The Great Worm Lich

The bright red blood climbed up along the cracks on the stone pillar while emitting hot aura like magma, and soon, faint black smoke began to emit out of the totem pole.

Upon seeing the emergence of this strange phenomenon, the hundreds of thousands of natives turned even crazier at once. The ordinary tribesmen kneeled on the ground while shouting towards the tribal Raider at the top of their lungs, “Great Zhang Lisheng, you’re the guardian protecting your believer’s heritage. You’re our living faith…”

At the same time, the chief warriors became even braver as they competed to go to the stone pillar to decapitate their own heads.

In the continuous sacrifice of soul and life, the cracks on the tribal totem pole gradually spread out. The spiritual monsters and giant beasts belonged in the ancient legacy of Tudenan, and several dozens of tribes that the Tudenan conquered began to break into pieces and nothingness.

As the sculptures crumbled, Zhang Lisheng, who was pondering about the similarities and differences between Witchcraft’s Gate of Death and Sacrifice by starting from their sources, suddenly felt the heat between his brows. Inadvertently, the Gate of Sacrifice’s method of becoming a wizard in his mind suddenly succeeded out of the blue.

His vision began to get blurry as he inexplicably felt as though his body seemed to hover high in the air. Then, a feeling of long-lost fear started to rise in his heart, causing chills to run down the young man’s back.

“W-What’s happening?” Zhang Lisheng calmed down and muttered in shock. Looking down at his feet, he saw that his thighs were now partially submerged in densely packed, long, golden hair.

“T-This is…” Looking around, he suddenly found that he was standing on the head of a three-headed, six-armed, terrifying giant ape covered entirely in golden fur.

“T-This is the monkey king from Oasis World, but bigger. What’s going on here…” Zhang Lisheng’s mind was in a daze. When he recalled the brutal means of the foreign world’s apes that could destroy everything with just its simple violence, he snapped back to reality in shock and did not think too much about it anymore while he tried to nihilate his body using the nine-tailed lizard’s power. However, he realized that his transformation power had already passed.

While his heart tightened, colors drained even more from the young man’s face as he became stunned. He tried to drive the wizard gus to crawl out from his body to protect himself using his mind, but after trying it for a while, he could not even sense a single wizard gu at all.

“The transformation power and my wizard gus are not usable right now…” A lightbulb went off in the head of Zhang Lisheng who had been inexplicably caught in a desperate situation suddenly while the greatest possibility came to his mind.

Just as this possibility appeared in his mind in a flash, the three heads of the giant ape below him suddenly let out an earth-shattering roar in unison with its six arms hitting its own broad chest.

Just this one roar alone was enough to make Zhang Lisheng bleed from all his four orifices which were his eyes, nose, mouth, and ears. He collapsed and fell from the ape’s head weakly and was clapped into a puddle of meat by two giant palms, before being thrown to the ground.

As his vision blacked-out, he could clearly feel that the impact of a colossal force had shattered his body and was merely adhered together by the thick, bloody, sticky plasma. At once, fear rose from Zhang Lisheng’s heart.

In the heart-wrenching pain, his muscles and bones began to reshape gradually and return to human form. However, the young man suddenly felt a shadow appearing above his head. With a loud ‘smack’, it had smashed him into a puddle of meat again.

The pain gushed up his body with twice the pain, causing Zhang Lisheng to lose his mind. Fortunately, with his long cultivation of witchcraft, his mental willpower was much stronger than other ordinary people, allowing him to hold on to his last rationality and not break down.

With his mind still rational, he could infer and make the correct choice in the face of adversity. When Zhang Lisheng reshaped into the human body once again, he began to comfort and encourage himself. “I must have turned into the Gate of Sacrifice’s Rank-1 Wizard from the Hellfire tribesmen’s power of faith, and I’m now trying to fuse a beast’s soul. Then again, of all beasts, why did it have to be the monkey king from the Oasis World… Ah, I can’t think of these idle things. I must keep my rationality! I must keep my sanity! Even if I can’t cast any Gate of Death’s witchcraft method for now, my body strength should be strong enough under the nourishment of the wizard gus. Just focus on dodging the next blow first. I’ll look at the situation and slowly come up with a solution…”

The instant he recovered, he stepped aside using his Shape-Will Fist’s footwork with his hands on his waist and had almost dodged away from the slap coming from the sky. Unfortunately, under the huge impact, Zhang Lisheng’s foot staggered, and the strong wind sent him flying away to over ten meters away. Just as he climbed up from the ground, the giant ape immediately trampled him, causing the bones and flesh of his body to smash together.

Turning into a puddle of meat for the third time, the layer-upon-layer of pain instantly drowned Zhang Lisheng’s mind. Unconsciously, countless subtle prayers and chants began to resonate in his mind again and again, “Great Raider, you’re our living faith, the legend who walks amongst our tribe…”

“… I offer you the most sincere prayer, and I will always praise your brilliance…”

“… you are the belief gifted to the tribe. The island should be renamed to your name…”

Each of these prayers could bring negligible power to the young man, but when these powers gathered together, it managed to beget a human-headed snake monster of withering skin, with dry black hair on his head, out of Zhang Lisheng’s meat puddle. Its facial features looked dilapidated with his eyes, one black one white, in a blank expression.

When the monster was born, all the cracks filled with the warriors’ fresh blood on the tattered totem poles began to connect with each other, forming a blurry snake shadow with a bent body that circled on the towering stone pillar.

As though a child carved it, the snake image had a human head with an unrecognizable face. When it crudely appeared on the totem pole, the Tudenan tribal book of history enshrined in the altar suddenly burst out into dazzling brilliance like a star, turning the treehouse into ashes that rose to the sky.

Under the illumination of the tribal book of history, a raging fire suddenly ignited on the totem pole, from the top to the bottom, burning the snake shadow encircling it. However, no matter how hot the flame was, the snake shadow did not dissipate. Instead, it merged gradually with the stone pillar into one.

The burning did not remove the snake shadow, the Tudenan tribal book of history suddenly roared violently and radiated an even more dazzling light.

Unfortunately, to the tribal book of history that contained so much power, losing its soul in the process, its eruption came with great difficulty. After that, it began to dim into a bleak end and soon, brilliance dissipated from the bark book and the roaring gradually died down.

After sometime later, the radiance on the tribal book of history became exhausted, the flames on the totem pole slowly extinguished as well. At this time, pairs of giant hands suddenly appeared in the air and began to slap down on the totem pole, making it flatter and thicker, with many vivid patterns carved on it.

These sculptures were no longer related to Tudenan or the information of the other Hellfire tribes. It was carved with a double-headed, five-faced Demon image shrouded in a dark fog.

One head of the Demon had long hair spread out on its shoulder with an unclear face. The other head, on the other hand, had four different faces on it while one had a wide mouth bulging eyes like a toad; one looked like a wyrmdragon that had mouse ears, cow nose, and so on. They were all various images of entities Zhang Lisheng had transformed before.

“It’s a success! It’s a success! The legendary ‘rebirth’ ritual actually succeeded…” Tugra, who was kneeling on the ground sneakily peeked quietly; they could see clearly that only the Demon’s image developed by the young man was left on the tribal totem pole. Ecstatic, he clenched his fists tightly.

Right at this time, in the unseen world where consciousness blended with each other, the human-headed snake monster evolved from Zhang Lisheng’s corpse had already entangled the giant ape with its bloody mouth widely opened before swallowing it directly.

The instant the ape entered his stomach, the young man felt his vision going blurry right away. With his head spinning, he opened his eyes.

“No wonder it’s said that the merging of the beast’s soul of the Witchcraft’s Gate of Sacrifice is even more difficult than Witchcraft’s Gate of Death’s refining of wizard gu! This difficulty level completely blows my mind away… This is impossible! This difficulty level is just too impossible! Could it be that Su Deli has done something on it…” The instant Zhang Lisheng recovered his consciousness, he gritted his teeth tightly as he blurted out, forgetting that unlike refining a wizard gu, the merging of beasts’ soul could already be freely changed by the wizard himself.

Even in ancient times, the Rank-1 Wizards would only merge with beasts, such as a wolf, leopard, and so on, and then change later on when they had become much more powerful. Nobody would merge with a three-headed, six-armed, impossibly powerful, giant ape that only appeared in myths as their first beast’s soul.

When the young man was muttering to himself, Tugra, who was kneeling at his feet, did not dare to interrupt. When Zhang Lisheng had become quiet and began to glance around with a frown, this foreign world’s native that had just become Zhang Lisheng tribe’s headman from Tudenan tribe’s headman said respectfully with a slightly trembling voice, “I-It’s a success! Great Raider, the ‘rebirth’ ceremony succeeded! ‘Tudenan’ has disappeared and the new Zhang Lisheng tribe had replaced it. Not only that, but you’ve also obtained the title ‘Conqueror’!”

“Zhang Lisheng tribe…” Zhang Lisheng repeated this name and found it to be very awkward.

“Yes, Great Conqueror! With the tribe and the island named after you, you have the opportunity to be the Island God now…”

“Wait a minute, Tugra!” Looking at the tribal headman’s excitement, Zhang Lisheng interrupted in confusion, “Since the entire tribe is already named after me, and I have conquered an island, why can’t I become the Island God directly?”

“Great Conqueror, Legendary Spirit and the Island God differ from the previous five titles. They’re completely different…”

“How so?”

“I’ve never left the island before, but I know from the legend that the acquisition of the ‘Island God’ honor means that one would become a real god. As for the rest, I know nothing about it anymore.”

“Become a real god?” Zhang Lisheng did not believe in such nonsense. With his lips curled, he looked at the several hundreds of bodies lying under the totem pole that had become different from before. Sighing, he picked up the canvas bag that he had brought with him from the ground.

When he opened the bag, he could see that the slow-throbbing flesh ball and the silk cloth drawn with the Eight Trigram were still there. The stone turned by the monkey king after it died, on the other hand, had disappeared without a trace.

After pondering for a while, the young man reached out a hand into the bag to touch its interior before rubbing his own fingers together. At once, he felt something slippery between his fingers.

Seeing the stone powder between his fingers, he muttered, “The stone did indeed contain the monkey’s soul before. Now, it has finally vanished into thin air…”

Then, he shifted his attention onto the aborigines that stretched out as far as the eyes could see.