After a long silence, someone finally stammered in a low voice, "Who's going to go ask?"
Someone immediately retorted, their voice carrying obvious resistance, "Ask what? Isn't her silly daughter still standing over there? She looks fine, so there shouldn't be any problem, right?"
The adults were hesitant, but the children clearly didn't think the same way.
A boy of seven or eight skipped over to the woman. "Shagu, Shagu, is Ugly Hag doing okay?"
The boy's mother shouted curses from behind him.
The woman ignored them, walking straight to the child.
She crouched down and fished a dark object out of her robes; it seemed to be a dried locust.
She held the dried insect to the child's mouth.
The boy's mother initially wanted to stop him in terror, but seeing the longing in her child's eyes, she eventually lowered her head in defeat.
The boy devoured the dried locust ravenously. After all, roasted grasshoppers were indeed quite fragrant.
The woman reached out and gently patted the child's head with an extremely standard, yet completely cold posture.
"It's fine. We are all very well."
The woman's movements were as precise as if they had been rehearsed a thousand times, but within her eyes—one half clear and cold, the other half turbid—there was nothing.
There was no pity, no relief, not even a flicker of emotion.
It was as if what she had just completed wasn't a warm gesture to comfort a child, but a cold command written into a program.
The boy, hearing this, skipped back to his mother's side, only to have his ear pinched and receive a scolding.
"You dare eat something a fool gives you? Are you looking for a beating?"
The woman seemed not to see it. She pulled a worn notebook and a stub of charcoal pencil from her lapel.
Opening the notebook, she wrote a line of words in an extremely neat script.
Chen Zhou's divine sense was incredibly powerful. Even from dozens of feet away, he could clearly see the content of that line.
【Observation Record 32: Giving food to a hungry fledgling and supplementing it with a head-patting motion can effectively terminate crying behavior. Judged as a good deed, though it may elicit dissatisfaction from surrounding adult individuals.】
Below the writing, she even drew an extremely simple symbol representing a smiley face.
'Is this a pseudo-human?'
Chen Zhou could clearly feel that her logic did not stem from empathy, but from observation, recording, analysis, and then execution.
The dried locust wasn't born of kindness, but was a prop for an experiment; the patting wasn't out of affection, but a step in a program.
It was very strange.
After completing all this, the woman turned and entered the house. Chen Zhou immediately followed.
He stopped three paces away from her.
The woman seemed to sense something and turned her head. It happened to be that half of her face that was as beautiful as a celestial being. Her phoenix eyes were as cold as the moon, filled with scrutiny and inquiry, as if she were sizing up a species she had never seen before.
Being stared at by such eyes, even a firm-willed cultivator might lose their composure.
But Chen Zhou was an evil spirit.
He was immune to charm.
Chen Zhou spoke directly: "What are you?"
The woman did not answer immediately.
She tilted her head. This simple movement looked exceptionally eerie on her, as if a marionette were adjusting its own joints.
Her gaze scanned up and down Chen Zhou's body, as if scanning and analyzing data.
After a moment, she opened the small notebook in her hand, seemingly looking for a response protocol.
"Note Item 7: When facing a question from a stranger, one should first express politeness," she whispered to herself. Then she looked up at Chen Zhou, stiffly tugging at the corners of her mouth to mimic a "smile."
However, this expression appeared incredibly horrifying on her face, which was half-exquisite and half-ghastly.
"Hello," she said, her voice dry and flat, without any tonal inflection. "I am called Piao."
Piao.
The starved dead.
A name that was extremely simple, yet heavy enough to be suffocating.
"Why that name?" Chen Zhou frowned.
"Because..." Piao seemed to get stuck. No one had ever asked her name. Everyone called her Shagu, so naturally, no one had asked why her real name was Piao.
Indeed, why?
But she seemed to know deep down that she should be called by this name.
Chen Zhou's gaze fell upon her, and his divine sense surged out, attempting to probe her origins.
However, this time, Chen Zhou could more clearly feel two vastly different, yet eerily symbiotic auras.
One was the resentment of endless starved corpses.
Cold, silent, and filled with hatred for the living and an eternal craving for food.
This resentment was immense, as if it had gathered the despair of all those who had starved to death on this land over thousands of years.
The other was a purer, more primitive evil of greed.
It was the greed of locusts passing through, devouring all things between heaven and earth—the embodiment of the desire to destroy and consume everything.
This evil was full of tyranny and chaos, forming a sharp contrast with the deathly resentment.
The two forces were like two venomous snakes biting each other, yet forcibly bound together, collectively forming the monster known as Piao.
Inside her body, there were no soul fluctuations that a normal living being should have, only a conscious core barely maintaining a balance.
Born of chaos and evil, her consciousness was unexpectedly non-aggressive—or perhaps it was just a disguise; Chen Zhou wasn't sure yet.
But the only thing certain was that this monster, which resembled a pseudo-human, was very powerful.
"Are you learning?" Chen Zhou changed the question.
Piao nodded and then started writing something in her notebook again.
Chen Zhou saw it once more: 【New Observation Subject: Unknown. Characteristics: Powerful, unknown, possesses a high degree of inquisitiveness toward me. Response Protocol: Unknown. Preliminary Judgment: Danger level high, but currently no hostility.】
This monster was interesting.
"You may call me the Bone God."
When one was out in the world, one's identity was whatever one claimed it to be.
Piao nodded, crossed out the "Unknown" after the new observation subject, and wrote the four characters for "Bone God" stroke by stroke, with great seriousness.
Thoughts swirled in Chen Zhou's mind. Suddenly, he reached out and produced a Soul-Shaping Pill.
"This is for you."
The moment the sphere of light appeared, Piao's body jerked stiffly.
On the hideous insect-like right half of her face, those carapace-like patterns seemed to come alive, beginning to twitch slightly.
Her turbid insect pupil instantly shrank to the size of a pinhead, staring fixedly at the Soul-Shaping Pill in Chen Zhou's palm. A suppressed low hiss, like the rubbing of insect limbs, escaped her throat.
That was the roar of the greedy instinct originating from the "Locust."
But at the same time, her beautiful left half was tensed, and her phoenix eye revealed a struggle that looked almost like a programming error.
Her rationality—the program of being a "human" that had been taught and molded—was engaged in a fierce confrontation with her instincts as a monster.
Finally, she took a deep breath and forcibly suppressed the desire to consume.
She opened her notebook again, searched for a moment, and then said in a stiff voice: "Note Item 15: Accepting a gift from others without reason is impolite behavior. Need to... need to ask for a reason."
She looked up at Chen Zhou and asked one word at a time: "Wh... y?"
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