“What lights? Trying to bring everyone over here?”
“Alright, stop wasting time. Let’s get to work!”
Wu Jie’s anger hadn’t subsided. She just wanted to finish this mission quickly and then storm over to the Can Mountain YCG branch to demand some answers.
Ye Yang immediately fell silent and obediently worked with Chi Lian to set up the retrospection formation, quickly beginning the playback.
Xing Tian slipped off to the temple’s administrative office, while Wu Jie headed to the internal area behind the temple.
The retrospection moved quickly. Before long, they reached two years earlier. Reviewing the footage from those two years, Ye Yang discovered that this side hall had been opened just two years ago, and the statue had been there from the beginning. Back then, the hall had even had a plaque reading “Guanyin Hall.”
But soon after, Dongru Temple built a proper Guanyin Hall, the plaque was removed, yet the statue remained.
From that point on, the side hall seemed to have been forgotten. No one came anymore. Gradually, the statue began to change on its own, becoming increasingly bizarre.
Six months ago, the first incense-offerer who had taken a wrong turn entered the hall. Then, more and more people started coming—yet the temple monks acted as if they saw nothing.
Before the retrospection was even complete, Wu Jie and Xing Tian had returned. They’d been highly efficient, not only figuring out the entire situation at Dongru Temple but also finding a lot of relevant information online.
Everyone who entered this side hall had been referred by friends. Their wishes really did come true, and they would in turn tell their own friends.
Yet the news that Dongru Temple had a very efficacious Buddha statue never spread widely—it only circulated within small circles.
At first, the statue granted simple wishes—winning a few thousand dollars from a lottery ticket, an unfaithful husband leaving the marriage with nothing. But gradually, the tone began to shift.
The statue still granted wishes, and it was still highly effective and quick. But the way it granted them grew increasingly twisted.
A woman wished for a baby boy. The next day, on her way home from the night shift, she was dragged into an alley by a group of men and assaulted. Eight months later, she suddenly collapsed at work, was rushed to the hospital by colleagues, and gave birth prematurely to a baby boy.
During those eight months, she dared not speak up. She secretly bought pregnancy tests multiple times and went to the hospital under various pretexts for checks—all showed she wasn’t pregnant. She didn’t know she was pregnant until the child was born.
Her family fell apart as a result, and the hospital ended up in a lawsuit.
Another case: an elderly man wished for his wife to die soon so he could marry the nanny his son had hired for him.
That very day, when he got home, his wife suffered a sudden cerebral hemorrhage. By the time they reached the hospital, it was too late to save her. The very next month, he impatiently married the nanny.
Just a few days into his comfortable new life, a group of debt collectors showed up at his door—The old man’s son, who had always kept his nose clean and worked diligently, had on the day of his mother’s death taken out a high-interest loan using the house and car as collateral. He borrowed a huge sum of eight million, and even the old man’s own home had been used as collateral.
Only then did the old man remember that his son had mentioned going abroad on a business trip a few days earlier. Now his son was gone, nowhere to be found. The old man was about to be kicked out of his house.
Misfortunes never come singly. The nanny, seeing the situation, used passwords she’d previously coaxed out of the old man to transfer away all his money. Calling the police was useless—they were legally married, so it was considered marital property.
…
Ye Yang was utterly shocked. “How did you find out all this so quickly? Where did you even find it?” Only about an hour had passed, hadn’t it?
Wu Jie spread her hands. “Right on local forums. It’s just that most people don’t believe it.”
The internet was a wonderful thing. Ye Yang couldn’t help thinking back to his own cult case. If only that had been this simple. Back then, there had been no information online at all—he’d had a headache just gathering materials!
“Alright, keep listening. I’m not done yet!” Wu Jie knocked on the donation box in front of the statue. “Soon, people started noticing the pattern, so fewer came. As for those who had come—whether out of fear or because they simply didn’t believe there was any connection—online discussions were sparse, and hardly anyone paid attention.”
Chi Lian curled his lip. “So this young man still dared to come and make a wish. He’s not afraid of the consequences.”
Wu Jie said, “It’s not that he’s not afraid. It’s that he has nothing left to lose.”
“Now he’s all alone. He’s said online before that he’s not afraid of dying to avenge his parents. As long as he can make Qin Ruhai die, he’s willing to bear any consequence.”
Xing Tian picked up where Wu Jie left off. “But he didn’t expect that Qin Ruhai would also come and make a wish. His wish was directly nullified. But precisely because his wish wasn’t granted, he didn’t suffer any harm either.”
“So this statue actually has principles…”
Ye Yang asked, “What about Qin Ruhai? What price did he pay?”
Xing Tian said, “You’ve hit the key point there. Guess how we got this mission and such detailed intelligence?”
“?”
Xing Tian gave a cold laugh. “As soon as we got the mission, I had someone look into it. I just got word back. Just as I thought—Qin Ruhai’s group has grown to its current scale for a reason. He’s a very clever man.”
Qin Ruhai was a businessman—a shady one at that. And shady businessmen are greedy. On one hand, he wanted to stay alive. On the other hand, he was afraid of bearing the consequences of having his wish granted. So he came up with a workaround—a way to pull the rug out from under the problem.
He had some connections and vaguely knew a little about YCG. Not much, but enough to know that such an organization existed in Huaxia.
Wu Jie’s voice turned cold: “No matter where you are, money is a good thing. Qin Ruhai spent nearly half his net worth to get the director of the Can Mountain YCG branch to help. As soon as the news about matching organ sources came through, they suppressed this statue.”
Those few sentences carried an enormous amount of information. It took Ye Yang a long moment to process it. “Th-That’s not right, is it?”
“Not right? It’s completely and utterly wrong!” Chi Lian had been reviewing YCG regulations lately and immediately became furious. “They knew there was a harmful statue like this, and instead of directly destroying it, they used it to make money?!”
Ye Yang finally pieced it together. “Since they already suppressed it, why did Can Mountain YCG post this mission and send us here?”
Wu Jie thought for a moment. “All I can say is that there are still some normal people at Can Mountain YCG. Not everyone there is greedy for money.”
But Xing Tian saw it more clearly. “They couldn’t handle it themselves, so they deliberately kept it for us outsiders to deal with. And our previous mission just happened to fail.”
Their thinking was this: ordinary operations team members would just complete the statue mission as quickly as possible to make up for the previous failure. Plus, ordinary members wouldn’t have Xing Tian’s connections to figure out the truth and the behind-the-scenes exchange of favors so quickly.
But they hadn’t expected that Dongzhou, seeing the urgency of the situation, would send a group of unassuming powerhouses.
Ye Yang and Chi Lian didn’t count—but Wu Jie and Brother Hui had both been great demons of their time. Even though they’d since retired, their strength hadn’t disappeared.
And Xing Tian? His name in the system wasn’t “Xing Tian,” and he’d been slacking off for so long that he looked like a low-level nobody too.
But that was no excuse for Can Mountain to order them around and make them do their dirty work.
Even someone as good-natured as Ye Yang couldn’t take it. “Our mission failed because their intelligence was flawed!”
“Those old fossils at Can Mountain have been sitting in their positions too long, with their heads buried in the sand. They really think we from Dongzhou don’t know anything and can be pushed around.” Wu Jie, prompted by Xing Tian, had her already explosive temper immediately ignited. Fire seemed ready to shoot from her eyes, but her voice was cold enough to freeze.
“So we’re just going to let it slide?” Chi Lian was even angrier. “No way. I’m going to demand an explanation!”
“Don’t worry, there’s no way we’re just letting it slide. Finish the mission first, and then…” Wu Jie didn’t finish her sentence, but from her tone, it was clear that her unspoken words were far from pleasant.
The statue had always been here. Eliminating other possibilities, only one remained: later-stage mutation.
Xing Tian, without the slightest hesitation, jumped directly onto the statue. Just as he reached for the object emitting a green glow in the statue’s hand, the thing suddenly blazed with light. But Xing Tian simply squeezed it with one hand, and the green light, like a chicken with its neck wrung, instantly wilted.
With his other hand, he casually broke off half the Buddha’s hand. It fell to the ground with a dong, rolling and tumbling to Ye Yang’s feet.
Ye Yang picked it up and examined it. The statue’s material looked like stone but felt somewhat soft when pinched—it even had the warmth and smoothness of human skin. Ye Yang quickly threw it back on the ground.
Disgusting.
When he looked up again, Xing Tian had already obtained an irregularly shaped green stone, about half a fist in size, with a grassy green liquid flowing inside.
This was the source of the statue’s mutation.
“So it’s this thing.” Xing Tian weighed it in his hand, now understanding. “I can’t remember exactly when—it was a very long time ago—but I’ve seen something like this before. It’s a malevolent object from the Xiang Kingdom. You know how people talk about raising ‘little ghosts’ or Kuman Thong? It’s similar to that. But this one—this one has been raised to an enormous size.”
Ye Yang asked, “How did this thing end up at Dongru Temple? Could Dongru Temple be involved too?”
Wu Jie said, “Dongru Temple probably doesn’t have the nerve. Many people who no longer want to enshrine a Buddha or evil deity statue secretly dump them at temples, hoping to escape the backlash. This one was likely the same.”
Xing Tian nodded. “This thing is very sinister. I suspect the original owner hid it inside the Buddha’s hand, hoping the Buddha statue would suppress it.”
“And the original owner…” Ye Yang started, then closed his mouth. Did he even need to ask? The original owner definitely didn’t meet a good end.
The green stone’s light flickered. Before Ye Yang could get a closer look, Xing Tian gave it another hard squeeze. With a piercing shriek, the green stone shattered directly into powder. He opened his hand and blew—the powder rose, turned into specks of glowing light, and disappeared.
“Eh?” Ye Yang was dumbfounded. He didn’t even know what it was yet, and Brother Xing had just destroyed it? What were they supposed to turn in for the mission then!
Xing Tian looked completely innocent. “The mission said ‘deal with it.’ Isn’t this dealing with it?”
Wu Jie let out a cold laugh. “They wanted us to bring this harmful thing back so they could use it? Dream on.”
Ye Yang: “…” Well, when he thought about it that way, it was pretty satisfying.
“Should we go, then?”
“Just leave? That would be letting them off too easy.” As Chi Lian spoke, his tail suddenly appeared and lashed out violently. He snapped five or six of the statue’s twisted legs in one go. “From what I know, all damage caused during a mission is paid for by Can Mountain YCG, right?”
Wu Jie and Xing Tian’s eyes lit up. They immediately joined in, turning back around and sharpening their metaphorical knives for the statue.
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