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Chapter 227 Conscription
nine!

These words shocked not only Fu Wen, but also the two guards of the Shuo King beside him.

The people of the northern region are simple and honest. Although they are a bit rough around the edges and don't follow etiquette as much, they are not fierce.

In normal times, violent acts and fights of a serious nature rarely occur in Shuodi, let alone murder. Occasionally, one or two such incidents will be handled impartially and severely punished to serve as a warning to future generations not to follow suit.

The two guards had never seen or even heard of anything like the skeletons of at least nine people that were unearthed from a single pit.

They were terrified of what was going on.

Even more terrifying is that the bones in the pit haven't been completely dug out yet. Who knows if what will be dug out next are other parts of the bodies of these nine people, or if some "new member" has been added!
Zhu Yu no longer doubted the possibility of accidentally digging up someone else's grave, since no family in the world would bury their entire family in one pit.

After a while, Fu Wen and the two guards finally dug out all the bones in the pit. To be on the safe side, Fu Wen dug around the pit a few more times, but found no new bones. The three of them breathed a sigh of relief and climbed out of the pit.

Rune seemed quite calm, probably because he had handled many more eye-opening things while following Lu Qing.

On the contrary, the two soldiers who came with Zhu Feng had never killed anyone or even a chicken before. They had martial arts skills but had never stained their hands with blood. Now, they were digging out dead bones one by one from the pit. When they climbed out of the pit, they were covered in cold sweat and breathing rapidly. They looked very frightened.

However, it seemed that God was not too kind to these two poor soldiers. Before they could recover, another exclamation came from not far away.

This time, Zhu Yu and the others didn't need to guess anymore. Apart from a sinking feeling in their hearts and a sigh, they had no other thoughts.

The two soldiers looked as if they had lost their parents, but they had no choice but to go. Their legs went weak and they followed Fu Wen. When they looked down, they saw that they had dug up more white bones from the ground. They could only sigh in resignation and jump down to help dig.

This time was slightly different from before. The person digging the hole wasn't as careful this time, and with one shovel, they broke a bone in two.

Fortunately, the young man who used the shovel was brave enough and wasn't scared. He just stood there scratching his head, looking at the skeleton in the pit, and asked the person next to him in confusion, "Could this area have been a mass grave in the past? How come we dug up so many human bones?"

The commotion alerted Zhu Feng, who had just returned from elsewhere. He walked over and saw his two guards digging for human bones in the pit with Fu Wen. He was stunned for a moment, but when he turned his head and saw Zhu Yu checking the location and number of human bones, he was really shocked. For a moment, he couldn't even believe his eyes. He blinked a few times and looked at Zhu Yu hard before he was sure he wasn't mistaken.

Although Zhu Feng was shocked, he could only swallow his surprise as he watched Fu Wen carefully hand the two pieces of freshly dug human bones to Zhu Yu, seemingly without any sense of impropriety. He watched as the people continued to dig more bones out of the ground.

Zhu Yu noticed Zhu Feng beside her and could sense the look in his eyes, but she had no time to pay attention to it. The skeletons in front of her were enough to consume all her attention.

The newly unearthed human bones, like those previously discovered, appear to be from young adults in their twenties or thirties, judging from the wear and tear on the joints and the teeth in one of the newly unearthed skulls. Furthermore, the shape and width of the pelvises discovered so far all indicate that they are male.

Judging from this evidence alone, it all seems to be related to the mysterious disappearance of able-bodied men that they heard on their way to Shuo Kingdom.

The oldest of the missing able-bodied men were only in their thirties, and the younger ones were only seventeen or eighteen. They were all men, and there wasn't a single woman among them.

So many people have disappeared without a trace; according to conventional logic, they are most likely already dead.

However, on the one hand, the various signs exhibited by these skeletons inevitably lead people to associate these remains with the missing able-bodied men; on the other hand, it is also these skeletons that make all of this seem somewhat illogical.

Based on what they had learned along the way, in those places where a large number of able-bodied men had mysteriously disappeared, the earliest missing men had only been gone for about a year, and the shortest for about half a year.

The northern regions are generally arid, and the Sunrise Ridge area is particularly arid. Furthermore, the soil here contains many loose stones, which over time form a more compact structure, making the soil denser and harder.

Just now, Zhu Yu tried to dig the bones out of the soil with his hands, but his fingers were cut painfully by the dry, hard soil and rocks after only a few strokes, which also confirmed this characteristic.

In such an environment, burying a corpse in the soil would actually slow down the rate of decomposition. It would take at least three or four years for a complete corpse to decompose into a skeleton, and possibly even longer.

This is definitely not a result that can be achieved in about a year. Even if those missing able-bodied men and blacksmiths died immediately after they disappeared and were buried directly in the ground, by now they would only be half-rotten corpses, or even mummies.

There is another situation that is equally puzzling.

Human bones were accidentally unearthed in these two pits, and not just one or two people. However, the second pit has not yet been completely dug out, and the remains of more than a dozen people have been found, but not even a scrap of cloth has been found.

Not only were there no clothes, but there was also another thing that is extremely difficult to decompose even when exposed to air—hair—which was not dug out either, not even a single strand.

This is indeed quite strange.

Zhu Yu's brows furrowed more and more tightly.

If these middle-aged dead were not the blacksmiths and able-bodied men who had previously disappeared, then why were there so many people of similar age, who were completely naked and whose hair seemed to be missing, buried in the wilderness?
Not to mention Shuoguo, the practice of human sacrifice has been abolished for hundreds of years across the five continents and four seas.

Or what if those skeletons were the strong men who went missing elsewhere?
What methods were used to treat them to make them look like this?