In just a few years, the villagers noticed that while the girls in the village were growing more and more beautiful, they were all starting to look alike.

　　When the children of the same age stood together, it was impossible to tell them apart without looking at their clothes.

　　Looking at the younger children, they clearly resembled the older girls when they were little.

　　This time, the villagers panicked again.

　　The villagers didn't understand any secret arts, but they knew a lot of old sayings passed down from their elders.

　　The elders valued a person's facial features.

　　Although they couldn't necessarily discern anything specific, in their eyes, people with upright features were definitely more popular than those with pointy mouths, monkey cheeks, or toad eyes.

　　No one in the village knew who started the rumor, but it went something like this: If all the girls in the village looked like empresses, wouldn't the palace officials be stumped when they came to choose an empress?

　　These words, whether intentional or unintentional, made the villagers think differently.

　　The villagers, who had been constantly arguing over offering flowers to the gods, now spoke even less. When they passed each other, they tried to avoid making eye contact.

　　This situation didn't last long before a girl in the village fell into a well and drowned.

　　The parents of the deceased cried and wailed, insisting that the villagers had deliberately done it.

　　The onlookers didn't say anything, but they all stepped back, having already accepted this version of events.

　　Before that family's funeral could take place, another girl died, hanging herself from a tree. But there was nothing to stand on or step on under the tree; she had clearly been hung there by someone else.

　　After that day, a terrifying emotion began to brew in the village.

　　In just a few days, that emotion erupted on the seventh day after the first girl's death. The villagers hid their daughters and secretly went out to kill other people's children.

　　That night, the whole village was in chaos. Villagers who had lived together for decades turned on each other. People blinded by rage couldn't distinguish relatives from friends; they just attacked anyone they saw with knives.

　　The slaughter continued until midnight before it stopped. There was no one left standing in the village, and even those who survived were lying in pools of blood, on the verge of death.

　　What they didn't expect was that all the identical-looking girls emerged from their hiding places, picked up the bloody cleavers from the ground, and hacked at the remaining villagers, not caring who was who.

　　And just like that, a village vanished. The girls who committed the murders walked into the mountains covered in blood and never came out again.

　　The story of what happened in the village was spread to the outside world by the only survivor, a bachelor.

　　He had never married and had no daughters. That night, he hid and managed to escape the calamity.

　　People from the local government went to the village to investigate, and local Taoists and sorcerers were also called in, but no one could find the temple.

　　In the end, the case was closed without a resolution, and the bachelor went to a neighboring village.

　　Years later, in the village where the bachelor had gone, someone rescued a Taoist priest from freezing to death in the snow.

　　The bachelor went crazy and chopped off the Taoist priest's head with a kitchen knife.

　　When the villagers were about to arrest him and take him to the authorities, they realized that the person the bachelor had killed wasn't a Taoist priest at all, but a human skin stuffed with straw!

　　At that moment, everyone believed the bachelor's words. The long-standing mystery was finally solved.

　　Those who knew about the incident said that the woman in the temple wasn't a mountain god. She was a monster who cultivated in the mountains, and she created that trap to eat people.

　　After that, no one in the area believed in the Phoenix Fate or anything like that anymore.

　　However, some people could still encounter that temple, and some girls would still suddenly become more and more beautiful. Those girls who inexplicably became beautiful, whether unmarried or married elsewhere, would one day disappear into the mountains for no apparent reason.

　　Later, a legend was left behind in this place.

　　Don't pick flowers in the mountains, and don't take flowers with you.

　　Once you encounter a dilapidated temple in the mountains while holding flowers, it means that you will die in that temple one day.

　　Zhu Ziyan said, "That's roughly the content of the story!"

　　"Wu is definitely hiding in that temple. He won't pass up such an opportunity."

　　"As for wanting to kill you, it doesn't conflict with him seizing your Nian Li (power of thought). If he occupies the Mountain God Temple, he can know everything that happens within a hundred li radius, and he can even summon fake Jiu Gui (Nine Ghosts) with a single thought."

　　"It's actually easier for him to kill you if he hides."

　　Su Su couldn't help but curl her lips and say, "A dignified ghost god has to hide and plot against a spellcaster. I don't think he's very promising."

　　I shook my head slightly and said, "That's not right! Wu must have an even greater purpose!"

　　I turned to Zhu Ziyan and asked, "When Wu was in the Reincarnation Department, did he ever collect Nian Li (power of thought)?"

　　"No!" Zhu Ziyan answered very decisively, "We didn't give Wu such an opportunity."

　　"That's right then!" I tapped the dashboard of the car and said, "Wu has been controlled by you for so many years without receiving any Nian Li (power of thought). The fact that he can't wait to hide in a legend as soon as he gets out shows that Wu has another purpose. We must kill this person!"