Chapter 307: Heart
“Don’t go! Come back!” Wang Zheng let out such a silent roar while suffering from the tear and bite of ten thousand toads. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to make a sound, but a mutated toad bit off his vocal cords in one bite. He couldn’t make a sound and could only look with hatred and unwillingness at the man deeply favored by the Toad Frog God leaving right in front of him.
As his body was torn and bitten into pieces, his body was also rapidly undergoing an unexpected mutation. His flesh was regenerating and transforming at an accelerated rate, but not in a normal direction—rather, it was a deformed discovery. His appearance was becoming similar to those mutated toads that were tearing and biting him.
Wang Zheng’s eyes revealed strong hatred and anger. “How could the person favored by the deity be him, not me?”
“Living cowardly in such a misguided era, do my ideals and my collection have to be hidden away in fear like this?”
“Every day I have to pretend to be upright and righteous, with ‘correct’ thoughts, and even force myself to teach those who yearn for wrong thoughts the ‘wrong’ concepts. Why the hell am I the one living so tiringly!?”
“I clearly possess the power to correct all this—why won’t you listen to my request!?”
“I am more pious than him, more active than him. Why is the blessed person him and not me? Why!?”
“……Gu! Gu! Gu!”
After a bout of hysterical silent rage, Wang Zheng completely transformed into a deformed frog person shedding human skin. His consciousness was almost entirely gone, but he retained Fang Mu’s obsession.
To be precise, it was actually a strong longing for the blessing power wrapped around Fang Mu’s body.
A similar scene also happened to another person who had crossed paths with Fang Mu—he was the Old Village Chief, the person Fang Mu sought help from in Wenyatun during his second life.
He personally told Fang Mu the method to remove the blessing and handed it over for Fang Mu to handle himself. This village chief, who seemed amiable and approachable, had extremely suspicious anomalies on his body.
His son was one of the frog people who madly hunted him in Nong Mountain. The paulownia wood box he gave to Fang Mu was almost the root of sin, containing a nail hammer capable of opening the sensory acupoint that resonates with the god. And that nail hammer was clearly taken by his son, who was openly a human law enforcement officer, yet the nail hammer ended up in his hands.
The method the elder told Fang Mu to remove the blessing was not entirely wrong. He just didn’t consider the possibility that Fang Mu was alive, nor the huge price his words and actions would bring to himself and his people.
That nail hammer harbored the great power of another deity transcending the divine. The believers of the Toad Frog God must maintain noble purity, a purity so strict that they must distinguish which aspect of the faith they worship: those yearning for fine weather, natural great power worship the pristine frog; those yearning for power, wealth, and depravity enshrine the ugly toad… As long as a person deeply blessed by the Toad Frog God brings this nail hammer before the Toad Frog God as an offering, the enraged deity will confiscate the bounty on him.
But what the elder didn’t expect was that what was imposed on Fang Mu was not a blessing—just as humans cannot distinguish the good and evil of deities, because deities have no good and evil. What was imposed on Fang Mu was merely a attention, a mark, a signal.
Rather than calling it a blessing, Fang Mu’s own description of it as a curse was more fitting.
The evil elder with misguided thinking believed that Fang Mu’s appearance meant a once-in-a-millennium opportunity and the era had arrived. The god’s love could be transferred, the god’s bounty could be on him, and thus also on me. So he widely opened altars for evil magic and held large-scale offering rituals. Little did he know that to that deity, all his actions held no secrets—everything was exposed.
The Toad Frog God unleashed its rage on that group of humans who had gone mad with devotion, burying the lives of those several hundred people in Nong Mountain.
……
Through the Toad God’s eyes, Fang Mu saw story fragments he had never seen before. He, whose emotions were gradually becoming numb, also understood some of the Toad God’s intentions.
It had never cursed or blessed him; it was just that Fang Mu, being human, could not bear high-dimensional attention.
As for the anomaly event that happened to him, it actually had nothing to do with It being there or not, because he would eventually pick up that hammer, that nail. It was more like an accidental outsider trapped in Its destiny. The rebellion It could do was to accelerate the cycle on Fang Mu and complete Fang Mu’s awakening. Fang Mu read a trace of the other’s thoughts in one of the Toad God’s eyes that was close to humanity.
“What destiny do I have, and what do I need to awaken?” Fang Mu inquired of it.
He still harbored doubts and refused to break out of human thinking logic.
If he didn’t replace that heart, he would die on that day in 2013, and everything would end.
Without replacing that heart, he wouldn’t go searching for the heart’s master and thus obtain that diary.
Without that diary, he wouldn’t pursue the taboo secret hidden in the diary, searching for traces of the Toad Frog God.
Without searching for traces of the Toad Frog God, he wouldn’t go to that forest cabin and obtain that nail hammer.
Without that nail hammer, he wouldn’t fall into the time loop……
……
He obtained that nail hammer because he was searching for It—so where does the destined connection come from?
The Toad God calmly gazed at him, using some invisible force to draw out the rune stone embedded with half a black jade from Fang Mu’s body. At the same time, a flash shot from Its body onto the rune stone—it was the other lost half of the black jade. When the two pieces of black jade were joined, the rune stone displayed an eerie image at that moment, accompanied by an eerie beast roar that drilled into Fang Mu’s brain marrow, striking his soul like a battering ram against a great bell.
That language he had never encountered automatically translated into a voice he had heard before: the youth in white clothes laughing and asking him, “Are you really not dreaming?”
Fang Mu’s spirit, which had tended toward deathly silence, once again felt panic. He struggled and screamed in the Toad God’s restraint, wanting to escape.
A bold guess he had never imagined, dared not imagine, like fatal poison, little by little eroded his reason.
“How can I determine that Fang Mu is my first life?” Fang Mu collapsed, questioning himself wildly in the dark abyss.
His questions were hoarse and exhausted, wishing he could shut his eyes tight, block his ears, hold his breath, with his whole body tense except his mouth straining—finally reduced to pure venting roars.
“Who the hell am I!?”
“Hundun…” Li Yuning sat cross-legged beside Lin Ling, focused on reading. The rocking of Lin Ling’s rocking chair didn’t disturb her dedicated reading. She curiously asked, “Without senses, how does It stay alive?”
“Doesn’t It still have a heart?” Lin Ling smiled, sipping tea and petting the cat.
“Then if Its acupoint is opened, does It really die?”
“Hee hee, he just admitted it from the bottom of his heart.
