Chapter 142 The True Enemy
The voice that spoke was no longer Hong Chenji's old, hoarse tone.
It had become youthful, deep, and carried a strange sense of delight.
His body was also changing—the once withered frame quickly filled out, white hair turned black, wrinkles vanished, and even the decayed aura of the Five Decays of Heaven and Man was completely swept away.
In just a few breaths, he had actually returned to his peak state!
—No, not right.
Ji Hongli's pupils narrowed slightly.
She could "see" that beneath this youthful shell was something far more terrifying.
It was not human, not demon, not fiend, not anything known.
It was a twisted, unnameable abomination.
Hong Chenji took a deep breath, his face showing intoxicated delight. "What a pure world… it is truly beautiful."
Ji Hongli said coldly, "You are not Hong Chenji."
"Of course I am." Hong Chenji smiled, but the curve of his lips seemed pulled unnaturally by some force, grotesque and stiff. "Only, compared to that conservative old fool who clung to the notion of 'human supremacy,' I am the perfect Hong Chenji."
"But…" Hong Chenji sighed. "That old man lasting so long without letting me out, even planning to drag me into the grave with him—that was already impressive…"
His voice grew deeper, carrying a strange resonance, as though countless voices were speaking in unison. "But the pity is… he had too many attachments, too many flaws. He was easily deceived by the things I created. From the moment I was born atop Buzhou Mountain, his fate was sealed… to become nourishment for me."
Ji Hongli was silent.
She bore little malice toward humanity.
On the contrary, compared to most of the demon race, she had grown up among humans.
Her great battle against the Ten Saints of humanity back then had been as much personal vendetta as it was the final desperate struggle of a demon race already fated to lose its rightful place in the world.
Thus, she had never returned to the demon domains, because she felt… she owed the demon race nothing.
Yet whether human or demon, those who reached the Saint Realm were all stunning figures of peerless brilliance. In any ancient record, they would be hailed as true protagonists.
And at this moment, she could confirm—
The Saint known as Hong Chenji had already fallen.
Or rather… he had already died on Buzhou Mountain.
"Who exactly are you?" Ji Hongli's voice was cold as ice. "Or should I ask… what lies behind you?"
Hong Chenji laughed.
His smile grew wider and wider, the corners of his mouth nearly splitting to his ears, revealing the pitch-black, writhing flesh within.
Then he spoke softly:
"We are gods.
We come from the endless void."
The moment these words fell, the entire ancestral grounds of the Hong family were swallowed by gray-white mist.
But Ji Hongli quickly raised a new barrier, enveloping herself and Chen Xingcai, keeping the gray-white mist from approaching even a fraction.
"So the entire Hong family became like this because of you?"
Chen Xingcai's voice was especially clear in the deathly still courtyard.
She stared straight at "Hong Chenji," without the slightest fear. Everything she had seen and heard over the past three days flashed through her mind—those twisted ethics, the frenzied desires, the endlessly magnified ambitions…
"Incest between siblings, slaughter between kin." She spoke each word clearly. "I've only been here three days, and I've already found that everyone here is ruled by their own desires, as if… something is deliberately nurturing these evil thoughts."
"Hong Chenji" smiled, with a hint of approval in his expression. "Yes, and no." His voice suddenly became erratic, sometimes old, sometimes young. "Originally that stubborn old man only wanted to quietly cultivate in seclusion, like the ancestors of the Hong family, to bless his descendants when he passed away…"
Suddenly his tone turned, dripping with mockery. "But the Hong family has enjoyed the treatment of a top clan for too long! They feared that without a Saint Realm to guard them, they would fall into the ranks of second-rate families."
"I merely… gave them a choice."
His body began to writhe and deform, as though countless tiny things were swimming beneath his skin. "It was I who told Hong Tianque that close-blood coupling could awaken the ancestral bloodline, which produced you—the 'dual Saint Physique' siblings. It was also my suggestion of 'preserving the female and conceiving the child,' to merge two Saint Physiques into one…"
A chill ran over Chen Xingcai's entire body.
At last she understood why a dignified Saint Realm clan, one of the top families on the Xuanying Continent, would harbor filth even ordinary mortal families would never see!
"You think the old man didn't know?"
"Hong Chenji" suddenly burst into wild laughter, the sound shaking dust from the beams above. "He didn't stop it because the Hong family was his weakness! It was precisely because of his repeated acquiescence, his repeated compromises, that I was able to slowly erode him—until today…"
His body suddenly split open, revealing the writhing black substance within. "Let me tell you: sending Hong Longxiang to find you was also my idea. By that time he was already half-conscious."
"So I pretended to be the Heavenly Dao, letting him in his half-dreaming state believe he was hearing the will of the Heavenly Dao, telling him that by doing this he could be rid of me, could save himself and redeem himself… He believed it all. And I… I even knew that behind you there must be a Saint Realm, so I drew the Saint behind you into the trap as well. This was all my carefully prepared feast—"
"You will all become my first meal after rebirth."
…
(Evening chapter still to come)
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