Chapter 76 – The Sacrifice

Lu Yuan stood frozen in the doorway, maintaining the posture of pushing the door open.

His eyes were fixed on the scene inside the room, unmoving.

After several seconds, he stepped inside and gently closed the door behind him.

Lu Yuan stood silently at the entrance of the room, the 100-watt incandescent bulb illuminating the entire scene clearly.

Blood.

There were traces of blood everywhere: on the walls, the floor, and the ceiling.

Dark red, already dried and hardened.

The stench of blood was overwhelming.

A woman knelt in the center of the room with her back to Lu Yuan.

She was already dead.

The skin on her back had been peeled off, her chest cavity opened from behind, but it was empty inside.

Beside the woman, there were bizarre patterns, lines, and symbols painted with fresh blood. Some even looked like children’s doodles.

The entire scene resembled a gruesome and brutal sacrificial ritual.

And the woman was the sacrificial offering, slaughtered like cattle or sheep!

“Ugh—”

The calm expression on Lu Yuan’s face shattered, his stomach churned slightly.

Thanks to his experiences in the Consciousness Space where he had tried various ways to torture and kill Ratman, and had seen the scenes of blood and organs dumped on the ground like garbage, his nerves were a bit more resilient, so he didn’t vomit on the spot.

“Hiss—”

Lu Yuan tried to take a deep breath to calm himself, but he immediately stopped when the foul smell filled his lungs.

Covering his nose, he walked around the room slightly and then found a pile of charred items in the corner.

It was probably the woman’s clothes before she died, along with a handbag that was almost two-thirds burned.

Lu Yuan gently poked it with his foot and barely made out a few letters on the strap.

“HAL”

It seemed to be some luxury brand.

It was obvious that this woman, whose innards had been used as paint, wasn’t a local from this area.

Maybe she was a white-collar worker in some high-end office building in the city?

Lu Yuan took out his mobile phone from his pocket and checked the screen, still no signal.

He took a few photos of the woman’s corpse and the room, then exited the room.

“Co-coo-coo—”

The corridor on the second floor was lit, and apart from Lu Yuan, there was no one else.

He heard noises coming from downstairs and looked down.

He saw the Man in a Vest from the living room and another person holding something resembling a dustpan, feeding the crows in the front yard as if they were feeding chickens.

Lu Yuan couldn’t make out what was in the dustpan, and the two men didn’t notice him.

He watched for a moment, then boldly walked into the second room on the second floor.

The second room was similar.

It was another gruesome and brutal sacrificial scene, with strange symbols painted all over the walls and floor.

This time, the sacrificial offering was a man.

He looked strong.

But he was kneeling on the floor with his hands tied behind his back, and his head had been cut off.

Lu Yuan took more photos and then exited the room.

He went from room to room.

After finishing the second floor, he moved up to the third floor.

Every room had the same bloody scenes.

The higher he went, the fresher the corpses and bloodstains became, and the colder and harder Lu Yuan’s expression grew.

Even he could clearly feel it.

Inside his chest, around his body… it seemed like a wave of oppressive and icy air was surging.

Constantly accumulating.

Ready to explode at any moment.

In a cramped and dim room, the fluorescent light seemed to be malfunctioning, flickering on and off, unlike the glaring lights in the previous rooms.

Lu Yuan squatted down and gently poked a pile of charred ashes on the floor with half a mosquito coil he had picked up from the stairs.

From this pile of burnt debris, he fished out a half-burned ID card.

The photo on the ID card was no longer recognizable, and the name section…

“Chen…”

Lu Yuan read the first character, the second one was burned and blurry, but he could barely make out a radical that looked like “ch”.

“Chen…”

A sudden flash of realization crossed Lu Yuan’s mind. He instinctively looked up at the corpse in the center of the room.

“Chen Yang?!”

Lu Yuan remembered the crying woman he had seen at the entrance of Yuan Martial Arts Gym, clinging to Lin Zhiqin and repeatedly murmuring, “Chen Yang, my Chen Yang.”

The sacrificial offering in this room was indeed a male.

Very young.

His limbs had been broken.

His facial features had been cut away, and his empty eye sockets stared silently at the ceiling.

“Is it the same person?”

Lu Yuan didn’t know.

But at this moment, it didn’t seem to matter anymore.

He watched silently for a while, then dropped the mosquito coil and turned to leave the room.

This was the last room on the third floor.

Only the fourth floor remained.

As he walked, Lu Yuan had entered no less than ten rooms and seen no less than ten corpses in various states of death.

He thought he had almost become numb.

But when he walked into the first room on the fourth floor, his heart still felt like it was being fiercely squeezed.

The first room on the fourth floor was large.

It was the same gruesome slaughterhouse scene, with strange lines and symbols painted everywhere.

The only difference was.

At the center of this room’s ritual, there were four kneeling corpses.

Three adults and one child.

All had been beheaded, and their heads were held in their hands, placed in front of their chests.

A wooden stake protruded from their chests, supporting them so they wouldn’t fall.

On the floor in front of the corpses, a horn-shaped dagger over a foot long pinned something to the ground.

Lu Yuan walked over step by step and saw that it was a photograph.

The bloodstained photo depicted a family of five— a young couple holding a little girl.

Behind them stood an older couple.

The dark-skinned man with a simple, honest smile, looking like an old farmer, was unmistakably the Man in a Vest Lu Yuan had seen earlier, the one who had orchestrated the beating of Wang Zhichao!

Next to the photo, a line of words written in blood read: “Dedicated to the great and supreme Crow Deity!”

Lu Yuan stared at these crooked, misspelled characters.

In his mind, he pictured the Man in a Vest, one by one, beheading his loved ones, carefully arranging them, and then using his rough hands, worn from a lifetime of labor, to earnestly write these words in blood on the floor.

Perhaps, fearing his dedication was insufficient, he had even nailed the treasured family photo in front of the corpses.

Lu Yuan stared at the photo in front of him, his eyes flickering as if something inside him was about to erupt.

“Whoosh•”

Suddenly, a wave of intense stench hit him.

Lu Yuan looked up to see that the window facing the sun in this room was not closed, and the black curtains were flapping wildly in the wind.

He strode forward and yanked the curtains aside.

The stench that had lingered in his nostrils since he entered the courtyard suddenly intensified a thousandfold.

He looked down through the window.

All he saw was a massive cesspool covered in crows.

In the pool, he could vaguely make out rotting, pale limbs.

Lu Yuan stood at the windowsill for a long time, dazed.

The hot wind, mixed with the stench of decay and bird droppings, continuously blew against his face.

“Brute.”

Lu Yuan closed his eyes, muttering as if talking to himself.

When he opened them again,

Only a cold, icy resolve remained.

“Damn them.”

He turned calmly and walked step by step towards the door.