Zhou Hui later thought that the anomaly had actually been discovered by Chu He first.
Chu He was sitting by the railway tracks organizing their bags, one foot idly scraping at the gravelly ground. After a while, he stood up and walked away. Later, Zhou Hui went to relieve himself. As the stream of liquid washed over the ground, a blood-red eye was revealed beneath the gravel.
If Chu He had scraped his foot a couple more times, he would have ended up with a shoe sole full of blood.
Zhou Hui didn’t call Zhang Shun. He single-handedly cleared away the loose stones and, with his bare hands, dug half a lama out of the frozen earth—literally half. The man had been torn in two from the center of his skull downwards. The cross-section was jagged, cleverly avoiding the internal organs. Due to the rapid drop in temperature, all the organs were frozen inside the abdominal cavity.
Zhou Hui squatted on the stone beach and looked at it for a long time. Nearby, Zhang Shun was bent over, supporting his brother, and vomiting profusely, unable to even speak.
“Wifey,” Zhou Hui said after a while, poking the unfortunate lama with his hand, “eating from the middle, tearing it in half, eating half and throwing the other half away, biting off the abs but not liking the organs… This is a bit like our Da Mao’s style…”
Chu He supported the retching Zhang Shun with one hand and turned the lama over with the other to examine it carefully. After a moment, he said, “It looks a lot like Maha’s bite marks.”
“Damn, you can even tell that?!” Zhou Hui thought to himself, You really deserve to be one of the top ten good mothers who moved the six realms, but he held his tongue. He reached out and took a tattered blue and white piece of cloth from the lama’s neck.
The cloth was soaked in blood, the pattern blurred. Zhou Hui squinted at it for a long time before he recognized it. “—Hey, isn’t this the Snow Lion Flag?”
He and Chu He exchanged a look, then both turned to the empty railway tracks.
“This… this must be one of the separatists who started the riot on the train,” Zhou Hui said in disbelief. “He happened to run into Maha, who was on the same train, during the hijacking, and ended up being eaten by that unlucky kid…”
A similar scene simultaneously appeared in both their minds—gunshots rang out on the train, flesh and blood flew everywhere. The strong smell of fresh food intensely stimulated the perpetually hungry Maha. Finally, the Peacock Wisdom King could no longer hold back. When a clueless hijacker rushed over and pointed a gun at his head, he suddenly grinned, revealing sharp teeth stained with blood…
“Th-that,” Zhang Shun wiped his mouth and asked weakly, “wasn’t Team Leader Wu Er also on the train?”
Zhou Hui: “…”
Chu He: “…”
The couple’s expressions simultaneously turned grim.
“Wu Bei is a team leader, after all…” Zhou Hui’s explanation sounded weak even to himself. Just as he was involuntarily starting to think about how to handle the aftermath if Maha had really eaten Wu Bei, Chu He suddenly pointed to the lama’s neck. “Wait, this is the Great Roc’s Golden Seal.”
Zhou Hui looked down.
On the part of the corpse’s neck that had been covered by the Snow Lion Flag, there was a complex golden Sanskrit character branded into the flesh. It was very blurry amidst the charred skin, but one could still make out the unique mark of the Golden-Winged Great Roc.
“…” Now Zhou Hui was truly puzzled. “How was Jia Louluo on the train too?!”
Maha suddenly appearing in the human realm from the Sea of Blood was already very unusual. For Jia Louluo to suddenly descend from the snowy mountains where he had been in seclusion for hundreds of years and get on the same train out of Tibet with Maha, what on earth had happened?
Could it be that Maha had gone to find Jia Louluo for something? But what could it be? Could it be that Maha was no longer satisfied with the limited territory of the Sea of Blood and wanted to get his brother to help him kill the Demon Lord, take over Hell, and from then on, transform into the Great Peacock Demon King, a beggar-turned-emperor who would unite the Four Evil Paths for all eternity?
Zhou Hui’s first reaction was that it was too ridiculous, but then he realized that, given Maha’s personality, he really could do it. He just didn’t know why the two brothers would take a train to the demon realm. Could this train pass through a space-time tunnel?
What Zhou Hui didn’t know was that at that moment, Chu He was staring intently at the Great Roc’s Golden Seal, his pupils slightly dilated in the depths of his eyes.
He had thought of a more terrifying possibility—
If Maha discovered that his divinity was gone, he would definitely find a way.
And just eating people would not be enough to effectively slow his decline. Like a human with leukemia in need of a bone marrow transplant, he would first look for a similar divinity among his close relatives, and then he would strike.
Back then, in the grotto in H City, it was because he was worried about this that he had refused to tell Maha the reason for stopping him from leaving the grotto.
But now, this worst-case scenario had finally happened.
But fortunately, since the Great Roc’s Golden Seal was still there, it meant that Jia Louluo’s divinity was temporarily still his own. Otherwise, it would have been the Peacock Wisdom King’s seal that appeared.
Chu He let out an imperceptible sigh of relief, closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, he saw Zhou Hui staring unblinkingly at his face.
“…What is it?”
Zhou Hui’s gaze was sharp with observation and study. After a long moment, he said, “Nothing… You looked a bit pale just now. Tired?”
Chu He immediately looked away and said casually, “Yeah, a little—I was just thinking, why was the body buried in the frozen earth? If it was Jia Louluo stopping Maha from eating people, even if they fought and destroyed the train, the body would only have been thrown far away by the blast wave, right?”
But Zhou Hui said, “There is one premise that could make this situation happen.”
Chu He and Zhang Shun both looked up at him. Zhou Hui shrugged. “I’ve been searching for traces of the missing train for two days with no luck, and I had a suspicion. I just couldn’t be sure at the time, because Wu Bei alone wouldn’t have caused this possibility—but Maha and Jia Louluo’s strength is extraordinary. If the power output of their fight reached a certain level, it could cause spatial distortion, in a sense achieving random travel through the six realms…”
“The entire train could have been taken by them to Hell, the Hungry Ghost Path, the Animal Path, or even the Heavenly Dao’s Mount Sumeru. The body appearing under the frozen earth might be because it was violently thrown out of the train window during the spatial distortion. Jia Louluo making a mark on it might have been a reaction in a very urgent situation, to guide rescuers as much as possible.”
“So we need to dig down now,” Zhou Hui turned to look at the stone pit where the body had just been dug out. “There may be more bodies and deeper earth veins under the loose stones. The train was teleported after entering the ground. Once we find the last location of the train before it disappeared into the earth’s core, we can follow the clues to find the next random teleportation point within the Nine Heavens and Ten Earths…”
·
Zhou Hui was a man of action. He took off his jacket, leaving only a black tank top that revealed his firm, taut upper body muscles, and began to dig up stones in large quantities.
With one palm strike, he could shovel up hundreds of pounds of gravel, lift them into the air, and then fling them far into the center of the Lhasa River, like a downpour of rocks, the rumbling sound deafening. Zhang Shun covered his ears and hid behind a hill, trying his best to keep his head down to avoid being hit by the gravel. He shouted at Chu He, “This Zhou guy is too awesome!—Why doesn’t he go to Lanxiang to teach how to operate an excavator?!”
From the other side of the hill came Zhou Hui’s roar, “I heard that, disaster brother-in-law!”
With a loud boom, the collapsing ground caused a large area of the railway tracks to cave in. Fortunately, the train service had been suspended, otherwise any train passing near this mountain would have been wrecked, with everyone killed.
“Wifey!” Zhou Hui shouted. “Wifey, come out and see the dead people!”
Chu He nimbly leaped up the slope and slid down. Zhang Shun followed unsteadily behind. The moment he reached the top of the slope and looked down, he froze.
The stone beach had been almost completely dug through by Zhou Hui. Below, in the frozen earth, the rocks were huge. Strewn among them were the bodies of many red-robed lamas, mostly in gruesome, fragmented pieces of flesh and blood.
And about ten meters down, a black underground rock mountain appeared in the frozen earth—it was an underground branch of the Wangjia Snow Mountain, pressed under the thick frozen earth for thousands of years. The black mountain rock had countless huge cracks, like a spider web, tearing and spreading, converging into a huge mountain pass at a deeper point.
Scattered outside the mountain pass were countless iron plates and bearings, as well as seven-hole wheels that had been shattered into pieces.
—Maha had taken the train into an underground cave.
Zhou Hui muttered, “Damn… this kid really knows how to play.”
He turned to look at Chu He, and their eyes met in mid-air.
“Go down,” Chu He said after a moment. “Find the train’s last location before it was teleported first.”
He slid down the huge stone pit, avoiding all the protruding sharp rocks. Within seconds, he reached the bottom, stood on the black mountain rock, and looked back at Zhou Hui.
But Zhou Hui’s eyes flickered with a complex light. After a long moment, he said, “I must remind you, if we are teleported, the next location is very likely to be a random one of the Four Evil Paths. And the golden ring lock on your spine has a prohibition spell attached. The moment you cross the boundary of the human realm, this physical body will be blown to pieces…”
“But I’ll still have my soul, won’t I? Just go through the six paths of reincarnation and remold a human body.” Chu He said casually, but then he saw Zhou Hui’s face instantly turn ashen and immediately realized something. “…I was joking.”
Zhou Hui stared at him, his gaze icy.
Chu He reflexively took half a step back.
Not far behind him, Zhang Shun stumbled down the wall of the stone pit, looking at them blankly.
On the frozen plain, the cold wind howled, making a whimpering sound in the rugged cracks of the mountain rock. Zhou Hui stared at Chu He for a long time before saying softly, “You know my temper… This kind of bloody and gory talk, in front of me, say it less next time.”
Chu He lowered his eyes.
“I was joking,” he said after a long moment. “If we encounter a teleportation point, I’ll stay in the human realm by myself.”
Zhou Hui’s lips curled, but there was no smile in it. After a long while, he finally turned away, probed the windy underground cave entrance, and beckoned for Zhang Shun to pack up their supplies, preparing to go down into the cave to search.
·
This mountain fissure, wide enough for a train to crash headfirst into, was very spacious. Although the path was rugged, it wasn’t too difficult to climb. But after just a few minutes of walking, it became dark and cold. Zhang Shun’s fleece-lined jacket was no longer enough. Zhou Hui had to take off his own jacket and give it to him for an extra layer.
It was so dark around them that you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. Even the light from the headlamps couldn’t penetrate very far. Zhou Hui led the way with an ice axe, Zhang Shun was in the middle, holding onto the climbing rope, and Chu He brought up the rear. There was a section of the path that went straight down. Zhou Hui leaped down, and with Chu He, they held the rope from above and below, slowly lowering Zhang Shun down with the climbing rope.
When he landed, Zhang Shun shivered violently, stomped his feet, which were almost numb from the cold, and asked, panting, “How far are we from the ground?”
Chu He descended from the sky, landed steadily, stood up, and clapped his hands.
Zhou Hui said contemptuously, “Only fifty-something meters, brother-in-law. In terms of fucking, this amount of exercise is only half a fuck… Do you usually feel satisfied with just half a fuck? It’ll be hard to find a wife like that…”
A vein throbbed on Zhang Shun’s forehead. He saw Zhou Hui turn around smugly and say, “Come on, there’s an underground river here. We’re almost there.”
In fact, even without him saying it, the sound of water was already very clear. The ground was littered with charred train parts, stretching like a long road into the darkness, leading straight to this underground river that miraculously ran through the Wangjia Snow Mountain in Tibet. The winding river course was sometimes wide, sometimes extremely narrow, rushing towards the distant, interlocking mountain rocks.
“This is a tributary of the Lhasa River. It goes underground on its way to Nagqu. If it doesn’t dry up midway, it might extend all the way to the Ordos or the North China Plain.” Chu He turned on his tactical flashlight and explained to the amazed Zhang Shun, who was looking at the river surface. “The vertical drop of this river further down could be several kilometers or even tens of kilometers… If you can’t hold on, you can go up first.”
“No, no,” Zhang Shun waved his hand, standing by the riverbank in shock. “The natural scenery is too amazing!”
Chu He smiled silently.
“—The eighteen levels of Hell are even more spectacular…”
Zhang Shun didn’t hear clearly. “What did you say?”
But Chu He raised his hand to stop him. Not far away, Zhou Hui suddenly shouted, “Lao Si!—Come over here, I found the train!”
Chu He strode over. When the tactical flashlight shone, even he couldn’t help but be stunned.
In the wide underground space, half a train engine stood abruptly by the underground river, like some ferocious, terrifying beast in the darkness. It was twisted into an extremely contorted shape by the intense spatial compression. Several carriages were connected behind the engine, completely twisted into a huge, screw-shaped pile of scrap metal. Countless bearings, wheels, and carriage shells were charred black from burning, piled messily against the mountain wall.
“It entered the spatial rift right here. Too bad only half of it went in, the other half got stuck here.” Zhou Hui climbed onto the engine, held up his flashlight, and looked into the cracked iron roof, muttering, “Damn, the quality of this engine is really solid. If it were a Honda, it would have been crushed to dust by the spatial torsion…”
From below, Chu He shouted, “Be careful!”
“Yeah, yeah, I know—”
Zhou Hui’s voice stopped abruptly. With the help of the flashlight, he saw that there seemed to be a person in the driver’s seat, sitting in front of the control panel with a face full of blood. A black trench coat was draped over his sturdy body. He had already passed out.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Zhou Hui said in surprise. “Found him.”
He turned and beckoned to Chu He on the ground. “My dear!—Don’t come over here, it’s dirty. Have the stupid brother-in-law help me carry Lao Er out!”
·
Meanwhile, in the Hell Path, the Sea of Blood.
The sky was blood-red. Perhaps it wasn’t originally this color, but being perpetually shrouded in the red smoke above the sea surface, it looked sinisterly and terrifyingly red, as if it could crack into pieces at any moment, and a downpour of blood would leak from the fissures.
A Nine-Headed Infant flew across the sky, letting out a shrill cry. The blood-red waves of the sea rolled and roared, carrying countless rotting corpses, which were then swarmed by dense low-level demons crawling out of the water, greedily tearing and devouring.
The small demons climbed up the cliffs by the sea, chasing and biting each other, curiously peeking at the half-train engine that had suddenly appeared on the clifftop, baring their fangs at this strange iron beast.
But then, a figure sitting on the roof of the train moved, lowered his head, and revealed a beautiful and indifferent face.
The small demons screamed in terror and scattered in an instant.
At the very bottom of the engine, Jia Louluo groaned on the ground, then opened his eyes.
His vision was blurred. It took a long time for it to gradually focus. A dull pain slowly crept through all the nerves in his body.
If anyone had seen this scene, it would have been a very tragic one. Jia Louluo’s entire body was pinned to the ground by the train engine. His body and arms were a bloody mess. His legs were trapped in the collapsed carriage, one calf pierced through by a long steel bar, pinning him firmly to the rock.
“You’re awake?” Maha poked his head out from the top of the train, looking down at him.
Jia Louluo tried to lift the heavy train off himself, but after several unsuccessful attempts, he gave up, panting.
“…Come on, then,” he said suddenly after a long moment, lying on the ground.
“Do what?”
“Come and take my divinity. Wasn’t this the whole purpose of all this?”
The two brothers looked at each other for a long moment. Jia Louluo smiled slightly. The smile on his blood-covered face actually looked very peaceful.
“I don’t want to see this anymore. Father and son fighting, family torn apart, wandering for hundreds of years, everyone filled with hatred and resentment… I just want everyone to live in peace. So if you want it, just take my divinity. It’s not like I can resist anymore anyway.”
Maha tilted his head, looking at him against the blood-red sky, his eyes full of innocent naivety.
After a long time, he finally moved. Just as Jia Louluo thought he was about to jump down and make his move, he saw him comfortably change his sitting position.
“I don’t want it,” he said.
“…What?”
“I never thought about taking your divinity.”
Under Jia Louluo’s unconcealed astonishment, Maha smiled. His face was breathtakingly beautiful, though his smile was full of mischievous triumph.
“When I escaped from the Demonic Prohibition Grotto back then, Mother tried his best to stop me, but he repeatedly refused to tell me the reason why. At that time, I was blinded by anger and jealousy, so I didn’t think carefully about the reason for his irrational attitude… It wasn’t until I descended into the Sea of Blood and one day suddenly found myself gradually weakening with time that I realized my divinity was gone. Only then did I understand the reason Mother was unwilling to tell me the truth.”
“He was afraid I would come for you. He was afraid that after swallowing the Buddha, I would commit the grave sin of fratricide. He didn’t want to see his two children fighting and killing each other.”
Jia Louluo’s expression was wistful. He heard Maha say leisurely, “If that’s what he wishes, then I… If I were to snatch your divinity, Mother would surely be very, very sad. I don’t want the only person in the world who loves me to show that kind of sad expression again…”
There was a moment of silence. After a long while, Jia Louluo suddenly spoke, his tone somewhat softened. “Then why did you orchestrate all this?”
“Orchestrate what?” Maha said cunningly.
“Don’t play dumb. We fought on the glacier for seven days and seven nights without tearing space. Why was it that on the train, I just blocked you once, and the whole train ended up in Hell? You had already tampered with the railway line beforehand, didn’t you!”
“Oh, you even figured that out,” Maha raised an eyebrow. “This is a long story. It starts from when I decided not to snatch your divinity… After I made that decision, I began to search the Four Evil Paths for someone with a divinity similar to mine, because it’s possible for me to absorb such a person’s divinity…”
Jia Louluo couldn’t help but interrupt, “There’s divinity in the Four Evil Paths?”
“If you’re ugly, you should read more, little brother,” Maha said lazily. “The Great Asuras all have divinity. Asuras are everywhere, and divinity is cheaper than dirt. You’ve seen too little in the human realm.”
Jia Louluo: “…”
“I searched for a long time with no results. After all, being born a Wisdom King, there are very few in the Nine Heavens and Ten Earths with a divinity similar to mine. I had once given up hope, but not long ago, I suddenly had an inspiration. After carefully inquiring about Phoenix’s various irrational and inexplicable behaviors over the years, such as suddenly betraying Zhou Hui and falling into the Four Evil Paths… I finally came up with a very vague, but highly possible guess.”
Maha paused. Jia Louluo asked doubtfully, “You found a culture medium that can provide you with divinity?”
“I’m not sure,” Maha said. “So I set up a trap. The plan was to kidnap you to get everyone to come to the Tibetan region, take the opportunity to eliminate the irrelevant personnel, and let Mother escape control and come to the Four Evil Paths—if my guess is correct, Mother will definitely come. In fact, he has indeed come now.”
Jia Louluo thought to himself that this “irrelevant personnel” must be referring to his dad, but there was no point in asking now. He sighed, tried to push over the train engine again, but failed, and could only lie on the ground, looking up at the sky in defeat.
“I have… one last question,” he said hoarsely.
“Did you deliberately coming up to the snowy mountain to fight me for seven days also have some deep meaning?”
Maha leaped down from the top of the train, stood beside Jia Louluo, and stroked his chin, appreciating his brother’s miserable state from all angles.
“No,” he said lightly. “It was just a way to bond.”
Maha gave a malicious smile, placed his hand on the cold iron of the train’s front, and a few seconds later, with a loud boom, he pushed over the train engine, which had been twisted into a giant block of iron.
·
Wangjia Snow Mountain, underground dark river.
Zhang Shun pried open the deformed car door. Zhou Hui dragged out the blood-covered Wu Bei. He checked for a breath and found that he was still alive. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief.
Wu Bei’s condition meant he couldn’t be moved carelessly. Chu He gave him first aid and a shot of adrenaline. A few hours later, his body temperature slowly returned to normal, and his pulse became stronger. After Zhou Hui repeatedly fed him water several times, Wu Bei finally opened his eyes slightly. “Boss Zhou…”
His voice was so faint it was barely audible. Zhou Hui asked, “How did you end up like this? Do you know who was on that train?”
Wu Bei smiled weakly, closed his eyes, and didn’t move.
Not far away, Zhang Shun was tying a simple stretcher that could carry a person, his whole body shaking from the cold, his nose running. Chu He was boiling hot water for him, a faint white steam rising from the pot.
Zhou Hui sat beside Wu Bei, packing up to head back. Suddenly, he saw his eyes open again. He said hoarsely, “Boss… Boss Zhou, about those Tibetans, there’s… something not right… cough cough cough cough cough!”
The moment Wu Bei moved, he dislocated a rib and coughed up blood foam. Zhou Hui shook his head at the sight. After a long while, he finally caught his breath and gasped for air on the ground for a moment. “…We were on… the train… your son…”
His throat muscles were torn, his voice low and muffled, very unclear from even a short distance away. Zhou Hui put down his backpack. Just as he leaned over to put his ear closer, Wu Bei’s voice suddenly stopped.
The next second, a smile suddenly appeared on Wu Bei’s face.
—His facial skin quickly curled up, like a low-quality sticker being torn off, revealing the true face underneath. Then, he reached forward, his five fingers as sharp as a blade, and thrust directly towards Zhou Hui’s heart!
__
Author’s note:
The Wu Bei who appeared in Chapter 44 was the real Wu Bei! To avoid any misunderstanding as the chapters are not released back-to-back, I’m making a special note here.
