usatvline Chapter 128 Old Stories
Chapter 128 Old Stories
At first, this world didn't care much about transmigrators from outside. This world already had monsters and gods, and the daily friction between monsters and mortals was lively enough, so a few more outsiders wouldn't make a difference.
It's alright if they cause trouble. There are plenty of capable and skilled Taoist priests and monks. What they do most often is eliminate demons and protect the righteous path. If these guys cause trouble, there are cultivators to handle minor disturbances and immortals to handle major disturbances. They can handle it all.
After all, it's a story from Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, with a very complete system of immortals and demons. When illegal transmigrators cause trouble, the native inhabitants of this world can easily handle it. This world is like a person with a naturally good constitution and strong resistance. Even if they get sick occasionally, they don't need to take medicine and can heal themselves quickly.
But viruses evolve, and those who cause trouble become increasingly clever. At some point, they stopped causing direct destruction and started playing mind games.
Liaozhai itself does not have a fixed protagonist. It consists mainly of scattered small stories and legends from various places. The characters in the stories are not limited by gender, species, or age. Many even have no restrictions on sexual orientation. It can be said that the upper and lower limits are unknown. While it is fragmented, its diversity is unparalleled.
For illegal transmigrators whose mission is to destroy the world to gain energy, the unique composition of the Liaozhai world is a very troublesome and laborious "dungeon". There are many scattered people who can be called the chosen ones. If they are impatient and act too quickly, they are likely to fall into the eyes of various gods and be eliminated on the spot.
In the beginning, those who came to cause trouble were mostly unlucky guys like this. No matter how much trouble they caused, they would expose their identities and be eliminated by the Heavenly Dao first. It was not worth it.
Even so, it did not dampen the enthusiasm of those illegal systems to drill into this place. The reason is simple: they have a complete cultivation model and a demon-immortal management system, which means that this world has high energy and is a fat sheep.
These kinds of worlds are usually high-level martial arts or fantasy worlds, where the native inhabitants are very strong in combat, and the so-called protagonists are even more gifted and have superhuman strength, making them extremely difficult to conquer.
The world of Liaozhai stands out among these genres because the main focus of Liaozhai Zhiyi is still people, emphasizing "human nature." Most of the protagonists in the stories are ordinary people who have experienced injustice, and the monsters that appear are most skilled in transformation, but their strength is generally not high. The weak ones can even be killed by dogs or children.
A world with abundant energy and where the main fortune resides in ordinary mortals is hard to find. As long as one can avoid gods and the Heavenly Dao, mortals can be killed with ease. As long as one can steal even a little bit of energy, it is considered a victory.
And so, illegal transmigrators kept coming in, and the powerful beings of the world itself did not hold back. The more they came, the more they were eliminated. When they found that the frequency and number had decreased, they thought that the other side had finally given up, so they relaxed their efforts.
Indeed, fewer people came, but they became smarter. They stopped causing trouble openly and started trying to stay behind the scenes and establish themselves in the shadows.
It is impossible to know when they started doing this. All we know is that from a certain point, the guys who used to cause trouble disappeared and were replaced by a group of parasites who would hide and incite the indigenous people to stir up conflict. They hid among the people and slowly eroded the world's energy.
"The most outrageous incident was probably more than a hundred years ago."
The elderly monk lifted the new wind chime, and it suddenly broke apart. Multiple chimes came from outside. Looking out the window, the wind chimes hanging under the eaves had all changed. The new patterns and bright surface were exactly the same as the wind chime that Meng Danqing had brought back.
Looking back at the wind chime that had fallen earlier, Jian Feidao had placed it on a nearby table, but it was now gone.
"If I remember correctly, you two came from Shandong and have always lived in this northern region?"
"My friend and I have indeed been operating in the north."
Changqing County is located in Shandong Province. Jian Feidao and Ren Pingsheng had been traveling in the north, while Meng Danqing came here by chance. According to the original route, Meng Danqing should have been in the south.
"Have you two heard of the Three Treasures Sect?"
“…I’ve heard of it.”
They had not only heard of it, but also encountered its former leader when the Sanbao Sect rebelled over a hundred years ago. They personally captured him and handed him over to the local City God.
The old monk suddenly brought up this matter, and there was certainly a connection between them. In the beginning, the rebellion of the Three Jewels Sect could only be considered a routine performance in the mortal world. During the change of dynasties and turmoil, there were always some people who felt that they could also rebel, casually raising a few flags and dreaming of becoming emperors.
As is customary, the Sanbao Sect will follow the established path of first rebelling and then suppressing. Although there are a few cult members who know magic, the three leaders are not that capable. If a more experienced general were appointed, the Sanbao Sect could be easily wiped out.
But as the rebellion was drawing to a close, the three leaders of the Three Treasures Sect suddenly no longer wanted to be emperors. They wanted to become immortals and achieve eternal life, and with this goal, they began to research elixirs of immortality.
This decision was abrupt and abnormal. The leader of the Three Treasures Sect didn't have much vision and didn't know many spells. He just happened to be in the area when there was a disaster and took advantage of the situation.
But these three opportunistic guys suddenly had the audacity to try and become immortals through their own means, collecting medicines, refining pills, and even refining corpses.
"Corpse refining..."
Jian Feidao frowned. He recalled the headless zombie incident. The body of the leader of the Three Treasures Sect was a bizarre zombie, transformed through special means.
At the time, neither the City God nor the ghost messengers understood how the other party had become like this. The body was just an ordinary purple zombie, but it could move freely, which was very different from traditional zombies.
“Someone is instigating the leaders of the Three Treasures Sect to become immortals, and is using them.”
However, if the method of turning him into a zombie came from a transmigrator, then it makes sense. No matter what kind of system it is, it can give the host a variety of abilities, and it is not impossible to obtain the method of creating zombies.
The Three Treasures Sect eventually collapsed, and the three ringleaders were beheaded and their heads displayed in public. However, their souls eventually entered the underworld. Someone noticed something was wrong and investigated all the named disciples of these three men. Since mortals only live for a hundred years, and these people had all committed murder and arson, it was easy to find them through the underworld.
It was during this investigation that a problem was discovered: the numbers didn't match up. Decades had passed, and all the Sanbaojiao followers who had fled back then had died, yet there were still two people whose identities could not be found.
Unlike the three leaders whose souls didn't go to the underworld after they died, during the interrogation, all the relevant personnel claimed to know these two people, saying they were the leader's capable subordinates back then. However, after searching through the Book of Life and Death, these two people simply did not exist in the world.
The fact that these two people are not listed in the Book of Life and Death means that they do not exist in the mortal world. However, those who were asked and were prominent figures in the Three Jewels Sect during their lifetimes all said that there were such people, who were leaders, confidants, involved in many events, and were highly trusted.
Even if it's a monster, it shouldn't be in this situation where no one can be found. As long as it was born in this world, the underworld can find it no matter what. It's impossible that nothing can be found and there's only verbal information from others.
The only beings capable of creating this situation are transmigrators from outside this world. They are not originally from this world; they are truly outside the Three Realms and not subject to the Five Elements. Only they have the ability to create a situation where everyone has seen them, yet no one can actually be found.
In other words, two time travelers infiltrated the Sanbao Sect and instigated its leaders, who were blinded by the success of their rebellion, to study how to achieve immortality through evil and unorthodox methods, thereby further harming the local people.
The Three Treasures Sect was completely used as a pawn. At this point, the deities who had previously seen the illegal transmigrators realized that these outsiders had not really disappeared, but had moved from the forefront to the background and changed their methods of destruction.
Since then, people have been paying close attention and have identified quite a few, but after being purged, it turns out that none of them were originally involved in the Three Jewels Sect.
And the more you search, the more you realize that these guys have completely become parasites in the shadows, relying on their special abilities to remain silent, catching the old ones and then letting in new ones, endlessly, like an incurable poison.
Despite repeated invasions, even with numerous deities intervening, it wouldn't escalate into a cataclysmic disaster. But who would want to watch those annoying rats burrowing into their home? The Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio certainly wouldn't, so it contacted the system for cooperation. This place became a mission world, allowing the legitimate system to guide the host in completely eradicating the pests.
"But how did you know all this?"
After hearing the whole story of the Sanbao Sect incident, Jian Feidao and Meng Danqing had a new question. The Sanbao Sect rebellion happened more than a hundred years ago. With so much time having passed since the headless corpse incident, Jian Feidao finally understood how many years ago those zombies and ghosts were unlucky guys.
However, based on this timeline, the old monk in front of him doesn't match up in age as someone who knows the story. When he tells these stories, he seems like one of the people who experienced them before. It's hard for an ordinary mortal to live to be over a hundred years old, and his appearance doesn't match either.
"Because the painter who created this mural was one of the former followers of the Samtaksa sect."
The old man stretched out his withered hand, tracing the images on the mural. When the Three Jewels Rebellion broke out among the people, causing widespread suffering and death, did the members of the Three Jewels Rebellion truly feel nothing?
Of course not. There was one person who believed in the White Lotus Sect's slogan of saving the world, which was also one of the ways the sect recruited its members before its rebellion. He joined the cult and coincidentally had some talent for cultivation, becoming one of the leader's many disciples.
But soon he realized he had come to the wrong place. "Three Jewels" is a Buddhist term, and he thought this place would be a place to save people as described in Buddhist scriptures. But in reality, it was a place where murder and arson were committed, and even his master had become possessed and wanted to live forever.
So he ran away without hesitation. Fearing being caught, he even used some special means to escape to the capital and eventually became a painter.
Even after becoming a painter, he was still uneasy. Most of the White Lotus sect's doctrines were copied from official Buddhism, and the Three Jewels sect directly adopted the terminology from scriptures. Because of this experience, the painter painted Buddha images and Bodhisattvas again and again, and gained some fame.
Then, he took on a construction project for a temple and was in charge of the murals in the main hall. Perhaps thinking that he should not abandon the magic he had learned before, he mixed magic into the creation of the murals. At that time, the world on the other side of the murals had already taken shape, so whether the murals gave rise to the small world or the small world influenced the painter's thinking, no one can say for sure.
Not long after the temple was built, the Three Jewels Rebellion was completely quelled. The three leaders were beheaded and their heads displayed to the public. The focus then shifted to purging the remaining rebels. At this time, someone discovered that the painter came from the place where the Three Jewels Rebellion had taken place and found him suspicious. The painter himself had started painting Buddhist paintings because of psychological obstacles. Upon hearing any news, he immediately left the capital.
He first went to Changqing County, where the psychological pressure made him want to paint Buddhas even more, feeling that this could atone for his sins. So he offered to paint murals for the temple where he was staying. Thus, the murals of Changqing came into being.
The painter still didn't listen after all that. For some unknown reason, he went south again, as if he was looking for the Three Jewels Sect. He finally stopped in Jinling and painted murals there.
This time it did not go smoothly, because at that time there were indeed remnants of the Three Treasures Sect who had escaped to heaven in the south. Those who were able to run away were all quite capable, and among them were the painter's former "colleagues" in the sect.
His colleagues recognized the painter's identity and sought revenge. He was ultimately unable to escape and died in front of the mural he had painted. His blood splattered on the mural, covering a bodhisattva in the painting. Mixed with spiritual energy and the painter's resentful blood, it combined with the already extraordinary mural to create the first "person" who could freely enter and exit the mural's world.
He possesses the painter's memories, the painter's image, and even the painter's blood, but he is not the painter; he is a person from the world of murals.
This person is the old monk we know today. He has changed his Dharma name and used many identities, but in the end, he returned to the capital and stood guard in front of the original mural, working as a monk in the temple, waiting for the destined person to arrive.
The painter was a colleague of the Three Jewels sect, and he was also a colleague of several bodhisattvas in the mural world. Occasionally, he would return to the mural to preach and visit the inhabitants.
Because the body was constructed from the original painter's blood, and he had lived in the mortal world for over a hundred years, he was already tainted by worldly affairs. So even if you use a demon-revealing mirror, all you can see is an ordinary old monk.
The wind chimes that Meng Danqing brought back from the murals were actually meant to obscure the memories of the worshippers. Something big had happened in the temple, and it would attract a lot of attention in a short period of time. The old monk's special background was not suitable for such attention, and given how long he had been there, it was almost time for him to change his identity.
In a remote temple, there can always be an old monk guarding the temple, but this old monk can never be the same person forever. Once the identity changes, the power of the wind chimes will disappear, and they will become just an ordinary ornament hanging under the eaves.
"So the formation on the mural was created by you, Master, changing the core of the formation."
When Meng Danqing came to break the formation, he discovered that the formation's core was actually on the donation box in the main hall. Such an absurd placement, yet so conspicuous, was something Meng Danqing told Jian Feidao about when he came out of the mural.
However, Jian Feidao clearly saw that the array's core was not in such an absurd location as the donation box. But Meng Danqing's words were true. In such a short time, there was no reason for two illegal transmigrators to mess with the array's core.
From the very beginning, the old monk knew everything and had been protecting the murals in his own way. However, because of his status, he could not alert the intruders or provoke them to leave.
Actually, he didn't need to do anything. His disguise was simply to be a law-abiding monk. After all, in terms of appearance, an old monk doesn't pose much of a threat.