Ch46 - Finally, I found you.

Translator-Rhapsodite

Editor-simpforlife, Proofreader-Ghostie 

A huge number of villagers had gathered by the river.

Wei Fuyuan was perplexed at first, but he was a good 1.87 meters tall and stood out from the gathering of two or three hundred people. He soon found Bei Quan who, likewise, was being squished by the crowd.

The distance between the two was not too far, Wei Fuyuan squeezed towards his boss relying on his height and physical advantage, and towered over him.

“When should we do it?” 

He bent his head sideways and leaned close to Bei Quan’s ear. Fearing that others would hear him, he deliberately lowered his voice.

To be honest, Wei Fuyuan’s worry was unnecessary.

The river was tumultuous at the moment, and the rumbling roar of the turbulence was thunderous. Nobody could hear what they were discussing.

Bei Quan turned to look at Wei Fuyuan, smiled at him and mouthed a ‘Don’t worry’.

Wei Fuyuan had no idea what Bei Quan had in mind. Now that he couldn’t go to the bottom of it, he had to suppress his fear and quietly wait for the festival to begin.

At this time, the noise suddenly seemed to have doubled. With the sound of gongs and drums coming from an invisible direction, a group of young and strong men carried hundreds of paper people and paper horses to the river.

The paper people and horses were thrown into the river one by one.

Wei Fuyuan observed that the river’s flow of water was unrestrained, but the weightless and fluttering paper figures had not been swept away. They were tightly packed on the river’s surface, whirling peculiarly on the spot. The image made people shudder because it seemed as though the river was covered in floating corpses. 

The scene became even more frightening after the villagers poured a large amount of reeking blood into the river.

Like some hellish river from folklore, the scarlet river water twisted over, layer by layer, devouring and spitting the densely packed paper people on the river.

It was the first time Wei Fuyuan had smelled such a strong blood odor. He felt so nauseous that he grimaced deeply and had to cover his mouth and nose with his palm.

“Right now!” 

Bei Quan shouted without warning at this time.

Wei Fuyuan worked as an assistant for almost a month. He had formed a conditioned reflex. He took out the bamboo strips from his arms, untied the rope and prepared to toss them into the river without hesitation.

Bei Quan only ordered him to toss the inscribed bamboo strips into the water, because the river was unquestionably the closest water source to them.

There were 49 bamboo strips in all, each measuring one finger long and two fingers broad. It was riddled with blood phrases that Wei Fuyuan couldn’t comprehend. 

The river was already a dark crimson with the mixed blood and teeming with all types of paper sacrifices. After being thrown in the water, the small bamboo strips should have appeared unremarkable.

However, when Wei Fuyuan pulled out the bamboo strips and prepared to toss them away, the villagers who had previously served as NPCs in the game storyline spotted what he was holding, turned their heads one after the other, and their expressions hardened quickly, before turning to terror.

Wei Fuyuan got a terrible premonition all of a sudden.

He made a split second decision, pushed out his arm, shoved the people around him aside, broke away his hand from the crowded space, crossed over to the river in two large strides, lifted his hand and flung out the stack of bamboo strips, and shouted at the same time, 

We’re sorry for MTLers or people who like using reading mode, but our translations keep getting stolen by aggregators so we’re going to bring back the copy protection. If you need to MTL please retype the gibberish parts.

“Let’s go!”

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Ktf fzjma wbwfca atf raglqr abemtfv atf yibbv-oliifv glnfg, jii 49 yjwybb raglqr uibkfv j ubivfc gfv. 

Ktf nliijufgr bc atf glnfg yjcx revvfcis rajgafv rmgfjwlcu tsrafglmjiis.

Wei Fuyuan noticed the forty-nine bamboo strips that were floating on the water were connected by a red light, forming a rune shape.

Immediately after, the blood-red river water erupted into boiling water, tumbling and hurling waves.

The paper men floating on the river were abruptly dragged down by the surging river water and all of them were buried at the bottom of the river in a second, disappearing without a trace. 

Wei Fuyuan was standing near the river and almost got caught in the gigantic crimson waves. Fortunately, he responded soon enough and took several steps back before moving away from the perilous situation.

——No, wait!

However, before he could exhale a sigh of relief, Young Master Wei twisted his head in astonishment and was shocked into a cold statue by the scene before him.

He saw hundreds of villagers who should have been standing around the river, just like a videotape that pressed the stop button. At this time, they stopped in their places one by one. 

Each of them kept a posture for a moment, with a frightened face and a ferocious expression. They opened their mouths, stared and stretched their hands forward. It seemed that they would rush over in the next second and tear the uninvited guests who dared to destroy their festival into pieces.

But the villagers didn’t move again.

Because right in that moment, Bei Quan had summoned his innate magic weapon, the brush tip drew an arc in the void, and the golden-red light flashed past like a shooting star and fell into the boiling lake. It integrated with the formation of forty-nine bamboo strips.

For a moment, the red light flourished. 

Wei Fuyuan only felt an invisible pressure and the world rocked violently from the ground up.

His feet softened, and he suddenly knelt forcefully.

The people behind him were like sand sculptures shattered by the pressure of the waves— they all crumbled to dust in an instant as the pressure abruptly hit.

“Bei-” 

Wei Fuyuan supported the ground with one hand, wanting to see what Bei Quan was doing.

At this time, Bei Quan spoke.

“Aren’t you going to show up yet?”

Bei Quan asked coldly, “If you don’t appear soon enough, the debris space you have worked hard to create will eventually be crushed by me!” 

When he finished speaking, Wei Fuyuan felt the pressure on his body being increased another degree, and he frantically and vigorously struggled to hold himself on four limbs on the trembling ground, fighting harder to avoid hitting the ground.

——Fuck!

He cursed in his heart.

——Bei Quan, you are really too careless! 

——Before you break this ghostly place, you are definitely going to crush me to death first!

Wei Fuyuan tried to raise his head.

The two or three hundred villagers that formerly encircled this place were no longer present, and they all appeared to have vanished. There were only four students on the river bank at this time, all of them were on their four limbs and trying to support themselves against the pressure, same as Wei Fuyuan.

He turned around and looked at Bei Quan with difficulty. 

From Wei Fuyuan’s current perspective, Bei Quan seemed unaffected by the tremendous pressure. He had a taut, straight back, slender neck and a thin but razor-sharp beautiful jaw.

——Can you please stop pretending as if the force isn’t affecting us!?

Young Master Wei thought angrily.

——At Least let us out first! 

In truth, Bei Quan was not any better like he seemed.

He made a huge move as soon as he walked up. In reality, his goal was to terrify the ‘thing’ that created this fragmented space and force the opposing side to reveal its true body.

Even if he had written the bamboo strips ahead of time, it would still take a lot of Bei Quan’s strength to keep the extant array going.

Xuanmen village, on the other hand, was a natural Yin-collecting basin. Because of the unique geographical setting, this fragmented space gathered considerably more Yin Qi than its volume. With his strength, he intended to destroy it from within. 

Bei Quan clenched his teeth discreetly.

——No, I’m afraid… I don’t have the strength to fight anymore.

However, the ‘thing’ that didn’t know where to hide turned out to be far more patient than Bei Quan thought.

Under the heavy pressure of the array, all the villagers in the fragmented space had disappeared, and the scattered courtyards were pushed down like toy blocks. One by one, they collapsed, finally turning into powder. 

But even in this case, the culprit who started off these events still refused to show up.

——There’s no way!

Cold sweat flowed from Bei Quan’s forehead and wet his sideburns.

——In that case, we can only force it harder! 

“Hey, Comrade Xiao Wei!”

Bei Quan shouted, “Do me a favor.”

When Wei Fuyuan heard Bei Quan calling him, he was very furious, “Do you think I’m in a position to move right now??!”

Bei Quan, who always had an amicable smile, became unreasonable and difficult at such a time. 

“Stand up!”

He couldn’t help saying, “If you want to go back!”

——I # ￥% # ￥ ￥!

Wei Fuyuan scolded a string of mosaic curses in his heart. His mind was full of “This Lao Tzu will quit when he goes back!” 

But even if he was a little reluctant, he had no choice right now.

Wei Fuyuan clenched his teeth, fighting the tremendous strain that felt like it would practically crush his spine, and climbed up like a snail, steadily using his hands and feet together.

What Young Master Wei didn’t realize was that while he strained to move inch by inch, a layer of brilliant golden light formed all over his body, wrapping over him like a shield and offsetting part of the tremendous pressure imposed on by the array for him.

At long last, Wei Fuyuan stood upright. 

“You, cough…”

He asked Bei Quan, “What the fuck do you want me to do?”

Bei Quan didn’t explain, and directly ordered, “Cut open the ring finger and drop the blood on the ground!”

Wei Fuyuan wanted to spit out a mouthful of blood in anger but he dared not refuse what Bei Quan had asked him to do. 

Unfortunately, he didn’t have any sharp weapons, nor did he have the ability of Bei Quan to draw blood script by using a magical brush on the skin.

No way. He probably had to use the move he learned from the costume drama, and placed the ring finger of his left hand in his mouth and bit it harshly——

The cut was quite deep, and the blood dripped onto the shore drop by drop, eventually forming a tiny pool of blood the size of a coin.

Wei Fuyuan was about to ask Bei Quan what to do next when he noticed that the blood droplets he had put on the ground had sprung to life and expanded a thin bloodline in a certain direction. 

The blood thread stretched longer and farther, like a narrow, slender spider thread, and its destination was not the river, which was still churning with bloody waves, but rather the cemetery at the village’s outskirts, where many dead people were buried.

Bei Quan smiled gently, “Finally, found you.”

The next second, Wei Fuyuan felt a sudden decline in the pressure surrounding him.

He stood up straight and looked around blankly. 

The array of forty-nine bamboo strips in the river had disappeared, and the boiling river had returned to its original calmness.

The other four students also got up one after another.

They were more confused than Wei Fuyuan. They didn’t know what the hell had happened just now.

“This…” 

Pan Xiaoyun, the monitor, hesitated, “Is this over? Can we… finally leave?”

Bei Quan turned to look at Pan Xiaoyun.

“Of course not. This is just the beginning.”

He smiled and said an answer that nearly made the students faint. “Now, let’s go and find out who the culprit is.” 

—————————

The author has something to say: Mr. Wei wishes to resign right now/away.