Chapter 15

Chapter 15

“What are you doing? Have you all lost your minds?”

Zuo Hao’s voice rang out just then. He was still struggling to hold Ba Wuyue back.

Ba Wuyue, however, was still trying to charge forward like a madwoman and kill Ren Meng.

Ren Meng seemed to have completed the ritual, but his mind was completely gone. He kept muttering to himself as he spun in circles where he stood.

By then, the sky had turned unnaturally gloomy. The sun had vanished completely, and darkness had swallowed everything around us.

For one instant, Zuo Hao lost his grip, and Ba Wuyue rushed straight toward Ren Meng.

I had no time to stop her. All I could do was shout at the top of my lungs, “Is he really your friend? Ba Wuyue, look at him! Look with your own eyes!”

Ba Wuyue had already raised her knife and charged right up to Ren Meng. Hearing my voice, she stopped in her tracks.

A muffled clap of thunder rolled through the sky. I rushed to Ba Wuyue’s side as fast as I could.

Ba Wuyue stared blankly at Ren Meng. White light flowed through those strange eyes of hers. “No. You’re not her…”

I hurriedly snatched the knife from her hand and pulled her behind me.

What the hell was going on?

Zuo Hao looked utterly lost. Only then did Yi Jingchen stagger to his feet from the ground.

“It’s the blood from those goats! Ever since we entered this village-no, ever since we got close to this place-the smell of that blood has been affecting us.”

Yi Jingchen was right. The moment we truly abandoned reason was after Xu Da finished the ritual and came back covered in goat blood.

That heavy stench of blood hadn’t just brought on all kinds of hallucinations. It had even robbed us of the logic we needed to think.

In the end, all of us had been driven toward slaughtering one another.

I looked around at the bizarre altar on the hillside. In truth, it was extremely crude. There were only a few round wooden posts used to hold the goat heads.

A stone goat statue stood at the edge of the slope.

The only thing that truly drew attention was the sticky, soft mud beneath our feet. Who knew how much goat blood and human blood had soaked into it over the years?

That pungent reek made the surrounding air feel thick, stagnant, and wrong.

“But why? Why would that village do something like this?” Zuo Hao asked, voicing the very question in my mind.

Just then, two beams of light suddenly tore through the darkness, shining down at an angle from above our heads.

I looked up. Above this hillside was a cliff, a place that should offer a commanding view over the entire village.

And suddenly, I understood why.

Because I knew those two beams of light all too well. They weren’t from some strange source.

They were headlights.

A car was parked on that cliff.

Everything we had done these past few days had been watched all along.

I was afraid the people inside that car were the real “customers” of Red Cloud Village.

And people like Zuo Hao, the ones who entered the village to perform the ritual, were the true Scapegoat.