Missing

It took three lives to confirm that he had drained every last scrap of knowledge from the Mask.

Lin Feng took off the helmet and set it down.

Although he had died three times, he was thoroughly satisfied.

Those deaths were worth it!

What a win!

It was just that sensation of dying. Whether it was his imagination or not, Lin Feng could still recall that sickening feeling.

Sickening and painful.

The console seemed to be doing it deliberately. Remembering the pain was part of the price he paid for gaining knowledge through repeated deaths.

After taking some time to calm himself, Lin Feng decided he had still come out ahead.

He had gotten his hands on the Priest's closely guarded secrets.

Of the three secrets, the last one, Ritual Incense, struck Lin Feng as possibly the most valuable.

The art of making Ritual Incense.

From now on, Lin Feng could proudly call himself a craftsman.

Ritual Incense was also an important component of sacrificial offerings.

For a grand sacrifice, Ritual Incense was indispensable.

The offerings required more than the full set of an ox, a sheep, and a pig. Other things were needed to supplement them.

Ritual Incense, for example.

Ritual Incense did not affect only the Priest. It also had an effect on the intermediaries in a sacrifice—the ancestral gods—and its ultimate divine recipient, the Heavenly Emperor.

It worked wonders on all of them.

It was one of the Heavenly Emperor's favorite offerings.

Of course, the form of sacrificial rites changed with every dynasty.

From the Yin-Shang oracle-bone inscriptions, in which written records were hard to find, to the bronze inscriptions of the later Zhou dynasty, and then through the upheavals of successive dynasties, books had been burned, and those who inherited the traditions had been starved or killed.

By the present day, little had truly survived.

Nor had the methods of sacrifice remained unchanged.

Everything had kept changing. The gods who fed on blood offerings, for example, had been commonplace during the Yin-Shang period, but had almost vanished by the end of the Han dynasty.

Even priests and spirit mediums had fallen into decline.

Taoism, Buddhism from abroad, and later Confucianism had taken their place.

From the Han Dynasty to the Qing dynasty.

Denied recognition by the orthodox establishment and stamped out by certain prominent ministers, the gods who fed on blood offerings had been forced to hide among the common people, lingering in the shadows.

They had never again flourished on a large scale.

Some mystical arts had also disappeared with time.

Such as this decidedly evil [Five-Organs Incense].

[Five-Organs Incense] was merely one variety of Ritual Incense.

It was nothing good. In the Mask's memories, Ritual Incense was divided into five grades.

Stripped of the awkward technical jargon used to erect barriers between experts and outsiders, and put into plain language, Ritual Incense came in five grades.

Lin Feng labeled them supreme, superior, fine, inferior, and abysmal.

[Five-Organs Incense] fell into the inferior grade.

Its assessment was:

Barely serviceable.

Just as the text following the Ritual Incense description said, humans were neither the best raw material for Ritual Incense nor the worst.

Humans were the most economical and practical option.

For sacrificial rites, they were merely a by-product of war.

Yin-Shang had a longstanding tradition of human sacrifice.

Prisoners of war provided some of the raw materials for [Five-Organs Incense].

Thus, [Five-Organs Incense] had become one of the traditional varieties of Ritual Incense.

As for the supreme grade.

Lin Feng now had a method for making heavenly-god Ritual Incense in his head.

It did not mean making Ritual Incense for heavenly gods.

It meant turning heavenly gods into Ritual Incense to offer to the Heavenly Emperor and the ancestors.

Utterly absurd.

Lin Feng gave it one glance and stopped reading.

That's way too fantastical. I, Lin Feng, am an honest, ordinary man. I can't bear to look at this.

If I could capture a heavenly god to make Ritual Incense, why would I bother making it?

Who would I even offer it to?

Wouldn't that be like the Heavenly Emperor hiding his status and going back to a college campus to pick up girls?

If I were that powerful, why the hell would I go to a college campus?

I'm just an honest craftsman. Please spare me. I can't even make inferior [Five-Organs Incense], and you want me to catch a wild heavenly god?

Looking at the five-grade classification system, Lin Feng thought the promises this Ritual Incense dangled were awfully grand.

Very much like a social-media sales pitch.

It was not just the best grade. Even for the next-best stuff, Lin Feng had none of the materials needed to make it, so he did not take it seriously either.

The superior grade used legendary divine beasts such as dragons, qilin, and pixiu as vessels for Ritual Incense.

Where was Lin Feng supposed to find dragons and qilin?

Go look in the Classic of Mountains and Seas!

The fine grade used beings that practiced cultivation as raw materials.

That would not work either.

Lin Feng had no intention of turning himself into Ritual Incense.

Only the abysmal grade was something Lin Feng could try.

For the abysmal grade, any creature of flesh and blood would do.

Lin Feng planned to buy a few rabbits and try making Ritual Incense.

A creature of flesh and blood, plus some minerals and medicinal ingredients. If those were unavailable, he could adapt to whatever was locally available.

It was quite flexible.

He chose rabbits because he remembered there were plenty of people selling live rabbits around here.

In this region, spicy rabbit, cold rabbit, shredded rabbit—the ways of preparing rabbit were endless.

Lin Feng would not feel too guilty about turning a rabbit into Ritual Incense.

Having settled those matters, Lin Feng tidied up his appearance.

The next time he entered the game, he would clear it straight away, move on to the next act, and see what it held.

He wanted to see whether his guess was right.

This game had filled Lin Feng with the thrill of unraveling a mystery.

If he turned out to have guessed correctly, it would be even more satisfying.

Before that, however, Lin Feng had to begin his prison stint and get ready to grind away at work.

Gotta make that cash, gotta make that cash!

Rich old guys, sugar mommies, toss me a little cash to live on!

After taking a shower and looking at his refreshed reflection in the mirror, Lin Feng sat down at his computer and went through his usual preparations for streaming.

He switched on the DSLR camera he used as a webcam, checked that the microphone and sound card were working, and checked the capture card...

Once everything was ready, he opened the software on his computer, clicked to start broadcasting, and went live.

He entered the group chat and tagged the members.

He sent out the stream notification.

After a while, plenty of familiar faces appeared in the stream.

The chat started scrolling.

[So you do remember to come back? I thought you'd found a sugar mommy and quit streaming.]

[Look who I found! A missing person!]

[You're open, you're open? No stream notification? No stream notification?]

[Daddy Daddy Daddy Daddy Daddy Daddy]

Lin Feng greeted them and glanced through the chat.

He kept feeling that something outrageous had slipped in among those messages.

Absolutely unhinged.

That last message.

It was even a paid Super Chat.

He had to admit it.

There really were a lot of rich people.

Rich people have such weird tastes.jpg

Western Hunan.

Deep in the mountains.

At night, deep in the Western Hunan Mountains, a host of blazing incandescent lamps illuminated the site of the rescue excavation of an ancient tomb.

A fine rain drifted down.

Because of the terrain, much of the heavy machinery could not be brought in.

Even a rescue excavation had to be done by hand, so progress was slow.

Beyond the foot of the mountain, even jeeps and pickup trucks could not make it up.

Many of the supplies had been carried up by hand.

The elderly Professor Han rubbed his hands together anxiously.

Rain drifted down outside the tent. Several security personnel stood beside him, all looking grim. Professor Han's students were comforting the old man. Everyone wore raincoats, and several had just returned from the search-and-rescue site.

The elderly Professor Han's students were all around him. History and archaeology were disciplines passed down through lineages of teachers and students, with something of the old sentiment that "a teacher for a day is a father for life."

Professor Han had only a handful of students. Losing one of them left the old professor heartbroken.

What was more, the one missing this time was his most senior student, the senior fellow student of all the graduate students: Ran Zhihui, a doctoral student.

He was the one who had told his junior fellow students last time that, while going to the bathroom at night, he had seen a blood-red human figure in the forest watching them.

He had vanished.

His disappearance was strange, and more importantly, before he vanished, he had said some very strange things to one of his junior female fellow students!