To their surprise, there weren't many words on such a large tortoise shell.
There were only two or three words on each fragment, and once assembled, they formed a simple yet chilling passage.
"Sacrifice the feminine to the heavens, draw wealth through ten thousand corpses, build a lake to lock in grievances, transform resentment through red, re-bury in the North Mountain; may the vengeful spirits never disperse, and the Mandate of Heaven endure forever."
The expressions of the group shifted as they read these words. Although they had guessed that the Zhou family was committing unspeakable atrocities—given that the entire Zhou Family Compound seemed built upon a tomb—seeing the confirmation was far more shocking than they had imagined.
In simple terms, the Zhou family had done several things. The Great Ancestor of the Zhou Family had made his fortune by betraying his village for glory; the entire history of the family's rise was built on blood.
However, he later discovered that because of the immense slaughter, the Zhou family could not endure. Seeing that the wealth he had painstakingly acquired over the bones of others was about to end with his generation, he turned his gaze toward the dark arts.
No one knew where the Great Ancestor of the Zhou Family had obtained such a wicked method, but they began collecting women from everywhere, bringing them into the manor under various pretenses.
Two fates awaited these people: one was to become stones of resentment, and the other was to become a wife of the Zhou family.
Most became tools for accumulating resentment. The Zhou family tortured and imprisoned them, using every method to make their lives worse than death. They gave them a glimmer of hope only to let them kill each other within the small confines of the Zhou manor, and in the end, without exception, they were all killed.
The Zhou manor was built directly over the burial grounds of these women. Through an array, this resentment was converted into an elixir that nourished the Zhou family's lineage.
However, this was ultimately an evil path. While it could draw wealth, it required many lives to appease the darkness.
So, the Zhou family did a second thing: through marriage, they turned innocent women into members of the Zhou family.
Using arrays and talismans, they redirected the target of the vengeful spirits seeking their lives toward these women who had become Zhou family wives.
The resentment of generations of spirits was not to be underestimated, which was why the wives of the Zhou family were replaced so quickly. Shortly after becoming part of the Zhou family, they would sacrifice their lives to the family's sins.
It didn't end there. The Zhou family even constructed a barren mountain that completely defied the feng shui of residential architecture, burying the bodies of these wives there.
The clashing resentments between the two locations could not dissipate, forming a closed-loop array within the Zhou manor that continuously provided the family with longevity.
It was unknown where the Zhou family had obtained such a method of using the righteous to nourish the evil. The fact that they had endured for three dynasties proved that the person who gave them this method was highly skilled in the dark arts.
Yet, it was still an evil art, and a backlash was inevitable sooner or later.
It was likely that when the Zhou family began constructing the Thousand Buddha Ceiling, they already felt that the array could no longer fully suppress the resentment of all those years.
Perhaps those thousands of Buddha statues were useful at first, but it was only a matter of time.
Rumor had it that every branch of the Zhou family, including the servants, died suddenly in a single night, and their deaths were gruesome. This was likely the consequence of the backlash.
Tears involuntarily flowed from Zhu Xi Ning's eyes. She had the strongest sensory abilities and was the most empathetic among them.
She stared silently at the few small words on the massive tortoise shell, which felt like a thousand-pound stone pressing against her chest.
"...Is this world really not just a polluted, distorted place beyond saving? How can a normal person..."
Zhu Xi Ning stopped there. She knew Nan Yue had doubts about the existence of the mission worlds, and she wasn't a fool; she had her own guesses about Wen Xiang Yuan's situation.
They had never harbored as much hostility toward the mission worlds as other scavengers; they even empathized with the NPCs.
But the shock this time was too great. She couldn't imagine how a normal person could sacrifice so many innocent lives for their own selfish gain, for so-called wealth.
If such a world wasn't an irredeemable place distorted by pollution but actually existed and operated before they intervened to purify it, that was a terrifying thought.
How could such an absurd and corrupt world even exist...
Nan Yue remained silent. She didn't know the truth either, and she was equally shaken.
But they had more important things to do now.
After coming down from the Lake-center Pavilion, the tips for the four of them had reached 4,444 points, meaning they could already leave.
A prompt appeared on the streaming screen: 【Would you like to end the stream?】 but Nan Yue didn't click it.
She was silent for a moment before asking the screen, "Can the others leave?"
They were able to get these points because of their strength, but the other scavengers were likely still short.
As the mission continued, the difficulty would only increase, and the others probably wouldn't be able to handle it.
Not to mention there were several NPCs among them. Their condition for leaving wasn't 4,444 points, but to be the sole survivor.
No matter how absurd this world was, people like Daoist Qingfeng, Yellow Hair, or Bai Qing weren't wicked people who deserved to die. They were just people who had wandered into this world and been turned into sacrificial lambs.
Blood-red bullet comments drifted across the screen.
【DIE】
【DIE】
【DIE】
【Anyone who enters the Zhou family must DIE!】
Nan Yue lowered her eyelashes. "If I can set you free, will you let them go?"
Zhang Qixu, who had been listening intently nearby, didn't quite react in time.
Who was Nan Yue talking to?
At first, he thought she was bargaining with the Entertainment to Death Live Streaming Platform, but as he continued to listen, it didn't seem to be the case.
As scavengers, they knew from the moment they entered the mission that there was something wrong with the platform. The three figures wearing human-face masks who met them at the beginning probably weren't human either.
Therefore, the Entertainment to Death Live Streaming Platform itself should be something bridging the world of the living and the dead, allowing those in the living world who enjoyed paranormal adventures to stream from haunted houses.
But Nan Yue seemed to be... chatting with the audience.
Nan Yue looked at the suddenly silent bullet comments on the screen and raised an eyebrow.
"Did I say something wrong? You... aren't you the spirits who died at the hands of the Zhou family?"
A shiver ran through Zhang Qixu's entire body. Did Nan Yue mean that from the beginning, there were no regular viewers interacting with them? Were those who tipped them and suggested twisted ideas for them to take risks actually these spirits?!
He might have even seen their corpses.
"At first, I also thought you were regular viewers, but then I realized you knew too much."
"You know too many details that outsiders shouldn't know. The opera scripts in the side rooms, the hairpin at the bottom of the well—these are things lost a hundred years ago. You couldn't have known about them."
"Even if platform staff had scouted the place beforehand and revealed important information to you, your reactions were far too intense."
Nan Yue sighed. "Especially in the places where corpses were gathered, your reactions were much stronger than those of ordinary viewers."
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