Lu Yuan walked a few steps inside, his gaze falling on the floor toward the back of the common room.
A person was lying there.
It was a man, likely middle-aged, wearing the apron of an inn attendant.
He had fallen face down, his hands braced on either side of his chest, his fingers dug deep into the cracks of the floorboards. His fingernails were caked with blood and filth. Lu Yuan circled to the front and crouched down to see his face.
His mouth was wide open, and his eyes were bulging and round, the pupils already clouded. Yet the look of extreme terror remained frozen on his features, twisting his entire face into a distorted shape. Whatever he had seen in the final moment of his life had terrified him to this extent.
The moment Lu Yuan drew closer, the grey-white text in the corner of his vision finally surfaced.
【Weak pollution source detected...】
He paused for a moment.
The man was dead and his body was cold, yet he carried a faint trace of pollution.
Clearly, an eerie entity carrying pollution had broken in here and caused the massacre before him.
Lu Yuan made a note of this but didn't rush to investigate further. More pressing matters took priority—he needed to sweep the entire inn first to ensure nothing living was hidden inside.
He stood up, signaled to the three Nightwatchers behind him, and walked deeper into the common room.
Passing through the hallway behind the bar, he found the kitchen. An iron pot sat on the stove, the soup inside long since dried into a crust. A kitchen knife was embedded in the cutting board, beside which lay several half-chopped radishes.
Two corpses lay on the kitchen floor. One had collapsed at the foot of the stove, and the other was slumped in the corner. Like the man in the common room, their faces were hideous, mouths agape, eyes wide, and no visible wounds could be seen on their bodies.
Further in, there was another body in the corridor leading to the small living room.
This one was different.
A grey-brown tentacle extended from the wall on the left side of the corridor, piercing the victim's shoulder and pinning them firmly to the wall.
The tentacle had already withered, its skin shriveled and hardened, embedded immovably in the cracks of the wall. A large spray of blood at the point of entry had stained half the wall a deep brown. Now that it was dry, it had formed a crust that flaked off at the slightest touch.
The victim's feet hung a palm's width above the floor, their head tilted, the expression on their face no different from the others.
Lu Yuan stopped in front of the tentacle and observed it for a few seconds.
The tentacle had completely lost its original aura; there wasn't a trace of a living thing on its surface.
He continued inward.
The small living room held even more corpses.
Five or six people were sprawled in this room in various positions. Some were curled in corners, others were draped over the threshold, facing outward—their final act before death had been an attempt to flee.
Two of them had been pinned to opposite walls by similar tentacles. The dried tentacles had pierced through their abdomens, one on the left and one on the right, with overlapping bloodstains crisscrossing the ceiling.
Yet, most of the people still showed no visible wounds.
They simply lay there with hideous expressions, their skin intact and clothes tidy. It was as if they had been crushed from the inside by something, or perhaps something had been forcibly drained from them.
Lu Yuan walked among the corpses, and a picture of what had happened here began to form.
Being able to pierce through people so easily suggested that the eerie entity that attacked this place was strong. At the very least, most people showed no signs of resistance; it had been a one-sided slaughter.
At the same time, its size likely wasn't too large, as the building showed no significant structural damage.
What Lu Yuan found truly troublesome were the corpses that had died without wounds. They made up the majority, and their manner of death was uniform—all possessed faces of extreme terror. The entity had killed most of them without using physical means, relying on something else entirely.
Clearly, the level of the perpetrator was not low.
He filed this judgment away and swept his gaze to a corner of the small living room.
Several people were sitting side by side against the base of the wall. They wore grey robes with light-colored veils over their heads.
They were Church nuns.
Three of them sat close together, their backs against the wall, heads bowed, chins pressed against their chests.
Their hands had slipped from their knees. A prayer book had fallen by the feet of the person on the far left, its spine upward, the open pages curling slightly in the wind.
Lu Yuan walked over and crouched down to look at their faces.
They were completely different from the hideous faces filling the rest of the house.
There was no fear on the faces of these three nuns, no struggle. Their features were relaxed, their expressions peaceful, lips slightly closed, and not a trace of a frown on their brows.
They had died quietly, as if they had fallen asleep while sitting here and simply never woke up.
A chill ran down Lu Yuan's spine.
One had to know that a nun's means of resisting the eerie were far greater than those of an ordinary transcendent. This effect was especially strong when there were more Church members present. Judging by their expressions, they had clearly met their ends without much of a struggle.
He stared at the prayer book on the floor for two seconds. His mind flashed back to the Church checkpoint he had seen when leaving the city, and the words of the guard as they left: “The Angel has issued a warning; the road ahead is not peaceful.”
The Church had cast net after net along this road. Was the presence of these nuns in this inn a coincidence, or had they been waiting for something all along?
Lu Yuan had no answer.
The upper floor had not yet been cleared.
He led his men up the stairs.
There were bloody handprints on the wooden stairs leading to the second floor, smeared all the way from the bottom until they stopped halfway up. Another corpse lay at the landing, curled up with hands over its head, facing the wall.
He pushed open the second-floor guest rooms one by one.
Some rooms were empty, the bedding neat and unused. Others contained corpses in various positions—some hiding under beds, some huddled in wardrobes, and some dead behind doors while clutching the bolts.
They had all died the same way: hideous expressions, no physical wounds.
After searching the entire inn—from the inner courtyard to the stables, from the common room to the top floor—the seven or eight Nightwatcher brothers had stepped into every single room.
It was confirmed that there were no living things.
Not even a mouse.
When the Nightwatcher brothers gathered back in the common room, their faces were grim.
One of the older brothers stood beside the corpse pinned to the corridor wall by the tentacle. His Adam's apple bobbed as he struggled to find his voice for a long time.
“Captain,” he whispered. “Everyone in this inn—there must be twenty or thirty of them—is dead.”
Lu Yuan nodded, not rushing to respond.
He scanned the surroundings, his gaze lingering on the corpses.
They had searched what needed to be searched and confirmed what needed to be confirmed. There was nothing living in the entire inn. From beginning to end, the grey-white text had only displayed a single warning of danger.
Clearly, the powerful eerie entity that had done this was long gone, leaving behind only an inn full of dead people and a layer of weak pollution on the corpses.
Lu Yuan was internally unwilling to linger here, but he had no choice.
The horses needed rest, and the residents on the carriages needed a brief moment to regroup.
Fortunately, the sun in the sky could dispel most eerie entities, and the grey-white text provided no further warnings, so they could only stay here for a short time.
What came next was the duty of the Nightwatchers.
Lu Yuan pulled a palm-sized leather-bound notebook and a piece of charcoal from his waist pouch, flipped to a blank page, and spoke to the brothers beside him.
“Don't worry about clearing the bodies yet. Determine the cause of death and record it.”
His voice wasn't loud, but in this unnervingly quiet inn, every word was heard clearly.
When Nightwatchers encountered a case of death by unknown causes on the road, they couldn't just take a look and leave.
Investigating the cause of death and recording it was a rule written into their handbook.
This allowed them to confirm the presence of nearby eerie entities and pollution. These records, when sent back to the branch, might become the key to another brother's survival.
The Nightwatchers took their orders and dispersed to take count. Lu Yuan turned back to handle another matter.
The grey-white text had reported a 【Weak pollution source】 when he first entered. He had set it aside while they cleared the inn, but now it was time to sort it out.
He closed his eyes and focused his attention on Environmental Perception, going over everything meticulously.
However, there was no lingering aura of the eerie.
Something capable of slaughtering an entire inn wouldn't be low-level.
If an eerie entity of that level were still nearby or had just left, it would always leave behind a distinct aura.
The places where those ghouls had stayed under the pipe network still smelled of rot days later. Yet this inn was clean; aside from the faint traces on the corpses, he could perceive nothing.
After confirming it was temporarily safe, Lu Yuan crouched back down beside the first corpse found in the common room and began a detailed examination of each body.
Every time he approached a corpse, the grey-white text would flash: 【Weak pollution source】.
He went through them one by one, confirming that every single corpse was polluted.
Even the three nuns were the same, carrying that same layer of corruption.
By the time Lu Yuan reached the twelfth or thirteenth body, he pulled the Holy Light Stone from his utility pouch.
He didn't press the stone against the corpse.
Instead, he gripped the stone in his right hand and held his arm out far to his side, keeping the stone an arm's length from his own body.
The surface of the stone emitted a faint glow. The light pink shimmer in his palm was the base color brought out by the trace of corruption on his own leg; as always, it remained just a tiny speck.
Then, he slowly turned his arm toward the corpse, bringing the stone closer.
The light pink on the stone's surface deepened by a shade.
It wasn't a drastic change, just slightly heavier than the base color from before, shifting from a light pink toward a pale red.
Lu Yuan pulled his hand back and tucked the Holy Light Stone back into his pouch.
This served as confirmation: the corpses indeed carried a weak pollution. The grey-white text hadn't lied to him, and neither had the Holy Light Stone.
Whether this corruption, currently lying dormant on the dead, would change was something he couldn't say for sure.
When in doubt, he would treat it as the worst-case scenario.
He stood up and walked among the Nightwatcher brothers.
“Finished checking?”
“Done.” Old Muller handed over a stack of rough notes, the handwriting crooked and messy. “Twenty-seven bodies. One in the common room, two in the kitchen, one pinned to the wall in the corridor, six in the small living room, and the rest in the second-floor guest rooms. Plus the three nuns.”
He paused. “But we didn't find any pollution on them. Initial suspicion is Sanity trauma, leading to immediate death.”
“For now, we need to conduct a more detailed investigation of the corpses to gain more information.”
Lu Yuan took the notes and scanned them; they matched what he had seen.
He added several key points of suspicion to his own notebook. Unknown cause of death, mostly woundless, tentacles, abnormal state of the nuns' deaths, and all corpses carrying weak pollution sources. He listed them clearly; though the words were few, they were enough for someone else to understand later.
As for performing autopsies, Lu Yuan didn't intend to have the brothers do it. Their current mission was to escort the residents of Bronze City, and he didn't want to invite further complications.
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