Chapter 12: The Little Sprite: I Dare to Playfully Tease Daddy!

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Yuan Zhu’s mental conversation with the little sprite looked long enough to pad out a chapter, but in reality, only a few seconds passed.

After a brief dazed look crossed his face, Yuan Zhu abruptly switched from his former honest, nervous, and worried demeanor into confident mode. The words he had previously struggled to piece together suddenly became clear and logically ordered.

In just a few sentences, he explained what had happened to him.

That morning, he had driven a truck alone to deliver a batch of sedated goblins. After the delivery had been signed for, he had taken his tools to tidy the lawn and tend the gardens. At noon, he had eaten a sumptuous meal in the restaurant. After that, he had lost consciousness, and his memory had ended there.

When he woke again, he was lying in a freezing pool of blood. The scene had been like hell itself, with scraps and chunks of flesh scattered everywhere and not a single living person in sight.

That was Yuan Zhu’s summary of his circumstances. As for the details of the sacrificial ritual, how he had slaughtered everything in sight, the source of the contamination, and the monsters eroded by it, he avoided all of those subjects. He simply pretended to have amnesia and skipped over them.

He had only lost the portion of his memory between “passing out at noon” and “waking up.”

According to the little sprite, that was the most logical explanation. Rather than waste effort inventing a story in which he, the Tiger Demon, had not participated, it was better to push everything aside, put on an innocent face, and shout:

I don’t know anything! How am I supposed to answer you? All I know is that when I woke up, the place was a bloody hell, and there wasn’t a single person left.

“I was terrified at the time. I genuinely had no idea what to do. So the first thing I did was contact the Safety Bureau through the estate’s remote dialer. After that, I tried to search for valuable evidence to prove my innocence.”

Yuan Zhu’s attitude at that moment was simple: I don’t know anything. I’m extremely frightened and completely panicked. But I’m a law-abiding citizen, and I’m willing to cooperate one hundred percent, without conditions!

With the little sprite’s help in managing his micro-expressions, he vividly displayed the mental state of a genuine victim. The two investigators were left clicking their tongues in amazement.

What a natural transition between mental states. There wasn’t even a hint of awkwardness. He had gone straight from panic to calm composure. Clearly, this was not the behavior of a normal victim.

The young man surnamed Han had already approached Yuan Zhu with prejudice and a preconceived judgment. Now he became even more certain that Yuan Zhu was hiding something. Yet the detector in his hand showed no unusual reaction whatsoever. Every reading was perfectly normal.

That meant there was no abnormal energy residue on Yuan Zhu. His condition was even more bizarrely healthy than that of an ordinary person. If they pulled any random pedestrian off the street for testing, their deviation index would fluctuate somewhere between one and seven.

But this man named Yuan Zhu had personally survived a sacrifice involving countless deaths and injuries, and his deviation index was actually zero.

Was that supposed to be normal?

It was completely abnormal. Those were not readings any ordinary human being could possess. Especially not someone who worked for a cleaning company like Fire Fang and dealt with contamination every day. Yuan Zhu had also been born into the lowest social class, so his deviation index should have been even higher.

What did he think he was, some great noble who had never lifted a finger, grown up in luxury, and never come into contact with danger?

Once prejudice had taken root in his heart, the young man became increasingly convinced that Yuan Zhu was no innocent survivor. Quite the contrary: Yuan Zhu must be concealing some enormous and dangerous secret. His obedient, cooperative expression was merely a disguise, a false image meant to lull others into complacency.

The more he observed Yuan Zhu, the more he sensed that something about the man was deeply out of place. There was a serious problem with him!

His tone consequently became colder and harsher. He aggressively challenged Yuan Zhu over the slightest detail.

“Why are you wearing the victim’s clothes?!”

The sudden interrogation startled Yuan Zhu. Inwardly, he cursed, Are you insane? Are you trying to catch me off guard with a surprise question? What kind of ridiculous question is that? I could have been wearing anyone’s clothes!

Yuan Zhu also sensed the other man’s hostility, so he offered no courtesy in return.

“I woke up because I was freezing! My clothes were gone when I regained consciousness. What was I supposed to do? Run around naked? I could only pick up whatever clothes nobody wanted from the ground.”

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Fatty Wang let out an astonished exclamation.

“Oh? What kind of sacrificial ritual was that? So uninhibited that they even abandoned their clothes?”

Judging from his tone, he had clearly misunderstood the nature of the ritual. After all, evil gods were rampant in this world. It was entirely plausible that wild parties involving the worship of some lustful goddess existed.

“You may have misunderstood,” Yuan Zhu said. “Although there wasn’t a single person left when I woke up, the scene was exceptionally bloody and cruel, as though a massacre had taken place. It probably wasn’t the kind of sacrifice you’re thinking of.”

Fatty nodded, accepting Yuan Zhu’s explanation, and recorded it in the small notebook in his hand.

“Is that so? Then after you woke up, what was your deepest impression of the scene? Were there any details worth noting? Don’t try to use reason to recall and analyze things. Use your instincts! Tell me your first impression. What objects or sensations did you experience the moment you regained consciousness?”

“Uh…”

The question stumped Yuan Zhu. What kind of impression could he have had?

He had been awakened by the noise of the Great Wilderness Immortal Scripture. If he had to describe his feelings, they would have been irritation and the helpless resignation of a bedridden patient lying motionless like a vegetable.

Then came exhilaration.

The power of shadow had poured into his body, and his mutated spiritual root had loaded in synchronization. He had obtained unprecedented strength, gained a cheat from the very beginning, ascended to the heavens in a single step, and slaughtered his way through everything in his path. He had fully experienced the might and dominance of the king of beasts. The simple joy of crushing everything through slaughter had been primitive, yet utterly pure.

And finally, there had been the little sprite, who had suddenly come online. She had a pleasant voice and a sweet mouth, and she was willing to help him drain coins from that old fossil of an Immortal Scripture. What else could he say about an “intelligent utility program” that had betrayed its own class and become a labor renegade in the world of cheats?

He, Yuan Zhu, would protect her life.

After recalling his feelings, Yuan Zhu decided to tell the truth—but in an edited version.

“The strongest feeling I had after waking up… was that my mind was a complete mess. Does that count? It wasn’t ordinary confusion. It was as if some invisible force had stirred my brain, scrambling my memories. Things that happened when I was a child kept surfacing in my mind for no apparent reason, while my memories of the recent past were fragmented and disjointed. Still, if I concentrated, I could gradually recall them.”

Although he said this, Yuan Zhu knew perfectly well that his mind had become chaotic because the little sprite had mixed one-point-three sets of foreign memories into his soul and stirred them together.

But he had not lied. The sacrifice really had caused a temporary disturbance in his soul.

That counted as one abnormality, and it could withstand a mental examination—assuming the other side possessed such a technique.

The middle-aged man surnamed Wang was not satisfied after hearing Yuan Zhu’s description.

“This was clearly an illegal sacrifice that summoned a large number of evil spirits and triggered an uncontrollable disaster. The participants and sacrificial victims alike are now impossible to account for, whether dead or alive. You think you merely passed out, and that your condition doesn’t even qualify as amnesia—just ordinary memory confusion caused by a minor shock to the brain or soul. You call that abnormal?”

Old Wang looked at Yuan Zhu’s symptoms like an old physician specializing in rare and difficult illnesses who had suddenly encountered a patient with nothing more than a scraped palm. It was laughable.

If you had come a few hours later, the wound might already have healed!

“That’s all? Think harder. From the moment you woke up until now, has anything unusual happened? Anything you believe might be related to this massacre? Are there any uncertain abnormalities still lingering in your body?”

“Hmm…” Yuan Zhu continued to ponder. “After I woke up, I felt an intense revulsion toward everything at the scene. It was a disgusting, instinctive rejection, the kind of feeling that made me want to flee immediately.”

The young man standing nearby was visibly displeased with Yuan Zhu’s attitude.

“I advise you to be honest. Don’t dodge the important points and play clever games!”

“Oh, right!” Yuan Zhu suddenly put on an expression as though he had just thought of something.

“There’s something else. When I woke up, I discovered that the wounds on my body had already healed. I strongly suspect that after I lost consciousness, someone used me as a sacrificial victim and brutally murdered me. I don’t think I survived through sheer luck. There were deep wounds on all four of my wrists and ankles, as well as over my heart. But by the time I woke up, they had healed, leaving only scars.”

Old Wang raised his pen and began taking notes.

“Oh? That is worth examining. You may really have died, though perhaps not completely. Then some kind of change occurred, causing the blessing that should have descended upon the believer to be redirected. It dragged you back from the brink of death, while all the other participants—and even the sacrificial victims—became the price. That would also explain why you were the only survivor of the entire ritual.”

As he spoke, he recorded these circumstances, along with his own theory, in his notebook.

Then he hesitated.

“But there’s a new problem. If it was merely a case of dying and coming back to life, that would still qualify as a minor miracle and fit the ritual of summoning an evil god. But such a small blessing would be nowhere near enough to justify dozens of living sacrifices. If you truly were the only survivor, then what you gained cannot have been merely another chance at life. There may be something far greater hidden within you.”

“Captain, I have something to report as well. This kid is highly abnormal! His deviation index is below one, registering as zero.”

With that, the young man shook the detector in his hand.

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As a portable detector, its readings were not perfectly precise. The display did not mean that Yuan Zhu showed no signs of deviation whatsoever. It merely meant that his value was below one.

The deviation index was very similar to the contamination level mentioned by the little sprite. The natives of Dulings Star were accustomed to classifying the distortion and erosion produced when both soul and body were contaminated as a person’s deviation index.

Within the limited memories Yuan Zhu had excavated, this planet was connected to multiple external universes. As a result, energies that did not belong to this universe’s laws had invaded it. In the eyes of certain scholars, these foreign substances—imbued with the laws of other universes—were incompatible with the rules of this planet, regardless of whether they were beneficial or harmful. They were therefore all classified as harmful.

If Dulings Star were compared to a human body, then the various energies, laws, and phenomena leaking from other universes would be foreign substances invading the human immune system. Since different universes contained supernatural systems far beyond the basic laws of physics, these substances were harmful by several orders of magnitude.

Consequently, the planet’s entire atmosphere contained an even distribution of extremely minute traces of contamination. As long as ordinary people remained alive, they would slowly accumulate various forms of contamination over the years, whether through breathing, drinking water, or eating food.

There were simply too many types of contamination sources dispersed throughout the air, and the symptoms they produced varied wildly from person to person. Precise statistics were nearly impossible, so the deviation index had become the universal standard of measurement.

Although that sounded terrifying—every breath causing mutation, every moment of life bringing greater strength—the inhabitants of this planet had long since grown accustomed to it. So long as they did not recklessly approach highly contaminated zones or handle contamination sources with their own hands, the contamination produced by ordinary breathing and eating was little different from a chronic illness.

In fact, most ordinary people died suddenly or succumbed to disease before their contamination had time to erupt. It was much like how few animals in nature worried about cancer. Unlike humans, ordinary animals had lifespans too short to wait for cancer cells to spread. They completed their entire lives before that could happen.

Generally speaking, if a Dulings Star native received proper care from childhood, drank clean water, ate healthy food, and followed a regular routine of study and physical training, their deviation index would remain very low, indicating good health.

By contrast, lower-class residents breathed exhaust fumes every day, drank impure water, ate food exposed to all kinds of contamination, and frequently entered highly contaminated zones. Their deviation index consequently rose sharply.

Now consider Yuan Zhu.

He had worked for a long time at an Elemental Steam Factory, receiving close-range exposure to the fumes of elemental steam engines every day. He also worked part-time for Fire Fang, occasionally performing highly contaminated exorcism rituals and using special drugs to poison and hunt goblins.

His deviation index should have been at least six—an ordinary contamination level for a commoner over the age of thirty-five.

Yet the instrument now showed a deviation index of zero.

Yuan Zhu suspected that this was very likely because of the Ordinary Version of the Great Wilderness Immortal Scripture. According to the little sprite, the Immortal Scripture came with a spiritual firewall, and it had indeed blocked mental contamination attacks against him, one point at a time.

He still had not figured out the exact principles governing the Immortal Scripture’s operation, but he had crudely imagined the Ordinary Version as a somewhat weak protective suit, or perhaps a sheet of cling film wrapped around his body.

Other people would have difficulty distinguishing this transparent, skin-tight film. But to Yuan Zhu, this layer of “defense” effectively blocked the viruses in the air—the low-level contamination—and continuously kept him healthy. That was why his deviation index was zero.

Hidden even deeper, the VIP Tiger Demon Template of the Great Wilderness Immortal Scripture stood above the ordinary cling film. It was a plastic suit of armor forged from a contamination source—shadow. It still provided close-range protection, but its strength, defense, and damage output completely crushed those of the Ordinary Version.

To use an inappropriate metaphor, Dulings Star was one enormous India, and everything in its air had long since achieved a balance of filth. Ordinary people had grown accustomed to the ecosystem. They accepted the pollution of the Ganges every day without finding it strange.

But they would not deliberately reach out and play with poop—that would still get them killed on the spot.

When faced with this world’s contamination sources, the Ordinary Immortal Scripture was like wearing cling film and an N95 mask. It blocked the contamination elements from outside and rendered him immune to the myriad laws of the world.

However, he had one option that others did not: he could approach the poop voluntarily without being contaminated.

But the moment he deliberately grabbed it and applied even a little force, he would rupture it, contaminate himself, suffer a severe deviation, and twist into a monster.

The Tiger Demon armor, however, was as tough as plastic. One punch could explode the poop, leaving him untouched by the resulting cause and effect, his body still spotless and pure.

The enemy, meanwhile, would be struck by the splatter, suffer layers of mental contamination, lose all composure, twist and mutate, and transform into a fully grown Feces Beast!

“Your deviation index of zero may also be a beneficial result of this sacrifice,” Old Wang said, still baffled. “It’s strange. So many people have vanished—or died—and whatever they summoned must have been a vicious evil god. Yet not only did you return from the dead, your deviation index also fell to zero. That sounds more like the work of a benevolent god.”

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