Chapter 1: The Weakling Feral God
Chapter 1: The Weakling Feral God
Sheng Kingdom, Wan'an County.
Dozens of miles south of the county seat, nestled deep within a range of layered, overlapping mountains, sat several small villages.
Song Family Village.
It was a modest place — no more than twenty or thirty households — with fertile fields, quaint homes, and mountains on all sides.
Today was the first day of the month, and it was noon.
Villagers walked in small groups toward the head of the village, carrying incense and offerings as they chatted along the way.
At the head of Song Family Village stood a solemn wooden structure, just over two meters tall.
Couplets wishing for favorable weather and year-round peace were pasted on either side of the door.
Inside, a stone idol roughly one foot tall was enshrined.
Wreathed in curling wisps of incense smoke, the idol's face was indistinct and blurred.
The villagers set down their offerings, lit three sticks of incense, and knelt before the idol.
"Lord Xuanqing, please bless us — I hope my wife can have a safe delivery this month..."
[Incense Value +4.]
Inside the cramped shrine, Song Xuanqing watched the kneeling, incense-burning villagers below with a complicated expression.
The villagers had no idea that someone was watching their every word and move from above.
Nor could they see Song Xuanqing.
Because Song Xuanqing was no longer human.
He was now, by all accounts, a "god."
Just not a very impressive one.
He was a Feral God.
A Weakling Feral God, at that.
It had taken Song Xuanqing two full hours to come to terms with the fact that he hadn't died in the plane crash — he had transmigrated instead.
Though the circumstances of his transmigration were a bit peculiar.
He had somehow become the Feral God enshrined and worshipped by Song Family Village.
Yes. A Feral God.
As for why the System had slapped him with the label of "Feral God" when, by his own understanding, he was basically functioning like an Earth God — he had no idea.
Sure, an Earth God was still a low-ranking deity, but at least it was an Ordained God with an official position.
And yet the System had labeled him — a Feral God!
It didn't exactly inspire confidence. He was half-afraid some passing Ordained God would come along and smite him one day.
As a member of the great transmigrator army from the Blue Star, Song Xuanqing possessed the one thing every transmigrator must have — a System.
His System was called: the Incense Offering Divine Ascension System.
The name sounded incredibly impressive, but just how impressive it actually was, he had yet to find out.
Song Xuanqing let out a sigh and opened his system panel.
[Incense Offering Divine Ascension System
Host: Song Xuanqing
Age: 20
Lifespan: **
Identity: Feral God
Cultivation: Unranked
Cultivation Technique: None
Domain: Song Family Village
Incense Value: 38.5
Evaluation: A Feral God without the recognition of the Heavenly Dao, with meager incense faith, no Divine Rank, and no Divine Position. Adrift like duckweed, with negligible power.]
[Beginner's Quest: Though you are merely a rural Feral God, as a deity worshipped by the people, you should do something for your believers and increase their faith in you.
Progress: 0/1
Completion Reward: Beginner's Gift Pack; System fully unlocked.]
Every time Song Xuanqing read that final evaluation, it felt like a knife to the heart.
Furthermore, beyond the system panel and the beginner's quest notification, Song Xuanqing had found no other system functions whatsoever.
No gacha, no System Shop, no stat allocation — nothing.
The System currently felt like an unfinished product.
It seemed he would need to complete the beginner's quest before any other features would unlock.
And the beginner's quest required him to do something for the villagers of Song Family Village — to raise their faith in him.
Song Xuanqing couldn't see the villagers' faith levels directly, but faith determined Incense Value.
The higher the faith, the higher the Incense Value.
So far, the highest Incense Value Song Xuanqing had ever seen from a single person was 7.
That had come from a frail, elderly villager.
The lowest had been 2.
That was a child of five or six, brought along by his father to offer incense.
Though Song Xuanqing grumbled about the System labeling him a Feral God — something even an Earth God would look down on — the truth was, he was actually fairly satisfied with his situation after transmigrating.
So what if he was a Feral God? A Feral God was still a god!
Being a Feral God was still better than transmigrating as an ordinary person!
From what Song Xuanqing had gathered, this world bore a strong resemblance to the ancient China he remembered from his previous life.
But this world didn't seem to operate on science.
Well, of course it didn't — there was already a Feral God being worshipped by villagers, after all.
But that wasn't what he meant.
What he meant was: this world genuinely had demons, evil spirits, and monsters!
How long Song Xuanqing's stone idol had existed was impossible to determine.
Before he arrived, no divine being had ever been born from it.
But perhaps because the idol had absorbed so much incense over the years, it possessed a certain spiritual quality of its own.
For instance, the idol could sense what was happening in its surroundings.
When Song Xuanqing transmigrated into it, he naturally inherited the idol's accumulated memories.
Fragmented and incomplete as they were.
But even so, Song Xuanqing had spotted something remarkable within them.
It was a moonless night, with howling winds that sounded like ghostly wails. Then came a loud splash of water breaking the surface.
On the riverbank behind the temple, a bone-chilling figure hauled itself ashore.
The figure had the body of a great fish, over three meters long, standing upright on its tail fins like a pair of legs.
But atop its body was the head of a beautiful woman, her mouth stretched into a sharp, piercing laugh.
A few breaths later, the woman's face shifted into that of a weathered old man, his voice dissolving into a man's sobbing wail.
A few breaths after that, it changed again into yet another face.
The faces on the grotesque fish-demon's head kept cycling through, never repeating.
The memory ended there — the idol's recollections were all fragments.
But based on other scattered impressions that followed, the fish-demon appeared to have devoured several villagers. How it had ultimately been dealt with, he didn't know.
In short, this world was a dangerous place.
Even if Song Xuanqing was only a Weakling Feral God, his ability to protect himself was still greater than that of an ordinary person.
And he had the System.
The future was bright.
Past noon, more villagers trickled in one after another to offer incense.
"Lord Xuanqing, please bless us — I hope this year's harvest will be a little more plentiful..."
A man dressed in coarse linen, trouser legs rolled up — clearly just back from the fields — knelt on the ground and murmured his prayers, hoping the deity above might hear his heart's wishes.
Song Xuanqing did hear him. And he genuinely wanted to grant their wishes.
He still needed to complete the System's beginner's quest, after all.
But he... simply couldn't.
The wishes of these poor villagers were not unreasonable, but he didn't know any spells for ensuring safety, and he had no way of making the harvest more bountiful.
Unfortunately, he was not the kind of all-powerful, supremely capable deity who could do anything.
The man finished offering his incense, walked out of Xuanqing Temple, and ran into another villager coming to offer incense.
"Oh, Brother Shan! Didn't you take your wife back to her family? You're back from Liu Family Village already?"
The approaching villager was Song Dashan. He replied, "Yeah, we just had a meal. If my wife hadn't insisted, I wouldn't have bothered making the trip. But hey, did you hear? Something big happened in Liu Family Village recently!"
The other man's curiosity was immediately piqued. "What happened?"
Song Dashan put on a mysterious expression, first bowed three times to Song Xuanqing's idol, then pulled the man aside and lowered his voice.
"Remember the Three-Eyed Lady that Liu Family Village worships?"
"Of course. What about the Three-Eyed Lady?"
"Her idol was smashed!"
"What! Who would dare do something like that — smash a deity's idol?!"
"They say it was someone wearing a veiled hat and white robes. Nobody in Liu Family Village could make out their identity or appearance — all they could tell was that the person was extraordinarily skilled. And not only did they smash the Three-Eyed Lady's idol, but apparently they dug out one of her eyes and took it! I heard that when the eye was gouged out, it was red as if it were about to drip blood!"
"That villain is so brazen! Aren't they afraid the Three-Eyed Lady will bring divine punishment down on them?!"
"Who knows if they're afraid or not. Either way, the people of Liu Family Village are terrified. They failed to protect the idol, and if the Three-Eyed Lady blames them for it, they're done for!"
"Sigh... what a senseless disaster."
"You're telling me. I even told the Village Chief about it. He said we should all keep a closer eye on Lord Xuanqing's idol for the time being, in case that villain comes here and causes trouble."
Inside the temple, Song Xuanqing felt a wave of unease wash over him as he listened.
Having read countless novels in his previous life, he had a strong feeling that whoever had smashed the Three-Eyed Lady's idol and gouged out her eye was no good person.
If that person had set their sights on the idol in the neighboring village, there was no guarantee they wouldn't come after his idol next.
Song Xuanqing's heart fluttered with anxiety. He had no idea how strong he actually was, but given that the System had rated him an Unranked Weakling Feral God, he felt absolutely no sense of security.
By instinct alone, Song Xuanqing knew that if his idol were smashed, he would be gravely wounded even if he didn't die outright.
This wretched world — even a god couldn't feel safe in it!
No. He had to complete the beginner's quest as fast as possible and unlock the System!
As everyone knew, a System was a transmigrator's greatest cheat!
Song Xuanqing: I can't stand another day living as a Weakling Feral God! I need to get stronger!