Chapter 338: Infant-Feeding Ghost

The scene on the screen of the Underworld Live Show Phone was absolutely terrifying. Infant Spirits swarmed the area. Those young, resentment-filled souls lingering here all crawled toward me.

If not for the deterrence of the Ksitigarbha Sutra, these Infant Spirits would have already burrowed into my body and sucked my Yang Qi dry.

"There are way too many of them." More than one thing crawled across my back, and the sensation of being grabbed by tiny hands made my hair stand on end.

"Eight breaths left."

I gritted my teeth, stepped forward, and held up the phone to illuminate the cubicle.

The Infant Spirits opened their mouths to bare tiny, sharp teeth. They grinned ferociously as they exhaled resentment and Yin energy, crawling through every corner of the room.

Yin energy raged, obscuring my vision. Only by using Chasing Eye could I barely make out the image on the screen.

The preparation room was about fifteen square meters. Ghostly talismans were pasted in all four corners, their runes congealed like dried blood on the dust-covered Talisman Papers. It looked like no one had entered this room in a long time.

A dilapidated room covered in Talisman Papers and swarming with Infant Spirits—I had anticipated all of this before coming in. But one thing exceeded my expectations.

Chanting the Ksitigarbha Sutra, I waded into the dense Yin energy. Even though the room was barely over a dozen square meters, it felt like a vast, deep-water lake with no end in sight.

Every step splashed up bone-chilling ripples. The faint golden light formed by the Buddhist scripture flickered unsteadily. Gritting my teeth, I forced my way a few steps deeper and finally reached the exact center of the room.

Sitting there was a very ordinary wooden table painted pale yellow. It looked entirely out of place, as if it had been moved here from another department.

There was nothing remarkable about the table itself; what caught my attention was the woman lying flat on top of it.

Her body was spread-eagled, lying flat on the wooden table without a shred of dignity.

Marks of binding ringed her ankles and wrists, but there were no ropes or iron chains in the room. She appeared to have been dead for a long time. Her arms hung down limply. Her coat wasn't torn, but it bore obvious signs of struggling and tugging. It looked as though it had been forcefully unfastened and then haphazardly put back on, appearing completely askew with several buttons forced into the wrong holes.

"The deepest part of the abortion room isn't hiding an Infant Spirit, but a woman?" With four breaths of time left, I walked up to the wooden table to observe her at close range before leaving.

Her hair trailed to the floor. All ten of her fingers were pierced by extremely fine silver needles, pinning them firmly to the tabletop. Glancing over the rest of her body, almost every joint and acupoint had been punctured by silver needles.

"Who did this? Piercing acupoints with silver needles... this is definitely not something a Western doctor could master." From the moment the Talisman Papers appeared on the wall, this was no longer a simple murder or child kidnapping case. There had to be an extremely evil sect standing behind this maternal and child healthcare center.

I stared at the dense cluster of silver needles all over the woman's body, counted my heartbeats, and hurried out of the preparation room, sprinting all the way outside without looking back.

The talismans in that room placed a huge restriction on the Infant Spirits. After I left, the Infant Spirits crawling on me were intimidated by the talismanic magic and didn't escape along with me.

"That was close, way too close!" Taking huge gulps of fresh air, I sat cross-legged on the ground. Ignoring Wang Yu off to the side, I focused on meditating to restore my mental energy.

Only after circulating a Major Heavenly Cycle did my headache slightly ease. I climbed to my feet and looked at my livestream. "Is Master Tianxin still here? Just now, in the third cubicle, there was a woman pinned to a table with silver needles. Did any of you notice anything?"

"That woman should be a ghost too, right? When the Streamer walked over just now, I saw her fingers twitching, and her pulse showed signs of waking up."

Teletubbies Died of Murder: "Spending all day with so many Infant Spirits... if she isn't a ghost, then she's the most pitiful one of all."

"Yeah, a living person pinned to a table, serving as an outlet for the Infant Spirits' resentment day and night—that's pure torture! I'd rather guess she's a ghost."

Yue Liang: "Is the other party conducting some sort of ritual? That little boy led the Streamer to this room. Do you guys think the woman pinned to the table could be the little boy's mother? I don't know if any of the livestream viewers got a good look at that woman's face, but I bet she looks a lot like the boy."

"The guy above makes sense, but why would the little boy's mother be pinned to a table and locked up with the Infant Spirits?"

Peerless Little Jerk: "There is only one truth. I think I've already figured out why this woman is trapped here."

Yue Liang: "I'd love to hear the details."

Delinquent Girl Xiao A tipped the Super Thriller Live Broadcast Room 1 Yuanbao: "Newcomer reporting in, here to aggressively spectate!"

Peerless Little Jerk: "The Streamer stepped into the room with his left leg first. He took four steps in total, taking ten breaths of time from start to finish. His closest distance to the wooden table was 21.03 centimeters, and he tilted the screen at a sixty-degree angle with his right hand to film. Based on all of this, I've discovered a detail that none of you noticed."

This guy's way of speaking was on par with Socrates Paradox. I regulated my breathing while waiting for his next chat message.

Peerless Little Jerk: "The woman lay flat on the wooden table with nothing cushioning her lower body. Her coat was peeled open to both sides. According to actual measurement data from certain documentaries, the variance coefficient between a woman lying on her back versus her stomach is roughly around 0.6. From this, I can responsibly tell everyone..."

The livestream chat, which usually flew with messages, didn't have a single new line right now. Tens of thousands of people were waiting for this data-analysis emperor's final conclusion.

"This woman's bust size is at least a 36D!"

Caught completely off guard, my breath hitched. I nearly suffered a qi deviation, and a chorus of curses erupted in the livestream.

"Get the hell out of here!"

"Fuck off, you completely derailed my train of thought!"

...

Suppressing the Pre-Heaven qi rampaging in my dantian, I looked at the livestream with lingering fear. The livestream viewers were a wildly mixed bunch; their words couldn't be fully trusted. No, for the most part, they were completely untrustworthy.

"Master Tianxin, are you there? If you can hear me, press 1."

Master Tianxin: "Almsgiver, the Buddha has already given me the answer to what you wish to ask. The one lying on the wooden table is neither a living person nor a corpse; it is a special kind of ghost."

"If she's a ghost, why would she be pinned to a table and locked up with the Infant Spirits?"

"That is precisely what makes her special," Master Tianxin said. As soon as this true master spoke, the other livestream viewers quieted down. "Infant Spirits cannot be tamed; they are even less useful than Little Ghosts. The cubicle you just entered is exclusively used to seal Infant Spirits. If I'm not mistaken, the talismans inside make up the Maha Fallen Spirit Grand Formation. This formation only targets spiritual bodies. When you first entered, the reason those Infant Spirits desperately tried to enter your body was to seize your flesh and escape the grand formation."

I shook my head. "Master, what does this Moke Grand Formation have to do with that woman?"

"Maha means infinity, symbolizing suffering and hell. Any grand formation requires an array core. The prerequisite for an array core capable of suppressing the Moke Grand Formation is that it must be able to withstand the impact of the Infant Spirits' resentment. The number of Infant Spirits in that room is immense; even if my true self were there, I wouldn't be able to resolve it. Under normal circumstances, suppressing so many Infant Spirits would require an extremely rare treasure. The array builder couldn't produce such an item, so they came up with an opportunistic shortcut: using a ghost to act as the array core."

"Using a ghost to act as the array core?" I had dabbled a bit in formation building, but I had never heard of such a thing.

Master Tianxin: "An ordinary ghost definitely wouldn't work. That woman must have been coerced while she was alive. Following the array builder's orders, she cared for these Infant Spirits. Afterward, she was ritually refined, undergoing inhuman torture before being transformed into a ghost eternally barred from reincarnation—an Infant-Feeding Ghost. The Saddharmasmrtyupasthana Sutra divides the world's ghosts into thirty-six types, and the Infant-Feeding Ghost is one of them. The common traits of this ghost are having the reflection of its own child stamped deep in its eyes and clutching a cloth sack filled with mangled flesh and blood. It wanders in a stupor, following its instincts from life to serve Infant Spirits. It is the only type of ghost that Infant Spirits will not attack."

After reading Master Tianxin's chat message, I couldn't help but feel that this description sounded a bit like the madwoman who fed the Little Ghosts. I had learned after asking about it that the madwoman was in the process of being refined. However, compared to Infant Spirits, Little Ghosts had less resentment and hatred, which was why she had managed to drag out her miserable existence. "The other party really made a brilliant calculation. They used a grand formation to trap the Infant Spirits and used an Infant-Feeding Ghost as the array core. Since Infant Spirits won't actively attack an Infant-Feeding Ghost, the grand formation remains as impenetrable as a fortress."