Everly lowered her voice and shared with Old John and Misha her plan to destroy the sacrificial formation.
“Too dangerous. I should go,” Old John was the first to object.
Everly shook her head. “No. That duct is suspended in midair. Grandpa, you’re too heavy, you might crush it.”
“What about ?” Misha raised her hand to volunteer.
The sweat on her forehead and her tightly pressed lips showed that Misha was actually a little scared. Even so, when soone needed to step up, she didn’t hesitate to stand forward. This gave Everly a new appreciation for this old classmate.
No wonder she was a citizen of Lemot Town—even a little girl had remarkable courage and daring.
Unfortunately, this task could only be done by her…
Everly shook her head again, speaking vaguely, “I’m the only one who can destroy the formation. I also know the route better than anyone else. It’s best if I go.”
Seeing Misha opening her mouth in protest, as if wanting to argue further, Everly waved her hand. “Enough. Ti is critical. It’s settled. Misha, you and Grandpa will guard the sewer cover. I’ll leave my phone here. Once we get the password, you can unlock it for the police imdiately. I’ll head straight to the stage to destroy the formation.”
With that, Everly swapped her phone with Old John’s, took Grandpa’s phone, and turned toward the stage, crawling in that direction.
One thing Everly said was true—she was indeed more familiar with the route to the stage than Misha.
From the performance hall to the props room, Old John had taken an extrely winding and complicated route to avoid the ever-present masked n. Without a clear sense of the backstage layout, it would be easy to get lost and impossible to retrace the exact path.
Everly didn’t have that problem. Even in the narrow, enclosed ducts, her sense of direction remained strong. She could adapt and maneuver, finding the safest and fastest path to her destination among the many branching routes.
The massacre in the waiting hall had drawn away the vast majority of the masked n. On her way to the stage, Everly only encountered three or four stragglers, so there were far fewer obstacles to avoid. Soon, she arrived at the entrance to the duct above the stage.
From this point on, the duct changed from being embedded inside the wall to being suspended outside it. Crawling along it required extre caution, because Everly couldn’t be sure whether the tal strips holding it in place (she didn’t know their technical na) were strong enough to support her weight.
She paused at the entrance, took a deep breath, and tentatively pressed one hand onto the duct in front of her. Only after confirming it was secure did she slowly place her other hand, then try shifting her weight.
Her upper body’s weight pressed down through her arms. Whether it was real or imagined, Everly thought she heard the duct beneath her creak lightly with a “squeak-squeak.”
When she felt the duct sag under her hands, a cold sweat imdiately broke out on her back. She stepped back slightly, shifted her weight rearward, and withdrew one hand. As expected, the duct gave a “squeak” and slowly bounced back upward.
—This wasn’t good. The duct was genuinely thin and fragile. If she continued crawling on all fours as before, it probably wouldn’t hold her.
Everly lingered at the entrance, hesitating.
anwhile, the screams from the waiting hall continued. As part of this “performance” ant to please the evil god, the innocent victims were destined not to die quickly. The masked n would use every possible thod to torture them—cutting with knives and axes, carving flesh and bones, pulling out fingernails, smashing teeth, sawing off limbs, branding their skin with hot irons… One grueso scene after another, scenes she had once seen in videos, now resurfaced in Everly’s mind alongside the distant, hellish wails of the dying.
Those nauseating images, while filling her with intense discomfort, also injected courage into Everly’s chest.
She loathed those who treated the lives of others as toys, and she despised torture and death. If she didn’t destroy the sacrificial formation quickly, not only would the captives die, but she, her grandfather, and Misha would also be in danger… Taking a risk now was nothing compared to being drained of life as a sacrifice—sothing she absolutely could not accept!
“Let’s try again. Maybe if I reduce the pressure per unit area…”
With that thought, Everly exhaled a long, coarse breath, adjusted her posture, and shifted from crawling on hands and feet to lying flat along the duct. In this position, her weight was spread over a larger surface, reducing the stress on any single point.
Maintaining this prone posture, Everly inched forward, slowly and steadily.
At first, progress was smooth. With her entire body pressed against the duct, it no longer sagged under her weight as it had before.
But these ducts were not designed for crawling. As she moved, the walls of the duct scraped against the outer tal strips, inevitably producing a “squeak-squeak” sound. Once her upper body had fully entered the duct and she began pushing her lower body forward, the friction noise grew sharply. For a few monts, Everly almost feared she would fall along with the duct.
For safety, she had to pause, lying still like a wooden puppet, enduring the dust that blew into her nose with every breath and the crawling, centipede-like itch as cold sweat ran down her forehead.
One second… two seconds… she waited. The imagined collapse did not happen. Though the duct wobbled slightly, the old ventilation shaft had, after all, held her weight!
In just a short ti, the screams outside had begun to fade. Everly guessed that the second group of captives had already been tortured down to almost none. The masked n would soon upload the videos to the forum, drawing more attention—and then the sacrificial ceremony would officially begin…
There was still a long way to the second ventilation shaft. She couldn’t stop now; countless lives depended on her!
Once her entire body was inside the duct, crawling beca increasingly difficult. Everly could no longer push herself forward by kicking against the duct behind her, nor could she straighten her body—the duct was too fragile. Any point bearing too much weight would sag. Reluctantly, she had to move as if her lower body were paralyzed: arms stretched forward, fingers gripping the seams of the duct, using upper body strength to drag her entire body ahead.
It was far from easy. The duct hadn’t been cleaned in years, and a thick layer of dust coated its surface. Lying atop it, Everly had to breathe carefully or risk coughing. The heavy dust also increased friction, forcing her to expend even more energy to move.
Worse, the duct’s seams were narrow and offered almost no leverage. To shift her body forward, Everly had to dig her fingers deeper into the gaps. Soon, small cuts appeared on her fingertips, and the nail on her right middle finger split, leaving a deep red line of blood along the crack.
It really hurt…
Everly gritted her teeth, forcing herself to push aside the pain and continue crawling through the duct.
The only good news: after passing the entrance section, the duct rarely creaked during the rest of her crawl. The racket at the start had likely been caused by a loose tal strip at the entry point.
She wriggled through the duct like a maggot—one ter, then two… After the grueling crawl, she finally reached the first ventilation opening.
Everly pressed herself against the flap, peering through the narrow gap with hope, cautiously looking down. Unfortunately, the magic circle was still further ahead. Pouring contaminants from here wouldn’t affect it; she still had to continue crawling.
The other bad news: the masked n had returned.
They strode into the auditorium, casually carrying bloodstained lee weapons, spreading out into the corners of the hall. Even without seeing their faces, their relaxed, confident movents radiated sheer excitent and satisfaction.
These people clearly had thoroughly enjoyed the recent bloodbath.
Inside the hall, the masked n grouped in threes and fives, busying themselves with their tasks.
A few of them went onto the stage, placing carefully selected male and female corpses flat on the floor. They dressed the bodies in costus, painted on their terrified faces with makeup, and bound their joints with sticks and ropes, arranging them into bizarre, grotesque poses.
Everly knew what they were doing—they were making “decorations” to embellish the pile of corpses. The more twisted and shocking the scene, the happier their “master” would be.
Other masked n gathered around the one wearing a pig mask, watching as he used his bloodied fingers to operate a laptop, uploading the videos they had just fild.
“This is so thrilling! I want to kill two more, can I, boss?”
“No. If you kill more now, there won’t be enough sacrifices. Be patient. Once the ritual succeeds, Master will grant power. Then, ordinary humans, kill as many as you want.”
“I can’t wait…”
“…”
Everly knew ti was critical. She stopped observing and pressed forward, ready to continue crawling. But just as she began to move, a puff of dust suddenly fell through the vent, landing on a female corpse below.
It was dust she had brushed off with her body!
Everly pressed herself against the flap, eyes wide, watching as the masked man who was painting a “grinning” expression on the corpse reached out and wiped at it. He seed confused, unsure where the dust had co from. After glancing around for a while, he finally looked up, his elephant mask facing straight in Everly’s direction.
Everly’s heart almost stopped. Even so, she remained perfectly still, not daring to make any evasive move. The duct was too fragile—any sudden motion, any extra noise, or more falling dust would almost certainly give her away.
Her decision proved correct. The ventilation duct was positioned high enough to be out of the lights’ reach, and the slanted grille at the flap made it easy to see out from inside, but hard to see in from the outside. The masked man stared upward for a mont, likely thinking the dust had fallen from the long-neglected stage, then paid it no mind and bent back down to continue manipulating the corpse in front of him.
Everly exhaled in relief.
She rubbed the cold sweat creeping into her eyes with her elbow, steadied her nerves, and carefully inched her body forward—inch by inch, painstakingly passing through this critical point.
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