Chapter 75 - 74: The Hidden Village

Chapter 75: Chapter 74: The Hidden Village

Mao Mao led them deeper in, hopping and skipping along the way, visibly happy.

After walking for nearly twenty minutes, Gu Qingyin started to get anxious. Just as she was about to ask, Mao Mao, up ahead, suddenly let out two excited cries.

Gu Qingyin’s heart stirred. She quickened her pace, and the view ahead suddenly opened up.

Gu Qingyin was astonished. Who would have thought there was a village hidden on this small island?

Mao Mao glanced back and cried out to them twice, then turned and shot off, its speed even faster than when it had been fleeing before.

Huo Xinghai jumped in surprise. "It’s not running away, is it?"

"It’s not." Gu Qingyin was very interested in the village. "Let’s go take a look."

The houses in the village were all wooden stilt houses. They must have been very old; some had already half-collapsed.

Gu Qingyin found a house that looked relatively intact and went inside.

The furnishings inside were simple: a bed, a low table, and four wooden stools. There was a plate on the table, its contents charred black and unrecognizable. There was no quilt on the bed, only a straw mat and a crooked wooden pillow.

In a corner of the house was a sickle, a bow and arrows hung on the adjacent wall, and a wicker basket with holes in it was suspended from the rafters...

After looking around, a feeling came over Gu Qingyin.

The owner of this house hadn’t known that when they left this time, they would never return. They had just stepped out for a bit, perhaps even planning to finish the food on the table when they got back.

"What on earth happened..." Gu Qingyin murmured to herself.

’Judging by the pile of bones outside, the villagers must have all left for the same reason, and not a single one managed to return.’

"Mom, did you find anything?" Huo Xinghai asked, peeking in from the doorway.

Gu Qingyin came out and shook her head. "Is Mao Mao back yet?"

This place was too dirty. Huo Xinghai radiated disgust, as if terrified of touching anything.

"No idea where it ran off to. This place is such a wreck, what could it possibly want from here?"

Gu Qingyin continued walking into the village. Huo Xinghai instinctively didn’t want to go in, but he didn’t want to just stand there with the two puppets either. After a moment’s hesitation, he reluctantly followed his mom.

In the village, Gu Qingyin discovered a very strange building. From the outside, it looked a bit like a yurt, but it was built from wood.

It had a circular wall with a conical roof. A wooden pole stood atop the roof, with strips of white cloth tied to its front.

The wooden door had fallen off. Looking inside from the outside, it was a pitch-black maw, as if some monster was hiding within.

"Mom... Mommy," Huo Xinghai tugged on Gu Qingyin’s clothes. "You’re not thinking of going in, are you?"

Gu Qingyin stared into the yurt’s interior and offered a half-hearted reassurance. "Be good. If you’re scared, just wait for Mom by the entrance. I’ll just go in for a quick look and come right out." Without waiting for Huo Xinghai to reply, she started walking.

Huo Xinghai could only watch helplessly as his mom got farther and farther away, finally disappearing into the yurt’s entrance.

He blinked. Something felt strange. ’Would a normal person just suddenly vanish the moment they stepped inside?’

Huo Xinghai suddenly grew tense. ’This entrance isn’t a gateway to another dimension, is it? Mom can still come back, right?’

He pulled out his phone to check the time, secretly making a very brave decision—if Gu Qingyin wasn’t out in five minutes, he would go in to find her!

The main idea was, if someone was going to go missing, they would go missing together. There was no way he was being left behind alone.

The moment Gu Qingyin put one foot inside, she knew something was wrong. It was that feeling again—of passing through a spatiotemporal tunnel.

But it was too late to pull back. She could only follow the force pulling her forward, unless she could rip her body in half, with one part on this side of spacetime and the other on that side.

Things weren’t so dire that she had to rip herself in two, so Gu Qingyin opted to bide her time and see where she would end up.

As the force of spacetime slowly dissipated, light returned to Gu Qingyin’s vision. It was a dim, yellow light, flickering as if it could go out at any moment.

Gu Qingyin looked up, her eyes falling upon a wall covered in stone murals. The light she had just perceived was coming from the torches mounted beside them.

Gu Qingyin paused and looked around.

This was a wide-open space. In the center was something resembling an altar, upon which sat a brazier and a bronze cross. As she moved closer, she saw large patches of dark red staining the edges of the bronze altar.

’If I’m not mistaken, this must be what the yurt looked like before it was abandoned—the village’s site for performing sacrifices.’

There was no telling how many people had died on this altar. The Evil Qi was incredibly thick. Gu Qingyin casually slapped an exorcism talisman on it.

But strangely, the moment the exorcism talisman landed on the altar, the talisman suddenly turned transparent and then slowly faded away.

Gu Qingyin raised an eyebrow in understanding. ’It’s because I’m from another time. I can’t affect things here unless I want to stay forever.’

But clearly, she didn’t want that.

Shrugging, Gu Qingyin turned back to the murals. She was only curious about the fate of this village.

The murals were crude, but their meaning was clear. Gu Qingyin began examining them, one by one.

There was no specific timeline. It began with a group of people trekking over mountains and wading through rivers until they found a piece of land. They settled down and became the first inhabitants.

This land was the very island where Gu Qingyin and the others were filming their show.

The villagers had always performed sacrificial rituals. The deity they worshipped was, coincidentally, the Candle Dragon.

The Candle Dragon would occasionally answer their prayers and then sweep away their offerings.

But one day, the Candle Dragon suddenly disappeared. No matter how many offerings the villagers prepared or how sincerely they prayed, the Candle Dragon never appeared again.

The villagers didn’t understand. After a long discussion, they reached a conclusion: perhaps their offerings were wrong.

After that, the villagers began using live humans as sacrifices, praying for the Candle Dragon’s response.

The result was unexpectedly good. The very first time they used a person as an offering, the Candle Dragon appeared.

The Candle Dragon swept away the offering and then granted the villagers’ wish.

From then on, the villagers became even more convinced: Lord Candle Dragon liked to eat people.

Although it was evil, the villagers all felt it was worth it if sacrificing one person could bring a good life to the entire village.

But they never could have imagined that would be the Candle Dragon’s final appearance. Afterward, no matter how many men and women they sacrificed, the Candle Dragon never responded again.

The villagers fell into a panic. They once again reflected on what they had done to anger the Candle Dragon and came to another conclusion: the offerings were too old and didn’t taste good.

Led by the village chief, the villagers broke into a family’s home that very day and took away their child, who was less than a week old.

That child was born with a disability. He couldn’t speak, had an abundance of body hair, and was small and scrawny. At first glance, he looked like a little monkey.

Gu Qingyin stared at the hairy child in the mural for a long time. ’It can’t be such a coincidence, can it?’ she thought. But her intuition told her that it was exactly that coincidental.

This hairy child was a younger Mao Mao.