Starting to Gain Experience from Push-Ups Chapter 1388 - 670: The Giant Well

Could it be those monsters are planning something tonight?

At that thought, Xu Hao quickly shook off his remaining sleepiness and sat up.

He gingerly climbed off the bed, his feet landing on the cold cement floor.

He then grabbed the jacket and trousers draped over the back of the chair and swiftly put them on.

Bending down, he pulled his sneakers out from under the bed, hurriedly put them on, and tied the laces tightly.

Once dressed, Xu Hao walked quickly to the door.

His right hand gripped the rusted door handle, thumb pressed against the latch, and slowly pushed downwards.

"Clack."

With a faint sound, the wooden door opened a crack.

A cold wind, heavy with moisture, slipped in through the gap and hit his face.

The wind carried a long-lasting moldy smell with a faint trace of inexplicable stench.

Xu Hao turned sideways, like a vigilant night cat, and squeezed through the crack in the door.

The courtyard was foggy.

Gray-white mist rolled along the ground, swallowing his ankles.

He hugged the wall, inching towards the big iron gate of the courtyard.

The gate was ajar.

He peered through the gap between the two iron doors at the dirt road outside.

The road was deserted.

Yet the sound of "rumble, rumble" grew clearer, seemingly coming from the east side of the village.

Xu Hao hesitated for a moment, then pushed open the iron gate and slipped into the narrow alley outside.

He deliberately lowered his center of gravity, knees slightly bent, landing first on the outside edge of his foot, then transitioning the weight to his entire foot.

This was the tactic he’d honed over years of street fighting.

Even on a dirt road filled with gravel and dry twigs, he hardly made a sound.

Following the two-meter-wide dirt wall alley, Xu Hao crept towards the direction of the sound.

The further east he walked, the thicker the fog became.

A fine layer of condensation coated the surface of the dirt wall.

Whenever Xu Hao’s fingers brushed against the wall, he’d feel the discomfort of slimy wet coldness.

Turning at an intersection, he suddenly stopped.

Ahead in the fog, twenty or thirty meters away, were faint glimmers of light.

Not the usual warm yellow light, but a ghostly cool green hue.

Xu Hao pressed his body against the shadow of the wall, sticking out half his head.

Ever since he began cultivating the "Great Sun Burning Body Technique," his senses were far more acute than before.

He saw several figures carrying white paper lanterns, lined up and moving slowly along the dirt road.

Upon closer inspection, they were villagers from Ancient Locust Village.

They wore thick black cotton coats, faces pale, expressions wooden.

Despite it being a summer night, they wrapped themselves tightly.

The procession consisted of about ten people, including men, women, and children.

Their walking posture was extremely strange, with stiff arms hanging by their sides, showing no motion.

When stepping forward, their knees barely bent, heels didn’t leave the ground—moving rigidly across the dirt road.

At the end of the procession was a familiar figure to Xu Hao.

Supervisor Wu.

Instead of carrying a lantern, he was pulling an old single-wheeled cart, laboriously moving forward.

"Rumble—rumble—"

The axle of the cart was obviously deformed, causing the wheel to jam every half turn, dragging a deep groove into the ground.

On the cart, there was a mound covered with a tattered waterproof cloth.

As the cart jolted, dark red liquid continually dripped from the edge of the cloth, splattering dry soil, creating patches of dark spots.

The nauseating stench emanated from the cart itself.

Breath held, Xu Hao stayed still, quietly lurking in the shadows, observing.

Once the procession passed the intersection, he emerged from the corner, trailing a hundred meters behind, following the dark red stains on the ground.

The procession finally stopped at an open area in the center of the village.

This was the old temple site of Ancient Locust Village.

The dilapidated great halls had mostly collapsed, leaving a wall full of holes.

In the very center of the ancestral hall, instead of planting a tree, there stood a huge well, stark and abrupt.

The well’s opening was three to four times larger than that of an ordinary well, surrounded by a ring of darkened bluestone railings.

Xu Hao hid behind a stone lion outside the ancestral hall’s main gate, using the ghostly green glow of the paper lanterns in the yard to clearly discern the scene inside.

Supervisor Wu stopped in his tracks and released the handles of the wooden cart.

He turned around, walked to the side of the cart, and swiftly uncovered the rain cloth.

Xu Hao’s pupils suddenly contracted.

Piled on the cart were not miscellaneous items but a heap of skinned animals.

They looked like sheep or dogs, but their limbs had been brutally broken, twisted grotesquely in the opposite direction.

From a distance, they resembled enormous, flesh-colored spiders, entangled and stacked upon one another.

With a blank expression, Supervisor Wu bent down, grasped a skinned animal by the hind leg with both hands, and brutally yanked it off the cart.

He dragged the bloodied carcass to the edge of the large, black well.

With a fierce exertion of his arms, he hurled the animal directly into the well.

One second.

Two seconds.

No sound of the animal hitting the water and causing a splash came from below.

Nor was there the dull thud of a heavy object striking the well’s bottom.

Instead, there came an exceptionally fine and dense chewing sound.

"Creak... Munch..."

It was as if countless mouths full of sharp, fine teeth were simultaneously tearing at flesh and crunching bones deep within the well.

The sound, amplified by the well shaft, echoed in the silent courtyard of the ancestral hall, making one’s scalp tingle with horror.

Xu Hao felt a nauseating tide surge in his stomach, a hint of bile rising in his throat.

The bun and pickles he had eaten in the afternoon threatened to come up violently.

He held it down with effort, forcibly swallowing back the sourness that welled up.

Supervisor Wu repeated his earlier actions, throwing the animals from the cart one by one into the well.

The chewing noises at the bottom grew louder and more frequent, mingled with a certain joyful and greedy humming.

Until the cart was empty.

Supervisor Wu stepped back two paces, turned around, and his icy gaze swept over the villagers holding lanterns.

The villagers uniformly placed their lanterns on the ground.

Then, they lined up, one by one approaching the well’s railing.

The first was a gaunt old man.

He extended his arms above the well’s opening, then fished out a sickle for harvesting rice from his sleeve.

Without a moment’s hesitation, he gripped the sickle and slashed a deep gash across his left wrist.

Bright red blood trickled from his withered fingers, dripping into the well.

The old man slowly raised his head, his deeply wrinkled face beginning to twitch with irregular muscle spasms.

Then, his mouth corners contorted furiously towards his ears, revealing the eerily perfect smile Xu Hao had seen during the day, one like a mask.

The pull was so intense that the skin at the corners of his mouth tore slightly.

After cutting, the old man stepped aside.

A middle-aged woman stepped forward, took the sickle, and repeated the same action.

No one made a sound of pain, and no one showed any fear.

Only the sound of the sickle slicing flesh and the drip of blood falling into the well broke the silence.

Xu Hao crouched behind the stone lion, his hands clenched tightly into fists.

Finally, he understood why the villagers had appeared so stiff during the day.

Their blood was likely almost completely drained by whatever resided in that deep well.

The entirety of Ancient Locust Village was nothing but a massive feeding ground.

The villagers were living vessels providing sustenance.

Whatever lurked beneath that well was surely the true form of Jiang Chen that the boss sought, or a part of its body!

Having identified the target, Xu Hao’s heart started pounding faster.

Now, he just needed to quietly withdraw, find a safe corner to report the situation to the boss, and his undercover mission would be a great success.

He took a deep breath of the metallic-tasting cold air, forcibly suppressed his excitement, planted his heels on the ground, preparing to retreat along the wall.

Just then.

An icy chill suddenly surged up from the back of his neck.

Without warning, a hand landed on his left shoulder.