Worship the Lady (9)

"How do you feel now?"

Standing in front of the Lady's Temple, Bo Yi turned to ask Bo Yu beside him.

"Much better..." Bo Yu raised her head, gazing intently at the Lady's Temple.

"Mm. Do you feel anything else?"

At that, Bo Yu tore her gaze away from the Lady's Temple and turned to Bo Yi with a puzzled look. Sure enough, Bo Yi had taken out his little notebook again and started jotting things down.

Bo Yu was both annoyed and amused. Giving up, she said, "Does wanting to go inside count?"

"Of course. Why wouldn't it?" Bo Yi carefully recorded her words, then put away his notebook and looked at the Lady's Temple. "We can look around and see if there's a way in..."

"You really are..." Bo Yu had figured it out. Bo Yi had suddenly become so eager to help because he was treating her as some kind of test subject and conducting an experiment.

Still, there was no downside for her, so she readily accepted his invitation. The two of them approached the doors of the Lady's Temple.

"No good. This lock is too complicated. I can't get it open..." After fiddling with it for a while, Bo Yu wiped the sweat from her forehead. "We need the key."

"Otherwise, we'll have to break the lock..."

Bo Yi, meanwhile, walked a circuit around the Lady's Temple. "The windows can't be opened from outside either. We'd have to smash one."

But they both knew that whether they smashed a window or broke the lock on the doors, they would alert the villagers. As for what would happen after that, they could only trust their luck... Neither wanted to take that risk until they were certain there was no other way.

While they stood there frowning, Bo Yi's ear suddenly twitched.

He looked up into the distance. "Someone's coming."

They immediately ducked into the nearby woods. Soon, several villagers came into view. Bo Yi narrowed his eyes. Judging by their approach, the villagers seemed to have come from the direction of Back Mountain.

"Huh? What are they carrying?" Bo Yu asked softly, puzzled.

The two villagers at the front were carrying something between them. It was long and thin, with a somewhat irregular shape, and wrapped so tightly in white cloth that it was impossible to tell what it was. The villagers behind them carried incense, candles, incense burners, brushes, rags, and other assorted items, while the last two carried a large iron bucket together.

The iron bucket looked very heavy and seemed to be full of liquid. As they moved, faint sloshing sounds came from inside it. Perhaps to keep the liquid from spilling, the bucket had been sealed tight, making it impossible to tell what it contained.

The villagers soon reached the Lady's Temple. One set down what he was carrying, took out a key, and unlocked the doors. With a creak, the temple doors were slowly pushed open.

"Should we follow them?"

"Bo Yi? Bo Yi?"

"Hm?" Bo Yi snapped out of his thoughts.

"What are you looking at?" Bo Yu asked curiously. He had been so absorbed that he hadn't even noticed the villagers entering the temple.

Looking toward the temple doors, Bo Yi replied as though talking to himself, "I think I saw someone I know..."

One of the villagers carrying the iron bucket at the rear looked very familiar to Bo Yi-because not long ago, he had buried that very man in the well inside the house. He hadn't expected the man to climb out so soon.

But... Bo Yi wasn't sure whether he had imagined it, yet he felt that the homeowner had glanced toward his hiding place before entering the temple.

That glance had been loaded with meaning. More importantly, Bo Yi thought he had seen a flash of red light in the man's eyes.

"Someone you know?" Bo Yu was even more confused now.

"It's nothing..." Bo Yi skipped over the subject. "What did you just say?"

"Oh, I asked whether we should follow them..." Bo Yu tipped her chin toward the temple. "Look..."

Perhaps the last villager to enter had been careless, because the temple doors hadn't been shut properly. They had been left brazenly ajar, with a gap wide enough for a person to slip through.

Excitement crept into Bo Yu's voice. "We won't get many chances like this!"

"Let's take a look, then..." Putting the familiar face out of his mind for now, Bo Yi crept carefully to the temple entrance with Bo Yu, and they peered through the gap.

Perhaps because the dust coating the windows blocked the daylight, visibility inside the temple was poor, so candles had been lit. Their bright yellow flames flickered without bringing a trace of warmth. Instead, they stretched the shadows of the surrounding objects, casting strange, eerie shapes across the walls and making the temple's interior seem even more distorted.

Amid the crackling candle flames, Bo Yi saw the "Lady" seated high on a raised platform:

It was an unusually tall statue, nearly reaching the ceiling and casting an enormous shadow across the floor. The upper half of the "Lady's" face was hidden in darkness. From Bo Yi's angle, all he could see was the slightly upturned corner of its mouth. He couldn't tell what the statue was made of. It was neither bronze nor jade, and its eerily smooth sheen sent an inexplicable chill through him.

Of course, the most unsettling thing was the arms on the "Lady's" body. They sprouted in dense clusters from the statue's shoulders down to its waist. Strangely, every arm differed in length, thickness, and even pose. Some were raised overhead, some drooped to the ground, and others bent and twined around one another.

Their only common feature was how lifelike they were. Even the fingertips were carved with fine, realistic patterns. As the candlelight danced, the arms looked from a distance as though they had come alive, flailing wildly in the darkness.

The villagers, who had been kneeling on the floor with their heads bent over their work, finally removed the white cloth wrapped around the object they had brought, revealing what lay inside.

Bo Yu drew a sharp, silent breath when she saw what it was. "That's..."

"An arm," Bo Yi answered softly. But as he watched the villagers handle it, he frowned in puzzlement. "It's not that dead player's arm."

Quite apart from how the thickness of this arm clearly didn't match the burly build of the player who had died after his arm was torn off, its color and shriveled condition suggested that its owner had been dead for quite some time.

Before Bo Yi could work out where the arm had come from, the villagers began prying open the large iron bucket.

"Huh?" Bo Yi murmured in surprise.

The instant the bucket was opened, he saw the surface of a rich, bright red liquid. But a mere blink later, when he looked closely again, the liquid inside had become clear and transparent.

The liquid gave off a strange smell, cloyingly sweet yet thick with the stench of rot. It was utterly nauseating. At least, Bo Yu beside him had already covered her mouth in discomfort.

The villagers had placed the arm on the floor. Taking out brushes, rags, and other tools, they dipped them into the liquid in the bucket and began coating the arm. The moment the liquid touched its skin, it was completely absorbed. The arm was like a bottomless pit, soaking up however much they applied. Before long, that enormous bucket had been emptied.

The arm, meanwhile, had undergone a complete transformation. It had become plump with flesh again, looking as fresh as though-

It had just been chopped off a person's body.