Edrick's pupils contracted slightly, but his breathing remained steady.
He had already considered this possibility—an abandoned factory would inevitably be home to beings beyond the realm of the ordinary. But when those hollow eye sockets locked onto him, a primal warning flashed through his nerves.
He slowly backed away, carefully controlling his movements to ensure he didn't alert these inhuman beings. The corners of the children's mouths turned upward, and the cotton fibers clinging to their bodies wriggled like living creatures.
The scene should have been terrifying, but Edrick's mind had already begun to analyze it: the synchronized movements suggested a collective consciousness, while the stiff joints pointed to some kind of puppet-like control mechanism.
Edrick quietly backed away. To be honest, he didn't know how to deal with these supernatural phenomena. What was their logic? How could they cause harm? How could they be restrained?
In Edrick's memory, things like wraiths were not very rare. Although the people of this world did not like wraiths, they were not as afraid of them as the people of Earth.Moreover, the people of Stellaxis had some basic knowledge about wraiths, such as that they disliked light and devout faith.
Furthermore, the vast majority of wraiths had very limited influence and followed certain rules. Generally speaking, they did not have the unreasonable ability to kill someone instantly with just a glance.
Just like now, those children were only watching Edrick quietly, without making any further moves.
Edrick wasn't completely unprepared. Before coming here, he brought everything he could find that might be useful for exorcism, including a dagger, a cross—no, a three-pronged emblem—coarse salt, an iron hex wrench, and a fragment of a reflective mirror.
Edrick clenched the triangular emblem in his palm. This was the symbol of the church in this world, and he assumed it must have a similar effect to a cross.
Although the children hadn't charged at him yet, perhaps out of fear or some premonition, Edrick quietly backed away.
He didn't need to get into any conflict with these strange phenomena right now. He just needed to hang around the textile factory and wait for the Flower Maiden and the Wealth-Scattering Lad to finish their work here.
Just as Edrick had backed away to a safe distance and was about to turn around, he suddenly found himself struggling to breathe. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn't regulate his breathing rhythm.
At some point, Edrick's breathing rhythm had synchronized with that of the children. His lungs felt as though they had been filled with indigo dye from a dye vat. He tried to take a deep breath, but his throat was wrapped in invisible threads.
The chests of the children in line were rising and falling in perfect unison, and the wet, gasping sounds from their noses echoed like three hundred spindles piercing cotton simultaneously.
"Huff... huff..."
He pressed his Adam's apple and swallowed hard, cold sweat trickling down his spine and into his work pants. The children's breathing slowed to three breaths per minute, and Edrick's fingertips turned purple. What was even more terrifying was that when he tried to bite his tongue to stimulate his nerves, he discovered that even the rhythm of his saliva secretion was synchronized with the children's.
In such a dire situation, most people would panic, but Edrick was surprised to find himself unusually calm. His mind raced, and he first tried to move away, but his legs seemed to be nailed to the ground. Looking down, he saw that two white children had wrapped their arms around his legs.
Their necks were twisted 180 degrees, and their hair was woven into eyes with spindle-shaped pupils that stared straight at Edrick. The strength in their hands was so great that it was impossible to break free.
Edrick immediately closed his eyes and tried everything he had brought with him one by one. He had seen these children appear, so it was likely that the power of these wraiths was affecting their victims through their line of sight.
First, he tried the triangular emblem, but it had no effect.
What about salt? Or taking deep breaths?
He even pulled out an iron hex wrench and swung it around, but it had no effect either. The wrench seemed to pass right through the two white children clinging to his legs.
Finally, he took out the mirror.
In many legends, mirrors are said to have unexpected effects in exorcising evil spirits.
This time, it worked wonders. The two white children, upon seeing their reflections in the mirror, immediately covered their eyes and screamed as they vanished.
The children who had been waiting in line also covered their eyes and crouched on the ground, trembling, but they continued to wait in line.
Once his feet regained sensation, Edrick immediately stepped back, keeping a safe distance from the door.
Edrick swept the mirror's light toward his feet, and the two children revealed their true forms in the reflection: their skin was stretched over miniature skeletons like cotton fabric, their chest cavities filled with gears wrapped in胎毛, and their gaping mouths sewn shut with fragments of the "John Harrison & Co., Linen Manufacturers Child Labor Employment Contract."
Yeeeeeeee
The scream did not come from the children, but from the old spinning machine deep in the workshop.
The moment the reflection in the mirror touched the wraiths, the two small corpses curled up and carbonized like sun-dried slugs.but the children in the queue continued to march mechanically. Edrick noticed that every time their bare feet hit the floor, more pearl-colored silk threads seeped out of the cracks in the floor—these threads were weaving a suffocating web in the capillaries of his lungs at the rate of his breathing.
After ensuring his safety, Edrick closed his eyes, and his consciousness returned to the Sanctum of the Village Deity, where he stood in front of the television: "Hey, are you done yet?"
"Almost... almost done." The ellipsis after the Wealth-Scattering Lad's 'almost' was very long, lasting for almost half a minute, before he finally said, "Okay! Analysis complete!"
"Then I can get my Faith Essence Points?" Edrick was overjoyed, but he didn't expect the Wealth-Scattering Lad to type out several lines of dense text: "Follow the method below to exorcise the evil spirits, and then you can absorb them."
"WTF..."
Edrick's boots were stuck in the damp moss, and the rotting wooden floorboards of the textile factory creaked beneath his feet. Moonlight filtered through the broken dome, casting mottled patterns on the walls—small handprints left by children, dried blood now blackened.
He had just shaken off the lingering wraiths of child laborers, and now the cursed spinning machine was waiting for him in the workshop.
The machine was still running.
There was no steam, no clatter of gears, only the spinning spindle, the cotton thread on the spool glowing an eerie pale green. Edrick knew this wasn't a mechanical issue—something older, more evil, had taken root within.
He approached slowly, running the tip of his hex wrench along the machine's body, leaving a fresh scratch on the rusted metal.
The machine suddenly emitted a low hum, and the spindles began to spin faster.
When Edrick's hex wrench pressed against the inspection hole, he saw the true nature of the "cotton threads"—each thread was woven with translucent strands of hair, which upon closer inspection turned out to be the fetal hair of children and the long hair of female workers, twisted together into cursed strings.
"Old thing, it's time to retire." As Edrick's wrench plunged in, three hundred steel strings snapped taut, pinning his right arm to the spindle shaft.
The sound of cracking bones resonated with the mournful wail of metal. In the excruciating pain, he saw—each spindle tip embedded with the skull of a female worker, strands of hair erupting from the eye sockets, twisted into nooses of revenge with the silk threads.
"Stop this machine!"
Edrick's left fist smashed into the control panel, his knuckles crashing into the brass knobs until they were a bloody mess.The machine responded with even greater ferocity: the eight skull spindles spun backward, the hair strands like steel strings cutting into the gaps between his arm bones, peeling away muscle fibers with the precision of a scalpel. Blood flowed through the grooves of the bearings engraved with runes, activating a blood curse deep within the base.
"Ssshhhhh
Steam erupted suddenly from a boiler room that shouldn't have existed, mixing with the putrid scent of bone dust and settling on Edrick's face. The instrument panel glass shattered, and among the flying shards, he saw his own face reflected on the rusted copper plate—his skin was being consumed by thread-like mold spots.
A strange force began to erode Edrick's body. Deep in his consciousness, the few remaining candles on the two rows of candle holders in the dilapidated Sanctum of the Village Deity suddenly began to burn wildly. Within seconds, the huge flames burned the candles to nothing. The Flower Maiden and the Wealth-Scattering Lad on the TV saw this scene and woke up as if from a dream.
Flower Maiden: "You unlucky child, did you forget to tell him the rules!"
Wealth-Scattering Lad: "Ah, right (; ̄Д ̄), it should be fine. This level of Murmur Corruption can be overcome by burning some Faith Essence Points."
The skull spindle cracked open the jaw, and the hair turned into steel strings, forming a toxic tornado that swept toward Edrick. The first string pierced his left shoulder blade, the second wrapped around his right shinbone—each thread carried the venomous hatred of the dying female worker, imprinting fragments of memory into his nerves:
Child laborers' fingers crushed by spindles... Pregnant workers miscarrying in piles of cotton... Overseers shoving wailing children into dye vats...
The television in the Sanctum of the Village Deity burst into a blinding snowstorm, and the Flower Maiden's hair suddenly scattered, thousands of strands of black hair piercing the screen and entangling the broken television. The Wealth-Scattering Lad cried and threw gold ingots out the door, typing as he cried, "My secret stash!
Edrick erupted in agony, tearing the steel strings from his shoulder blades and thrusting them into the control panel.
With a bone-chilling "click," the entire machine convulsed.
The moment the Faith Essence candles burned out, the spindles emitted a dying whimper and stopped spinning one after another. The cotton threads on the spools twisted strangely, like decapitated snakes, and finally fell limply. A wet, crackling sound came from inside the machine, as if something had been torn apart from the inside.
When the final tremors subsided, the only sound left was Edrick's heavy breathing. He pulled out the wrench, its metal tip dripping with dark red rust, corroding the iron plate into hissing grooves. The rust crawled between his fingers, as if it were alive, trying to burrow into his wounds.
Outside the door, the other machines in the darkness suddenly emitted a low, resonant hum, as if mourning or warning. Edrick wiped the rust off the wrench, but he couldn't remove the blood that had seeped into the metal's texture.
He knew this was far from over—the entire factory was watching him, and the silent machines were slowly awakening in the darkness.
"Congratulations, you have gained a tiny bit of Divine Authority, which is equivalent to about 1,500 Faith Essence Points. Oh, right, there are two more of these ghostly things in this textile factory. You'd better absorb them all, or else they will remember you, curse you, and make sure you die a horrible death (✿◕‿◕✿)."
A dialogue box appeared on the TV screen, showing the Wealth-Scattering Lad's words. His small mosaic face seemed to reveal a gloating smile.
However, Edrick didn't care. His attention was focused on the candlesticks on both sides of the temple. Now, another candle had been lit... Huh? A candle? Shouldn't there be a little left after buying the Cat Control Spell earlier?Moreover, he had agreed to pay 1,500 Faith Essence Points, but how could only half of the candles be left?
"When you were fighting desperately with the loom, the murmuring Divine Authority tried to corrupt you. In order to save your life, all of your Faith Essence Points were consumed, and I also had to heal your injuries," said the Flower Maiden. "You are very lucky to have mastered the correct method, so the corruption is not serious. Otherwise..."
Edric finally realized that the terrible wounds on his body had miraculously healed, but of course, the price was quite heavy—500 Faith Essence Points.
Tonight was too dangerous. In just a short while, he had experienced death twice. The wraiths in this textile factory were beyond the level that ordinary people could fight against. If he wasn't a Village Deity (Apprentice), he definitely wouldn't have made it out alive today. Even after fighting so hard, he only earned 700 Faith Essence Points.
"Isn't there any spell I can use?" Thinking of today's disproportionate effort and reward, Edrick couldn't smile.
However, this was only on the surface. The gains from this battle were subtle, but he had just escaped death and hadn't noticed them yet.
"As long as you light the candle, even if it burns out, it's still an improvement for you," added the Wealth-Scattering Lad, but Edrick was in no state to consider such things.
The remaining contamination could wait until tomorrow. Edrick was too exhausted; for a mortal like him, clearing one curse in a day was already his limit.
When Edrick pushed open the rotten wooden door of the latrine, a heavy smell of rust mixed with a kind of sweet rottenness hit him. Griff was curled up in the corner, his arms mechanically wrapped around an idol covered in brown stains, his knuckles white from excessive force.
The idol had been eroded beyond recognition by time, its rough surface pitted with the gashes of the years, barely discernible as a twisted human form.
The head of the statue had been worn down to a blurry sphere, and its limbs had melted into the torso like wax, leaving only an eerie, almost embryonic, curled posture.
Griff's lips moved at an unnatural frequency, uttering sticky syllables: "Tekeli-li... Tekeli-li..."
Each syllable carried an eerie metallic echo. Moonlight slanted in through the broken window, illuminating his dilated pupils: the edges of his irises were an abnormal iron gray, as if eroded by tiny metal particles.
When Edrick approached, Griff suddenly convulsed violently, and the god statue in his arms emitted a high-frequency vibration, with vein-like ridges appearing on the surface of the stone.
"You dog, you're so lucky that the stones in this latrine can be used as your god statue!" Edrick's consciousness did not return to the TV, but he seemed to hear the Flower Maiden's gloating voice.