"Anna?"
The mural was not very detailed. Sun Hang could only make out that the person strapped to the operating table was a girl. As for whether she was the white-haired girl sealed inside the glass jar or someone else entirely, that was impossible to tell.
This mural seemed to record something that had happened in a research institute—or perhaps a hospital. Beds equipped with restraints were designed to stop unconscious patients or those in a disturbed mental state from thrashing about, but Sun Hang felt that compared with the quietly lying girl, the lab-coated figures dancing around the operating table were the ones who deserved that treatment.
Their mental states could hardly be called calm and stable. At the very least, they were utterly deranged... Although the lab coats in the mural all wore masks that revealed only their eyes, the artist had thoughtfully painted their eyeballs a vermilion red.
Normal human irises came in many colors, but vermilion red was not one of them.
Unless all those lab coats had acute conjunctivitis...
"Dancing... Were they celebrating something? Or was it some kind of sacrificial ritual?" Sun Hang muttered to himself. He could not help thinking of the natives on Pratambak Island. Whenever they held a ceremony, they danced around a bonfire, and the meat and fish roasting over it were offerings to the Flower of Joy.
Could the girl strapped to the operating table be the sacrifice those lab coats wanted to offer to some entity?
Using young virgins as living sacrifices seemed to be a custom found in many places, and folktales with similar plots were everywhere.
Sun Hang continued onward, but beside this mural was a long stretch of blank space—he had no idea whether it had never been painted or had been erased by some