Chapter 331: Into the Forest (11)
“Now! Move!”
At Anthony’s command, the four people hidden in the bushes immediately sprang to their feet and sprinted toward the settlement ahead.
When they reached the food processing area, the Black coach was the first to stop.
His assignment was to stand guard over the unconscious Carib tribesmen. If any of them woke up before the operation was over, he was to put them back to sleep by physical means. In truth, Everly’s preferred solution had been to “strike while they’re down”—to finish off the dr*gged cannibals with weapons and eliminate any future threat. But the coach couldn’t bring himself to do it.
It was understandable. After all, he had grown up in a civilized society. Killing in self-defense when his own life was in danger was one thing, but asking him to slaughter a group of unconscious people—even if they were cannibals—like some cold-blooded murderer was a psychological burden he simply couldn’t bear.
If she could, Everly would have gladly carried out the “righteous judgment” in his place. Unfortunately, she had another mission.
The remaining three reached the center of the settlement, where Everly voluntarily came to a stop.
Her task was to search the area around the altar for any suspicious ritual formations or mystical objects and destroy them, thereby dispelling the eerie power that concealed the cannibal tribe.
Stopping beside her was the anthropologist, Sophia.
Throughout their previous adventures, this horror-movie heroine had more than proven the breadth of her knowledge and the sharpness of her mind. With Everly relying on practical experience and Sophia approaching the problem from a professional perspective, searching together would no doubt make the process much faster.
As for Anthony, he first escorted the two women to the altar. Along the way, he smashed apart the wooden cage holding the captives and rescued all eight survivors.
Once every hostage had been freed, he gave his two companions a nod, gripped his homemade weapon, and charged toward the outskirts of the settlement—
While Everly and Sophia searched for anything related to the barrier, Anthony would patrol the perimeter of the settlement. That way, even if some of the Carib tribesmen were delayed on the way back and failed to return in time, he would spot them immediately and nip any danger in the bud.
As it turned out, Anthony’s decision to leave ahead of the others was an extremely wise one.
The rescued survivors had all been deeply traumatized.
After being freed from the wooden cage, they had wanted to pour out their fears to the strongest among them, Anthony, hoping to find some emotional comfort. But Anthony was like a gust of wind—he rushed past and disappeared just as quickly.
Unable to find him, the helpless survivors turned to Everly and Sophia instead, crowding around them and chattering nonstop.
“Sob… sob… You finally came. We thought we were going to die here…”
“How much longer do we have to stay here? Why aren’t we leaving already?”
At that moment, Everly was examining the Carib altar for any suspicious ritual formations.
It was a quadrangular pyramidal platform built from stone and plaster mortar. The top had been leveled into a flat square roughly the size of a bedroom.
At each of its four corners stood a torch pillar, while at the center rested a solid rectangular stone altar.
The altar stone was long and narrow, resembling a log laid flat on the ground. Years of exposure to the elements had weathered the rock, leaving its edges rounded and worn. Four severed heads rested in the middle of the stone: three belonged to the Carib tribesmen killed by Everly’s group of four, while the fourth belonged to a survivor named Abby.
A thick layer of dried blood coated the stone. The pungent smell of blood hung in the air long before anyone came close.
Aside from these gruesome sights, there were no unusual ritual formations or mysterious objects anywhere atop the crude altar.
Just to be safe, Everly walked over to the stone slab and rapped it with her knuckles. It was solid. She then tried to move it, only to discover that it had been cemented to the base of the altar with mortar. It was firmly fixed in place and couldn’t be budged at all.
“…Hey, why are you ignoring us? How much longer are we supposed to stay here?”
“Yeah! This place is way too dangerous. Hurry up and get us out of here…”
As Everly searched for clues, the rescued survivors kept yammering beside her. When she continued to ignore them, one of them even reached out and tried to shove her.
She was already irritated enough from failing to find what she was looking for. Looking up and seeing the survivors trembling while wearing expressions of accusation only made her even more annoyed.
What kind of attitude was that? Anthony had rescued them, sure, but hadn’t she risked her life saving them too? Why were they treating people differently based on who looked stronger?
With that thought, Everly grabbed Abby’s severed head off the stone altar and stuffed it into the hands of the boyfriend who had tried to push her.
“Aah! What are you doing?!”
Her gaze turned razor-sharp as she glared at him. “Hold on to it. That’s your girlfriend’s head. You didn’t protect her when she was butchered, and if you dare throw her away now, I’ll send you to keep those primitives company.”
“Y-you… y-you…”
Just as the confrontation was escalating, the flap of the tent below was suddenly pulled open. Sophia poked her head out.
“Everly! I found something! Come quick!”
“Coming.”
With more important matters at hand, Everly didn’t waste any more time arguing with the survivors. After giving the boyfriend one final warning, she strode down from the altar and entered the priestess’s lavish tent.
The tent was divided into two rooms. The outer room served as living quarters, furnished with animal hides, dried grass, and other simple necessities. The inner room, meanwhile, was used as a storage room.
The storage room was very dark. Everly stepped inside and switched on her phone’s flashlight, sweeping the beam around the room. Several wooden shelves lined the interior, each crammed with all sorts of strange and curious objects.
Some had clearly been looted from outside explorers and bore obvious hallmarks of modern civilization. Others were unmistakably products of a primitive tribe, exuding an ancient, untamed aura.
As they made their way between the shelves, Everly’s gaze accidentally fell upon a broken totem pole resting on one of them. She came to an abrupt halt.
“This is…”
Hearing her, Sophia, who was leading the way, glanced back and immediately explained, “Judging from the patterns carved on it, this should be a Winton totem pole. The Winton were a branch of the Native Americans in North America and were once distributed around Dalifer State as well. Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, they were driven from their homeland by European colonists and forced to migrate to Yanifly State. The two tribes probably came into contact during that period.”
Thinking Everly was interested in the objects on the shelves, Sophia casually added, “It’s not just the totem pole. Everything on these shelves is war booty looted from different tribes. For example, that feathered serpent mask over there clearly came from the Aztecs. And the spiral-shell necklace next to it is obviously the work of the Calusa.”
Following Sophia’s explanation, Everly took another careful look at the items on the shelves. Sure enough, upon closer inspection, their shapes and styles all differed significantly. They clearly hadn’t originated from a single tribe.
So the Carib people had fought the Winton before…
Lost in thought, the two women passed through the rows of shelves and arrived at the innermost part of the tent. There were no shelves or miscellaneous items here. Instead, sheets of stitched-together human skin hung from the ceiling like layered curtains, reaching all the way to the ground.
The pale yellow surfaces of the macabre tapestries were painted with colorful scenes using pigments. The outermost skins were relatively new, their colors still vivid. The farther inward they went, the older the tapestries became, their pigments increasingly faded. Some even bore pitted scorch marks from fire.
“These are the tribal records left behind by generations of Carib high priests,” Sophia said, pointing to the outermost human-skin tapestry. “Look here.”
Following Sophia’s instruction, Everly raised her phone and used its flashlight to illuminate the hanging tapestry, scanning it from top to bottom.
The first panel depicted a fierce battle.
A gigantic, crimson-skinned figure with a ferocious face was locked in combat with a giant serpent on a vast plain.
The reason Everly knew the red-skinned man was a giant was that beside him and the serpent were a crowd of tiny figures no bigger than fingers. Half of the little people had yellow skin, while the other half had red skin. Brandishing spears and other primitive weapons, they swarmed around the two colossal beings, shouting as they fought one another.
In the next panel, the red-skinned giant had slain the serpent, while the red-skinned people had massacred the yellow-skinned people. Corpses littered the plain, and blood flowed like rivers. At the edge of the scene, several white-skinned figures wearing tricorn hats hid in the distance, spying on the battlefield through what looked like telescopes.
As she continued downward, Everly discovered that the red-skinned people and the white-skinned people were actually allies.
After the war, the red-skinned giant now wore a belt fashioned from the giant serpent’s body around his waist, and the red-skinned settlement had become filled with roasted human corpses.
The red-skinned people did not eat human heads. Instead, they chopped off the heads of the yellow-skinned people and traded them to the white-skinned people in exchange for industrial goods such as iron pots, wool blankets, and mirrors. Both sides repeatedly admired their spoils, clearly delighted with what they had gained.
But the partnership did not last long. In the very next panel, the two factions had abruptly gone from friendly trading partners to bitter enemies.
The transition was so sudden that Everly couldn’t make sense of how it had happened. One way or another, the red-skinned people and the white-skinned people had ended up at war.
The red-skinned people still had the red-skinned giant fighting on their side, but behind the white-skinned people stood a group of priests and ministers holding crosses aloft. The red-skinned warriors continued to wield primitive weapons, while the white-skinned soldiers had already formed ranks and unleashed volleys from their muskets.
The outcome of the battle was obvious. The red-skinned people suffered devastating casualties and, like beaten strays, fled into the forest under relentless pursuit by the white-skinned people.
The next two paintings were the most important.
In the first, the red-skinned people who had fled into the forest performed a ritual. They offered up every child in their tribe, killing and beheading them as sacrifices to the red-skinned giant. The giant devoured the severed heads, then removed the dead serpent from around his waist, peeled off its beautiful turquoise-green skin, and handed it to the little people.
In the second painting, the red-skinned people draped the serpent’s skin over a stone pillar in their settlement. A turquoise-green radiance burst forth from the pillar, enveloping the entire tribe. Outside the glow, the pursuing white-skinned warriors had blood streaming from their eyes. They staggered about in circles, thrown into complete confusion.
“So what we’re looking for is a stone pillar covered with serpent skin?”
“That’s right. These kinds of stone pillars were once common throughout Central America. They were carved with the deity worshipped by the tribe and served as the spiritual symbol and focal point of the entire community. They’re quite large—around three meters tall and forty to sixty centimeters wide. I already searched the entire tent and didn’t find anything that matched the description, so I called you over to ask whether you’d seen anything similar in the settlement.”
Everly was certain she hadn’t.
A three-meter-tall stone pillar would stand as high as two tribesmen. If such a conspicuous structure existed, there was no way she would have overlooked it.
Unless it wasn’t standing upright…
At that thought, the image of something flashed through her mind, and her eyes suddenly lit up.
She understood.