Starting to Gain Experience from Push-Ups Chapter 1394 - 673: Land of Hungry Ghosts, Zombie Clan (Part 2)

Supervisor Wu straightened his back, his lips opening and closing as he recited in a cadence that rose and fell:

"When the Netherworld first opened, the Nine Springs gathered baleful qi. Yu Dynasty’s High General, the General’s divine might. Devouring the essence of sun and moon, seizing the creation of heaven and earth. Commanding ghost soldiers, undying and indestructible... Now with Pure Yang Blood, I summon our King, Jiang Chen, to break through the earth and return once more!"

As the words of his prayer drifted out, that deathly pale full moon hanging in midair suddenly underwent a faint, eerie change.

The edge of the moon looked as if it had been slit open by some invisible sharp blade.

A smear of dark red shadow, like seeping fresh blood, began to slowly spread along the outline of the moon.

In just a few minutes, the once bright moonlight was completely devoured.

The entire full moon turned into a dark red blood sphere hanging in the night sky.

The red moon hung high.

The light spilled on the ground shifted from ghastly white to an even more unnerving dark red.

The temperature in the air dropped rapidly,

Xu Hao shuddered, every hair on his body standing on end.

The breath he exhaled instantly condensed into white mist before him, and even his eyelashes were coated with a thin layer of tiny ice crystals.

It felt like his whole body had fallen into an ice pit.

Along with the shift in moonlight, thick gray-black fog began to gush up from the ground in the ancestral hall’s courtyard.

This fog was extremely viscous; it did not disperse with the wind, but clung to the base of the walls, flowing along the drainage channels and rapidly spreading in all directions.

The mist gathered higher and higher, like layers of dark clouds closing together above the ancestral hall’s courtyard

eventually forming a Barrier like an enormous overturned sea bowl, completely shrouding the entire ancestral hall and even the whole Ancient Locust Village.

Supervisor Wu finished reciting the prayer, put away the sheepskin scroll, and stepped over to the well platform.

Then he reached to his waist and drew out a bronze dagger of ancient design.

The dagger’s surface was covered in green patina, and at the guard there was a carved head of an Evil Ghost with a ferocious face.

He held the blade up with both hands, presenting the dagger to Qian Dongming, who stood beside him.

Qian Dongming, breathing raggedly, threw away his cane and stretched out his age-spotted hands, snatching the bronze dagger.

Without the slightest hesitation, he pressed the sharp edge against the index finger of his left hand and slashed hard.

The pad of his finger split open, and dark red blood seeped out.

Gritting his teeth against the pain, he held the bleeding finger over the black well, letting several drops of fresh blood fall into the bottomless shaft.

Staring unblinking for a few seconds, he suddenly whirled around to face the villagers kneeling on the ground.

"Great King! Please accept the tribute of your loyal servant!"

Qian Dongming shouted hoarsely, using every ounce of strength in his body.

The moment his voice fell, the twelve sturdy men in the innermost circle moved in unison.

They stood up in perfect sync and walked straight to Xu Hao.

Twelve cold, merciless gazes fell on Xu Hao all at once.

The skin on Xu Hao’s scalp prickled, and the muscles in his arms tightened abruptly.

This formation clearly meant they were going to cut him open and bleed him.

But he’d been a tough slab of meat since birth; the more desperate the situation, the more he had to run his mouth.

So he suddenly craned his neck forward and shouted curses at the men closing in:

"Come on then, you half-dead bastards! If I so much as blink today, I’ll admit I’m your damn pet!"

"If you’ve got the guts, go straight for my heart—if I even frown, I’ll take your surname!"

His curses rang loudly through the empty, dark ancestral hall.

The twelve burly men, however, turned a deaf ear and walked right past him, splitting into two lines beside the wooden pillars to the left and right.

Xu Hao froze for a moment and forcibly swallowed the rest of his cursing halfway down his throat.

Their targets were clearly that corpse stitched up with black thread, and another village guard with a vacant expression.

The twelve men stretched out their rigid hands, each grabbing the four limbs, heads, and torsos of the two village guards.

Xu Hao’s pupils shrank sharply, and his stomach lurched like a storm-tossed sea.

He watched as those men, without using any tools, relied solely on their fingers as they exerted force all at once.

Accompanied by the sound of muscles tearing and bones snapping crisp and clean, the two village guards were actually ripped into a dozen chunks of flesh by sheer brute force.

Black blood and fragments of viscera splattered all over the floor.

The men, faces expressionless, held up the severed limbs in their hands, walked to the edge of the great black well, and one after another tossed the chunks of flesh in.

"Gulug."

Chunks of flesh fell into the water, and from the bottom of the well came an immediate burst of dense, gluttonous chewing.

"Creak... gurgle..."

The sound was more than ten times louder than last night.

It was as if tens of thousands of fanged mouths were fighting over this morsel in the deepest depths of the darkness.

Or perhaps, down there lay the Yellow Springs Road together with the Underworld itself, with countless starving ghosts lurking within.

The crisp crack of bones being chewed was amplified as it traveled up the shaft, faintly echoing within the dark red Barrier.

The twelve men retreated to their original positions and knelt back down on the ground.

The scene that followed completely shattered Xu Hao’s baseline understanding of what humans were capable of.

The twelve of them raised their hands at the same time, and drove ten pitch-black, razor‑sharp fingernails viciously into the arteries on the sides of their own necks.

They showed not a shred of hesitation; with a sudden outward tug of both hands, flesh and skin were torn open.

Dark red blood instantly sprayed out like a high‑pressure hose.

But the eerie thing was, this blood did not splatter at random. Instead, as though drawn by some invisible force, it fell into the stone grooves around the well platform—those patterns usually buried beneath the dirt.

The blood flowed rapidly along the grooves, sketching out an enormous and fiendishly complex Array diagram.

The men in the first ring finished their sacrifice, yet they did not die; from their wounds surged countless tiny buds of flesh.

These fleshy sprouts intertwined and tangled with one another, and in just a few breaths, the torn skin and muscle knit back together.

Aside from their faces turning even more deathly pale, they moved as freely as ever, tacitly stepping half a pace back.

The second ring stepped forward at once, following in their companions’ footprints, repeating the same self‑mutilating act.

Fresh blood poured continuously into the Array.

Under the dark red moonlight, the Array on the ground began to shine with a strange, blood‑colored radiance.

Qian Dongming knelt at the edge of the Array, raising the bronze dagger high above his head, his mouth rapidly chanting some obscure, bizarrely‑syllabled Spell.

Supervisor Wu also knelt at his side, both hands pressed flat to the ground, his forehead tightly pressed to the icy stone slabs.

The ancestral hall was saturated with the thick stench of blood and the sounds of tearing flesh.

Xu Hao clenched his fists so hard his nails dug into the skin of his palms, trying to use the pain to keep himself calm.

He stared fixedly at that dark well, from which red light ceaselessly poured.

Something unspeakably evil seemed to be gestating inside.

As the blood kept pouring in, the chewing from the bottom of the well gradually subsided.

In its place came a series of extremely heavy, powerful thuds.

"Thump."

"Thump."

The sound did not travel through the air; it came up through the underground rock layers, directly shaking Xu Hao’s eardrums and heart.

It felt like a colossal heart that had slept for a thousand years, which, after drinking its fill of fresh blood, was finally beginning its first forceful beat.

The bluestone slabs around the well began to shudder violently, tiny pebbles jittering restlessly across the floor.

The solid wood pillar binding Xu Hao creaked under the strain, its wooden fibers snapping one after another in the tremors.

An aura unimaginably ancient, unimaginably rotten, yet suffocatingly terrifying, erupted like a volcano from the bottom of that great dark well, shooting straight toward the sky.

Beneath this crushing pressure, Xu Hao felt like an ant facing some primordial beast; even drawing breath became excruciatingly difficult.

The blood coursing through his veins actually stalled for a brief moment under the weight of that aura.

"King... our great king of the Zombie Clan!"

Qian Dongming and Supervisor Wu prostrated themselves on the ground, their bodies trembling violently with extreme ecstasy as they howled fanatically from their throats.

All the surrounding village guards and villagers pressed their heads deep into the ground, their bodies shivering uncontrollably.

At the mouth of the great dark well, the dark red glow flared to a blinding peak.

Thick blood, like boiling lava, slowly overflowed from the rim of the well.

A withered, gigantic, bluish‑gray hand suddenly thrust out from the blood.

Five pitch‑black nails, each half a foot long, like five sharp short swords, clamped savagely into the bluestone at the edge of the well platform.

Szzzz—

The surface of the bluestone was instantly corroded into five deep grooves, belching acrid white smoke.

Jiang Chen.

The King of Ghouls, who had slept in the long river of history, was finally about to crawl out.