Zhou Hui later realized that Chu He had actually discovered the anomaly first.
Chu He was sitting by the railway tracks, tidying his luggage, one foot unconsciously scraping against the rocky ground. After a while, he stood up and walked away. Afterward, when Zhou Hui went to relieve himself, with a splash, a blood-red eye was revealed beneath the gravel. If Chu He had scraped his foot twice more, his shoe sole would have been covered in blood.
Zhou Hui didn’t call Zhang Shun. He alone swiftly moved the scattered rocks. From the frozen earth, he dug out half a lama with his bare hands—literally half. The body was torn in two from the mid-cranial line downwards, with jagged edges that cleverly avoided damaging the internal organs. Due to the rapid drop in temperature, all internal organs were frozen within the abdominal cavity.
Zhou Hui squatted on the rocky beach, observing for a long time. Zhang Shun stood beside him, helping his brother vomit violently, unable to speak.
“Wife,” Zhou Hui poked the unlucky lama with his hand, then after a while, said, “Tearing things from the middle to eat, eating half and throwing away half, biting off the abs but not liking the internal organs… this is a bit like our Da Mao’s style…”
Chu He held the profusely vomiting Zhang Shun with one hand and turned the lama over with the other to observe carefully. After a moment, he said, “It looks very much like Maha’s tooth marks.”
“Holy cow, you can tell that?!” Zhou Hui thought, You really are worthy of being one of the top ten best mothers of the Six Paths, but he suppressed the urge to speak. He reached out and took a tattered piece of blue and white cloth from the lama’s neck. The cloth was covered in blood, and the pattern was very indistinct. Zhou Hui squinted for a long time before recognizing it: “—Hey, isn’t this the Snow Lion Flag?”
He and Chu He exchanged glances, both looking at the empty railway tracks.
“This… these should be the separatists who rioted on the train,” Zhou Hui said incredulously. “They happened to run into Maha, who was on the same train while hijacking it, and that unlucky guy just got eaten by him…”
A similar scene simultaneously appeared in both their minds—gunshots erupting on the train, blood and gore flying everywhere, the strong smell of fresh food intensely stimulating the perpetually hungry Maha; finally, the Peacock Wisdom King could no longer suppress himself. When a foolish hijacker rushed over and pointed a gun at his head, he suddenly grinned, revealing blood-stained fangs…
“Then… that,” Zhang Shun wiped his mouth, weakly asking, “Wasn’t Group Leader Wu Er also on the train?”
Zhou Hui: “…”
Chu He: “…”
Both husband’s faces turned rather unpleasant at the same time.
“Wu Bei is a group leader, after all…” Zhou Hui’s explanation sounded weak even to himself. Just as he involuntarily began to consider how to handle the aftermath if Maha had indeed eaten Wu Bei, Chu He suddenly reached out and pointed at the lama’s neck: “Wait, that’s Jia Louluo mark.”
Zhou Hui looked down.
He saw a complex golden Sanskrit character seared onto the lama’s neck, which had been covered by the Snow Lion Flag just moments before. It was very blurry amidst the charred flesh, but it was still discernible as the unique mark of the Great Golden-Winged Jia Louluo.
“…” Now Zhou Hui was truly puzzled: “How is Jia Louluo on the train too?!”
Maha’s sudden appearance in the human realm from the sea of blood was already unusual. For Jia Louluo to suddenly descend from the snowy mountains where he had been cultivating for hundreds of years and then board the same train leaving Tibet with Maha—what exactly happened? Could Maha have 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 enlist his younger brother to help him kill the Demon Lord, take over hell, and thus transform into the Great Peacock Demon King, a rich, handsome, and successful individual who went from beggar to emperor, unifying the four evil paths for a thousand generations?
Zhou Hui’s first reaction was that this was too ridiculous, but then he realized that with Maha’s personality, he could actually do it. He just didn’t know why these two brothers would take a train to the demon realm. Could this train travel through spacetime tunnels?
What Zhou Hui didn’t know was that at this moment, Chu He was intently staring at the Great Golden-Winged Roc’ mark, his pupils slightly dilated in the depths of his eyes. He recalled an even more terrifying possibility—if Maha discovered that his divinity was gone, he would definitely find a way. And simply eating humans would not effectively slow down his weakening. Like a human with leukemia needing a bone marrow transplant, he would first look for similar divinity from close relatives, and then move to seize it.
Back in the H City grotto, he had worried about this point, which was why he was unwilling to tell Maha the reason for preventing him from leaving the grotto. However, now this worst-case scenario had finally come to pass.
But luckily, since the Great Golden-Winged Roc’s mark was still there, it meant that Jia Louluo’ divinity was still within him for the time being, otherwise the Peacock Wisdom King’s mark would have appeared.
Chu He subtly let out a sigh of relief, closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, he saw Zhou Hui staring at his face without blinking.
“…What’s wrong?”
Zhou Hui’s gaze was sharp with observation and study. After a while, he said, “Nothing… your face didn’t look so good just now, tired?”
Chu He immediately shifted his gaze, casually saying, “Yeah, a little—I was just wondering, why would the body be buried in the frozen earth? If Jia Louluo stopped Maha from eating people, even if they really fought and blew up the train, the body would only be thrown far away by the blast, right?”
Zhou Hui, however, said, “There’s one prerequisite that could make this situation happen.”
Chu He and Zhang Shun both looked up at him. Zhou Hui shrugged: “I’ve been guessing since these two days we couldn’t find any trace of the missing train. I just couldn’t be sure then, because Wu Bei alone wouldn’t cause this possibility—but Maha and Jia Louluo’ powers are extraordinary. If the power output when they attack each other is great enough, it could cause spatial distortion, achieving randomized Six Paths shuttling in a sense…”
“The entire train might have been brought by them to Hell, the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, the Animal Realm, or even the Sumeru Mountain of the Heaven Realm. The body appearing under the frozen earth might be because it was violently shaken out of the train window during the spatial distortion, and Jia Louluo leaving a mark on it was perhaps a reaction in an extremely urgent state, trying to guide rescuers as much as possible.”
“So now we need to dig down,” Zhou Hui turned to look at the pit where the body had just been dug out, and said, “More bodies and deeper geological veins might be covered under the rocks. The train was teleported after entering the underground. Once we dig to the last position where the train 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 acted immediately. He took off his assault jacket, leaving on only a black vest, exposing his strong, taut upper body muscles, and began to shovel rocks in large quantities.
With one strike of his palm, he could scoop up hundreds of pounds of gravel, lift them into the air, and then hurl them far into the center of the Lhasa River, like a violent downpour of rocks, the booming sound deafening.
Zhang Shun covered his ears and hid behind the hill, trying to duck his head to avoid being hit by the gravel, and shouted to Chu He with all his might, “That guy surnamed Zhou is too amazing!—Why doesn’t he go to Lanxiang to teach excavating?!”
From the other side of the slope came Zhou Hui’s roar, “I heard that, burdensome brother-in-law!”
With a thunderous crash, the collapsed ground caused a large section of the railway track to cave in. Fortunately, the train service had been suspended, otherwise, anyone passing near this mountain would have faced a terrible wreck and loss of life.
“Wife!” Zhou Hui shouted, “Wife, come out and see the dead!”
Chu He quickly leaped up the slope, skillfully sliding down its incline. Zhang Shun staggered behind him, and as he reached the top of the slope and looked down, he froze. The rocky beach was almost completely excavated by Zhou Hui. Beneath, within the frozen earth, lay huge rocks, crisscrossing, intermingled with many corpses of red-robed lamas, mostly fragmented and grotesque masses of flesh and blood.
And more than ten meters down, a black underground rock mountain appeared in the frozen earth—it was an underground branch of Mount Wangjia Xue, pressed under thick permafrost for thousands of years. The black rock had countless huge fissures, tearing and spreading like a spiderweb, converging into a massive mountain pass deeper down. Outside the pass, countless iron plates and bearings, as well as shattered seven-holed train wheels, were scattered.
—Maha had taken the train into an underground cave.
Zhou Hui muttered, “Holy cow… this kid really knows how to play.”
He looked back at Chu He, their gazes meeting in mid-air. “Go down,” Chu He said after a moment. “First, let’s find the last position of the train before it was teleported.”
He slid down the huge rocky pit, avoiding all protruding sharp rocks, and reached the bottom of the pit within seconds, standing on the black rock, looking back at Zhou Hui.
Zhou Hui’s eyes, however, gleamed with complex light. After a long while, he said, “I must warn you, if we are teleported, the next location is likely to be a random one of the Four Evil Paths; and the golden ring lock on your spine is attached with a forbidden spell. Once it crosses the human realm boundary, this body will be blown to pieces…”
“Isn’t there still a soul? Just go through the Six Paths of Reincarnation and reshape a human body,” Chu He said casually, then immediately realized something when he saw Zhou Hui’s instantly ashen face: “…I was joking.”
Zhou Hui stared at him, his gaze chilling. Chu He instinctively stepped back half a pace. Not far behind him, Zhang Shun staggered down the wall of the rocky pit, looking at them blankly.
A cold wind howled across the frozen wilderness, making a wailing sound in the rugged crevices of the mountain rock. Zhou Hui stared at Chu He for a long time before quietly saying, “You know my temper… don’t mention such messy, bloody things in front of me again.”
Chu He lowered his eyes. “I was joking,” he said after a while. “If we encounter a teleportation point, I’ll stay in the human realm myself.”
Zhou Hui’s lips twitched, but there was no hint of a smile in that expression. After a long moment, he turned around, probed the windy underground cave entrance, and gestured to Zhang Shun to pack the supplies, preparing to enter the cave for search and rescue.
This mountain crevice, wide enough for a train to crash into, was very spacious. Although the path was rugged, it wasn’t too difficult to climb. After just a few minutes of walking, it became incredibly dark and cold. Zhang Shun’s fleece-lined assault jacket could no longer withstand the chill, so Zhou Hui had to take off his own jacket and give it to him as an additional layer.
It was pitch black all around, so dark that you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face; even the headlamp’s light couldn’t penetrate very far. Zhou Hui used an ice axe to clear the way in front, Zhang Shun clung to the climbing rope in the middle, and Chu He brought up the rear. At one point, the path went straight down. Zhou Hui leaped down, and he and Chu He, one above and one below, pulled the rope. Zhang Shun was finally lowered bit by bit with the climbing rope.
Upon landing, Zhang Shun shivered violently, stamped his almost numb feet, and exhaled, asking, “How far are we from the surface?”
Chu He descended from above, landed steadily, stood up, and clapped his hands.
Zhou Hui scornfully said, “Only about fifty meters, brother-in-law. If you convert that to making love, this amount of exercise is just half a go… are you usually satisfied with only half a go? It’ll be hard to find a wife that way…”
Zhang Shun’s temples throbbed wildly. He saw Zhou Hui turn around triumphantly and say, “Come on, there’s an underground river here, we’re almost there.”
In fact, he didn’t need to say it, the sound of water was already very clear. Countless charred train parts spread out like a long road, extending into the darkness, leading directly to this miraculous underground river that flowed through Tibet’s Mount Wangjia Xue; the winding riverbed, sometimes wide, sometimes extremely narrow, rushed towards the rugged mountains in the distance.
“This is a branch of the Lhasa River, turning underground on its way to Nagqu. If it doesn’t dry up along the way, it could extend all the way to Ordos or the North China Plain.” Chu He turned on his tactical flashlight and explained to Zhang Shun, who was marveling at the river, “A large amount of ice and snow melts in Tibet every year, permeating through surface water and flowing north. The vertical drop of this river further down could reach several kilometers or even tens of kilometers… if you can’t hold on, you can go back up.”
“No, no,” Zhang Shun waved his hand, standing by the riverbed in shock, “The natural scenery is truly astonishing!”
Chu He smiled silently:
“—The eighteen layers of hell are even more spectacular…”
Zhang Shun didn’t hear clearly: “What did you say?”
Chu He, however, raised a hand to stop him, seeing Zhou Hui suddenly shout from not far away, “Lao Si!—Come here, I found the train!”
Chu He strode over, and even he couldn’t help but freeze when the tactical flashlight illuminated the scene. In the vast underground space, half a train engine stood abruptly by the underground river, like some grotesque, terrifying beast in the darkness, extremely distorted by the intense compression of space. Connected behind the engine were several carriages, which had been completely twisted into enormous screw-shaped scrap metal. Countless bearings, wheels, and train car shells were charred black from burning, piled haphazardly against the cave wall.
“This is where it entered the spatial rift, but unfortunately, only half of it went in, the other half got stuck here,” Zhou Hui climbed onto the train engine, holding his flashlight and peering into the cracked sheet metal roof, muttering, “Holy cow, the quality of this engine is really something. If it were a Honda, it would definitely have been crushed to dust by the spatial torsion…”
Chu He shouted from below, “Be careful!”
“Yeah, yeah, I know—”
Zhou Hui’s voice abruptly cut off. With the help of his flashlight, he saw someone in the driver’s seat, covered in blood, sitting in front of the control panel, wearing a black trench coat over his sturdy body, already unconscious.
“Oh my gosh,” Zhou Hui exclaimed in surprise, “Found him.”
He turned and waved to Chu He on the ground, saying, “Dear!—Don’t come over here, it’s dirty. Tell that idiotic brother-in-law to help me carry Lao Er out!”
Meanwhile, in the Hell Realm, the Sea of Blood.
The sky was blood-red. Perhaps it wasn’t originally this color, but perpetually shrouded by the red mist above the sea, it looked grim and terrifyingly red, as if it could crack into pieces at any moment, letting out torrential blood rain from the fissures.
Nine-headed infants swept across the sky, emitting piercing cries. Blood-red waves rolled and roared, the spray lifting countless decaying corpses, which were then greedily torn apart and devoured by dense swarms of low-level demons climbing out of the water. Little demons scaled the cliffs by the sea, chasing, tearing at each other, and curiously peering at the half-train engine that had suddenly appeared on the cliff top, baring their fangs at the strange steel behemoth.
But then, a figure sitting on the car roof moved, lowered its head, revealing a beautiful yet indifferent face. The little demons shrieked in terror, instantly scattering.
At the very bottom of the engine, Jia Louluo groaned on the ground, then opened his eyes. His vision was unfocused, taking a long time to gradually sharpen as a dull pain slowly spread through his entire nervous system. If anyone had seen this scene, it would have been a truly horrific sight. Jia Louluo’s entire body was pressed to the ground by the train engine, his body and arms were bloody and mangled, his legs were crushed under the collapsed carriage, and one lower leg was impaled by a long steel rebar, firmly pinned into the rock.
“You’re awake?” Maha poked his head out from the top of the car, looking down at him. Jia Louluo tried to push away the heavy train pressing down on him, but after several unsuccessful attempts, he could only gasp and give up.
“…You do it,” he lay on the ground, then suddenly said after a moment.
“Do what?”
“Take my divinity. Isn’t that what all this was for?”
The two brothers stared at each other for a long moment. Jia Louluo smiled slightly, and on his blood-stained face, that smile actually appeared very peaceful.
“I don’t want to see this anymore. Father and son killing each other, families broken and destroyed, hundreds of years of wandering, everyone filled with hatred and resentment… I just want everyone to live peacefully. So if you want it, take my divinity. I can’t resist anyway.”
Maha tilted his head, looking at him against the backdrop of the blood-red sky, his gaze filled with innocent naivety. After a long time, he finally moved. Just as Jia Louluo thought he was about to jump down and act, he only saw him comfortably change his sitting posture.
“I don’t want it,” he said.
“…What?”
“I never thought about taking your divinity.”
In Jia Louluo’s undisguised astonishment, Maha began to laugh, his face utterly captivating, even though his smile was full of mischievous triumph.
“When I escaped from the Demonic Seal Grotto, Mother tried his best to stop me, but repeatedly refused to explain why he was stopping me. At that time, I was blinded by anger and jealousy, so much so that I didn’t carefully consider the reason for his illogical attitude… It wasn’t until I descended into the Sea of Blood and one day suddenly realized I was gradually weakening with time that I felt my divinity had disappeared. Only then did I understand Mother’s reason for not wanting to tell me the truth.”
“He was afraid I’d look for you. He was afraid I’d commit the grave sin of fratricide again after devouring the Buddha. He didn’t want to see his two children fighting and killing each other.”
Jia Louluo’s expression was wistful. He heard Maha leisurely say, “If he wishes so much, then… if I seize your divinity, Mother would definitely be very, very sad. I don’t want the only person in the world who loves me to show that sad expression again…”
A heavy silence. After a while, Jia Louluo suddenly spoke, his tone somewhat softened: “Then why did you orchestrate all this?”
“Orchestrate what?” Maha cunningly said.
“Don’t play dumb. We fought on the glacier for seven days and seven nights without tearing space. Why did the entire train come directly to Hell when I just blocked you for a moment on the train? You must have tampered with the railway line beforehand!”
“Oh, you even found that out,” Maha raised an eyebrow and said, “That’s a long story. It begins when I decided not to snatch your divinity… After I made that decision, I started searching the Four Evil Paths for people with similar divinity to mine, because it’s possible for me to absorb the divinity of such people…”
Jia Louluo couldn’t help but interrupt, “There’s divinity in the Four Evil Paths?”
“Ugly people need to read more, little brother.” Maha said lazily, “All the great Asuras have divinity; it’s practically ‘Asuras walking everywhere, divinity less than dogs’. You’ve seen too little in the human realm.”
Jia Louluo: “…”
“I searched for a long time and found nothing. After all, being born a Wisdom King, there are simply too few people with similar divinity to me within the Nine Heavens and Ten Earths. I had once given up hope, but not long ago, I suddenly had an inspiration. After carefully inquiring about Phoenix’s various illogical and inexplicable behaviors over the years, for example, suddenly betraying Zhou Hui and falling into the Four Evil Paths… I finally had a very vague, but highly probable guess.”
Maha paused. Jia Louluo asked suspiciously, “You found a culture medium that can provide you with divinity?”
“I’m not sure,” Maha said. “So I set up a trap. I wanted to kidnap you to bring everyone to the Tibetan region, take the opportunity to eliminate 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 is indeed here now.”
Jia Louluo thought to himself that “irrelevant personnel” must refer to his father, but there was no point in asking now. He sighed, tried again to push over the train engine but failed, and finally gave up, lying on his back on the ground.
“I have… one last question,” he rasped.
“Was there a deeper meaning to you specifically coming to the snowy mountains to fight me for seven days?”
Maha leaped down from the top of the train, stood beside Jia Louluo, and admired his brother’s miserable state from all angles, stroking his chin.
“No,” he said casually, “It was just a way to connect with you.”
Maha showed a malicious smile, reached out and pressed his hand on the cold iron plate of the train front. A few seconds later, with a thunderous roar, he pushed over the train engine, which had already twisted into a massive block of iron.
Mount Wangjia Xue, Underground Dark River.
Zhang Shun pried open the deformed train door, and Zhou Hui dragged out Wu Bei, who was covered in blood. A check of his breath revealed he was still alive, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief.
Wu Bei’s condition made it unsafe to move him freely. Chu He administered emergency first aid and gave him a cardiac stimulant injection. Several hours later, his body temperature slowly returned to normal, and his pulse strengthened. After Zhou Hui repeatedly fed him water a few 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, then closed his eyes and remained still.
Not far away, Zhang Shun shivered and his nose ran as he tied a makeshift stretcher for carrying people. Chu He was boiling hot water for him; a faint white steam rose from the kettle.
Zhou Hui sat beside Wu Bei, packing his things for the return journey, when he suddenly saw Wu Bei’s eyes open again. He rasped, “Boss Zhou… Zhou… about those Tibetans, there’s… something wrong… cough cough cough cough cough cough!”
Wu Bei’s movement dislocated a rib, and he coughed up blood foam, making Zhou Hui shake his head. After a long while, he finally caught his breath and gasped with difficulty on the ground for a moment: “…We were… on the train… your son…”
His throat muscles were torn, and his voice was low and muffled, making it very indistinct if one was slightly far away. Zhou Hui put down his backpack and just leaned closer, tilting his ear, when Wu Bei’s voice suddenly stopped.
The next second, a smile abruptly spread across Wu Bei’s face.
—His skin rapidly peeled back, like a poor-quality sticker being ripped off, revealing his true face beneath; immediately afterward, he reached forward, his five fingers swift as knives, and plunged directly towards Zhou Hui’s heart!
