Act three: The road

[Mountain God’s Blessing]

[Mountain God's Wrath]

Both statuses sounded like good things: one boosted survivability, the other boosted critical hits.

With the added Dragon-Tiger Qi effect from [Embroidered Uniform Guard], Lin Feng figured he could land astonishing critical hits against ordinary evil spirits.

But what interested Lin Feng most was the other thing the Mountain God had given him.

[Shaman Priest’s Cultivation Method]

Shamanism, broadly defined, existed all over the world.

Most shamanic traditions believed that everything had a spirit, and shamans served as vital intermediaries between spirits and humans.

Shamans could, in fact, also be called spirit mediums.

Through specific rituals—chants and ritual implements—the lead shaman invited a particular spirit to possess an assisting medium.

Lin Feng opened [Shaman Priest's Cultivation Method].

A dense torrent of information flowed into his mind.

Just as he became engrossed, an aerial root of the banyan tree crept furtively through the open skylight in the game and struck him hard in the back of the head.

Lin Feng noticed it a little too late.

Immersed in an ocean of knowledge, he had his skull cracked open.

The Banyan Tree root even broke into Lin Feng's brains and drank its fill.

Lin Feng had survived the Blood God's revival, only to die at the hands of the Banyan Tree.

Who knew what was wrong with that Banyan Tree?

Launching a sneak attack like that.

His character was dead. Lin Feng had long since stopped finding that surprising.

He had gotten used to dying in this damned game.

He was forcibly expelled from the world.

Standing in the dark game space, he listened to the shrill, frenzied suona, the unsettling muttering, and the wails of women. Some new sounds had joined them: the roar of torrential rain.

The sounds mingled together, a demonic cacophony assaulting his ears and leaving him deeply uncomfortable.

Just listening to this music seemed to leave his body coated in a damp, clammy air.

Out in the darkness, a weeping woman seemed to be secretly watching.

The air was foul with the five impurities, its stagnant flow enough to make a person ill.

Lin Feng stood in the darkness, studying [Shaman Priest's Cultivation Method] without logging out. The person who had compiled this cultivation method was not the Mountain God.

The Mountain God had merely recorded and preserved it.

In a few hundred words, the preface laid bare its creator's bitter contempt for the world.

He said that all ordinary people who cultivated in this world did it for one thing: official office. All of them sought power.

Monks saw how fine court beads looked and hung them over their own robes, smiling at those above them while treating those below with cruelty. Their grand, red-gated temples amassed land, with fertile fields stretching for a thousand miles.

Taoist masters courted the upper classes and taught the elite. Five-mineral powder, life-stealing elixirs—a single prescription could starve countless palace maids and infants to death. He had seen all too much sanctimonious hypocrisy.

As for recluses, even more of them were hypocrites. With so many famous mountains and great rivers under heaven, they just had to retreat to Mount Zhongnan, right beside the capital.

A shortcut to office through Mount Zhongnan.

Even their cultivation methods borrowed the imperial court's ranking system.

Officials rose from insignificant ninth-rank posts to the highest first-rank offices, and these people likewise cultivated from the ninth rank to the first.

Unable to stomach them, the person who had left this method behind had presumably come to Western Hunan and created a method of his own.

The Shaman Priest's Cultivation Method had both limitations and advantages, two sides of the same coin.

Its limitation was the lack of backing. Even if you achieved success in cultivation, you stood alone. The Buddha in the Western Paradise would not help you, and even if you called upon the Heavenly Officials, the immortals would ignore you.

It was a cultivation method for a free-roaming recluse.

In other words, Taoists and Buddhists were civil servants in the cultivation world. Once you entered their ranks, you were one of their own.

Even if you could not handle something yourself, you could call on the organization for help.

The advantage was freedom. Once you learned it, that was that. No master-disciple ties, no ancestral rules.

Lin Feng had not intended to learn it, but after reading this introduction, he was tempted.

Mostly because Lin Feng himself was used to an unstructured life. He had started creating online content in college, and after graduating, he worked without holding an office job. He had long grown accustomed to being a "free-roaming recluse," so suddenly finding a cultivation method like this intrigued him.

True, even once he became powerful, he would have no backing. But viewed another way, without rights, he naturally had no obligations either.

He checked the cooldown. There were still fifty minutes before he could play the third act.

He took another look at the third act.

[Western Hunan Blood God]

[Act three: The road]

[Reach Bull-Head Stockade alive]

[Lives remaining: 3]

[Mission completion reward: one tael of Fortune, obtain the Fortune-Enhancement Method]

[Low-level mission. Failure incurs a one-hour cooldown]

[Start game]

[Exit game]

Just as in the second act, the moment Lin Feng saw the blood-red text, his vision went black. When he opened his eyes again, the cutscene had begun.

Though he could not play the game, he could still watch the cutscene.

At the entrance to Clear Spring Stockade, three people had survived.

Lin Feng was panting. Before him, Liao Chi had dissolved into a puddle of blood.

Hundred-Household Officer Zhu looked rather pale. Still short of breath, he rested against the pot, while Lin Feng leaned heavily on his sword.

The guide had actually survived too, stumbling out of the stockade. The game did not count him as a teammate, but he was still a person, at least.

At that moment, however, he reeked terribly.

Dead flies were falling off him, too.

Lin Feng glanced at the other two. The labels above their heads had not changed.

Lin Feng took out the map and unfolded it, finding Bull-Head Stockade. Someone had marked it with a spot of blood, leaving a dark, dirty stain.

But Lin Feng could not make sense of the rest.

Ancient maps were very different from modern ones.

He handed the map to Hundred-Household Officer Zhu, who shook his head as well.

Lin Feng thought of their handy guide.

He beckoned.

[Come take a look at this map]

The guide came over, took the map, and studied it. [Bull-Head Stockade is forty li from here. It'll take about six hours to walk there. It's the hour of the Snake now, Taoist master, sir. We must leave as soon as possible and reach Bull-Head Stockade before the hour of the Dog. The deep mountains of Western Hunan are unlike anywhere else. Even human-fat candles cannot fool the passing Yin Gods there]

Lin Feng: [All right, let's go. But what's this little dot beside the road?]

The guide: [That's the Jixi Inn]

The three walked and talked, gradually receding into the distance. Lin Feng's viewpoint remained behind like a phone abandoned on the ground, watching them leave.

Lin Feng: [What is the Jixi Inn?]

The guide: [Jixi, or joyous spirits, are zombies. The Jixi Inn is an inn where corpse drivers stay]

Lin Feng: [Isn't this the territory of the Thirty-Six Stockades? Why is there a Jixi Inn here?]

The guide: [That's a secret of the corpse drivers, Taoist master. I don't know either]

They had been walking for nearly half an hour.

Something was wrong with the viewpoint.

Lin Feng frowned.

He was still stuck in the same spot.

Just then, he heard a series of bangs from behind him, the sound of things exploding.

Only when those sounds rang out did Lin Feng's viewpoint shift.

He turned his head, and the view blurred with speed! It was as though an invisible hand had seized him and dragged him forward, swiftly carrying him to the [Clear Spring Stockade Forbidden Ground].

The viewpoint stopped. Outside the Forbidden Ground, the corpses' bellies burst open one after another. Red-Line Worms poured into the Banyan Tree in mountainous, oceanic masses, staining the entire old tree blood-red.

Wails rose from the Shrine inside the old Banyan Tree. In the end, the Mountain God worshipped by Clear Spring Stockade had failed to defeat the Blood God. Above the Banyan Tree's head, Lin Feng saw [Blood God, phase two].

The enormous Banyan Tree uprooted its aerial roots, and blood-red faces appeared one after another across its bark.

Lin Feng furrowed his brow.

His theory had been overturned completely.

He had thought the Blood God was a dead person stripped of skin.

Yet now, right before his eyes, an old Banyan Tree had become a Blood God!