Serpent God Festival

The immense cursed energy tore the mist in midair to shreds, and a scorching gale slammed head-on into them.

The trembling earth sent rubble rolling down without cease.

Lu Ping stood firm on the shaking ground. He coldly watched the firelight in the distance, then lowered his gaze to the trembling little girl.

The distant explosions grew increasingly dense. Kamo Chitsubaki had clearly already engaged the monster in the core area.

Lu Ping withdrew his gaze, slung the Piercing Ox Horn Bow from his back over one shoulder, then bent down, grabbed the little girl by the collar, and lifted her up.

"Waaah—!"

The little girl screamed at the sudden force, but the sound stopped short when she met Lu Ping's calm eyes.

"Don't be afraid. I'm here to get you out."

There was a reassuring steadiness in Lu Ping's voice.

With one hand, he shrugged off his black uniform jacket, switched the longbow to his left hand, then turned and gestured to the little girl.

"Climb on. Hold tight around my neck."

Driven by the instinct to survive, the little girl endured the agonizing pain in her leg, spread her thin arms, and clung desperately to Lu Ping's shoulders, pressing her entire body tightly against his back.

Lu Ping pulled over his uniform jacket and spread the broad garment over the girl's body.

He drew the sturdy sleeves beneath his ribs and expertly tied them into a dead knot across his chest.

After tugging hard to make sure it was secure, he held the bow in one hand and stamped his foot.

Bang.

Mud and water exploded from the ground. Lu Ping became a blurred black streak and vanished at the end of the alley in an instant.

He did not blindly charge into the center of the explosions.

With the situation unclear, bringing an injured person straight into the battlefield would have been the most foolish choice.

Lu Ping darted through the dense ruins of collapsed buildings, constantly scanning the structures around him.

Before long, a scorched three-story building caught his attention.

The building covered a vast area. Though its walls were blackened, its reinforced concrete frame remained largely intact.

In Snakebone Village, where most buildings were low wooden houses, this tall structure stood out conspicuously. Judging by its design, it was likely the residence of the village chief or some wealthy household.

Lu Ping pushed off a broken wall and lightly leaped several meters into the air, landing steadily on a half-collapsed terrace on the third floor.

What greeted his eyes was a corpse lying across a corner of the terrace.

Lu Ping stepped forward and used the tip of his bow to lift away the charred wooden strips covering the body.

It was the corpse of a middle-aged man. Though his clothes were torn, they were clearly far more luxurious than the coarse linen worn by ordinary villagers. A melted gold watch still clung to his wrist.

The corpse was remarkably intact, with no signs of being bitten or torn apart. Yet its skin had turned an eerie grayish white, shriveled like air-dried cured meat.

Lu Ping crouched and used the bowtip to turn the corpse's head to one side.

Around the dried-up neck was a dense ring of sunken bite marks.

The wound formed a perfect circle, its edges neat, while the nearby skin had turned dark purple.

"He was drained dry of blood."

That meant the killer possessed an extremely sharp, tubular mouthpart capable of draining an adult's entire body of blood in a very short time.

This feeding style was entirely different from the Three-Eyed Snake King Cursed Spirit at the village entrance, which only knew how to pounce, bite, and tear with its enormous body.

After gathering the information from the corpse, Lu Ping turned and looked into the distance over the railing.

From this height, the battle in the village's central square was visible at a glance.

Two hundred meters away, the rolling fog had been churned apart by powerful cursed energy, leaving behind a vacuum-like zone.

Amid the flying rubble and bloody light, Kamo Chitsubaki was locked in a frenzied battle with a monster.

It was a two-meter-tall Human Effigy Cursed Spirit, its skin grayish white and shriveled all over.

A pair of broad membranous wings grew from its back, each flap whipping up a shrieking gale.

The cursed spirit had an enormous bat's head. Its split-open mouth was packed with fine, dense fangs, while its eyes glowed red with two narrow vertical pupils.

Most bizarre of all were its hands. All five fingers had lengthened and calcified into sharp white bone spikes.

[Blood Bat Cursed Spirit].

Lu Ping instantly recalled the registration files he had seen on this cursed spirit in Jujutsu High's archives.

This cursed spirit's technique was called [Blood Feast: Molting].

As long as it consumed enough blood, it could shed its skin and make a stepwise leap in physical strength, movement speed, and total cursed energy.

Lu Ping swept his gaze across the battlefield's edge and saw two enormous gray husks scattered there, resembling cicada shells.

It had already molted twice.

This cursed spirit might originally have been nothing more than an ordinary Grade 1 Cursed Spirit. But after devouring the blood of countless villagers, it had forcibly evolved twice. The cursed energy it now radiated was already nearing the threshold of High Grade 1.

Its intended role in this "Serpent God Festival" should have been that of a "porter," slaughtering villagers, collecting their blood, and transporting it to the center of the village.

But its greedy instincts had driven it to hold back part of the offerings and turn them into nourishment for itself.

Boom!

The Blood Bat Cursed Spirit left a pale afterimage in the air. The bone spikes on its hands tore through the air with piercing sonic booms as it stabbed wildly toward the ground.

Yet in this close-quarters fight, the one holding the absolute upper hand was the relatively slender Kamo Chitsubaki.

The Kamo Clan elite's long hair whipped wildly around her, and her eyes overflowed with savage killing intent.

Empowered by [Red Scale Surge], every punch she threw carried the weight of a thousand pounds.

Facing the incoming bone spikes, Kamo Chitsubaki neither dodged nor retreated. Thick crimson cursed energy wrapped around her right fist as she drove it straight forward.

Flesh and bone spikes collided with a deafening impact.

The massive two-meter monster was knocked off the ground by that punch. Large sections of bone spikes shattered from its arms, and dark green acidic fluid sprayed from its mouth.

Kamo Chitsubaki pressed her advantage. The ground beneath her feet collapsed layer by layer as she became a red cannonball, instantly closing in on the Blood Bat Cursed Spirit's chest.

"Die!"

She let out a cold, sharp cry, turned her left hand into a blade, and viciously drove it into the monster's abdomen.

Under her control, viscous blood transformed into countless sharp blood blades and tore wildly through the monster's body.

The Blood Bat Cursed Spirit let out a pained scream. Its still-underdeveloped capacity for speech allowed it only to howl in broken fragments:

"Damn it... strength... my... blood..."

Kamo Chitsubaki's eyes were icy. As a master of Crimson Blood Manipulation, she was far more sensitive to blood than ordinary people.

The instant she pierced the monster's flesh, the surging blood aura within it carried countless distinct traces to her senses.

Within that blood was the decayed deathly aura of the elderly, the blazing essence blood of grown men, the fearful resentment of women, and even... the pure vitality of infants still in swaddling clothes.

Part of the lives of an entire village—more than a hundred people—had been sucked into this beast's belly.

"Scum."

Blazing fury ignited in Kamo Chitsubaki's eyes. Her right leg swept out like a battle axe, smashing the Blood Bat Cursed Spirit's heavy body viciously into the nearby mud wall.

On the terrace of the tall building, Lu Ping silently watched the scene unfold.

There was no questioning Kamo Chitsubaki's strength. Even though the Blood Bat Cursed Spirit had completed two molts by secretly withholding offerings, its purification was only a matter of time before Crimson Blood Manipulation unleashed at full force.

Lu Ping slowly raised the Piercing Ox Horn Bow in his left hand. His right hand settled on the cold bowstring and gradually drew it back.

Hum.

As the bowstring moved, the free black cursed energy within his body began to surge madly toward the bow's grip.

A shadow arrow, black from end to end and rippling with silent waves across its surface, slowly formed on the string.

Its arrowhead locked onto the distant battlefield, ready to deliver a fatal strike to the cursed spirit at any moment.

"Hey."

While maintaining the charge, Lu Ping slightly turned his head and spoke to the girl on his back.

The little girl had already stopped crying.

The supernatural battle in the distance had long surpassed her understanding. That world-ending power felt utterly unbelievable to her.

Hearing Lu Ping's voice, she instinctively shrank her neck and answered in a small voice.

"B-Big brother..."

"You said earlier that you escaped because you were afraid, which was why you didn't become an offering." Lu Ping's eyes remained fixed ahead, his right hand steady as a mountain.

"Then tell me: what did the monster you saw before you passed out look like?"

At the word "monster," the little girl's body convulsed violently again.

Thick fear surged back into her already numb eyes.

She gripped the fabric at Lu Ping's shoulder with all her strength, her voice trembling beyond recognition.

"It was... very big... very long... It crawled out from the mountain behind the village..."

"What did it look like?" Lu Ping asked tersely.

"Its upper body... looked like a person."

The girl swallowed. "It was a man with no hair, no eyes, and no nose... Its skin was covered in shiny dark green scales... Its mouth was huge, split all the way behind its ears..."

"Its lower body was a thick, long snake tail... It was as thick as the old locust tree at the village entrance... Every section of that tail had bones growing on the outside, gleaming like knives... Wherever it crawled, all the stones on the ground were sliced to pieces..."

As he listened to the girl's halting description, Lu Ping's fingers on the bowstring stiffened for a brief moment.

A human head and a snake's body.

No facial features, only a horizontally split mouth.

A thick snake tail several meters long, every vertebra protruding into independently movable bone spikes.

Lu Ping narrowed his eyes slightly as the information in his mind rapidly came together.

The enormous beast-shaped Snake King Cursed Spirit with three blood-red eyes, which had intercepted them at the village entrance and led a swarm of Grade 2 Cursed Spirits, was one of them.

The winged Blood Bat Cursed Spirit currently fighting Kamo Chitsubaki head-on, which used its mouthparts to drain the village chief and villagers of blood, was another.

And the "human-headed, snake-bodied, exposed-spine" monster the little girl described—the one that had crawled out of the mountain first—clearly belonged to neither of those two.

This was not a matter of one or two cursed spirits.

At least three curses at the High Grade 1 level had taken up residence in the village.

No, more precisely, the Three-Eyed Snake King at the entrance was the gatekeeper, while the Blood Bat Cursed Spirit before them was the transporter that collected the offerings.

Then that half-human, half-snake monster the little girl saw, which had yet to reveal itself...

Was the true core of this Serpent God Festival.

"We were fooled."

Lu Ping thought to himself.

Jujutsu High Headquarters had assessed this as a Grade 1 incident, believing there was only a single newly born Grade 1 Cursed Spirit.

But now, it appeared the curses here had formed a miniature closed ecosystem.

The Blood Bat Cursed Spirit had withheld the blood for itself, leaving the Serpent God Curse Embryo at the core unable to obtain enough offerings to complete its final birth.

If that half-human, half-snake monster reclaimed all the blood inside the Blood Bat Cursed Spirit...

Boom!

On the distant battlefield, Kamo Chitsubaki threw another heavy punch, tearing apart half of the Blood Bat Cursed Spirit's membranous wing. Black blood rained down from the sky.

At the same time, the ground beneath the village's central square began to crack over a wide area.

A snake tail covered in barbs, like a long whip made of white bone, slowly emerged from the shadows underground.