Refuse to trample on the pride of heaven

Chapter 342: Fireworks Disappear, True God Revealed (2 in 1)

When the evening drum sounded, the Bodhisattva's drooping eyelids lifted half a degree, revealing the eyeballs covered with translucent nictitating membranes - on that iris-like membrane, the beating blood vessels in the neck of every believer were reflected.

The light projected from the mirror in Lu Wensheng's hand was like a thunderbolt splitting the roof on a rainy night, and the bluish-white light of the lightning shone directly into the Buddhist shrine.

The believers then saw that the flowing gold paint was actually densely packed incantations, that three-toed animal feet were faintly visible at the hem of the cassock, and that from the corners of the lips that always smiled, a centipede with a human face was slowly crawling out.

How can this be a solemn image? It is clearly a flesh-eating Bodhisattva!

The incense burner exploded with a loud bang, and sandalwood ash wrapped in blood splattered on the shrine. When the twisted centipede drilled out from the lips of the Bodhisattva, the old pilgrim's walking stick fell to the ground with a clang. The crowd burst into heart-wrenching screams, the offerings rolled down, the candlesticks fell over, and densely packed baby faces floated in the green smoke.

"Are you scared now?" Qin Xiao cut off the attacking tentacles with his backhand. The tip of the sword brushed the scalp of some pilgrims and cut off the wriggling buds in his hair. "Why weren't you afraid when you came up to me to exchange for a windfall?"

The pilgrims were so frightened that they collapsed, trembling and unable to utter a word.

The sound of shattering glass could be heard in the temple. The eight-treasure crown on the Bodhisattva statue fell off. The baby spirit in the jade bead crawled out and ran around between the beams and pillars, dragging its umbilical cord.

Fu Xiangxing threw out three copper coins, which turned into golden locks in the air and bound the infant spirits. Those blue-black little things actually let out hoarse screams like old men.

"Be careful!"

Wang Yanzhi pushed Xiaoman towards Yu Shuoyang. The incense ash on the ground moved without wind and condensed into countless gray arms that grabbed everyone's ankles. As the young master of the Foundry Pavilion, he naturally had a lot of treasures. He took out his magic pen and drew talismans in the air. Cinnabar fell on the gray arms and ignited green flames. The burnt smell was mixed with the smell of incense.

The statue's glazed pupils suddenly exploded, and blood runes poured down like a rainstorm. Yu Heyang threw out the formation plate, and the moment the golden barrier was expanded, the blood runes burned honeycomb-shaped holes on the light curtain, and the gap in the barrier immediately disappeared.

"It's time to stop playing tricks on me."

Lu Wensheng stepped on the altar and flew into the air, his brocade robe filled with a fishy smell. The beam of light from the magic mirror suddenly converged into a line and accurately pierced into the slightly opened right eye of the Bodhisattva. The glazed pupil exploded, and the flying chips actually contained the faces of thousands of pilgrims.

He raised his hand and the golden light of the magic mirror suddenly surged, approaching the Bodhisattva statue on the lotus platform. In the intersection of light and shadow, his figure was stretched out and slender, as if it had merged with the golden light.

Lu Wensheng's magic mirror was hung on the dome, and the light of the mirror was like the scorching sun, burning the evil spirits. The entangled tentacles of the beams and pillars twitched in the golden light. Every time a tentacle was broken, a pilgrim vomited black blood - these fools had long been connected with the demon temple by blood.

The Bodhisattva's appearance began to collapse. The six-foot-tall golden body faded into a dark blue lump of flesh. The eight arms turned into octopus-like tentacles. The lotus pedestal was actually woven from white leg bones. The nursery rhyme turned into a shriek, and the puppet child in the corner exploded into a bloody mist.

Qin Xiao's sword pierced the floor tile, and the sword energy spread out like ripples, severing all the red strings connecting the pilgrims. Yan Zhou's specially made talismans followed the red strings and burned into the hearts of the believers, forcing out the "greedy worms" they used to feed the evil Buddha - those were maggots with human faces.

The evil Buddha finally revealed his true form: a centipede wearing a human skin robe, his thousand hands were covered with bone spurs, his crown was cracked with a bloody hole filled with beating golden pupils. Each of his eyes reflected the greed of the pilgrims and was now madly absorbing their regret and fear.

"Step back!" Lu Wensheng bit his fingertips and drew a bloody rune on the mirror.

The magic mirror made a humming sound like a dragon's roar, and the phantom of the snow-capped peaks of Kunlun Xu emerged in the mirror's light. The other disciples formed a formation at the same time, and the light of their magic weapons intertwined into a net, trapping the demon in the collapsed temple.

The locust tree grew wildly outside the barrier, the inverted animal heads spewed out poisonous mist, and the ninety-nine white lanterns turned into skulls.

But the sword lights of the young men were brighter than the dusk. When the magic mirror pierced through the evil Buddha's head, the red lines of the whole town broke at the same time, and the crows wailed and turned into ashes.

When the last ray of golden light faded, only faded red silk remained in the ruins.

When the golden light penetrated the evil demon, the entire temple suddenly became eerily quiet. The glazed tiles turned into powder and fell off. The faded red silk burned in the void, but no ashes fell.

The pilgrims huddled among the ruins, the red lines on their wrists turned into festering wounds. It was unknown who cried first, and then cries of grief rose one after another, diluting the lingering smell of sandalwood.

The smoke and dust rising from the rubble were like countless struggling grey veils. A red mist mixed with lingering fragrance rolled in the air. The broken beams were still smoldering. Turbid tears like human fat oozed from the charred wood, shrouding the entire ruins in a fishy-sweet chaos.

Suddenly, a golden light pierced through the haze.

The corner of Lu Wensheng's robe was the first to emerge from the mist. The dark-patterned brocade was covered with incense ash, but in the glow of the magic mirror, it emitted fragments of light like an inverted galaxy.

He stepped on the red silk cloth that had turned to ashes all over the ground. The fabrics soaked in human blood turned into powder under the soles of his boots. The dust particles that were raised were penetrated by the golden light, like thousands of floating fireflies.

Xiaoman stared blankly at Lu Wensheng. He stood there, with a soft glow on his body. Something in his heart was leaping with joy, like a young bud awakening from the frozen soil in deep winter, pushing through the broken ice. He felt his heart was filled with joy, as if he had welcomed the first god...

The corner of Lu Wensheng's robe brushed across the dying candles on the ground. The extinguished sparks suddenly leaped up and blossomed into golden and red flowers on the Bai Ze pattern embroidered on the hem of his robe.

Incense ash mixed with blood mist circulated around him, as if being pulled by an invisible pen, gradually outlining the trajectory of the stars. What floated up from the ashes was not green smoke, but fine gold foil, which fell on the festering wounds of the believers and condensed into golden fragments.

The magic mirror in his hand reflects countless phantoms - different gods and Buddhas appear in the eyes of each believer, but they all have his eyebrows and eyes.

As dusk fell, the last piece of gold foil fell on everyone's brows.

As Lu Wensheng walked by, the golden threads wrapped around him suddenly stretched out and gently tied the little fingers of the people kneeling on the ground, gradually calming their trembling hearts.

In a trance, I saw the roar of the Kunlun avalanche in the sky and heard the crisp sound of the iron chain breaking on the seabed. In the rolling clouds and mist at the corners of the people's robes in front of me, the light and shadows of a hundred thousand eternal lamps seemed to emerge.

When the dust and fog finally cleared, the bronze rust color of the magic mirror in the young man's palm had faded.

The coiled dragon patterns wrapped around the edge of the mirror moved around as if alive, crushing the last few wisps of black air into green smoke.

The silk ribbon that tied his hair had broken at some point, and his long dark blue hair was lifted up and down by the wind waves, with the ends of his hair still stained with crystal fragments from the explosion of his glass pupils.

Those crystal fragments turned into fireflies before falling to the ground, illuminating the faded longevity tablets on the ground.

Xiaoman suddenly realized that what was stuck on Lu Wensheng's eyelashes was not dust at all - it was Sanskrit characters as thin as mustard seeds, which were falling down as he blinked, sinking into the cracks in the ground and blooming more white flowers.

All eyes were fixed on Lu Wensheng. The suspended golden dust suddenly gathered into a waterfall of light, enveloping him completely, like the circle of light behind the Buddha.

The people clearly saw that when the golden light illuminated his neck, there was a flash of light - just like a god who had been worshipped by incense for a thousand years, inadvertently revealing his true appearance while enjoying the believers' kneeling worship.

Countless chapped lips were still stained with vomited black blood, but now they were trembling and moving in the golden light.

The old woman clutched her festering wrist, the sparks of the young man's falling eyelashes reflected in her cloudy pupils - the silver bracelet stained with human fat suddenly became incredibly hot, and the melted wax seeped into the festering red scars under the skin, just like an eternal lamp that had been burning in front of a Bodhisattva temple for half a lifetime, finally burning through her cocoon of self-deception.

"It turns out that our eyes have been blinded by lard..."

The rice shop owner who was slumped under the broken beam suddenly curled up like a shrimp, with his forehead pressed against the blood-stained lotus brick.

The newly severed tissue in his hair was still oozing yellow fluid, but he didn't care about the stench at the moment. He just stared at the faded longevity tablets on the ground and trembled. The gold lacquer on it read "prosperity and prosperity", and there were clearly patterns of the centipede that had just crawled out of the Bodhisattva's mouth.

The embroiderer was picking at the red thread marks on her neck like a madman. The moment the gold foil fell, translucent maggots emerged from her festering flesh.

She suddenly remembered how she knelt in front of the Buddhist shrine three days ago and how she was ecstatic to wrap the umbilical cord around the statue of Guanyin, the Goddess of Childbirth - what was squirming in her belly at this moment was not a fetus, but a curse that was sucking her sperm and blood.

The ashes swept by the corner of Lu Wensheng's robe swirled into star trails, and the gambler kneeling at the front suddenly whimpered like a baby animal.

He dug his ten fingers deeply into the blood-stained pile of incense ash. The ashes of paper ingots that had been used to worship the evil Buddha were now emitting tiny golden cicadas from between his fingers.

When the first golden cicada bit his blackened fingertips, this man who cut his flesh in exchange for luck in front of the Buddha suddenly pounced on the rags dragging on the ground under the rocks as if he were scalded, but he could not catch anything.

"Click——"

The golden lotus hairpin in the widow's hair suddenly broke, and she stared blankly at the deceased child emerging in the mirror light - the baby spirit swallowed by the jade bead was curled up in the starry sky of the magic mirror and finally dissipated.

The nails stained with nail polish dug fiercely into the cracks between the blue bricks. The broken jade residue in the cracks cut the flesh. Blood mixed with tears dripped onto the faded red silk, and translucent Udumbara flowers bloomed.

The old man's cloudy pupils reflected golden light. The wrist bone where the red thread had been cut off was still festering, but at this moment he was trembling as he tried to catch the falling gold foil.

He remembered that he had used these hands to push innocent people onto the altar. At this moment, the severe pain of the Sanskrit seeping into the wound was not as severe as the twitching of his heart - the gold foil was clearly sucking the black blood from his bone marrow, but why did the more severe the pain, the clearer his chest felt?

The peasant woman's forehead was stained with the slime of the human-faced maggot, and when the gold thread was wrapped around her little finger, she suddenly felt an unbearable pain three inches below her navel.

She finally saw clearly that there was no fetus in her belly, but a ball of red thread tangled with copper coins, which was now squeaking like a mouse in the golden light - the evil karma fed by the ashes of the incense sticks for praying for a child had already eaten away her uterus and turned it into a maggot nest.

"Bodhisattva...Bodhisattva...Hehe, who is it..."

The silk merchant's gold teeth were chattering, and he suddenly saw clearly that the fellows he had drowned in the pond were floating in the falling Sanskrit.

Each mustard seed-sized scripture exploded into a pale face, but when white flowers gushed out from the cracks in the ground, the dead souls actually nodded to him through the stamens - just like the bag of stale rice he sold on credit to the poor scholar that year, with the compassion that he had long forgotten and that a human being should have.

The young man suddenly opened his shirt to reveal a black scar on his heart, which was the mark of the cornucopia curse that he had earned in exchange for his parents' lives.

The moment the golden light pierced the scar, he heard his mother's dying cough mixed with the Sanskrit sound, and his father's fingers crushed by the boulder were growing along with the white flowers.

It turns out that a true "Bodhisattva" will dig up the rotten flesh and uproot the money-grubbing that has penetrated into the soul. Even if the pain makes him curl up like a shrimp, he will still replant the pure cry of a baby into his chest.

When the last piece of gold foil melted between his eyebrows, the festering old gambler suddenly straightened his back. In his cloudy right eyeball was the fragment of the longevity lock that he had tied on the wrist of his deceased child thirty years ago.

The shattered greed on the ground floated in the star tracks. The pilgrims finally saw clearly that what was engraved on the gold foil was not the scriptures for saving suffering - it was clearly the blood and tears that fell on the altar when they knelt in front of the Flesh Bodhisattva and cut out their hearts and flesh.

The sobs that rose and fell in the twilight were suddenly tinged with the rhythm of Buddhist chants. The crawling spines gradually stretched out under the traction of the golden threads. Someone suddenly discovered that what was wriggling in the festering wounds were no longer maggots, but new flesh and blood that were pushing up against the black scabs.

The moment the fallen Sanskrit took root in the cracks in the ground, it seemed as if the entire ruins suddenly trembled and were filled with Udumbara.

Everyone has become a river clams cut open by a magic mirror, forced to expose their most smelly soft flesh under the light of divinity.

They saw dark roots drilling into the earth from their knees as they knelt down to worship; they heard the crisp sound of copper coins falling into the merit box mixed with the crunching sound of human bones being crushed; they smelled the sweet and rotten smell deep inside the incense sticks, which turned out to be the saliva of the monster digesting the boys and girls.

When the pain of the golden threads spread over my heart, I felt a kind of bone-tearing pleasure.

Those festering wounds began to ooze turbid golden liquid, like a sewage ditch washed by heavy rain finally welcoming clear springs.

The remaining candle that was brushed by the corner of Lu Wensheng's robe rekindled into a lotus of fire, illuminating the blood and tears on the faces of the believers.

They finally learned to tremble, not at the false majesty of the clay and golden bodies, but in the eyes of the true God that penetrated people's hearts, and saw their own souls that were as rotten as dry bones.

At this moment, he kowtowed no longer for asking, but to pray that the golden light that penetrated the evil fog could illuminate his moldy spine.

Those foolish people who had sacrificed their bones and blood in front of the evil Buddha temple finally shed clean tears on their upturned faces, thirty years late.

All sobs are stuck in the throat, and all sins are exposed in the waterfall of light.

They once called greed sincerity, mixed human blood with lamp oil, and used the cries of their wives and children to raise the incense table.

What emerged on the faded tablet at this moment was not the title of the god, but the humanity that he had strangled with his own hands - those good thoughts that should have rotted long ago were now rekindled in the sparks brushed by the corner of Lu Wensheng's robe.

Someone kowtowed frantically in front of the crystal chips on the ground, and the blood on his forehead dyed the white flowers made of Sanskrit red - it turned out that the real offering was to place the filthy souls on the altar and let them burn.

The pilgrims looked at Lu Wensheng, some cried and some laughed, and after muttering softly, they kowtowed devoutly with expressions of pain and piety on their faces.

In this turbid world, the spirit platform is burning, and the bright mirror reflects my heart.