I fabricated myths to guide the revival of spiritual energy.

Before the morning mist had completely dissipated, nine figures dressed in coarse linen clothes, accompanied by a lame young hunter, silently walked down the mountain path where the weeds reached their waists.

The further you go, the clearer the outline of this decaying world becomes, and the more oppressive it feels.

Vast swathes of fields lay barren, with only a few still cultivated plots. Instead of scarecrows to scare away birds, these fields contained eerie skeletons propped up by wooden sticks, adorned with faded yellow talismans and tattered red cloth strips. Scattered in the roadside ditches were the cleanly gnawed bones of livestock, bearing bite marks clearly not those of normal wild animals.

As he passed the entrance to a village, Meng Changlu saw a small earth god temple.

That place, which should have been a sanctuary for the local deities, now had its incense burner upside down on the ground, its ash scattered clean. The face of the deity was covered tightly with a dirty red cloth, as if the villagers no longer prayed for the gods' attention, but instead feared being seen by them.

When the early-rising farmers saw this group of strangers from afar, they were as if they had seen a ghost. They immediately dropped their hoes and ran back into their houses, slamming the wooden door shut. They didn't dare to look back even once.

This almost pathological panic speaks volumes about the breakdown of religious order and the widespread fear in this land, even more so than the abandoned mountain temple.

Zhou Aman limped ahead, leading the way. He seemed quite used to this scene, but lowered his voice and cautiously turned back to warn, "My benefactors, when we get to the county, do not ask about the 'Night Crying Case,' and do not mention the Demon Suppression Division. The county magistrate has given a strict order: anyone who spreads rumors will be arrested and imprisoned as a 'troublemaker.'"

Silence fell upon the crowd. In a place where order has been lost, fear often drives people mad more easily than the demons themselves.

……

Zhou Aman's home was not in Huai'an County, but in a dilapidated shantytown right next to a mass grave outside the city.

Pushing open the rickety wooden door, a strong smell of herbs mixed with a musty, chilly odor rushed out. Cracks covered the earthen walls, and the stove was cold, clearly having not been used for several days.

In the cramped inner room, on the earthen kang (heated brick bed), lay a middle-aged woman with a withered face. She coughed violently, each cough accompanied by streaks of dark red blood, her face a lifeless, ashen gray, as if only a faint ember of life remained.

"Mother! I'm back! I've found the White Bone Grass!"

Zhou Aman scrambled to the front of the kang (a heated brick bed), frantically pulling out the herb he had risked his life for from his bosom. But when he tried to feed it to his mother, he found that she was so weak that she couldn't even open her mouth, let alone swallow.

Zhou Aman was so anxious that tears streamed down his face, his hands covered in mud smearing streaks on the woman's face: "Mother, swallow it... don't scare Aman..."

"Don't touch her."

Lin Xiaolu, carrying a worn-out medicine box, quietly walked to the front of the kang (a heated brick bed). She extended two fingers and gently placed them on the woman's withered wrist.

The pulse was extremely erratic, and the patient's life force was almost gone. But this was not ordinary tuberculosis.

Lin Xiaolu frowned almost imperceptibly. She felt an extremely cold, damp aura, carrying the smell of rotten incense, creeping into the woman's respiratory tract and settling deep within her lungs.

"She has been staying in this place with extremely heavy yin energy for a long time, and the evil energy has entered her body, causing her lungs to wither and decay." Lin Xiaolu quickly made a judgment. "The white bone herb is too potent. Her current body cannot withstand it. If she eats it, she will die on the spot."

Upon hearing this, Zhou Aman collapsed to her knees: "Then... what do we do? Is my mother beyond saving?"

"Go boil a pot of water," Lin Xiaolu instructed the physician Tang Qinghe.

Tang Qinghe immediately and nimbly went to the courtyard to start a fire. Lin Xiaolu took out several packets of common herbs that she had picked casually in the mountains from the medicine box. While grinding the herbs, she silently kneaded a tiny, extremely diluted trace of Yi Wood spiritual power into the powder.

She mixed the medicinal powder infused with the spiritual energy of the Wood element into a warm paste and carefully applied it to the woman's chest and several key acupoints. At the same time, she used a seemingly ordinary acupuncture technique to slowly guide the wisp of Wood spiritual energy to neutralize the Yin energy in the woman's lung meridians.

Half an hour later.

The woman's violent coughing gradually subsided, and a faint trace of color returned to her previously ashen face. Although she remained unconscious, her breathing had become much more stable, and her fingertips had regained some warmth.

The effect was obvious yet reasonable, like a highly skilled mortal doctor who pulled a person back from the brink of death.

"Thump."

Zhou Aman knelt heavily on the ground and kowtowed to Lin Xiaolu: "Benefactor! Living Bodhisattva! I, Zhou Aman, will serve you like a slave for the rest of my life..."

Lin Xiaolu reached out and supported his arm, helping him up. Her voice was gentle but carried a hint of warning: "Don't make a sound. We're just a small merchant caravan fleeing from another state, and I'm just a traveling doctor who knows a little about traditional Chinese medicine. Understand?"

Although Zhou Aman was young, he had already become quite shrewd and worldly-wise through his experiences. He glanced at the nine distinguished-looking but poorly dressed strangers and immediately nodded vigorously: "Understood! You are a caravan passing through, seeking lodging!"

Han Zhao and Meng Changlu exchanged a glance; they had secured this local foothold.

……

After settling Zhou's mother in, the team quickly made adjustments to their disguises based on the fabricated identities.

They were out-of-state caravans that claimed they had encountered evil spirits on the road, lost most of their goods, and were left with only a few boxes of herbs and cloth.

Lin Xiaolu naturally became the traveling female doctor leading the group, with Tang Qinghe as her medicine boy; Meng Changlu, waving a tattered paper fan, served as the caravan's accountant; Xie Wujiu's perpetually pale face was slightly modified by Meng Changlu with a few strokes of plaster, transforming him into a taciturn, sickly-looking old accountant.

Xu Chenzhou and Han Zhao carried swords wrapped in tattered cloth, disguised as martial arts guards; while Luo Qi carried a carrying pole full of empty wooden boxes, becoming a laborer. Lu Yan and Fang Bai blended in among them, inconspicuous.

With everything ready, the nine people followed Zhou Aman toward the city gate of Huai'an County.

Despite being called a city gate, it was so dilapidated that it was worse than a village gate. The iron-clad city gate was half-open, with no regular soldiers guarding it. Only two bailiffs dressed in shabby yamen uniforms and with rusty knives at their waists sat on the stone stools at the entrance.

Upon seeing a caravan of merchants from out of town entering the city, the two constables didn't even raise their eyelids, but lazily stretched out a hand: "Entry fee. Ten coins per person. Double the amount for those carrying goods."

Meng Changlu pulled out a piece of silver that he had prepared beforehand, which was pitted and dented by his teeth, and handed it over with a bow and scrape: "Officer, you've worked hard. We're fleeing from Qingzhou Prefecture. The animals in the mountains have almost destroyed all our goods. Please be lenient."

The constable weighed the loose silver in his hand, wiped it on his clothes, and stuffed it into his pocket.

He glanced at the crowd with a numb, almost indifferent look, then waved wearily. "Go inside. Find an inn to stay in yourselves. Remember, lock the doors and windows before dark, and don't open the door no matter what noise you hear or who knocks."

There was no hint of well-intentioned advice in his tone; instead, it conveyed a numb indifference that was nothing new.

Upon entering the city, the scene in Huai'an County evoked a profound and unsettling feeling.

Despite it being daytime, there were very few pedestrians on the street. Everyone was hurrying along, heads down, hugging the walls. The shops on both sides were half-open, and even those that were open had shopkeepers with worried expressions.

Almost every household had faded yellow talismans pasted on their doorframes and oddly shaped peach wood branches hanging from them. Even some steamed bun stalls had a bowl of undercooked rice that hadn't been lit with incense.

In stark contrast, several paper money shops on the street corner were not only open, but doing exceptionally good business. The shop assistants were sweating profusely as they made paper figures and folded gold ingots, and carts loaded with cheap yellow paper kept coming and going.

As he passed a tavern with its door half-open, Meng Changlu, with his extraordinary hearing, caught the extremely low voices of two patrons inside:

"Have you heard? Last night, another family from Old Li's house in the north of the city... was wiped out."

"What a tragedy... I heard that Old Li's wife got up in the middle of the night and heard someone calling her name outside the door. She was still half asleep when she went to open the door... As a result, when the neighbors went to check this morning, all five members of the family were gone, and the house was full of water."

Han Zhao's eyes flickered, but he didn't let the group stop and continued walking forward.

Led by Zhou Aman, they passed through a secluded street in the west of the city.

At the end of the street stood a large, blue-brick building, much taller than the surrounding houses. But the building looked unusually desolate, with peeling red paint on the gate and a crooked plaque, on which the words "Huai'an County Branch Office of the Demon Suppression Division" could be barely made out.

Two intersecting seals were affixed to the gate; the seals were old, blackened, and covered in dust.

As Xie Wujiu, disguised as an old servant, passed by the empty government office, the paper doll hidden in his sleeve trembled violently, and the small seal of the underworld placed close to his body emitted an extremely chilling sensation.

Lin Xiaolu, who was walking ahead, also paused for a moment. She keenly sensed that although the old trees near this empty government office looked lush and leafy, their internal vitality had long since withered away, like a dried-up corpse with its internal organs removed and only a layer of skin remaining.

"Don't stop," Han Zhao whispered a reminder.

The group didn't go inside to investigate, but silently etched the location into their minds. The evacuation of the Demon Suppression Division was definitely not an ordinary relocation; this sealed-off, empty office might very well hold crucial clues about the origin of the "Night Crying Case."

Continuing forward, a faint, nauseating stench of decay wafted from the south of the city. That was the location of the mortuary.

Just then, a funeral was being held at the door of a house not far ahead.

Strangely, a thin-skinned coffin sat in the courtyard, surrounded by seven or eight family members dressed in mourning clothes, but there wasn't a sound of crying in the entire courtyard. The family members mechanically threw paper money into the brazier, their faces flushed red, tears streaming down their faces, but they bit their lips hard, not daring to utter a sob.

"In Huai'an County, you can't cry at night, and you don't dare cry out loud during the day either," Zhou Aman explained in a low voice, "for fear of summoning 'her' back."

"Damn the county magistrate! Damn the Demon Suppression Division!"

Suddenly, a drunkard rushed out from the street corner, carrying a broken wine bottle, and started cursing wildly, "The officials ran away, the demon-suppressing guys ran away! Leaving us here to die! Knock on the door! Come knock on my door tonight if you dare!"

Before his curses had even finished, several fierce-looking constables rushed forward, kicked him to the ground, stuffed a rag into his mouth, and dragged him towards the county government office like a dead dog.

The surrounding people quickly moved aside, heads down, as if they hadn't seen anything.

Xu Chenzhou tightened his grip on the sword, but Han Zhao pressed it down: "Let's see first."

……

On the distant far side of the moon, before the star gate.

Lu Yan used the boundary markers and a clandestine, extremely low-power band to transmit his first intelligence back to Earth.

On the screen at the Guanghan base, a few extremely simple lines of code appeared.

Wang Mingyuan stared at the deciphered text, his fingers clenched tightly:

Nine people survived. They have entered the city. They have not been exposed. The ruins of the Demon Suppression Bureau have been discovered. The nighttime rules appear to be related to crying, knocking on doors, and wet footprints.

He couldn't see anything; he could only sketch out the dangerous outline in his mind.

"Let them continue according to plan." Zhou Lan's voice remained calm in the holographic projection. "Under no circumstances should they be rushed."

The summit of Kunlun.

Deep within the Heavenly Palace, Gu Qing vaguely sensed through the boundary markers that the reconnaissance team had entered the city. He did not intervene.

He was more concerned with the world's reaction. The current sense of rejection was still very mild, indicating that the nine people's disguises had perfectly blended into the underlying logic of this world.

But as Gu Qing sensed the boundary marker buried deep in the mountains as the team passed the Demon-Suppressing Office, it gave a very faint buzzing sound.

Gu Qing slightly opened her eyes, a cold glint flashing in her dark pupils.

Within that government office, a trace of high-level pollution lingered, enough to make even the boundary markers uneasy. The decline of Huai'an County was not simply due to the depletion of spiritual energy or the rampage of low-level demons.

He closed his eyes again and continued to sit steadily in Kunlun.

……

The first boundary, Huai'an County.

Instead of staying in those shady inns, the team had Zhou Aman arrange for them to rent a dilapidated but independent courtyard in a secluded alley not far from his home, on the grounds that the out-of-state caravan needed a quiet place to rest.

The team spent the entire afternoon in the courtyard organizing intelligence and setting up a low-spiritual-pressure alert array in preparation for the first night in the city.

Lin Xiaolu gave Zhou's mother a follow-up examination, while Tang Qinghe started a fire in the yard to brew medicine. To repay the kindness, Zhou Aman volunteered to go to the street to buy some coarse rice and salt, and busied himself in the yard.

The warmth of everyday life rose in the dilapidated courtyard, yet it could not dispel the increasingly heavy chill in the air.

The sun had not yet completely set.

But outside the courtyard, the heavy sounds of doors slamming and bolting could be heard echoing through the streets of Huai'an County. Every household had locked themselves tightly inside before nightfall.

On the bluestone road leading to the mortuary in the distance, a cart was being pushed by a man dressed as a night watchman.

A tattered straw mat covered the cart. Beneath the mat, drops of foul-smelling water dripped from the cart shaft onto the stone slab.

Night is approaching.

Han Zhao made a hand gesture, and the nine members of the team immediately dispersed to various blind spots in the courtyard, holding their breath and concentrating.

Just then, Zhou Aman, who was washing vegetables in the corner of the yard, suddenly turned deathly pale.

He turned his head stiffly to look at the dilapidated empty house next door.

He clearly remembered that Widow Wang next door had died three months ago. The house had been empty ever since; even mice wouldn't go in.

But just now, he heard it clearly.

From the empty room next door came the faint, yet heart-wrenching sound of a woman sobbing.

The night in Huai'an County had not yet truly fallen when the cries had already begun.