Song Ciwan stood her ground and looked around.

A slate-gray sky hung like a massive dome, blanketing the mountain village before her.

Amidst the sprawling feast, the villagers who had been staring fixedly at Song Ciwan had, at some unknown point, withdrawn their horrifying gazes.

They were no longer watching Song Ciwan. Instead, they refocused their attention on the refugees beside them, continuing to enthusiastically urge them to eat.

"Come, come, eat up. Don’t worry about there not being enough food. We have plenty! There’s more after this is gone..."

Their enthusiastic voices were laced with laughter, even a sort of doting affection!

The feast grew lively once more, but the harmonious atmosphere was permeated with an unspeakable eeriness.

Some of the faster-eating refugees were no longer content with just using chopsticks. They threw them aside, using both hands, and even buried their heads in the bowls.

SCOOPING and SHOVELING, they grabbed handfuls of rice and crammed meat into their mouths. HUFF... PUFF...

As they ate, their mouths seemed to widen. Their faces began to swell subtly, and their bellies gradually bulged.

An indescribable, hair-raising chill shot up Song Ciwan’s spine.

In that one glance, she saw too much!

The female villager beside her, the one who had been urging her to eat, now only shot her a resentful glare. Then, she abruptly turned the spoon and viciously shoved it into the mouth of a refugee eating on her other side.

Song Ciwan’s heart skipped a beat. The refugee took it!

The refugee not only took the mouthful but also giggled foolishly as he ate. "G-good... tasty..."

His voice was dull and indistinct, as if his ability to speak was already beginning to deteriorate.

Just a short while ago, Song Ciwan had personally heard him talk about his escape from the famine. Back then, he had been logical and articulate.

Song Ciwan was beginning to understand. ’I must have stumbled upon the core of Wealth Village’s bizarre rules.’

In a Deceitful Realm, humans must obey its rules, and so must the anomalies.

From the looks of it, the greatest ability of the Wealth Village villagers was their power to persuade people to eat.

They could use coaxing, persuasion, and even hand-feeding to get people to eat. They could stuff food at someone, but they couldn’t force them to take it.

If someone possessed immense willpower, a strong rebellious spirit, and refused to eat a single bite from the start, they could escape this control.

That might not sound too difficult, but there was a critical catch: everyone here had lost their original identities and memories the moment they fell into this bizarre world, transformed into starving refugees fleeing a famine.

It’s easy to lose your senses when you’re starving. Add to that the coaxing of the seemingly warm and generous villagers, and how many people could possibly resist taking a single bite?

Song Ciwan could resist because she truly possessed a will and conviction that surpassed ordinary people.

And yet, even as she stood and her memories returned, the hunger clawing at her stomach hadn’t lessened in the slightest.

Far from lessening, the hunger was rapidly intensifying, like a whirlpool churning and devouring her from within her gut.

A flood of stomach acid began to surge, and a searing pain spread through her internal organs.

The feeling was more agonizing than having your heart ripped out. It was obvious that if Song Ciwan didn’t eat soon, her own stomach would turn on her, forcing her to digest herself!

’To eat yourself... what kind of horrifying sensation would that be?’

Song Ciwan did have food stored in her Heaven and Earth Scale, but could she possibly take it out to eat now?

Clearly, she couldn’t. It wasn’t because she feared these Wealth Village villagers would riot, but because a subtle intuition warned her: according to the rules of this bizarre world, outside food was forbidden!

The choice was to either starve until she devoured herself, or to abandon her principles and convictions and eat the handouts offered by the villagers of Wealth Village.

One was a quick death with a clear mind; the other, a delayed death in a stupor. Neither was a good outcome, yet most people would instinctively choose the latter.

The chatter around the feast dwindled, and the sounds of clinking cups and lively exchanges vanished.

Most of the refugees no longer needed persuading. They ate with wild abandon, stuffing food into their mouths on their own. More and more of them tossed their chopsticks aside, grabbing the food with their bare hands.

HUFF... PUFF... SLURP... SLURP...

The villagers of Wealth Village smiled. They sat there calmly, occasionally and nimbly refilling the bowls of the refugees who had eaten everything.

Standing amidst the crowd, Song Ciwan noticed another key detail: there were a full ninety tables in the village square. Each table seated three refugees, attended by a single villager from Wealth Village.

’What is this like?’

’It’s as if each villager gets to claim "three head" of refugees, to be marked and domesticated!’

The table before Song Ciwan was no different. There were three refugees: herself, Aunt Zhou, and an unfamiliar man.

The man’s face was now swollen from the green-clothed villager’s feeding, and he was beginning to take on a piggish appearance.

Aunt Zhou held up her chopsticks, slowly mimicking the motion of eating, but in truth, she hadn’t taken a single bite.

Her movements were less conspicuous than Song Ciwan’s, and since the green-clothed villager was busy feeding the man while keeping her sinister gaze fixed on Song Ciwan, she hadn’t noticed that Aunt Zhou was only pretending to eat.

’This is good!’

Her mind raced. No matter what, she decided, she had to try walking away from the feast.

The moment she took a step, the green-clothed villager’s gaze followed her like a shadow. She spoke in a low voice, "If you don’t want to eat, then don’t. But you can’t leave. Oh, little miss, you can’t go. Once the feast begins, we have to stay here. Children who run off aren’t good children... they’ll be punished by the Village Chief, you see..."

The Village Chief!

The hulking man built like a giant!

The green-clothed villager had barely finished speaking when the Giant Village Chief, seated at the center of the feast, suddenly turned his head. Across rows and rows of tables, his gaze landed squarely on Song Ciwan.

A primeval aura seemed to swirl around him, and Song Ciwan instantly felt an immense sense of threat.

’So this is the third danger in Wealth Village,’ she thought. ’Leaving the feast also means death!’

It was a dead end!

’How to break this deadlock?’

Song Ciwan mulled over everything she had just observed, extracting the keywords in her mind. She immediately replied to the villager, "Ma’am, I’m not trying to leave my seat. It’s just that I learned to be a pretty good cook growing up. Look, the people over there cooking must be getting tired, right? I’ll go help them out..."

Help?

’That’s right. Helping isn’t leaving, so I haven’t broken the rules!’ 𝒇𝒓𝒆𝒆𝙬𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝒎

The green-clothed villager tilted her head, her sinister gaze still fixed on Song Ciwan, but she seemed unable to refuse this so-called "help."

After Song Ciwan finished speaking, the villager offered no reply.

Steeling herself, Song Ciwan took another step outward.

As she walked, she accessed the Heaven and Earth Scale and sold the "Mysterious Ghost Spirit" she had previously obtained from this very same villager!