The improved female villains regained their memories.

Yang Pingsheng was startled. He immediately amplified his spiritual light and then saw the scene of the temple in front of him clearly.

"This……"

Dead body.

Countless corpses.

The guards' corpses were piled up in layers, each with wide-open eyes and faces filled with terror. The memorials that originally housed the ancestors of each family had been completely destroyed, and their original locations had been replaced by severed heads. It was a scene straight out of hell.

Even Yang Pingsheng was shocked by the scene. He walked in tremblingly and saw a large white cat lying in the deepest part of the bloodstains.

Like a corpse, its eyes were wide open. Its nine tails had been cruelly severed, and its belly had been ripped open, its intestines spilling out onto the ground. Its demon core had also been taken away, and its entire body was covered in wounds.

"This is the guardian demon king of the temple, the nine-tailed spirit cat. It has been cruelly harmed. Who did this?!"

Yang Pingsheng muttered to himself, then suddenly sensed something and abruptly looked up.

The emaciated body of an old man was hanging there, his limbs removed, his eyes and tongue destroyed, leaving only a stick, swaying precariously in the air.

Yang Pingsheng subconsciously took a step back, not knowing what mechanism he had stepped on. Instantly, a bell rang out, its sound echoing throughout the entire mountain town.

When, when, when!

"Huh, what's that sound?"

"The temple bells are ringing! The temple bells are ringing! Something's happened at the temple!!"

"Oh no! Something's happened at the temple! Could the goddess be in danger?!"

The once pitch-black mountain town was suddenly brightly lit.

Chapter 252 Yang Pingsheng Imprisoned

As Song Panning hurried toward the temple, the heads of various families had already arrived. Her father, Song Xingtian, had been waiting for a long time in the shadows at the entrance to the temple from the Goddess Hall. When he saw his daughter heading toward the temple, he quickly stepped forward, grabbed Song Panning's arm, and led her into the shadows.

"The temple ruler is dead."

The first sentence made Song Panning dare not make a move and listen quietly.

The temple's ruler rarely appears; he is the only surviving old monster. Although he doesn't show himself often, every clan leader has seen him.

But now, he is dead, cut into human sticks, and hung from the roof beam.

The scene was horrific. Almost all the guards were slaughtered, with only one surviving because he had to leave temporarily. The others, even the demons, did not survive.

This short sentence was enough to illustrate the seriousness of the matter, and even Song Panning could not maintain a calm and composed expression.

"In addition..." Song Xingtian hesitated, as if he wanted to say something but then stopped.

Song Panning looked at him, waiting for her father's next words.

“Yang Pingsheng was at the scene; he is now the prime suspect.”

After the bell rang, the heads of the various families rushed up and immediately sealed off the entire temple. They examined the flow of spiritual energy and found that apart from Yang Pingsheng's spiritual energy, there was no one else's.

Yang Pingsheng's spiritual energy mostly lingered at the doorway. Although it wasn't detected on the corpse, he remained the prime suspect.

The entire temple is backed by a high mountain, with only one exit through the main gate. To be able to kill so many people in the temple silently at midnight, including the guardian beasts and the temple's controller, the murderer must undoubtedly be an immortal. But what is puzzling is that none of the corpses had any spiritual energy left behind, as if an ordinary person had cut them up bit by bit with a knife.

This is simply impossible. Putting aside the temple guards and the monsters, let's talk about the temple's ruler. As an old monster who survived the past, he must have mastered many mysterious methods and his strength was close to that of a true immortal. Such a person was silently slashed into a stick and hung on the temple's roof beam without making a sound. No matter how you look at it, the murderer could not possibly be an ordinary person.

"Ning'er, listen to me, this matter is extremely serious. If things go wrong, the mountain city could be destroyed."

Song Xingtian said that as the high priest and the patriarch of the Song family, he knew all too well what it meant to be in power in the temple.

The goddess communicated with the heavens and bestowed blessings upon the people of the mountain city. Her greatest supporter was the ruler of the temple, who established the unchanging rules for the goddess's election for thousands of years. He was also the one who founded the mountain city with everyone's ancestors. He was the only ancient fossil, the true sky of the mountain city, and now, the sky has collapsed.

If the sky falls, can the goddess we recognized that day still stand?

Song Xingtian was a shrewd and ambitious man. He could tell at a glance that this was the time to test the family's resources and strength.

With the death of the old fossil, a void naturally arose in the discourse. Admittedly, there will be loyal conservatives who will continue to uphold the old fossil's system, but not everyone thinks that way.

As for the Song family, as soon as they learned of this news, Song Xingtian's think tank suggested that Song Xingtian should quickly go to Song Panning, take control of the temple hall, recruit the goddess guards, and then wait for the heads of various families to gather at the temple to wipe them all out in one fell swoop, striking first to gain the upper hand.

He rejected the suggestion. He was joking. His advisors knew who the heads of the various families were, and so did they. This was the time to remain calm. Normally, everyone operated under the same rules, and no one knew anyone else's trump card. It wasn't time to risk everything. If Song Xingtian did that, they would definitely fight to the death, and the Song family would become the target of everyone's ire.

The nail that sticks out gets hammered down; Song Xingtian understood this principle perfectly well.

"Ning'er, don't go in. I'll stay here. Go back to the Goddess Palace right now and reorganize the guards and servants there. Make sure no one goes in or out, quick!"

"But……"

She turned her head slightly towards the temple, where the interplay of light and shadow revealed the figures of countless ambitious individuals, and her most important person was inside, becoming the prime suspect.

"Father, in my life."

"Have you forgotten what you've done? If they find out, our family will be the first to suffer." Song Xingtian grabbed Song Panning's shoulder and said, word by word, "I'll take care of Yang Pingsheng. You hurry back to the Goddess Palace, then choose someone you trust and send her to my study. Don't let her see anyone until I give you new information, quick!"

"it is good."

"Wait, I have one more thing to say. No matter how things turn out, even if something happens to my Song family, Ning'er, you must guard the Goddess Palace and not let anyone enter it. You must make it your territory!"

“I know, Father.” Song Panning answered calmly, but beneath that calmness lay the same madness as Song Xingtian. “If anything happens to my Song family, I will never give up the Goddess Palace. I have already set up multiple arrays there. If they dare to do that, I will activate the arrays. At worst, we will fight to the death.”

"Good, then I have confidence."

After giving Song Panning a heavy pat on the shoulder, Song Xingtian turned and headed towards the temple. Song Panning also turned around and quickly returned to the Goddess Hall.

At the same time, Lin Wanjun also received the news.

She stood in the Lin family courtyard, wearing a robe, looking in the direction of the temple, her expression shifting between light and shadow.

Lin Jinxuan ran over, panting heavily, holding a scroll in her hand: "Phew... Sister, little sister, Father has sent a message."

"Bring it here so I can see it!"

Lin Jinxuan took the scroll, and Lin Wanjun activated her spiritual energy to absorb the information inside.

A moment later, she exclaimed in shock, "The Temple Master is dead!?"

"Huh?" Lin Jinxuan was startled.

As children of a prominent family, Lin Wanjun and Lin Jinxuan naturally knew who the person in charge of the temple was. They never expected that this legendary person would actually die.

Lin Jinxuan's shock was understandable, but Lin Wanjun's shock was not due to the death of the temple's controller, but rather to the fact that he had died at this very moment.

[In my past life, the temple's controller did indeed appear, seemingly also investigating Song Panning. However, Song Panning deceived him, and when the time was right, she killed everyone in the mountain city, including the temple's controller. Could it be that she has decided to activate the grand formation set up in the mountain city?! If that's the case, forget about revenge; I'm afraid I won't even be able to save my life!]

The grand formation from her past life left a deep impression on Lin Wanjun.

What a terrifying scene that was!

The moon turned blood-red, and starting from the temple, the blood-stained spiritual energy infected everyone. People's bodies seemed to be bursting open as if by some force.

The first to explode was her sister, Lin Jinxuan, followed by her servants and parents. She fled in terror, only to find that the guards of the Goddess Palace had all been turned into minced meat.

Du Wanli rushed over, but before he could say a word, he exploded in front of her, like a rain of blood mixed with bits of flesh, splattering all over Lin Wanjun.

She screamed in fear and ran in terror, but everyone was dead. The entire mountain town had become a city of blood. She, the goddess, was no longer a goddess, but a fallen fairy who had entered a hellish battlefield. She was all alone and helpless, and countless scoundrels wanted to defile her purity.

It was under those circumstances that Song Panning walked down the temple steps, step by step, slowly descending. She looked down at Lin Wanjun, who was slumped on the ground, and revealed a mysterious smile.

"My... dearest friend..."

"!!!"

Lin Wanjun snapped out of the nightmare-like scene, threw down the scroll, and gasped for breath.

Calm down, calm down.

She pounded her chest, her bloodshot eyes fixed on the ground, repeatedly telling herself:

"The timing is wrong. It's too early now. Song Panning has no chance at all."

The grand formation that ravaged the entire mountain city couldn't have been set up so quickly. She even went to check several places she remembered vividly. Although she couldn't figure it out, she was quite certain that Song Panning's grand formation still had flaws and couldn't be activated so easily.

She calmed down, bent down to pick up the intelligence scroll again, ignored the worried look in Lin Jinxuan's eyes, and walked back to her dark room alone, silently beginning to think.

"The scroll says that the temple's controller was cut into human sticks and hung from the roof beams. The guardian beasts and temple guards all died tragically, and there was no spiritual energy left on their bodies."

She frowned slightly, her gaze fixed on the word "spiritual energy".

"Such a brutal massacre, yet it didn't make a sound in the heavily guarded temple. The bell alarm was triggered by Yang Pingsheng. It's strange, though, why would Yang Pingsheng be there?"

She had been thinking about how to fulfill the prompt and send Yang Pingsheng to jail, but now that this has happened, Yang Pingsheng will have to spend some time in jail, regardless of whether he is the murderer or not.

“Yang Pingsheng’s spiritual energy was mostly found in the corridor near the entrance, and at most it reached the demon cat’s corpse. Judging from this, he seems more like the one who discovered the person than the murderer. So what was his purpose in going to the temple?”

Lin Wanjun frowned. Could it be that in such a short time, Yang Pingsheng and Song Panning's feelings for each other had rekindled, and their childhood sweetheart love had surpassed her love at first sight? So Yang Pingsheng was now willingly helping Song Panning with her affairs.

“Something feels off. If Song Panning is the murderer, why would she send Yang Pingsheng there without telling him the location of the trap, leaving him to trigger it? If Song Panning sent Yang Pingsheng to the temple for some other purpose, and Yang Pingsheng discovered the crime scene, then that means Song Panning isn't the murderer. If she were the murderer, she could have easily achieved her goal by doing all this; there would be no need for such a complicated process.”

Lin Wanjun was having a headache. No matter what she thought about, unless Song Panning's purpose was to send Yang Pingsheng to prison, she couldn't understand why Song Panning was doing all this.

"Or, to put it another way, what if Song Panning wasn't the murderer?"

Song Panning is proficient in formations, and the path of formations relies heavily on spiritual energy. The two abilities she possesses, one is formation, and the other is the Dance of the Goddess, both of which require the use of spiritual energy to kill enemies. If the real culprit is indeed Song Panning, a clash of spiritual energy would not be able to occur silently.

"According to intelligence, most of the dead were cut to death with ordinary curved knives. This is the most bizarre thing. A group of cultivators, a cat demon, and a thousand-year-old monster were actually slaughtered alive with knives that only mortals use. It's impossible."

Let alone those capable people being slaughtered without a sound by a single knife, even a dozen or so unarmed civilians couldn't possibly be killed silently.

"Could it be that the murderer wasn't just one person, but a group of people?"

Names began to flash rapidly through her mind: Ling Shuxin, Shen Qingqing, Du Wanli... She thought about these people, pondered the information in the scroll repeatedly, and began to consider various possibilities.

“It’s impossible for the various families to do this, unless they’ve gone mad. They wouldn’t dare to oppose the temple’s controller even if they had ten lives. Song Panning might be an option, given her past record, but as I thought before, there’s no benefit for her to do so. She’s currently in the position of goddess, and if the temple’s controller dies, she will be the first to face pressure from the various families. The only possibility I can think of is Du Wanli.”

Du Wanli was the person she couldn't understand the most, just like in her past life. It was only because he was killed by Song Panning for her sake that Lin Wanjun didn't hold his actions against him.

"In this life, Du Wanli doesn't have the cultivation of an Earth Immortal. I originally wanted him to live an ordinary life, but he got involved with Ling Shuxin instead. Damn it, could he actually be the mastermind behind it all? That mysterious person, and the so-called instructions on the scroll, the Spirit-Seizing Array—were all actually set up by him?"

The more I think about it, the more confused I get.

But no matter what, Lin Wanjun was certain of one thing: the mountain city was about to descend into chaos.

"With the temple's ruler dead, no one can now stand above the major families. There's always a first place, and those family patriarchs are probably starting to have designs on us."

Flames blazed in Lin Wanjun's eyes. Now that she had complete control of the Lin family, she might as well give it a shot.

As she was thinking, the scroll that the mysterious person had given her suddenly emitted light, flew out from the corner, landed in Lin Wanjun's hand, and opened automatically.

"Ok?"

She looked closely, and the next instruction had already appeared.