“This smell…”
Su Mo immediately frowned and stopped the team from advancing when he sensed that something was strange.
The snow had not completely stopped falling from the skies.
The snow could cover the smell of most creatures and the rotten smell of corpses.
The pungent scent could break through the barrier of snow and be smelt from hundreds of meters away.
It was hard to imagine how far the smell could have traveled without the snow. It could have possibly been smelled from even the foot of the mountain.
“Get the second team to gather here. We shouldn’t act rashly yet!”
Following Su Mo’s order, the second team traveling along a detour route also discovered the problem inside the cave. As soon as they received the order from the main team, they removed their camouflage and began to move forward at full speed.
In less than five minutes, both teams successfully converged 100 meters away from the cave.
From a distance, even those with a dull sense of smell could smell the stench of blood coming from the cave.
“Shelter leader, I’m afraid that inside the cave…”
The smell was so overwhelming that most people’s subconscious reaction was to take a half step back and put on their masks strapped around their waists.
Only a few people, including Feng Tianmin, paid attention to the dark cave entrance with a cautious look and carefully tried to discern the information they could gather from their sense of smell through their nose.
He shook his head and indicated that he was unsure of the cause.
Su Mo pulled out his binoculars from a small leather pouch around his waist and began to observe the dark cave entrance.
Similar to the cliff territory, a few crooked characters and symbols were engraved on the cave exterior in the Murderer Territory, representing the identity of the people accommodating inside.
However, most of the characters were covered by snow, and it was apparent that no one had cleaned up for a very long time.
There were no burnt traces from the outside, meaning the current situation was not caused by an accident such as a fire.
“Call Liu Jie and Liu Zhi over here!”
Su Mo immediately gave an order to bing the Liu brothers after gathering some critical information from observing for a while.
Soon, the brothers at the back of the line stepped forward.
“Was the majority of the people who lived here Westerners?”
Liu Zhi was taken aback by the question for a moment but followed with a nod.
“It seems the territory belonged to foreigners. We hadn’t seen any descendants from Huaxia in the crowd that had confronted us when we passed by the last time.”
“When they were entrenched in this area, did they provoke any other powerful gathering places or territory?”
Liu Zhi took a while to think about the question and answered unsurely, “I don’t think so. Although there are a considerable amount of human gathering places in the Great Mountains, only the Origin Camp in the center is considered relatively strong. It’s unlikely for the gathering places that branched out from the center to have more than a thousand people and weapons.
“Plus, Great King Mountain is already close to the periphery of the Great Mountains, so if someone were to attack them for revenge, it wouldn’t be possible for us to not have received news about it!”
They were neighbors, so it was impossible for another party to simply clean up another camp consisting of two to three hundred people so quietly.
It could only be accomplished if they had advanced technological weapons with unknown powers like the mysterious group of people that appeared from the ruins, which could somehow reduce the commotion during an attack.
It was also possible that they outnumbered them and used their strength to crush the opponent without making any noise.
Other methods such as surrounding them with multiple teams, poisoning them with food, and airborne poisoning would have too many constraints.
They seemed like simple operations, but they would have the opposite effect if executed carelessly.
“Let’s go in to see what’s happened!”
After thinking about the possibilities, Su Mo had a rough idea of what might have happened and no longer hesitated to enter the cave.
Whoa!
As soon as Su Mo’s order was given, the team began to divide into ten groups in an orderly manner and began to sprint the last hundred meters toward the cave in the formation of an arrow.
The smell had been blocked off by 80 to 90% because of their mask.
Even if the air contained toxic particles, it would not pose a major threat for a short period.
“Teams 1, 2, 3, and 4, follow me into the cave. Teams 5, 6, and 7, stay on guard outside. Teams 8, 9, and 10, use this cave as the central coordinate to search for suspicious traces within 500 meters around the area.”
At the entrance, everyone could clearly distinguish the blood stains condensed into solids on the ground.
It was like a blood-colored centipede.
The blood trails were chaotic and accompanied by a few terrifying bloody handprints that were like a scene from a horror film.
Fortunately, it was still daytime, and many people were present, preventing the gloomy atmosphere from affecting the mental state of the soldiers.
They took out their flashlights and started their flame torches.
