By noon the next day, the drawbacks brought by malicious intent finally began to gradually ferment, though they were not as serious as Ren Qing had imagined.
The sun had just risen to the top of the sky when cooking smoke began rising within the city.
Everything signaled something unusual.
Monks living in Heaven Above Heaven had no need to drink water or eat food. Buddhist qi would subtly replenish what their bodies required, while simultaneously eroding their flesh and bones.
They could rely on their aberrated bodies to cultivate Maitreya White Bone Sutra and Maitreya Skin-Sutra. As long as the soul achieved a Buddha Soul, they could step into the Ascension state.
Yet in merely one night, Heaven Above Heaven had already become completely different.
A large number of monks simultaneously set up iron pots and lit fires. Firewood crackled beneath the pots, clearly for steaming food.
Heaven Above Heaven did have simple granaries, though the grain mainly came from refugees. It was stale grain carried with them when they came to the city, usually piled inside and ignored.
Inside Jinguang Temple it appeared utterly silent.
Wu-Wu had only been a novice monk at Jinguang Temple last night, but after switching into the prime-age consciousness the next day, his status became that of a formal monk.
He was currently blocking several strangely behaving fellow disciples, just about to stop them from bringing hemp sacks dragged from the granary into the temple.
The sacks emitted an unpleasant stench, and stinkbugs could faintly be seen crawling on them. Clearly they contained already rotten grain.
"Junior Brother No-Thought, what exactly is happening?"
"Hungry."
Wu-Wu wanted to question the childhood No-Thought, but the latter merely glanced at him, his gaze filled with inexplicable dullness.
Only when No-Thought was old did he become the abbot of Jinguang Temple, but even in childhood his status within the temple was not low, so the surrounding monks did not stop him.
"Hungry?"
Wu-Wu froze for a moment.
He had long forgotten the experiences of being outside. No matter how he tried to recall, he could not remember what the word "hunger" represented.
This situation was not limited to Jinguang Temple. It appeared everywhere throughout the city, as could be seen from the wisps of smoke rising from houses.
However Wu-Wu did not think much of it and helped No-Thought and the others move the grain.
The grain was poured onto the open ground in the courtyard. The hemp sacks contained dark brown rice covered in mold, and much of it had already been eaten clean by rice worms.
Seeing this made the monks deeply uncomfortable.
But No-Thought and the others calmly washed the rice, then impatiently placed iron pots and firewood in the courtyard.
The firewood was soon ignited, and the flames illuminated the various expressions on the monks' faces.
When the iron pot began boiling, it should have released the fragrance of rice, yet the smell spreading through the air had not the slightest hint of fragrance. Instead it was extremely pungent and unpleasant.
Wu-Wu hesitated as he glanced at No-Thought several times, noticing the latter constantly swallowing saliva, his eyes fixed firmly on the iron pot.
As soon as the rotten rice finished cooking, they hurriedly lifted the lid.
Ignoring the scalding heat, the monks surrounded the pot and grabbed the rice with their bare hands, urgently stuffing it into their mouths.
The rice appeared pitch-black, mixed with the corpses of various stinkbugs.
Because of the temperature, blisters formed on the monks' hands and mouths, yet it did not slow them down at all.
They occasionally glanced sideways toward the monks of Jinguang Temple.
"Cough cough cough cough..."
The old abbot slowly walked into the courtyard. Facing the bizarre scene before him, his expression remained calm: "Take them to the Ascension ground for parinirvana."
Wu-Wu appeared somewhat surprised: "This..."
The abbot did not reply. Several dozen monks had already rushed forward, tying up the monks beside the iron pot, preparing to bring them to Bottomless Pit.
In fact, from the mountains of corpses piled at Bottomless Pit, it could be seen that most monks had not met the conditions for ascension before death.
In reality, how could there be so many monks capable of ascension? The requirement of consciousness fusion alone eliminated eighty to ninety percent.
When Ren Qing traveled through Bottomless Pit earlier, the frequency of corpses falling from above had been as dense as raindrops.
Pure faith also represented pure evil. It was likely that dozens or even hundreds of monks were quietly disposed of every day.
Just as ropes bound No-Thought and the others, the escorting monks' gazes fell upon the steaming iron pot.
No-Thought revealed a strange smile and asked, "Aren't you... hungry?"
All the monks of Jinguang Temple swallowed.
Soon they could no longer restrain the hunger in their hearts, as if countless ants were crawling within them. Their bodies trembled uncontrollably.
When one monk could no longer endure and rushed toward the iron pot, the others followed, scrambling to stuff rotten rice into their mouths.
The entire Heaven Above Heaven descended into madness.
Although only a little more than ten thousand monks had contracted split personality disorder, the calamity spread without warning toward a population of five hundred thousand.
Ren Qing steered the ghost ship through Bottomless Pit and also noticed the abnormalities in Heaven Above Heaven.
However he did not use dream flowers to examine it closely. He only knew that some monks were pursuing satisfaction of their appetites and appeared extremely insane.
Ren Qing glanced at the sky and accelerated the ghost ship, trying to bypass the enormous corpse Buddhas to avoid being affected.
When he arrived at the edge of the range where he could cast spells, he immediately used ghost shadow to dig a cave dwelling.
Rubble rolled down.
Large numbers of corpse Buddhas crawled toward the source of the noise, yet they could not sense Ren Qing's aura, so they wandered like headless flies.
Ren Qing quickly corroded a two-meter opening using Nether Yuan.
After hiding inside, he sealed the entrance with stone powder mixed with viscous liquid. The strength of the stone wall could not compare to the original rock, but it was sufficient.
Bottomless Pit extended in all directions. Who knew whether there were strange entities that could not be fought by force...
Just as Ren Qing had this thought, heavy footsteps echoed through Bottomless Pit, approaching from afar toward him.
He could even sense terrifying Buddhist qi emanating. Even through the stone wall he could clearly smell the stench of corpses.
Bang... bang... bang...
Ren Qing cursed a few times and immediately stopped digging.
Ghost shadow checked the situation and discovered it was a gigantic corpse Buddha several hundred meters tall, its corpse qi already forming a thick fog.
The corpse Buddha was so massive that its arms rubbed against the stone walls on both sides, and the sutras it chanted sounded like roaring beside the ear.
Yet after only a moment, the corpse Buddha's footsteps disappeared again, as if it had never appeared.
Ren Qing used ghost shadow to emerge from the cave and cautiously observe, only to find that Bottomless Pit showed no traces of such a massive entity.
He waited for a moment before resuming excavation of the hard rock wall. This time no further disturbances came from Bottomless Pit.
It was very possible that Bottomless Pit did not contain only corpse Buddhas. As for what regions it actually connected to, even the well-informed Chen Changsheng could not explain clearly.
Ren Qing spent over half a quarter-hour arranging the cave dwelling again.
Unknowingly it was already evening outside.
He had originally thought Heaven Above Heaven would become extremely lively. After all, when traveling earlier there had already been signs of losing control—if a few hundred people did not die it would make no sense.
But to Ren Qing's surprise, the town remained shrouded in calm.
However smoke rose from temples everywhere, and nearly all monks had begun steaming food. The granaries had already been emptied by them.
Ren Qing took a deep breath and closed his eyes to examine the number of split personality disorder patients. He was immediately shocked by the countless malicious intents.
Within only half a day, several hundred thousand monks had already contracted the stubborn illness, though the severity of symptoms varied.
"Something's wrong..."
Ren Qing frowned deeply, suddenly realizing something belatedly.
He connected to the dream flower artifacts within the city and carefully examined the monks' souls, immediately discovering something he had overlooked all along.
The monks' souls emitted a faint golden luster. Their three hun and seven po were extremely rigid, and most importantly the spiritual light of the soul was completely missing.
At first glance the souls seemed aberrated from erosion by Buddhist qi. But thinking about it now, there were almost no "people" in the conventional sense remaining in Heaven Above Heaven.
Buddhist qi possessed the strange characteristic of containing body and soul. Thus when cultivators of past generations achieved the true fruit, they would be completely devoured by Buddhist qi.
Although monks were only mortals, they likewise could not avoid it. Once Buddhist qi converted them, their souls became part of the Buddhist qi.
The monks of Heaven Above Heaven seemed to possess sound intelligence.
But the truth was that the monks' intelligence was merely bestowed by Buddhist qi. The moment they stepped into Heaven Above Heaven, their souls had already scattered.
They had become puppets possessing independent thought.
It resembled a science fiction concept from Ren Qing's previous life: uploading human consciousness to a cloud server to form mechanical immortality.
Therefore when Ren Qing infected the first monk with split personality disorder, it was like a virus invading a network, spreading directly.
Moreover the Buddhist qi "antivirus software" had no defense against split personality disorder at all.
Ren Qing used Method of Modeling Heaven and Earth to attach the Ice Crystal Technique jailer onto his brain, placing himself in absolute calm, and the arrangement of Great Compassion Maitreya Bodhisattva gradually became clear.
Great Compassion Maitreya Bodhisattva was clearly using monks' ascension to forcibly strip out the countless souls contained within the Buddhist qi.
Ren Qing guessed those souls escaped the confinement of Buddhist qi in the form of corpse Buddhas.
As for the exact method used by Great Compassion Maitreya Bodhisattva, he could only glimpse fragments of it. It likely had some connection with the Buddhist Ten-Lifetime Reincarnation.
Ordinary souls stripped from Buddhist qi would become ordinary corpse Buddhas.
Only the successive Great Compassion Maitreya Bodhisattvas could gradually transform into hundred-meter corpse Buddhas and ultimately be sealed within the mountains outside the city.
"As expected, none who reach the Earth Immortal level are good characters."
The schemes of Earth Immortals casually used hundreds of thousands of people as chess pieces. As merely a Yang Spirit realm cultivator, he had no power to participate in such a game.
Ren Qing thought of the Supreme Heavenly Demon. As long as cultivators mastered the Beast Enclosure Method, they would inevitably aberrate into Supreme Heavenly Demons.
Buddhism was precisely the opposite. Buddhist qi was actually composed of countless cultivators.
I am all living beings and all living beings are me.
After understanding the situation of Cishi, Ren Qing instead breathed a long sigh of relief. It meant Great Compassion Maitreya Bodhisattva was temporarily not in Heaven Above Heaven.
He secretly felt fortunate that he had not rashly come into contact with Buddhist techniques. Regardless of whether the information flow could exempt the drawbacks, the hidden dangers were simply too great.
Ren Qing began preparing for the matters of the South Mountain small world at night.
Because he was far from Heaven Above Heaven, the dreams in the South Mountain small world could also mix in the illusions of Mirror Immortal, making the generated severed limbs even more realistic.
This should indirectly increase the efficiency of lifespan extension.