True Gods and Descent

Chapter 41: True Gods... and Descent

"More accurately, this should be a horror movie based on mythology and folk beliefs."

Si Ming searched through his memories, then exchanged for the detailed information available from the Main God.

"Hmm, a movie from 2022. The plot is..."

The synopsis appeared on a temporary public screen, along with a giant display that could simultaneously play detailed scenes, Easter eggs, and behind-the-scenes footage. The five Reincarnators sat in a row and watched the movie, naturally accompanied by popcorn and orange soda.

It didn't take long.

Watching the entire movie and then repeatedly examining its details took only about two hours.

The story itself wasn't complicated. Hundreds of years ago, in the Yunnan region, local monks discovered the true form of an evil entity known as the Great Black Buddha Mother and cautiously worshipped it as an evil god. The entity had a peculiar trait: once someone willingly offered it their real name, it could curse them to death without fail. It also had no power to protect anyone, making it the sort of evil spirit that wouldn't cause trouble as long as you gave it offerings.

Of course, the reason evil spirits were evil spirits was that offerings wouldn't make them stop or satisfy them. So, amid a series of events left out of the movie, a family named Chen took the entity's true form from Yunnan and hid it in a remote mountain on an overseas island. They trapped it deep inside a cave with layers of maze-like wards. After that, the Chen family offered themselves as sacrifices year after year to restrict its rules of sacrifice, preventing it from straying far from the mountain village for hundreds of years.

Until six years before the main story began—

Two young people, either unaware of the truth or kept in the dark by their elders, had been sent to a big city. They brought back a woman: a self-media creator named Li Ruonan, who was pregnant with one of their child.

That was where everything began to fall apart.

They had pried into the secret the Chen family had guarded for hundreds of years. They had entered the tunnel that was absolutely forbidden. And the Great Black Buddha Mother, trapped for centuries, seized its chance. Disguising its cries as a baby's, it lured in the young Chen man about to become a father and thereby broke the seal the Chen family had maintained for hundreds of years.

The evil spirit broke free and took the lives of every member of the Chen family. Only Li Ruonan escaped. She was later sent to a psychiatric hospital because of her psychotic symptoms.

Six years later, she was released from the hospital and managed to regain custody of her daughter, Chen Duoduo. But the evil spirit was still out there, and it had its sights set on her and her daughter. Soon, Duoduo began showing unmistakable signs of possession. After getting nowhere with doctors, Li Ruonan took her daughter to seek help from a local temple keeper and spirit medium...

In the end, though, she let them down. The temple keeper had clearly said that the ritual would take seven days and Chen Duoduo couldn't eat during that time, but Li Ruonan fed her daughter canned pineapple. The ritual failed, and the temple keeper's family died. Even the temple's deities rejected her, leaving her to fend for herself.

But the evil spirit kept closing in. Duoduo's adoptive father went to Yunnan and used footage from six years earlier to get a local monk to translate the details of the evil spirit. The spirit then cursed him to death from thousands of miles away. Li Ruonan, however, came up with an idea: she disguised the hand seal and incantation used to share the curse as a ritual to pray for her possessed daughter, edited it into a mockumentary, and uploaded it online. In the end, she covered herself from head to toe in sacrificial incantations and disappeared into the pit where the evil spirit had been sealed.

"Hmm..." Valentina studied the giant screen in front of them as it played the credits, lost in thought.

"It feels like a pretty simple movie... True gods exist, and society is very stable under normal circumstances. The strongest villain is just a statue sealed deep in a cave. And for the curse to work, you have to watch a video, perform the ritual to share it, or offer your real name... Even if the Main God starts us off with a curse, we can just go to a local temple and ask that whatever god it is for help... Zhou Cang?"

"It's Guan Yu," Song Tian replied gravely. "Zhou Cang was Guan Yu's subordinate, but he's also a powerful folk deity. Invoking him to borrow the power of Saint Emperor Guan is a very common practice around here."

"Saint Emperor Guan?" Valentina tilted her head, looking confused.

"The Eastern god of loyalty and justice," Jacob explained. "A lot of people in the East worship him. His faith is widespread."

"Loyalty and justice..." Valentina glanced at the information she had just pulled up, then looked enlightened. "But if that's the case, why doesn't this powerful true god just kill the Great Black Buddha Mother? Hmm... The part where the temple keeper and spirit medium die is basically the evil spirit killing the true god's priests right in the true god's own temple, in front of him. And even then, he just turns away and leaves her to her fate. He's so patient... Is he just not strong enough?"

"That's possible, but I think the bigger reason is that they're true gods. In this world, the difference between true gods and evil gods is that true gods act according to rules, not personal preference, while evil gods do whatever they please."

Si Ming raised a hand and pulled up an Easter egg from a temple fair that hadn't made it into the main feature. In it, Duoduo—who clearly showed signs of being possessed—was noticed by the White Crane Boy and General Zeng and General Sun, but they couldn't move until Chen Ruonan screamed and carried her away from the fair.

"True gods have duties, and they only fulfill those duties. People must pray first and offer their sincere worship; only then will the gods respond to matters within their jurisdiction. Outside of that, even if the whole world were reduced to scorched earth or turned into an evil spirit's buffet, the true gods wouldn't lift a finger."

"Heaven itself would grow old if it had feelings." Yu Zhiwei nodded in agreement. "A procedure that can't produce valid results unless the steps are followed in the proper order. No ambiguity or room for negotiation, just like the laws of nature. A god like that is unquestionably a true god. It doesn't get any more 'true' than that."

"If a god interferes in the mortal world, does that make it neither good nor evil?" Jacob nodded slightly. "That makes sense. Lathander, Lord of Morning, meant well, but he caused the Dawn Catastrophe, which had worse consequences than the actions of most evil gods. For mortals, a rigid, rule-abiding god is certainly 'true' enough."

True, but unrelated to good or evil. A mechanism, a celestial phenomenon, a force that could be borrowed.

"Then I'll take some time to study the rules of the Eastern pantheon and the related folk beliefs," Jacob said. He glanced at Si Ming and Yu Zhiwei, whose Eastern ancestry was especially pure. "But as far as I know, Eastern gods care a lot about skin color and bloodline. If we need to borrow their power, you two might have to be the ones to carry out the rituals."

"I don't mind," Yu Zhiwei said, waving a hand casually.

Si Ming looked down at his palm, at the Night Battle Qi there, now tinged with a few Divinity Particles.

Gods didn't see one another.

But the gods in the Incantation world probably weren't the same kind as the one tied to the Death Divinity he possessed.

"If necessary, I'll step in. But I don't think things will come to that." Si Ming closed his fist and looked around at the others. "We're the Celestial Team, and there are only five of us. That means the next world's difficulty will be capped at the level for five people. There probably won't be too many unpredictable factors, or a difficulty spike from some sort of divine descent."

"Could we just kill our way through?" Yu Zhiwei perked up.

"Maybe we won't have to kill anyone." Valentina carefully examined the many details. "At the beginning of the movie, Li Ruonan hasn't had a chance to see her daughter yet. Duoduo hasn't been cursed, either. If we approach her at that point, we should be able to convince her to take another path. As for the Great Black Buddha Mother, we can go straight to the temple keeper while they're still alive—or we can deal with the problem ourselves by filling in the mountain or moving it."

"That sounds simple, Valentina. But how would you convince a cultist?" Yu Zhiwei rested her chin on her hand and brought up a hidden Easter egg. "Look, this proves Li Ruonan knew about the curse ritual as far back as six years ago. Judging by her actions in the movie, she wanted to sacrifice her daughter, Duoduo, from the very beginning. The temple keeper's family were actually sacrifices she offered to the evil spirit. Maybe a little maternal feeling stirred in her at the end, so she spread the curse ritual to save her daughter. But who knows how much of that love was sincere?"

"You're thinking the worst of people, Miss Yu," Valentina said with a frown. "And please don't call me that."

"Thinking the worst won't hurt you. But if you're too optimistic... you might lose more than a piece of flesh."

Si Ming tapped the table, cutting off any chance of the conversation going further. He carefully examined the projected footage, analyzing and calculating a few crucial details.

"We might not arrive when Li Ruonan meets Chen Duoduo. Haven't you noticed? This is an artfully edited mockumentary. It records events that have already happened in the 'movie world.' If we follow our usual practice and arrive at the start of the plot, we might find every screen already playing that hand seal disguised as a prayer for blessings."

It was an original conclusion.

It left everyone on the Celestial Team silent for several seconds. They immediately began examining the finer details again, and the more they saw, the more deeply they furrowed their brows.

"If that's the case, we're probably not facing a world with a difficulty level of five anymore," Jacob objected.

But his objection was easy to refute.

"The difficulty level is determined by the main mission, not by how dangerous the world itself is," Si Ming said with a shrug. "Maybe our mission will just be to survive in a world like this for a few hours or days. We could find a completely deserted mountain forest, or take a boat out to sea."

"A survival-through-hiding victory? That wouldn't be bad." Yu Zhiwei merely rested her chin on her hand, casually eyeing Si Ming and the others present.

"But would you really choose to do that? As one of the Celestial Team members, a team that only accepts captains?"

They exchanged glances.

The next moment, even Valentina, who seemed the most serious—and might well have been the most serious—had a smile on her face.

"Of course not."

It was the second proposal the entire Celestial Team had unanimously approved since their afternoon meeting.

The meeting ended there. Three days remained, enough time for everyone to prepare thoroughly. Folk customs, geography, exorcism supplies, holy implements—everyone stocked up on plenty of things according to their own plans.

Until—

The beam of teleportation touched down on the pure white ground.

--[World Incantation, beginning transmission.]

--[In progress...]