C135 – Strange Tales of Fengjia Town

Legend had it that there was a method of refining gu, which could refine a person into a human gu.

 

Eating the flesh and bloo-d of the human gu could lead to immortality and eliminate all diseases.

 

The refining method was to put the three-month pregnant woman into a Gu jar and then put the five poisonous insects into it one by one until they penetrated the skin before resting for a while.

Afterwards, break open the skin and lure it out with virgin bloo-d. They had to wait until all the insects had crawled out to complete one round.

 

If it was a hundred rounds, it was necessary to ensure that the pregnant body didn’t die during this period until the birth of the Gu baby, and the human Gu could succeed.

 

When consuming human gu, one had to remember that the gu must not die tragically, or else they would be in great trouble.

 

Strange Tales of Fengjia Town

 

When he opened his eyes, Jiu Shu heard many voices reciting the Bible in his ears.

 

He looked down at the believers praying under the stage, and his expression didn’t change much.

 

He only glanced lightly at the system panel in front of him.

 

Having just woken up from the death of the last world, Jiu Shu had a faint sense of disappointment.

 

With the accumulation of energy in these worlds, the day of returning home was getting closer and closer.

 

At the same time, it also meant that the days of spending time with the object of punishment like this were becoming fewer and fewer.

 

When he actually returned to his hometown, Jiu Shu didn’t know if he would encounter him again.

 

Looking at the information about the new world displayed on the system panel, Jiu Shu narrowed his brows and dispersed the frustration in his heart.

 

For Jiu Shu, the primary goal was to return home.

 

This had become his obsession.

 

It was also by relying on this obsession that he was able to survive the countless ridiculous years of being manipulated by the system.

 

Maybe even he couldn’t remember the reason why he longed for his hometown at the beginning. He only knew that he had to go back, and even if he couldn’t bear to part ways, he couldn’t give up on going home.

 

[You’re both crazy! He actually fell in love with you in the last world! That guy is really crazy!]

 

The system was again taking advantage of the gap between worlds to escape supervision.

 

It sounded crazy and seemed to have collapsed.

 

[My companions must have found you! You don’t have long to live!]

[If you admit your mistake now, we may be able to spare your life in the end!]

 

The companions in the system’s mouth naturally referred to the clan of high-dimensional creatures it was from.

 

Originally hidden for unknown reasons, they seemed to have recently begun to emerge again, and Jiu Shu could feel their prying eyes coming from far away as he traveled across the world.

 

Luckily, Jiu Shu had already solved the system hosted on his body and had the system under complete control.

 

Those high-dimensional creatures were thus unable to directly interfere with him and could only watch as he extracted the system’s energy and traveled between worlds.

 

But they could still do some small tricks to influence the world he traveled to.

 

[You will only become more and more miserable in the future; stop struggling unnecessarily!]

 

The system clamored.

 

Listening to the system’s clamor in his ears, Jiu Shu’s expression didn’t change as he looked down at the Bible in his hands.

 

He was a priest in this world.

 

What he believed in was also a god in the traditional sense, so there was nothing abnormal about it.

 

However, looking at the synopsis of the content of the original, Jiu Shu couldn’t help but raise his eyebrows slightly.

 

His identity in this world wasn’t good, and he could even be called a villain.

 

His relationship with the original hero and heroine could even be called mortal enemies.

 

The end result was a tragic death at the hands of the object of punishment.

 

If he followed the inertia of the plot that had been getting stronger and stronger over the past few worlds, he might actually die at the hands of the object of discipline.

 

Compared to the past, it was obvious that this should be the handiwork of the systems.

The purpose was to make him miserable.

 

Jiu Shu calmly accepted the situation and tapped on the detailed plot of this world.

 

This world was a small world derived from a literary work.

 

Its original book, Strange Tales of Fengjia Town, was a thriller novel that favored the folklore horror genre, recounting a series of strange events that the heroine, Feng Qi, encountered in the town.

 

The heroine, a recent college graduate, followed Feng Yun, the hero she had been secretly in love with, back to her hometown, where she has been away for more than a decade, to offer condolences to her dead elders.

 

The heroine originally thought she could take advantage of this time to develop her relationship with the hero in this remote town.

 

However, as the only son of the family, the hero was too preoccupied with family affairs to fall in love.

 

He also cared less and less about the heroine.

This made the heroine feel lost, and she tried to attract the hero’s attention, leading to the discovery of a series of strange things hidden in the town.

 

The town was sparsely populated, and the people were strange, fanatically believing in all kinds of gods they had never heard of.

 

As if believing in something was the only way to survive in this isolated town nestled in the mountains.

 

There were very few young people in the town.

 

There were middle-aged and elderly people everywhere, and many of the women seemed dazed.

One of them once pulled the female protagonist and talked about the strange story of monsters in the mountains and forests that circulated in the town, urging her to leave the town quickly.

 

It was said that someone had once seen a snake-tailed monster slithering through the streets in the dead of night, and in an instant it was gone like a ghost.

 

All sorts of weirdness abounded.

 

The town seemed to be abnormal from beginning to end.

 

In addition, the female lead once sneaked a peek at the male lead presiding over the sacrificial activities in the ancestral hall and also saw many usually amiable townspeople kneeling down in the sacrificial hall with many porcelain jars on their faces, looking ferocious and fanatical.

 

That was one of the Fengjia Village’s customs, using compost to sacrifice to the gods.

 

The heroine, as a former member of Fengjia Town, was also clear about this custom.

 

After all, living in the mountains, there were many poisonous insects and beasts that threatened the lives of the townspeople, and over time there had been this custom that lasted for thousands of years.

 

However, when the heroine’s family moved out of town, she was only five or six years old, and her memory of this custom wasn’t deep.

 

She only vaguely remembered observing it a few times when she was a child, but it wasn’t as weird and horrifying as what she saw with her own eyes as an adult.

 

By comparing the scene of the sacrifice with her memories, the heroine could see that the number of people attending the worship was nowhere near as large as it had been when she was a child.

 

Part of the reason for this was that many of the townspeople, like the heroine’s family, had moved away from Fengjia Town more than ten years ago, and fewer and fewer townspeople remained.

 

Another reason was the development of other religious sects.

After all, it was a modern society now. Even if Fengjia Town had inconvenient transportation, it had already been connected to the internet, water, and electricity.

 

A few years ago, a highway to a nearby city was also opened.

It was also shortly after the opening of the highway that there were more and more sects in the town.

 

Including the most prevalent outside world of the divine sect of God.

 

The church where Jiu Shu was now located was newly built two or three years ago.

 

And in just a few years, it had developed nearly two-thirds of the townspeople as believers.

 

The momentum was so strong that the town’s long-rooted patriarchal shrines were afraid of it.

 

This was one of the reasons why the hero was so busy as soon as he got home, busy fighting this hostile force led by the priest.

 

The heroine didn’t really know much about these things; she had only seen the priest in the church a few times from afar.

 

She knew he was a strange priest with a handsome face and a smile that stayed on his face all day long.

Though the townspeople regarded this priest as an incarnation of the gods, considering him benevolent and kind and praising him.

 

However, the heroine could detect the hypocrisy behind the priest’s smile.

 

Later on, she really found out that the priest was just an ordinary clergyman who had been driven out of the church from the big city.

 

With the deceptive tactics he learned from the church in the big city, he had swindled a lot of so-called ransom money in the town, causing many townspeople’s families to die.

 

It could be said that that priest was the source of conflict in the town.

 

And now Jiu Shu was that priest.

 

Seeing this, Jiu Shu glanced at the various gilded decorations within the church.

 

According to the original owner’s memories, the original owner really wasn’t considered a good person.

 

Not long after arriving, he had raided a lot of people’s wealth and thus lived a very prosperous life, and even the church had been repaired in a very luxurious manner.

 

It was a well-deserved antagonist in the story.

 

And this time the object of punishment was also not too positive; his final fate was as tragic as before.

 

The object of punishment this time was named Gu Yin, a monster with a human body and a snake’s tail.

 

Jiu Shu paused and glanced at the method of refining human gu written at the beginning of the original story before continuing to read down.

 

In the original, the female lead felt helpless against the conflict between the church and the hero’s family.

 

After all, she was just an ordinary student, and there was simply nothing she could do in the face of these two tit-for-tat forces in town.

 

Seeing that the male lead was getting busier and busier and couldn’t take care of himself, the heroine’s mood became more and more sad, and she could only go to the mountain forest by the town to take a break.

 

In the meantime, she also wanted to see whether the so-called monster in the townspeople’s mouth existed or not.

 

In this small world where materialism was predominant, the heroine actually didn’t really believe in it.

 

However, the truth was so amazing.

 

The heroine really encountered a strange creature.

 

Tall, strong, snake-tailed, pale as a corpse.

 

There were even traces of stitches on his limbs.

 

It was as if he had been dismantled, his head chopped off, and sewn back together again.

 

It was the object of discipline.

 

The heroine had fear at first, but her character had always been bold.

 

After realizing that this creature wasn’t malicious and had a simple character, she assumed that everything was just the townspeople’s nerves being too sensitive and that they misunderstood Gu Yin.

 

The heroine thus became friends with Gu Yin.

 

She also learned that he was not a spirit but a human.

 

And he was an abandoned baby who was abandoned in the mountains and forests since he was a child.

 

His mother died when he was very young, and since then he has been living in the mountains and forests with wild animals.

 

He had never gone out of the mountain.

The heroine was curious about the snaketail on the lower half of Gu Yin’s body.

 

After all, it was impossible for a normal human to have such a tail.

 

Gu Yin himself couldn’t say when he became like this.

 

He only remembered that he wasn’t like this when he was born, and then he didn’t know what happened to him before he became like this.

 

Because of his appearance, Gu Yin had always stayed in the mountains and forests, occasionally sneaking into the town late at night when no one was around.

 

This was the source of the town’s strange tales.

 

In response, the heroine had to look at this as just another strange incident in the town of Fengjia.

 

Jiu Shu scrolled down and saw that the heroine had befriended Gu Yin, and they had grown to be good friends.

 

Like in many stories of strange and wondrous things, Gu Yin rightfully fell in love with this kind girl who didn’t fear him and dared to come near him.

 

And he fell head over heels for the heroine.

 

While the heroine didn’t discriminate against this monster-like being, she only regarded the snake-tailed man as a friend of the same age.

 

Not to mention that Gu Yin’s expression didn’t have much love in it; it was more like a child imitating the feelings of a normal human being.

 

Even though Gu Yin was as strong as a young man, he was still as ignorant as a child, having grown up in a deep forest.

 

It was obvious that he didn’t know what true love was.

 

Therefore, the heroine rejected his advances.

 

Afterwards, she treated him as an ordinary friend and continued to fall in love with her childhood friend, the male lead, Feng Yun.

 

However, since rejecting Gu Yin’s advances, the heroine suddenly realized that the town had become even stranger.

 

Street corners, walls, and crevices often spread with unknown poisonous insects.

 

Although Fengjia Town had always had a tradition of gu, it was rare to see so many poisonous insects spreading to all parts of the town.

 

One after another, the townspeople were bitten, seriously affecting their lives.

 

And the ones who were bitten were some townspeople who had once spoken disrespectfully to the heroine.

 

Only later did the heroine realize that all of this was the work of Gu Yin.

 

It turned out that Gu Yin wasn’t as gentle and simple as the heroine had seen on the surface.

Since childhood, he was more like a cold-blo-oded animal.

 

Whether it was humans or animals, in his eyes, they were mostly food; they were objects that could be hunted.

 

The heroine was the only exception.

 

And the heroine finally rose in fear after discovering the strangeness of Gu Yin.

 

Then she told everything to her boyfriend, Feng Yun; they had just established a relationship.

 

As the male lead, Feng Yun’s expression seemed a bit strange after hearing the snake-tailed monster with a human body mentioned by the female lead.

 

The female lead didn’t notice the strangeness.

 

The male lead quickly covered it up and patiently comforted the female lead, saying that he would protect her.

 

But it wasn’t long before Gu Yin’s actions intensified.

 

Gu Yin hated any object hostile to the heroine, naturally including the priest, whose position was naturally antagonistic to the hero and heroine.

 

The town’s most opulent church was stained with bloo-d overnight.

 

The priest died a miserable death in front of the idol.

 

Jiu Shu turned to the original footage of the priest’s death.

 

The heroine, who happened to visit the church, witnessed everything.

 

On the steps carved in alabaster, many black-colored vipers slithered and crawled like flowing black streams.

 

Feng Qi covered her mouth in horror and locked eyes with the priest who had fallen in front of the idol.

 

The priest’s once handsome face became twisted and horrible.

 

There seemed to be many bugs and insects swimming slowly under his skin, searching for an exit.

Eventually, large clusters of fine parasites gushed out from within his mouth, making his death even more horrifying.

 

Even the glaring empty eyes had many slender worms burrowing out of them.

 

Rustling and dense.

 

And the pale man with the pitch-black snake’s tail was standing on the steps, tilting his head and observing the priest between the parasites that were all over his body.

 

He seemed to be admiring his work.

 

Or like an icy beast watching the death of a human being as if it were nothing.

 

After all, the priest was gnawed to death by the parasites inside his body, and it did seem as if it had nothing to do with the man who was close by.

 

Feng Qi could only see the man’s pale spine, with the robust and nearly perfect musculature of a male, but at this moment, he looked incomparably eerie and terrifying.

 

After noticing Feng Qi’s arrival, the man turned his head, and a childlike, happy smile even appeared on his pale, bloodless face.

 

The lips that were as bright red as bloo-d looked like they had just drank fresh bloo-d.

 

If one ignored the ugly stitch marks on the man’s face, there was a kind of otherworldly handsomeness.

 

“Feng Qi, look! He died beautifully, didn’t he?”

 

The man’s cold vertical pupils curled up, his smile pleasant and almost euphoric, as if this miserable dead body didn’t matter at all.

 

Jiu Shu looked at this original paragraph and lowered his eyes thoughtfully.

 

Only after a few moments did he continue to scroll down.

 

Although the original novel depicted Gu Yin as a horrible beast that ki-lled without blinking an eye, those details that were not thoughtfully depicted made Jiu Shu feel that there was something else going on.

 

Perhaps the original story would give a reversal later.

 

The system’s voice interrupted Jiu Shu’s thoughts.

 

[Calculating the time, by now the object of punishment should have already gotten to know the female lead, and perhaps he’s already fallen in love with the female lead as well].

 

[Ho ho ho!]

 

[You see, His so-called love for you is nothing more than something that can be changed so easily.]

 

[It can even grow from love to hate and ki-ll you!]

 

The system’s snickering caused Jiu Shu to frown slightly.

 

He turned the system back off before continuing to read the plot.

 

Just from the first half of the original story, there wasn’t much about Gu Yin’s inner thoughts, but it was showing Gu Yin’s cruelty from word to word.

 

Even if he was as innocent as a child, he still had the cruelty of a wild beast.

 

It seemed that in the eyes of Gu Yin, except for the heroine whom he cared about, all other people could be ki-lled.

 

Now as a priest, he was no exception.

 

And just as the system said, according to the original owner’s memories, the timeline should have already reached the plot node where Gu Yin met the heroine and became her good friend.

 

Soon it would be him, the priest, who would die at the hands of the object of discipline.

 

Jiu Shu looked at the original content on the system panel, blinked, and simply flipped it to the end.

 

In the original, the priest’s death was only the beginning of Gu Yin’s cruel deeds.

After that, the town was terrorized by the deaths of people one after another.

 

Coupled with the fact that the town’s original antagonistic situation was broken, the townspeople were naturally on edge all day long after the pivotal priest died so easily at the hands of a monster.

 

The increasing number of poisonous insects in the town also added to the unease.

 

In order to pacify the people, the hero told the truth about the monster.

And encouraged the townspeople to go together to ki-ll the monster with a snake’s tail.

 

The town’s fear and loathing of the monster had already reached its peak, and it was even more energized by the male lead’s manipulation.

 

Taking advantage of the fact that Gu Yin wasn’t on guard when he met with the heroine, the townspeople, who had been waiting for a long time, captured Gu Yin and brutally ki-lled him.

 

Gu Yin was captured.

Even if Gu Yin’s power was strong, he couldn’t resist the humans’s g-uns and ammunition after all.

 

Feng Qi didn’t dare to look at him.

 

However, she could still feel Gu Yin’s dismayed stare at her.

 

Feng Qi felt a little guilty, but there was nothing she could do.

 

Just like what Feng Yun said, Gu Yin was no longer the Gu Yin of the past.

 

He was becoming more and more crazy and could not continue to be indulged.

 

Bang.

 

The sound of an axe chopping through bones came. Feng Qi couldn’t help but look up; it was a grim-faced man who chopped off Gu Yin’s head.

 

But in the next second, it was the townspeople who let out miserable screams.

 

Because what gushed out from Gu Yin’s wound wasn’t bloo-d but large swathes of parasites, which pounced on the people nearby in a dense and raging manner.

 

 

Feng Qi’s face turned white with fear, and when she met the eyes on Gu Yin’s pale head, she only saw a piece of childlike bewilderment and resignation.

 

Even at the moment before his death, Gu Yin still didn’t seem to understand the status quo and even wanted Feng Qi to help get him out.

 

After all, from the beginning to the end, Gu Yin had only wanted to make Feng Qi happy.

 

Whether it was teaching those townspeople who spoke out against Feng Qi or that priest who often caused Feng Qi to be in a depressed mood.

Gu Yin never knew he was doing wrong.

Because no one ever taught him.

 

Feng Qi didn’t dare to look any further and leaned into her boyfriend’s arms and cried uncontrollably.

 

She really did treat Gu Yin as a friend, and watching a friend die with her own eyes wasn’t a good feeling.

 

She cried so much that her whole body was in a trance, unable to remember everything that happened afterward.

 

She only remembers that Gu Yin’s body caused a great deal of chaos and was burned cleanly by her boyfriend in a fire.

 

After that, Feng Qi became very sick and decided to leave Feng Family Town to recuperate.

 

Her boyfriend, who had been bombarded with family affairs, finally softened and stayed by her side.

On the day she left the town, Feng Qi looked at the scenery passing by outside the car window, still looking a bit depressed.

 

Her boyfriend brought her a bowl of hot congee.

 

The lean congee was delicious, and Feng Qi had been drinking a bowl of it every day for the last few days, almost addicted to it.

 

“You’re much better.” The boyfriend held Feng Qi in his arms.

 

Feng Qi snuggled into her boyfriend’s arms and said, “Yeah, it always feels like my heart doesn’t hurt as much anymore.”

 

Feng Qi had always had a heart condition, and moving away from Feng Jia Town once upon a time was partly to cure her illness.

 

But recently, she had gotten much better and even felt that she didn’t need to take medicine to control it anymore.

 

“It’s all in the past; we’ll get better in the future.”

 

“Okay, we’ll also have congee tomorrow.”

 

Feng Qi kissed her boyfriend, and her eyes glanced unobtrusively at the bowl of congee next to her.

 

For a moment she felt that there were traces of compost worms wriggling within the unshredded lean meat.

 

Just like the parasites that squirmed when Gu Yin died that day.

 

Even the small town gradually disappearing outside the car window became eerie and terrifying, as if shrouded in an invisible layer of black mist.

From afar, it looked like a dark vertical pupil nestled in the middle of a mountain, full of resentment.

 

Feng Qi knew she was hallucinating again.

 

Guilt made her sigh, closing her eyes and leaning against her boyfriend’s arms to sleep.

 

Perhaps for the rest of her life after this, she would never return to this creepy town again.

 

This was the end of the original novel.

 

Jiu Shu looked at the contents of the original novel with a slight frown.

 

Although, on the surface, the original story was just a simple tale of a young girl encountering a monster in a small town and finally uniting with the people to kill the monster, some small details and ambushes revealed that the story was not simple.

 

There was a much darker, more subtle truth hidden in the story.

 

Although the original didn’t directly mention Gu Yin’s life, looking at the whole text, it wasn’t difficult to guess that Gu Yin was the townspeople of Fengjia town’s refined human gu.

 

For some unknown reason, they abandoned Gu Yin in the mountains and forests until the female protagonist discovered him, which brought Gu Yin back into their sight.

 

Jiu Shu guessed that perhaps all those murderous tragedies in the town were not necessarily the work of Gu Yin.

Everything was a ploy set up to catch Gu Yin.

 

After all, few people could resist the temptation of consuming human gu to live forever and eliminate all diseases.

 

A man who wasn’t guilty of a crime became guilty of one.

 

Even if this human gu was simple-minded, just a teenager bent on pleasing his sweetheart.

 

It could be said that there were many mysteries left in the original work, which relied solely on readers’ guesses based on clues, making it difficult to get a full picture.

 

But luckily the work was brought to the big screen later in life, and it was all answered in the spinoff horror movie <<The Strange Tales of Fengjia Town.>>

 

Looking at the horror movie titled “Human Gu,”  Jiu Shu paused but clicked on the synopsis.

 

The storyline of Human Gu took place a few years after the death of Gu Yin.

 

The gradually deserted town became a ghost town known far and wide.

 

A few college students who traveled and explored in pairs came to the town and found a dozen or so altars labeled with yellow talismans and filled with broken pieces of limb.

 

It also revealed the secrets hidden in the town’s shrine.

 

Jiu Shu’s gaze lingered for a moment on a paragraph on the movie synopsis describing the method of sealing human gu before closing the system panel.

At this time, the prayers on the stage had just ended.

The church’s once-a-day mass had come to an end, and it was time for the priest to recite the Bible for his sermon.

 

“May the Lord’s love and favor be with you all.”

 

Jiu Shu raised his eyes and looked at the crowd on the stage and arched his eyebrows; his smile was gentle, and one couldn’t see a trace of him being an imposter.

 

It was as if the owner of this body had never changed; he skillfully completed a series of processes.

The believers under the stage also looked reverently at the priest standing on the altar as usual.

 

They didn’t notice anything different; they only felt that the priest standing under the colored windows of the church seemed to have become extraordinarily gentle, and even his smile was as bright and beautiful as that of a god.

 

He was even more admirable than before.

 

Just as holy and flawless as the incarnation of the gods.

 

Although his features didn’t seem to have changed much, he just made people feel more trusting.

 

Trustworthy to the point that even if they were asked to donate another sum of money to atone for their sins right now, even the most indebted one in the crowd would donate money without hesitation.

 

Sometimes, the power of religious brainwashing was that powerful.

 

Jiu Shu looked at the townspeople who had brutally split the object of punishment into pieces in the original story.

 

His expression remained gentle as his eyes swept over the expressions of devout fervor on their faces.

 

Since the plot node was already so late, it was only fair that he speed up his pace as well.

 

Let’s just set a small goal of receiving the entire town on this side of the church first.

 

Thinking so, Jiu Shu ended today’s mass.

Fengjia Town

 

At this time, it was the afternoon, located in the intersection of mountains and forests; even in the hot summer, it didn’t feel the slightest bit stuffy.

 

On the contrary, there was a cool mountain breeze on the face, refreshing one’s mind.

 

Feng Qi looked at the turquoise blue sky above her head and walked towards the deeper part of the mountain forest.

 

The lush shade of the trees covered the sky, setting off this mountain forest in a slightly eerie manner.

 

Although everyone in the town shunned this mountain forest, Feng Qi still acted calmly.

 

Because she knew that there was no danger in this mountain forest.

 

Hiss.

 

There was only an old friend that she hadn’t visited in the past few days.

 

The hissing sound of snakes rang in her ears.

 

Although Feng Qi had long known that this was Gu Yin’s sound, she still didn’t hold back the goosebumps.

 

The sound of snake scales rubbing against the tree trunk came, and Feng Qi saw a thick snake tail winding its way down the tree trunk.

 

Between the cover of the tree branches, the first thing that appeared was Gu Yin’s arm; the white muscle lines still showed the vitality that belonged to a teenager.

 

The slender fingers were well boned, but the nails were pitch black, like a dead body.

Feng Qi sat down on a stone aside; her mood was still very unpleasant.

 

Today, her childhood friend, who was now her boyfriend, still ignored her, burying his head in his work in the clan temple all day, as if there was something very attractive inside.

 

Feng Qi sighed.

 

Gu Yin’s inorganic vertical pupils stared at Feng Qi, looking increasingly cold in the light spilling from the leaves.

 

Like a cold-blo-oded viper.

 

Gu Yin’s words weren’t much; even to the self-proclaimed favorite heroine, he would only stay quietly by the side, nowhere near as funny and humorous as Feng Yun.

 

That was why Feng Qi would often talk to herself like this, only treating Gu Yin as a trash can for emotional outbursts, so that when she was done, she would be in a much better mood.

Gu Yin looked at Feng Qi in this troubled state and smiled like the townspeople he had once seen, innocent and pure as a child.

 

Today, Feng Qi mentioned the priest who had been making her uncomfortable.

 

“That guy really looks like a smiling tiger; he looks really creepy; he’s doing all sorts of bad things.”

 

“Bad guy.”

 

Gu Yin repeated.

 

Feng Qi nodded. “That’s right, he’s the bad guy, but unfortunately the bad guys are always well hidden; no one in the town seems to be able to tell that he’s the bad guy!”

 

Every time she talked about the priest, Feng Qi would be stifled by the townspeople staring at her with unkind gazes whenever she tried to say a few bad words.

 

It was only in front of Gu Yin that she could speak freely.

 

“Bad people, ki-ll.” Gu Yin naturally picked up the conversation.

 

He saw that everyone else in the town would pick up on each other’s words between conversations.

 

Feng Qi hesitated for a moment at his words; perhaps concluding that Gu Yin was just joking, she nodded back.

“Yeah, it would be nice if he dies; so many people wouldn’t have their families broken up because of him.”

 

Thinking of those townspeople whose wives and families were separated because of the payment of ransom money, Feng Qi only felt anger in her heart.

 

That priest had good skin, but inside he was rotten to the core.

 

Even that skin was actually not as good-looking as Feng Yun’s. She really didn’t know what was wrong with the townspeople who followed him—that they actually believed in the priest so much.

 

Gu Yin cocked his head, looking at the crumpled expression of indignation on the human female’s face in front of him, and remembered some of the gossip he had heard recently around the town.

 

There were always humans who had been chatting around the mountains lately, intentionally or not, and they were all saying that the priest was a very bad guy.

 

Bad guys deserved to die off or something like that.

 

Gu Yin had actually been mimicking the demeanor of a normal human.

He’d been in the mountains for too long.

He didn’t want to stay any longer.

He wanted more than anything to become a normal human and live a life like a normal human.

 

It had almost become his obsession.

 

It was as if just by becoming normal something great would happen.

 

So he learned to communicate with people in the mold of a normal human, sneaking into town to peek and learn human mannerisms.

 

Feng Qi was the friend he managed to make by imitating human mannerisms.

 

Gu Yin felt that to a friend, you had to take care of their problems.

 

What a friend hated must be solved for them.

So Gu Yin decided to ki-ll that priest.

 

Then maybe Feng Qi wouldn’t be so sad all the time, and they would become better friends.

 

And he’d be a normal human loved by humans.

Gu Yin had been alone for too long.

 

Even though he looked like a snake and was called a monster by all who saw him, he was human after all.

 

As a child, he could tolerate the loneliness; the older he got, the more he longed for the human world.

 

He wanted to be loved by others, cared for by others, to be a perfectly normal human.

 

But when he once tried to get close to humans, all he got was the disgusted look of people looking at monsters.

 

It was also then that Gu Yin knew that his looks were ugly in the human world.

 

He had low self-esteem, so now he extraordinarily cherished Feng Qi as a hard-won friend.

 

When Gu Yin thought of this, it was as if he recalled the woman’s voice from the depths of his memory.

 

That was when his memories first began.

 

The newly born him was tenderly held in the woman’s arms, and what came to his ears was the woman’s voice that was resentful to the extreme.

 

“I really hope you die; why don’t you die yet? Die as badly as you can, and then ki-ll them all!”

 

“I wish for you to die!”

 

“You damned thing, this white-eyed wolf who doesn’t die yet! What are you crying so loudly for? Trying to get attention? Ho ho ho, you monster! Hear that!”

“No one will love you; the best thing that can happen to you is death!”

“So die quickly, oooooo.”

 

The woman’s voice had been too distant, too far away to distinguish the timbre, and Gu Yin could only remember the resentment in the woman’s tone and the tenderness in her arms as she held him.

 

It was the only tenderness Gu Yin had ever gotten since he could remember.

And he wanted more.

 

If he became a normal human, he should be able to.

 

Gu Yin had always thought so.

 

Feng Qi hadn’t eaten lunch at noon and had come over with her lunch box.

 

She opened the lunchbox and lowered her head as she ate the meal in it.

When her chopsticks accidentally didn’t hold it steady, a piece of intact chicken leg fell onto the stone; fortunately, the stone was still clean and the chicken leg wasn’t much dirty.

 

But looking at the dusty chicken leg, Feng Qi frowned in disgust, not really wanting to eat it anymore.

 

She looked at Gu Yin next to her.

 

Gu Yin had always eaten raw meat and rarely ate cooked food.

 

Even though he had the upper body of a human, in this mountain forest, his eating habits were like those of a real python.

 

Feng Qi had long felt sorry for him.

“Eat it; it’s much tastier than raw meat.”

 

Feng Qi carried the chicken leg and handed it to Gu Yin like a wild dog.

Her fingertips were carefully pinched, as if she was afraid that the chicken leg would dirty her fingers and as if she was afraid that Gu Yin would bite her hand.

 

After all, it was a delicacy that Gu Yin couldn’t normally eat, so it was quite possible that Gu Yin would devour it and bite it.

 

Looking at the chicken leg that was handed to him, Gu Yin tilted his head happily.

 

The snake’s letter that was still spitting out turned into a human tongue that said thank you.

Sharing food with each other was indeed what human friends did in the daily life of the Fengjia Town he had watched from the sidelines.

 

Although, as a monster whose strength far exceeded that of humans, he had no shortage of food in the mountains and forests and could even be called a bully in the mountains, Gu Yin was still happy that he had a friend who could share food.

 

So he directly swallowed the chicken leg into his stomach.

 

Looking at Gu Yin’s gulping way of eating like a snake, Feng Qi watched in some amazement as the chicken leg bulged from his neck and swallowed it down again, like she was looking at a novelty Western scene.

 

In fact, to Feng Qi, who had never seen a monster before, Gu Yin was similar to a Western scene.

Curiosity about Gu Yin as a monster was actually one of the major reasons why Feng Qi decided to become friends with him in the first place.

 

After talking about what was on her mind and having lunch, it was time for Feng Qi to leave.

 

She didn’t have much time to accompany Gu Yin, a monster who couldn’t even say much, and being able to come and visit occasionally was already the greatest kindness to Gu Yin.

 

Especially Gu Yin’s face that was full of stitches; every time she looked at it, it would give a visual shock, and Feng Qi avoided looking at it as much as possible.

 

Even the snaketail on the lower half of his body was not as ugly as that face.

Thinking this way, Feng Qi waved her hand towards Gu Yin and turned around to leave this mountain forest, leaving him to continue sitting on the ground.

 

Gu Yin looked at Feng Qi’s faraway back, curled up with some inferiority complex, and touched the stitches on his face with bleak eyes.

 

As a beast living alone in the mountains and forests, Gu Yin could certainly detect some of Feng Qi’s unpleasant emotions.

 

This face of his was indeed ugly.

 

Ever since he knew the ugliness of this face of his, Gu Yin felt more and more inferior day by day.

 

Compared to an ugly being like him, Feng Qi was simply the other extreme.

 

Many people in the town loved her.

 

Although there were also some people who hated Feng Qi, Feng Qi was still very popular.

It was probably because Feng Qi’s smooth face was beautiful.

 

If only it could be torn off and sewn onto his face, then he would be as popular as Feng Qi.

Casually tearing off the dead skin that had molted on his arm, looking at the stitch marks that couldn’t be hidden even with the molted skin, Gu Yin was a little lost.

 

Maybe when his relationship with Feng Qi was a little better, he could borrow a little skin from her.

 

After all, good friends always helped each other.

 

At least that was what Gu Yin had learned from the town’s television was correct.

 

Therefore, in order to get closer, Gu Yin decided to visit that church tonight.

 

If he ki-lled that priest, he and Feng Qi would be better friends.

 

With this thought, Gu Yin swam to the stream and looked at his pale face, tickled his lips, and started practicing a smile like he always did.

 

A smile of pure pleasure, as if he had already seen that future where he was welcome and no longer a monster.

 

The price was simply… a human life.

 

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TN:

I wanna slap this new heroine.

This was really long, I was gonna two part it but it was so interesting that I kept going.

See ya ✌️