"You will live here from now on." Yu Chuan turned around and left without looking back. "Tomorrow morning at 7:30, you and the sacrifice masters will go to the largest clans and families in Luming County together."

"Give me a proper look. I don't want to see any inappropriate attire or behavior."

After the boat left, the servants stared at the rusty cages in a daze. Soon, a man in gray servant clothes walked out tiredly from the boat house, holding a skinny puppy in his arms. He pushed the cage open skillfully and got in. He turned around and poured part of the leftovers from the sacrifice that the adults didn't want into the dog bowl, and ate the other part himself.

The dog crawled out of the cage and eagerly buried its head in the cage to eat the dirty leftovers. After eating, it retracted its head. The man and the dog huddled in the narrow cage, hugged each other, and fell asleep like that.

Cang Tai was almost stunned.

Soon, many servants came out of the boat house, gave the leftovers to their pets and ate the rest themselves, then curled up in the cages in various postures to keep each other warm and fell asleep.

Some of the new servants shook their heads and stepped back in fear, while others seemed to have accepted reality and pushed open the cage door in despair.

The old servants looked at the new servants, and someone asked:

"Are you the new servants this year?"

"What are the personalities of the sacrifices in this batch?"

The other children didn't know how to answer, so Sota answered hesitantly:

"They all have good personalities..."

A servant with his back to everyone sneered, "Whether the sacrifice has a good temper or will torture us servants, how can we tell now? We have to wait for the assessment in half a year."

Sota was stunned by this retort. The other servants whispered to him, "During the assessment in the first half of this year, he was demoted from a sacrifice to a servant because he suffered less than his servants."

"His servant killed his own kitten, and cried for a whole week while holding the body. He was successfully promoted to a sacrifice in the assessment, and he was pushed down."

"But I think he can go back in the second half of the year." The servant glanced at the servant behind him, "Because it is said that he and his servant are good friends. When he was a sacrifice, he never let his servant and his servant's cat live in the same cage, and he ate leftovers and lived and ate with him."

"But his servant seemed to be of a soft temper. The first thing he did when he came up to offer sacrifice was to drive him and his dog into a cage here."

Sota was a little surprised: "Servants can live with sacrifices?"

The servant nodded: "As long as the Lord of Sacrifice is willing, you can live with him, but..."

"There are very few sacrifices that the Lord is willing to make."

Sota was a little confused: "Why?"

Before the servant could even open his mouth, the servant who was curled up in the cage with his back to everyone answered coldly: "The sacrifice went through so much pain to get a boat house, and you just let the servant live in it. This is simply disrespectful to the great pain he has endured."

The attendant beside him added in a low voice: "After this man's attendant came to power, he told him that if he was allowed to live in the same house with him easily, it would be totally unfair to the little cat that died in his hands and made him a sacrifice."

Sou Tai was speechless for a moment. He didn't know what to say.

Seeing that Cang Tai was so frightened that his face turned pale, the servant sighed and kindly comforted him: "Being a servant is not as terrible as you think. We are servants of the lowest level, and there are many servants who are treated better than us."

"Tomorrow you and the sacrifice master will be taken to the big families for them to choose. If you are chosen by the big family masters and given the big family surname, the big family masters will rent a room for you in the houseboat, and you don't have to live in a cage."

Sota was a little confused: "Big family? Why should we be taken to a big family for selection?"

The attendant was slightly surprised: "Don't you know the rules of worshipping the evil god in Luming County?"

"The evil god worship here is held twice a year, divided into the winter festival and the summer festival, held in August and January every year."

"One month after the winter festival, Lord Yufune, the mayor of Luming County, will start buying a new round of sacrifices and training them. Half a year later, around June or July, your sacrifices will be half-mature and can be offered to the evil god at the evil god festival. If your pain meets the standard at this time, the sacrifice will be successful. If it does not meet the standard, the sacrifice will fail."

The servant recalled: "But from the beginning of the evil god festival to now, there are very few sacrifices that can meet the pain standard in half a year. Most of them have to endure another half a year and wait until the winter festival to offer sacrifices again."

"Generally speaking, the probability of a batch of sacrifices being successful during the winter festival is much higher than that during the summer festival. If there are still some sacrifices that have not been successfully offered in this batch, they will enter the summer festival of the next year and continue to be offered."

The attendant shrugged, "But generally speaking, if the sacrifice is not successful in the first year, it will be difficult to succeed in the next sacrifice."

"Of course it won't work again." The attendant with his back to the crowd said hoarsely, "No matter how intense the pain is, if it lasts for a year, people will become numb."

The attendant sighed, "But if this kind of sacrifice that has been suffering for a long time can transcend its numb pain and become more painful, and then successfully sacrifice it in a certain evil god sacrifice, that kind of pain is said to make the evil god very happy, and the quality of the wish will be greatly improved. Therefore, many large families will deliberately accumulate such sacrifices and will not offer them to the altar in the first year."

"Kitahara Kokui of the Kitahara family is such a sacrifice."

"Every year, Luming County will distribute the sacrifices and servants purchased according to everyone's contributions to the county in the previous year. The top eight tax-paying families in the county can first select two sacrifices or servants of their choice."

"The remaining offerings will be randomly distributed to the public at the Ship Palace Night Festival the day before the Evil God Festival as gifts for everyone."

"Usually, the remaining sacrifices are inferior ones with weak wills, and it is not easy to succeed in the sacrifice. Moreover, most of them will commit suicide during the subsequent [Painful Training]. Even if the sacrifice is successful, the wish of that level of pain that can be traded from the evil god is not a high-quality wish, so it is not valued by the big families."

The attendant looked up at Sota and said, "The family that paid the most taxes last year was the Kitahara family. They offered a little boy who was in the painful maturation period of one and a half years at the winter festival last year. I heard that he was Kitahara Kokui's younger brother, so they successfully made a high-quality wish last year."

"We servants don't know exactly what the Kitahara family's wish is, but it's to make the Kitahara family expand rapidly in the past year, surpassing the Yusen family, which was originally the top tax-paying family, and become the current number one family in Luming County."

"If you don't want to live in a cage, think of a way to be chosen by the adults of the Kitahara family tomorrow."

While the two parties were talking, a group of adults in long coats walked in. They were holding a cage covered with black cloth and casually threw it in front of Sota and the others. They said coldly, "Some of your pets died because they couldn't be cured, and some are still alive. Dig them out yourself."

Cang Tai rushed forward and opened the black cages one by one. Finally, he found his dying little black cat in a black cloth cage that was leaning against the corner of the wall.

Not only did the little black cat not receive any treatment, but it became even weaker. It couldn't even move out of Cang Tai's arms. Its butt was covered in blood. It was not known whether it had diarrhea or was bitten by other animals in the cage.

"[Sōta]!" Sōta looked at the blood on the little black cat's buttocks and its rising and falling chest. His face turned pale with fear and tears immediately fell. "How could this happen!"

Other children's pets are not much better than the little black cat. They exhale more than they inhale.

Suddenly, the whole backyard was filled with the sound of children crying.

The servants lying in the cages felt somewhat sorry for the situation. The servant who had been chatting with Sota and the others before poked his head out and told them with mixed feelings: "It's going to rain outside today. You'd better not bring the little one into the cage. He'll freeze to death."

"If you have a good relationship with the sacrifice master, go and ask them to take you in."

A group of children seemed to have found their direction, and their eyes lit up:

"Yes, he and I agreed at the beginning. We would be tied together as a pair. I would be his servant first, and he would treat me well as a sacrifice. If he fell off the sacrifice, I would treat him well as a sacrifice. This way, we would both be treated like sacrifices!"

"Me too! I'm going to find her now!"

The children ran to the front yard with their pets in their arms as if they had found a life-saving straw.

Hearing these words, the servant looked at the servant behind him with a complicated look, as if he wanted to say something but hesitated.

The attendant in the cage behind him, with his back to the crowd, suddenly laughed nervously: "That's what I agreed with him at the beginning."

"I said I couldn't bear it anymore and didn't want to suffer anymore. He said he would suffer for me and be a sacrifice in exchange for his protection. What happened?"

The man hugged a motionless, frozen dog tightly and laughed hoarsely and intermittently: "My dog ​​froze to death outside, and he didn't open the door for me, did he?"

The children who had already run away did not hear this; they excitedly knocked on the doors of the sacrifices.

The offerings opened the door. Most of them were wearing comfortable yukatas and holding a wooden tub that had obviously been used for a hot spring bath. Heat was emanating from their bodies. On the floor inside the door lay an unfinished hot soup pot and fried lobsters, which looked extremely rich.

The pets, dressed in delicate and warm little clothes, lay leisurely on the fluffy white blanket, stretching their waists and sleeping soundly and comfortably.

The servant standing outside the door was extremely filthy, with tattered clothes that gave off a foul stench of rotten food. Because of the light rain, the ends of his hair were dripping with muddy and dirty water like oil. In his arms, he was holding a shivering, dirty little animal tightly, with blood dripping from the little animal's body.

The moment the door opened, the expressions and movements on the faces of both the offerings inside and the servants outside froze for a few seconds.

——After only a few hours of separation, everyone seemed to be from two different worlds.