Just as Meng Zhao and Niu Dali were about to find a better inn to wash up, shake off the exhaustion of their grueling journey, and order some fine wine and dishes to reward themselves, a series of banging gongs rang out from one corner of the street.
Amid the clamor of gongs and drums, the beggars who had been sprawled along the roadside like corpses, along with some passersby whose faces were clouded with sorrow and whose spirits were dead, all began converging toward the source of the noise. In an incredibly short time, they formed an extremely dense ring of onlookers.
Standing outside the crowd, Meng Zhao and Niu Dali could see only a sea of bobbing heads, people shoving and jostling one another in utter chaos. Yet after a crisp, melodious voice rang out, the young men and women gathered there, as well as the tottering elderly, all wore expressions of fanatical yearning and knelt to worship someone at the center of the encirclement.
Some very young children, innocent and ignorant of the world, were also forcibly pressed down by their parents or elders to bow to that person.
Niu Dali was startled. If the people of Yunhua County had just been a stagnant pool, each one a walking corpse, then they had now erupted with astonishing vitality and liveliness. Still, it seemed somewhat excessive; this flourishing vitality even carried something sinister about it.
Of course, while many were fanatical to the point of losing their reason, there were also those who remained calm. As Meng Zhao and Niu Dali stood at the outskirts, they noticed a frail-looking scholar nearby, his clothes still fairly neat, deeply dissatisfied with the person within the crowd. He muttered under his breath,
"Demoness, demoness, gathering hearts and minds with unfathomable intentions.