Chapter 4

Chapter 4

I followed Zuo Hao toward their gathering place. The seven of them had already spent the night there yesterday.

I also gave Zuo Hao a brief rundown of my situation, leaving out the part about being kidnapped. I only told him Dashun and I had gone into the mountains to gather wild goods and had accidentally gotten separated.

I had a feeling the chances of Dashun being at the gathering place weren’t very high.

He was probably like me-someone who had arrived later.

Right now, I hoped even more that he hadn’t been dragged here.

The village Zuo Hao mentioned, the one that practiced that mysterious ritual, might very well have been Red Cloud Village, the place we’d accidentally stumbled into that night.

No wonder such a remote village had been built to look so prosperous.

I didn’t know why they had brought me here, but it couldn’t be for anything good.

The ritual sounded simple, but the more I thought about it, the more malicious it felt.

Seven people, but only four goats. Four days. In the end, who would be willing to give way?

Not to mention, there was one more person now-me.

We soon arrived. In the center of the village stood a large, well-preserved circular wooden house.

Before we even got close, we heard a goat bleating.

“Damn, someone caught one!”

Zuo Hao hurried over to take a look. In front of the wooden house, someone had tied a black goat to a wooden post with a rope.

The goat was extremely agitated, constantly stamping its hooves and lowering its horns again and again, trying to ram the post over.

I looked at it carefully. This wasn’t the one I had run into earlier.

This black goat was much smaller and thinner, with some stray white hairs around its neck.

As soon as Zuo Hao got close, two people came out of the house. “Stay back. Don’t even think about trying anything!”

The two who came out were a pair of brothers, one called Xu Da and the other Xu Er.

Xu Da was burly, with dark skin.

Xu Er, on the other hand, looked somewhat frail and refined, carrying himself with a bit of a scholarly air.

When the two of them saw someone following behind Zuo Hao, they were both surprised. But after seeing my face, they didn’t seem to dare say much.

It looked like the goat in front of the house had been caught by these two brothers.

I made a round inside the house. It was empty everywhere, and I didn’t see any trace that Dashun had left behind.

Before long, two more people returned one after another.

One was a young girl wearing sunglasses, her hair braided into many thin plaits. Judging by her appearance, she seemed to be from an ethnic minority.

Behind her came another man, around thirty years old. He was handsome, well-dressed, and very polite in the way he spoke.

Zuo Hao introduced him to me. The man was Yi Jingchen, a university lecturer. The girl was Ba Wuyue, from the south.

Yi Jingchen took the initiative to shake my hand. He seemed surprised by my sudden appearance, but he didn’t ask too many questions.

Ba Wuyue, meanwhile, kept sitting in the corner without saying a word.

But somehow, I kept feeling that behind those sunglasses, she had been watching me the entire time.