Remote, dilapidated, and rarely passed by.
Even Will, who rarely moved about in the city, felt something was amiss, but he desperately wanted to finish this final task before their departure, so he forced down the unease in his heart.
Seeming to notice Will's nervousness, the man who brought him here took a bottle of wine from a drawer in the room and poured two glasses.
"I asked the boss to go get the stuff, it'll take about ten minutes. These are materials stolen and resold by clerks or apprentices from other shops, so their origins aren't exactly glorious. We can't display them openly; hope you don't mind."
Saying this, he raised the wooden cup and drained the wine.
Will nodded and also took a small sip.
After the wine hit his stomach, the other party seemed to open up, chatting about everything from the weather to the current situation, from other people to himself.
He spoke of his own helplessness: without a smart brain, he couldn't become a scholar or an apothecary.
Nor did he have extraordinary talent; his level couldn't go up, so he couldn't become an adventurer or join the army.
He could only do some gray-market business in the city. It looked highly profitable, but there were few customers, and after everyone above and below took their cut, not much reached his own hands.
Listening to his story, Will also nodded, somewhat empathizing with him.
When he was young, he had also fantasized about becoming a powerful mage or a great warrior. If it wasn't for his lack of talent, how could he have been a farmer for half his life?
Seeing that Will agreed with him, the man suddenly asked: "Do you... believe in reincarnation?"
The slightly tipsy Will pursed his lips: "You mean the soul's cycle of reincarnation after death, being born again?"
"Yeah, some churches can control the afterlife. Don't you want to become a genius in your next life?"
However, Will's reaction was flat as he shook his head: "I don't know about all that, but even if there are souls and rebirth, there definitely wouldn't be any memories of this life left, right? Otherwise, those heroes and nobles of the past would all jump out and claim they are 'so-and-so'. Since they haven't, that means memories can't be retained. Without memories, is that person still themselves?"
"Why not? Your soul is still this soul!" The man spoke with some agitation, unconsciously clenching his fists.
The drunk Will didn't notice anything wrong with him, muttering to himself: "Anyway, I don't think so. Believing in that, you might as well believe in Puchis! They can let us live happily and joyfully in this life! As for the afterlife or whatever, although the doctrines of the Church of Mushroom also say believing in Puchis grants eternal life or something, I still only care about this life... hic..."
After saying this, the other side suddenly fell silent. This finally made Will realize something was wrong.
He sobered up by half in an instant, looking across with a guilty conscience: "It's... been over ten minutes already, is the boss still not here?"
The man stood up, making a sound through gritted teeth: "An incurable heretic!"
"You... what are you going to do?" Will backed away, only to be tripped by clutter underfoot.
And the person in front of him drew a longsword from his sleeve.
Will didn't know how such a long sword was hidden in there; there had been no trace of it beforehand.
Of course, this might also be because he simply hadn't noticed. Ultimately, he was just a former farmer with little worldly experience.
"H-help!" He shouted for help loudly while retreating.
"Screaming is useless." The cultist opposite wasn't in a hurry at all. A soundproofing magic array had long been set up around this room.
Simple yet effective, more than enough to deal with an ordinary person like Will.
He targeted Will for a reason: an unfamiliar face with a severed arm, highly likely a refugee from outside.
This kind of person had the highest probability of being recruited into the church. If that failed, they could be used as a sacrifice; their disappearance would highly likely not attract any attention.
Will, backed into a corner, suddenly burst with courage under his will to survive and lunged forward to counterattack.
However, although this cultist wasn't an expert, he wasn't someone the one-armed Will could defeat either. Instead, during the struggle, the longsword accidentally pierced through Will's heart.
Seeing this, the cultist roared angrily: "Damn it! Resist, resist for what? I was going to send you into the Goddess's embrace, but you just had to resist. Now that you're going to die just like this, all my effort was for nothing!"
He was indeed angry. The sacrifice ritual required living sacrifices; if they were dead, the ritual couldn't be held.
However, Will could no longer feel his anger. He stared lifelessly at the sword piercing his chest, his thoughts scattering.
He had finally experienced happiness with such difficulty, had finally found something he wanted to do, yet he never expected the end of his journey to come so suddenly.
What a pity.
Carrying regret and unwillingness, Will closed his eyes forever.
...
The cultist was still cursing to himself, failing to notice that the mycelium, which had originally just been growing in the cracks of the wall, was spreading at an extremely fast speed, even emitting rustling sounds similar to squirming.
The Church of Mushroom, as Lin Jun's faith experiment project, naturally received Lin Jun's attention.
That initiation ritual indeed didn't contain any magical elements, but within the mycelial network, Lin Jun would add all officially initiated members to the Level 3 observation list.
The disappearance of an observation subject naturally caught Lin Jun's attention.
Cultists of the Hand of Passage, huh...
They were just like cockroaches. Although he had cleared them out as much as possible, and figures of them gathering and moving about indeed couldn't be seen on the fungal mats anymore.
But in the corners of such cities, there would always be one or two slipping through the net, occasionally causing some trouble.
Feeling something slippery underfoot, the cultist finally noticed the anomaly and looked down, only to see a floor covered in mycelium.
In his horrified gaze, the fungal mat was still continuing to spread.
Very soon, it climbed onto Will's corpse, decomposing the body at a speed visible to the naked eye. In just a dozen seconds or so, only a skeleton and clothes were left.
He wanted to retreat outside, but found that the doors and windows had also been sealed by mycelium at some unknown time.
What was more fatal was that on the fungal mat, the rudimentary forms of Puchis were bulging up one by one.
"What... what exactly is going on?"
Plop—
From the wall, a tattered voice Puchi dropped down first, its terrifying and sticky voice echoing in the small, enclosed room:
"Cute heretic, you can't go to the Death God's divine kingdom anymore. But I have another place perfectly suited for you."
"The packaging process might hurt a little, so struggle and scream to your heart's content!"
"After all, you set up a soundproofing magic array, didn't you?"
Poof— Poof—
Puchis landed one after another. Even as the cultist brandished his longsword to hack and slash at them, they unhurriedly and slowly surrounded him.
"What are you? Wait, no, no! Ahhhhhhh—"
Outside the house, it was pitch quiet. The effect of the soundproofing magic array was indeed very good.
...
The two companions who were purchasing together followed the last perception of the believer in the mycelial network and found Will's skeleton.
In the remote, empty house, they didn't find any clues.
Grieved and furious, the two could only go back first to seek help from Julia and the Mushroom Envoy.
Meanwhile, in the Mushroom Garden, a new mycelial cocoon was gradually taking shape.
(End of Chapter)
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