“Cough, cough… You… you will descend to the Yellow Springs to join me! I have already seen that future!”

The Yin Fate Great God knew it could not escape its fate.

Sealed within the pig’s head by the Gentleman Penguin, its Spirit Body flickered violently, its emotions flaring.

Wu Wang held up 【Xiaochuan】, his expression calm.

He said softly, “The Yellow Springs? I couldn’t ask for more.”

Puchi!

The broken sword sank mercilessly into a crack in the pig bones, embedding itself firmly in the Spirit Body within.

An overwhelming pressure mixed with pure Mental Strength erupted from the blade.

A volcanic blast of energy and mental fluctuations slammed against the sky canopy, making the barrier created by the magic orb tremble violently. Fortunately, its indestructible nature allowed it to hold.

In the distance, Xiezhi and the An City Director wore grave expressions.

This energy was almost unbelievably strong. Even Xiezhi at his peak probably couldn’t produce such immense mental fluctuations.

Could this be the Yin Fate Great God’s true form?

The master wasn’t about to be defeated, was he?

While they were lost in thought, Wu Wang’s expression, on the other hand, was growing more and more joyful.

“It’s just as I guessed!”

From the moment he first obtained the 【Xiaochuan Broken Sword】, he had been puzzled. If the sword could only devour Spirit Bodies that had lost the ability to resist, how could it grant different attribute boosts based on their strength?

Generally speaking, a spirit that couldn’t resist was about to fade away anyway. If they were all half-dead, how could you distinguish the strong from the weak?

Eventually, he had come to a conclusion.

The attribute boosts and Attack Special Effects must be calculated based on the Spirit Body’s intrinsic power, not its current state.

A starved camel is still bigger than a horse, after all.

No matter how weak the Yin Fate Great God was now, the essence of its soul was anything but simple. It could descend upon the human world from some unknown dimension and lay schemes in various strange worlds. In a xuanhuan novel, it would be considered half an otherworldly demon.

No one should be fooled by the Gentleman Penguin knocking it into a stupor with a single cane. If a normal player had faced it, their fate would have been the same as those few Level 25 treasure hunters.

One bite, and crunch.

Therefore, Wu Wang had struck gold.

This Sword Spirit, formed from the Yin Fate Great God, would surely be unbelievably strong!

“Come on, baby! Show me what you’ve got!”

The light in the pig’s head’s orbital cavities and the overwhelming energy gradually weakened until they vanished. A strange, purplish-red glow began to coil around the sword’s blade.

Wu Wang could feel 【Xiaochuan】 undergoing some kind of change.

Almost there…

It’s about to come out!

Omm—

Just as Wu Wang thought the entry for the Attack Special Effect or the updated attribute panel was about to appear, something else popped up.

【Reading Spirit Body Memory…】

【Replaying Memory…】

Wu Wang blinked. “Huh?”

In an instant, his vision blurred.

Everything around him began to rewind wildly. The knee-high weeds around the desolate village vanished, revealing an empty plot of land.

The Ancestral Hall, which had been completely demolished by the An City Director as if he were a one-man demolition crew, was restored to its original state.

Even the village’s dilapidated state regressed to a time of prosperity, with one anomaly. The entire village was filled with severed limbs and all sorts of corpses, the aftermath of the avenging Saintesses. The pungent smell of gunpowder still hung in the air from craters left by landmines.

This was the state of the village right after the instance had ended.

“I’m… back again?”

Wu Wang was inwardly shaken.

He was standing right in the center of the Ancestral Hall. Less than five meters in front of him, beneath the floor tiles, was the Yin Fate Great God, still sealed after being knocked senseless by the Penguin.

Da, da, da…

Footsteps sounded from outside the Ancestral Hall’s doors.

Someone was coming.

A wave of confusion washed over Wu Wang. Because he had been there, he knew just how bizarre the appearance of these footsteps was.

The villagers had all died tragic deaths. The Saintesses, having fulfilled their last wishes, had also found release and disappeared. The largest living things in the entire village capable of making a sound were mice.

Yin Fate Village was supposed to be a deserted, empty village. So where the hell did these footsteps come from?

Creak—

The doors of the Ancestral Hall were pushed open.

A person wearing a black-and-white mask walked in. They were tall, at least 1.9 meters, and their black robe fluttered in a strong wind that seemed to follow them. Even the green grass turned yellow and withered where they passed.

On their shoulder, they carried a strange, three-meter-long scythe. Their grim-reaper-like aura made one hesitate to even breathe.

“Holy shit! My Fake Smile Mask!”

Wu Wang was stunned for a moment. But upon closer inspection, he realized that although the mask looked similar to his own 【Fake Smile Mask】, there were slight differences.

The expression on this mask was a crying face.

Moreover, a strange inverted triangle symbol was carved in the center of its forehead, the Calamity Cult Mark that Xiezhi had mentioned.

This guy’s aura was truly bizarre.

Wu Wang subconsciously wanted to hide.

But the other person acted as if they hadn’t seen him at all, merely glancing around the empty space before standing still, lost in thought.

“Oh, right, this is a memory,” Wu Wang realized. “Dammit, I’m so used to being a lurker, my first instinct is to hide and launch a sneak attack.”

He felt a surge of pride at his own bad habits.

See that! Lurker behavior is already carved into my DNA!

The Crying Face Eccentric stood in place, sensing something. After about five minutes, he finally took a strange, camouflage-patterned walkie-talkie out of his pocket.

His voice was hoarse, like two pieces of rusty sheet metal scraping together.

“The trait of the Undying appeared here, but I was too late. I didn’t find him.”

Thump thump!

Wu Wang’s heart couldn’t help but beat a little faster.

【Undying】!

The other party actually knew about 【Undying】!

He’s here looking for me? Who is he?

From the other end of the walkie-talkie came a woman’s voice, seductive to the extreme.

“Don’t be so impatient~”

Her voice was filled with a strange allure. “Since he’s already been chosen by the Spirit Calamity Game, we’ll have plenty of opportunities to find him. You can’t rush a good thing~”

Even though it was only her voice, and even though Wu Wang was merely observing a memory, he still felt his mouth go dry. An unholy fire seemed to rise in his chest.

It wasn’t simple lust. Rather, a primal desire inherent to all living beings was being amplified and provoked.

Fortunately, the Crying Face Eccentric’s hoarse voice sounded again. The chilling killing intent that filled the entire Ancestral Hall instantly sobered Wu Wang up.

“Me, impatient? If it weren’t for your mistake, that Advent Ceremony should have pulled the 【Undying】 from the real world into the Spirit Calamity Game forever!”

“Instead, you barely managed to cause a plane crash in reality, making the 【Undying】 disappear! I’ve waited an extra five years because of you!”

“Do you have any idea how I’ve spent these past five years!”

“Across the entire history of the eternal ages, past or future, a second Undying can never appear! This is the only chance to make contact with Them! And you! You lost him!”

As the Crying Face Eccentric raged, a fierce wind kicked up. All life within the Ancestral Hall began to be annihilated. Insects like ants and spiders went still. The grass outside instantly turned yellow and withered before becoming dust, scattered by the wind.

Wu Wang, however, was frozen in place for a different reason.

Ever since he had lost the concept of death, most of the emotions deep in his heart had grown faint. Intense feelings like fear and anger were things he could no longer truly feel.

But now, he seemed to have found them again. All sorts of emotions began to erupt.

【Five years ago, Advent Ceremony, plane crash, Undying】.

These four keywords slammed together in his thoughts.

Waves of shock crashed through his mind.

“That was no accident!”

“It was a premeditated ceremony!”

But even then, Wu Wang was able to maintain his rationality and frantically analyze the situation.

Why were they looking for him instead of just creating another 【Undying】? No, from what the man said, it seemed they couldn’t. 【Undying】 wasn’t something that could be created by human power. They had just wanted to pull him into the Spirit Calamity Game through that blasted ceremony.

Given this person’s description and emphasis on the Undying, the source of his ability might be on a much higher level than he had imagined. Perhaps his absurd, initial idea was right. To know the source of 【Undying】, he really would have to meet the Abyss God. After all, It was the highest-level existence he knew of so far.

But no matter what, one thing was now crystal clear.

The plane crash was because of these bastards.

Undying was not a power created by man.

But the accident was.