Sacrificial Offering to Evil God
Darkness and bonfires.
You could not see your own hand in front of your face, and the sky looked as though it were draped in a shroud of black.
The Bane Kingdom called nights like this one—nights without stars or moon—a new moon night.
This meant a night without the blessing of the gods.
New moon nights were especially prone to strange occurrences.
Such as: white bones in graves coming back to life, people who died tragic deaths turning into specters, or black cats suddenly speaking in human tongues.
Even the busiest red-light district in the royal capital would close its doors and cease business on a new moon night.
Conversely, for doing things that the gods detested, a new moon night was a rare and auspicious day.
For example: summoning an evil god.
"Viscount! Everything is ready!"
On Blackstone Cliff, a nine-foot white stone altar was completed.
Stone pillars carved with totems of ten thousand beasts stood all around, and dark brown blood painted the pattern of a hexagram.
The rosewood divine table was draped with a layer of luxurious yellow silk.
One of the legs of a cast-bronze four-legged cauldron had been broken off by sheer brute force.
Three wooden stakes as thick as a wrist were still jammed into the remnants of the cauldron.
"Daya-ta-om-ga-di-ba-la..."
Viscount Orson was shrouded in a black robe, carefully patrolling in a circle around the altar.
His demeanor was frenzied, his pupils crimson, and he muttered in indescribable tones.
Below the high platform, hundreds of knights clad in leather armor and carrying sharp swords stood erect like iron towers.
In front of each of them was a sacrificial offering bound with hemp rope, kneeling on both knees as they stared up at the white stone altar.
Sharp blades flashed with cold light in the dark night.
They waited only for the word, when hands would rise and blades would fall to sever hundreds of heads.
In an instant, gushing fresh blood would be absorbed by the totem stone pillars of special material.
Vivid, bloody totem patterns would emerge—bewitching, beautiful, and sanguine, enough to please the unknown evil god.
"..."
"Where is this? The Immortal Realm?"
Among the sacrificial offerings.
Yin Ming slowly opened his eyes.
He discovered that his hands and feet were bound with hemp rope and he was unable to move, surrounded all around by humans with different hair and eye colors.
Suddenly, the memories remaining in this body's brain rushed in like a tide.
Faced with a massive amount of information that could cause an ordinary person to faint, a mere flash of disorientation crossed Yin Ming's eyes as he instantly digested the information left behind by his predecessor.
"My name is Eno? The serf Eno! The evil god's sacrificial offering chosen by Viscount Orson."
This body's name was Arthur-M. Eno!
Both parents were dead, and he was an ordinary serf in the Mountain Territory.
Ordinarily, he would have continued the fate of his forebears, marrying a serf wife and begetting a serf son, farming the land for the Orson lineage for generation after generation.
As it turned out, something went wrong with his generation.
Viscount Orson had inadvertently obtained a divine statue which recorded information on sacrificing to evil gods.
To gain true transcendent power, Viscount Orson decided to sacrifice three hundred serfs to an unknown evil god, and Eno was one of the unlucky ones chosen.
It was worth mentioning that this world had not yet entered the Age of Dharma Decline.
The Knight's Breathing Method practiced by Viscount Orson belonged to a kind of semi-transcendent power.
"Possession? What the hell kind of development is this? I ascended, I didn't time-travel!"
Yin Ming wore a look of grief and indignation; decades of arduous cultivation had finally succeeded in ascension, yet he ended up with the same treatment as people who got hit by cars or struck by lightning. Who could make sense of such a thing?
The Age of Dharma Decline was a desert of spiritual energy.
In antiquity, the Qi Refining Great Dao, and in the near past, the Golden Core Great Dao, had both been unable to condense even a shred of dharma power.
To ascend to the Immortal Realm, Yin Ming had exhausted all his resources and racked his brains.
He had chosen the Corpse-Liberation Great Dao—regarded by the sages as a heterodox path—visualizing and nurturing the spirit, forgoing dharma power to use vital breath as firewood, and opening up a path of ascension in the Age of Dharma Decline.
Entering tranquility, introspection, the Void Lightning Realm, the Yin Spirit, yin winds, bathing in fire, the Yang Spirit, gangwinds, and Thunder Tribulation.
Having endured harrowing tribulations and found an artifact jade gourd nurtured by heaven and earth within an underground ancient karst cave to perform corporeal release, his Yang Spirit had finally successfully left the body, borrowing the artifact to cast off the world and ascend.
At this moment, he should have been reshaping his immortal body in the Immortal-Forging Pool of the Immortal Realm, becoming an immortal whose lifespan matched the heavens.
Instead of possessing a serf about to be sacrificed.
"Ignite the divine flame! Press the sacrificial offerings' heads to the ground."
Viscount Orson issued an order.
Two servants hauled a bucket of sticky, charred black corpse oil.
Pouring it from top to bottom over the three wooden stakes jammed into the crippled iron cauldron.
Then they used torches to ignite the stakes.
Black smoke billowed as three points of ghostly blue flame flickered to life.
The distant bonfire was about to die out, sparks flickering uncertainly, and the atmosphere was gloomy enough to wring water out.
The sacrificial serfs awaiting execution wore only expressions of endless numbness, lacking even a single wail or plea for mercy.
This scene possessed an indescribable, eerie, and evil aura.
Yin Ming looked up and down, yet felt an inexplicable sense of familiarity.
"It looks familiar. Could this... actually be worshipping a god?"
No way!
Absolutely not!
Which god could be so lacking in common sense?
The altar was indeed for worshipping a god, and it looked the part.
But the four-legged iron cauldron, with one leg broken, could be used as a three-legged round tripod?
Using round wooden stakes directly as incense was one thing, but soaking them thoroughly in charred corpse oil before lighting them—was this blatantly poisoning the incense power?
A blood sacrifice of three hundred able-bodied men with chaotic, mingled spiritual essences—how was that any different from cramming excrement straight down one's throat?
Besides, these were all Western faces with strange hair and eyes; how could an Eastern deity possibly pop up?
"To think I toiled for forty-two years, hunted dragons and located gold, struck mountains and smashed temples, only to finally endure the tribulation and ascend—was it just to give an otherworldly evil god a change of pace?"
"Had I known it would come to this, dammit, I might as well have rotted in the mortal world."
Yin Ming could not help but curse inwardly.
Having successfully overcome the tribulation, he could also be called an immortal!
Yet so what? Immortals were not as powerful as people imagined.
Especially those who ascended by shedding their physical forms; a Corpse-Liberation Immortal without dharma power was particularly "weak."
Cultivating the Visualization Method to the Void Lightning Realm granted only the first special ability: night vision.
The Yin Spirit realm brought the second: Divine Sense.
The Yin Spirit and Yang Spirit were fundamentally incapable of wandering the North Sea at dawn and the Cangwu Mountains at dusk; they could merely close their eyes and see during windless nights.
Even the Yang Spirit realm only allowed the Divine Sense to be strengthened, enabling normal use during the day.
Not until liberating one's corpse and becoming an immortal did one truly possess, in the real sense, the first special ability capable of manifesting before mortals: Spirit Travel.
That is, storing the Divine Sense within a Corpse-Liberation Artifact to leave the body and travel as a spirit.
His strength was only sufficient to deal with ten or eight ordinary people, and he was completely unable to defeat the hundred-odd knights holding sharp blades, nor could he break free from the thick hemp rope binding his body.
Faced with such a ruined starting hand, he could only wait to be butchered like a lamb.
"Behave! Dare to move and I'll use you to consecrate the banner."
The knight behind him gave a low, angry shout, brutally pressing Yin Ming's head to the ground.
The three hundred serf sacrifices were forced to kowtow in worship toward the nine-foot white stone altar, great swords propped diagonally against the back of the sacrifices' necks to prevent them from lifting their heads normally.
Feeling the coldness transmitted from the blade against his skin, Yin Ming could not help shrinking his neck.
"Right! The gourd! The gourd artifact."
Other people's decades of internal family Qi could at least buy them an extra day of life.
After cultivating immortality for decades, it was impossible to have zero survival capability.
As long as the Corpse-Liberation Artifact remained, his Primordial Spirit could leave the body and undergo rebirth via possession once more.
Yin Ming hurriedly sensed the Sea of Consciousness between his brows, where a verdant and warm jade gourd floated within a vast, white space.
"Phew..."
Yin Ming let out a sigh of relief, not immediately fleeing with an out-of-body Primordial Spirit.
He quietly awaited the opening of this bizarre sacrificial ritual.
Unless it was an absolute last resort.
He was unwilling to discard this physical body either.
Becoming an immortal was equivalent to a rebirth, with the divine soul being reshaped to perfectly fit the body of the first possession; casting aside this physical body was equivalent to abandoning his original flesh.
Just in case this turned out to be nothing more than a farce that failed entirely to summon the so-called evil god, wouldn't he be taking a massive loss!
"I humbly beseech: Void Water-Star Spirit Commander, Endtime Eater, Crimson Warden of Law."
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