Chapter 68: Where Did the Villagers Go?

“Thi... this... what on earth happened?”

Hong Yu stood at the altar of Hongjia Village, looking at the scattered remains of human limbs on the ground, and questioned with a trembling voice.

Hong Sheng silently placed his bundle on the ground.

Inside were small items he had carefully prepared for the villagers of Hongjia Village, things he had brought from outside the village—such as fine needles, ink lines, and sweet persimmons.

However, these items that had been prepared for so long now seemed to have no one left to receive them.

Hong Sheng half-squatted by the altar, grabbed a handful of bloody mud from the ground, and rubbed it between his fingers:

“The blood is dark brown, and the mud is dry and hardened. This must have happened at least three days ago.”

Hong Yu stood dazed at the altar, staring at the desolate Hongjia Village.

From the wide-open doors of the houses, not a single living person walked out.

It had only been three months since she last left Hongjia Village.

How was it that upon her return, not a single living soul remained?

And these human remains by the altar—who did they belong to?

“Where’s elder brother? Where’s mother?”

Hong Yu’s lips turned pale from biting them.

After returning with her second brother, Hong Sheng, from the Bureau of Heaven Monitoring, they had searched Hongjia Village several times and concluded that all the villagers must have encountered something on the same day.

That event had driven all the villagers out of their homes in a hurry, finally gathering them here at the altar.

From the fact that the doors of every house had been left wide open, it could be simply deduced that whatever had happened made them so rushed that they didn’t even have time to close their doors.

But when she and Hong Sheng returned, they could not find a single villager, and with the altar nearly drenched in dark red blood, it could only be inferred—

The villagers had most likely all met with misfortune.

At the very least, even if not all had died, a significant portion of them had perished, and the rest had fled as an entire village.

“What could have happened that made an entire village leave?”

Hong Yu still refused to believe everyone in Hongjia Village had already died.

She would rather think the villagers, along with her elder brother and mother, had gone to the mountains or elsewhere.

After all, she and her second brother had searched the village for a long time but hadn’t found a single complete corpse of any villager, right?

The scattered remains by the altar proved nothing, after all...

“Could it be that bandits came to the village? And elder brother, along with Uncle Yun and the others, left voluntarily to protect mother and the rest? These remains at the altar must belong to the bandits?”

Hong Sheng shook his head:

“Hongjia Village has always been isolated from the outside world. The chance of bandits causing trouble is extremely small.”

“From the traces in the village, no large-scale bloodshed occurred anywhere else, only here at the altar. And no single corpse was left behind.”

“If it had been bandits, who kill wantonly and covet wealth, then there should have been corpses and bloodstains everywhere in the village. And they certainly wouldn’t have been so kind as to clear away the corpses.”

“The village’s food and money also showed no signs of being taken. So the possibility of bandits can be ruled out.”

Hong Sheng thought carefully, feeling that something like this had happened somewhere before.

Normally, Hong Yu was praised for her cleverness by her teacher, but today her mind was in chaos.

She could only ask blindly:

“Then since elder brother and the others are fine, where did they all go?”

Hong Sheng knew his little sister had always been pampered and had grown up under the protection of their father, elder brother, and himself, without experiencing many hardships.

Now, after three months away, she returned to Hongjia Village only to find everyone gone and a shocking pool of blood left behind.

Naturally, she could not accept the possibility that they had been killed.

So subconsciously, she insisted they were still alive, merely hiding elsewhere for some reason.

Hong Sheng did not expose her thoughts.

Instead, he circled around the altar and soon discovered new clues.

Hong Yu leaned closer and saw that Hong Sheng was holding fragments of tiny patterned remains, smaller than stones:

“This is...”

Hong Sheng pieced them together one by one:

“They look like snake remains. Judging by the patterns, there were clearly more than one or two.”

“From the cross-sections, it seems they were chopped into pieces with sharp tools like woodcutter’s knives.”

Hong Yu asked:

“But with snakes of this size, wouldn’t one or two strikes be enough to kill them? Why chop them into pieces like this?”

Her eyes lit up:

“Could the blood at the altar be from these snakes? I knew it! Everyone must be fine. They must have captured many snakes and performed some kind of ritual here.”

Hong Sheng shook his head at her words:

“With this amount of blood at the altar, even hundreds of snakes being bled at once wouldn’t be enough.

The most likely explanation is still human blood.”

“And judging from how the snake remains are scattered, instead of the villagers slaughtering the snakes here, it seems more like the snakes surrounded the villagers at the altar, and the villagers fought desperately with woodcutter’s knives...”

Hong Yu’s face turned pale, and she fell silent.

As they continued searching the altar, Hong Yu suddenly crouched down as if she had picked something up.

When Hong Sheng came over, he saw her holding two large snake scales pressed together, strung in the middle with a cord.

“It’s elder brother’s snake scale...”

Hong Yu’s legs gave way, and she almost collapsed, but Hong Sheng quickly supported her.

As siblings of Hong Wen, both knew how much he valued that snake scale.

Now that this scale, which elder brother had never parted with, was broken into two pieces at the altar, then their elder brother...

“No, no... it can’t be.”

Hearing his little sister mutter, Hong Sheng remained silent for a moment, then said:

“Little sister, elder brother and the others may already have been killed.”

Though neither of them wanted to admit it, they were both intelligent enough to understand—what kind of situation would leave behind such an enormous amount of blood at the altar, yet no corpses to match it?

Why was Hong Wen’s snake scale broken at the altar, while Hong Wen himself was nowhere to be seen?

On top of that, this scene gave Hong Sheng a hauntingly familiar feeling—just like when the corpse collector Hong Sanjiang “disappeared” years ago.

Back then too, there had been no corpses, no stolen belongings, no deliberate cleanup of traces.

The only difference was that back then, only one man, Hong Sanjiang, had “disappeared.” But now, it was the entire Hongjia Village.

“Perhaps near Hongjia Village, another Great Demon has appeared. And it’s even stronger than the snake demon that devoured Uncle Sanjiang back then. Strong enough to devour the entire village...”

Hong Yu didn’t wait for Hong Sheng to finish speaking.

She suddenly turned and ran.

“Little sister!”

Hong Sheng hurriedly chased after her.

After all, by his deduction, a demonic beast might indeed be lurking near Hongjia Village.

If Hong Yu accidentally provoked it, she would be in grave danger.

Just as he was running after her, a probing voice suddenly sounded from above his head:

“Excuse me, are you people of Hongjia Village?”

Hong Sheng looked up and saw a middle-aged Daoist priest, about thirty-seven or thirty-eight years old, dressed in Daoist robes, with a proper bearing, descending from the sky.

“Allow me to introduce myself. I am a Daoist of the Great Qian Dynasty’s Bureau of Heaven Monitoring. My name is Gong Zixian, and I have come seeking the children of Hong Tianfeng, the snake catcher of Hongjia Village.”