Ye Yang and Brother Xing exchanged a glance. Their hearts, which had just begun to settle, leaped back into their throats. Their minds raced.
“N-no, that’s not it,” Ye Yang stammered. “I don’t know him.”
Xing Tian paused, then quickly caught on and also explained, “Yes, I don’t know him either. I just overheard the name Zhu Kai.”
The man kept glaring at them. The woman had fallen silent, but her eyes kept darting back and forth between the two of them. The agonizing silence stretched on for what felt like an eternity. Finally, the woman spoke again.
“Go tell Zhu Kai to stop being so greedy. We’ve told him multiple times—only one referral at a time.”
The hundreds of stares that had been boring into their backs shifted away, one by one. The irregular sound of footsteps gradually returned to the line.
Was that it? Had they passed?
Ye Yang quickly nodded and walked inside. Xing Tian immediately followed. The delay meant they were struggling to keep up with the person ahead of them.
The small church’s backyard was quite large. They walked ten meters or so before reaching the church building itself.
Taking advantage of this brief moment when no one was paying them any attention, the two quickly communicated telepathically.
Ye Yang: “That was terrifying. Brother Xing, were you scared just now?”
Xing Tian was speechless. “How could I possibly be scared of humans? It’s just that they’re so jumpy…”
Even though he knew he could easily take down several ordinary humans with one punch, Ye Yang was still rattled. “Those two were way too creepy. Really scary.” He hadn’t been this fearful before—it had to be because he’d been watching too many horror movies with Shen Ming lately!
They had only exchanged a few words when their steps finally brought them to the small church.
Passing through the backyard led to the church’s back door. The door was designed to be very inconspicuous. From the outside, it had no lock or handle, blending seamlessly into the church’s exterior wall. If you weren’t looking carefully, you’d never notice there was a back door there at all.
Now, the door was open. By the moonlight, they could vaguely see that there was no hallway leading to the first floor—only a narrow staircase leading upward.
They climbed the stairs and rounded a corner. Ye Yang’s steps faltered. He couldn’t help but let a flicker of surprise show. Xing Tian raised an eyebrow, took a long stride to stand beside him, and let his spiritual power stir faintly.
He truly hadn’t expected this. At the top of the stairs wasn’t a second floor, but a doorframe glowing with blue light. The center of the doorframe rippled like the surface of water, obscuring whatever lay beyond.
This was clearly not something that should exist in the ordinary human world. Yet neither Ye Yang nor Xing Tian had sensed anything unusual.
Their eyes met, and they quickly communicated telepathically.
Ye Yang: What is this??
Xing Tian: Who knows? We’ll figure it out once we’re inside.
No matter how rationally he usually behaved, it couldn’t hide the fact that Xing Tian was fundamentally a very reckless guy—otherwise, he wouldn’t be missing a head.
Ye Yang wasn’t much better. Neither of them hesitated for a second. Together, they stepped through the doorframe.
Passing through the “water surface,” their surroundings suddenly brightened. Ye Yang blinked. Once his eyes adjusted, he almost thought he was dreaming.
No—he couldn’t dream up something like this even if he tried.
Before them seemed to be a forest. The sky was filled with fantastical, multicolored lights. A small path wound its way forward, destination unknown. The cult members who had entered earlier seemed familiar with the place, boarding vehicles without hesitation and letting them carry them along the path.
But—
These vehicles weren’t real modes of transportation. They were living vehicles, made entirely of human bodies.
Four or five completely naked women supported each other in strange, intertwined poses, forming the shape of a lotus flower. The cultists, as if this were perfectly normal, stepped on one woman’s stomach to climb aboard and sat in the center of the lotus, as if they were just getting on an ordinary electric scooter.
Meanwhile, the naked women’s expressions were a mixture of pleasure and pain. Their soft, pale arms—serving as seats—struggled to bear the weight of the passengers. Their bare feet stepped on the dirt ground. Occasionally, they stepped on a sharp stone, leaving bloody footprints that were then smeared by the next step.
Xing Tian, having lived far longer and seen far more, kept his composure better than Ye Yang. But even he couldn’t help frowning deeply.
If his senses weren’t failing him, these naked women were all ordinary humans. Their souls and spirits were intact—they weren’t being controlled, nor were they puppets. Their expressions didn’t suggest coercion, either. Ye Yang had even considered that they might be under an illusion.
But ever since the Fox Demon Cub Incident in Luoyang City, while Ye Yang had no real skill in illusions himself, he had grown very good at recognizing them. How could an illusion powerful enough to hypnotize this many people leave absolutely no trace?
The only explanation was that everything these women were doing was voluntary!
As he was pondering this, a “lotus chariot” came to a stop in front of Ye Yang. One of the “petals” opened—a naked woman bent backward as if boneless, becoming a step for boarding.
Her head was practically upside down, touching Ye Yang’s foot. It took all his effort to resist the urge to step back.
Xing Tian gave him a push from behind and telepathically said: Go on.
Ye Yang gritted his teeth, suppressed his discomfort, and stepped onto her.
The “petal” held her breath and closed her eyes. No matter how you looked at it, being stepped on the stomach was extremely painful. But the expected pain never came. When she opened her eyes again, this newcomer she had never seen before was already sitting upright in the center.
There was no time to dwell on it. Her companions pulled her left and right, guiding her back into position, her arms that had been braced on the ground becoming part of the seat once more.
Ye Yang had used a light floating technique. Boarding this “lotus chariot” for the sake of investigation was already his limit. He absolutely could not bring himself to actually stomp on an innocent woman’s stomach.
The “lotus chariot” moved forward slowly. Ye Yang felt extremely uncomfortable. He didn’t want to look at the naked women beneath him, so he kept his eyes fixed on the scenery along the path. Gradually, the view opened up. The trees of the forest grew sparser, and the path became flanked by various marvels.
Birds from different regions gathered together, singing unknown melodies in unison. In the distant sky, the silhouette of a giant whale glided past. An enormous spider sat motionless in the crown of a towering tree, silently watching the “lotus chariots” crawling below…
It was all dreamlike and fantastical, yet eerie and incomprehensible.
Ye Yang used a simple illusion to mask his actions and pulled out his phone, trying to take photos. But no matter how he tried, every photo came out as an indistinct mass of blue. Stare at it too long, and it became almost unsettling.
Right—he should have expected this. They had been allowed in too easily. No one had even asked them to hand over their phones. So this was their safeguard. For ordinary people, wouldn’t having your phone show nothing but a blurry mess when you tried to take a photo feel more like a divine miracle than having it confiscated? Even someone who was skeptical at first would be convinced after seeing that.
After traveling about two hundred meters, the birdsong gradually gave way to soft music played on some unknown instrument. It was the kind of melody that should have been relaxing, yet it carried an inexplicable sense of dread. Then, suddenly, a blue glowing orb appeared before Ye Yang. Inside the orb seemed to be a majestic figure.
Beneath the orb lay a circular pool filled with blooming lotuses. The pool was shrouded in mist, and a staircase led from it up toward the glowing orb in midair. The cult members who had arrived earlier were kneeling around the pool, eyes closed, heads bowed, hands clasped together and pressed against their foreheads.
In short, everything about this scene screamed “cult.” It had nothing whatsoever to do with the words “Mutual Aid Society.”
Suddenly, Ye Yang’s field of vision lowered. He looked down and saw that the women forming the “lotus chariot” had knelt. The arms that had formed the seat spread apart. Once Ye Yang was fully on the ground, they skirted around the lotus pool and left via another path, heading—it seemed—to pick up more cultists.
Ye Yang knelt down, following the cultist in front of him. Soon, Xing Tian arrived and knelt beside him.
Some time passed. It seemed all the cultists had gathered. Dong— A bell rang. The mist over the lotus pool dispersed, and the glowing orb grew even brighter.
Ye Yang’s breath caught in his throat. He hadn’t expected that the lotus pool contained not only lotuses, but also countless naked women. Their pale, limp bodies drifted with the water, their skin taking on an eerie gray-blue hue under the light of the blue orb.
All the cultists opened their eyes, but not a single one looked at those naked women. Their fanatical, devout gazes remained fixed solely on the glowing orb.
“Let us begin.”
The figure inside the orb spoke. It was a middle-aged man’s voice—nothing special. It even carried a heavy local Eastern Continent accent.
Wait, just like that, the mystique was completely ruined?! Ye Yang nearly lost control of his expression again.
The cultist closest to the pool stood up. He was visibly agitated, trembling badly despite being young. He almost fell as he rose, only steadying himself because a woman in the lotus pool reached out to support him.
He didn’t spare her a single glance. Muttering, “Thank the True God, thank the True God,” he stretched his shaking hands toward the glowing orb.
The next moment, a beam of blue light flew out from the orb and landed in the cultist’s palm. He flinched as if burned and shook even more violently, muttering to himself, “Finally my turn, finally my turn…”
Ye Yang was puzzled. What did that mean? Wasn’t he the first?
The blue light lingered in the cultist’s hand for a moment before returning to the orb.
Wait—Ye Yang narrowed his eyes slightly. When the blue light went back, had it taken something with it?
The first cultist knelt back down, expressing endless gratitude and bowing his head repeatedly, his face full of ecstatic joy. Then came the next person.
The process was nearly identical. This time, Ye Yang saw it clearly. When the blue light came out of the orb, it was pure blue. But when it returned, it carried a thread of gold.
He continued observing for a long while. He noticed that the blue light that emerged was always the same size, but the amount of gold mixed into it varied—some large and obvious, others faint and small.
He also carefully sensed the figure inside the orb. By all appearances, he seemed to be an ordinary person, with obvious emotional shifts. Sometimes impatient. Happy when he saw significant amounts of gold, angry when the gold was weak.
As time passed, he grew more and more impatient. Confident that the cultists below couldn’t see him, he kept one leg crossed, bouncing it restlessly, while occasionally rubbing his fingers together as if longing for a cigarette.
Finally, the cultist in front of Ye Yang received the blue light. Next was Ye Yang.
He tensed up, ready.
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