Chapter 54 – Wendigone

Adam had also had the incident at the shrine weighing on his mind. He had felt guilt at leaving Sam but also leaving Earth in the hands of the Kitsune clan leader. But she had confided in him that the two of them were the only ones who knew of Elios’s treachery. So laying low for the time being until he had an effective strategy to deal with the God-tier entity was not a bad idea.

He had managed to evade the system, as they called it, twice. Though he knew the truth from what Clarrisa had let slip, and IakesI knew for sure.

From what IakesI had told him, Elios was an ancestor of hers who turned evil.

The claw kitsune clan had lived in relative harmony apart from the usual wars, famines, and political upheavals of centuries untold. It seemed nothing could destroy that fundamental harmony that was the bedrock of their clan—until a simple chance incident blotted their family line forever.

Ti Hong-Meng, the crippled younger brother of the sect leader, had spent so much time trying to heal the affliction that he became quite famous throughout the province of Yang-Tu.

A murderer, Gu Mo, who had killed more people than there are crumbs in a toaster, dropped dead for no discernable reason. There were no signs of foul play when he was as strong as ten men.

No one wanted to go anywhere near his corpse, for their fear of the man was still palpable, so instead, he was left to rot on the streets. And spoil he did until the stench became unbearable; it was the stench of the repressed energy of resentment as his foul spirit still thirsted for blood. What should be done? The people thought.

On hearing of the corpse, a visiting magistrate sent it straight away for Ti Hong-Meng to exorcise the body and rid the town of the savage entity, Gu Mo.

Ti Hong-Meng was well-practiced in the yantric arts of exorcism; the scriptures were second nature to him. So he was hurrying as fast as his decrepit form allowed, weaving his way through the streets and alleyways, panting until he came across Gu Mo’s corpse, surrounded by a few gawking nasally challenged onlookers.

He laid his hands over the corpse, recalling the teachings of his first master Mo:

First, liberate; second, suppress; third, eliminate. Utilize the gratitude of his relatives and grant his dying wish. Forget that! Move on to the following method: suppression. If the crimes were extremely wrongful, and its energy of resentment did not dissipate, exterminate it completely. The cultivation world should precisely keep to this order of measures. No errors should be allowed.

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But errors there were, and despite using the blood of several roosters and covering the ground with several meters of the yantric script, the spirit still lingered. But the sun that had punished him throughout the day now fled, so he retired to try again the following day. But on rising, he found he could, rise like a newborn cub, his affliction erased like freeze pops on a bench in the sun.

Spiritual energy is energy; resentful energy is energy as well. Spiritual energy is stored in the dan tian. It can split mountains and fill oceans and is available for human use. If so, then why can’t resentful energy also be used by humans?

The fact that Hong-Meng tried to rationalize his next decision might have had something to do with him knowing he would be next on the list of exorcisms If he were found out.

Thus, Hong-Meng, our story’s nemesis, took his first steps onto the path of demonic cultivation.

The dark seed planted then festered within Hong-Meng, taking him to the brink of insanity, then over the edge, for once tasted the fruits were too hard to resist. The scent of the flesh of innocents was like a juicy ripe mango to his mind.

A week later, he killed the whole of Ti Xiao’s family. And his rampage did not stop until he had wiped out the whole of his clan. He eventually ascended and went on to become a God-tier being.

IakesI was certain that Hong-Meng was Elios or that Elios was the name of his organization.

Clarissa had given hints to Elios’ reasons for continuing to dabble in the lives of mortals. He was using them and then culling them before they got too powerful or their numbers became too large. What benefit he was gaining, Adam did not yet know. On the other hand, he could perhaps have merely been a deranged god seeking pleasure in such suffering. Either way, Adam would need to stop him.

He would need to get much more powerful, or his AI would need to devise a master plan. But, if there was some way of replicating what he had done on a broader scale, they could at least have a defense or be effectively inoculated against the system.

It was now the following day, and after letting all concerned know that he may be some time, days possibly before returning. Adam set off to find the boundary of the Wendigo infestation. He had not left any of the cores at the village as he did want to take the risk of one regrowing while he was absent. So instead, he kept all of them in his PD. He had checked on them, and fortunately, none had grown.

After surveying the forest from the top of the canopy again, Adam had finally found where the Wendigo infestation finished or the edge of where it had reached. He then traveled back to where he estimated the middle of the whole region. The region, at a rough estimate, totaled several hundred miles.

Currently, they were waiting to see if Libby’s plan would work. He had killed more than thirty new Wendigos or at least trapped their cores. The plan was simple, as all great plans are.

They would plant ten Wendigo cores as a magnet to others in the area. After some trial and error, ‘Live Testing,’ they discovered this to be an optimal amount. Next, arrays were drawn using Libby’s space magic to stop Wendigos from reaching the cores. These, in turn, were fed by the initial cores.

Once a Wendigo was trapped in the space array, the initial cores would start draining it. This left the problem of the initial ten cores regrowing into Wendigos. With Echo’s help, Libby neatly solves this problem by using Adam as the storage device for all this dark energy.

So Adam sat in a circle of arrays and Wendigo cores, waiting for something to happen.