I'm Already the Richest Man, Why Did My System Just Arrive?

Chapter 206: Chapter 144: "Words of the Sun Chaser

"The Chang’an Secret Record?"

Though the cover was missing two words.

But as Zheng Xiu read the entry about ’Cotton Shedding,’ he blinked and mentally completed the title on the cover.

"Oh? You know of the secrets of the ’Darkness,’ sir?"

the old man asked in surprise.

Zheng Xiu shook his head without answering. With a strange expression, he finished reading the account of ’Cotton Shedding,’ then flipped back to the first page to read the preface.

After reading it all in one go, Zheng Xiu roughly understood.

The person who wrote this book didn’t actually know the Darkness existed, nor had they ever faced it directly.

Just as primeval humans feared the night in an ancient era without fire, the ancients held a sense of reverence and fear for the unknown.

All fear stems from the "unknown," from a lack of firepower.

In other words, it stemmed from humanity’s "ignorance" and "weakness."

For things that "common sense" couldn’t explain—from grand phenomena like climate change and the cycle of day and night, to smaller ones like water freezing into ice and fire turning wood to charcoal—the imaginative ancients recorded these strange tales based on what they saw and heard, combined with a degree of subjective speculation.

Cotton Shedding was one such tale.

This ancient book also described many bizarre creatures, called demons and monsters, such as human-faced carp, eight-legged spider-bodied tigers, world-roaming fish, and the Sun Chaser.

Countless years ago, the ancients imagined the world was divided into two sides: one called the ’Common World,’ the other the ’Darkness.’ The two sides were not supposed to intersect. But whenever strange things happened in the Common World, they speculated that some evil creature had escaped from the Darkness to wreak havoc on the mortal realm.

To be honest, Zheng Xiu had read similar folk records before his imprisonment. They were filled with all sorts of bizarre tales, but the events they described were too outlandish. In a world where most people still believed the theory that Heaven is round and the Earth is square, Zheng Xiu found it hard to take these strange stories as fact.

But now, he had no choice but to believe.

The book stated that ’Cotton Shedding’ was formless, colorless, and difficult to discern with the naked eye.

At first, Cotton Shedding was like a contagious disease.

Before the founding of the Daqian Dynasty, on a starless night, legend tells of a nameless village. There lived a beautiful young woman named ’Cotton.’ After a full ten-month pregnancy, she went into labor, but gave Birth to a "child" that was a lump of sludge-like ooze.

Cotton and her husband were horrified. The ooze seemed sentient as it slipped through a crack under the door and vanished into the night.

From then on, Cotton was depressed and listless. But ten days later, she heard the sound of a baby crying in her house. She eventually found an infant inside a sealed chest.

The baby’s features greatly resembled Cotton’s. The woman, longing for her child, believed it was her baby, transformed and reborn, and so she gave it the name ’Tui’.

Tui looked like a normal child, but it was exceptionally quiet. It never cried or fussed, and it grew very quickly.

In one month, it grew to the size of a three-month-old.

The woman simply said the child must have caught a chill at Birth, but her husband found it increasingly strange, for the child only resembled Cotton, not him.

Two months later, the child suddenly fell into a deep sleep, and dark green mold spots appeared on its body.

Then one day, Cotton heard a baby crying from another room in the house. When she went to look, she found another infant.

At the same time, in Cotton’s village, another pregnant woman gave Birth to a similar sludge-like child.

By the time the sixth strange infant appeared in the village, someone had summoned an Alchemist from the Jianghu, an Odd Person who claimed to have an innate gift for Spirit Communication. The Alchemist declared the children were the work of a vile evil. After he burned all the infants and the pregnant women to death, the matter was finally put to an end.

Henceforth, this phenomenon came to be known as ’Cotton Shedding’.

The reason Cotton Shedding is also called the ’Centennial Worm’ is because this phenomenon occurs once every hundred years, mostly in remote places.

At the end of the entry on ’Cotton Shedding,’ the author speculated based on the words left behind by that Odd Person, the Alchemist. He theorized that Cotton Shedding is a type of ’worm’ from the Darkness. When its centennial cycle arrives, it secretly enters a pregnant woman’s womb, devours the fetus within, and takes its place. When the woman gives birth, the nascent Cotton Shedding escapes in the form of ’ooze.’ After a period of development, it sends a ’human-like mushroom’—a being in human form—back to the mother’s house to continue absorbing nutrients and split into more ’human-like mushrooms’.

A ’human-like mushroom’ only looks like an infant. In reality, it is a worm called ’Cotton Shedding’.

A human-like mushroom is not a Human.

Since ancient times, the only way to deal with ’Cotton Shedding’ has been to burn all the ’human-like mushrooms’ and the pregnant women carrying them with fierce fire. Only then can its further reproduction be stopped.

Such an appalling ’story’ was recorded in the ancient text in obscure language.

The more Zheng Xiu read, the more frightened he became.

Suddenly, a strange question occurred to Zheng Xiu. The method for dealing with Cotton Shedding was so cruel. Even the most ignorant person would not believe an old, dusty book and choose to burn pregnant women and babies alive.

Zheng Xiu had seen the infant with his own eyes. If he hadn’t used his [inspiration], he wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference; on the surface, it looked exactly like a normal baby.

"Why do you all believe what’s written in this ancient book without question?"

The old man sighed. "Because, about twenty years ago, this place already had an outbreak of ’Cotton Shedding’."

Zheng Xiu’s brow twitched. "Twenty years ago?"

"Yes, sir." The old man gave a helpless, bitter smile. "I personally burned the human-like mushrooms back then. I know how terrible Cotton Shedding is. After I burned them, I was overwhelmed with guilt and fell into a deep depression. So I trained Xiaozhao to be the sixteenth-generation Purifying Witch of Jingtang Town, and I retired to the fields."

「Twenty years ago.」

’Twenty years ago again.’

Cotton Shedding, which was supposed to appear only once a century, had returned after just twenty years.

Zheng Xiu’s face was expressionless as he clenched his fists.

A voice in his heart kept telling him that none of this had anything to do with him. But no matter how he tried, Zheng Xiu couldn’t dismiss this specific point in time as a mere ’coincidence’.