“This doesn’t seem right.” Dong Zheng only chased her for two steps before stopping. Ren Heming also frowned. He lit up the talisman paper, and when the ashes fell, it pointed after the girl.
“That child has a problem.” Ren Heming scattered the paper ashes with his feet. He looked in the direction the girl had disappeared to and said, “If she was the sacrificial child, the villagers would follow to ensure that the sacrifice went through smoothly. She probably secretly escaped, and…it’s possible that some unclean thing may have taken advantage of her.”
The child had ran away too fast and even the sounds of her crying had disappeared. They wouldn’t be able to catch up to her.
Ren Heming sighed. “Let’s leave this alone. Even if we catch up with her, what could we do? Take her back to the village where the plague broke out? Wouldn’t we be taking her back to her death?”
No matter how one looked at it, the girl’s reprieve from death was still very slim. Dong Zheng didn’t want to not save her, but after experiencing so many boxes, he already understood that sometimes people need to be selfish.
He must complete the library’s test. This was his only chance to dissolve the blood contract between himself and Cui Zuojing.
He needed to avoid other distractions.
With a heavy heart, they grabbed their horses and returned to the trail. The sun was gradually slanting to the west, stretching out their shadows. After walking for less than half an hour, they discovered that the road in front of them was blocked.
There were a few bodies lying on the ground.
Dong Zheng and Ren Heming looked at each other, and with their hands on their xiuchun swords, they slowly approached with caution. The man closest to them was lying face down, motionless, Dong Zheng used his sword to turn the man over and discovered that he was bleeding from his seven orifices, clearly dead.
The man looked like a Dashi person, with a full beard and large, frightened eyes. Dong Zheng touched the man’s neck, noting that he still had some residual body temperature. It shouldn’t have been more than two hours since he died.
Ren Heming inspected the other corpses. They died in the same condition as the bearded man. According to the placement of their bodies, they should have been killed in a panic while fleeing.
Baskets, fruits, brown chicken feathers, and bloodstains were scattered all over the floor.
Dong Zheng said, “These should be the group of people who wanted to sacrifice the little girl.”
“There’s no injury, and yet these people are dead.” Ren Heming squatted on the ground, and said to Dong Zheng, “Looks like the work of an evil spirit…It might have attached itself to the little girl after all.”
It seemed that not catching up was the right choice.
They continued to search, hoping to find other clues. Dong Zheng checked the body of a young man and discovered that he was holding something tightly in his hand.
It was a small, stone statue about ten centimeters high with smoothed edges from either careless carving or overhandling. The statue was of a person standing with arms folded against his chest, hands pressed in prayer.
“Look at this.” Dong Zheng showed the statue to Ren Heming, but Ren Heming also couldn’t figure out what it was. “Maybe it’s something related to the sacrifice. Let’s take it with us.”
The sun in the west was about to dip beyond the horizon. With the unknown statue in hand, they mounted their horses and continued to follow the direction of the evil spirit.
🔼 Jump to Chapter 251.
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