu Xin first selected the most important recent events.
"After the disaster of the red sun appearing over the Wasteland, this subordinate made a decisive judgment and realized that it was the beginning of our White Sun Holy Cult's great rise. I immediately began activating the arrangements we had made beforehand.
"As it happened, Great Zhen's north and the place where east and west converged suffered snow disasters, freezing disasters, and abnormal weather this year. It grew colder and colder as calamity descended. Great Zhen was beset by troubles within and without, and on top of that, this subordinate had already planted and arranged certain measures over the past several decades.
"With true and false intelligence, combined with secretly fanning the flames, Great Zhen finally plunged into civil war.
"The Xiang King's Department in northern Great Zhen and the Imperial Capital Zhen Emperor had already reached the point where they could no longer avoid tearing off their masks. The fighting below had already begun. These two, uncle and nephew, had always been wary of each other, and now there was no path back.
"Together with the Holy Mother's descent this time and the omens surrounding him, this is precisely the moment for our Holy Cult to rise."
The White Sun Holy Mother's expression remained placid, seemingly not paying it much attention. He held a scripture in his hands and flipped to the pages concerning Hungry Ghosts, appearing extremely interested.
"This scripture was altered by you, wasn't it?"
"Holy Mother, I was bold enough to do so."
"Then tell me in detail about this... Hungry Ghost."
Yu Ziqing looked at the densely packed documents spread across the long table before him, his eyes gleaming. He felt that one of his bold guesses was truly looking more and more like the truth.
With Su Li along, the efficiency of handling affairs was indeed countless times higher. Whether it was finding intelligence, knowing where to look, organizing materials, or any other professional task, Yu Ziqing, Cècè, and Wu Shuangge combined were no match for Su Li.
After traveling for many days through dozens of cities and gathering vast amounts of documents and testimony, the entire process had been extremely tedious. Yet Su Li handled everything in perfect order, with extraordinary efficiency.
Yu Ziqing naturally developed some other thoughts. He wanted to recruit Su Li to their side.
Of course, now was not the right time, and they did not have the means. Yu Ziqing could only set the thought aside for now. Becoming friends first would be good enough.
He had matters in hand to deal with. He felt that his approach of investigating from the common people at the bottom, whom even the higher-ups paid little attention to, had struck right at the heart of the matter. He was about to seize the White Sun Evil Sacrifice by the tail.
These past few days, he had entered dozens of shantytown districts. The information he obtained increasingly convinced him that his bold deduction might actually be true.
Yu Ziqing had already felt that the evil sect was not merely screening devout believers.
Now he was even more certain.
They seemed more like they were screening cauldrons—or, in other words, vessels that had lost themselves yet were willing to offer themselves.
The overall path closely resembled the parasitism he had previously speculated about.
Moreover, every household they took away without exception was headed by a woman. The children below numbered anywhere from two or three to four or five, but there were always both sons and daughters.
According to earlier records, these evil sects had always liked to harm entire families together. This was no secret.
To study an evil sect, one had to understand its history. The inertia of certain things could not easily be changed through one generation after another of iteration.
Amid the complicated history Old Yang had recounted, Yu Ziqing found some of this evil organization's easily overlooked patterns of behavior.
It was like a dynasty: even after changing rulers and generations, it was still a dynasty. People here habitually took such inertia for granted and ignored it, including old pedants like Old Yang.
But Yu Ziqing knew that after a dynasty perished, the dynasty that followed did not necessarily still have an emperor sitting on the throne.
The White Sun Evil Sacrifice possessed similar inertia.
When one looked at a matter from a different angle, one saw different things.
He had noticed that every generation of White Sun Holy Mother possessed certain shared traits in the historical records, traits people treated as self-evident.
Exquisite beauty, sacred and untouchable, a voice with an innate bewitching quality. Their styles of conduct differed somewhat each time, yet they also shared certain characteristics.
Let us begin with a controversial claim.
He had a bold guess: perhaps this generation's White Sun Holy Mother had not yet appeared.
These evil sect members were choosing a vessel for their Holy Mother.
And every generation's White Sun Holy Mother might, in reality, be the same person.
If this was not the case, Yu Ziqing could not make sense of many things.
Why had so many experts worked tirelessly to expand the White Sun Evil Sacrifice?
Even when the contemporary White Sun Evil Sacrifice was destroyed, experts still went into hiding and continued developing it.
He did not believe that that lousy scripture could brainwash every high-ranking member of the White Sun Evil Sacrifice.
If they had all been brainwashed into losing themselves and becoming nothing but absolutely devout believers, then who would develop the organization? Who would make the decisions?
Only if every generation's White Sun Holy Mother was the same person could the White Sun Evil Sacrifice's higher-ups maintain their loyalty while remaining completely clear-minded.
Moreover, seizing the throne had to offer them nothing. Only by maintaining their loyalty could they obtain the benefits they wanted.
This would also explain why every generation's White Sun Holy Mother only appeared after the White Sun Evil Sacrifice had revealed itself, developed for a while, and grown stronger.
Likewise, it explained why those believers cared so much about devout female believers. Even when they were not particularly devout, the women still received extra care. When male believers died, their corpses were simply thrown away, but when a devout female believer died, they immediately flew into a rage. This naturally had to do with their mission.
What was more, after visiting dozens of shantytown districts, he had not encountered a single case of women being harmed. Some believers in those districts would even rather visit brothels outside.
He had never believed that those believers, who clearly had not lost themselves, were all good people.
Adding to that, after reviewing the historical records again and again, he found that not a single generation's White Sun Holy Mother had been promoted from among the White Sun Evil Sacrifice's higher-ups. Each time, after the organization had revealed itself and grown for a while, an unfamiliar White Sun Holy Mother would suddenly make a public appearance.
There were simply too many signs.
Of course, Yu Ziqing also understood that he could not be the only one to have made these guesses.
Even if those high-and-mighty masters were too lazy to lower their heads and glance at commoners sunk in the mud, there had to be plenty of clever people among them.
His theory had one major problem.
For instance, the White Sun Holy Mother of every generation had suffered the destruction of both body and soul more than once.
And there had even been one occasion when a dean of Langya Academy personally took action. He must have considered everything as thoroughly as possible. How, then, could that White Sun Holy Mother still have left behind a sliver of vitality?
Even so, Yu Ziqing still firmly trusted his judgment and intuition. After all, a fellow like Old Yang had surely also had things he had never seen and did not know.
He had never been blindly reverent toward Langya Academy's dean.
Right now, he only wanted to find a way to discover where those devout believers who had been taken away had gone.
If his guess was true...
No, he did not have the leisure to prove that his guess was true, announce it to the world, and then exhaust himself convincing everyone else.
The intelligence he had now was sufficient.
He only needed to make someone believe it was true—or have someone half-believe it and give it a try. That would be enough.
His goal was to kill the White Sun Holy Mother and all their higher-ups. He was not writing a thesis.
See? The connection he had maintained with Great Li before had finally come in handy.
Su Li could also pile together the raw clues from the investigation without providing a conclusion and submit them. As long as the people of the Shadow Division were not blind, they would be able to see the conclusion. At the very least, they would send experts to investigate, right?
Thus, Cècè began writing another letter.
He opened with the conclusion. No process, no clues.
"My young master asked me to inform you that every generation's White Sun Holy Mother is the same person. This generation's White Sun Holy Mother will soon descend in Great Zhen, and the vessel will be obtained through the sacrifice of believers."
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