The Demon of the Buddha

"Ah! I lost again!" Chen Shang tossed his 3-4-5-6 cards aside in resignation and sighed.

Chiyo, who had just ended the game by throwing out the ultimate trump card, rose gracefully to her feet and said, "You always look so sure of victory, but your luck is strangely terrible."

Chen Shang leaned over to gather the scattered cards. At that moment, a man with flowing long hair and a sword at his side slowly approached them.

"Is it over?" Chen Shang asked without looking up.

"It's over. The Daoist Sect has been wiped out," Chu Jianlai replied casually.

"Then let’s head to the next place." Chen Shang put the playing cards back in their box and stood up, ready to leave.

"The Buddhist Sect?" Chiyo Yasuji asked.

"That's right. The most fearsome enemy awaits us there," Chen Shang replied.

Chu Jianlai remained silent, quietly following behind.

The bustling city street was already deserted. The police, having sensed the abnormality, had evacuated all the tourists.

They arrived at Maitreya Mountain, the stronghold of the Buddhist Sect. Unlike the other two sects, there seemed to be no defenses here; as they ascended the mountain, no one attacked them.

"It's so quiet. There aren't even any Buddhists on the street..." Chiyo whispered, gripping her mechanical katana warily. "Are they planning to ambush us from somewhere?"

"Those monks have probably already scattered," Chen Shang said, stretching lazily as if he had not a care in the world. "Their loyalty is to their faith, not the sect. To them, even if Maitreya Mountain is blown to pieces, they’d just find some other place to worship and spread their teachings."

Chu Jianlai pondered for a moment, then said, "When they attacked Gusu Town to seize the engine, not a single Buddhist monk was among them."

"What? Why didn’t you say so earlier?" Black Calis, having long since recovered from her system crash, complained. "If you’re not after revenge, why are we even here?"

"But the abbot came," Chu Jianlai continued. "He alone killed eleven members of my Chu family and ninety-nine townsfolk of Gusu."

The abbot—the supreme leader of the Buddhist Sect in the Kunlun District. It was rumored that he had secluded himself in the mountains years ago, and no one had heard from him since.

"So we just need to kill this abbot, right?" Black Calis waved her hand nonchalantly. "I bet you’ll slice him up in no time, as easily as cutting fruit~"

The four climbed the mountain, passing through nearly a hundred temples, until they reached the summit of Maitreya Mountain.

Though it was the sweltering autumn season, the mountaintop was already clad in a shroud of snow. A few withered old trees swayed in the wind, and a solitary temple loomed into view.

The scene around the temple was eerily strange. It wasn’t so much that the temple had been built in the snow, but rather that it had drained all life and warmth from its surroundings, leaving an icy wasteland in its wake.

Chen Shang quickly put on a coat, but still couldn’t help sneezing.

"Let’s go in." Chen Shang pushed open the temple doors, signaling the others to follow.

Inside, all was pitch-black, with only the faint stench of decay and the sharp odor of machine oil in the air.

Suddenly—whoom!—the lotus lanterns along the walls flared to life, their gentle glow instantly illuminating the entire shrine.

And at that moment, the sight before them struck all present with an incomparable shock.

...

[Excerpt from "Memoirs of the Architect," a special feature in the XX Evening News]

That day, I finally secured an interview with "the Architect," the man whom every magnate in Night Axis City loathed to the core.

We spoke at length and with much delight. The Architect was witty, animated in his storytelling, and his passion was infectious even to me.

When our conversation turned to his experiences in the Kunlun District, I asked, "When you entered that mountaintop Buddhist temple, what did you see?"

The Architect suddenly clasped his hands, adopting a contemplative posture.

He was silent for a long time before he finally spoke. "Since time immemorial, the lifelong pursuit of every religious devotee has been to draw ever closer to their god."

"Yet in seeking the divine, a rare few inadvertently become beings on par with the gods themselves."

"When I saw him... how should I put it... Was it fear? Awe? Despair? Standing before such a being, all emotion is erased, and your mind is left utterly blank."

"Though I’d steeled myself for this, when I saw him with my own eyes, I could barely resist the urge to kneel and pray to him."

At this point, the Architect took a deep breath, his expression returning to calm.

"So how did you defeat him in the end?" I asked.

The Architect smiled knowingly, his answer laced with meaning. "Because suddenly I remembered... I was the god he sought all along."

...

As the lights filled the shrine, the group beheld a road paved with the wreckage of mechanical men.

To the left of the road, a row of mechanical monks, only their upper bodies remaining, knelt with hands pressed together in prayer. On the right, the monks’ lower halves were arranged upside down in a neat line.

At the end of the road, a mechanical monk nearly two meters tall sat in a broad chair. A dense array of cables sprouted from his back, connecting him to the mountainous apparatus behind the shrine.

Chu Jianlai and Chiyo Yasuji felt a crushing weight upon their shoulders, their legs trembling uncontrollably.

They braced themselves with their weapons, barely managing not to collapse in humiliation.

"God..." Chiyo whispered, a golden light gleaming in her eyes.

These two had the highest spiritual sensitivity—they must have glimpsed something truly terrifying.

With an inspiration score of only two, Chen Shang remained unimpressed, stifling a yawn before, belatedly, the overwhelming pressure made him stumble.

At that moment, the mechanical monk at the end of the road opened his eyes and spoke in a deep voice. "Now that you stand before the true Buddha, why do you not bow?"

The group fell silent, unsure how to respond.

The mechanical monk pondered, then continued, "You’ve come to kill me, haven’t you?"

"Cut the chatter, old man~" Chen Shang raised his light crossbow and called out, "Hurry up and get ready for a fight."

"Heh... Old man?" The mechanical monk flexed his joints, rising from his chair. "After years of seclusion, the first thing I hear is being called an old man."

His gaze then swept to Chu Jianlai. "I remember you—you’re the child from Gusu Town who found the Heart of the Earth... Do you still carry it?"

"You’ve got some nerve asking..." Chu Jianlai’s veins bulged, and the engine in his chest roared to life in response to his fury.

"I don’t need to guess. You’ve come to take my life," the mechanical monk said calmly, as if he had foreseen everything. "But I have no intention of letting you kill me here..."

"All these years, I’ve done everything in pursuit of the ultimate Buddhist path. But whether machine or human, there’s always a limit."

Chen Shang coughed lightly and asked with a smile, "So you want to transcend everything, to become the Buddha himself?"

"It seems you understand me..." The mechanical monk pressed his palms together, and the echo of his clap reverberated through the empty shrine.

At once, the mechanical monk remnants on either side of the road began to move.

They crawled forward like the undead, gathering at the end of the road and connecting themselves to the monk via cables, merging into his form.

What finally appeared before them was a monstrosity that could only have been birthed in hell itself.

It was a giant mechanical abomination, fashioned from the bodies of nearly a hundred mechanical monks—a grotesque, upright human centipede.

The monster rose, draping an enormous monk’s robe over itself, and spoke using the third mechanical head from the top:

"Come... merge with me as one! The Buddha takes on countless forms. To reach that state, I must continue to fuse... More must become one with me!"

"Come, let yourselves become a part of my body!"

Dozens of heads on the Buddha-robed creature roared in unison, shaking the lotus lanterns until they nearly flickered out.

"Here it comes, get ready!" Chen Shang raised his crossbow and called out in warning.