The death of a high elder in the Ripple Mist sect went strangely unnoticed. Lin Mu had not paid much attention to it since he was busy clearing out the stores of the sect, but when there was no response, even after thirty minutes, he found it to be highly suspicious.
'If they haven't responded even now, then there is either something stopping them… or they are planning something else.' Lin Mu thought to himself.
He didn't know whether the first option was worse or the second. To him, a normal response and open conflict would be better than to dodge a hidden danger or scheme that they may be hatching.
Still, in thirty minutes, Lin Mu had basically cleared out all the resources that the Ripple mist sect had out in the open. There were more of them hidden underneath the main peak of course, and that was where he was about to head to.
"The back of the main peak is also where they built that seclusion hall… time to take a look there, too." Lin Mu muttered to himself.
~shua~
He took flight and openly entered the main peak. Standing high up in the air, he let his spirit sense check everything and found that the peak was actually empty!
"This is certainly not normal…" Lin Mu understood.
His spirit sense continued down and went to the back of the Main peak where the seclusion hall was built. It was there that he sensed the spirit sense fluctuations. And it wasn't just a handful of them, but rather thousands of them.
But at the same time, his spirit sense met resistance and couldn't go beyond a certain level of the building.
"A dense barrier like that is not something one would place in a seclusion hall. That seems more like a prison instead." Lin Mu said, as his eyes narrowed.
Approaching from the side, Lin Mu phased into the building but didn't reveal himself, instead hiding himself within the ground. There was no problem doing that, as the gap between each floor was of more than two meters.
Just this thickness of floor showed Lin Mu that this place was more of a prison than a seclusion hall.
In the first floor of the hall, he saw a few disciples that were lined up and a few elders that were taking down their names. In the second floor, he found more disciples but they were simply sitting down and waiting for something.
Lin Mu recognized most of them to be the same disciples that had been called in with the last announcement. This floor was larger than the one above and could easily accommodate ten thousand disciples at once.
And when Lin Mu tried to head to the third floor of the Seclusion hall, he faced resistance. A thick barrier made from formation arrays as well as hard rock were blocking his way. Even phase couldn't pass though it as it was a formation array.
"Wouldn't stop me much longer." Lin Mu said as his expression turned serious.
Directly placing his hand straight on the barrier, he pushed.
~CLANG~
A strange sound, as if metal pressing against metal echoed all over the area.
"What was that?" The disciples were surprised.
"Go check," One of the elders instructed a junior elder.
But when he checked everywhere he didn't find anything. After all, Lin Mu wasn't entering through any normal places, but rather he was hidden in the ground itself. And there was no way the junior elder would think there was someone in the middle of the solid ground.
~CLANG~
But the sound repeated, this time even louder.
~CLANG~
~CLANG~
The sound continued to echo until finally it seemed like something had been broken.
~KACHA~
"Go down and see if anything happened there!" The elder immediately ordered other elders.
Without caring for this, Lin Mu entered through the hole he had made in the solid rock reinforced with formation arrays.
'That was tougher than the sect's main defensive formation array… If they are using it here, then there is certainly something to hide here.' Lin Mu felt sure.
And when he finally descended into the third floor, his doubts were cleared.
"What in the…" Lin Mu was left shocked as he saw pools upon pools of blood spread around the third floor.
The third floor was the largest of them all, and easily spanned over a kilometer in area.
But that was not all that shocked Lin Mu, what shocked him was the condition of the blood pool. Some of them contained bodies of cultivators that were wearing the robes of the disciples floating in them.
Others only contained bones, and some didn't even have that.
The various pools had different levels of decomposition of corpses and all of it was being merged into the blood pool.
Breathing the very air made Lin Mu feel sick, but at the same time, it ignited the fury within him. For he recognized what these blood pools were.
"The rebirth blood… they are using their own disciples as the fuel for rebirth blood…" Lin Mu muttered as his voice turned cold.
His spirit sense scanned the entire area in a moment's notice and found several elders of the sect adding more disciples to the blood pools. They would first slit their throats and then poke out their hearts, making sure as much blood flowed out of them as possible.
"I think we will reach our quota early this time. Lord Gu Yao will be pleased." One of the elders that had Dao Shell realm fluctuations coming from him spoke.
"Indeed… after the last time's fiasco, he should be pleased with us." Another elder with spirit Qi fluctuation at the Dao Treading realm replied.
Just as these two elders were talking, three more elders appeared from the staircase nearby.
"Supreme elder! Is there any problem going on? We heard something break on the floor above." One of the elders asked.
"Oh? Nothing happened here. The sacrifices are going as normal—" Just as the man was about to complete his words, he saw something that made him stop.
