Chapter 82: Bone Room

An hour later, Liu Mu and the dog, plus the workers called over to help...

Inside the green bungalow, everyone stood leaning against the walls.

Facing the large pit that had been dug out, and the things inside the pit, everyone had their own guesses, but not a single person spoke.

Liu Mu prided herself on having seen countless horrors, betrayals, evil deeds, and evil people from childhood to adulthood across two lifetimes, yet the scene before her still left her extremely shocked.

Sorrow and anger intertwined, rampaging through her chest.

With a dark face, she wiped the sweat off her palms onto her trousers, and the first thing she said was a local profanity, "Damn it! What kind of trash lives in this town? Are there really no ghosts or monsters running around at night?"

"Is, is, is this a mass grave?" A timid outsider hid behind another burly man, his lips trembling, "There are even, even cooking stoves here. It wouldn't be what I think it is, would it?"

His voice sounded like he was about to cry.

The burly man he was leaning on also had a gloomy face and couldn't say a word.

"Someone go! Get Cai Hongfa here," Liu Mu shouted to the people at the door, "And get those two who hang out with him every day, too."

The tile and concrete floor had been flipped open, the soil underneath already soaked by rainwater; beneath the wet, large pit was an underground space nearly the same size as the house's foundation, containing countless human bones.

Compared to the silt, these bones were stark white, and apart from neat cuts on some of the necks, there were no other wounds.

Several of them were even laid out neatly on a cement platform, pieced together perfectly, not a single bone missing.

To the side, several piles of bones were sorted by category, looking very much like 'Lego parts' that hadn't been assembled yet.

These sorted bones totaled seven piles, perfectly encircling the complete skeletons, and the skulls were even stacked into a 'small mountain'.

Cai Hongfa was responsible for liaison and odd jobs in the town, while his two brothers had both gone to the mine; accompanying him was his son, Cai Zhenlong, who was off duty today.

Perhaps thinking his old man had run into trouble at work, Cai Zhenlong entered first, nodding to Liu Mu in a neither humble nor pushy manner, "Boss, were you looking for us?"

Although he was not actually among the people Liu Mu wanted to find.

The few people originally blocking the front moved aside; seeing that everyone's face was as pale as if they had seen a ghost, Cai Zhenlong felt increasingly uneasy.

But he took two more steps, and the next second, his face became the same as everyone else's.

Cai Hongfa was blocked by his son walking in front, and fearing that Liu Mu really had something to blame them for, he greeted her very obsequiously from behind while pushing his son aside, "Oh my, big Boss, how come I didn't see you come for breakfast today? I specially saved you a large bone with plenty of meat, I... my Mazu Niangniang, bones!"

The bones were already scary enough, and the fluke in Cai Hongfa's heart collapsed entirely after seeing the complete human skeletons. Fortunately, his son was behind him and caught his father, who had been scared to the point of wetting himself.

"This, this, this, what is this?" Cai Hongfa was old, after all, and in his life, apart from witnessing Liu Mu killing people and the mountain ghost incident a few days ago, he hadn't experienced much bloodshed.

During the natural disaster, everyone hid in the Mining Tunnel, and although there were occasional frictions, there hadn't been any real fights except for the time Liu Mu appeared.

The scene before him really scared him half to death.

"This is that foreign engineer's house," Cai Zhenlong steadied his mind and immediately understood the reason Liu Mu had called his father over, "Boss, I know more about this person's situation; let me report to you."

The room was full of white bones, but there was no foul smell; instead, the stench of urine from Cai Hongfa permeated the air.

Liu Mu's cold gaze swept over the father and son, then looked at the others again, "You all go rest first. Afterward, without my permission, no one is to come here. Little Cai, stay."

Cai Zhenlong asked the two men beside him to take Cai Hongfa away, and stood opposite Liu Mu across the white bone pit.

Although he felt ashamed, his body couldn't help but tremble; facing this kind of situation, fear was a physical instinct that could not be controlled by his subjective will.

"Tell me, what engineer?" Liu Mu picked up a half-meter-sized floor tile with one hand, threw it onto the dirt pile, and sat down to ask, "Find a place to sit yourself."

Cai Hongfa didn't want to sit at all, but clenching his fists to bolster his courage, he walked not far from Liu Mu, and only then did his trembling body feel a bit of security, "He was invited by Boss Ma, who contracted the mine. They said he was a professional professor from some foreign mining university, and he was paid a high price to help plan the Mining Tunnel..."

Yamaguchi Hisashi, a Japanese, a mining engineer, arrived in Yang Family Town fifteen years ago and disappeared suddenly before the disaster.

"Fifteen years. In your town, besides those women, are there any other missing persons? Especially children."

Liu Mu listened halfway and jumped into the opened basement herself to examine those snow-white bones.

She hadn't moved before, partly because she was a bit tired after digging for so long, and partly because she was afraid of scaring the workers.

"There were children who went missing, but not many. In my memory, the only one I was familiar with was a primary school boy my age who went missing. It was said he was abducted by human traffickers from out of town..."

"Oh? Did that classmate of yours have any physical characteristics?" Liu Mu's movements as she rummaged through the bones were fast, yet she looked at every single piece carefully, still wanting to find traces that might have been left behind to discover valuable clues.

"I remember he seemed a bit thinner than me, especially pale, and everyone called him 'Bean Sprout'. Cai Zhenlong knew what Liu Mu was suspecting and tried harder to recall, "Right, his left thumb..."

"Is missing a joint." Liu Mu had already stopped beside a white skeleton preserved separately on the platform, picked up a section of a finger, and showed it to the young man beside her.

"Yes," Cai Zhenlong took a step back, then felt too cowardly, gritted his teeth, and stepped forward two steps, "Did that little Japanese kill Bean Sprout?"

"This is the skeleton of a child around ten years old; I can only say it's possible," Liu Mu tossed the bone section to Cai Zhenlong, "Have there been any cases of missing children in the surrounding towns and villages?"

Upon checking, not a single one of these skeletons was an adult.

Cai Zhenlong clutched the bone, his whole body icy cold; the small section felt like a block of Extreme Cold ice, and he almost couldn't hold onto it.

His face showed both terror and regret, but lacked fear; he turned his eyes away to look outside the dilapidated house, as if avoiding something, "Boss, these are all things from before the disaster. The families of these deceased might not be around anymore either; is there a need to keep investigating?"

This time, Liu Mu did not throw out cold words, "This Japanese left before the disaster; is it a coincidence, or is there a reason?"

What really concerned her was indeed not these skeletons, but that pile of skulls stacked into a small mountain, which had patterns on their snow-white tops.

The patterns were the size of a fingertip, the carving was exquisite, and they were not colored; if one didn't look closely, one wouldn't notice them at all.

"This, I don't know about this," Cai Zhenlong found it strange why Liu Mu would ask such a question; he hesitated for a moment, then went down to the basement from the collapsed stairs nearby, wanting to put that finger bone back.

"That engineer often went out; it was said he was teaching outside. I remember he even gave a lecture at Xi Zai's university the year before last. Anyway, he was a very famous person. I don't know how much Boss Ma and the others paid to make someone willing to stay in a deep mountain valley like ours."

He said everything he knew about Yamaguchi Hisashi, and seeing Liu Mu holding a skull with one hand and looking at it with fascination, he felt it was a bit weird.

Seeing her not speak, Cai Zhenlong carefully put the finger bone back in its original place and also sized up the small, slender white skeleton.

So Bean Sprout was that small back then? It seemed he could have picked the person up with one hand, but unfortunately, now only bones remained.

Naturally, no good person would want others to die, and as a childhood classmate, Cai Zhenlong naturally wouldn't either. After watching for a while, he asked, "Boss, can I send Bean Sprout to the ancestral graveyard to be buried later? There's no one left in his family now."

"You can," Liu Mu suppressed the surging waves in her heart and turned to beckon Cai Zhenlong, "Come over and take a look, have you seen this pattern anywhere?"

Cai Zhenlong didn't dare to get too close, dodging and weaving in the narrow corridor, managing not to touch another bone, but even so, he still broke out in goosebumps from the cold.

Only when he was close did Liu Mu hear his muttering, "No offense intended, sorry for the disturbance, the debt has its debtor and the grievance has its source, please don't blame me, everyone, don't blame me..."

Seeing his cautious and fearful appearance, Liu Mu twitched the corner of her mouth, not knowing what expression to make.

Most people in coastal provinces believe in Mazu Niangniang; besides this deity, they also believe in others, and many villages have their own family temples.

It can't be called superstition; at the very least, it's a comfort.

When she used to collect scrap, she had seen families so poor they couldn't even afford a meal, yet they would still take the little money they saved to worship gods. They prayed for wealth too; when reality is too hopeless, faith becomes very important.

"Rest assured, with me here, neither ghosts nor gods can harm you," Liu Mu had not lived many good days since she was small, so she felt indifferent toward faith, but whether others believed or not had nothing to do with her, "Look carefully, has this pattern ever appeared around that Yamaguchi Hisashi?"

Cai Zhenlong stayed half a meter away, unwilling to get close and afraid to touch that glistening white, clean skull.

Yet after looking for half a minute, he actually found that round bone somewhat comforting; of course, if one didn't look at the empty holes on its face, the sensory experience would be much better.

But he was puzzled, "Isn't this the logo of the Tiankui Snake Company?"