The Mountain God's Haunted Domain

While the two men talked, Zhang Xuan began looking around the temple.

Danger lurked on every side inside the temple. They could not stay long—it was time to find a way out!

The campfire flickered, stretching the three men's shadows across the mottled walls like twisted specters. Zhang Xuan's gaze blazed as he activated his [nether candle mystic eyes]. No lurking horror could hide—

[Warning! The sacrificial ritual has begun]

[Gate of life: Kun position (contamination concentration: 36%; will fill completely in 15 minutes)]

[Gate of death: altar (contamination concentration: 89%)]

Several lines of tiny red text burst across his retinas. As Zhang Xuan shifted his gaze, every minute detail of the ruined temple became visible to him...

The crumbling temple walls on either side were covered in blackened, bloody handprints. Deep gouges remained beneath the fingers of every print, scoring the already dilapidated walls with scratches of varying depths. Some even had thin, sharp objects embedded in them.

A closer look revealed broken fingernails driven deep into the decaying walls...

Sparks suddenly erupted from the carved marks on the wooden horse, and thick black blood welled from the gaps between the blue bricks. Zhang Xuan pressed his throbbing temples. Through his mystic eyes, the entire temple was shedding its disguise—dark red walls of flesh lay exposed beneath the rotting plaster, and every floor tile rose and fell as though breathing.

Though the sight was horrifying, Zhang Xuan had braced himself. He did not lose his composure as he had when he first saw the "Headless Corpse Buddha."

But the disturbance was so great that even Meng Changxi and the monk sensed something wrong. Their bodies tensed as they watched their surroundings nervously.

The floor kept trembling beneath their feet. Without anyone touching them, the ruined temple's rotten doors slammed shut, and a foul stench filled the air.

Cold sweat streamed down Meng Changxi's face. Seeing that Zhang Xuan and the monk still had not moved, he tugged his collar open in agitation and cursed, "Damn it, why aren't we leaving? Are we waiting here to die?"

With that, he suddenly drew a dagger from his boot, strode to the entrance, and slashed at the rotten wooden doors, cursing all the while.

The monk's brows twitched. Meng Changxi's movements were practiced, swift, and powerful. Clearly, he had martial training.

"Don't touch them!" Zhang Xuan's warning was drowned out by the hissing crack of splitting wood.

Dozens of scarlet tendrils of flesh suddenly squeezed through the gap cut by the dagger, winding around Meng Changxi's wrist in an instant. The eyes of the painted door gods began to turn. Their faded cinnabar became bloody tears that ran down their cheeks and dripped onto Meng Changxi's shoulders.

Before Meng Changxi's horrified eyes, the carved door panels sprouted fangs and swallowed half his body into their writhing flesh.

The monk roared and swung an incense burner at them, but the bronze vessel vanished like a clay ox sinking into the sea. Zhang Xuan darted forward, lightning flashing at his fingertips as he scorched Meng Changxi's back—the blood-drinking tendrils recoiled as though electrocuted, exposing an opening.

"Hold tight!" Monk Sanjie's muscles bulged as he forcibly hauled Meng Changxi out of the wall of flesh. The hem of Meng Changxi's brocade robe had been eaten into strips. Honeycomb-like holes covered the skin of his calves, each containing a wriggling bud of flesh the size of a grain of rice.

He looked utterly wretched, but at least his life had been saved.

Freed from danger, Meng Changxi collapsed onto the floor and scrambled backward on his hands and feet. Only after he had hidden behind Zhang Xuan and Monk Sanjie did he stop, his eyes full of terror as he gasped for breath.

The clay statue on the altar was rotting faster. Its moss turned a purplish black like corpse spots. Blood-vessel-like vines stretched from the severed neck beneath the Buddha head, crawling along the beams and pillars to cover the entire ceiling.

After hauling Meng Changxi back, the monk turned to Zhang Xuan. Though cold sweat also covered Zhang Xuan's forehead, his expression remained fairly composed.

"Taoist, what in the world is happening?"

Zhang Xuan closed his eyes as though concentrating. Then, with a turn of his right hand, he snatched his Taoist robe from the drying rack over the fire, leaned forward, and put it on. Despite having hung there for so long, it was still soaking wet.

Under the scrutiny of his [nether candle mystic eyes], the bloody handprints scattered across the ruined temple's walls seemed to come alive. They transformed into hideous black-and-red fish, all streaming toward the entrance.

The two rotten wooden doors were already covered by the flesh pouring from the gap between them, their surfaces densely packed with blood-red handprints.

"The wind and rain outside must be an illusion created by the unorthodox god in this ruined temple. Its purpose is to force everyone nearby inside and devour them, leaving nothing behind."

Zhang Xuan spoke briefly, a trace of coldness in his voice.

That also explained why their clothes showed no sign of drying despite having been left beside the fire for so long. All of this—was an illusion!

Over the past several years, nearly a thousand living people had been sacrificed. This ruined temple had probably "eaten" them using the same method.

As he spoke, the temperature inside the ruined temple plummeted. They all felt cold surge around their bodies.

Meng Changxi sensed the change too. Enduring the excruciating pain, he climbed to his feet and quietly moved closer, his lips trembling as he said, "Masters, surely that can't be right? We didn't do anything after entering the temple. How did we run into something like this?"

After speaking, he pressed a hand against his bleeding thigh and pleaded with Zhang Xuan and the monk, "Whatever happens, please don't leave me behind!"

"Didn't do anything?" Zhang Xuan glanced at Meng Changxi, then looked gravely toward the shrine a short distance away—

"The Buddha head you took from the shrine earlier is no ordinary object. It's a Buddha Treasure, and it's also the life-bound object of the Evil God in this temple."

At the words "Buddha Treasure," Meng Changxi's eyes lit up.

The moment he had picked up the Buddha head, he had felt that it was extraordinary. It had even given him the faint illusion that they were connected by blood.

Suppressing the heat rising in his heart, he asked with feigned indifference, "That wooden Buddha head is actually a Buddha Treasure?"

For some reason, Zhang Xuan concealed nothing and even explained it to them in detail. "This Buddha head can not only help someone embark on the path of cultivation, but also erase karmic hindrances. Ground into powder, it can be made into Realm-Breaking Pills or Marrow-Washing Body-Refining Pills. It can also be used to forge artifacts, and at its best, it can be refined into a Spirit Treasure-grade magical artifact."

Meng Changxi's hands trembled slightly. Forcing down his excitement, he asked, "How do you know that, Master?"

Zhang Xuan pointed at his eyes. "These eyes of mine can see into the netherworld. I was born able to see certain things ordinary people cannot. That was why my master took me as his disciple."

Zhang Xuan had made that up on the spot. Naturally, he could not reveal to anyone that he possessed the "celestial master's ordination." But to Meng Changxi, who knew nothing of his background, it sounded quite convincing.

After all, when he had picked up the Buddha head earlier, he had indeed seen Zhang Xuan's expression change dramatically.

"Taoist, what is this Evil God you just mentioned?"

Unlike Meng Changxi, the monk's attention had been caught by the "Evil God" Zhang Xuan spoke of.

Zhang Xuan turned toward the clay statue on the three-foot-high altar. "That, of course!"

At that moment, pinpricks of scarlet light began to kindle, one after another, within the hollow eye sockets of the hundreds of human heads covering the "Headless Corpse Buddha," which had seemed lifeless until now.