Chapter 110

Chapter 110

The off-road vehicle rattled its way to the vicinity of the school.

Song Jingchen’s school was the closest to the ocean. It was also the closest to freedom, which was why it had fostered a few rebellious souls.

Lu Yan had White Wolf park the vehicle several kilometers away.

He put on his wireless earpiece. Ning Huai’s worried voice crackled through. “Are you sure you’re fine going alone?”

The system chimed in. [The school’s overseer is a combat-type Awakened with a spiritual power threshold of 3000. Talents: Danger Sense, Heavy Pressure. The other teachers are also Awakened, with average thresholds around 1300. Clearly, Ning Huai underestimates you.]

Lu Yan planned to infiltrate the school and perform a Mental Remodeling on the overseer and teachers.

Probably because the Sacred God was a psychic-type pollutant, it monitored psychic Awakened among humans with extreme severity, killing them almost upon discovery. Evolutionaries of other types, however, were not valued by the Divine Kingdom.

Barren land could never yield a bountiful harvest. A threshold of two or three thousand was the limit for these devotees.

Though he’d never skipped a single class in his student days, Lu Yan was proficient at scaling walls. His feet landed on the ground without a sound.

The night was utterly silent, the rustle of the wind seeming loud by comparison. According to the memories he’d seen in Song Jingchen’s mind, the overseer and teachers lived in corresponding staff dormitories.

Compared to the cramped, single-occupancy student dorms, the staff building was far more spacious. The walls were painted with propaganda murals praising the Sacred God.

The murals seemed quite old, their colors already fading. In them, the Sacred God wore Grecian robes, holding olives and clusters of eyeballs. Where a human face should have been was instead a massive, crimson brain flower.

Beneath it, bold characters proclaimed: “Father of Thought, Light of Hope. Praise the Sacred God.”

Despite the bright colors, the painting was mentally corrosive due to its bizarre, twisted background.

[This school’s overseer possesses a slender, prehensile tongue, gecko-like climbing abilities, and highly acidic saliva. He is a survivor of the original Prey Hunt.]

The overseer’s room was on the third floor.

[Because of his Danger Sense talent, the overseer feels inexplicably unsettled, but doesn’t know why.]

[The overseer wants to flee. But the windows here are sealed shut. His hand touches the doorknob, his heart hammering a frantic warning of danger beyond the door.]

Yet the corridor outside was empty, save for Lu Yan.

[The overseer hides under the bed, silently reciting the Sacred God’s name. A pity the Sacred God is unlikely to hear its follower’s call. It isn’t a true god. Just a pollutant that usurps names and titles, arrogantly attempting to become one.]

So, Lu Yan knocked gently on the door.

Fat beads of sweat rolled down the overseer’s temples. His pupils had nearly slit into vertical lines, his heart pounding violently.

The next second, the door emitted a sharp creak—

Lu Yan had broken the lock and walked in.

The room’s furnishings were stark: a bed, a desk with a copy of The Teachings of the Blissful Creed, and not even a bathroom.

The overseer heard the visitor let out a soft, puzzled sound. “Not here?”

Then came the sound of receding footsteps, followed by the door closing.

The overseer let out a shaky breath. He waited a long time, until the hot sweat on his back had turned cold, before slowly crawling out from under the bed.

However, the moment his head emerged from beneath the bedframe, his relieved smile froze on his face.

Lu Yan was crouched by the bed’s edge, looking down at him. Within his silver-white eyes, a crimson crescent moon glowed faintly. “There you are.”

[Talent 14 – Mental Remodeling]

The overseer was thirty-seven. Perhaps because his spiritual power threshold was stronger than Song Jingchen’s, the “computer” in Lu Yan’s hands stuttered intermittently.

He accessed the overseer’s memories, one-click replacing the faith within. He tacked on a package of common knowledge about human society, along with the plan for their Divine Kingdom operation.

By the time he withdrew, the overseer’s expression was one of fanatical piety.

“My Lord.”

He knelt, wanting to kiss the tip of Lu Yan’s shoe, but was instantly cowed by the undisguised killing intent in Lu Yan’s eyes, freezing in place.

Lu Yan had only brought this one pair of shoes to the Divine Kingdom.

If they got licked dirty, he’d have nothing to change into.

Tears welled in the overseer’s eyes. “My Lord, I have endured humiliation and survived in this Divine Kingdom for over thirty years, awaiting your arrival. I cannot bear this filthy world a moment longer. To gain the trust of those heretics, my crimes over the years are too numerous to record. I deserve death a thousand times over. I beg you to unleash endless purgatorial flames upon this land of sin, to burn me and this place to ash together.”

Once they became believers, they all started talking the same way.

While Song Jingchen, being good-looking, was barely tolerable when he cried, the overseer was not. Lu Yan cut him off halfway through. “Call the other teachers over.”

He spent half an hour completing the Mental Remodeling.

Though none of these individuals had high thresholds, doing several dozen in a row still left Lu Yan feeling somewhat fatigued.

He cross-referenced the overseer’s memories, confirming no one had been missed, then opened the earpiece channel. “You can come in now,” he said to Ning Huai.

Ning Huai swaggered in through the main entrance with two teammates.

They were all “heretics” on the Divine Kingdom’s internal wanted list, targets every believer was duty-bound to eliminate. Yet these brainwashed devotees showed no reaction upon seeing Ning Huai and the others.

The overseer even bowed his head respectfully. “Welcome, honored guests of the Sea God Cult.”

Meng Hu rubbed the goosebumps on his arm. “Truly the strongest psychic talent. The effect is terrifying.”

[That’s because faith itself occupies a massive portion of their psyche. The object of their faith has simply shifted from the Sacred God to you.]

According to standard procedure, the school would send selected “honor students” to the Divine Kingdom every year on October 10th.

This school had five slots.

The four of them, plus Song Jingchen, made exactly five.

The overseer appeared deeply concerned. “My Lord. I can indeed send you to the Divine Kingdom, but the other three are wanted fugitives there. They’ll be discovered the moment they arrive. I fear they won’t even make it to the hunting grounds.”

Ning Huai turned. “That’s an easy fix. White Wolf.”

White Wolf had a talent called Magma. It wasn’t as overpowered as Purgatorial Flames, merely capable of converting blood into molten rock. It wasn’t very effective against high-pollution-value pollutants.

But it was more than enough to severely burn a person’s face with high heat.

They had cheated death more times than they could count. Disfiguring themselves was a minor matter.

Besides, Awakened had strong regenerative abilities. The facial injuries would likely heal within a few months.

Even if they didn’t heal perfectly, it didn’t matter.

Ning Huai had long since disregarded life and death. A face was nothing to cling to.

The appearance of the burn “patients” was indeed horrifying and grotesque. Lu Yan was reminded, somewhat inappropriately, of Zong Yan.

On the eve of their departure for the Divine Kingdom, Lu Yan divided his special medication and sedatives into four portions, handing them to the other members.

He had his Hellfire. For convenience, he hadn’t brought his bow, opting for a gun instead.

The final issue was the barcode markings on their necks—the ones that identified them as believers.

The system offered concise guidance. [Human Parchment.]

This piece of Human Parchment had been recycled many times and was somewhat grimy on the surface.

Lu Yan was rather disgusted, but with no alternative, he used a dagger to cut the parchment into four pieces. With a black marker, he meticulously copied four barcodes onto them.

His hand was steady, the lines he drew perfectly straight. The resulting barcodes looked convincing enough.

Squeezed of its last bit of value, the Human Parchment adhered to the napes of the four Awakened, quivered slightly, and fused with their skin.

Ning Huai couldn’t help but ask, “How do you seem to know everything? I never asked… how did you find the Vault Base…?”

Other pollutants had wandered the area for years without discovering a survivor base inside.

Lu Yan answered without changing expression. “I saw it in someone’s memories.”

After all, he already possessed Talent 14. This explanation seemed plausible enough.

Ning Huai reluctantly accepted it.

When Song Jingchen saw Lu Yan again, he was visibly excited.

Tears welled in his eyes. “I knew you wouldn’t abandon me.”

Although Song Jingchen was an Awakened, he had never undergone deliberate, intensive training. His spiritual power threshold was only a little over seven hundred—and that was only because he’d awakened early and had a decent talent.

On the hunting grounds, he would be particularly favored prey for the pollutants.

Lu Yan sighed. “Once we’re on the hunting grounds, I can’t guarantee your safety. You’ll need to find a way to hide yourself.”

Song Jingchen nodded solemnly, then asked with curiosity, “What are the hunting grounds?”

“Your coming-of-age ceremony.”

During the ceremony, honor students from over ninety schools would be released into a no-man’s-land.

This time, the zone was a derelict industrial district.

In the past, this had been a food processing district, home to the largest snack factory on the entire Changjia Island.

With no one working there, most of the machinery was coated in rust. Many useful components had been stripped and sent to other processing plants.

At the coming-of-age ceremony, the bodies of these hunted believers would be devoured by pollutants, while their souls entered the Central Divine Court to become nourishment for the Holy One.

The Holy One had recently suffered a severe wound and desperately needed to replenish its energy. This time, the Hunting Grounds would contain not only believers, but also "heretics" gathered from other survivor bases across the island.

The Divine Kingdom occupied the central region of Changjia Island. And at the very heart of that kingdom lay the "Central Divine Court"—the sanctuary of the Holy One itself.

That was where its true body was stored.

According to the system, the Central Divine Court resembled a massive server room.

The school bus ground to a halt at the entrance to the Uninhabited Zone. Several figures stood waiting at the perimeter.

The overseer produced his pass. "Number 34 Middle School."

The believers guarding the gate scanned the barcodes on the backs of the students' necks. One of them glanced at the group and remarked offhandedly, "Why are three of them so ugly?"

"Childhood fire."

A slight nod. The gatekeepers swung the heavy doors open. "Go on in. The Divine Ones have been waiting."

The gates sealed shut behind them with a final, grinding thud. Ning Huai pulled a sedative from his pack, lighting it with hands that trembled ever so slightly. "I've waited a long time for this day."

Lu Yan didn't answer. Instead, he drew the pistol from his thigh holster.

The Fifth Research Institute was also known as the Armory. What he'd bought was naturally the best weapon money could buy.

The system let out a low, appreciative whistle. [Let the hunt begin.]