His mind went slightly hazy. The instant the answer “spider legs” emerged, Xie Fan shuddered violently. A chill rose from the soles of his feet, making every hair on his body practically stand on end.
Spider legs……
Spider God?!
How had he forgotten?
The evil god in this book was the Spider God!
Thinking about how he had instinctively overlooked this fact all this time, Xie Fan’s scalp went numb.
In a novel called God Worship, the most important character was the evil god. No matter how much the author wanted to maintain an air of mystery, there was no way they would completely conceal the evil god’s identity.
He should have known from the moment he transmigrated into the book that the other party was the Spider God!
Yet somehow, for the past several days, he hadn’t remembered anything about it?
The instinctive terror he had felt upon seeing insects while trying to escape Xican Village flashed through his mind.
Only then did Xie Fan realize that his instincts had already been warning him back then.
Warning him……
Stay away from insects.
His body went rigid.
Xie Fan could even hear his own heartbeat until Xiao Yao turned toward him after eating several spoonfuls of apricot jam.
“Brother A-Xie, what are you thinking about?”
“You don’t look very well?”
The little girl in dark-blue cloth clothes put down her spoon in confusion.
Xie Fan came back to his senses. Looking into Xiao Yao’s concerned eyes, he forcibly suppressed his trembling.
“It’s nothing.”
“I just suddenly remembered something.”
“By the way, did you lock the door to your main room?” Xie Fan asked casually, as though it were nothing unusual.
Xiao Yao nodded without the slightest concern.
“Of course I locked it. Those outsiders don’t know how to behave, you know.”
“System, inside the main room…… has the Spider God always been enshrined there?” Xie Fan asked with difficulty.
He remembered the last time he had explored his main room, only to find absolutely nothing.
There was definitely something wrong with his memories.
Or rather……
What he had seen at the time had been completely fake!
Everyone in Xican Village worshipped the Spider God. As one of Xican Village’s native residents, how could the original owner possibly not have enshrined it?
Which meant that the room directly opposite his bamboo bed actually…… contained something.
Xie Fan swallowed.
He felt indescribably terrified, especially when he thought about how he had slept beside that room almost every night without noticing anything at all!
The air fell silent for an instant.
Then he heard the system’s calm voice.
“Every household in Xican Village enshrines the deity.”
The unsurprising answer shattered his final shred of hope.
Xie Fan clenched his hand.
When Xiao Yao asked whether he had locked his own door properly, he answered in a daze, “I locked it.”
His expression was slightly blank.
Even he didn’t know how he had managed to say those words.
Still, he really had kept that room locked all this time.
Xie Fan took a deep breath and forced himself to pull himself together.
“Xiao Yao, take your time eating.”
“I have something to do, so I’m heading back.”
He really!
Really couldn’t stay here any longer.
“Okay, Brother A-Xie. Be careful on your way back.”
Although she didn’t know what had happened, Xiao Yao obediently waved at him. Just as Xie Fan turned to leave, she suddenly reminded him:
“Right, Brother A-Xie, you’d better not go near the village chief’s house today. Brother A-Qi’s gotten even sicker. It’s really contagious.”
With that, Xiao Yao skipped away.
Xie Fan, however, suddenly stopped.
Contagious?
He frowned slightly.
But the fleeting thought was quickly replaced by something else.
Xie Fan took a deep breath, returned home, and yanked open the door to the main room.
A strangely familiar yet unfamiliar altar appeared before him, leaving him with an almost disorienting sensation.
Because this time——it was no longer empty.
Instead, enshrined upon it was a bizarre statue shaped like a human, with long curling hair and eight spider legs extending from its back.
Staring at the sinister statue before him, Xie Fan went slightly dazed.
For an instant, it was as though his mind had suffered some kind of impact. No matter how hard he tried, he simply couldn’t make out the statue’s facial features.
Hallucinations flickered repeatedly before his eyes.
Xie Fan barely managed to keep himself from collapsing. Supporting himself against the doorframe, he gasped for breath, unable to tell whether he couldn’t see the statue’s face because of his prosopagnosia, or because the statue itself simply could not be clearly perceived……
But there was at least some good news.
At least now he knew that the deity worshipped by this village was the Spider God, didn’t he?
Recalling the original novel’s descriptions of the Spider God, Xie Fan took a step backward.
Suddenly, he began to suspect that A-Qi’s illness…… might not have been an accident.
……
The doors of the village chief’s house remained tightly shut.
Two entire days had passed, and not once had they opened.
Even the tour group found it strange.
“Could it actually be some infectious disease?” He Cheng couldn’t help asking.
At first, he had assumed the villagers were making a mountain out of a molehill and deliberately ostracizing their group of tourists. But this was already the second day.
Wasn’t keeping every door and window sealed a little excessive?
“Do you guys think there’s actually someone inside?”
He Cheng held a bowl of insect rice, unable to muster any appetite.
Tan Qingxian found it strange as well.
A-Qi was the village chief’s nephew, after all, and he seemed to hold considerable authority within the village. Yet he had simply been sealed inside, and nobody had raised a single objection?
The villagers were actually behaving as though……
Everything was perfectly normal.
The insect rice in his hands tasted bland.
Tan Qingxian took a bite and glanced toward the woman working in the woodshed behind them.
The woman had probably overheard their conversation. She gave them a strange look but said nothing. After finishing what she was doing, she hurriedly shut the wooden door behind the partition, clearly unwilling to have any contact with them.
He Cheng: ……
“They really do think we’re the plague?”
Shen Xun was helpless too.
“If the village chief hadn’t given them instructions, they probably wouldn’t even be willing to cook for us.”
When the woman had brought out their food earlier, she had stayed several meters away from them the entire time, as though terrified of accidentally touching them.
Truthfully, these wealthy young masters, all favored sons of heaven back in the city, had never been treated like this before.
Pei Jing remained silent.
However, when Shen Xun shook his head and served himself a second bowl of wild vegetables, Pei Jing gave him another look.
Wild vegetables.
For three consecutive days.
No matter how reluctant Shen Xun was to waste food, that was getting difficult to explain.
Besides……
Shen Xun wasn’t normally that frugal.
Pei Jing’s expression cooled slightly as he silently observed him.
Yet aside from his newfound fondness for wild vegetables, there was nothing else unusual about Shen Xun.
In fact, he seemed exceptionally normal. Even the cold that had left him weak several days ago had completely disappeared.
Pei Jing frowned slightly.
Only after watching Shen Xun finish eating and appear to remember something, restraining himself and stopping, did Pei Jing suddenly say, “Eating wild vegetables continuously isn’t good for your stomach.”
Wild vegetables weren’t exactly easy to digest.
Hearing him speak, Tan Qingxian only then realized that Shen Xun had already eaten far too much wild mustard over the past few days.
His probing gaze turned toward him.
Shen Xun froze for an instant.
Under the gazes of several friends, he came back to himself and smiled slightly.
“My stomach really has been a little uncomfortable. Maybe compared to insect rice, I just find wild vegetables easier to accept.”
Since the village’s diet was so monotonous, nobody suspected anything for the moment.
After all, when the choices every day were either insects or grass, it wasn’t unreasonable for Shen Xun to prefer the grass.
“You should still eat some insects this afternoon.”
He Cheng delivered his conclusion and rubbed his forehead.
He had suffered from insomnia again last night.
Every time he closed his eyes, he heard “bang, bang, bang,” making it impossible to sleep properly the entire night.
This time there had been no footsteps.
Instead, it sounded as though someone were repeatedly slamming into a wall, each impact more violent than the last.
He Cheng couldn’t even be bothered asking.
He already knew no one else had heard it.
He took a sip of the bitter, astringent tea and frowned slightly.
He had even started wondering whether A-Qi next door had been smashing himself against the wall.
But how could that be possible?
A normal person would have died long ago from hitting a wall that violently.
It was probably just another hallucination caused by his nightmares.
He Cheng exhaled and stood up.
After finishing their meal, the group returned to the guesthouse.
Shen Xun had originally planned to organize the paints he had brought along this time. But after opening his backpack, he kept feeling as though something was missing.
Only after rummaging around for quite a while did he remember.
Was it……
The painting from last night?
“The painting I made at the foot of the mountain last night is gone.”
He Cheng thought back.
“Maybe you forgot to pick it up when we left yesterday evening. If you really want it, we can go look for it later.”
“Forget it. It was only a painting.”
Shen Xun came back to himself and shook his head.
For some reason, even though he had thoroughly enjoyed painting it last night, now that he thought about it, he inexplicably didn’t like it very much anymore.
If it was lost, then so be it.
As soon as he finished speaking, he looked outside.
“It looks like it’s going to rain later. We’d better stay inside today.”
The weather outside really was gradually changing.
Nothing had seemed unusual that morning, but by noon, dark clouds had gathered overhead.
Xie Fan sat on his bamboo bed, staring at the gloomy sky.
He even began to wonder:
Was it really only…… clouds blocking the sky?
Or was it something else?
His head throbbed in waves, accompanied by a heavy sense of vertigo.
The spider legs encircling the entire village on the drawing seemed to merge with the dark clouds overhead.
Xie Fan’s breathing quickened.
Then he heard the system’s inexplicable voice beside his ear.
“You should rest.”
After such drastic emotional swings and prolonged mental tension, Xie Fan now looked somewhat overstimulated.
From the “system’s” perspective, he resembled a frightened cat with all its fur standing on end.
Far too pitiful.
Xie Fan shook his head, slightly dazed.
Talking to the “system” seemed to be the only way he could remain clear-headed.
He didn’t dare rest.
He didn’t dare fall asleep.
He was afraid that when he woke up……
He would become a villager like Zhang Hai.
That fear had been planted in him the instant he saw a villager turn into wood.
Now it had finally erupted.
Fuck!
He absolutely!
Absolutely refused to turn into a wooden puppet!
He couldn’t keep being passive.
The facts had proven that playing dead wouldn’t keep him alive in this village.
After all, that evil god seemed to be silently eroding the entire village. Even A-Qi had fallen victim to it.
The village chief’s nephew had more scenes in the original novel than Xie Fan did. He could at least be considered a supporting male character.
Yet now he was……
Sick?
Remembering Xiao Yao’s “warning,” Xie Fan increasingly felt that the more the villagers forbade anyone from seeing A-Qi, the more necessary it was to go see him.
“We should go find A-Qi while I’m still clear-headed.”
He seemed to hear a sigh beside his ear.
Xie Fan received no response, but he knew the system was there.
The system was always there……
This remote mountain village still used old-fashioned oil-paper umbrellas.
The umbrella felt heavy in his hand, considerably heavier than the modern umbrellas sold outside.
The moment Xie Fan picked it up, his wrist began to ache slightly.
He took a deep breath, opened the umbrella, and stepped outside.
What he failed to notice was that the instant the oil-paper umbrella opened, its entire canopy was covered in densely packed spiders.
All of those spiders opened their eyes simultaneously.
Silently staring at him.
Thunder roared outside.
A bolt of lightning flashed, and sure enough, it wasn’t long before rain began to fall.
This was Xie Fan’s first time going outside alone in the rain.
Truthfully, he was still somewhat frightened.
Especially when the sky became completely dark and candles began appearing in the windows of every household.
White candles burned eerily.
The sight sent chills down his spine.
Xie Fan had always suspected that the candles served some particular purpose.
Now that he remembered the evil god in this book was the Spider God, he finally came up with a theory:
Spiderwebs feared fire.
The candles were lit to prevent the Spider God’s corruption.
Zhang Hai hadn’t had a candle last time, which was why he had been corrupted.
Xie Fan breathed out softly and tightened his grip on the white candle in his hand.
Then another doubt suddenly occurred to him.
If Zhang Hai had gotten into trouble because the protagonist group had taken away his candle, then……
What about A-Qi?
Had he also been……
Corrupted?
Braving the rain, Xie Fan reached the village chief’s house.
The moment he looked up, he saw that the doors and windows had been nailed shut.
From a distance, they seemed to have been sealed completely.
But when he approached, he discovered that one of the windows at the back was slightly loose.
Had the village chief deliberately left it that way?
A-Qi was his own nephew, after all.
Surely he wouldn’t genuinely seal him inside with no way out.
Xie Fan instinctively made this guess and tentatively tried prying open the window.
Unexpectedly, it actually opened?!
Inside a wooden room on the side of the first floor:
A-Qi sat silently on a chair, leaning against the wall with his head lowered.
The ominous feeling in Xie Fan’s heart grew increasingly intense.
After climbing through the window, he tentatively called out, “A-Qi.”
There was no response.
Exactly the same as last time!
The person sitting on the chair opposite him resembled a puppet, utterly motionless.
Xie Fan stood frozen for a long while.
Finally, with a trembling hand, he brought the candle closer.
And sure enough, he saw——
A wooden face without any features.
There was an explosive roar inside his mind.
Xie Fan instinctively stumbled backward.
“A-Qi…… A-Qi turned into a wooden puppet too.”
“Did the Spider God corrupt this place?”
For a moment, Xie Fan didn’t even know whom he was asking.
His thoughts became slightly hazy.
He suspected that he was hallucinating again.
Because he saw A-Qi, who had turned into a wooden puppet, raise his head and silently look at him.
Xie Fan backed away——
Straight into a cold embrace.
Somewhere beyond Xie Fan’s sight, a tall young man with honey-colored eyes leaned down slightly.
Facing A-Qi directly, he smiled.
“But these were only puppets to begin with.”
A transmigrator from another dimension.
The deity tilted its head with a beaming smile and asked:
“Why couldn’t it be you who is corrupting the deity?”
Giving puppets autonomous consciousness.
Making the deity, the instant it sensed your existence, suddenly develop an overwhelming——mating urge.