Chapter 728: Slaughterhouse

After meeting Zhu Li and the Doctor, my impression of the tenants in the Pig Cage Apartments was terrible. To me, they were all sick—a bunch of lunatics existing completely outside the bounds of normal society. Identifying as pigs and cannibalizing their own kind, their minds were utterly twisted. Living in such an environment, that streamer had likely been affected to some degree; his way of thinking was probably far from normal.

'The streamer I saw at Jianghu Cancer Research Hospital was tall and thin. He had a gloomy vibe, but he spoke quite rationally. He felt completely out of place in the Red Building...' I frowned at the thought.

Aside from the Traitors and the streamer I had already met, the Underworld Live Show had other broadcasters—such as the Butcher, a dangerous figure who specifically hunted down other live show streamers.

The Butcher's personality and methods closely mirrored those of the Red Building's tenants. He was brutal and bloodthirsty, treating slaughter as a form of liberation and justifying it with lofty excuses. Their beliefs were twisted; their minds, thoroughly diseased.

'What if, before my broadcast started, the person who answered my SOS call wasn't the black-robed streamer, but the Butcher...?' I shuddered, not daring to follow that train of thought. Perhaps it was because I wasn't wearing a jacket, but I suddenly felt freezing. An icy chill filled my lungs, feeling as if it would freeze me solid.

I only knew that the streamer I met at Jianghu Cancer Research Hospital lived in Jinghai City. I had no way of knowing if the Butcher lived here too!

'Are they both Jinghai City streamers?' Thinking back, it was entirely possible. When I first made that call for help, the voice on the other end of the line had been completely unfamiliar.

At the time, I assumed the other party shared my cautious paranoia and was using a disguised voice. It seemed I had been assuming too much, projecting my own perilous situation onto them.

A drowning man will instinctively grasp at anything near the shore. That intense desire to survive had left a glaring blind spot in my reasoning.

'I was too impulsive. I came to a completely unfamiliar city and blindly charged in without understanding a thing. If my SOS call really went to the Butcher, then he must already be inside the Red Building, waiting to hunt me down.' I sighed. My situation had just gone from bad to worse. 'What is a blessing is not a disaster, what is a disaster cannot be avoided. Let's just hope I'm overthinking things.'

I glanced down at my stream. Master Hypnotist Fantasy and Socrates Paradox were still locked in a fierce debate. The two of them were spamming the chat, and any occasional interjections from other livestream viewers were quickly buried under their scrolling text.

Master Tianxin was nowhere to be seen. Keeping an eye on the time, I realized I couldn't stay here any longer.

'I'm far too passive right now, and I barely know anything about the Red Building. If I want to break out of this situation, I have to seize the initiative. Blindly hiding is just a slow death.' I slowly pushed open the door to the storage room. The corridor outside was pitch-black; I could only vaguely make out a row of tightly shut doors.

'It quieted down...' When I first ducked into the storage room, the Red Building had been echoing with the nerve-wracking sound of heads violently slamming against doors.

Stepping out of the storage room, I pressed my back tightly against the wall and tried to figure out my location. 'I panicked and ran blindly when that thing spooked me. I should be in Unit 3 or Unit 4.'

Channeling my true qi, I activated my Judging Eye to pierce through the darkness. I peered down the corridor at the apartment doors, noting that the doorplates were obscured by something resembling red paint.

'It should be fine to go over and take a look.' I cautiously approached the apartments. Before I could even get close, a sudden gust of cold wind swept through the corridor.

"Creak..."

The iron door of an apartment not far away emitted a soft sound as its rust-covered frame swung outward.

'It's unlocked?' I had been in the Red Building for quite a while now. Whether a room was occupied or not, the outer iron doors were always kept shut. This was the first time I had seen a door left ajar.

Stepping closer, I reached out to wipe the paint off the doorplate to check the unit number. But the moment my fingers brushed against the red stain, I froze.

'A hard scab? This texture... why does it feel exactly like dried blood?' Peeling dried paint off a surface required significant effort, but blood was different—a quick scrape with a fingernail would cause it to flake off in chunks.

'This was left a long time ago. It seems the number of lives buried in this building is far more than just a handful.' Finding a bloodstain on a randomly chosen doorplate... it was hard to imagine that so many living people still resided in a place like this.

'Unit 3, Room 371.' I memorized the door number and was just about to leave. But the moment I turned around, the iron door swung open a little wider.

The grating screech of the door hinges was deafening in the dead silence of the corridor.

'There wasn't any wind just now. How did the door move on its own? Is someone inside?' The doorplate was smeared with blood, and this was the only unlocked apartment on the floor. Something terrible must have happened in there.

After a moment of hesitation, I raised my Live Show Phone and pulled the iron door completely open.

Only by standing this close could I see it clearly. The red coating on the inner wooden door was highly uneven—some patches were dark, while others were pale.

I gripped the doorknob. Before I even leaned in, a faint metallic stench of blood hit my nose.

I didn't know how many months had passed, but the bloody stench clinging to the wooden panel was still distinct.

'The base layer is paint, but it's slathered with a coat of blood.' Shining my phone's flashlight over it, I noticed that the dried blood was distributed with eerie regularity, as if someone had deliberately painted it on.

'Could this be another one of Zhu Li's art pieces?' To that lunatic, anything could serve as a canvas for his art. He never restricted himself to conventional mediums.

The lock on the wooden door was already broken, bearing obvious pry marks. Right next to the keyhole were deep, frantic gouges left by human fingernails.

'Based on the angle, someone desperately grabbed the lock to avoid being forced inside, which is why the scratches are on the outside.' Seeing this, I was a bit confused. Why was that person so terrified of being thrown into this apartment? The gouges were incredibly deep; they must have fought back with everything they had, struggling right up to their dying breath.

Driven by curiosity, I pushed the wooden door open without a second thought.

The faint stench of blood mixed with the reek of rotting mold washed over my face. I narrowed my eyes slightly. When the wooden door swung completely open, I stood frozen in absolute shock.

Red floors. A red living room. A red ceiling. Red furniture and red walls...

Blood!

The entire room was smeared with blood!

It looked like a demon's lair. Grimy crimson filled my vision, coating every single place in the room.

'Was... was some kind of ritual held here?' Terror gripped my heart. In my mind, not even the most deranged cultists would commit an act this absurdly psychotic.

All I could see were filthy stains of gore. Every patch of dried blood seemed to speak of the tragedies that had unfolded in this room.

I stood in the doorway, lacking the courage to even step inside. There were bloodstains right at my feet—a gruesome, horrifying sight!

It took me a few seconds to regain my composure. Covering my nose and mouth, I finally took a step inside.

I couldn't tell how much blood had pooled on the floor, nor how many lives had been buried here. The concrete ground was entirely obscured. As my shoes stepped onto the thick, crusted scabs of blood, they produced a sickening crunch that made my heart tremble.

Moving further in, I noted that the room's layout was mostly the same as the other apartments. The only difference was that the wall separating the kitchen and the living room had been knocked down to connect the two spaces. In place of the demolished wall hung an enormous sign.

The most ironic part was the three neatly written characters painted across it—Slaughterhouse!

The calligraphy was beautiful, and the description was all too fitting. But this was an apartment building meant for the living, yet someone had slapped those three characters onto it.

'Treating humans like pigs? Or is it someone dealing with humans using the mindset of a pig?' The idea that all lives were equal was the greatest joke and irony of all—especially looking at the scene before me. Whether for humans or for pigs, equality didn't exist. Perhaps this was the true reason why all existence was divided into the Six Paths. Status and worth were predestined even before birth; this was what fit the rules. And whenever those rules were violated, scenes like the one before my eyes would appear.

Slaughterhouse. After smelling the blood, I already knew exactly what was being butchered here. I just didn't want to believe it. It would take far more than a few people to coat an entire apartment in blood like this.

My breathing grew heavy. Jinghai City was a top-tier metropolis with a booming economy and a transient population of over ten million. One or two missing persons would barely even register—just a tiny ripple in a vast ocean.

'The Red Building... This red is blinding.'

The name Slaughterhouse was a perfect match for the Pig Cage Apartments. I unconsciously clenched my fingers. 'Naturally, a slaughterhouse would have a butcher... Was my guess actually right?'

The blood in the room had completely dried out. It was left several months ago, and a thick layer of dust had already settled over the surface.

I forced myself to stay calm. Standing in the blood-colored room, I slowly crouched down and swept my Judging Eye across the floor.

The killer had committed murder in this room, spilling blood everywhere. It was highly likely they had left behind a clue about themselves.

'No fingerprints or shoe prints. The culprit was a professional; after killing, they deliberately used blood to wipe away all traces.' This wasn't just a simple murder anymore, but absolute psychopathy. He was enjoying the process of killing, treating it as a part of his art. The extremely even coating of blood was the best proof of that.

Because smearing blood over every single corner of the room would require an immense amount of time, a normal person could never stay in such a bloody room for that long.

'Treating slaughter as art...' My eyebrows shot up. I abruptly turned my head to look at the massive sign. The three characters for 'Slaughterhouse' completely encapsulated this room; its existence was just like naming a piece of work!

'Could Zhu Li have arranged everything in this room? Is Unit 3, Room 371 one of his pieces of art?' Standing in the blood-colored room, I was thinking of an entirely different question.

When I first saw Zhu Li, I realized his build didn't match the streamer at the Cancer Research Hospital, so I removed him from the list of streamer candidates.

But if the streamer living in the Pig Cage Apartments wasn't the one from the Cancer Research Hospital, and was instead the Butcher I had never met... then Zhu Li was highly suspicious.