Serpent God Festival

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

The trembling earth sent rubble rolling endlessly through the ruins.

Lu Ping stood firm on the swaying ground. He watched the distant flames with cold eyes, then lowered his gaze to the trembling little girl.

The thunderous blasts in the distance grew increasingly frequent. 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 his shoulder, then bent down and grabbed the little girl by the collar, lifting her up.

"Wah—!"

The little girl screamed at the sudden force, but the sound abruptly died 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, shifted the longbow into his left hand, then turned around and gestured to the little girl.

"Get on. Hold tight around my neck."

The instinct to survive made the little girl endure the agonizing pain in her leg. She spread her thin arms, clamped tightly onto Lu Ping's shoulders, and pressed herself against his back.

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

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

After tugging it hard to make sure it was secure, he gripped his bow in one hand and stomped down.

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, taking an injured person directly into the battlefield would have been the stupidest possible choice.

Lu Ping darted through the dense wreckage of buildings, constantly scanning his surroundings.

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

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

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

Lu Ping pushed off from a broken wall and leaped several meters into the air, landing steadily on the partially collapsed terrace of the third floor.

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

Lu Ping stepped forward and used the tip of his bow to lift away the charred wooden planks 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 remained on his wrist.

The corpse had been preserved intact, without any signs of being bitten or torn apart. Yet its skin had taken on a strange grayish-white hue, shriveled like dried cured meat.

Lu Ping crouched down and used the tip of his bow to turn the corpse's head to one side.

A dense ring of sunken bite marks remained clearly visible on the dried-up neck.

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

"He was drained of blood."

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

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

After gathering what he could from the corpse, Lu Ping turned and looked out over the railing.

From this height, the battle in the village's central square was completely visible.

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

Amid flying rubble and flashes of blood, Kamo Chitsubaki was locked in a savage battle with a monster.

It was a two-meter-tall Human Effigy cursed spirit, its skin entirely grayish-white and wrinkled.

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

The cursed spirit had an enormous bat-like head. Its split-open maw was packed with fine, dense fangs, while its eyes glowed red, their pupils narrowed into two thin vertical slits.

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

[Blood Bat Cursed Spirit].

Lu Ping instantly recalled the registration records 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 drank enough blood, it could shed its skin to achieve a dramatic leap in physical strength, movement speed, and total cursed energy.

With a sweep of his eyes, Lu Ping could see two massive sheets of gray dead skin scattered at the edge of the battlefield, like cicada husks.

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 approaching the threshold of High Grade 1.

Its 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 greed had driven it to withhold some of the sacrifices and turn them into nourishment for itself.

Boom!

The Blood Bat Cursed Spirit streaked through the air in a pale afterimage. The bone spikes on its hands screamed through the air with sonic booms as they stabbed wildly toward the ground.

Yet in close-quarters combat, the one holding the absolute upper hand was the comparatively slight Kamo Chitsubaki.

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

Empowered by [Red Scale Surge], every one of her punches carried crushing force.

Facing the incoming bone spikes, Kamo Chitsubaki neither dodged nor retreated. Her right fist, wrapped in dense crimson cursed energy, shot forward head-on.

Flesh and bone spikes collided with a dull explosive crash.

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

Kamo Chitsubaki pressed her advantage without mercy. 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 barked coldly, turning her left hand into a blade and driving it viciously into the monster's abdomen.

Under her control, viscous blood transformed into countless sharp blood blades, slicing madly through the monster's body.

The Blood Bat Cursed Spirit let out a pained shriek. Its still-underdeveloped ability to speak allowed it only to howl in broken fragments.

"Damn... power... my... blood..."

Kamo Chitsubaki's gaze was ice-cold. As a user of Blood Manipulation, her sensitivity to blood far surpassed that of ordinary people.

The instant she pierced the monster's flesh, she detected countless different presences within the surging blood aura inside it.

There was the decaying deathly aura of the elderly, the blazing vital blood of adult men, the fearful resentment of women, and even... the pure life force of infants still in swaddling clothes.

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

"Trash."

Raging 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 a nearby mud wall.

From the terrace of the tall building, Lu Ping watched the scene quietly.

Kamo Chitsubaki's strength was beyond doubt. Even though the Blood Bat Cursed Spirit had molted twice by secretly hoarding sacrifices, purification before Blood Manipulation unleashed at full force was only a matter of time.

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 string moved, the black cursed energy drifting through his body began to surge madly toward the bow grip.

A shadow arrow, entirely black and rippling with silent waves across its surface, slowly condensed upon 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 tilted his head slightly and spoke to the girl on his back.

The little girl had stopped crying by then.

The supernatural battle in the distance had long surpassed her understanding. The world-ending power on display filled her with disbelief.

Hearing Lu Ping's voice, she instinctively shrank her neck and replied softly.

"B-Big brother..."

"You said earlier that you escaped because you were scared, so you weren't made into a sacrifice." Lu Ping's eyes remained fixed ahead, his right hand as steady as a mountain.

"Then tell me, what did the monster you saw before passing out look like?"

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

Thick terror welled up again in her already numb eyes.

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

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

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

"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 huge, long snake tail... It was as thick as the old locust tree at the village entrance... Every section of bone on that tail grew on the outside, gleaming like knives... Everywhere it crawled, the stones on the ground were cut to pieces..."

As he listened to the girl's broken description, Lu Ping's fingers on the bowstring froze for an instant.

A human upper body and a serpent lower body.

A face without features, save for a single horizontal mouth split wide open.

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

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

The massive Snake King Cursed Spirit with three bloody eyes, which had intercepted them at the village entrance and led a swarm of Grade 2 Cursed Spirits, had a beast-like form.

The one currently fighting Kamo Chitsubaki head-on, using its feeding organ to drain the village chief and villagers of blood, was the winged Blood Bat Cursed Spirit that excelled at flight.

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

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

At least three curses at the High Grade 1 level were entrenched in the village.

No, more accurately, the Three-Eyed Snake King at the entrance served as a gatekeeper, while the Blood Bat Cursed Spirit before him was the transporter that collected sacrifices.

Then that half-human, half-serpent monster the little girl had seen, which still had not appeared...

Was the true core of this Serpent God Festival.

We were fooled.

Lu Ping thought to himself.

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

But now, it seemed the curses here had formed a miniature ecological cycle.

The Blood Bat Cursed Spirit had secretly hoarded the blood, preventing the core Serpent God Curse Embryo from receiving enough sacrifices to complete its final birth.

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

Boom!

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

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

A barbed serpent tail, like a long whip of white bone, slowly emerged from the shadows beneath the earth.