kvmb Chapter 736 High Priest
Chapter 736 High Priest
"They've built a nest in the sewers!"
Doctor Zhang took out a stack of yellow talismans, and the cinnabar runes on the talisman paper were oozing blood.
Chen Yile suddenly pressed his temples, and he heard all the bronze instruments within a five-kilometer radius resonate at the same time.
White-collar workers in office buildings fell to the ground and convulsed, scratching their backs. Kindergarten surveillance showed children drawing talismans on their companions' backs with cinnabar. Hospital emergency rooms were crowded with patients who had scratched their backs.
"Your third eye has been opened."
Doctor Zhang dragged him into the paper-making shop at the corner of the alley. Twenty meters away, a man in a suit and tie was mutating.
His spine pierced his suit, and his outstretched bony wings were covered with pearl-like egg sacs. The splashing mucus corroded the bluestone slabs, making a sizzling sound.
Chen Yile raised the syringe tremblingly, but found that the liquid in the glass tube was a strange bronze color, and memory flashed back suddenly.
On the night of his fifth birthday, his mother gave him some talismanic water to drink in front of the altar, and the same bronze powder was deposited at the bottom of the bowl.
Seeing his hesitation, Dr. Zhang suddenly grabbed his wrist and said, "Those bronze dusts are the ashes of oracle bones from the Shang Dynasty. They came from the altar beneath the Yin Ruins in Anyang. This is the true origin of the human skin fly."
The ground shook again, and Chen Yile felt a soreness in his back teeth. The sound reminded him of the heartbeat deep in the cold storage.
A blood mist suddenly gushed out of the sewer outlet on the street, and flesh tentacles two meters in diameter broke out of the ground, their surface covered with melting human faces.
"The mother is still alive!" Chen Yile's pupils split uncontrollably into compound eyes. "It's calling the insect swarm to move towards the City God Temple!"
His vision suddenly rose to three hundred meters in the air, and he saw a whirlwind of insects gathering towards the City God Temple.
Doctor Zhang pulled an ancient bronze sword from his bag. "They want to pollute the City God statue and turn the incense into an incubator."
He bit his fingertip and drew a talisman on the sword: "I will take you to get the Soul-Calming Bell, but I need your Sky Eye to locate the Matrix."
Chen Yile gritted his teeth and injected the serum into his veins. Severe pain radiated from his cervical spine to every part of his body. When he knelt on the ground and retched, he vomited out winged larvae.
The moment his vision returned, he saw that the worms he had vomited were forming an arrow shape, pointing towards the City God Temple and constantly reorganizing.
"Follow the swarm!"
Dr. Zhang broke open the wooden door of the antique shop, and Chen Yile picked up the soul-calming bell.
As they rushed into the streets, the entire city was mutating.
The roots of the street trees protruded from the ground, entangled with half-melted parasites.
The red lanterns flashed in sync with the swarm's wings.
On the shop door, countless paper figures were banging their heads against the windows, with swollen insect sacs on their backs visible through the cracks in the spider web.
The City God Temple has become a palace of flesh and blood.
Chen Yile ran wildly on the slippery blue brick floor and saw the vermilion lacquered pillars of the hall covered with pulsating flesh membranes.
Doctor Zhang's peach wood sword cut off the tentacles blocking the way, and the bone spurs on Chen Yile's back suddenly extended into wings, carrying him to glide across the boiling pool of blood.
“It’s in the City God statue!”
Chen Yile's compound eyes penetrated the thirty-meter-thick smoke and saw that the mother's broken body was absorbing the power of the incense.
The mother's face had completely melted away, replaced by a skull made of incense ash, with swarms of insects swirling in its eye sockets.
When Dr. Zhang rang the soul-calming bell, Chen Yile suddenly saw hundreds of embryos floating in the mother's abdominal cavity, each with his face.
The oldest embryo suddenly opened its eyes, and a picture came through the swarm's empathy.
Twenty years ago, my mother knelt in front of the altar of Yinxu and sprinkled a handful of ashes on her bulging belly.
"No!"
Chen Yile rang the soul-calming bell in the storm of incense. The moment the bell penetrated the core of the mother's body, he saw his mother's remaining consciousness smiling.
The sound waves of the soul-calming bell swept across the entire temple. His bone wings shattered in the sound waves, and as he fell into the abyss of the blood pool, he heard the distant ringing of bells coming from underground.
It was some older creature awakening.
As Chen Yile fell into the pool of blood, the fishy liquid suddenly became clear.
He saw that the bottom of the pool was covered with bronze plates engraved with runes, and faint green phosphorescence seeped out from the cracks.
The moment his back touched the bottom, those words written thousands of years ago suddenly came alive and swam into his pupils like tadpoles.
In severe pain, he saw himself standing on the altar of the Shang Dynasty.
Dark clouds pressed down on the huge bronze tripod, and the boiling human oil inside the tripod emitted smoke in the shape of a human face.
Masked priests were gouging out the slaves' spines and stuffing the wounds with foreign objects.
Instead of screaming, the chosen slave showed an obsessed smile.
Beneath the skin of their backs, pearly insect eggs glowed.
The high priest's voice overlapped with Dr. Zhang's.
"Human skin flies were originally mediums connecting heaven and earth, until the old king used them to devour souls."
The illusion suddenly distorted, and Chen Yile found himself standing in a pit with a bluestone coffin locked with iron chains in front of him.
On the coffin lid was painted with cinnabar a statue of a god with a human face and a fly body, whose eyebrows and eyes were surprisingly similar to his own.
When the light of his mobile phone swept across the edge of the coffin, he saw an archaeological record: "The remains of a pregnant woman were found in the main tomb chamber, and there were oracle bone fragments embedded in the back of the fetus in her belly."
There was a loud sound of chains breaking from underground, and Chen Yile suddenly woke up and found himself lying in the ruins of the City God Temple.
Doctor Zhang was tying his wrists with a hemp rope soaked in black dog blood: "Your soul is being assimilated by the altar!"
Sticky black blood oozed out of the blue brick ground around, gathering into the shape of oracle bone characters.
Chen Yile suddenly understood the symbols - every word was repeating the word "sacrifice".
He looked down and saw a bronze tripod tattoo emerging on his chest. Winged larvae crawled out of the tripod's mouth and were gnawing at his heart.
"The Matrix is merely the gatekeeper of the altar."
Doctor Zhang lit the rhino horn incense, and a panoramic view of the underground appeared in the smoke.
Eighteen bronze coffins were arranged in a star-like shape, with iron chains extending from each coffin like blood vessels, converging on the vermilion lacquer coffin in the center. It was the stone coffin with the human-faced fly god statue engraved on it in the illusion.
The ground suddenly cracked into spider-web-like cracks. When Chen Yile grabbed the Soul-Calming Bell and jumped away, he saw countless blue-black arms extending from the cracks, with bone fragments embedded in the nails.
Those arms dug into the ground and pulled out the zombies covered with copper rust. In their sunken eye sockets, human skin flies were moving instead of eyeballs.
"The sacrifices have resurrected, and they're looking for replacements!"
Doctor Zhang's peach wood sword pierced the zombie's throat.
Chen Yile rang the soul-calming bell, and the moment the sound waves shattered the zombies, he heard a heartbeat like a fetus moving from the vermilion lacquer coffin.
Black water from the River Styx suddenly gushed out from the cracks in the ground, with hundreds of swaddling clothes floating on the water. Each baby had a tumor as big as a fist on his back.
The swaddling clothes at the front suddenly burst open, and the three-year-old Chen Yile crawled out, his barbed mouthparts protruding from the cracked insect eyes on his back. "Brother, come and join us in the sacrifice."
Doctor Zhang quickly threw out the Five Emperors' Coins to form a formation, but the copper coins rusted into powder in mid-air.
The tripod pattern on Chen Yile's chest was as hot as a branding iron. He suddenly had an idea and quickly bit his tongue, spraying a mouthful of blood on the soul-calming bell.