Chapter 160: A Livestock in the Butchery
Dusk had settled over the Twin Peak Hill, cloaking the Hanz Estate’s landscape in a twilight shroud that seemed to deepen the air’s oppressive weight. The Water Lily Lake, once serene, now lay under a spectral pall, its surface disturbed by a cascade of burning joss paper fluttering down like the ashes of a funeral pyre, swirling in an eerie, windless dance.
Jorge Blue’s face was ashen, his usual composure frayed as the Thirst Bull Captain snapped his folding fan shut with a trembling hand. Nearby, Soren Langley’s limbless form was a grotesque mockery of living being, his face and body fissured with cracks like a shattered porcelain vase.
Bang!
A moment later, a brittle crack echoed through the still air, and Soren’s body exploded into a cloud of blood dust, his essence scattering into nothingness, leaving only the faint tang of scorched earth behind.
"How fares Junior Brother Vincent?" Jorge asked, his voice tight as he turned to his squad companion.
A short distance away, Rodney Luther stood up from his knee, the man’s expression grim as he shook his head. "His soul has unraveled. There’s no saving him."
Beside him, Emma Dawson and Ann Marlph stood in disarray, their robes and dress splattered with blood, Emma’s delicate arm marked by two jagged wounds that wept crimson. Another surviving male cultivator, his clothes stained and tattered, stared blankly, his eyes hollow with shock, as if the just now horror of their ordeal had stripped his spirit bare. All of the Thirst Bull Squad looked miserable.
Jorge opened his mouth to speak, but before he could form the words, a beam of silver moonlight sliced through the suffocating darkness of the clouds, striking the water like a blade. For a handful of heartbeats, the beam stood there, a luminous pillar between heaven and earth, before vanishing as if swallowed whole. But beneath the still waters, something sinister began to awaken.
The water, thick with the stench of blood gore and rotten human flesh, began to move. Not with the ripple of waves, but with something far worse—a slow, deliberate churn, as if unseen hands were dragging the depths upward. Countless severed limbs bobbed like macabre buoys, severed heads rolled with hollow-eyed stares, and the gore-thickened water darkened further, swirling now into a vast, gaping whirlpool.
The blood lake—thick with the stench of blood, gore, and rotting flesh—began to move. But this was no ordinary ripple. The blood surface churned slowly, deliberately, as if something monstrous were clawing its way up from the abyss. Severed limbs floated like grotesque buoys, lifeless hands twitching in the current. Hollow-eyed severed heads rolled in the murk, their slack jaws whispering secrets of the drowned. Then the blood water darkened, twisting into a vast, gaping whirlpool—a hungry maw dragging everything down into the depths.
The wind came—but not from the mountain or from the sky. It rose from the whirlpool itself, a gale of rotting flesh and clotting blood, howling like a thing alive. It lashed at the onlookers, spectral fingers snatching at their robes, dragging them toward the vortex’s gaping maw. And there, in its center, something formed.
A doorway.