The strange feeling that had been buried deep in the woman's heart since childhood finally broke the surface at this moment.
She finally understood why she always felt so uncomfortable and out of place living in this city.
She also understood the source of that strange feeling she'd always had during the sacrifices.
With her sense of good and evil reshaped, the woman couldn't accept it for a while.
She locked herself in the room for a full three days.
The man had no idea what the woman was thinking during those days in the room.
All he knew was that when she opened the door again, her face was streaked with tears.
The woman cried for a whole day.
She fainted from crying, woke up and continued, then fainted again.
It wasn't until she had no more strength left that she finally calmed down.
The man asked curiously why she was so sad.
The woman said that originally, she should have been one of those sacrificed.
The only reason she survived was that her parents had taken her place and died.
There was an unwritten rule in the city.
All married families had to take turns sending their children for sacrifice every month.
There was a fairly large population in the city.
They didn't need to work. All they had to do was lie in bed every day and pray to the cellar, and they could get everything they wanted.
Everyone in the city had nothing to do all day.
They had plenty of time to have children.
So even though eight children were sacrificed every month, no family in the city had completely died out.
They just had time and could keep having kids.
Childless couples were naturally exempt from sacrificing children. But if a family had children and refused to offer them up, there was only one way out.
Two adult lives for one child's survival.
Almost no one was willing to do this.
In this morbid environment where they had to sacrifice their own children every month, everyone regarded family ties very lightly.
If they could raise a child, they'd keep it.
If a child wasn't selected for sacrifice between the ages of two and eight, they could grow up safely.
The cellar had everything they wanted, and they didn't need children to support them in their old age. As soon as they grew up, they'd leave home and form a new family.
So almost no one violated this rule.
Only the woman's parents chose to die themselves and let their child live.
The woman didn't know what her parents were thinking at that time.
She was too young then, and her memory of this incident was very fuzzy. After living a carefree life for so long, the pain of losing her parents had gradually faded away with the passage of time.
It wasn't until the man brought up the real sense of good and evil that she suddenly remembered that night when she was selected for sacrifice.
When her father and mother were being dragged away.
Her mother had said.
She had to leave this place and get away from this city.
She must go and never stay.
Everyone in the city was a demon. There were no living people in this city.
She didn't understand what this meant at the time, but now she suddenly did.
Pulling herself out of grief, the woman decided to leave the city.
After being instilled with the correct sense of good and evil, she simply couldn't accept this way of life anymore.
She said she wanted to go with the man.
It didn't matter where they went, as long as they didn't have to live in this city anymore.
The man also wanted to leave, so he agreed.
But they never expected that this city was a place you could enter but never leave.
Previously, when the woman saw the guards at the city gate, she thought they were protecting everyone's safety and keeping outsiders out.
It was only when they were actually stopped and locked in the dungeon that she realized the guards at the city gate were actually there to prevent people from escaping.
No wonder.
No wonder this city didn't allow outsiders in or out, yet occasionally someone would manage to enter the city right under the guards' noses.
This wasn't a oversight on their part; they just didn't care.
Once you stepped into this city, you either joined everyone else, accepted this way of life, and became one of them.
Or you became a corpse, forever keeping the city's secrets.
The man was also locked up, but he was a demon, and the strength of mortals was too weak for him.
It was just a dungeon made of wood and chains. He could break out of it easily.
He escaped from the dungeon, found the woman, and planned to force their way out.
It was precisely this act that led to the tragedy that followed.
The snake demon only thought that he could easily kill all the humans in a minute.
He completely forgot about the god that everyone in the city worshiped.
An inexperienced young girl and an inexperienced little demon.
They didn't even manage to escape from the cage before they were both caught again.
Those who attempted to defect.
Would die.
Neither of them could escape the fate of death.
Needless to say about the young girl. As a mere mortal, a single fire was enough to burn away her life.
Even though the man was a demon with the protection of his magic power, he couldn't bear the pain of being burned day after day.
In the end, he couldn't hold on any longer, revealed his true form, and was also burned alive.
But for demons, physical death isn't the end of life.
Even without a physical body and only a soul remaining, demons can still continue to cultivate and keep their souls from disappearing.
At the moment he closed his eyes, everyone in the city saw his snake body and knelt down together.
They kept kowtowing towards the temple, shouting the name of the god and celebrating that they had gotten rid of the demon.
And the man, now a soul, watched as the soul of his beloved girl was caught and devoured by a ghostly shadow.
He also saw that when everyone in the city knelt and prayed together, a glimmer of spiritual light appeared on their foreheads and all rushed towards the inside of the temple.
At that moment, he was certain that what lived in the temple wasn't a god at all.
It was an evil creature.
Humans, as the masters of the world, are born with spiritual light.
The gods worshiped by people originally had no life.
But because they absorbed the spiritual light dispersed from human beliefs, they gained life and consciousness.
They truly became the gods protecting a region.
The same was true for those gods worshiped by countless people.
But no god would ever take away human spiritual light on purpose.
That was a crime for a god.
The evil creature in the temple absorbed most of the spiritual light by force.
The snake demon fled.
His soul escaped from the city.
By a stroke of luck, he shared his life with a human, which was how he survived and became the way he was now.
When he completely took control of this body, he wanted to avenge his beloved girl.
He attempted to manipulate the power of heaven and earth to engulf the city.
He wanted to destroy the evil creature in the city.
During the confrontation between the two sides, the evil creature in the city was severely injured.
Then.
It drained the vitality of everyone in the city.
Overnight, all the common people in the city turned into skeletons.
This city thus became a dead city.
With a large amount of human vitality to support it, the snake demon couldn't defeat the evil creature.
He couldn't get close to the city, let alone destroy the evil creature.
He could only keep lying in wait outside.
He had been waiting for an opportunity.
That evil creature had survived by relying on the power of faith and absorbing the lives of the living.
Now that there was no one left in the city, the evil creature's power would gradually decline over time.
As long as it became weak enough, he would have a chance to avenge himself.
But things didn't turn out as he'd hoped. As time passed, the desert had turned into a plain, and the once magnificent city had been buried underground. But there were still people who occasionally came to feed the evil creature in the city with human lives, making it impossible for him to find an opportunity to avenge himself for a long time.