CG Chapter 132: The Bizarre, The Fiendish, and The Strange
After the fall of the Han Empire, Wu Wuqing declared the birth of a new era and the beginning of his Great Wu Dynasty.
With that declaration, he laid the foundation for the rise of his empire by announcing the start of the Era of Heaven's Severance.
The name of the era signified his feat of splitting apart the previous oppressive heaven of the Han Empire, which had shackled and stepped over the common people for over six hundred years.
Unfortunately, the start of the new era wasn't accompanied by good fortune.
The two Great Empires surrounding Great Wu moved quickly, like hungry wolves seeing a weak lamb ready for slaughter, as they launched multiple attacks on the border cities.
Each of these two empires hoped to carve out a piece for themselves while the new regime was still unstable.
They didn't even wait for the blood on the throne to dry or the hearts of the people to calm down from the previous war.
What was even more unfortunate were the strange and bizarre occurrences that started to happen all over Great Wu.
People vanished in the night without a trace.
In some villages, the corpses of children were found mangled and twisted. Some even had their bodies hollowed out from the inside, with only their skin remaining.
When the villagers saw them, they couldn't understand how the organs were removed without a single flesh wound.
One morning near the village of Qing He, the people awoke to find an entire family hanging from a tree.
Their bodies were drained of blood, their skin pale as wax, and their pupils… dilated too wide, as if they were staring, not at the sky, but at something more dark and twisted that didn't belong to this world.
As these grotesque and bone-chilling scenes repeated over and over again, rumors began to spread.
Some people said that they saw ghosts walking in the night.
Others said that they heard of beasts shapeshifting into human children, visiting the homes of villagers with perverted smiles that did not move as they asked you to let them in.
The only way you could tell them apart from normal children was their pitch-black and soulless eyes that were ready to suck you in.
Fortunately, the provincial governors quickly took control of the situation.
Officials warned against those spreading misinformation and rumors, as they set heavy punishments of treason for anyone who dared to speak up.
The official position of the empire was that these occurrences were all due to the underhanded actions of the other two Great Empires, who were trying to sow distrust and take down the Wu Empire before it grew to become a threat to their position.
The people had no other choice but to believe it. And even if they didn't, they would at the very least hate the two other empires who were the reason behind all of this.
…
In a dim inn near the capital, a group of people gathered around a young scholar who was talking passionately with a hideous-looking old man with shaking hands and wine-stained lips.
The old man quickly picked up the liquor in front of him, and he started spewing spit while quickly talking.
"Why can't you understand already? Young people these days…"
Sigh!
"I keep telling you, those inbred mongrel bastards of Shen and the blood-sucking demons of Xien won't learn their fucking place unless we push them back with our sword and cut a few heads."
He paused, gathering the attention of the crowd as he drank some more before continuing.
"If they think they have great swords, then we have hammers that can shatter their heads into the ground."
"Well said, Old Yang. If the yellow-skinned fucks don't know their place, then we can show them."
"Even I, with my old bones, still have a fight in me if the emperor calls."
The young scholar on the side thought of stepping in.
He believed that the three Great Empires should unite together for the good of the common people, but he was left speechless as he saw the people pushing the old man on and joining him in the insults.
As some time passed and the night thinned out, the inn emptied. People left in twos and threes.
Only the subtle flickering light of the oil lamps remained, their flames wavering unnaturally.
Old Yang drunkenly stumbled out of the inn; he quickly glanced left and right before joyously holding the heavy pouch of silver coins in his pocket.
Talking to himself, he grinned as he said, 'This is the easiest silver I have ever made in my cheap life. I just need to visit three more inns and my job will be done.'
…
The same night, far from the city, in a forgotten village, two people stood among the spirits of the damned, as they watched the empty houses and heard the weeping voices of the dead villagers.
One was a large, burly man. The other was a thin young girl.
These two people wore masks on their faces.
The middle-aged man wore a full-face skull mask of a strange creature with two horns, with the left horn broken and a part of the left side of the mask missing.
The young girl wore a more common fox skull mask that covered the lower part of her face.
From afar, the two would look like a father and daughter, but if you heard their conversation, you wouldn't think so.
"What do you mean we need to leave?" the girl snapped.
"We didn't even find the reason behind the deaths of all these people here, and you want us to run? What about their souls? Their grievances? Their pain?"
The girl began to shout at the middle-aged man without giving him a chance to speak.
However, despite her screams, he didn't seem to be affected at all as he kept his calm.
"Would you say the same if I was here among them? Or if…"
"Enough!"
The old man's single word was enough to make the young girl stop talking.
She wanted to rebuke him, but after seeing his eyes, she didn't dare say anything.
"Grab your things. We will return to the headquarters right away. This job is higher than our rank."
He paused as his pupils subtly began to shake.
'Many types of resentments can take down a village, but for there to be no one who escaped or even heard of them, this is something…'
He didn't complete the thought.
The young girl didn't notice the sweat forming on his knuckles, nor the way his fingers twitched as if he was placed in the middle of an icy pond.
What he didn't say was that in all his long years of hunting strange and bizarre creatures, no place had ever made him feel the way this village did.
The moment they passed through the village gate, he felt an extreme sense of relief, but that feeling didn't last for long as he felt it once more…
Whoosh!
The gaze of a malevolent entity watching their every move from the shadows, laughing.
But the strange thing was that the creature didn't do anything to them, as if it were mocking them.
As he thought of the second possibility, of the creature thinking that he wasn't even worthy of being its prey…
If that were the case, then he didn't know if even their headquarters would be capable of handling this.
He just knew one thing: he needed to get as far away from this place as possible.