Chapter 466: Evil God Festival · Houseboat |
The door of the shrine was kicked open from the outside by Bai Liu. Flames instantly rushed toward his face, bringing with them a wave of ash and heat.
Bai Liu lifted his eyes. His pitch-black pupils reflected the orange-red blaze, the forest burning into black charcoal, and the brilliant fireworks constantly exploding into the sky.
From far away, the sound of crowds cheering and counting down rose from the foot of the mountain:
“The Evil God Festival is about to officially begin! The fireworks display is also coming to an end. Let us count down together to this once-a-year moment that brings us happiness!”
“Ten!”
Gorgeous fireworks soared into the sky one after another, exploding like bouquets ignited by sparks, blooming in the night sky as an offering to the god, drawing back the beautiful curtain of the story.
Bai Liu carried the scar-covered Tawil in his arms and bore the blood-stained Kitahara Aoi on his back. His head was lowered, as if he were carrying something he had over-exerted himself to hold. Step by step, he walked extremely slowly down the mountain.
Countless threads wound out from the shrine, wrapping around Tawil in Bai Liu’s arms. These threads, known as [Suffering], strangled Tawil and Bai Liu who was holding him. Their blood mixed together, dripping onto the scorched black earth burned by the great fire.
“Nine!”
But the threads on him and Tawil would not allow them to move any further away.
“Bai Liu.” Tawil’s face was being strangled into fragments by the threads, yet he didn’t seem to feel the pain. Instead, he very lightly touched the wounds strangled out on Bai Liu’s body, gazing at him with focused, downcast eyes, as if wanting to remember his appearance forever. “Put me down.”
“You can’t get out of here while carrying me.”
“Your hands are shaking from holding me.”
“Eight.”
“I won’t,” Bai Liu looked up, staring directly at Tawil. “Since you have already traded yourself to me, I naturally have the right to take you away.”
Supporting himself on Bai Liu’s shoulders, Tawil stood up. He looked at Bai Liu, then leaned down to embrace him, saying softly:
“But I love you.”
Bai Liu’s pupils constricted.
“Seven!”
Tawil continued, his eyes slightly closed: “I finally understand what those feelings were when you came to see me.”
“It’s love, isn’t it?”
“Six!”
“I wanted to see you. I wanted to escape from the shrine to see exactly who you chose as your Prince Charming, and I wanted you to tell me why you wouldn’t come inside to see me.” Tawil buried his head completely into Bai Liu’s shoulder, embracing him so tightly that Bai Liu rarely felt he couldn’t breathe. Tawil’s voice was hoarse, “I wanted you to come see me every day, to talk to me, to look into my eyes and tell me about yourself.”
“I wanted you to take me away. I wanted to go with you.”
One thread tightened.
“I wanted you and me to be together forever.”
Two threads tightened.
“Five!”
Bai Liu’s gaze was momentarily dazed, and he subconsciously returned Tawil’s embrace: “…You’re going to leave me again, aren’t you?”
“The God once told me,” Tawil answered him in a very soft voice, “that when I generate suffering capable of being sacrificed to Him, I can become His successor.”
“He said that only love can make a god suffer.”
The countless threads wrapped around Tawil snapped taut in an instant.
“Four!”
“The more love one obtains, the more suffering will be generated to sacrifice to the God, and the easier it will be for the God to control that person.” Strangled by threads, Tawil slowly lifted his eyes to look at Bai Liu in his arms. He gave a gentle smile, looking as if he were very happy. “I am already one of the God’s puppets now.”
“I cannot leave the cage that imprisons me, because it was forged from the love and suffering I generated myself.”
“Three!”
“Two!”
“One!!”
“The Evil God Festival has officially begun!!”
Numerous shadows quickly closed in from the small path behind Bai Liu. These shadows held the hands of sacrificial offerings whose faces were dead with silence; they were clearly the people of the Eight Great Families who had come up early to make their sacrifices. These people shouted angrily:
“What’s going on! How did the shrine catch fire!”
“Where is that corpse?! The corpse in the shrine is gone!”
“Did the Kitahara family steal it themselves, or did some runaway sacrifice do this!”
Fireworks exploded in large clusters behind them.
“I love you,” Tawil closed his eyes. He lowered his gaze and pressed his cold lips against Bai Liu’s unresponsive ones, whispering softly, “My soul exists here only for you.”
“But you cannot exist here.”
“Because here, there is only suffering.”
>[System Notification: Congratulations to player Bai Liu for obtaining Main Task Objective 1 (Evil God’s Soul). You are about to set off to return to the timeline five years later. Player Bai Liu, please be prepared!]
All the threads on Tawil pulled tight, dragging him backward. He closed his eyes, embracing Bai Liu, his hands interlaced tightly behind the long hair of Bai Liu’s head. His lips moved as if he were saying something.
Bai Liu saw many people behind him holding knives, guns, and clubs, their faces distorted as they ran toward him. Fireworks continued to bloom, and multicolored light and shadows mixed before Bai Liu’s eyes, dazzling him so much that he closed them for a moment.
The moment he closed his eyes, Bai Liu heard Tawil whisper in his ear:
“Goodbye, my long-haired princess who came to save me.”
Bai Liu opened his eyes. He found himself lying in the washroom of the shrine where the sacred festival dances were practiced, as if he had fallen asleep from exhaustion.
There was no light in the room; it was pitch black. One could only vaguely see the moon-light reflecting off the painting on the opposite wall—the map of the Sea Wave Shrine that Bai Liu had originally found the clue in to travel through.
Everything around Bai Liu—the fire, the hysterical crowds, the bleeding Kitahara Aoi, and the “corpse” of the gentle, kissing Evil God—had all disappeared, as if it were nothing more than an unrealistic nightmare.
He sat up for a while, then dressed neatly, donned his outer coat, and stood up to push open the door to leave.
Two servants were kneeling on the floor by the door. Judging from their clothes and the characters for [Mifune] embroidered on their right collars, it was clear they were from the Mifune family.
The moment Bai Liu stepped out the door, the two servants lowered their heads and quickly raised their hands to block his path: “Bai Six-sama, you cannot leave here.”
“Lord Mifune has ordered that if you do not practice the sacred festival dance for tomorrow night, you are not permitted to take a single step out of this shrine.”
Bai Liu paused upon hearing this. He turned to look at the servants, then at the shrine behind him—which no longer looked anything like the original structure—and asked with a raised tone: “Is this the Luming Shrine?”
“Yes,” the servant replied, looking a bit confused. “You have been practicing the dance in the worship room of the shrine; don’t you remember?”
“If this is the shrine,” Bai Liu countered with a calm gaze, “then where is the Evil God who lived here five years ago? Where did he go?”
The two Mifune family servants’ expressions changed upon hearing this question, as if they had heard something extremely taboo. They bowed their heads, eyes tightly shut, and put their hands together as if in prayer, muttering quickly in low voices:
“May the Evil God not take offense, may he not take offense. We did not intentionally move you from Luming Shrine to the Sea Shrine after the fire.”
“It’s just that the power you unleashed five years ago was too terrifying. Half the people in Luming Village committed suicide in their sleep, dying tragic deaths.”
“…We humbly pray the Evil God does not take offense!”
The expression vanished from Bai Liu’s face. His gaze slowly moved from the boat-shaped object tossing on the waves in the distance to the mural hanging on the wall inside the room—it was a painting of a giant boat-shaped shrine being tossed on the waves of the ocean.
A seaside houseboat.
Following a moment of lightning and thunder, a heavy rain suddenly began to fall.
A girl wearing a soaked inner lining shivered as she hid inside the houseboat. Her lips were pale and her face was purple. There were obvious scars on her fingers and joints. Despite the heavy rain, she did not close the door. Instead, she knelt on the floor with the door open, letting the wind and storm surge in and slap against her bloodless face.
The wind rattled the wooden plaque hanging next to the room. Four characters were written on the old wooden board, almost worn away to the point of invisibility—[Kitahara Aoi].
“Aoi, what are you doing?!” An alarmed male voice interrupted Aoi’s self-torturing behavior. A soaking-wet Kitahara Souta rushed forward to close Aoi’s door. He placed a paper umbrella, which had been blown inside out by the wind, by the door, and turned to speak to Aoi with reproach in his voice: “Why didn’t you close the door in such heavy rain?”
“Perhaps because I didn’t suffer enough just now during my training in the ‘Auspicious Room’,” Aoi murmured with a hollow gaze.
Souta paused. He looked at the marks on his own knuckles where they had been strangled by bloody threads, clenched his fists tightly, and lowered his head, falling silent.
Aoi rolled her eyes and caught Souta’s small movement. She asked: “You went to the ‘Auspicious Room’ too?”
“Yeah,” Souta smiled with a mix of misery and self-mockery. “Ever since we were found to be related to the shrine fire five years ago, even though the Kitahara family has declined and no longer has the ability to build a large mansion to train and torture us, our suffering still hasn’t met the standards every year. We are inferior sacrifices, but they still haven’t given up on torturing us.”
“Of course,” Aoi’s eyes lit up, and a triumphant, satisfied smile appeared on her face. “The events that happened five years ago scared those beasts out of their wits.”
“Yeah,” Souta couldn’t help but laugh too, his eyes filled with memory. “Back then when the shrine was on fire, Bai Six went to save the Evil God, and we went back to help him.”
“I went back to help him!” Aoi corrected him, but she soon leaned back and said mockingly, “But in the end, I didn’t really help much anyway; I was knocked unconscious pretty quickly.”
“Afterward, I vaguely remember Bai Six carrying me and the Evil God down the mountain, but the Evil God was pulled back by the threads growing out of the shrine. He couldn’t leave, and the people from the Eight Great Families came up for the sacrifice.”
“Mifune dragged Bai Liu directly into the shrine, intending to force him to be sacrificed.”
Aoi burst into loud laughter, her hands and feet flailing as she laughed until tears came out: “But the Evil God actually lost his temper for once!”
“He refused to open his eyes to look at Bai Six, and he wouldn’t allow Bai Six to be sacrificed. So he shut his eyes tight and said, ‘I won’t allow you to do this to him.’”
“And so, that night,” the smile on Aoi’s face grew wider and wider, “the Evil God unleashed his power, making half the people of Luming County follow his beloved sacrifice, Bai Six, to the grave.”
“He descended into the dreams of these people and looked directly at their souls. These beasts, filled with desire, were unable to face the Evil God’s eyes. They went mad in their dreams and committed suicide.”
“That was the first time I saw the Evil God kill people.”
