The emotions between people do not resonate; Gu Ling felt that Zhou Xuan was very gentle, but Zhao Wuya... only felt cold.
Zhou Xuan, meanwhile, felt as if every inch of his bones was splitting apart, and his perception had become exceedingly sluggish.
After the fabricated Dream Realm Heavenly God shattered, the Heavenly God Aura retreated rapidly, and Zhou Xuan’s mental and sensory perception was extracted from his body, carried away with the tide.
He was utterly exhausted, slumped onto the ground; to retain some semblance of dignity, he propped himself up with one hand, avoiding a disgraceful collapse.
"Young Master, your momentum earlier was astonishing," Gu Ling noticed Zhou Xuan’s sweat-drenched forehead and hurried over, supporting him while praising him.
Zhao Wuya, bare-chested, also approached and remarked exaggeratedly, "Landlord, are you really just two Incenses? With what you just displayed, even the Big Dragon I found can’t match your aura."
To emphasize how large the dragon he had found supposedly was, he stretched his arms open as wide as possible.
Zhou Xuan weakly asked, "Can you really find a dragon that big?"
Zhao Wuya’s boast was immediately punctured, but he was thick-skinned and remained calm, gesturing with his hands to indicate a length of "ten centimeters," and said with a straight face, "I could probably find one of this size, couldn’t I?"
Zhou Xuan, Gu Ling: "..."
Ya Zi’s mentality sure is resilient—patching up his own boasts .
The fierce battle concluded,
Zhou Xuan, in the guise of the "fabricated Dream Realm Heavenly God," had reduced Liu God to nothing but a cloud of blood mist.
The dreamscape of the brick factory completely dispersed, revealing its original appearance.
In the gatehouse of the factory, there were traces of blood everywhere; even on the yellow dirt in the courtyard, there were signs of it.
From the deepest brick structure came faint, maniacal laughter.
Gu Ling helped Zhou Xuan to his feet, pointing at the distant tiled house and said, "Someone inside is laughing, laughing crazily."
"Someone’s laughing?"
"Yes, I heard it," Zhao Wuya agreed.
Zhou Xuan could only chuckle bitterly.
After donning the guise of the Heavenly God, his perception had become extraordinarily dull; he couldn’t even summon his sensory abilities anymore.
Instead, Zhou Xuan’s hearing and vision had significantly diminished.
The immense depletion of mental and sensory energies was the price of being "possessed by the Dream Realm Heavenly God."
Fortunately, Zhou Xuan could sense—his mental state and perception were slowly recovering at a sluggish pace.
The price extracted mental and sensory energy, rather than completely shattering them; given some time to recover, he should be fine.
"Allowing the Heavenly God to possess me comes at too high a price; the vacuum phase is far too prolonged."
Gu Ling followed the sound of crying, leading Zhou Xuan and Zhao Wuya toward the brick structure from which the deranged laughter had emerged.
Along the way, Zhou Xuan noticed that the courtyard soil was covered in radial blood stains.
As the door of the brick room was pushed open, the stench of blood assaulted their nostrils.
Zhou Xuan pulled out a handkerchief to cover his mouth and nose; inside, he saw an old man wielding a butcher’s knife, hacking wildly at a cutting table.
"Oh? Guests from outside? Just in time! Today our factory is improving the menu—roast pig!
You’ve had roast pig before, haven’t you? Hung over a kiln fire, roasted with fruitwood to a crispy golden perfection; as soon as it’s out of the kiln, the fragrance wafts down the street,
not something you can enjoy everyday..."
The old man sang praises of his roasted pig, spitting saliva wildly, like mist scattered haphazardly into the air,
but even imaginatively flying spit has limits; streaks floating too high in the air mixed with specks of dust, burdened by their weight, eventually collapsed onto the chopping board, landing atop the hacked-up corpse...
"Wait a minute, you’re not guests; you’re pigs, pigs that should be roasted..."
The old man, already deranged, suddenly became even more frenzied, wielding the butcher knife and aiming a strike at Zhou Xuan’s head.
Gu Ling ignited a ball of Dao Yan Flame, engulfing the old man in flames. The fire spread fiercely, reducing him to a skeleton within moments.
Zhou Xuan bypassed the charred skeleton and approached the iron door of the brick kiln.
Inside the kiln burned fire; the iron door itself was scalding hot. Zhou Xuan picked up an iron hook from the ground and used it to latch onto the door’s handle, yanking it open with force,
As the iron door opened, the horrifying scene within the kiln was revealed.
Upon a single glance, Zhao Wuya bent over and retched uncontrollably,
Gu Ling, as a Bone Elder accustomed to the bloodied horrors of life, held far greater fortitude than Zhao Wuya yet couldn’t help a twitch of her eyelids.
Inside the kiln, men and women were hung one after another, iron hooks piercing through their hands, suspending them in the raging flames of the kiln...
The charred stench permeated the entire brick room,
Zhou Xuan stared silently at the factory workers who had died such tragic deaths, rendered speechless; a thick weight pressed against his heart.
clenching the iron hook tightly, Zhou Xuan began rhythmically knocking it against the iron door.
"Dust to dust, ash to ash. Brave men, noble women, may you be reborn into good lives in your next existence; may you not seek high ranks but find wealth, health, and happiness for a full hundred years..."
The sound of the iron hook striking the iron door served as a bell guiding the souls onward to the netherworld.
On Gu Ling’s back, Zhou Xuan had crafted two tattoos; one of them depicted a "White Tiger Head," the totem of the God "Tian Jun,"
"Tian Jun" governed the passageway between the human world and the netherworld.
At this moment, "Tian Jun" seemed moved by Zhou Xuan’s melancholic voice, or perhaps simply couldn’t bear the grotesque tragedies of the human world,
The "White Tiger Head" tattoo crawled from Gu Ling’s back onto her face, compelling a tiger’s roar to erupt from her throat.
Following the thunderous roar, the physical surroundings of the brick room began to distort, walls fading as if becoming sheer fabric; the souls trapped in the kiln started to free themselves from their bodies, moving toward the walls.
Before passing through the walls, each soul turned back and bowed reverently to Zhou Xuan.