Chapter 452: The Arrival of the Ancestral God |
In late May, under the firm hand of Councillor Hayes and other senior officials, Jiang City and its neighbors were swift to restore order. In tandem, a series of methodical purges began.
After being hit with a tranquilizer dart, Lin Chen had fallen into the custody of the Weird Investigation Bureau. When he awoke, he remained silent for a full day, processing the events of the Final Instance and the death of Si Qi.
Over the next several days, under interrogation by the Bureau, he confessed to everything he had experienced since entering the Weird Game. Only then did people learn that the Unnamed Guild's elusive president, Lin Wuya, was just a college student who had recently joined the game—a mere front created by Si Qi to project an image of strength.
According to regulations, a criminal of Lin Chen's severity should have been sentenced to life imprisonment in a containment cell, just like Lin Jue. However, the Undead Shepherd identity card was far too useful; it was arguably one of the most critical cards the Weird Investigation Bureau needed at this stage.
After a fierce debate, Councillor Hayes made the final decision, authorizing Lin Chen to be dispatched across the Dragon Prefecture to atone for his crimes through service.
And so, investigators flew with Lin Chen from city to city. At each stop, they would let him wander through the streets. Once all the local ghosts had joined the procession trailing behind him, they would bring Lin Chen and his spectral army back to Jiang City, using the mysterious restricted zone to purify or restore them.
Through this method, the concentration of supernatural entities in the Dragon Prefecture gradually returned to the levels seen before the Final Instance began, proving that using Lin Chen to handle ghosts was a viable strategy. Councillor Hayes immediately signed a directive authorizing his deployment to other prefectures and regions.
On May 30th, a specialized aircraft from the Weird Investigation Bureau touched down at Regina Airport in Maple Leaf Prefecture.
The land, scoured by the supernatural, was shrouded in a haze of dust. A closer look revealed that the fine particles were not sand, but pulverized bone fragments and putrid flecks of flesh, their origin—human or otherwise—impossible to tell.
The moment he left the confines of Jiang City, he lost consciousness. He was now nothing more than a walking corpse, driven by his identity card through streets littered with mangled limbs and down alleys teeming with ghostly shadows.
A soft white halo bloomed beneath his feet, and ethereal white feathers circled around him. As he ventured deeper into the throngs of ghosts, the light grew more intense, becoming almost solid as it carved a path through the dark, spectral tide.
As if answering some unseen call, the strange, the grotesque, and the malevolent emerged one by one from the shadows, shambling along behind Lin Chen.
From the plane, investigators monitored Lin Chen's every move via satellite. The young man on the screen, who had been wandering aimlessly and changing direction whenever he met an obstacle, suddenly seemed to lock onto a target.
In an instant, he spun around and charged forward, scaling one crumbling wall after another, crashing through fences and roadblocks. He ran like a beast released back into the wild—a frantic, desperate sprint.
The investigator stared intently at the screen, his heart pounding. This was the Undead Shepherd's first mission outside the Dragon Prefecture, and something was already going wrong. Was it a coincidence, or...?
If a supernatural entity of this level lost control, anyone without serious connections would be unable to bear the consequences. Visions of a court-martial flashed before the investigator's eyes. He shuddered violently and began frantically mashing the communication button.
"Calling headquarters! The Undead Shepherd is showing signs of losing control. Requesting expert analysis..."
"Calling headquarters! Should we execute the termination protocol immediately? Please provide the location of the nearest nuclear launch facility..."
A stream of messages was transmitted from the plane's radio to Jiang City, along with the satellite surveillance footage. Five minutes later, the analysis and instructions from the Jiang City Weird Investigation Bureau came through, delivered by a cold, emotionless electronic voice.
"Calculations indicate a 90% probability that the Undead Shepherd's destination is the original site of the Red Maple Boarding School, located one hundred and twenty kilometers away. We cannot predict the chain reaction that will occur if these two supernatural vectors converge."
"A small-scale nuclear warhead will be deployed over Regina in ten minutes. The expected fallout radius is two kilometers. All personnel are advised to evacuate immediately."
The Undead Shepherd might be valuable, but no one was willing to risk him losing control. Suppressing the threat with overwhelming firepower before the situation spiraled was the safest option for humanity.
The investigator had completed his report, knowing that whatever happened next, the responsibility wouldn't fall on him. As the plane banked to begin its return journey, he let out a small sigh of relief, only to be jolted by a piercing alarm that blared through the cabin.
[Warning! All electronic instruments on the central control panel have failed. The aircraft is going down!]
At the same time, the Weird Investigation Bureau in Jiang City received a message from the nuclear launch facility: "Our missile went offline at a high altitude two hundred kilometers from Regina. The source of the interference is unknown..."
On the deserted streets of Regina, abandoned cars lay scattered at odd angles. Inside them, dashboards that had been silent for days suddenly sprang to life, their dials spinning wildly with a strange clicking sound.
In the empty houses lining the streets, televisions switched on by themselves, displaying a frenzy of static and colored data bars. Radios crackled to life, their knobs turned by unseen hands, tuning in to a ghostly station that recited: [Tonight... *crackle*... all of you... *hiss*... will die...]
One bizarre scene after another unfolded across the city, yet Lin Chen ran on, oblivious. When a person becomes a supernatural entity, mingling with ghouls and phantoms is like a lost soul returning home. Fear is a forgotten emotion—a fate both fortunate and tragic.
A mournful sigh echoed through the air—a woman's voice. The sallow sky began to pale from the edges, turning the color of a corpse. Countless silver threads stretched out from all directions, weaving a delicate spiderweb across the dome of the heavens.
A pair of silvery-white eyes slowly opened and closed. Beneath their cold, indifferent gaze, an old-fashioned school built of gray concrete rose from the ground. Circles of emaciated children sat cross-legged on the ground, clapping their hands and singing a nursery rhyme:
"Good children who won't eat their food must learn to eat dirt, While wicked children grow toadstools of hurt.
A god takes root in the rot and the weeds, And yellow buds bloom where a dead man now sleeps..."
Lin Chen charged into the school and ran into the midst of the children before abruptly halting. His gray-black eyes clouded over, for the first time since becoming a monster, with a distinctly human confusion.
Where was this place? Why had he come here? He felt like he had forgotten something... forgotten someone and something very important...
"Good child, you've finally arrived. We were waiting for you," a woman with white clothes and white hair said softly, her back to Lin Chen as she stood among the children. "You must be tired after all these days. It's time to rest. Find a place to sit."
Lin Chen stood there, stunned. He felt torn in two. One half of him screamed warnings, telling him the woman before him was extremely dangerous. The other half soothed his soul, urging him to trust her kindness.
In the end, a low-sequence entity could not defy a high-sequence god. He walked toward the woman and stiffly sat on the ground, allowing her to plunge her hand into his chest and pull out a dripping, blood-soaked identity card.
The silver-white surface of the card was now coated in crimson, the images of the shepherd and his flock of ghosts smeared into a demonic, pale pink. The moment the card left his body, his human consciousness returned. Lin Chen's eyes widened, and he raised a hand, trying to snatch it back.
The woman looked down, patting his shoulder with pity. "Just sleep for a while," she said gently. "It won't be painful. It'll be over soon." Her words held a hypnotic power. A wave of drowsiness washed over Lin Chen, his thoughts crushed under an immense weight of fatigue. He slowly closed his eyes, and his body slumped to the ground with a dull thud. Bright red blood gushed from the wound in his chest, soaking through his white suit and spreading into an irregular pool beneath him.
The blood seemed endless, flowing like a river toward the children around him, staining their shoes and trousers. The children continued to clap, as if engaged in a game that could not be stopped. They sat in the pool of blood with expressions of terror, their mouths opening and closing in exaggerated motions as they sang cheerfully:
"The day the yellow butterflies came to play, Everyone died and was buried away.
No grass will grow on the children's graves, It's all because of the witch's dark ways..."
...
Nevada, Eagle Prefecture. Redemption Casino headquarters, third basement level.
Rows of small iron cages were packed tightly together. Inside each cage, a small boy or girl was curled into a trembling ball, their eyes filled with terror and despair.
Jack patrolled the aisles between the cages, a whip in his hand. Every so often, he would lash out, eliciting a pained scream.
No matter how chaotic the outside world became, it never stopped humanity from indulging its darkest imaginations, seeking out places far from law and order to lose themselves in debauchery. Besides its gambling operations, the Redemption Casino also procured homeless children from around the world to provide certain special services for its wealthy and powerful clients.
Thanks to the supernatural scourge, police investigators had been stretched to their limits. Thousands of cities had collapsed into chaos, and countless children were displaced by the catastrophe, left as orphans without parents. Human trafficking had become easier and cheaper than ever. In just a few days, beautiful boys and girls had filled all three levels of the Redemption Casino's vast, multi-acre basement.
As the man in charge of this gray-market industry, Jack could almost taste the fortune he would amass once the situation stabilized. Of course, he wasn't in it just for the money. As one of the world's lucky few who had turned a hobby into a profession, he had an innate sadistic urge toward weaker creatures—an urge that had started with cats and dogs and ended with children.
"Hey, little guy, what are you staring at me for? Don't worry, the next lash is for you," Jack sneered at a boy who was watching him, his threat a familiar refrain.
But the boy remained perfectly still, his gaze fixed on Jack. A silvery-white light spread across his eyes, and the fear that should have been there dissolved, replaced by the predatory hunger of a beast eyeing its prey.
"What... what is this?" Jack took an instinctive step back, only to feel an icy hand clamp around his ankle. He looked down and saw that the cage behind him had been torn open, creating a hole large enough for a person to crawl through. A girl in a tattered dress was lying on the floor like a snake, gripping his leg and baring a set of sharp teeth.
"Creak, groan..." The sound of bending iron echoed through the room. One by one, the cages in the basement were ripped apart by the children locked inside. Dropping to all fours like animals, the children snarled and lunged at Jack. A non-human, silver glint, as cold as a snow-capped mountain, shone in every child's eyes.
June 1st, a day designated by nations around the world as "Children's Day." Whether by coincidence or due to the wicked humor of some god, every child under the age of fourteen across the globe underwent a bizarre transformation.
They seemed to regress in their evolution, devolving from humans into beasts. They scurried through streets and alleys on all fours with startling agility, ganging up in packs of three or five to tear apart any lone adult they found. Once their target was lifeless, they would scatter, only to gather again in some corner of the city, their faces smeared with blood, forming circles to clap and sing.
Jiang City remained a mysterious restricted zone, untouched by the supernatural chaos. But the surrounding cities fell overnight. The concentration of supernatural entities, which had been reduced by the Undead Shepherd, shot back up to its peak, and this time it was more frenzied, more irrational, possessed by a malice that sought to wipe out the entire world.
Surveillance footage from the past month across the Dragon Prefecture was sent to the Jiang City Weird Investigation Bureau. Councillor Hayes and the others finally noticed a fact they had overlooked while dealing with Lin Jue.
The woman in white with white hair had landed in the Dragon Prefecture by sea on May 17th, the same day Si Qi had entered Jiang City. In less than two weeks, she had appeared like a ghost in various cities, handing out white candies to a few children. Those children had then skipped off to different parts of their cities, sharing the seemingly endless supply of candy with their peers...
"It's White Crow! I knew the Balance Church had been too quiet these days. So this is the poison they were brewing!" a councillor slammed his fist on the conference table, his face flushed with anger. "Who was it that said all the members of the Balance Church had sacrificed themselves in the Final Instance? That one false assumption made us miss our best window to prepare!"
Politicians were adept at assigning blame the moment a crisis hit—or to put it more bluntly, deflecting responsibility from themselves and pinning it on their rivals.
Someone sneered. "I did say that at the time, but who here can claim they didn't think the same? Why else did no one contradict me?"
Another chimed in, "Ultimately, it comes down to faulty intelligence. I'd like to ask, who was in charge of intelligence gathering?"
A cough came from the head of the table. It was Councillor Hayes. As the de facto leader of the Weird Investigation Bureau and the man most credited with imprisoning Lin Jue, his opinion carried immense weight in their meetings.
The councillors fell silent. Councillor Hayes shook his head slightly. "The Balance Church truly is gone. And what we're seeing is not White Crow."
Facing the councillors' bewildered gazes, he sighed and spoke more plainly. "What we must now confront is the supreme existence that operates within the rules, the Ancestral God who once created this world."
The councillors were silent. At their level, they were privy to secrets concerning gods and knew of the Ancestral God's existence. They also knew that her mission was to reclaim the old world after the rules collapsed and reboot a new one.
But what could they do? Electronic devices failed, nuclear missiles went offline. The modern technology humanity prided itself on was like a child's plaything to the Ancestral God. How were they supposed to stop her?
Councillor Hayes rose and walked to the window, gazing out at the gray-white sky. The silver eye hung over everyone's heads like a crack in the firmament, looking down on the scarred human world with an air of detached amusement. The struggles of ants could never move such a great being.
He drew his gaze back, his eyes falling on the windowsill. A ring of tea stains had formed there at some point. An ant was anxiously circling along the dark track, occasionally lifting its head and waving its two long antennae as if questioning its fate.
Councillor Hayes ran his index finger along the edge of the tea stain, creating a tiny gap. The next time the ant reached this spot, it would be able to escape the endless loop.
He rubbed his fingers together, repeating the wiping motion with focus, when he suddenly felt a sharp pain. The ant had somehow circled around in the opposite direction and bitten him fiercely.
"I was just thinking," Councillor Hayes murmured, pulling his finger back, "the Ancestral God could have destroyed us all in an instant. Why is she doing this step-by-step, allowing us to be aware of it? Does she want us to be afraid? Or is she hoping for a certain reaction from us?"
The councillors exchanged glances, but the old man before them let out a long sigh. "We know far too little about the Ancestral God. Not nearly as much as that man. So even though we know she is coming, we can only wait passively, unable to do anything."
Someone caught his implication and quickly stood up to object. "Your Excellency, Lin Jue is a madman! He'll destroy all of humanity! We weren't wrong. We acted in humanity's best interest!"
"Humanity is on the brink of destruction anyway. What difference does it make who destroys it?" Councillor Hayes turned to face the other councillors, his voice calm. "Disaster is already upon us. Instead of waiting for death, we might as well take one last gamble. A gamble that he is still on humanity's side."