Lu Yuan took a few steps inside, his gaze falling on the floor at the back of the tavern.
Someone was lying facedown there.
It was a man, probably middle-aged, wearing an inn attendant's apron.
He had fallen facedown, his hands braced on either side of his chest, all five fingers digging desperately into the gaps between the floorboards. His nails were caked with blood. Lu Yuan circled to the front and crouched down, seeing his face.
His mouth hung wide open, his eyes bulging, his pupils already clouded. Yet that extreme terror was still frozen across his features, twisting his whole face into a grotesque expression. In the instant before his death, he must have seen something that scared him into this state.
The moment Lu Yuan leaned closer, the Gray-White Text finally appeared in the corner of his vision.
[Weak Source of Pollution detected...]
He paused.
The man was thoroughly dead, his body already cold, yet he carried faint pollution.
Clearly, an Eerie thing carrying pollution had broken in here and caused this slaughter.
Lu Yuan noted it down without investigating further. More urgent matters came first: they needed to search the entire inn and make sure nothing living was hiding inside.
He rose to his feet, gestured to the three Night Watchers behind him, and headed deeper into the tavern.
Past the passage behind the bar was the kitchen. An iron pot sat on the stove, its soup long since boiled dry into a crust. A kitchen knife was embedded in the chopping board, with several half-cut radishes scattered beside it.
Two corpses lay on the kitchen floor, one at the foot of the stove and one slumped in the corner. Like the one in the tavern, their faces were twisted, their mouths open, their eyes wide,