139: Chapter 139 The Five Internal Organs

By the time Chen Zilong returned to Village Chief Su's relatively intact residence, a faint glimmer of light was already showing on the eastern horizon, though true dawn was still some time away.

Inside the main hall, the atmosphere was so heavy it felt almost tangible.

Laid out neatly on the floor were over a dozen corpses, all disciples from various sects who had died in the previous battle.

They had been roughly arranged, but the marks of death could not be erased.

Yet, the sight before him instantly seized Chen Zilong's recently calmed mind with an even deeper chill.

These corpses...

were too strange.

They did not bear the obvious wounds of blade strikes or spell impacts. Instead, their internal organs had been extracted with a terrifyingly precise and utterly cruel method.

But the strangeness wasn't that all the organs were taken, but that a single, specific organ had been removed from each!

Some had their livers removed, the wounds treated with a certain...

"cleanliness"; others had their spleens excised, the location pinpointed with extreme accuracy.

Some were missing their lungs, leaving a hollow space in the chest cavity.

Others lacked kidneys, bloody holes left in their waist and abdomen.

This eerie scene instantly reminded him of the corpses in Yingxian Pavilion, the ones with their hearts removed!

This damn thing wasn't killing for the sake of killing. It was more like...

collecting?

Collecting specific parts of the human body's five viscera?

The thought sent a chill down his spine.

What the hell is going on?

Chen Zilong felt the CPU in his brain was about to overheat from these continuous bizarre events, its temperature skyrocketing.

The sinister happenings in this village truly came one after another, endless, like a series of interlocking traps.

Unconsciously, the pale light of dawn in the east expanded.

The darkness was being gradually driven away.

But the intangible yet immensely heavy, eerie atmosphere shrouding this land showed no signs of lessening.

Instead, with the changing light, it revealed even more unsettling details.

Chen Zilong took out the jade slip he had obtained from Village Chief Su. The jade felt cool to the touch, yet to him, it seemed scalding hot.

He handed it to Lu Bingyun, whose expression was grim.

"Everyone should take a look. This village... Sigh, let's talk after you've seen it."

He sighed, his tone full of weariness and an indescribable heaviness.

Lu Bingyun, Ye Xishui, Tu Shan Xiaoxiao, Wei Guodong, and Jin Mei, who was in slightly better condition and could just about move.

The group took turns using their spiritual sense to probe the jade slip, examining the bloody, dark history it recorded—a history deliberately buried for a thousand years.

For a moment, the only sounds in the hall were heavy, suppressed breathing and the grinding sound of Wei Guodong clenching his fists.

Lu Bingyun's face was deathly pale, devoid of all color.

She pressed her lips tightly together, her lower lip almost bitten through.

A furious fire burned in Tu Shan Xiaoxiao's beautiful fox eyes, her fluffy tail bristling uncontrollably, every hair standing on end.

Jin Mei's face was full of pity and disbelief, her eyes dazed, as if unable to accept such a cruel truth.

The strongest reaction came from Wei Guodong of the Tiansha Sect.

After reading it, this rough man let out a low roar, like a wounded beast, and slammed his fist fiercely into the only relatively intact wall nearby.

With a dull *thud*, a shallow crater with spiderweb cracks appeared on the wall. He began cursing, his voice hoarse with extreme fury:

"Fuck Su Mu! Su Chen! And all those villagers who aided and abetted them!"

"Beasts! They're all a bunch of beasts worse than pigs and dogs!"

"I... I really want to dig them out of their graves right now and kill them all over again! Chop them up and feed them to the dogs!"

"Even I, a demonic cultivator, feel like a damn good person after learning this truth!"

Chen Zilong waited for them to vent some of the grief and indignation surging in their chests before speaking in a low voice. His words were quiet but clearly reached everyone's ears:

"We cannot change the tragedies of the past, but the trouble before our eyes must be resolved immediately."

"The urgent priority is to follow the clues mentioned in the jade slip and try to re-establish the Tripartite Demon Suppression Grand Formation, to stabilize this out-of-control situation. We cannot afford any more deaths."

His gaze swept over everyone, finally settling on Wei Guodong.

Hearing this, Wei Guodong seemed doused from head to toe with a bucket of ice water. His rage was forcibly suppressed, transforming into a kind of powerless dejection. He wiped his face, his voice muffled:

"How do we set it up? The headless body of that scholar from a thousand years ago has long since rotted to mud, and the monk's head is nowhere to be found. Where are we supposed to find replacements?"

His words instantly dashed the faint hope that had just kindled in the group, plunging their spirits back into the depths.

Indeed, the core Formation Eye materials were gone. Even the cleverest housewife can't cook without rice!

Having hope ignited only to be immediately snuffed out felt even worse.

Looking at Wei Guodong's expression, Chen Zilong couldn't help but roll his eyes, reminding him with a tone of exasperation:

"I say, Fellow Daoist Wei, could you use that brain of yours, the one less developed than your muscles?"

"We can't find thousand-year-old corpses and heads, but can't we use local materials?"

With that, he pointed at the corpses on the floor from the Haoran Academy, Jinguang Temple, and Qingyun Sect.

Although their manner of death was bizarre, their identities and affiliations—Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist—exactly corresponded to the three schools mentioned in the jade slip!

"Right!"

Wei Guodong slapped his own thigh with a crisp sound, suddenly enlightened, his eyes brightening, "We can use theirs! How did I not think of that!"

The others also realized, silently cursing themselves for being so flustered by the continuous upheavals that they missed such an obvious alternative.

Thus, the group quickly divided the tasks.

Lu Bingyun, along with Ye Xishui and Tu Shan Xiaoxiao, and Wei Guodong and Jin Mei, were responsible for transporting the corresponding corpses to the equally strange ancestral hall at the village center to attempt re-establishing the formation.

Chen Zilong, however, indicated he had other places to investigate, the feeling of something being wrong growing stronger and stronger within him.

"I keep feeling something's off. I must go to a few more places to confirm," he said, frowning deeply, his gaze directed at the still dim village outside the door.

He first went to the village outskirts, to the building named "Spring Breeze Pavilion," whose exterior still retained hints of its former elegance.

According to the jade slip, this was the place where Princess Zixia and her beautiful daughters suffered endless humiliation and torment, the hell where their blood and tears ran dry.

Even before getting close, an intensely nauseating smell of blood mixed with the damp morning air assaulted him, making him cough.

When he saw the scene at the entrance of Spring Breeze Pavilion, Chen Zilong felt an uncontrollable surge of rage shoot straight to the top of his head.

His fists instantly clenched with a grinding sound, his nails digging deep into his palms.

Under the eaves in front of Spring Breeze Pavilion's door, as if hanging out tattered sacks, over a dozen Female Corpses were suspended by coarse hemp ropes tightly wound around their necks!

They were from various sects, and among them were several female disciples from his own Xuantian Sect!

They had all been stripped naked, hanging there utterly exposed, their skin a deathly, lifeless bluish-white, glowing eerily in the faint morning light.

Even more appalling, each of them had a bloody, roughly-edged hole in their pale waists.

Their kidneys had been cleanly extracted!

Those hollow wounds seemed to silently accuse the extreme cruelty inflicted upon them.

Chen Zilong gritted his teeth with a grinding sound, forcibly suppressing the impulse to immediately draw his sword and raze this sin-filled building to the ground. With a face like thunder, he stepped inside Spring Breeze Pavilion.

With every step, he felt the floorboards beneath his feet let out a groan of agony.