The party of three walked through the wide tunnel of limestone, on all occasion Yamato and Baili Haoyue always sandwiched Qing Youya in the middle to provide him best protection.
However from midway in the tunnel, an odor of a burnt putrescent flesh gradually assaulted their nose. Yamato quickly brought everyone to a stop and asked Baili Haoyue for his half damp robe. He immediately ripped his robe right after receiving it, then tied the thrice folded cloth onto the lower half of Qing Youya's face to provide him an emergency mask.
"I'm sorry for the filthy inconvenience your highness, but please bear with it for a while," then Yamato tied a cloth to himself as well, followed by Baili Haoyue.
They continued to walk, and when they almost reached the end of the tunnel, this time Baili Haoyue was the one to bring them to stop. The man walked ahead to inspect if there was anything dangerous and came back, thus he reported, "There was no living things ahead."
Yamato frowned, "Means it's all dead?" because such strong putrid smell was impossible to produce without a fair amount of organic substance.
Baili Haoyue nodded with a rare solemn mien.
Capturing the rough outline of the situation ahead, they exited the tunnel, and was greeted by a horribly nightmarish, gruesome, and macabre scene.
The place clearly looked like it was on fire just recently. There were several piles of barely recognized rotten and burnt human skeleton littered all over the place. In the middle of the cave was three conspicuous seven feet tall stone cross stood erect, and in front of the cross was an empty small cage with iron bars. And on one side of the cave wall was again a barely visible knee high passage opened. The black skeletons, the ashes filled ground, the stained dark stalactites and stalagmites, the peculiarly striking cross, the empty iron cage, accompanied with an unaffectedly twinkling ceiling of beautiful gems, it was a bizarre scene no one there ever imagined. Though the lethiferous booby traps in the cave was clearly manmade, the morbid scenery in front of them was still extraordinarily incongruous.
Coming from a peaceful modern world, Yamato have never seen anything like this. He have seen gory movies, animes, and comics, however it couldn't hold a candle with the real thing. Because not only the sight, but the whole atmosphere, the aura, the silence, the smell, everything was extremely dreadful, sinister, and heavy. Yamato did not vomit nor faint, but from the moment he set his eyes upon the place, chills immediately ran down his spine while his heartbeat was thumping very loud. His entire body was chilled with a pale face that has made no movement ever since.
On the other hand, Baili Haoyue and Qing Youya only furrowed their brows in displease, but was not shaken even the slightest. Because Baili Haoyue have been in a battleground where thousands of corpses emerge, and Qing Youya have been in situations way worse than that.
Qing Youya was displeased because he didn't see such occurrence in his past life. He was considering whether it was a new incident on a parallel world, or was it just an incident that happened in the past that he didn't encounter. If it was past incident, then now he might be able to found out about what had happened to the artifact before it fell to his hands in the past.
The boy strode towards the pile of corpses and was hurriedly grabbed by Yamato.
Qing Youya gently fend the hand away from his shoulder, "It's alright sister-in-law," he unsheathed a small intricate knife from inside the robe's pocket on his chest, it was a pair with the knife Qing Lian has. Using the knife, he then carefully poked, sliced, gouged, and moved something that seemed to be a ribcage from the pile. On the ribcage sticks an unevenly distributed burnt meat which were crowded by maggot, and inside it was an intact charcoal like internal organs.
"Oh!" the boy lowly exclaimed.
"Is there something your highness?" Baili Haoyue readily responded.
"General, seems like these people are not simply killed and left to naturally decay. They must have received lingchi* alive until their deaths," the shape of the burnt meat that sticks to the bones was ragged and unnatural, and Qing Youya could see how it looked like it was randomly sliced. However there were no knife wound on the organs, meant that they were continuously tortured but not killed.
*(wiki: Lingchi (Chinese: 凌遲), death by a thousand cuts, was a form of torture and execution used in China from roughly 900 until it was banned in 1905. In this form of execution, a knife was used to methodically remove portions of the body over an extended period of time, eventually resulting in death.)
"Huh?" Yamato who was silently making an effort to calm his heart down, was now chilled again. "What the hell.. Is this place..." though extremely shaken as he quickly grasped the sensation of reality, Yamato still tried to steady his voice.
In contrast with times when he looked easygoing and cordial, currently Baili Haoyue looked very solemn and cold, "Are they perhaps.. The kidnapped woman of Zhuxin?"
Qing Youya realized how Yamato was tense in a cold sweat, however he didn't pay him any mind as he shook his head to answer. The boy then continued walking towards the three conspicuous stone cross as he scanned every piles of corpse in his surrounding.
In front of the cross was an empty small cage, and in between them lay three skeleton corpses facing down on the ground. The difference of the three from the other skeletons, was the fact that it still has a considerable amount of meat.
Qing Youya nodded, "I see.. These cross are used to tie people to be tortured with lingchi, and these three are in the middle of being tortured when the fire happened. They fell because the rope tying them burnt," he calmly made a deduction with a steady calm voice and a flat expression under the mask.
While frowning at those three, Yamato was finally able to regain both his composure and his steady heartbeat. The body heat that left him gradually came back as he felt empathetic towards how horrible those corpses died.
"But then, how or who started the fire?" Baili Haoyue looked towards Qing Youya, subconsciously depending on the clever boy for deductions.
However it was Yamato who answered, once his heart calmed down, his brain was back to work, "The possibility of the perpetrator burning this place on their own is small considering the crude method. Perhaps it's someone who was caught but not yet tortured.. But this place has no cell to trap anyone, or were they just being tied down?"
"Hmm.. Then, if they were really tied down, it wouldn't be impossible to undo a rope, so maybe they ran away to where the fiend came from? They should remember which switch to push. But.. could they even get outside? Considering how complicated this cave is.. The perpetrator might not even bother to tie them down at all, knowing how they couldn't get out even if they run around?" Baili Haoyue pondered with a fist on his chin.
"That may not be necessarily true.." Qing Youya added.
Baili Haoyue, "What do your highness mean?"
Qing Youya squatted beside the small cage, "Just like you said, there are no cells, and if the victims are only tied, they might run away, and even if they run around, not only that they might not reach outside, they might not even make it out alive considering how many booby traps hidden in this place. But that is the point. The perpetrator is a methodical person who is obsessed on killing slowly with a laborious lingchi, what good would it do to them if the victims died before they even lay their hands on it? That's why i think they might not have a stored stock of living victim. But... there is a cell here."
Yamato narrowed his eyes, "Cell?" he of course realized what Qing Youya was implying, however he still needed to make sure, "That small cage is?"
With a covered smile, Qing Youya peered inside the cage, "This fits a crouching small child," he uttered with a perfectly calm composure.
"Small child?! But.. This cage, it's perfectly in front of the crosses!" Baili Haoyue felt his stomach burn with anger, he have been avoiding the thought of a human being shoved into that small animal sized cage but logic forced him to face it.
Still with his calm composure, Qing Youya stood, "You see.. all those corpses, they are not the kidnapped woman because based on their frame, they also consists of men and children.. And from my rough estimation, their time of death all differs per three person based on the corrosion level of their organs.. The people that have been died longer has smaller remains of their organs, though i can't estimate the time because it's all burnt. But there is always one person with different time of death.. and it's always a child's body.
"So, maybe the children are designated to see the people in front of them suffer, before getting killed themselves later."
Though the face was red heated from boiling blood, the expression on Baili Haoyue's face was flat and cold.
On the other hand, Yamato's brows droop and his eyes glistened, he gritted his teeth as his empathetic self was overwhelmed by a stuffy feeling that reached the edge of his throat.
"Such a despicable, repulsive, distasteful son of a bitch!!!" Baili Haoyue growled through his gritted teeth, his clenching fist appeared as though it was ready to hit anything anytime.
Yamato was empathetic, but he was not one to lose composure over something sad or tragic. Because only getting angry or sad won't do the victims any justice, he wanted to find out the truth, so he continued to ponder, "Was it just a form of maniacal torture? Or was there a motive behind the act? Was there anything that required such ritual?"
Qing Youya actually more or less figured out about what had happened there, he also didn't mind telling the other two about it, however he didn't want to appear suspicious for knowing too much. In the end, he resorted to his previous leading methods of rhetorical questions, "In the first place, what good comes from burning this place? Which person would burn a closed space with themselves inside? If there was anything the captive would want to do, shouldn't it be to silently escape? Burning the place down not only didn't guarantee the perpetrator to let them out, it even thinned out their chance of survival with asphyxia and burn.."
"But maybe they only want to die the faster death or was desperate enough to create any kind of chance even if it was harmful for themselves," Baili Haoyue gave out a sound psychological reasoning, most cornered or despaired people will turn suicidal.
"... That might be the case, but the variable to take into consideration isn't that few here," Qing Youya continued to lead.
Yamato, "Yeah, for example... how did they set the fire in the first place? All of them are basically in a condition where they cannot move. What material did they use? Was it from the belonging of the perpetrator? Because it makes no sense for them to set fire when the perpetrator is not here for many reason.. Or was it an accident from a fire shooting booby trap? And, where have the child inside the cage gone?"
For he was wearing a mask, Qing Youya didn't bother to fake any smile, however he tilted his head to express his fake surprise, "Oh! Sister-in-law! aren't we forgetting something important?"
Yamato raised his right brow, "Something important?"
Qing Youya, "Yes! The biggest variable, didn't Xie Hei said he was a guardian wolf? Then he must be guarding something right? Even this cave looked like it was designed to guard something right? There must be some kind of treasure hidden here!"
Baili Haoyue was suddenly mind-boggled as realization left him felt unbelievable, he looked as though a girl he didn't know had suddenly slapped him, "...An artifact?"
Yamato furrowed his brows, coming from a modern world where artifact was just an item of cultural or historical interest, he felt that Baili Haoyue's reaction was somewhat strange. However he also felt something tugging on his mind, "Artifact?," he bowed his head as his right hand supported his neck, it was a pose he often does subconsciously when he was in deep thought. He mumbled, "Artifact.. Artifact..
"Oh, the passage of Xuyin..
'The anguish reaching the heavens,
The screams reached the demons,'
Does this mean a super painful suffering?
"'Our soul tattered,
Our hands dismembered,'
Tattered soul must come from a tattered body,
"'The demons answered,
Such blessings, such mercy,
Comes with a blinding sun,
And the light becoming our claws,'
Is something going to save them? Is this 'light' an object? A person?
"'For our anguish will never fade,
For our anguish will become fangs,'
Does this means their suffering emotions are getting converted into power?
"'This crimson vision will consume,
Towards countless sufferings,
Until the end of our time,'
This crimson vision, is it something that absorbs and converts sufferings into some kind of power?
"'My brethren,
The star of solitude will lead your steps,
If you desire our light'
"Does this means following the star of solitude in this cave will bring us to the destination of the 'light'? Or will the person who was born under the star of solitude leads us towards the 'light'?
Light, light.. This must be the person.. And the object must be the crimson vision.. Vision, vision, prophecy, ability to see, sight, eyes.. Eyes!
Yamato finally raised his head with a widened eyes like a lunatic, "The artifact is an eye that consumes the sufferings it saw to turn it into some kind of magical power. It needs the light, it needs a person to see and feel the sufferings with the crimson vision.. That must be the childs in the cage! That's why they are forced to see such long tortures in front of their eyes, to charge the power of the crimson vision! The last child must've been miraculously compatible with the crimson vision that it accidentally set some kind of magical fire with the power... It must've ran away.. That knee high passage! It must've gone inside that! And the direction of that is.. Determining from the star direction here, is east! Drawing a straight line to east from here.. Eyes.. Small child... Ah..
"Xiao Yun!"