Ruin! Ruin!
Gu Jun’s face was white as a ghost, but his eyes were flaring red. He unloaded the hail of bullets on the members of Lai Sheng Company, who had gathered around the crumbling shrine. The unfamiliar recoil almost shattered his shoulder, but his hand still managed to steady the barrel of the gun...
The rifle clicked from the lack of ammo. Without missing a beat, Gu Jun reached out to grab the guns from Yang Henan and Zhou Yi. He continued to rain death on those members who were still trying to run. Seeing the people being pierced by bullets, their blood dying the ground, hearing their groans as life left their bodies... Gu Jun fired even faster. This was the first time Gu Jun had fired a gun, and it was also the first time he had killed another human being... Well, it was still debatable whether the victims were human or not.
The tragedy of the past, the sadness of his childhood, the dark mist buried deep in his heart, the nightmare that occasionally visited him in his dreams, the fear of the sacrificial lambs, the hallucination of the villagers of Gu Rong Village, the pain of his comrades who sacrificed and bled—all would lead to ruination!
‘Didn’t I warn you? The boy will one day grow up to become a real man and stand before all of you again. When that time comes, all debt shall be cleared. That day shall be the day of your reckoning, and that day has arrived.’
Gu Jun grabbed a sniper rifle. He had asked how to use it when the Demon Hunters were resting on the spiral staircase earlier. He looked through the infrared scope on the gun and locked onto the man in black who had escaped the furthest away. The trigger was pulled. The man’s brain exploded as the shrapnel burst inside his head.
One.
Reloading, the ammo slid into place with a satisfying click. The scope moved to the other person in black. The neck was severed.
Two.
Click. Bang!
The back was pierced.
Three.
“Ah Jun, Ah Jun!” Xue Ba shouted in a hurry. “Aim for their legs. We need some alive to get information out of them...”
Gu Jun scored another headshot.
Four.
The barrel moved. Headshot.
Five.
Xue Ba went silent. He raised his hand to stop the other Demon Hunters from interrupting Gu Jun or influencing Gu Jun. Their bodies had not recovered, and they had no idea how Gu Jun’s current S value was. With the spell that he had cast before... it was wise for them to make their existence as scarce as possible for the moment. The sound of gunfire echoed endlessly. Among the mountains of mutated wolves’ carcasses, there were human bodies and dying victims. Be it the already dead or almost dead, their wilted faces were filled with pain, dissatisfaction, and a kind of confusion.
“Gu Jun...” The leading man in red collapsed in his pool of blood. Even though his body was punctured with holes, he did not groan once from pain. If anything, his voice was still as even as before. “Looks like your foreign soul... has some secrets that we do not know about... But even if you ruin us, you will not be able to ruin our...”
Bang!
Before the man could finish, his head erupted like a watermelon. His body fell to the ground, and no more venomous words could be heard out of him.
“I won’t be able to ruin your Lai Sheng Company, huh?” Gu Jun grumbled. “Go and tell that to your demon.”
He had a basic grasp of this organization. The origin of Lai Sheng Company had to be related to the cultish apostates from the foreign civilization. They had turned their backs on the Goddess of Life, whom they assumed had abandoned them, and turned to another power. They projected their souls to another universe, finding new vessels and assuming new lives.
Due to some cosmic arrangement, the first vessel was found on Earth, then the second and the third. But they only had fragments of their previous memory and consciousness. By finding one another, they grew in scale and power. They studied the foreign civilization to create more vessels. Gu Jun was one of the batches of super vessels or the Spirit Children. Many summoning rituals had probably been performed before his parents met each other.
It was not an apostate that his body was supposed to be a vessel for but a demon who they believed was hibernating deep underground, the Son of Misfortune. But...
Gu Jun pulled the trigger, another life lost.
How would these people know the demon Son of Misfortune who served the Great Old Ones was also the Son of Steel, Freud Landon, the most successful student from Carlot Academy. The warrior who stayed behind alone at the ruin of Rikers to conduct his research on the abnormal creatures, the lost soul who left his suicide note before slicing his own throat.
Gu Jun now understood that there were traces to follow... with regards to his memory of the foreign language, his talent in medicine, and the unknown power he had inherited from Longkan seabed.
Freud Landon.
The dark side, Son of Misfortune.
The light side, Son of Steel.
Now the powers of these two sides were awakened. They were battling it out inside his soul, and the battle was tearing him apart. Did Landon really committe suicide because he had lost faith?
‘Perhaps death can give me another answer.’
Gu Jun now believed that Landon might have had a bigger intention. After he became the Son of Misfortune, he had retained parts of his old consciousness, biding his time, waiting for the time to reap the fruit.
He was not totally consumed by the Son of Misfortune earlier thanks to the intervention of the Son of Steel.
Bang!
Gu Jun fired off another shot, but this bullet missed. His body swayed, and he almost fell. After casting the spell, the dark energy slowly regained control of his body as it ate away at his mind.
“Ah Jun, that’s enough,” Xue Ba yelled again. His face was lined with sincerity and concern. “Give me the gun. It is time for you to rest.”
“That’s right, Ah Jun.” Uncle Dan joined in the persuasion. Gu Jun’s face was startlingly pale, and his lips were turning purple, not good signs. If this continued, they were not worried about the people from Lai Sheng Company; Gu Jun’s state of mind would become their main concern.
“Okay...” Gu Jun took a deep breath and handed the gun over to Xue Ba with difficulty. He uttered lightly, “Captain Xue, I am not mad... I have never felt clearer about anything. If we give these heartless monsters any chance at life, they will only turn on us by casting the spell, and we are currently too weak to deal with that now...”
Once the gun left Gu Jun’s grasp, the bloodlust departed from him as well. He toppled toward the ground. Thankfully, Uncle Dan reached out fast enough to hold him. Xue Ba immediately had the other members who could still move go and pick up the few remaining guns and ammo to clean up the battlefield and apprehend the living Lai Sheng members.
“How come those people gained corporeality only much later?” Lin Mo, who sat to the side, peppered Gu Jun with questions. His face was lit up with a thirst for knowledge. As a member of Scientific Research Team, this was much too interesting of a discovery.
“I believe that was because... they had cast some kind of spell on themselves before they came...” Gu Jun sat down on the floor with Uncle Dan’s help. His voice came slowly and shakingly. “But I broke the spell... I do not know any spells myself. The one that I remembered... came from my subconscious... Technically, you could say I used brute force to bring the whole shrine down...”
“Enough with the questions, and you, stop talking!” Uncle Dan warned. His normally friendly face was covered with worry. “I need to take your pulse.”
Gu Jun was showing symptoms of quintessential cardiac arrest. Before Uncle Dan could do his diagnosis, Gu Jun suddenly started to spasm all over. The convulsions choked the words in his mouth. His consciousness was fading.
“Huohuo, emergency!” Uncle Dan ordered in a hurry. “The pulse of the aorta is weakening. The pupils are dilating... His heartbeat is slowing down. An intravenous injection, stat!”
Gu Jun collapsed on the ground. His lifeless eyes stared at the gray sky. Some black crows fluttered across it.
He could feel everything slipping away.
Ruin, ruin...
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