The old man had never expected something like this to happen. He had clearly watched with his own eyes as the old woman laid hands on this girl. She obviously pushed the girl, but he didn’t know how—just in the blink of an eye, he must have been seeing things. He saw the girl turn transparent, and the old woman passed right through her body, missing completely and falling straight down.
He stared wide-eyed at Luo Yuan, unable to react to how this happened. It wasn’t until he heard Luo Yuan say, “Grandma fell down,” that he suddenly let out a wailing cry and rushed to the window to look down.
In the lotus pond below, the old woman had more than half her body buried in the pond mud, with only two thin, skinny legs still sticking out, like two dried-up tree trunks, standing there motionless.
“Is she dead?” Luo Yuan stepped aside to make room for him and asked lightly beside his ear.
The old man rolled and crawled toward the stairs. At this moment, noise suddenly erupted below. Qin Feichang and the others rushed in like police coming to the rescue, weapons in hand, forming up to protect the Madam. As soon as they entered, they saw an old woman stuck upside-down in the lotus pond. Everyone froze. Then they saw an old man rushing out from the tower, lying by the pond and crying in grief.
Qin Feichang looked at Luo Yuan coming out of the tower, went forward, and asked, “Madam, what is going on?” Why did it feel like they were the villains here?
Luo Yuan: “I didn’t do anything.”
Qin Feimo followed with two bodyguards behind him. The two bodyguards were supporting a young girl. The girl was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, dressed plainly, covered in dust, with marks on her wrists and ankles from being tied with ropes.
“Madam, we found someone in the room.” Qin Feimo’s elite appearance had fully returned. He had been frightened earlier by those eerie crying sounds inside the house, but now that he realized it had actually been a living person, he instantly recovered to perfection. He had even efficiently extracted from the girl her identity and the reason she appeared here.
This girl was just an innocent tourist. Two days ago, she had traveled alone to Xingyun Mountain. While hiking, she met an elderly couple selling herbal tea. After chatting for a while, once they learned her family name was Luo, the elderly couple enthusiastically told her they also shared the same surname and insisted on giving her an extra cup of herbal tea.
Later, that old woman accidentally sprained her ankle. The elderly couple, pushing a cart and finding it inconvenient, begged her to escort them home. Seeing that they were so old and seemed kind, she agreed. But halfway there, she suddenly felt dizzy and fainted. When she woke up, she found herself tied up in their house.
She had thought she had run into some old scammers who trafficked people. Now she was furiously cursing in agitation.
After Luo Yuan let her vent her emotions, she asked her, “Your surname is Luo?”
The young girl glanced at the surrounding bodyguards, swallowed the curse still at the edge of her tongue, and suddenly became a bit timid again, because the people in front of her didn’t seem much better than those two traffickers. She couldn’t help lowering her voice. “Yes, my surname is Luo.”
Seeing her frightened, Luo Yuan handed her a bottle of water, gave her a friendly smile, and then continued, “Are you a Luo Clan divine descendant?”
The girl accepted the water, relaxed a little, and asked doubtfully, “What Luo Clan? What divine descendant?”
Not everyone knew of the existence of Clan Deity. Nowadays, most Clan Deity families had declined. Those still in existence were very low-key. Even the Qin family, which governed Yuzhou, hid behind various public institutions and private enterprises. Only the family members themselves understood the true situation. As for ordinary people, most knew nothing about Clan Deity families. Just like Luo Yuan in the past, she had only learned of their existence because she had been chosen as a sacrifice.
This girl knew nothing about Clan Deity, and was only here as a tourist. In all likelihood, she wasn’t a Luo descendant. Other than sharing the surname Luo, she had nothing to do with the Luo clan. So why did the elderly couple bring her here?
Seeing the girl become more and more uneasy, her gaze increasingly suspicious, Luo Yuan had no choice but to let Qin Feichang send her away first, so she wouldn’t remain here in fear.
Thinking of how the old woman had just tried to push her into the lotus pond, Luo Yuan asked the old man, “Were you using innocent people for some strange sacrificial ritual?”
The old man lay by the pond without moving, ignoring her words completely. He stared only at the lotus pond and the corpse of the old woman inside.
Luo Yuan also looked toward the pond, then turned to the bodyguards with stern expressions and said, “Please find some tools and dig open the lotus pond to see what’s inside.”
Hearing her words, the old man who had been like a statue suddenly leapt up, spreading his arms to shield the lotus pond, screaming hysterically, “No! You are not allowed! Don’t touch this pond! Get out! All of you get out!”
They moved the agitated old man to the side, and the rest began to dig into the lotus pond mud as instructed.
One shovel went down, and a foul stench rushed up. The first bodyguard to dig casually flipped his shovel and uncovered several segments of long and short white bones. These bodyguards were not ordinary people—no one panicked even after digging up bones. Even Qin Feichang and his sister stood by the pond with unchanged expressions.
But as the bodyguards continued digging, everyone’s faces gradually became grave. Because there were simply too many bones in the lotus pond. Wrapped in the thick, dark red pond mud, almost everything was layer upon layer of bones, and there were even corpses that had not yet decayed.
Luo Yuan fell silent for a moment. A terrifying guess formed in her mind—was this pond mud truly pond mud? Or was it a substance formed from decayed flesh and blood?
Qin Feichang contacted more people stationed at the foot of the mountain to come up and help. They came to ask for her instructions.
Luo Yuan: “Dig everything out. If possible, clean all the bones and place them aside.” She didn’t know who these remains belonged to, but afterward, she would have them properly buried in the cemetery.
This was an immense project. Even though another hundred or so strong men arrived with tools, cleaning out such a not-so-large lotus pond still went on until deep into the night.
More than a dozen bright lamps illuminated the surroundings as bright as day. Bones that could still be clearly identified as complete were placed together, and the scattered, mixed remains were piled separately. In the final count, there were at least over five hundred bodies buried here. According to the professionals who had just arrived, the earliest ones dated back decades—perhaps even a hundred years.
Inside the old couple’s house, many miscellaneous belongings were found, including old clothes and various backpacks… These obviously belonged to different people, and the identification cards found in some of the bags proved the same point. The only similarity was that all the IDs belonged to girls with the surname Luo.
“So many… Were they deceiving and killing innocent people to provide offerings for the Luo Clan deity? But hasn’t the Luo Clan deity already perished? This is useless.” Holding the stack of IDs, Qin Feichang sighed.
The old man was being restrained, staring blankly at the corpse of the old woman covered in pond sludge beside him. His elderly, trembling figure looked pitiful. Luo Yuan looked at his shrinking, withered state and suddenly stood up.
As she rose, the previously noisy yet orderly scene instantly fell silent. Everyone turned to look at her.
The bones in the lotus pond had been cleared away. Only piles of foul-smelling sludge remained, murky water covering the surface.
Luo Yuan walked toward the despairing old man, grabbed him by the neck, and dragged him to the edge of the pond.
The old man struggled violently, twisting in terror, opening his mouth to speak, but Luo Yuan pressed his head into the muddy water.
“Gurgle—puh—”
The old man desperately shook his head, trying to escape the suffocating feeling, but his strength was no match for Luo Yuan. His struggles grew weaker and weaker. Eventually, he stopped moving. Thin streaks of fresh red blood seeped into the murky water. His claw-like fingers dug into the pond’s edge, blood flowing freely.
Watching the life drain from him, Luo Yuan felt the boiling, indescribable emotion in her chest instantly calm, as if something heavy had been drawn out of her body.
It wasn’t an illusion—dark red sludge-like matter seeped from the hand she had pressed into the water, dispersing into the foul lotus pond.
