Chapter 3: Returning Home to Sponge Off His Parents

Before they left the dark area and returned to the brightly lit streets, no one in the car spoke.

The two children also sensed that something was wrong. They clung tightly to Chen Yi, so obedient it made one’s heart ache.

There were more pedestrians on the road now. The city’s everyday bustle finally dispelled that cold, bone-deep chill. To confirm the thought in his heart, Chen Yi asked the driver vaguely, “There was something wrong with that hotel just now, right? Did something happen there before?”

The driver gave Chen Yi a meaningful look, then nodded. “There was a fire.”

“I saw people still staying there…”

“Who knows? Sometimes when you pass by, a few rooms have their lights on, but we locals don’t really like taking people there. Especially when I saw you had two kids with you.”

“Thank you. You’re a good person.”

Chen Yi thanked him sincerely. They were strangers, after all. For the driver to show even this trace of empathy was enough to return a little warmth to the world.

After being thanked, the driver waved a hand. “All right. Seeing as you’ve got two kids with you and it’s not easy, and you were still picking the cheapest hotel, I won’t take that twenty-yuan commission.”

After a pause, he added, “But you still have to pay the taxi fare.”

Chen Yi: “…”

He had suddenly saved twenty yuan, but this feeling of being pitied and treated like a beggar…

Tsk!

Damn his pride!

Although the driver brought customers to hotels for commission, at least the place he recommended was safe. It was located in the busy city center, with a row of eateries and restaurants right downstairs.

In the book, a bustling downtown area did not ease the growth of aberration entities. On the contrary, because of the complexity of human nature and ambition, it was even easier for some difficult-to-handle urban legends to be born.

For example, in the novel, the aberration that attacked the protagonist at the very beginning was the Sewer Alligator Man, born from human fear.

The Old Night Watchman who saved the protagonist explained, “It originated from a foreign sewer alligator movie, then was reshaped once more by human thought, giving birth to the lowest-level urban-legend aberration.”

Even so, places with people still made people feel safe.

Besides, even if the revival of spiritual energy had begun, it was still in its early stage. The thin spiritual energy would only allow some weak aberration entities to manifest. Their lethality was extremely low; most of what they caused was psychological panic.

Chen Yi checked in, took the kids to dinner, then returned to the room to settle in.

Because they were traveling, everything was new to the children. Just adapting to the new environment was enough to keep them playing on their own for half a day.

Chen Yi used the chance to take a quick shower.

Because he was afraid of something like red liquid appearing, he kept his eyes wide open the entire time.

He finished the shower as if facing a great enemy, but everything was normal.

His tense heart finally relaxed just a tiny bit.

He did not bathe the children. He really did not have the energy. He only used a towel to wash their little faces and hands, wiped their little necks, then had them change into pajamas and get into bed.

“Milk~” The older brother and younger sister refused to sleep and called out together, “Milk! Milk! Milk!”

Chen Yi knew they were used to drinking milk before bed, so he resigned himself to taking the remaining half can of formula from the suitcase and mixing two bottles of milk.

Once the children got their bottles, they hugged their pillows and lay sideways across the big bed. They pulled the quilt up to their chests, then puffed out their cheeks and pursed their little mouths, gulping away. As they drank, their eyes began to drift shut.

Chen Yi was tired too, but he did not dare sleep.

While the children drank their milk, he went to the door and the window, locking both securely and fastening every deadbolt.

Then he went to the bathroom and felt around until he found the main valve. He shut it off.

Very good. This way, nothing like hair would crawl out.

Finally, he pulled the curtains shut.

Sleep.

At first, Chen Yi had not wanted to turn off the lights, but the children fussed and whined as they dragged out bedtime, directing all their little tempers at the glaring lights.

Chen Yi could only turn off the room lights.

His vision instantly went pitch black. A feeling of insecurity and coldness enveloped him. Chen Yi curled himself into the quilt. Seeing the two children squeeze toward him, he hugged them and closed his eyes.

The next second.

His eyes opened.

Chen Yi picked up his phone, logged into the booking website, and canceled the reservation from the backend.

The screen flickered. It flashed red for an instant. Before Chen Yi could notice, everything returned to normal.

Canceling the reservation in breach of terms cost him a twenty percent handling fee, 17.6 yuan. Rounded up, that was 18 yuan. His heart hurt so much!

With that heartache, Chen Yi slept groggily. Half dreaming and half awake, he suddenly felt a wave of heat that startled him awake.

He opened his eyes and stared blankly at the light from outside shining onto the ceiling, then silently felt the urge to urinate in his abdomen.

Very good. He had foresight. He did not need to get up to use the bathroom. He could hold it until dawn.

Just as Chen Yi was about to turn over and sleep again, he saw that inside the block of light on the ceiling, the shadow of an oval sphere was bouncing up and down.

It grew bigger and smaller, like a balloon floating in midair, yet also like something clinging to the window and watching.

Everything was silent. In the depths of night, it presented itself in an uncanny way.

A drop of sweat trickled down Chen Yi’s forehead.

He was staying on the third floor!

And he remembered very clearly that before he went to sleep, he had closed the window…

Chen Yi was terrified, but the two shallow breaths beside him also seemed to contain some kind of strength, supporting him from within his body.

No!

If it really was an aberration, then he, who had been targeted, had already been infected.

According to the argument in the book, cognition meant contamination, and contamination had a clustering force.

Chen Yi was certain that the probability of him encountering an aberration was one hundred percent.

Avoidance had never been the best method. It would only make him miss the best chance to counterattack.

At the very least, he had to clearly see where the opponent’s punch came from before he could fight back. That was definitely better than covering his head and only knowing how to hide.

There was no retreat. Only battle!

In this book, the courage and conviction humans possessed would form a vast righteous aura. Even if ordinary people could not rely on this to harm aberration entities, aberration entities also did not like provoking such people.

For himself!

For the children!

Chen Yi abruptly sat up and looked out the window.

“Meoowww!!”

Deep in the night, a shrill cat’s cry shattered the utter silence.

As if waking in panic, Chen Yi sat up limply and stared at the tightly closed curtains, his heart pounding.

He had returned to the real world. Everything looked the same as before he had gone to sleep. There was no block of light overhead, and certainly no oval thing floating there.

But in the instant before the cat’s cry, he was certain that he had truly met the eyes of the thing sprawled outside the window.

A ghastly pale face.

Smiling.

A twisted, swollen, enlarged head, floating lightly.

Just like a human-head balloon.

…He had been targeted.

In that instant, Chen Yi had an incomparably clear understanding.

I’ve been targeted.

It will come find me again!!

For the second half of the night, Chen Yi almost did not dare sleep again. Only after the roosters crowed at dawn did he finally fall into a dazed sleep.

When he woke again, the younger sister was hugging him clingily, while the older brother was still sleeping sprawled out in all directions.

Sunlight shone in from behind the curtains.

The presence of light brought warmth.

Chen Yi pulled open the curtains and bathed in the sunlight, driving away the cold lingering around his body.

Then, like a storm sweeping through fallen leaves, he packed the luggage, changed clothes, tucked one child under each arm, and quickly checked out.

He could not wait any longer.

He had to establish the sect as soon as possible and obtain the cultivation methods inside the Scripture Pavilion.

That was his only way to face aberration entities.

To get from the county town to the village, they needed to transfer twice. By car, it was nearly two hours of winding mountain roads before they could arrive.

The public bus only ran twice a day, once in the morning and once in the afternoon. There were motorcycle taxis, but the unlicensed mountain motorbikes drove wildly, and it only took one hour to reach the destination.

Chen Yi had two children with him and no other choice. The whole journey of eating, drinking, peeing, and pooping was like fighting a war. At last, dragging the two kids along, he boarded the bus departing at 7:55.

The old midibus was about eighty percent full. Chen Yi sat with the children in the back row and fastened both their seatbelts.

The bus happened to drive past the hotel that had seemed haunted last night. Chen Yi glanced at it. In daylight, the hotel building looked completely normal. The doors to the reception hall were wide open, and there was even an elderly man sweeping the courtyard.

The hotel soon fell behind them. Chen Yi relaxed and began to doze off.

The bus rocked and swayed. He woke for a while, slept for a while, and in this way entered the mountains.

…

Lishui Village was deep in the mountains. It was the poorest of the three villages under the jurisdiction of Wolong County.

Seven years ago, the road up and down the mountain was still a muddy path. If families in the village wanted to sell anything, they had to carry baskets on their backs and walk seven or eight hours before they could reach the county town.

Whether in the memories of the original owner or Chen Yi’s own memories, before he turned ten, what he looked forward to most was market day every Saturday, when he could go down the mountain and witness the prosperity of the county town.

Now, Lishui Village had roads and electricity, and conditions were much better.

It was true that the original owner had been born poor.

Chen Yi got off at the village entrance and looked out at the scenery, unfamiliar yet carrying a few hints of familiarity.

Lishui Village had only eighty-three households in total, adding up to around three hundred people.

In these years, the young people and the younger generation had all gone to the county town or the city to develop. The number of people still living in Lishui Village long-term was no more than one hundred, and many fields on the mountain had been left barren.

This included the hill his family had contracted back then by following the trend. The three hundred orange trees they planted, because no one managed them and they did not know scientific farming methods, were ultimately left to grow wildly in the mountains. Every year, the oranges sent over were sour and astringent, not tasty at all.

Chen Yi was still sighing in reminiscence when a middle-aged couple came around from behind the bus and greeted him with joyful faces.

They were the original owner’s parents.

They looked eighty percent like Chen Yi’s parents. What made Chen Yi feel close to them was the simple, honest mountain-dweller air about them, as well as their sincere joy in welcoming their son and grandchildren.

The sense of distance suddenly lessened.

“Was the trip smooth? Why did you come back so suddenly? Qianqian, Linlin, my good grandchildren, what do you want to eat? How about Grandma takes you to the little shop to buy yogurt?”

“Where’s your wife? I thought you’d come back together. It’s not a holiday either, so why come back now?”

When parents met their child, a round of nagging was unavoidable. Chen Yi could feel their delight, but he had matters weighing on his mind and really had no mood for small talk. He gave a few perfunctory replies, then before they even reached the front door, he asked, “Mom, has the land on the back mountain been transferred into my name?”

His mother, Xiang Lan, had been trying to get close to her grandchildren, so she answered absentmindedly, “Your dad went first thing this morning to handle it.”

His father, Chen Jiankang, nodded. “It’s done. That land’s been barren for years, and it was originally contracted by our own family anyway, so it was simple. But what are you asking me to change the name for? Are you coming back to start a business, plant trees, and livestream? The year before last, the second son of your Uncle Wang’s family came back and tried that too. I even called on the villagers to give him our full support, but it started strong and ended weak, leaving a whole pile of mess behind before he ran off. Don’t you go doing that kind of thing. I’m a village chief, after all. If I can’t create new income, I still have to do a good job cutting losses…”

The original owner’s father, Chen Jiankang, had developed better than Chen Yi’s father. He was the village chief of Lishui Village, and also one of the reasons Chen Yi had returned home to sponge off his parents.

The main quest of the sect system was to create a sect, and the first requirement was for him to establish a Mountain Gate. That was why, the moment he woke yesterday morning, he had tried it on the front gate of his home.

The system did not react.

Chen Yi finally determined one thing.

A “Mountain Gate” required the existence of a mountain.

Or perhaps, because this was not his house and was also an apartment in a high-rise building, the system did not acknowledge it.

The above were precisely why Chen Yi, even with two children in tow, had traveled over mountains and rivers back to his old home.

There was plenty of ownerless land in the mountains, and Lishui Village had no shortage of barren hills. Even if it was difficult to transfer the hill his family had contracted back then into his name, he could come back and contract another plot of land.

Of course, he was more willing to inherit the family hill. That area truly was quite good.

After returning home, Chen Yi did not even bother to eat. He barely managed to let the two children get a little closer to their grandma and grandpa before he hurried out, impatient to begin an on-site inspection.

Heading north from the village brought him to a hill facing the east.

The small mountain was not tall. A winding mountain path passed through terraced fields. Under the blazing sun, Chen Yi stumbled along for twenty minutes, passed through the terraces, and entered a fruit grove.

From here onward, it was the hill contracted by the original owner’s family.

Now it was his.

The orange trees planted back then had now grown lush and dense, covering the path ahead. Aside from the fruit trees at the edges, which the Chen family still came to pick from each year, the deeper areas could only be left for the fruit to fall and compost naturally. Instead, this had nourished them into even sturdier growth.

Chen Yi stood outside the fruit grove and looked into the depths of the dense woods.

He now had a bit of PTSD toward darkness, but he could only brace himself and walk inside.

One foot sank deep, the next shallow.

Amid the thick fallen leaves, there were also oranges that had not completely rotted and broken down. When he stepped on one, the feeling was hard to describe.

Chen Yi’s scalp prickled. Carefully, he brushed aside the spiderwebs in front of him and slowly walked deeper in.

Chen Yi recalled the area of his family’s hill and silently calculated the distance. After spending more than half an hour, he found the highest nearby patch of orange grove.

He did not know what the Mountain Gate would be like once established, nor whether the rewarded Sect Main Hall would still require him to build it brick by brick. In any case, the longer it remained hidden and unknown to others, the better.

At the very least, he needed to wait until he had built the Scripture Pavilion, learned the things inside it, and dealt with the aberration that had targeted him before discussing the next step.

Chen Yi stood beneath this huge orange tree and looked at the slanting sunlight overhead through the gaps between the leaves.

That sense of urgency pressed in again.

He really did not have many choices left.

The focus of his vision adjusted and returned to the water mirror.

He stared at the quest.

[Main Quest: Found a Sect]

[Rewards: Sect Main Hall, Scripture Pavilion]

One: Establish the Mountain Gate (0/1 incomplete)

Two: Name the Sect (1/1 complete)

Three: Recruit Disciples Widely (I) (2/1 complete)

The first task, [Establish the Mountain Gate], rippled and floated before his eyes.

Chen Yi silently recited in his heart.

Establish the Mountain Gate!

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