There are legends of the twelve ancient gods in the Miao religion, which is supposed to originate from the religious culture of Jiuli, which is enough to prove this from the carved pattern in the middle of the stone house, on the stone with the bones, each stone platform has a different pattern in front.

In line with the bronze circle we saw earlier at the entrance of the temple, each stone platform must symbolize an ancient god, and the religious roots of Jiuli are actually related to butterflies.

The corpses on the stone platform were supposed to be sacrifices to these ancient gods.

"How can the Jiuli clan treat butterflies as gods?" Tian Ji looked at these corpses and muttered to himself in horror. "Even if it's a sacrifice, you don't have to do such a bloody storm."

"It should be a totem worship, and the butterfly may be a symbol, and the ancestors of Jiuli firmly believe that they can gain strength and skills from this totem." Wen Ru also squatted in the hollow place in the middle to check. "But the origin of this totem is puzzling."

"Elder Wen, there are hieroglyphics here." Ye Zhiqiu said on the side of the stone platform.

Wen Ru hurriedly walked over, and we followed, and on the side of the stone platform there was a row of words with the same shape as the one we saw in the corridor before.

Wen Ru and Ye Zhiqiu identified it for a long time, and finally translated it after repeated research, and Ye Zhiqiu deduced that the temple of the ancestral god was built according to the Qiyao calendar, which enshrined the ancestral god of Jiuli, and no one was allowed to enter this place without authorization, only every 1,620 years, the priest led the clan to come to worship once.

After the sacrifice is completed, you must leave immediately, and the sacrifice is a living person, which was not a cruel thing at that time, just like in the minds of the ancestors of Jiuli, it is the supreme glory to be able to dedicate their lives to the ancestral gods.

"Only those who have been chosen by the ancestral gods can come to worship......," Ye Zhiqiu looked up at us with an anxious expression. The priest asked us to come here as a sacrifice! ”

"And after each sacrifice, the process will be carved on the stone slab of the corridor outside, we only see the murals of two sacrifices, the last sacrifice was in the Qin Dynasty, according to the time, it seems that the Jiuli tribe missed the time of the next sacrifice." I took a deep breath and looked at Ye Zhiqiu.

"The priests of the descendants of Jiuli should not know the location of the ancestral temple, presumably the tradition of sacrifice has not been continued because the temple has been secretly interrupted." The palace lord nodded to us. "However, what I am curious about now is that the first time we have come here, and it is also the first time we have heard of the Jiuli Ancestral God, since the tributes used for the sacrifice must be personally selected by the ancestral gods, why did the sacrifice, which has been interrupted for nearly two thousand years, start again after we appear, and why did they choose us?"

"I'm sure I heard the sound in the priest's house, it was definitely not someone outside, it was clearly from the room, and it came out of nowhere." Tian Ji's face was solemn. "And I've always been paying attention to the mouths of the priests and the men of Jiuli, those words definitely didn't come from their mouths, are they......"

As for the strange sounds of that night, I had paid attention to everyone in the room as much as Tian Ji, and it was certain that it could never have been said by the people in the room, and as for the outside, I also checked it outside, and what surprised me the most was that those majestic and ethereal voices like oracles actually came from a wooden stake carved with the pattern of ghosts and gods, but it was impossible to hide the subordinates there.

"Not to mention the illusory ones, I wonder what would have happened if we had really been chosen as a sacrifice?" Liao Kai asked distraughtly.

I have always paid attention to the characteristics of the temple, although the style is rare but almost certain, it is symmetrically distributed on the central axis, and the stone chamber in front of me has four open doors facing the four directions, if we are wrong, the location of this stone chamber should be just in the center of the temple.

"This is supposed to be a sacrificial room for the ancestral gods." Ye Zhiqiu nodded, then looked at Liao Kai in a deep voice. "Generally with the sacrifice of the living, all that needs to be paid is life......"

"I've seen slaughtering sheep and cattle and sacrificing to the heavens and ancestors, how to sacrifice with a living person, are you willing to lie here and wait to be killed?" Scar asked aloud.

Wen Ru carefully examined the calcified dry bones on the stone platform, and found no injuries elsewhere, but the ribs in the chest cavity showed signs of being broken, and each corpse was the same.

"Generally with the sacrifice of the living, the life is the most pious, when I study the early religious history of Miao Xinjiang, there is indeed a record of the sacrifice of the gods with the living, and in this process, the ancestors of the Miao people believe that life is given by God, and the life is the heart, so in the sacrifice to the god will be the heart offered, which is equivalent to returning the most precious thing to God." Wen Ru said.

"Are you sure you took out your heart to sacrifice?" Gong Jue and I stood opposite the corpse, and after listening to Wen Ru's explanation, Gong Jue raised his head and asked seriously.

"This is true of human sacrifice in all the people I have come into contact with." Wen Ru nodded affirmatively.

"Then it must not be here." The palace lord pointed to the corpse in front of him and shook his head. "Judging from the broken ribs, it will not be the heart that will be removed, this is the middle of the chest, and if it is an enshrinement of the heart, there should be no damage to this part."

I buried my head and carefully cleaned up the broken ribs of the corpse, and looked closely at the broken ribs, and my brows quickly furrowed.

"Whether it was taken away or not, I'm afraid we've missed the most fundamental thing."

"What's that?" Others asked.

Pointing to the broken ribs on the bones, I said, no matter what was taken from the bodies of these human sacrifices at the time of sacrifice, first of all, the fractures of these ribs were uneven, and they should have been broken by a strong blunt force, and the direction of the rib fracture should have been from the outside in.

"But the rib cuts on these bones are all from the inside out, and they are not taking anything to sacrifice to the so-called gods, but ......" I took a deep breath and looked at the others. Something came out of the bodies of these sacrificial living people, and that's why such wounds appeared. ”

The others all looked at each other after hearing this, Ye Zhiqiu re-examined each corpse, and looked stunned when he looked up, who couldn't figure out what would come out of the bodies of these sacrifices and penetrate his chest.

In the mural, the priest brought the ancestors of Jiuli to sacrifice, and when he left, there was only one priest, presumably the priest brought all the tributes of sacrifice, and these people we see now.

"Wait, it's a bit of a mess, let me think about it." Tian Ji scratched his head and walked back and forth a few steps, stopped in front of me, pointed to the corpse on the stone platform and licked his lips. "First of all, whether it is a heart or a liver, whether it is pulled out or something crawls out, I want to know, who did it? What ancestral god is the temple used to worship, and the priest said that this is also a resting place, indicating that the ancestral god of Jiuli is dead, if so, who killed these people? Could it be that there is something else in this temple besides the ancestral gods? ”

The question of Tian Ji also made me realize the unusualness of the temple, from the frescoes, the priest left the temple alone, and Wen Ru said that the priest had a divine nature and could not be killed, so it is obvious that these people who used to sacrifice were not killed by the priest.

After the priest left the temple, something very bloody must have happened here, but no matter what, Tian Ji was right to worry a little, this huge temple of gods should have hidden something other than the resting ancestral god.

Touch!

A loud sound interrupted our thoughts, and the doors that opened on all sides of the stone chamber were suddenly closed by falling boulders, and we were all trapped in the sacrificial chamber.

"The words on the stone platform originally meant this, suggesting that after the sacrifice is completed, you must leave immediately, and these mechanisms are all interlocking." The palace lord said to us with an anxious face. "If I'm not mistaken, it's a circular mechanism, when the priest brings the sacrificial living here, just like we did in the corridor, it triggers the opening of the stone doors around the sacrificial chamber, and when they enter and place the sacrifice on the stone platform, the priest will exit the temple for a limited time, and when the time is up, the boulders will fall down to close the entrance to the four directions, and the only way to open it is to ...... Waiting for the next sacrifice is retriggered. ”

"Next time...... "The pheasant squirmed his Adam's apple." The next time it will be 1,620 years from now, if anyone will be able to find it, and by that time......"

Tian Ji didn't say any more, subconsciously turned around and looked at the corpses on the stone platform, in 1,620 years we will be exactly the same as these dry bones.

Rumble......

Just when we were nervous, there was a roar from far and near behind us, and when we turned our heads, the front end of the twelve stone platforms in the middle of the stone chamber slowly opened a circular hollow, along with the hollow bronze cover in the middle.

It seemed that something was slowly rising from under the stone platform, and we involuntarily retreated until we were leaning against the stone wall, and no one knew what was happening, and the rest of us subconsciously raised the guns in our hands.

As the voice became clearer and clearer, a white oval object slowly appeared in front of us from the stone platform, like a transparent white jade, the surface was very smooth, and the strange lines inside could be seen in the firelight.

But soon I realized that the white jade was so crystal clear that I could see the lines inside moving slowly, and then the whole white jade slowly squirmed from the bottom to the right and from the top.

That thing turned out to be alive!

It looked like an unhatched egg, but I had never seen such a creepy, indescribably disgusting egg, and just as I was wondering what was slowly wriggling inside the egg, the top of the egg split into six petals like an orange peel, and a milky white thing stained with viscous liquid crawled out of it.

"You just said ...... What is this stone chamber called? I gasped in my heart and asked Ye Zhiqiu next to me.

"The sacrificial room." Ye Zhiqiu's teeth bumped, and I heard her slurred answer.

"Get the gun out." I took a deep breath and stared at those eggs and said to Ye Zhiqiu. "The sacrifice begins......