Lin Zhao looked at the tents. "Are they willing to offer up their closest loved ones as sacrifices?"

I laughed, "What was the point of the tour guide's story? And what did the girl who left the hotel this morning do?"

"But..." Lin Zhao said, "But that girl is dead! Did Tiewa Temple not choose her?"

"It's because her obsession with entering the demonic path wasn't deep enough!" My eyes narrowed slightly. "Do you remember all the things she said while kneeling beside her companion's corpse after he died?"

"Can you be sure if she was talking to the dead man or to the murderous ghost?"

"What if, at that time, the ghost told her that if she wanted something, she would have to offer up someone else as a sacrifice?"

"She didn't dare to kill again, so she naturally became an eliminated candidate."

Lin Zhao scratched his head. "Then why didn't the people from Tiewa Temple just tell them directly?"

"Are you full of a hundred thousand whys?" I flicked Lin Zhao on the forehead and explained, "Is telling her the same as her own obsession? It's a completely different matter when they kill to survive!"

Lin Zhao pouted. "Didn't someone tell Lin Zijing what to do as well?"

Feng Ruoxing shook his head. "Back when the arts world was hunting down Lin Zijing, they also investigated who was leading him down the demonic path. The final conclusion was that the person who 'enlightened' Lin Zijing didn't exist at all."

"That person was Lin Zijing himself. He was scrutinizing himself and implanted a suggestion in his own mind. So, that person appeared in his mind."

"In other words, he led himself onto the demonic path."

"People who enter the demonic path on their own are even more terrifying. If they're given time, they could establish their own sect and become a generation of demon ancestors."

"That's also why Lin Zijing wasn't causing trouble everywhere back then, but he was still relentlessly hunted down by the righteous path."

"What the righteous path feared was that one White Bone Qin Demon would add another demonic sect to the martial world."

Lin Zhao finally understood. "Li Po, if we want to enter Tiewa Temple, do we have to enter the demonic path too?"

I said with a solemn face, "I'm thinking about that too!"

The twenty-odd people in the camp could be said to have all been chosen by Tiewa Temple to enter the demonic path.

Any one of them could potentially treat the others as sacrifices.

What were Tiewa Temple's criteria for choosing people? How many people did they want to choose? We had no idea.

Don't even mention that I don't have any thoughts of killing off the entire tour group. Even if the four of us joined forces to slaughter the tour group, what if Tiewa Temple only wanted one person? Would the four of us continue to kill each other until only one person was left?

That kind of thing was impossible to do.

Having everyone pretend to be dead like Ye Yang to deceive Tiewa Temple's welcoming party wouldn't work either.

Tiewa Temple definitely had a way to measure whether someone had entered the demonic path.

We can deceive people, but we can't deceive demons!

I pondered for a long time but still couldn't think of a good solution.

However, I heard the sound of someone pushing aside the grass nearby. When I turned my head to look, I saw a pair of bloody hands reaching out from the grass.

The dwarf!

At first glance, the hands looked like those of a seven- or eight-year-old child, but the fingertips had a layer of calluses. It was clear that this person was a master who was used to using hidden weapons.

Among the people I'd met, only the dwarf fit that description.

Lin Zhao was just about to get up when I stopped him.

While I was staring intently at the grass, the dwarf gradually crawled out of it. The lower half of his body was nowhere to be seen, and the place where he had crawled from had long since run out of blood.

It looked like what was crawling over was a corpse.

The other party kept crawling until he was not far from me, then slowly raised his head: "Old Yan... Old Yan is back... He wants to live..."

When I looked up into the distance, I saw the old pipe smoker whom I had killed with a palm strike in the wilderness standing in the distance, leaning against a tree trunk, his orifices bleeding, looking at me.

The dwarf struggled, "He has to kill to live, avenge me!"

The dwarf barely managed to say the last word before his eyes widened and he collapsed to the ground.

The old pipe smoker in the distance also retreated slowly into the forest while sneering, and the other party disappeared into the fog that had appeared from nowhere after taking only three steps back.

Feng Ruoxing quickly made a move, touching the dwarf's corpse a few times. "He used the Western Regions 'Enduring Death' method to temporarily hang on to his life, just to come and deliver a message?"

I said calmly, "If we don't count the four of us, who is most likely to enter the demonic path?"

"Old Yan!" Lin Zhao said without thinking, "He can even make a corpse stand up to survive. Isn't his obsession deep enough?"

"I think it's Xu Yulong!" Feng Ruoxing said, "Xu Yulong is a top expert among the younger generation. It's fine if someone like him doesn't develop an obsession, but once he does, it's easy to turn it into a goal. I think he's the most likely one."

I shook my head. "I think it's Xu An'an!"

"Her?" Feng Ruoxing looked at me. "Isn't she the one who's supposed to be rescued?"

I said in a deep voice, "I have a feeling that Xu An'an has also received an invitation from Tiewa Temple."

"But if she wants to enter the demonic path, someone has to add fuel to the fire. It looks like I have to do the dirty work!"