Battle of Shadows, Life Draining Away

We went through the other houses as well. Every household had corpses inside. The most had seven bodies—men, women, old people, children. From the looks of them, they had maintained the postures they were in when they died.

Twenty-six corpses in total.

In other words, Yukang Village had originally had twenty-six residents.

Of course, there might have been more than twenty-six residents, but there had been twenty-six people in the village when the deaths occurred.

"Damn it!" the doctor said.

Fatty looked at me. I asked, "Did you think of something?"

Fatty said, "When we returned to the village entrance, that smell of blood disappeared. Where did it come from?" I shook my head. I couldn't figure out where the bloody smell had come from either.

Yin Wuyu said, "These people were all killed with sharp blades, but we didn't see a single bloodstain on the ground. Just now, inside those houses, I had the illusion that they were specimens—or wax figures. Waxwork scene figures."

The doctor hurriedly nodded. "Right, right, right, exactly. They all remained in their everyday postures. That means they probably didn't feel much pain when they were killed by those blades. They died quickly. But even so, there should have been bloodstains. Yet there wasn't a trace of blood on the ground. And those maggots and flies only appeared because the corpses had decayed."

Only then did Fatty slowly say, "Being pierced by a blade would definitely cause bleeding. With so many people, there would have been enough blood to leave that bloody smell in the air. But we didn't see any blood. So when we smelled it, we must have been witnessing the moment they were killed. Afterward, someone cleaned up the scene and preserved the villagers' postures from when they died. Just as you