Listening to the other's description, Sun Hang only felt something stirring deep inside his mind—those were fragments of memories he had just absorbed from the three saints, yet Sun Hang had forcibly sealed them immediately.
Even just the memory fragment from that girl had left him somewhat disoriented. If the fragments from all three rushed in simultaneously, the sense of confusion and loss would be a devastating blow to Sun Hang's self-awareness.
Sun Hang hardly had any memories "belonging to himself," and now with a heap of memories from others, yet all too real, it was easy for him to fall into self-doubt...
"Who am 'I' exactly? Sun Hang? Han Ying? A 'saint'? Or a member of a Cult Organization worshiping 'Ta Sui Ye'?"
Rather than face such a risk, Sun Hang preferred to seal away these memory fragments... until his self-identity was stable enough to handle them.
"You two, and you two." Sun Hang pointed at two more burly followers, "Take the tools and follow me downstairs."
...
Behind this residential building was an open area of about 200 square meters. Originally meant as a green belt for the community, but due to the project being left unfinished, not to mention greenery, even the most basic drainage system wasn't completed. The originally walkable paths had long been covered by soil, and Sun Hang could easily imagine how messy this place would become on rainy days.
"Where did the saints dig last time?" Sun Hang asked the two women.
The two pointed simultaneously to the middle of the open area.
In such a cheap community, land space was extremely tight, and the distance between buildings was compressed to the limit. This piece of land squeezed between two residential buildings almost never saw sunlight. The surface of the muddy ground and the bases of the two buildings were covered with uneven layers of moss, except for the spot they pointed to, where the soil looked clean, indeed appearing to have been recently disturbed.
"You two, dig up there." Sun Hang ordered the two male followers holding shovels.
"We... we're scared..." the two male followers shook their heads with painful expressions, "Only the saints can communicate with Ta Sui Ye, none of us have that ability. What if we anger Ta Sui Ye... afraid, just afraid..."
"Are you very afraid of 'Ta Sui'?" Sun Hang asked.
Not only these two men, but the two women also nodded repeatedly: "There used to be a follower who wanted to leave the cult after being cured of his illness, and he even threatened the saint, saying that if they didn't let him go, his family would report it immediately..."
"And what happened then?"
"The saint said to let him go. He took only a few steps outside before he walked back in terror, then he opened a window himself and jumped out... he fell to his death on this open space," a male follower said, "The saint didn't let us collect his body... but the next day, the body disappeared mysteriously, even the bloodstains were gone."
"It was eaten by 'Ta Sui Ye'..." another male follower whispered, "The saint said... it was called 'sacrifice'."
"So are you going to dig or not?" Sun Hang asked once more.
"But..."
"I just ask you, do you fear 'Ta Sui Ye' more, or... me?"
The two male followers suddenly recalled the things that had happened upstairs moments ago, their faces turned white as paper, and one of them nodded immediately: "Dig! We'll dig! But, could you do us a favor?"
"Speak."
"If 'Ta Sui Ye' gets angry, can you spare our lives?" he pleaded.
"I'll try my best." Sun Hang nodded slightly.
The two grabbed the shovels and walked slowly towards the area not covered by moss. The man who had asked Sun Hang for protection took a deep breath, lifted the shovel, and pushed it diagonally into the ground.
Just as the shovel head began to sink into the soil, the man's expression suddenly changed, and his body froze there. Cautiously, he said, "I... I think I hit something..."
"Don't scare me!" The other man instinctively stepped back two steps, "What did you hit?"
"It... it... it seems like the shovel cut into something fleshy..." the man glanced at Sun Hang and said tremblingly, "Can I pull the shovel out... and take a look?"
Sun Hang nodded.
The man held his breath and gradually pulled the shovel head out of the ground.
Aside from some scattered soil sticking to the end of the shovel, there was nothing unusual. But just when everyone else breathed a sigh of relief, a liquid resembling blood suddenly seeped from the soil, instantly dyeing the soil around the shovel dark red.
"Ah!" The man was instantly aghast, dropped the shovel, and fell to the ground, crawling backward with his hands and feet.
The two women let out a scream, retreating several meters in fright.
Sun Hang frowned, walked over, lifted the fallen man up, and then picked up the shovel from the ground.
The "blood" oozing from the earth wasn't much, only staining an area the size of a palm before it stopped spreading.
"When you've seen the saints cut the flesh of Ta Sui, did it bleed?" Sun Hang turned to the two women in the distance and asked.
The two women shook their heads like rattles.
"The... the... Ta Sui should... shouldn't be so shallow..." the young woman stammered.
"Does Ta Sui move on its own?"
"...Don't know." The woman still shook her head, "We've actually never seen what a complete Ta Sui looks like..."
"Since the Ta Sui parasites in your bodies can use mycelium to attack others, the main body of Ta Sui shouldn't be a piece of meat easily cut apart, right?" Sun Hang recalled the documents from seven years ago, that temporarily numbered "Wu 179" meat mass didn't have the ability to attack—at least in the Investigation Bureau's files, it stated "no observed aggressiveness, low threat level."
The Cult Organization fed the meat mass with immobile corpses, so if a live person without movement restrictions were thrown into the tank, they could easily escape the entangling mycelium and step over the meat mass to get out of the tank.
Assuming "Ta Sui" and that meat mass were the same type of uncanny entity, what could it have "evolved" into over seven years?
Sun Hang gestured for the two male followers to step back, then he held the shovel, approached the bleeding spot, and stomped the blade vertically downwards.
A soft squelch.
Just as the male follower had said earlier, the sensation from the end of the shovel didn't feel like breaking through soil—neither the loose soil nor the compacted soil—but like slicing into a piece of tough leather.