Chapter 98 – Sacrifice and Contamination

“My wolves are me.”

Yu Sheng felt that when Little Red Riding Hood said those words, a trace of something complex was hidden in her expression, but he couldn’t quite read it.

All he could tell was that the atmosphere around her had grown heavy and oppressive—clearly, “the wolves are me” was not a good thing.

If the timing and mood hadn’t been so wrong, he would have pressed her for every detail. But even though he held back now, Yu Sheng filed away that flicker of curiosity about Little Red Riding Hood and her wolf pack, planning to ask properly once they were more familiar, or when another opportunity arose.

For now, his gaze turned once more toward the White Exhibition Hall at the end of the corridor.

Even he could faintly smell the scent of blood in the air now.

The “security guards” only reacted to intruders themselves. They possessed only sight—no hearing or smell. These sentinels were actually quite rigid, following the rules to the letter, which left significant exploitable gaps…

Yu Sheng’s expression gradually turned contemplative.

Little Red Riding Hood lowered her voice and spoke again: “So, should we pull back for now? We could come back tomorrow…”

“No, wait,” Eileen suddenly cut her off. “Look at Yu Sheng’s expression.”

Little Red Riding Hood turned her head in confusion: “What about his expression?”

“He’s got another idea.” Eileen let out a sigh.

The puppet had barely finished speaking, and before Little Red Riding Hood could ask what she meant, Yu Sheng concluded his thinking. He turned to glance at the fox girl standing beside them: “What do you think—do Hu Li’s tails count as ‘her’ in person?”

Everyone present froze. Little Red Riding Hood didn’t catch on at first, and her mouth moved before her brain could keep up: “How would they not count? They grow right out of her body…”

“But her tails can be launched,” Yu Sheng said with utmost seriousness. “Strictly speaking, they’re all magical artifacts she’s refined—and the refillable kind at that.”

Little Red Riding Hood stood frozen with her mouth open. By now her brain had finally caught up.

The next second, she stared at Yu Sheng in shock: “Wait! What are you trying to do?”

“Just give it a try. Worst case, if we really alert those plastic people, we open a door and leave,” Yu Sheng said with the spirit of a true explorer. “Didn’t you say those ‘security guards’ only have sight? We just need to block all their lines of sight without being seen ourselves…”

Then, ignoring Little Red Riding Hood’s stunned gaze, he turned to explain to the still-bewildered fox girl: “I have a plan, and I’ll need to use your tails…”

“Wait, wait,” Little Red Riding Hood couldn’t help interrupting from the side after hearing half of it. “You said there are at least seven or eight ‘security guards’ in that exhibition hall, right? Hu Li already launched two tails earlier—does she have enough left?”

The words felt bizarre coming out of her mouth no matter how she said them, carrying the awkwardness of a normal person’s worldview being ground to pieces and forcibly reshaped to accommodate the abnormal. But the moment she finished, she realized—she’d been awkward too soon.

By then, Hu Li had already understood what Yu Sheng meant. She reached back, casually yanked out two tails and laid them flat on the ground, then pulled out two more, arranging them in a row. When she’d nearly depleted the tails behind her, the fox spirit glanced back, went quiet for two or three seconds, and then came the “hummm” of a treasured blade being unsheathed—nine new tails sprouted from behind her.

Little Red Riding Hood: “…?”

“These are her usual stockpile,” Eileen said with the air of a veteran, stretching her body to pat Little Red Riding Hood’s arm. “She normally eats a lot. That’s what she uses to stockpile tails.”

Little Red Riding Hood’s face remained a wall of question marks: “…?”

She recognized every single word. How did they form such an obscure sentence when strung together—was what she just heard even human language?!

Meanwhile, Hu Li was pointing at the tails on the ground, introducing them: “This one costs twenty chicken drumsticks. This one costs ten…”

Little Red Riding Hood’s expression went blank. She had no idea how her brain was keeping up (it probably wasn’t): “Because the second one is half price?”

“Because this one can only accelerate to subsonic speed. It’s a subsonic cruise tail,” Hu Li said, giving Little Red Riding Hood a strange look. “Mass and energy are directly proportional. Don’t you have any common sense?”

Little Red Riding Hood entertained the thought of giving herself another shot of Rationality-Blocker.

By this point, the fox girl with “plenty of common sense” had already arranged all the standby tails in neat rows—the fluffy fox tails appeared to rest on the ground but actually hovered a few centimeters above the surface, and behind each tail leaked wisps of strange, otherworldly Fox Fire. They emitted a faint trembling hum, like… rockets fully fueled and ready for launch.

The instant that comparison surfaced in her mind, Little Red Riding Hood felt her life was over. She had most likely already been influenced by the lodge’s trio—her brain was starting to malfunction.

Dealing with entities was truly dangerous—even seemingly harmless ones like Yu Sheng were no exception.

At the same time, Hu Li gently raised her hand.

The silver-white fox tails, wreathed in otherworldly Fox Fire, slowly rose into the air.

These “refined” treasures were originally capable of subsonic or even supersonic flight, but now, under the fox spirit’s meticulous control, they drifted through the museum corridor with a slow, cautious grace full of spiritual sensitivity.

“If those ‘security guards’ don’t react, block their lines of sight, and then we’ll go in to assess the situation. If they suddenly move, just grab whatever’s in the center of the exhibition hall as fast as possible and pull back. We open a door and leave,” Yu Sheng said, watching the fox girl’s precision control while reaching his hand toward the air, where a faintly glowing phantom door took shape in his grasp. “I’ll have the door ready. Waiting on your signal.”

“Mm.” Hu Li nodded a bit nervously, controlling her fox tails to inch their way into the White Exhibition Hall.

Only Little Red Riding Hood still wore a wooden expression. She felt she should be nervous—the atmosphere certainly called for it—but she genuinely couldn’t muster any tension, because the atmosphere had gone so far beyond normal. Her brain couldn’t keep up with her worldview, her worldview couldn’t keep up with her senses, and in her heart was the feeling of having hit a bug in reality.

Even her wolves had been frozen in stupor for a while now.

“They’re not moving…” And then, Hu Li finally broke the silence, a hint of joy on her face. “I’m trying to block all their lines of sight at once… I think it’s working.”

Only then did Yu Sheng finally let out a small breath of relief.

The phantom door silently dissipated in his hand.

After receiving Hu Li’s second confirmation, he waved the others forward: “Come on, let’s go see what’s in there.”

The group, each harboring different emotions, stepped toward the White Exhibition Hall that now sat in quiet stillness.

Their taut nerves reached a breaking point the moment they saw the dark blue security uniforms, then gradually eased as those plastic mannequins remained perfectly motionless.

Everyone’s eyes immediately went to the “security guards.” Little Red Riding Hood’s first glance found the entity standing beside the main entrance, apparently guarding the passageway—she saw this mannequin in a dark blue uniform standing stock-still, its head wrapped layer upon layer in a silver-white fox tail.

It was a beautiful tail. On the fox spirit, it looked like a wispy work of art, but now, wrapped around the plastic mannequin’s head, it gave off the impression of… a grotesque and sinister cocoon.

And then, she heard Yu Sheng’s low exclamation: “…Holy shit.”

Little Red Riding Hood instantly turned, following Yu Sheng’s gaze to the center of the exhibition hall.

That was where the statue of the Weeping One should have been.

But now there was no statue on the platform—only a bizarre, horrifying corpse. A man, bound tightly to the platform by iron thorns bristling with spikes, his body forced into a posture of kneeling prostration with both hands covering his face, weeping in anguish.

The pose was identical to that of the Weeping One statue described in the materials.

The victim had been drained of all blood and appeared to have been dead for some time. There was no sign of the killer anywhere nearby—only the acrid stench of blood that saturated the entire exhibition hall.

Yu Sheng felt his heart seize several times. He wasn’t exactly unfamiliar with death—after all, he’d already died sudden deaths more than once or twice himself. But this was the first time he’d confronted such a gruesome scene from a third-person perspective. And the scene itself was only part of it. What struck him even harder…

Was the thick, ritual atmosphere of sacrifice that pervaded it all.

A victim bound in iron thorns and bled to death. A sacrificial pose deliberately recreated to match the Weeping One sculpture. Blood flowing down from the raised platform. The contaminated White Exhibition Hall. And those plastic mannequins standing silently around the offering.

This was a completely different kind of terror from Entity-Hunger.

“Little Red Riding Hood, do you know what this—”

Yu Sheng instinctively turned back, wanting to ask the only “experienced person” present whether she could make sense of what they were seeing, when he suddenly noticed that something seemed wrong with the red-clothed girl.

She was staring fixedly at the sacrifice atop the platform. At some point, her eyes had turned the same blood-red as her Shadow Wolves, and a low, guttural whine was emanating from her throat. Fine fur was pushing through the skin of her cheeks and the backs of her hands.

The next second, Yu Sheng saw Little Red Riding Hood’s shadow abruptly stretch and grow. A massive beast clawed its way out of that shadow—standing upright, like a human wearing a wolf’s skin, or like a wolf that had devoured a human and taken on human bones and contours. This hybrid of human and wolf burst from the shadow without a roar, without warning, without any meaningless display of intimidation, and lunged forward in a single pounce.

But not at Yu Sheng—straight at the unresponsive Little Red Riding Hood.

It is very difficult for a person to dodge an attack from their own shadow.

(End of Chapter)