Everything changed early the next morning.
First came a hysterical scream, ringing through the village nestled deep in the mountain forests, almost completely cut off from the outside world.
Most of the village's able-bodied young men had split into two hunting parties, heading into the deep forests north and south of the village respectively.
Only a dozen or so able-bodied men remained behind.
That scream woke the entire village.
Doors opened one after another, and the hunters who had stayed behind swiftly rushed onto the dirt road in the village center, spears and hunting knives in hand.
Then they saw a scene that filled them with utter horror.
Beneath a tree in the village lay a "person."
Or rather, a "desiccated husk."
Only its outline barely identified it as a human corpse.
All the water, fat, and muscle in its body had been completely sucked dry, leaving nothing but withered skin stretched tightly over its bones.
A woman sat numbly before the desiccated corpse. She was the wife of the Sun Family's second son, from the eastern end of the village.
Beside her lay an overturned, battered bucket covered in stains, its filthy contents spilling across the ground.
One glance was enough to tell what had happened: early that morning, the second son's wife had gotten up to empty her chamber pot and stumbled upon this corpse, already sucked into a desiccated husk.
"This..."
It was not just the second son's wife. The sight before them sent a chill down the spines of all the strapping men who had rushed out.
If someone's child or an elderly villager had been eaten by a wild beast that had broken into the village, they could have accepted it, however gruesome and bloody the scene.
But a sight like this...
This was certainly