CHAPTER 76: CHAPTER 76: SACRIFICE_1

Lu Yuan remained frozen, his hand still on the door he had started to push open. He stared blankly at the scene inside the room, unmoving... After a few seconds, he walked in, gently pulling the door shut behind him.

Lu Yuan stood quietly just inside the doorway. A 100-watt incandescent bulb illuminated the entire room, revealing every detail.

Blood.

On the walls, the floor, the ceiling... traces of blood were everywhere. It was dark red, already dried and hardened.

The stench of blood was so strong it was suffocating.

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

She was dead.

The skin of her entire back had been peeled off. Her chest cavity was opened from behind, revealing nothing but emptiness.

Beside the woman, eerie patterns, lines, and symbols were drawn in blood... some even resembled children’s doodles.

The entire scene resembled a bloody and exceptionally cruel sacrificial ceremony.

And the woman was the offering, slaughtered like livestock for this ritual.

"Ugh—"

Lu Yuan could no longer maintain his composure; his stomach churned.

Fortunately, he had experimented with numerous ways of torturing rat men in the Consciousness Space. He had witnessed countless scenes of blood and organs spilled on the ground like garbage. His nerves had been somewhat hardened by this, which was the only reason he didn’t vomit on the spot.

He drew a sharp breath—

Lu Yuan tried to take a deep breath to calm himself but immediately stopped as he inhaled a lungful of the putrid air.

Covering his nose, he moved cautiously around the room and found a heap of charred remains in a corner. It appeared to be the woman’s clothing and other belongings. There was also a handbag, nearly two-thirds of which had been burned away.

Lu Yuan nudged it lightly with his foot, barely making out a few letters on the bag’s strap.

"H... A... L..."

It looked like the logo of a luxury brand.

Clearly, this woman—her organs gouged out, her blood used as paint—wasn’t a local.

Perhaps a white-collar worker from a high-end office building downtown?

Lu Yuan pulled his phone from his pocket and checked the screen, but there was still no signal.

He took a few photos of the woman’s body and the room, then backed out.

COO COO—

The second-floor corridor was lit, but Lu Yuan was the only one there. He heard a sound from downstairs and looked down. He saw the man in the tank top from the living room and another person. They were holding something like dustpans and scattering feed for the crows in the front yard, much like feeding chickens.

Lu Yuan couldn’t see what was in their dustpans, and neither of the two men noticed him.

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

The second room was similar. Another brutal and bloody sacrificial scene, the walls and floor covered in bizarre symbols.

This time, however, the offering was a man. He looked very strong. Yet he was kneeling, hands tied behind his back, his head hacked off.

Lu Yuan took more photos and left the room.

He went from one room to the next.

After checking all the rooms on the second floor, he went up to the third.

Every room presented the same gory tableau.

The higher he went, the fresher the bodies and bloodstains became, and the grimmer Lu Yuan’s expression grew. He could clearly feel it himself: a suppressed, icy current surging within his chest, throughout his body. It was continuously accumulating... threatening to erupt at any moment.

He entered a cramped, dim room. The fluorescent light flickered, likely due to a faulty tube, making it far less glaring than in the previous rooms.

Lu Yuan squatted and gently poked at a pile of charred ash on the floor with half a mosquito coil he’d found on the stairs. From the shapeless, charred mass, he pulled out an ID card, half of which was burned away.

The portrait photo on the ID card was unrecognizable. As for the name field...

"Chen..."

Lu Yuan read the first character aloud. The second character was scorched, and only its radical component was discernible.

"Chen... Chen..."

A thought flashed through Lu Yuan’s mind, and he instinctively looked up at the corpse in the center of the room.

Chen Yang?!

He recalled the crying woman at the entrance of Origin Martial Arts Hall. She had been clinging to Lin Zhiquin, incessantly murmuring, "Chen Yang, my Chen Yang..."

The offering in this room was indeed male. Quite young. All his limbs were broken. His facial features had been carved away, leaving only empty eye sockets staring silently up at the ceiling.

Is it the same person?

Lu Yuan didn’t know. But somehow, it no longer seemed to matter.

He observed in silence for a moment, then tossed aside the piece of mosquito coil and walked out of the room.

This was the last room on the third floor.

All that remained was the fourth floor.

By now, Lu Yuan had entered at least ten rooms and seen at least ten corpses, each mutilated in a different, gruesome way. He had thought he was growing numb.

But as he stepped into the first room on the fourth floor, his heart clenched painfully, as if someone had viciously squeezed it.

The first room on the fourth floor was large. It presented another scene reminiscent of a bloody slaughterhouse, covered everywhere with bizarre, strange lines and symbols. The only difference was that... in the center of this room’s ritual site, four corpses knelt: three adults and one child.

All had been beheaded, their severed heads held in their own hands before their chests. A wooden stake, thrust up through their chests from below, kept them from toppling over.

On the ground before the bodies, an Oxhorn Dagger, over a foot long, pinned something firmly to the floor.

Lu Yuan walked closer and saw it was a photograph.

The blood-smeared photograph showed a family of five: a young couple holding a little girl, with an older couple standing behind them. One of them, a man with dark skin and a simple, honest smile like that of a farmer, was unmistakably the man in the tank top Lu Yuan had seen downstairs—the one who had ordered Wang Zhichao to be beaten!

Beside the photo, a line was written in blood: "Dedicated to... the great, supreme... Crow God!"

Lu Yuan stared at the crooked, awkwardly scrawled characters, some of which were even written incorrectly. An image formed in his mind: the man in the tank top, severing the heads of his own kin one by one, arranging them meticulously. Then, with his rough hands, calloused from a lifetime of labor, dipping them in blood to painstakingly write those words on the ground. Perhaps, fearing his devotion was insufficient, he had even pinned his cherished family photograph before the bodies...

Lu Yuan stared at the photograph, his gaze flickering. Something felt as if it were about to erupt from within his chest.

WHOOSH—

Suddenly, a gust of overpowering stench assaulted him.

Lu Yuan looked up. The sun-facing window in this room was open, and the drawn black curtain billowed wildly in the wind.

He strode over and yanked the curtain aside.

The stench, which had lingered in his nostrils since he first stepped into the courtyard, instantly intensified manifold.

He leaned out the window and looked down.

He saw only a massive cesspool, swarming with crows. Vaguely visible within the pool were rotting, pale limbs—arms and legs...

Lu Yuan stood frozen by the windowsill for a long time.

The hot wind, laden with the stench of corpses and bird droppings, blew relentlessly against his face.

"Beast." Lu Yuan closed his eyes, murmuring as if to himself.

When he opened them again, his eyes held nothing but an utter, icy coldness.

"They deserve to die."

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