Chapter 95 – Death Crow Forest, Blood-Red Scarecrow


【Wow, what a large forest of meat. If you see so much food during a famine, it will definitely give you a sense of security.】

Lin Baici didn’t recognize the trees in these woods.

They were short, sturdy, and twisted. Each branch looked like the bony arm of an old person, twisted into various shapes, and also like the claws of the undead, performing eerie prayer rituals.

There weren’t many leaves on the trees, and most of them were blood red. Squeezing them hard seemed to produce blood.

But what frightened people the most was that each tree branch had a “wild game” corpse hanging from it with hemp rope.

These corpses included sheep, deer, cows, as well as wolves, tigers, and leopards. Whether they were herbivores or carnivores, their skins were peeled off, their bellies were opened, their internal organs were cleaned out, and some even had their heads chopped off.

If one didn’t often interact with these animals, they wouldn’t be able to recognize them at all because after their skins were peeled off, their appearances changed significantly.

Drip! Drip!

Occasionally, blood dripped from the corpses and fell to the ground, forming a dark black puddle that made people’s hearts race.

There was a foul smell in the air.

Everyone felt a chill, and many girls covered their mouths, afraid to scream and cause trouble.

“Xiaobai!”

Hua Yueyu leaned towards Lin Baici.

The branches and leaves in this forest were not lush, but with so many wild game corpses hanging densely, they blocked a lot of sunlight. As a result, the forest appeared dim. Coupled with the shadows of these corpses on the ground, it looked as if the corpses were gnashing their teeth and making eerie screams, filling the area with a terrifying and gloomy atmosphere.

After scanning the corpses of the wild game being dried, Lin Baici looked to his right.

There was a group of about thirty people, all of them with exhausted and anxious faces, filled with deep fear.

The man leading them was in his forties, with a square face and a bald head. He was wearing a black suit, but the jacket was off and draped over his shoulders, leaving him with only a white shirt.

The white shirt was stained with dirt, blood, and bird droppings. Even from this distance, Lin Baici could smell the stench coming from them.

“Starting from Douluo”

【A decisive man. If he hadn’t fallen into this God’s Ruins, his life would have been smooth sailing, enjoying the joy of being a winner.】

【No, this kind of person entering the God’s Ruins might achieve even greater accomplishments. After all, life in reality no longer poses any challenges for him.】

【What ordinary people strive for their whole lives, they were born stepping on it.】

Lin Baici carefully observed the bald man. The Food God only commented on him, indicating that he was worth paying attention to. However, in the crowd, Lin Baici saw someone “familiar”.

It was the girl who was responsible for pressing the buttons in the elevator when he went to the underground shooting range.

Her blue one-step skirt uniform was covered in stains, mostly bird droppings. The skirt on the right side had been torn, probably because it hindered her movements.

With just one step, her thighs were visible.

Her flesh-colored stockings were full of runs and holes, and there was a bloodstain on her left leg. She only had one high-heeled shoe left on her left foot.

Lin Baici remembered that this elevator girl was very beautiful and had very good manners. But at this moment, it seemed like all her vitality had been drained, leaving only fear.

She bent over, lowered her head, and huddled there, like a frightened rabbit.

【A woman addicted to collecting designer handbags. With one LV bag, she can successfully find a partner. If one doesn’t work, then two!】

【If it’s three, you can choose any posture when playing poker!】

“I’ll give you one last chance. If these wild game continue to be damaged or lost, I will chop you up and offer you as a dish to the king.”

The Chief Eunuch scolded.

“It won’t happen again!”

The bald man held a bronze halberd and swore through gritted teeth.

“Hmph!”

The Chief Eunuch snorted coldly and looked at Lin Baici and the others, instructing the bald man, “Teach them what to do, just don’t make any mistakes!”

“Give them some weapons!”

After the Chief Eunuch finished speaking, he turned and left.

Some soldiers threw their bronze halberds, crossbows, and arrows on the ground.

As soon as he left, the oppressive atmosphere immediately lightened.

“What’s going on?”

Guo Zheng waved at the bald man and said, “Come here and explain!”

The bald man held the spear and scrutinized the people. As for Guo Zheng, he ignored him. He didn’t like this guy’s attitude.

“What the fuck, ignoring me? You’re so arrogant!”

Guo Zheng laughed. If I can’t deal with Lin Baici, I can’t deal with you either. He rolled up his sleeves, preparing to teach the bald man a lesson.

“Lin God, this is Wang Mingfu, the owner of Palm Harbor Resort.”

Gu Rongjie stood beside Lin Baici and introduced him.

Although she was still unhappy, she had adjusted her mindset and was ready to serve Lin Baici with the enthusiasm of a secretary. She wanted to make him feel that she could be his right-hand woman and receive his divine favor.

At the very least, she didn’t want Lin Baici to treat her as cannon fodder.

“In the God’s Ruins, nothing matters!”

Guo Zheng sneered.

“If you continue with this attitude, you will die!”

Wang Mingfu glanced at Guo Zheng and casually made a sarcastic remark. He then looked at Lin Baici and said, “Miss Gu, who is this…”

Someone who made Gu Rongjie so cautious shouldn’t be insignificant.

Gu Rongjie didn’t answer. Instead, she looked at Lin Baici with an inquiring gaze, implying that without Lin Baici’s permission, she wouldn’t reveal his identity as a Divine Hunter.

“What exactly is the contamination of the rules in this situation?”Lin Baici picked up a crossbow and said, “Everyone, come pick up weapons.”

Hua Yueyu took a bow and tried to pull the bowstring, but found it too difficult. She then switched to a bronze spear.

The others were also choosing weapons.

“Do you see the hanging meat? Every now and then, a large group of crows will come to eat them. Our task is to guard them!”

Qifen turned back and instructed his companions, “You guys go set up defenses, I’ll take them over!”

“General Wang, be careful!”

“General Wang, come back quickly!”

“That guy insulted you, should we beat him up?”

The people under General Wang were close-knit and relied on him.

“No need, it’s not worth it to fight over pride!”

General Wang waved his hand and called Lin Baici and the others, “Let’s go, those crows might come back soon!”

The group followed General Wang and headed towards the ten o’clock direction.

“You’ve been here for a while, right? Have you found a way to drive away the crows?”

Lin Baici looked around, “How many times have the crows attacked? How long does each attack last?”

“We use smoke, spears, and straw men to lure and drive away the crows.”

General Wang didn’t hide anything.

“Straw men? I’ve made them before in my hometown.”

Zhou Ya’s face lit up, she finally felt useful.

“Hehe!”

General Wang smiled.

Hua Yueyu frowned, wondering if his smile was a bit strange.

After walking for about a hundred meters, General Wang stopped.

“This is the meat forest you are responsible for!”

General Wang took a deep breath, his expression cold, “Don’t expect us to help you, you are responsible for your own life and death!”

The others couldn’t help but look at Lin Baici.

Du Xin sneered, thinking to herself, General Wang, you’re walking a narrow path.

We have three divine hunters here, and with Lin Baici’s strength, do we need your help?

It’s you who might end up crying for help later.

Hey!

If only I were a hunter.

Du Xin felt frustrated, she knew that Lin Baici didn’t like her, not because of her appearance, but because her lifestyle was too unrestrained.

After all, even Du Xin herself knew that if she wanted to get married in the future, she had to find someone who was more foolish and cowardly to marry, otherwise her pre-marriage life would be exposed and she would most likely be abused by her husband’s family.

Damn it!

If I had known I would enter the God’s Ruins, I would have been a good girl before, so that my value would be higher.

“No one is guarding here, can’t we run away?”

Hua Yueyu looked around and couldn’t see any guards.

“You can’t run, but you can try!”

General Wang sneered.

“Can you explain it clearly?”

Xia Hongyao was unhappy with General Wang’s attitude.

General Wang actually didn’t want to say it. Whether these people live or die is none of his business. But he thought that if they couldn’t guard this meat forest, that eunuch might blame him. So he explained.

“Some of our people tried to run, but when the crows attacked, they grabbed a few of them and dropped them from the air, smashing them into meat patties. And a few others were caught by the guards, who, right in front of us, gutted them, skinned them, and made them into straw men, hanging them on wooden frames in the forest.”

General Wang now remembered those two scenes and felt a chill.

The others looked at each other.

General Wang took out his watch from his pocket. Every tick of the second hand represented death approaching.

“In about ten minutes, the crows will come. Take care of yourselves.”

General Wang ran back, he still had to command the battle.

The others looked at Lin Baici, waiting for his orders.

“Spread out and check the surrounding environment. If you find anything, report immediately!”

After Lin Baici finished speaking, he saw Du Xin and Gu Rongjie wanting to come over, so he immediately stopped them, “You two go to the left, Lü Yingxi, you take a few people and go to the front.”

“Zhou Ya, let’s go!”

Du Xin pulled Zhou Ya, “Don’t make trouble for yourself, Lin God won’t take care of you!”

Lin Baici walked to the right. The bodies of the wild game hanging from the trees cast shadows on the ground, making it look scarred.

“No bodies!”

Xia Hongyao deduced, “According to General Wang’s miserable situation, there must be dead people. So where did the bodies go?”

“Lin God! Lin God!”

Gu Rongjie suddenly shouted anxiously.

Lin Baici immediately ran over, Xia Hongyao followed easily, but Hua Yueyu was left behind. With her physique, she couldn’t keep up with the two.

“Lin God, look!”

Gu Rongjie saw Lin Baici and immediately reported.

In a forest about twenty meters away from everyone, there were crosses made of wooden stakes, about three meters high.

On these crosses were naked bodies, their wrists and ankles nailed with one-foot-long wooden wedges to keep them in place.

“Aren’t you asking where the bodies are?”

Lin Baici rubbed his nose, “This is it!”

The others ran over when they heard Gu Rongjie’s shout, and they froze when they saw this scene.

“This is too cruel, isn’t it?”

A girl started crying because they felt that they could end up like this too.

“That eunuch is truly ruthless. I wonder if he will use other cruel tortures like human pigs or lingchi later?”

Gu Rongjie suddenly felt that being torn apart by horses wasn’t so unacceptable anymore. At least with this punishment, they would die quickly, unlike the current situation where they would be tortured.

“So the meaning of straw man is not using straw, but using real people.”Zhou Ya felt bitter in her mouth. She thought she would have a chance to perform by being a scarecrow, but she didn’t expect scarecrows to mean this.

“This wasn’t done by that dead eunuch!”

Lin Baici’s face turned serious as he walked towards the scarecrows.

“What?”

Everyone was shocked.

“It’s not him, then who is it?”

Guo Zheng pondered, “Could it be the work of monsters? But aren’t monsters crows? Or is the crow that Wang Mingfu mentioned not the same bird we’ve seen, but a ‘crow person’?”

Everyone looked at Lin Baici, waiting for his answer. Gu Rongjie, who had seen the darkness of society and the horror of human nature, was the first to react.

“This couldn’t be done by Mr. Wang… uh, Wang Mingfu, right?”

Gu Rongjie was scared and had goosebumps all over her body.

Everyone was startled by Gu Rongjie’s deduction.

“That Mr. Wang said that those who try to escape will be disemboweled, skinned, and have their tendons pulled out, but these dozen or so people haven’t been skinned!”

Lin Baici examined the bodies.

Their bodies were tattered and torn, with no good skin left. They looked like they had been pecked by sharp bird beaks, covered in blood.

Each body had its eyes eaten, leaving only two holes. Most of their stomachs were torn open, with their intestines scattered all over the ground, like a buffet that had been picked apart by a group of birds, making a mess everywhere.

And the heads of these bodies had been pecked open, with empty skulls inside. It seemed that their brains had been eaten.

“It’s unlikely. How could people be so cruel?”

Zhou Ya said, but then she remembered that Guo Zheng had killed someone in the underground wine cellar and immediately shut her mouth.

“Why would they do this?”

Xia Hongyao blurted out.

“To attract crows with them and protect the wild game in the trees.”

Lin Baici confirmed.

“These bodies have many wounds, which should have been inflicted in a fight with the crows. Because their combat effectiveness decreased and they became useless, they were made into scarecrows!”

There was something even more cruel that Lin Baici didn’t say.

Most of these bodies were women, short and weak-looking, easy to bully. They had no combat effectiveness and were naturally the first to be sacrificed.

[That’s how nature is. Survival of the fittest. In the absence of laws and moral constraints, individual strength and intelligence become the key determining factors for status!]

[That Mr. Wang is decisive and ruthless, a hero. Although he is cruel, he has indeed survived and formed a team that listens to his commands.]

In reality, when the crows attacked, everyone was in chaos and couldn’t protect the wild game. They could only watch as the crows ate the meat.

It wasn’t until Wang Mingfu keenly discovered that when someone attacked the crows and got pecked, the crows would swarm and attack that bleeding person.

Wang Mingfu immediately had everyone bleed, trying to lure the crows away. But it didn’t work. Then he decisively revised the plan and found someone seriously injured, smearing fresh blood on their body to make them into a scarecrow.

And he succeeded. The nearby crows were all attracted.

In the subsequent attacks by the crows, Wang Mingfu used this tactic to save most of the wild game, but many people died as well.

When the eunuch came to collect the meat, Wang Mingfu advised him, saying that there were too few people and they couldn’t protect the wild game.

So Lin Baici and the others, who didn’t need to soak in medicinal wine for the time being, were brought over.

Wang Mingfu didn’t tell Lin Baici and the others the truth, wanting them to witness the horror of those crow monsters and experience the despair of losing the wild game and being killed. Otherwise, if he directly let them vote for “scarecrow,” they definitely wouldn’t do it.

Because there were too many hypocritical and cowardly people in this world.

But Wang Mingfu didn’t expect that Lin Baici would deduce their tactics just by seeing those scarecrows.

“Little Lin’s deduction is definitely correct!”

Xia Hongyao had great confidence in Lin Baici’s intelligence. “That Wang Mingfu is really bad!”

“Forget about whether he’s bad or not, what should we do?”

Guo Zheng glanced at Lin Baici, then looked at Gu Rongjie and the others.

According to his thinking, since Lin Baici had found the correct tactic to pass through, it naturally had to be used. The question was, who should be the scarecrow?

This Lin Baici was really strong. Following him would definitely allow them to leave this God’s Ruins. The only trouble was that he wasn’t ruthless enough and hesitated to kill people.

Some people at the scene were slow-witted and still worried or trying to come up with a solution. Those with quick minds had already moved towards Lin Baici.

Because Guo Zheng hadn’t concealed his cruelty, some people could tell that he was going to be the scarecrow.

No one wanted to be the unlucky one.

“Lin God, stop pretending to be ignorant and quickly choose a scarecrow!”

Guo Zheng urged. With this sentence, everyone’s backs went cold and their scalps tingled.

Lin Baici’s face was solemn as he stared at Guo Zheng. “Are you teaching me how to do things?”

“Fine, fine, you’re amazing, you have the final say!”

Guo Zheng shrugged his shoulders, secretly determined that Lin Baici wouldn’t be able to handle those crows later, whether he would become a scarecrow or not.

Once he did, everyone would know that he was a hypocrite.

Gu Rongjie wanted to suggest that Lin Baici and Guo Zheng go to Wang Mingfu and pick a few scarecrows, and also bring a group of cannon fodder. With their strength, even with ten times the courage of Wang Mingfu, they wouldn’t dare to resist.

But this idea was too ruthless.

Once it was carried out, it would definitely lower her image in Lin Baici’s heart.

Gu Rongjie was so angry that her face twisted, and she grabbed her hair with both hands. It would be so much better if she had divine grace and was a divine hunter.

Why bother to act according to these people’s faces?

[The cannibal crows are coming, get ready!]Upon hearing this, Lin Baici immediately picked up a relatively intact scarecrow corpse, pulled the wooden cross from the ground, and hurried back: “Quick, the crows are coming, prepare for battle, Guo Zheng, you also carry a scarecrow back!”

Guo Zheng didn’t refuse, he was desperate anyway.

When everyone ran back to the forest where the game was hanging, they saw a flock of crows flying from the southwest. They were vast and mighty, like a dark cloud covering the sun, and soon flew over the forest.

“Is…is this what you call a crow?”

Du Xin’s face turned pale with fright. Who has ever seen crows like this?

These crows, with their feathers all black, seemed to reflect light. What was terrifying was that their heads were disproportionately large, like adult mane dogs.

Their beaks were curved and sharp, like awls. When their wings spread out, they were more than a meter long. This shape was even more domineering than a golden eagle.

【Man-eating crows, they are violent in nature, they especially like to eat primates, especially golden monkeys. Their sharp beaks can easily peck open a monkey’s skull and eat the brain inside.】

【Man-eating crows generally do not attack animals larger than themselves, but they are extremely vengeful. Once attacked, they will retaliate in groups.】

【They are afraid of fire and smoke!】

【They are frugal and do not waste food. Once they catch prey, they will try to eat it all, and will not hunt again before that.】

Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!

The man-eating crows swooped down like dive bombers, targeting the game hanging in the trees.

“Quickly go and chop some branches and firewood, and make a few bonfires.”

Lin Baici urged, quickly loaded his crossbow, and shot at the nearest man-eating crow.

Whoosh!

The crossbow bolt shot into the wing of the man-eating crow.

Caw! Caw!

The cries of these man-eating crows were unpleasant, like an old woman with a hoarse voice calling out, and as the Food God said, they were extremely vengeful.

The man-eating crow attacked by Lin Baici, with a flap of its wings, turned around and pounced on him.

“Little Lin!”

Xia Hongyao, holding a short knife, was about to release her divine grace to kill this man-eating crow, when a flying stone suddenly shot out. Even though the man-eating crow was flying at high speed, the stone still accurately hit its head.

Bang!

The crow’s head was smashed, a burst of dark red blood exploded, and a few feathers scattered.

Thud!

The man-eating crow fell to the ground.

Seeing this, the nearby dozen or so man-eating crows were not afraid, but gave up pecking at the game and all flew towards Lin Baici.

The clay man started to fire, its slingshot was played very well, almost one stone per second, shooting at those man-eating crows.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

The group of man-eating crows fell to the ground one after another like snowflakes in winter, without exception, all their heads were blown open.

“Holy shit!”

Seeing this, Guo Zheng was envious, Lin Baici’s divine grace was so strong!

The key was that the thing was very good at hiding, and every time a stone was shot out, it was from a different location, which meant that it knew to change places after each shot, which was amazing.

Anyway, Guo Zheng widened his eyes, but couldn’t find the thing that shot the stone.

“Lin is awesome!”

Du Xin shouted, feeling that this level was simply a piece of cake.

The man-eating crows looked quite scary, but when everyone saw Lin Baici kill more than a dozen in one go, their anxiety and worry immediately lessened a lot.

With Lin Baici, there is hope!

No problem!

Gu Rongjie felt that Wang Mingfu’s desire to see their jokes was too naive. Wait a minute, let you see the power of Lin, it will blow your mind.


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