The man floated out of the door like a wandering soul, without even turning on the lights, and plunged headfirst into the boundless darkness, not knowing where to go step by step.

Ning Que looked at the other groups of men heading home, the lights they were holding growing brighter and brighter, almost blinding. So, he quickly leaped from tree to tree and caught up with the man.

He kept wandering in the inky black mass. Ning Que estimated the time and it should have been nearly an hour. When he saw that he was alone around, he said, "Is there a way I can help you?"

"Who!" He looked around suddenly. If he was given a little initial velocity, he would probably become a gyroscope.

"Ning Que, what are you doing!"

"I didn't think of anything!"

"Don't mess around."

"Xiao Pingping, believe me, how could I possibly do anything wrong?"

Ning Que jumped down from the tree and said firmly, "I can help you! Your daughter will be fine."

The man rushed forward like a burning bucket. "It's all because of you that my daughter got picked. If you had just obeyed and let it be written on, nothing would have happened. It's all because of you. I hate you."

Ning Que slapped him hard, threw him to the ground, looked him in the eye, and said to him word by word, "What you said is really ridiculous. You spent a lot of manpower and resources to catch a beast, and you blame its teeth for being too sharp and its body for being too strong. Isn't this nonsense?

All this is because you are too weak."

These words pierced his heart like a knife, and as they flowed down, Ning Que let him go. He immediately curled up, hugged his head, and began to cry loudly.

The sobbing cries floated upwards like a wisp of smoke, entangled in the night and condensed into balls of malice and cowardice.

"Okay, let's talk!" Ning Que took out a bottle of wine and put it in his hand, then took out a small folding table.

The man wiped his tears and stood up cautiously, "Okay!"

"What's your name?"

"Director Wu!"

Ning Que opened a bag of peanuts and poured them onto a plate. "I won't waste any more time talking nonsense. Tell me what this human sacrifice is all about."

"This story begins 20 years ago, when I was fifteen and a half. It was a famine. I was so hungry that I even dug up dirt to eat." Director Wu picked up the can of beer hesitantly, took a sip, and sighed deeply.

Ning Que seemed to have noticed a key point, famine!

"Back then..."

Elsewhere, after Yanan successfully hypnotized Old Man Wu to a secluded place, he also asked the same question, "What exactly is going on with the bride and the sacrifice?"

There was no light in my grandfather's cloudy eyes, but his mouth opened mechanically and he began to tell this story, "Back then..."

The time points on both sides began to overlap.

"There's a family in the west of our village who just got married less than a month ago. Unfortunately, because they were having a wedding, they had no more food in the cellar. So the family went to the neighbors to borrow food, but no one was willing to lend them anything.

Later, the man's grandmother was the first to collapse and died. They had no money, and it was impossible to hire a funeral procession, so they planned to carry her out and bury her themselves in the middle of the night.

The world was empty, and hungry ghosts lingered in it, their voices clamoring in the air, "I'm so hungry, so hungry!" The man carried his grandmother up the mountain, step by step, stopping every few steps to rest. As they walked along the mountain path, his stomach, full of water, rumbled and sloshed.

His entire face was deeply sunken and his lips were pale, and he looked not much different from the grandmother on his back.

"Li Zi, don't hold on. Sit down and relax. There's still half a multi-grain cake in your pocket. Eat it first!" the mother who came with her advised.

The man patted the cake in his pocket, reluctant to eat it, "Mom, it would be great if there was something to eat! I can exchange it for anything!"

The woman, whose temples were already gray, immediately kicked the ground and said, "Pah! If I had to trade your heart, liver, and lungs, would you be willing to do that? You're already dead, and you're still thinking about eating it. Remember this: good things don't work, but bad things do, especially in the mountains. Watch your mouth."

The man lay down on the spot, with Grandma's body lying next to him, breath drifting from his shrunken stomach. "Oh, I suddenly remembered the story you told me when I was a child. There was a jar in the village. If you put some plants, stones, or something like that in the jar, rice and flour would appear on your birthday or when you opened it again. If you were lucky and put a mouse in the jar, food for the emperor would appear. Oh, if only there was a real jar like that."

The woman took a bite of the bread in her arms and chewed it carefully. "Whatever you throw at me, all the grass roots and tree bark here will be stripped away except for the soil and rocks. Besides, you may not find it. My grandmother said that this jar is in the mouth of a monster."

The man's veiny and dry hands were stuck in the ground. He gathered a handful of sand and gravel and put it in his pocket. He muttered like a drunk, "What if, what if, what if..."

"Let's go quickly! If you don't bury her properly, your grandma might be stolen and eaten by some people." The woman stood up, propping herself up and began to urge.

The man got up trembling, and carried his grandmother on his back with great effort. He walked aimlessly, not knowing where to go, hoping to find a remote place to settle his grandmother.

He originally wanted to just wrap it up in a tattered straw mat and throw it into the wasteland, but there is a saying here that if the body of an elder is eaten, the family's wealth and good luck will disappear, and no one will die a good death within three generations.

The man calculated that he was within those three generations, and when he heard about being resettled, his heart started beating inexplicably fast, so he had no choice but to go for the resettlement.

The wind of hunger swept across the earth, leaving nothing behind. The moon was also filled with death. The branches with no leaves plucked out were swaying in the wind like hungry people eating each other, and the staggering backs walked step by step without knowing where to go.

Their eyes seemed to be covered with a layer of shadow, and they walked mechanically until they reached a cave entrance. They seemed to smell the aroma of food inside. There were lights on inside, and human figures were intertwined on the ground and the stone walls.

Their bodies were filled with energy, their bones crackling against each other, but their hopes were dashed. There was only a large vat inside, and other than that, there was only flying dust and the sound of hungry wind.

Are the aroma of the food and the light and shadow just their illusions?

The hunger in the man's stomach surged up in waves, as if patting his body to tell him that it was time to eat, but reality had to tighten his stomach.

The woman walked forward and looked into the jar. It was very clean inside. In the faint moonlight, the glaze looked like it was filled with a thin layer of oil, and the golden moonlight was broken into pieces and scattered inside.

The man saw his mother standing there in a daze, so he threw his grandmother onto the ground and walked over to her. "Mom, what are you doing? Hurry up and leave!"

Seeing that there was only a shallow layer of water inside, he became impatient and kicked the vat hard, "Fuck you, there's nothing but water." Then he pulled his mother away. Probably still not satisfied, he threw the sand and stones in his pocket out. Some of the stones hit the outside and fell to the ground.

The man softened after this. He took out the cake from his pocket and took a bite. "Let's go!"

The woman suddenly thought of something. "This, a gilded pattern. Wait!" She struggled to look up, her face full of ecstasy. "Li Zi, look, there's something inside!"

The men went over impatiently, but seeing that the water was gone and only a handful of rice grains remained, they turned their attention to the corpse that looked like a dead tree stump.

That night, a rare wisp of smoke wafted out of the chimney that had been dormant for hundreds of years. For the next period of time, three meals a day were served, and there was no shortage of food. One day, there was a pause, but their daughter-in-law was said to have fallen from the mountain while looking for food and died.

When Ning Que and Yanan heard this, they didn't show any expression, but instead looked as if they knew it.

"And then?" Ning Que patted his shoulder. "Go home. One night is better than another. But first of all, don't even think about replacing your daughter with me. Otherwise, she might be gone in no time."

Director Wu got up drunk, reeking of alcohol, his eyes red. "Well, well, you haven't told me yet. How can I save my daughter?"

"Let's go back. I can guarantee your daughter's survival!" Ning Que carried him on his shoulders. "Show me the way!"

So, under a bunch of blind instructions, Ning Que gently pushed open the wooden door. With a loud clang, the door fell. At this moment, Director Wu, who was on his shoulder, woke up instantly, his face flushed, and he struggled to get down.

This startled everyone in the room. A middle-aged woman, much older than her actual age, stood there nervously, her face filled with fear. "You, you, who are you? Put him down!"

Ning Que looked around the small room and saw a bed inside from the corner of the curtain. Ignoring the woman's exclamation, he carried him to the bed and said, "You guys go to sleep. Lend me the living room. No, lend me the room."

Then he took out the tenting equipment from the space, ignored the woman's gaze, and directly set up a tent at the entrance. He smiled and said to her, "I'm going to sleep."

The blue tent was surrounded by red silk. The woman stood there staring at the entrance of the small tent for a long time. When the weather outside turned slightly white, she lowered the curtain.

Ning Que opened his eyes and looked in that direction, patted the somewhat anxious Honghong, and fell asleep again.

After unzipping the door, the wooden door opened wide. A few malnourished trees grew sparsely on the barren land. Ning Que stretched and found a girl in her early teens sitting on a chair. She had two ponytails and a small red flower on her right side. She was holding a bitten egg in her hand. It was obvious that this girl was raised as a treasure.

The girl saw that she was a little flustered, but she was still very calm. She pursed her bloodless lips and said, "Sister, are you here to persuade me to be a sacrifice?"

"No, I want to go home." Ning Que pretended to take out canned food from the tent and put it on the table, giving one to the little girl. He then opened a can of beef and started eating it with bread.

The girl looked at the can and swallowed carefully, "Sister, is this can for me?"

"Yes, take it and eat it! You are growing now."

The girl nodded without saying anything and put the can in the cupboard. "Sister, my name is Wu Yue'er. What's your name?"

"Nice name. My name is Wu Lan, and we're from the same family." Ning Que ate the last piece of beef in the jar between his bread and chatted with him about some unrelated topics before asking directly, "Yue'er, do you know what sacrifice is? Why were you sacrificed?"

Two thin braids swayed behind her. She held a candy Ning Que had just given her in her mouth and spoke a little unclearly, "I don't know. Every time the pigs, cattle and sheep in the village died inexplicably, Chang Chang would come out of the cave and chat with the village chief for a while. After that, he would put some food in the cave. My father said that everything would be fine after that."

"And then?"

"If the things thrown in are useless, people will be thrown in, and the ones who are thrown in are children. I don't know what else will happen."

Ning Que looked at the time and saw it was already around ten o'clock. "Yue'er, go call your parents over. Stop hiding and come out for lunch!"

It is impossible for a parent to feel completely at ease letting their child stay with a complete stranger, especially for a short period of time, which means that the child's family must be nearby.

The girl arched her body, stared at the ground, and spoke in a voice so soft that it sounded like a mosquito flying around her ear.

Ning Que picked up the girl and placed her on the ground farther away. "Be careful."

His eyes flashed red for a moment, and he immediately picked up a stool and kicked it in that direction, punching a large hole through the wall and sending the stool splintering onto the ground. A group of villagers stood stunned behind him, stunned. Could it be that Ning Que could see the heat exhaling from their lungs? He really didn't know it was because they were just wooden men.

Ning Que picked up another bench and pretended to smash it over. The villagers immediately scattered like birds and beasts, leaving only three or two people standing behind Chang Chang. He was still wearing his white feather mask, but had changed into a solid linen shirt.

Ning Que bent down and smiled at Wu Yue'er standing beside him, saying, "Look, you can just run away now. If you don't want to be a sacrifice, you have to become stronger. Look at this group of people. As long as you are stronger than them, it will definitely not be your turn to be a sacrifice."

She took out a piece of plum candy and a fruit knife from her pocket and handed them to Wu Yue'er, looking into the distance, "Sister, I'm leaving soon, so take care of yourself."

As soon as she finished speaking, red ropes filled the air around her. She lightly tapped her feet and leaped into the air. She tapped her foot on the collapsed wall again, and the red ropes wrapped around her body, and she was easily carried away.

The sky was azure blue, with white clouds painted across it like cream. A figure was dancing up and down. Ning Que seemed to have lost track of the way. She stood on a thick branch, "Chang Chang, how do I get this way? Um, how can I get back?"

All I heard was a sound like a machine jamming, and a very familiar voice came out from inside his mask, "You can't go back to your playground, stay with me! Hehehe~"

The author has something to say: Thank you to the little angels who voted for me or irrigated nutrient solution during 2021-01-03 16:51:46~2021-01-07 21:01:08~

Thanks to the little angel who irrigated the nutrient solution: The clown is so sad. 1 bottle;

Thank you very much for your support. I will continue to work hard!