Volume 5, Chapter 91 – Arrival

The reason Tao Sicheng found it strange was because she had heard of the Feathering Sect’s wickedness and cruelty.

The moral bottom line of the emperors of the Yu Dynasty had already been extremely low. For something to be branded by generation after generation of Yu emperors as “the wickedest among the wicked” and “the most heretical of heresies,” there was certainly some selfish fear in that, fear that the Feathering Sect might restore Great Xuan. But it was also connected to how bloody the sect’s own methods were.

It was said that throughout history, there had been many incidents of Feathering Sect upheavals. They would first send people in disguise to infiltrate settlements, posing as followers of Buddhism, Daoism, or other faiths. They would lie low and spread “wicked scriptures” under the pretense of telling fortunes, healing the sick, or reading feng shui.

These “wicked scriptures” possessed an extraordinarily powerful bewitching force. Any ordinary person who heard them would immediately convert. Those converts would still be ordered to remain hidden, only quietly expanding their web of connections and increasing the number of believers as discreetly as possible.

Once ordinary people had been bewitched by the “wicked scriptures,” there were no visible signs on their faces or heads. The only way to identify them was to make them strip and check for an insect-wing tattoo on their backs.

But that kind of inspection clearly could not be carried out every day. It could only be done through periodic spot checks, which made omissions easy. The Feathering Sect took advantage of those gaps to develop a huge number of believers in a short span of time. By the time the court noticed, an entire city was often already poisoned through and through, with at least hundreds of thousands of people bewitched and contaminated.

The fate of such people was unimaginably miserable… because the guiding creed of those “wicked scriptures” was that “death is not the end” and “only in death can one welcome new life.” They encouraged people to cast off the shell of the flesh and undergo “Feathering,” and so once they were exposed, those people would usually “Feather” very quickly. Their bodies would rapidly turn into some indescribable monstrosity, slaughter for a while, then drop dead on the spot.

With conduct like that, the cities tainted and poisoned by them mostly became bloody dead zones. Naturally, the Feathering Sect became synonymous with absolute evil. When it came to not acting human, they had always enjoyed an excellent reputation.

So how could it be that in a country controlled by the Feathering Sect, there would be so many living people in its cities?

With that question in mind, the vehicle drove into the city. Along the way, Tao Sicheng kept observing the sights by the roadside and discovered that the architectural styles here differed enormously.

There were streets and high-rises full of modern flavor, but there were also shacks thrown together in the shadows of the alleyways. There were far more of the latter than the former.

All along the way, ninety percent of the districts she saw were incredibly run-down. The roadsides were packed with refugees, sitting or lying everywhere. Each one was dressed in rags, sallow-faced and gaunt, with used syringes scattered by their feet.

“I don’t like this place…”

Tao Kangyuan had long since woken up. After seeing the scene outside, he rubbed his arms and muttered that under his breath.

The more Tao Sicheng looked, the tighter her brow furrowed.

She had a bold guess: everyone in this city was in fact livestock being raised in captivity.

Xuanxia—in other words, the Feathering Sect—did not really care much whether their subjects lived or died. All they needed was for these people not to die too quickly, at least not before the moment they were meant to serve their purpose as consumable materials.

She had only just thought that when the light ahead turned red, and Rongyin slammed on the brakes.

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The brake marks dragged halfway across the road, and the shrill screech drew quite a few refugees into looking up.

When they saw it was an armored off-roader, quite a few people who knew their vehicles showed envious expressions. Two others, high out of their minds from shooting up, staggered to their feet and lurched toward the vehicle.

“Get the hell away.”

Rongyin rolled down the window and flicked out two sparks.

“Ahhh!!”

The sparks landed on the two of them, and explosive flames instantly burst to life. They screamed as they turned into human torches, frantically clawing and slapping at their bodies, dancing, crawling, and rolling in the street, utterly unable to put the fire out.

“Bonfire party! Bonfire party!”

The people who were still lucid naturally shrank back and scattered, but even more junkies gathered around instead, clapping and singing as they circled the two burning figures. They laughed and chattered as though they were attending some kind of celebration, with not the slightest hint of fear on their faces.

“This is just what it’s like here.” Seeing this, Rongyin frowned faintly as well and explained to the two in the back, “The people here can barely be counted as human anymore. Whatever you see here, don’t be surprised.”

This was already brutally excessive, all right?

Tao Sicheng’s brow creased even harder.

Even the refugees controlled by Northern Yu were only this miserable… yet from Rongyin’s tone, it sounded like there was something even more outrageous to come?

How much more outrageous could it get?

Would it be like those people too deeply corroded by demonic power—killing people and eating flesh?

Tao Sicheng’s curiosity was quickly satisfied, and it came in the form of a large truck driving toward them from the opposite direction.

To speed the circulation of air, the windows had been opened once they entered the city. As that truck passed, Tao Sicheng caught an overwhelmingly thick smell of blood. She instinctively turned her head to keep watching it, and with just one glance, her eyes flew wide open.

What had she just seen?

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A whole truckload of bones… Were those human bones?

“The unlucky ones from the last round,” Rongyin said with a hint of feeling. “Don’t look. It’s not suitable for the two of you at your current stage.”

“What was that?” Tao Kangyuan still could not stop the fear in his voice. “Tell me! What was that!?”

“Human bones. What else would they be?”

“I’m asking where they came from!”

Rongyin fell silent for a moment before answering, “As you can see, this ‘Arid Sand City’ is really just their livestock pen.”

“They have never stopped researching secret texts like On the Five Worms and the Feathering Scripture. All this time, they’ve been using the territories they actually control as experimental grounds.”

“Roughly every so often, there’s a cycle.”

“When the cycle runs its course, more than half the city starts to ‘Feather.’ At that point, most people die. Those are the unlucky ones I was talking about.”

“Only a very small number of lucky survivors manage to live through the ‘Feathering,’ but their fate is often even more miserable, because they get transferred into those high-rises—into the laboratories, for other experiments.”

“Then shouldn’t everyone here have died out long ago?” Tao Kangyuan demanded, shocked and furious.

“Ah, under normal circumstances, yes…” Rongyin nodded. “But you can’t stop fragments of the Illusory Realms from constantly returning to the main world.”

“What—”

“You don’t understand? Whatever else Xuanxia may be, it’s still a state whose main population is human. For those residents whose homes have been swallowed by the main world, forcing them to return to this ancestral land, joining Xuanxia and becoming its people is still better than going straight out into the wilderness to face demon beasts.”

“That’s deception, isn’t it?” Tao Sicheng cut straight to the heart of it.

“Their claims about their relationship with Eastern Xia are really just meant to deceive those Void Realm refugees, to make them think this is a polity similar to Eastern Xia. And so those people keep welcoming batch after batch of travelers who have come here to die… They were tricked into coming here, all of them!”

“I’m warning you two—don’t say that outside.” Rongyin looked back at them, displeasure on her face.

“Why?” Tao Sicheng shot back. “Aren’t I supposed to be a genius? Can’t the Li people protect me?”

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“A mind that’s too clever…” Rongyin narrowed her eyes. “That’s not necessarily a good thing.”

“Can I know what exactly happened?” Tao Sicheng pressed on. “Earlier, you said you were taking us to meet the one in charge, but we haven’t met anyone at all. We’ve just been traveling the whole time. Has some new development happened? And how many of our clansmen are left?”

Perhaps because her repeated use of “our” had finally taken effect, Rongyin fell silent for a while, then chose to tell them the truth.

“There are… still quite a few clansmen left.”

“Probably several tens of thousands, scattered all over many different places. They haven’t been gathered together yet.”

“The ‘one in charge’ I mentioned was our clan chief, Rongwen. At the time we set out, he had already assembled the final sacrifice and begun the great plan to resurrect our lord, so naturally he had no time to concern himself with us.”

“But he failed, didn’t he?” Tao Sicheng said.

“The demon god was defeated. The Li people lost their greatest trump card. Whether you still have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of people, without Saint-level power, you no longer have the confidence to stand on your own. Isn’t that so?”

“…Not necessarily.” Rongyin frowned.

Tao Sicheng lifted a brow. “Not necessarily?”

“I actually suspected something long ago…” Rongyin said in a low voice. “I always felt Rongwen was acting in obedience to someone’s orders.”

“It was just out of habit that I assumed those orders came from our lord, so I never once became suspicious.”

“But the moment he failed this time, he immediately mobilized us and sent us to ‘Arid Sand City,’ and he also described that infiltration plan.”

“The Feathering Sect was never this formidable before… I keep feeling there’s another hand behind all of this.”

She was right.

Earlier, Tao Sicheng had been too preoccupied to think it through, but hearing Rongyin put it that way now, she reacted as well. If the Feathering Sect had mastered those “witchcraft and gu arts” long ago, the Yu people could never have oppressed them so completely that they could barely breathe.

Looking at the map, the so-called state of Xuanxia occupied only a tiny patch of land, no bigger than a sesame seed. Let alone the Federation or Eastern Xia—Northern Yu alone was ten times its size.

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If they had possessed that ability from the start, they would never have developed so shabbily.

So it was not something they had mastered early on.

It was something they acquired later.

From Rongyin’s description, it sounded more like there had been outsiders—like a third force had granted it to them.

Who could that have been?

Pilgrimage Mountain?

The Federation?

Those powers were all hostile to the Xia Emperor as well. Any one of them seemed possible.

“Don’t overthink it.”

“Maybe once we go upstairs, we’ll know.”

The car stopped again. Rongyin opened the door and got out, then raised her head to look at the more than thirty-story modern high-rise by the roadside.

The building was extremely conspicuous.

Its entire outer surface was covered in sea-blue glass, throwing off brilliant refractions in the sunlight. With its streamlined exterior and heavy sense of technology, it looked like the sort of building that might have come from the Federation. Tao Sicheng could not help narrowing her eyes as she stared at the row of letters hanging over the second floor, slowly spelling them out in her mind.

“Feathering… Club…?”

Her heart sank.

Tao Sicheng had a feeling that this name boded very badly.

But after looking at the armed guards standing on either side of the main entrance, and then at Rongyin, who had already gone up the steps and was glancing back at them, Tao Sicheng could only open the car door and lead Tao Kangyuan toward Rongyin.