Chapter 304: This Is A Lie
“Didn’t your parents teach you not to eat things from outside randomly?” Fang Mu sighed, mentally complaining, but he also knew they couldn’t really be blamed; the bewitchment from the anomaly factors was beyond what normal humans could resist.
Seeing Mo Longwei looking dejected, Fang Mu decided to impersonate a Mystic Investigator from this era and used that as an excuse to continue questioning him about other matters.
He himself had worked as an “external staff member” in the Mysterious Group for a period, so impersonating a Mystic Investigator wasn’t too difficult.
“You’re also a Mystic Investigator?” To his surprise, when Mo Longwei heard Fang Mu’s “confession,” he wasn’t overly astonished. “What a coincidence. One of your companions has already gone into the mountain before you.”
Fang Mu raised an eyebrow in surprise, “Companions, two of them?”
Mo Longwei nodded, “One male and one female.”
Fang Mu understood. So, the other two “outsiders” registered at the inn were the two Mystic Investigators from modern times, following closely behind his first life self.
“Please tell me the cause of the entire village’s upheaval and the whole process up to now.” Fang Mu asked Mo Longwei to recount the events, and the latter quickly and obediently explained everything.
After Fang Mu’s first life and the tour guide Mo Guangning ignored the advice and forcibly entered the anomaly domain where Nong Mountain was located, Mo Longwei was very worried about his nephew’s safety. So, after waiting two days and not seeing them return from Nong Mountain, he immediately gathered a group of experienced herbalists and hunters in the village to enter Nong Mountain together to search for his nephew and Fang Mu’s whereabouts.
However, after another two days, the volunteer team returned, but they didn’t bring back the people they were looking for. Instead, they brought back a few strangely looking toad frogs.
Their appearance was very strange at the time, as if they were bewitched or possessed. They displayed those toad frogs to every household in the village as if they were trophies of their exploit. As a result, when the villagers heard the chirping of the toad frogs and met their gaze, they also became as strange as those who returned from the mountain.
Of course, not everyone in the village was bewitched by those strange toad frogs. But when those few toad frogs were cooked into a soup, even the villagers who were not bewitched had to drink the soup because their bewitched family members shared it with them. Ultimately, they also became like those bewitched, transforming into their current state.
Mo Longwei was supposed to drink that bowl of soup as well, but he happened to be rescued by two passing Mystic Investigators, who disrupted his attempt to drink it, thus saving him.
But this was not absolute luck; good and bad in the world are always relative.
Those two Mystic Investigators couldn’t save all the villagers who drank the soup. Under the pursuit of those frenzied villagers, they too had to flee into Nong Mountain in a sorry state, both to escape and to resolve the anomaly in Nong Mountain as early as possible. This might unravel the curse and hypnosis plaguing Wenyatun.
Mo Longwei had the villagers who hadn’t drunk the soup flee the village. As the Village Chief, he had an obligation to guard and protect the village; he couldn’t just abandon the cursed villagers.
Fortunately, the curse from that bowl of soup only manifested at night while the villagers slept, so most of the daytime remained relatively normal. However, at night, it became a scene of chaos.
All he could do was seal his doors and windows before nightfall, then guard his home with a weapon, unable to sleep, waiting for the dawn of hope and the start of a new day.
Staying up all night and sleeping during the day, this reversed work and rest schedule had been Mo Longwei’s routine for three days. He was highly tense when awake and plagued by nightmares when asleep, his mental state showing clear signs of deterioration.
He occasionally saw strange hallucinations. He saw villagers with familiar appearances in broad daylight, feeling both fondness and madness at times. His fragile, sensitive nerves were being brutally cut as if by a dull knife, tormenting him to the point where he sometimes wished for an end to it all.
Most critically, Mo Longwei had no one to talk to. He couldn’t tell the villagers, who showed no abnormalities during the day, about their transformations at night. That would only make him a target, seen as a madman.
When he discovered Fang Mu trespassing into the village that night, Mo Longwei not only felt no sympathy or sadness for Fang Mu but was actually relieved and happy.
Finally, he could meet a living person to share a story with!
Fang Mu listened to Mo Longwei’s story and had a general understanding of the entire event’s progression, though he didn’t fully believe Mo Longwei’s account.
“I understand,” Fang Mu said after Mo Longwei finished his story. He had also rested enough and planned to set off under the cover of night.
Mo Longwei said anxiously, “Didn’t you hear what I just said? It’s too dangerous to go out now. Those mad villagers are searching for you outside! Why not rest here until morning?”
“No, thank you,” Fang Mu shook his head, refusing Mo Longwei’s suggestion.
Hearing Fang Mu’s decisive rejection, Mo Longwei’s expression immediately darkened. However, the gloomy look quickly returned to normal, as if nothing had happened. He said, “Then how about a drink of water?”
Fang Mu was silent for a moment upon hearing this, then nodded, “Alright, I’ll trouble you then. I am quite thirsty.”
Mo Longwei stood up with brisk movements, “Okay, I’ll go get you some water right away, comrade. Please wait here.”
He passed by Fang Mu, his footsteps hurried.
Fang Mu turned around, looking left and right, picked up the massage stick from the wooden sofa, and gripped the massage stick with protruding rollers in his hand like a baseball bat, smashing it directly onto Mo Longwei’s head without any warning.
Bang!
A dull thud came from Mo Longwei’s head. He trembled on the spot and suddenly fell to the ground, unconscious.
Fang Mu casually threw aside the damaged massage stick and looked down at the fallen Mo Longwei with a stern expression. He hadn’t held back and didn’t care about the other man’s fate.
This guy was truly untrustworthy, mixing truth with lies. If he hadn’t secretly observed a few villagers’ homes beforehand, he wouldn’t have been able to determine which parts of Mo Longwei’s story were true and which were false.
Firstly, Mo Longwei presented himself righteously as the Village Chief, claiming to have stayed for the villagers. However, the moment Fang Mu entered, he had already used his ability to peek into someone’s actions and appearance at a specific time and saw the other man eating barbecued strange toad frogs.
Yes, he didn’t drink the soup, but he ate the meat in the end. Despite his outwardly normal appearance compared to outsiders, he was internally beyond redemption.
Furthermore, the fortunate villagers who didn’t drink the soup and were not cursed likely didn’t escape the village. If they had, word would have spread outside by now. Not only would the news media be in an uproar, but those Mystic Investigators would surely not sit still and would have stormed in in full force.
But none of that happened. Moreover, the presence of soul banners for the deceased at the entrance of each house indicated that many people had died in the village recently.
All of this almost told Fang Mu that the bad news hadn’t spread. The villagers who wanted to leave but didn’t escape had most likely met their demise.
