Chapter 49: Ants

“Tsk, tsk. Even a strand of hair can eat meat by the mouthful. The world really does have everything.”

Gazing at the astonishing scene before him, Lu Yuan clicked his tongue in wonder.

While he was sighing over it, the girl sensed a wisp of the Little Paper Man’s aura.

“Who’s outside?” the girl shouted in a low voice. Her originally clean, neat short hair had turned into a strange, weed-choked mess.

The Little Paper Man, its face covered, drifted into the stone cave.

When the girl saw that it was a masked paper man, she reacted as if facing a mortal enemy. Red patterns lit up across the muscles of her entire body, and they began swelling nonstop.

“Don’t worry. I don’t mean you any harm. If I did, there wouldn’t be anything you could do about it anyway.”

The Little Paper Man spread out its body, its brush moving as fast as flight as it quickly wrote those words across itself.

It was so practiced that it looked just like a flop author who could churn out thirty thousand words a day…

“A Aberration? Who exactly are you? What are you looking for me for?”

The girl did not relax in the slightest because of the writing on the Little Paper Man’s body. Instead, after witnessing the bizarre sight of the paper man writing on itself, she became even more wary.

A Aberration capable of communicating with humans either possessed extremely high intelligence, or had a powerful cultivator standing behind it. Either way, for her, it was a terrible outcome.

“Who I am doesn’t matter. The reason I found you is because I happened to be near your house just now.”

The Little Paper Man took out a piece of black talisman paper from behind itself and showed it to the girl.

“Proof of identity from Cangxing City?”

The instant she saw the black talisman paper, the girl finally set her mind at ease. For humans out in the wilderness, black talisman paper still held a certain degree of credibility.

At the very least, it was much better than some Aberration of unknown origin.

“What were you doing near my house just now? I’m warning you, don’t even think about hurting my family.”

The girl picked up a small knife and cut away the weed-like growths that had sprouted from her head, shearing them off layer by layer and throwing them all into a fire pit.

The weed-like hair burned violently in the flames, giving off a strange stench that made one want to retch.

“I have no designs on your family either. I only want to know what exactly this Lord Sacrificial Spirit you speak of is, and what the ritual specifically entails.”

The Little Paper Man wiped away its previous words and wrote anew.

“You cultivators in Cangxing City stand high above everyone else and enjoy the protection of a spirit realm. Why would you care about ordinary people in the wilderness, whose lives are as cheap as grass?”

The girl, her hair now short again, gave a bitter laugh. She looked at the still-burning fire pit in front of her, the light and shadow flickering across her face.

“The Sacrificial Spirit… I don’t know its origins in our village, or what it looks like. From the time I first had memories until now, I’ve never seen it. I only know it is closely tied to our hair.

“I only know that once the children in the village reach a certain age, they need to go worship the Sacrificial Spirit, seek its protection, and ask it to grant us strength.”

“If it can protect you and make you stronger, then why oppose your parents and stop your younger sister from worshiping it?”

“How could anything in this world be that good? Especially for ordinary people like us, who can’t cultivate.

“Do you know why everyone in our village is so thin and withered, and why very few live past forty?

“I once happened to see it on a dead companion’s body. The so-called ritual is actually the Sacrificial Spirit using hair it has refined since childhood to devour the villagers’ flesh-and-blood essence, drawing away their vitality and lifespan.

“The villagers give up so much, but what they receive is only the flimsiest protection imaginable. And they still have to be deeply grateful to it!”

“Then what you were doing just now was…” the Little Paper Man asked in confusion.

“My hair has been refined with that sticky liquid ever since I was small. Within a certain period of time, it must consume flesh-and-blood essence. Otherwise, there’s a risk of Aberration.”

“And there are requirements for that flesh-and-blood essence. It either has to be flesh and blood from my own body, since my hair and I are one, or it has to be that special black-red flesh from just now. And that special flesh is only provided by the village to children before the ritual.

“I once tested it. Even if I cut all my hair off, it still didn’t affect that hunger of its.”

“So that piece of black-red flesh was actually something your parents specially left for you?”

“Maybe…” The short-haired girl fell somewhat silent.

The next day, at the girl’s pleading, Lu Yuan controlled the paper man to shrink to less than three inches and hide on her body, accompanying her back home.

“Dad, Mom.” The girl pushed open the door and called to the withered middle-aged couple inside.

A little girl with a head full of smooth black hair sat obediently to one side.

“Little Ni…” Seeing the daughter who had always been avoiding them face the two of them directly, the middle-aged woman could hardly believe her eyes.

“You still have the nerve to come back!”

The middle-aged man glanced at the short-haired girl, then turned his head away.

“I came back because I wanted to tell you solemnly that I hope you can tell my younger sister the truth about the ritual, and let her choose for herself whether or not to go through with it.”

“You’ve rebelled! It’s bad enough that you refuse to undergo the ritual yourself, but now you’re even bewitching your sister into refusing it too! Are you trying to get your sister killed?”

The middle-aged man slammed the table and shot to his feet, furious.

“Is it wrong to tell my younger sister the truth? Since you won’t say it, I’ll let her see it with her own eyes!”

Before her words had even fallen, the short-haired girl swiftly grabbed at the hairpiece on the middle-aged man’s head.

The man’s hair spread all the way down, extending to his waist. Lu Yuan saw countless strands of hair running downward from his back, stabbing deep into the man’s body.

Skin, organs, bones… every part of his body was packed with countless black-red strands of hair.

The black-red strands squirmed nonstop, greedily drawing on the flesh and blood inside the man’s body.

As if stimulated by the light shining on them, the black-red strands shrank inward a little, exposing the five viscera and six bowels within, which had nearly been hollowed out.

The little girl with the head full of black hair stared at her father’s horrifying back, so frightened she froze in place and could not move.

“You! You! You!” The middle-aged man pointed at his eldest daughter, so choked with anger that he could not speak for a moment.

“So what if she sees it? That’s right, the ritual requires us to offer Lord Sacrificial Spirit the flesh and blood from our own bodies. But if we don’t undergo the ritual, this body won’t even have the slightest value for use!”

“I only want my younger sister to have the right to know, and the right to choose! Not to muddleheadedly offer herself up in exchange for a few short years of dragging out an existence.”

The girl refuted him with righteous conviction.

“Then go say that to those demonic beasts and weird entities! Say it to the cultivators in Cangxing City! What use is there in saying it to me?!

“In front of them, ordinary people like us are ants. They wouldn’t need to spend the slightest effort to crush you to death. Would they give you the right to choose?!”

“Then in front of that Sacrificial Spirit right now, are we not ants too?”

The short-haired girl looked at her father, who was beside himself with rage, and asked softly.

“Am I an ant now? Without Lord Sacrificial Spirit, I never would have survived until now. I never would have become stronger than ordinary people.

“No, I am not an ant…”

Because of one sentence from the short-haired girl, the middle-aged man seemed to age several years all at once. Ignoring the countless squirming black-red strands of hair on his back, he lay blankly in the chair and slowly slid downward.

The countless scraped strands of hair let out waves of strange hissing cries.

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