American homeless people, surviving in the city

Chapter 137 Blood Pool and Scriptures

After entrusting all his conjectures and known information to Lynch in one go, Jasper's face grew paler and paler, his body went limp, and he collapsed into the sewage.

Lynch instinctively reached out to help him up, but Jasper waved weakly, indicating that Lynch should leave: "It's not necessary. I'm just too weak from being locked up here for too long."

"Sir, don't worry about me. Go and do what you need to do! Find a way to escape, gather clues about the cult's crimes, contact the outside world via satellite phone—all these things we can't do ourselves, we have to leave to you! Only if you escape will we have a chance to be rescued!"

"If you are rescued, please don't forget us... If you can get me out of here, the Razor Clan will reward you handsomely!"

"So hurry up and leave, we've pinned all our hopes on you!"

Lin Qi pursed his lips and nodded emphatically: "Understood!"

Then, he took Sylvia's hand and strode into the depths of the basement.

First, the first thing he needed to do was naturally to check the mysterious room hidden deep in the basement.

The two strode across the room overflowing with sewage and arrived at the door hidden in the darkness.

At first glance, the door looks ordinary; it's just an iron door painted white, looking no different from a storeroom door in a shopping mall or a fire door in a school.

But after receiving Jasper's warning, Lynch was naturally not going to let his guard down in this room. He could almost guess what a terrible scene awaited him behind that door.

Standing in front of the door, Lynch turned to Sylvia and kindly offered a reminder, "I suspect the scene inside will be quite unsettling. Why don't you wait for me outside?"

"No, I want to go in with you." Sylvia's face was pale, but her eyes remained resolute. "It wasn't until I heard you talking about 'cults' and such that I realized who really did this to me."

"I want to gather more evidence, to learn more about them, to find out why they targeted me, and why they did this! Only then can I more accurately apprehend them after I escape!"

"I want them to pay for everything they've done to me and my family during this time!"

Sylvia's voice trembled slightly, but there was no hesitation in her words: "For this, I am willing to face anything!"

""

Lin Qi didn't say anything more, just nodded, then turned to face the door, took a deep breath, and slowly pushed the door open.

The moment I pushed open the door, the first thing that hit me was a strong, almost tangible, smell of blood.

Then, the first thing that caught their eyes was the flickering candlelight.

When Lin Qi saw the room's layout by candlelight, he almost cried out in surprise.

The layout of this room is exactly the same as the layout of the underground room in the villa where the murder case occurred in the lakeside district!

...Sure enough, everything is connected!

Lin Qi strode into the house.

First and foremost, the most striking feature of the room remains the eerie statue that resembles a Buddha, situated in the very center. Like the statue in the villa's secret chamber, it wears a sinister smile and sits cross-legged atop a flame; its bizarre form sends chills down one's spine.

Below the statue, there is still a pool of water.

However, unlike the pool in the villa's secret room, which was filled with murky sewage, this pool was filled with a dark red, viscous liquid.

The moment Lin Qi saw the pool of dark red, his scalp tingled and the hairs on his body stood on end.

Based on what the people in the basement had said earlier, and the strong smell of blood in the room, this pool of dark red liquid is very likely human blood!

This is a pool of blood!

"Ugh!... Mmm... Luh..."

Behind her, Sylvia abruptly covered her mouth. She hadn't reacted this strongly before, even when faced with the buckets of sour, foul-smelling swill in the kitchen and the stench of the basement. But now, smelling the thick stench of blood and seeing the pool of blood, she almost involuntarily felt a violent wave of nausea.

She desperately covered her mouth, her throat churning, and she struggled to suppress the urge to vomit.

Lin Qi's reaction wasn't as intense as hers, but he also felt a churning in his stomach, making him very uncomfortable. The wolf meat he had just eaten was struggling violently in his abdomen, as if it were about to pounce out at any moment.

Suppressing his nausea, Lin Qi looked around the room.

Although the decor is similar to the secret room inside the villa, the furniture arrangement here is somewhat different from that in the secret room.

The room wasn't filled with desks and bookshelves; instead, behind the blood pool of the statue, there was only a long table large enough for a person to lie on.

The long table was covered in dried bloodstains, and on it lay a short knife and a tattered book.

Lin Qi first took the short knife in his hand and examined it from head to toe. It was a sharp dagger, with a blade only about a palm's length long, but it looked extremely sharp. The handle was carved with delicate silver patterns and inlaid with emerald green gemstones, giving it a rather exotic look.

The intricate silver patterns depicted were the lotus flower and bone motif most commonly used by cults!

...really.

Lin Qi silently placed the dagger back on the table. He really didn't want to touch that unlucky thing again. Looking at the blood-stained long table, he could imagine how many heinous and inhumane things those cultists had done with that sharp knife on this table.

Then he picked up the tattered book again.

Just like the one he had seen in the secret room of the villa, this book was also a handwritten copy, covered with dense writing in a script that Lin Qi could not understand at all.

"Ah, this should be Amagi script, right?"

Suddenly, Sylvia spoke up from behind Lynch.

Lynch turned around and saw that Sylvia, though still looking terrible, seemed to have suppressed her urge to vomit. She was standing behind Lynch, tilting her head and looking at the book in his hand with some curiosity.

"You know this script?" Lynch was a little surprised. In his opinion, Sylvia, a rich girl born and raised in America, didn't seem like someone who should have learned such a strange script.

"Yes! I've learned some." To everyone's surprise, Sylvia nodded happily.

She scratched her head, a hint of shyness on her face: "But actually, I don't recognize many. We used to have an Indian nanny at home, and out of curiosity, I learned a little bit of the Indian language and script from her. The script they use is this Devanagari script."

"However, I only know some of the simplest and most commonly used phrases and sentences. What's written in the book... it feels like religious terminology? I really can't understand it."

"All right."

Lynch shrugged indifferently, not expecting Sylvia to decipher the cult's scriptures here—on the one hand, he didn't think it would help with his escape; on the other hand, as long as he could escape, the entire cabinet of evil books he had packed up and taken from the secret room could be clearly and accurately translated by professionals at the university through the Chen family.

However, just as he was about to put the tattered manuscript back on the long table, Sylvia suddenly pointed to a corner of the book and whispered, "Wait! Is that English writing at the back?"

"Hmm?" Lin Qi looked curiously at where Sylvia was pointing—because the book was so tattered, some pages could no longer be securely bound to the spine and could only hang loosely and intertwined.

What Sylvia saw was a torn page that had slid out from the back half of the manuscript, and there was indeed a passage of English written in black ink on it!

Lin Qi quickly turned to that page in the manuscript, and then he was surprised to find that the second half of the manuscript was entirely written in English!

...In that case, perhaps we can understand what's written in this book? Perhaps we can even find evidence of their evil deeds!

When the readable text appeared before them, a strong sense of curiosity immediately took hold of them.

By the flickering candlelight, Lynch tried to quickly skim the English text of the latter half of the manuscript. He soon noticed that one sentence appeared repeatedly in this section.

"Attaining the Asura state through evil deeds."