The Monsters All Covet Him - Chapter 35

However… Fu Bai felt that something about Lin was different.

To be precise, Lin was becoming more and more like an Evil God.

While Fu Bai was thinking of how to comfort him, Lin, who was looking down, spoke first. “Father, you said I am your son. So, am I a human?”

Lin Yang watched all of this unfold. Lin no longer remembered their conversations; Lin Yang had been erased from his memory, and the person he was closest to had become Fu Bai.

The crumbling Lin desperately needed someone to make a firm choice for him, to prove that he wasn’t facing this unknown and massive agony all alone.

“You are my child, so of course you are human,” Fu Bai gave an unequivocal answer.

Upon receiving this answer, Lin became even more pained. The humans he had seen did not have fishtails or wings, nor could they fulfill prayers that brought calamitous suffering.

Or rather, was everyone else just as abnormal as he was, wearing human skin when gathered together so that the strangeness couldn’t be detected?

Lin did not push further. Although Fu Bai was his father, their relationship was like walking a tightrope over a cliff; one wrong step would lead to a fall into a bottomless abyss.

Fu Bai was treating him with cautious care, and he was likewise trying to please Fu Bai with meticulous prudence.

This distorted father-son bond was more polite and formal than that between strangers.

He accepted Fu Bai’s prayer. This time, Fu Bai added no qualifiers; he only said he hoped humanity would win tomorrow’s battle.

Humans lived on land, while the Silver Jiao lived in the sea. The long, entangled conquest had resulted in many city-states on land being occupied by the Silver Jiao.

The town where Fu Bai resided was the last sanctuary. If it were lost, humanity would have absolutely nowhere left to settle.

The next day’s battle was won by the humans who had prayed.

Very few humans remained on the battlefield, while the Silver Jiao had all committed suicide.

The Silver Jiao realized that the humans had made a prayer.

By evening, humans and Silver Jiao were slaughtering each other in front of the temple; this place had become the second battlefield.

Just as the Silver Jiao were about to secure the temple with overwhelming force, the temple doors pushed open from the inside, and Lin emerged, having heard the sounds of fighting.

The gazes of all living creatures converged on Lin, and in an instant, they all fell to their knees.

“O God, I pray that you make me stronger.”

“O God, I want my dead lover to return.”

“O God, I do not wish to endure hunger ever again.”

“I pray for humanity to win the war.”

“I pray for the Silver Jiao to win the war.”

I pray. I offer my devout orison, for myself, for the public, for humanity, for the Silver Jiao.

For all private desires and for justice.

For greedy extraction and for selfless sacrifice.

Countless clouds of black mist surged from all directions, entwining the lone boy-god, dragging him downward.

It was cold becoming colder and colder.

Not a trace of spring could be seen on the green plains.

The snow fell heavier and heavier, seemingly never to melt again. This place was turning into a frozen wasteland.

Lin’s pale lips parted, speaking like an emotionless machine, “The God has accepted. All your wishes shall be fulfilled.”

As the words fell, Lin spat out a mouthful of pitch-black blood.

He wiped the blood from the corner of his lips with indifference. “It is noisy. Those who clamor before the temple shall die.”

This wasn’t a prayer; at most, it was a threat and a warning.

The faces of the humans and Silver Jiao turned ashen. They discarded their weapons one after another, and the temple fell silent. Lin turned and stepped back into the temple. As he went to close the great doors, he thought of something and paused. Prayers would be received as long as they landed before him; what if no being could see him?

He tried to force the cold, eerie black mist from his body, attaching it to the temple doors. With this restriction in place, humans and Silver Jiao would no longer be able to set foot in the temple.

Lin’s limbs became cold and stiff. He dragged his heavy body into the pool, sinking into its deepest depths.

Lin Yang witnessed this chaos. The subsequent course of the war was bizarre; after both humans and Silver Jiao prayed for victory, both sides went mad on the battlefield and committed mass suicide.

Warm blood soaked the soles of Lin Yang’s feet. Prayers were not all-powerful.

They were merely an invisible hand manipulating the movement of chess pieces based on the wishes made. When various possibilities collided, they resulted in a devastating disaster.

It seemed like the petitioners were winning, but in reality, they were losing everything.

The leaders of the humans and the Silver Jiao also realized this. They wanted to ban praying, yet they feared the opposing camp would go to pray.

Once both sides discovered the temple doors were sealed and inaccessible, they both breathed a sigh of relief.

The humans continued to retreat steadily, but the number of deaths wasn’t as high as when they were praying. The Silver Jiao claimed everything with the posture of victors.

Lin Yang watched all of this. He thought the first to break through that door would be the desperate humans, but he didn’t expect it to be a Silver Jiao named Qiao.

He voluntarily inhaled that black mist into his body, enduring the pain of having his bones crushed to powder as he walked before the sleeping Lin at the bottom of the water.

“Qiao prays please make me the strongest among the Silver Jiao, so I am not abandoned, so I am not given up on.”

Lin Yang remembered that a Silver Jiao who had previously entered the temple to pray had mentioned wanting to surpass Qiao. Looking at Qiao’s current wretched state, the prayer had been fulfilled.

A bone-chilling voice echoed from the pool: “The God has accepted. Your prayer shall be fulfilled.”

The forbidden doors were opened once more.

Lin stood barefoot in the inner court. He “watched” the petitioners who flocked to him, a sharp hatred surfacing abruptly in his heart.

Pray to your heart’s content. Humans, Silver Jiao, me let us all go to hell together!

More and more creatures came to the temple. With the reinforcement of prayers, the conflicts were no longer limited simply to humans versus Silver Jiao; friction within the same races also became increasingly severe.

Countless creatures lost their lives every day.

War, jealousy, framing one couldn’t trust an enemy at one’s back, nor could one trust a companion.

Both humans and Silver Jiao lived in terror. A thick black mist shrouded the land, and the sun had not been seen for a long time.

On another late night, Fu Bai appeared at the temple. Anxiety and resentment had been completely stripped from his face, leaving it peaceful. “I wish to pray. I want the Silver Jiao to leave the land and for humans to reclaim their lost territory. No matter the cost paid along the way, please let me alone pay it.”

Lin and Fu Bai were separated by a great distance. His hollow eye sockets without eyeballs looked directly at Fu Bai.

The prayer was formed, and both of them stepped onto their respective paths of no return.

Afterward, humanity drove all the Silver Jiao from the land with an unstoppable momentum. Their towns returned to them, and the final battle ended in a human victory.

Fu Bai stood before the red-black sea, feeling no sense of unreality like in a dream, because it hurt too much. There would not be such heart-wrenching pain in a dream.

There were almost no humans left behind him; the men who participated in the battlefield had nearly all become the living dead.

It doesn’t matter.

Fu Bai told himself this. Humanity still had children, still had women; they could still reproduce, they could still grow. The footsteps of humanity would not stop here.

For now, the war would not break out again. If the temple were forcibly sealed, all calamity would end.

Fu Bai already understood the greed of human nature. He wouldn’t naively imagine that shackles could stop the human heart from praying; therefore, the only way was to send the Evil God away.

Having made this decision, Fu Bai went to see Lin. He sat down across from him. “I am sorry. I lied to you. I am not your father.”

“I know.” Lin was innocent, but not so much as to be stupid.

The way Fu Bai looked at humans was like a powerful guardian deity tenderly watching his own people, but when Fu Bai’s gaze moved to him, it became wary and placating—like looking at a beast kept in a giant cage.

He feared the beast would break the cage and harm people, yet he wanted to use kindness to influence the beast and drive it to serve him.

Silence spread between Fu Bai and Lin.

Fu Bai felt guilty toward Lin.

By using forbidden arts, the price he paid was obtaining a long life. Fu Bai had no confusion about this curse; longevity was not a reward, but a painful punishment.

He had lost everything and could not use death as an escape, forced to watch suffering play out in cycles.

He had sacrificed nearly ten thousand lives from two towns to summon Lin, then personally watched as Lin was pushed onto a path of no return.

The Lin who had first arrived here was long dead; the one sitting before him was an Evil God in every sense of the word.

Yet in many moments, despite Fu Bai’s fear and vigilance, he truly did regard Lin as his own child.

“I am sorry,” Fu Bai said once more. “What was your original world like?”

Lin recalled, “It was a black sea.”

“Then… did you like it there?”

“I neither liked nor disliked it.”

“Compared to here?”

Lin wanted to blur it out that he would rather return to the black ocean but the words caught in his mouth for a second. It was as if some existence in this world was incredibly precious to him, something he would rather endure pain for just to stay.

He couldn’t remember it.

He said, “You no longer need me, so send me away.”

Lin was well aware of Fu Bai’s purpose tonight. Fu Bai was a bit embarrassed at having his thoughts seen through. He said sincerely, “May you be well. This is not a prayer, but my blessing.”

Ancient texts recorded that sending a god away did not require the blood used when summoning; if the formation was correct, the god could leave.

A golden formation lit up, but Lin remained in the center of the array.

Fu Bai checked repeatedly; it was impossible for the formation to be wrong. He flipped through the ancient text and saw a small line of characters at the back: If the karma is unbroken and the retribution unextinguished, the calamity is difficult to send away.

Lin was still entangled with this place.

Alarm bells rang in Fu Bai’s heart as an even more terrifying future rushed toward him. He felt dizzy. Lin’s gaze was indifferent. “Can you not send me away?”

Fu Bai sat weakly on the ground, his hair disheveled. “I’m sorry. I was wrong. It’s all my fault.”

“Get in there! That false god is in the temple! We’ll seize him and Fu Bai together! If the false god dies, those monsters like the living dead will all die too! Hurry!”

“That’s right! I don’t believe so many of us can’t kill that Evil God! He just looks like a weak boy with no strength to truss a chicken!”

“Yeah, I feel like he can’t even beat me; it’s just the prayers that are scary. We’ll cut out his tongue first!”

The people who had won the war could not live in peace and prosperity because of the living dead, because of the Evil God, and because of more insatiable desires.

What they couldn’t have, they would rather destroy entirely.

The people rushed into the temple. They were so terrified that their legs were shaking, yet they bravely surrounded Fu Bai and Lin.

Every single one of these people had been under Fu Bai’s protection, but the way they looked at him was as if they were staring at a monster. The leader said, “Fu Bai, I’m sorry. You have done much for humanity, but you are no longer human. When my father was alive, you were already in this state. Now my father is dead and I have grown white hair, yet you are still this young.”

“Human casualties are heavy; we cannot withstand any more turmoil. Your existence and that of this boy are like a sharp sword hanging over the necks of humanity; we don’t know which day it will fall.”

“Today, you both must die.”