The most suitable time to perform an exorcism ritual is on a night when the moon is just rising, or at dusk when the sun has just set. At the moment when the last ray of sunlight disappears, evil creatures become free and rejoice.
Their mood affects the success rate of the exorcism ritual.
Due to the nature of the spell, it is not suitable to perform the ritual at home. It is best to choose a location such as a sparsely populated forest or open field, or an abandoned factory.
For the thirteen days leading up to the ritual, one must refrain from washing with water (no bathing), as this is necessary to align with the impure nature of demons. One must remain unclean to resonate with them, and the decaying animal carcasses used in the ritual serve this purpose.
While this may be repulsive to human senses, it is considered fragrant to demons.
For the seven days prior to the spell, one must abstain from garlic. Though the taste of garlic is unpleasant to everyone, demons find it even more repulsive.
Once the preliminary preparations are complete, the spell can be cast.
On the night of the spell, a magical array must be set up at the casting location. The type of array varies, and its specific arrangement depends on the entity the summoner wishes to invoke.
...
The notebook was located in one of the few clean areas in this region, surrounded by piles of garbage, rotting food scraps, broken household items, and an odor so foul it couldn't be masked.
This is the city's sewer system, the filthiest place in the entire city... perhaps without exception.
The handwriting on the unfolded notebook pages is somewhat messy. The left side contains additional text, while the right side features a rough sketch of the ritual array, drawn in pencil with obvious signs of multiple revisions.
On the left side of the notebook was a ritual array filled with rotting lizards and rat corpses, the design of which was identical to the drawing on the notebook.
Someone had performed an exorcism ritual in this filthy place—a fact that anyone with even a modicum of discernment could see.
Did he succeed?
That would have to be asked of the young man sitting motionless beside the ritual array.
Xu Qiyun's gaze was unfocused. If one could observe his current mental or spiritual state, it would resemble a box of broken paint mixed together in water, fusing in an irreversible manner amidst chaos to form a new, unified color.
This process was not particularly painful.
Xu Qiyun would rather feel pain, as it allowed him to sense his own existence.
However, his actual state was akin to riding a long-distance bus for several hours, then running a kilometer around a small tree after getting off, followed by performing hundreds of pull-ups on a single bar, and finally going to a landfill to review complex CAD diagrams.
The dizziness and nausea made him want to vomit everything in his stomach.
However, judging from the nearby pool of vomit still slightly warm, he had nothing left to vomit.
As the dizziness in his mind gradually subsided, scattered memories began to surface.
Donald Grant, 23 years old, born in 1796 Imperial Calendar in Puston City, North Hack County, Ryan Empire, recent graduate of the Religious Studies Department at Godo University.
His father was the owner of a small grocery store in Puston City and died in a fire at the store in the year 1815 of the Imperial Calendar...
His mother was a worker at a small workshop and, like his father, died in the fire at the grocery store in the year 1815 of the Imperial Calendar...
The memory ends here!
Xu Qiyun was stunned. Why was there so little memory? Did the original soul of this body suffer from amnesia?
Impossible. He was a university student. If there were issues with his mind, how could he have acquired that knowledge and graduated from university...
All the knowledge he had acquired in university had vanished from his mind, leaving not a single trace of religious studies.
It was as if someone had forcibly severed and extracted the memories of his life, leaving only those deeply imprinted memories—such as his parents and the language he had learned from childhood—and nothing else.
Before Xu Qiyun could feel regret, as the dizziness faded, new memories began to emerge in his mind. This time, they were accompanied by a stabbing pain and a burning sensation, as if someone had opened his skull and poured boiling water inside, with the sensation of boiling spreading throughout his body.
These aren't Donald's memories!
Xu Qiyun confirmed this because such a sensation had never occurred during the fusion of previous memories, and this time, he had not recalled anything.
The scene before him suddenly began to blur, and his vision suddenly focused on what was in front of him, ignoring the trash around him, staring at the magical array drawn with the blood of an unknown creature. At the center was a hexagram piled with rotting animal corpses, and the outer layer was a blood-red ring engraved with various special symbols.
The next moment, the scene before him began to clarify, like adjusting the lenses of glasses, with the clarity of the objects in front of him adjusting accordingly, until he could see everything clearly.
Then, he understood the symbols...
"Sacrifice... offering... descent... soul... wait! What language is this!"
Covering his mouth, Donald stared at the magical array in astonishment. The symbols and markings on it did not belong to his native language. Given that he had lost all religious memories, this should not be something he could recognize.
"Sacrifice... sacrifice!"
Trying to repeat the meaning of one of the symbols, Donald spoke while listening to his own accent. It was difficult to pronounce the syllable with a human throat; his vocal cords and tongue seemed to be forcing themselves to serve as tools for sound production. It felt like using a flathead screwdriver to turn a Phillips screw—it could be done, but it wasn't very effective, odd and unfamiliar.
This language and pronunciation did not belong to his original soul, nor to Donald, but to another more obscure, indistinguishable form of knowledge.
Stay calm!
Stay calm!
"Eat grapes without spitting out the skin, don't eat grapes but spit out the skin... eat grapes..."
To calm his mind, Donald began trying to clear his head by repeating tongue twisters in three languages, alternating between them.
This was a habit left over from his previous life as a debater, and it had... some effect.
I've been transported here... This should be a sewer, and in front of me is a magical array I can understand. From the notes, it's a summoning array used to call forth demons.
Was the original body a member of a cult? I'm an atheist, after all.
Could it be that Donald's summoning brought my soul here?
Let's not dwell on that for now; it's meaningless. The key is what to do next...
Survival or death—that is the question?
My past self was likely drowned in a flash flood. This rebirth might be an opportunity granted by the gods. Wouldn't it be a shame to waste it?
Donald tried to gather his thoughts, but such a simple task was difficult to accomplish in this situation.
"Never mind. The most meaningful thing in life is to live well. If I'm going to be transported, so be it. It's better than dying young."
At this point, he could only find solace in mental victory, finding joy in adversity. Being alive was always a good thing.
He had to leave this place first. He couldn't stay in the sewer all night.
He bent down to pick up the notebook and candles used for lighting around the ritual array—these were his belongings. His gaze shifted to the demon-subduing ritual array beside him, the place where he had lived in his previous life. Such things were something he would never see again in his lifetime, so he couldn't help but glance at them a few more times.
Familiar, beloved.
When these two emotions flashed through his mind, Donald shuddered violently. Why did he feel a sense of familiarity toward these rotting corpses... What kind of person was the original owner of this body?
Is this the kind of feeling a human being should have?
But soon he realized that the object of his emotions was not these rotting corpses, but a dark red bead among them.
As Donald pondered why he felt this way and what the bead was, his index finger and thumb had already picked it up and stuffed it into the pocket at his waist.
There were too many strange events happening, and his hands weren't listening to him... Well, let them not listen, as long as they didn't slap him in the face.
Holding the candle, he avoided the filthy things on the ground and walked a few meters before stopping and turning back.
"Regardless of who you were before, at least now, I am me. Even though I use your name, I have no fondness for cults, so this ritual array for exorcising demons cannot remain."
The previous Donald Grant had chosen this location for the ritual not only for environmental reasons but also to avoid being discovered by others, which meant such behavior was equally unacceptable in this world.
The current Donald Grant wanted to live a normal life and naturally kept his distance from cults.
Donald didn't know how to proceed, so he could only blindly move forward. The putrid stench and occasional squeaks of rats around him only made his mood grow increasingly gloomy.
He shifted his focus back to himself, observing his attire in an attempt to find clues about this world.
He was wearing a pair of brown leather shoes, dark brown trousers, a white shirt underneath, a brown vest over it, and a gray cloak on the outside.
He searched all the pockets on his body and found a small bunch of keys and a copper pocket watch in the left pants pocket. The time displayed on the watch was 6:30 PM.
In the right pants pocket were some loose coins: 1 shilling and 5 pence. He roughly converted the amount in his mind using two memory concepts, estimating it to be around 150 yuan.
A metal ladder leading upward appeared ahead. Donald put everything back into his pockets. The strength of this body was only average, but climbing a ladder was no problem. After climbing a few steps, his right hand touched the manhole cover. He pushed it upward and then moved it to the side.
In the dim alleyway, two unfamiliar faces were looking down at him from above.
Donald's gaze lingered on their clothes for a few seconds before settling on the short knives in their hands, gleaming coldly in the moonlight.
"Excuse me, I'm sorry to disturb you..."
He reached out to pull the manhole cover beside him.
"Great Shadow King, your blessings fill us with gratitude."
The two thugs, seeing the lamb that had come to them, expressed their reverence to the god of thieves.