Volume 8: A Trip to the Sick Village Chapter 398: The Obsession of the Victims
The word "Victims" means both victims and sacrifices, and it specifically refers to the sacrifice of living things.
The hundreds of corpses stacked on the second floor of the izakaya flashed through Ke Lan's mind like slides. He would never be able to forget the frozen expressions of fear on the faces of the victims. The memory was as clear as if it had happened yesterday.
Ke Lan didn't know these people's names before they died, nor did he know what kind of people they were or what they had done... These people's lives might never have any intersection with his, just like two parallel lines - if there hadn't been this massacre.
He never thought that it was some bullshit "sacrifice ceremony". It was a naked massacre and a trampling of life by a group of heartless people.
…
When the "faces" on the puppet entities opened their eyes, the familiar wailing sound once again rang in his mind.
"I don't want to die..."
"Please... don't kill me, I can give you all my money..."
“It hurts… it hurts so much…”
"Blood! So much blood! Is this my blood..."
Not only could Ke Lan hear these voices, he could even feel the strong emotions these people were experiencing before they died... fear, despair, resentment... that immersive feeling was as if his soul had descended into the bodies of the victims to die in their place.
With his eyes closed, Ke Lan could see countless undead souls struggling in the mud beneath his feet. They stretched out their arms, whose flesh had rotted away and whose bones were exposed, and grasped his ankles tightly. The smell of death was like a leech, crawling up his legs, up to his knees, and wrapping around his throat.
From that day on, the remaining obsession of these undead spirits has been haunting him and has never disappeared.
They were like drowning people, waving their hands, trying to grab anything they could... They grabbed Ke Lan, but Ke Lan had no way to pull them out of the deep pool of death.
They are already dead.
Ke Lan did not believe in ghosts or gods, nor did he think that there were such things as ghosts in the world. He knew that the wailing was just an illusion, like the sound recorded on a tape, playing in his ears over and over again.
Ke Lan opened her eyes.
The illusory undead wanted to drag him into the abyss, but their bone claws could no longer hold Ke Lan's body. Ke Lan threw all distracting thoughts behind his mind. He raised the gun in his hand and aimed at the target in the distance.
The puppet individual has no limbs, and except for , its body shape is like a smaller version of Chiron's meat mountain. In the gaps between the faces, sticky "black asphalt" flows slowly - this is the original material of the puppet individual. Compared with the "fakes" "simulated" by human tissue, they have a higher density and the color is closer to pure black.
"What the hell are these screams?" Marshall covered his ears with his hands and clenched his teeth. "This is so annoying... Why do these noises seem to be ringing in my head... Damn it!"
"It was the wailing of the 'sacrifice' before it died." Ke Lan explained, "The faces on that thing came from the sacrifices it devoured."
"Sacrifice? Living sacrifice? Like what those people in 'Sick Village' did?" Marshall asked.
"Almost... But the Wall of Flesh and Blood is more like a waste recycling furnace. It breaks down human corpses and reuses them... It accepts material 'sacrifices'. Without those materials, it cannot build the 'abode of God' covered with flesh and blood."
"What about this guy? Is there any difference?" Marshall was stunned for a moment and asked again.
He had always been critical of the sacrificial practices of the "Sick Village Cult", but considering that most of those who were killed were seriously ill and that keeping them alive would only increase their pain and torture, he had never protested to Chiron.
"What they are sacrificing is... the consciousness of these victims."
"Consciousness? Could it be that these people..." Marshall pointed at the faces on the puppets, "Are these people the test subjects of the telekinetic living experiment project? How come there are so many of them? And... why are there old people and children?"
"No, they are all ordinary people." Ke Lan shook her head. When the East 9th District incident happened, Marshall had already "escaped" to the sick village, so it was normal that he didn't know about this tragedy. "The heretic sect planned a massacre. They killed thousands of civilians and took their brains. Although I don't know what they did to the brains of the victims. But it is obvious that a considerable part of the consciousness of those dead should have been preserved in some form."
“What do they collect these things for?”
"In order to create a powerful monster that they can use."
"Is it this ugly thing in front of you?"
"Yeah." Ke Lan nodded .
"They are all a bunch of lunatics." Marshall spat forcefully on the ground, pushed a grenade into the launch tube under the assault rifle, and pulled the trigger at the puppet individual.
“Boom—”
The cylindrical rifle grenade flew out of the chamber, and the moment it left the launch tube, Marshall even used his materialized thoughts to "push" it again, causing the grenade to fly towards the puppet individual at several times the speed.
However, when the grenade launcher was about five meters away from the puppet individual, its flying speed suddenly dropped to zero.
The iron-gray metal cylinder was frozen in mid-air. The next second, starting from the tail of the grenade, the metal shell suddenly began to deform. The entire grenade was like a metal ingot placed under a heavy forging machine, and was pressed into thin sheets in the blink of an eye.
The explosives filled in it were also detonated at this time, but the flames of the explosion could not escape from this small space. The flames, shock waves and fragments were all compressed into a space the size of a fingertip. If described in astronomical terms, this cannot be considered an explosion, but is closer to the concept of "collapse".
"Collapse" and explosion are two completely opposite concepts. The explosion releases energy outward, while the collapse gathers all the mass inward and, under the influence of its own gravity, eventually forms a celestial body with extremely high density.
The light produced by the explosion was finally condensed into a dazzling spot of light, which disappeared after flashing for a moment. As for the shell of the grenade, it turned into a round and solid metal ball the size of a soybean, which fell to the ground with a muffled "bang" sound.
