Demon King – Chapter 423 – The Village’s Story

No one knew how many years ago it was, but there was once an unnamed small mountain village, located halfway up an unnamed mountain.

Most of the villagers had settled there to escape the wars and harsh taxes of that era. The inconvenience of transportation gave them a patch of pure land, but at the same time, it almost completely cut them off from the outside world.

The village itself was not large, scattered around with only about a dozen households. They reclaimed terraced fields on the mountain, hunted in the forest. Life was hard, but through mutual support and help, they somehow managed to gradually stabilize the situation of the village.

Cut off from the world, self-sufficient. This simple and honest village slowly continued to develop. All of the villagers believed that their village would become a second Peach Blossom Spring.

No one knew how much time passed, until one day, several villagers discovered a strange blue stone at the source of a stream while hunting in the mountains. This discovery completely changed the fate of the nameless little village.

No one knew where the stone came from. Even the most well-traveled person in the village only thought it was a rare gemstone at most.

But in this isolated mountain village, what people needed most were food and tools for labor, not curiosities that could only be used for decoration. In their eyes, a gemstone was not even as valuable as a stone axe.

So they handed the stone to the village’s only craftsman. There were rumors that gemstones of this kind, when melted into copper or iron, could make forged blades sharper and more durable.

But something eerie happened. No matter how the craftsman smelted or hammered it, he could not damage the strange stone in the slightest. He could not even scrape off a thin outer layer, let alone melt it into steel.

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Unable to process it, yet unwilling to simply throw it away, the stone was eventually handed over to the village chief. Placed inside his house, it could only serve as a decoration in the end.

Some time passed after that, and during this period, the villagers discovered that their lives were not just smooth sailing, but smooth to an excessive degree.

Whether it was the harvest from hunting or the yield from the fields, everything far exceeded their previous levels. Once or twice could be considered luck, but when every single time was a bumper harvest, people eventually realized something was wrong.

The clever ones turned their attention to that strange stone. One day, they finally noticed that the stone would occasionally emit a mysterious blue glow at night.

People in the past did not understand much. When faced with things they could not comprehend, they often attributed them to gods and spirits. So they hurriedly enshrined the glowing stone as a divine stone, specially building a small platform to worship it.

As time went on, the villagers discovered that some of their intentional or unintentional thoughts and words would become reality after a period of time. And all of these occurrences shared one thing in common. They could only come true after the divine stone had emitted its light.

At this point, the villagers could no longer avoid drawing a conclusion. This so-called divine stone, though its conditions, timing, and methods were unknown, was indeed capable of randomly reading people’s thoughts and making them come true.

Under such circumstances, seeds of desire and greed were planted in the villagers’ hearts. After spending a relatively peaceful period of time, following rounds of mutual probing and suspicion, someone finally made a move on the stone.

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The first to harbor thoughts toward the stone was naturally the village chief’s family. One night, under cover of darkness, they secretly swapped the divine stone, placing a stone dyed blue with pigment behind the platform, while taking the real divine stone back to their home and hiding it.

Afterward, they secretly induced a certain villager to attempt the same act, then captured him in one move. Using this method, they greatly increased their prestige in the village while also dispelling some people’s doubts, allowing the fake to firmly take the place of the divine stone.

To be safe, after staging this whole affair, the village chief used the excuse of preventing malicious plots to logically arrange for the villagers to take turns guarding the fake stone.

No one knew that the stone had been swapped. This matter was designated by the village chief as the most important secret of his family, passed down from generation to generation.

With the protection of the divine stone, generation after generation passed, and the scale of the village grew larger and larger. But by this time, the structure of the village had already changed. It was no longer the simple, mutually supportive community it once was.

The village chief’s family, who had taken the divine stone for themselves, gradually developed into the local great landlords over generations. The other villagers were nothing more than long-term hired laborers working for them.

The wealthy village chief’s family could now be called the landlord family. While developing the village, they also continued to exploit the other villagers.

At the same time, with their broadened horizons, they set their sights on the outside world. This once isolated mountain village slowly began to have contact with the outside.

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The lives of the other villagers were miserable beyond endurance. Almost every day, someone would complain and curse the landlord family behind their backs. During conversations after exhausting labor, several hired hands quietly cursed that the landlord, that weasel, deserved to die alone.

The curse itself was nothing, but the thoughts in their hearts were learned by a certain stone. At the same time, the landlord family was planning to send their six children to the city to study and seek development.

No one knew what the divine stone did, but of the six children sent away by the landlord family, not a single one ever returned.

Four of the children, for unknown reasons, encountered accidents and completely lost contact with everyone else. The remaining two, though successful in their careers outside, believed it was the result of their own efforts. To distance themselves from the so-called divine stone at home, they cut off all contact with their family.

The hired laborers’ unconscious curses ultimately truly turned the landlord into a lonely man with no family. Unaware of the reason, the landlord was heartbroken, yet did not reflect on himself at all. Instead, he intensified his persecution of the villagers.

Under this persecution, a vicious wish was born in the heart of a certain villager. Rather than letting my life be this miserable, this damn village might as well be destroyed.

And so, not long after, this nameless small mountain village suffered a catastrophe it never should have faced. Several waves of bandits and mountain thieves, coming from who knows where, followed the roads opened up by the landlord family and looted the village.

After several rounds of plundering, almost nothing was left in the entire village. The final group of bandits, seeing there was no oil left to squeeze, set the whole village on fire.

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A village that had taken generations of hard work to build up with the help of the divine stone was ultimately destroyed by that same stone. And the surviving villagers, looking at the ruins left after the great fire, returned to the very starting point of their ancestors.

Translator Note

A divine stone that can grant any wishes…

I wish I have a lovely girlfriend who truly loves me and would never betray me :NachoPray: