“Who is this Hoztang?” Josephine Wong asked: “I’ve never heard of this name before.”

“And you shouldn’t have.” Tze Cha scoffed again: “He’s but a nobody not worthy of anyone’s time or faith. No wonder they ended up like this here, they can’t even find the right demigod to make deals with.”

“And the right demigod would be you, right?” Jianmen said and examined the tattoos on the other bodies - it turned out that all four of the bodies had the same symbols of Hoztang tattooed on them.

Tze Cha did not answer, and just stood on the side and said with his One Eye closed: “I’ll give you one more minute. I smelled anguish and horror ahead, and I also sensed something unusual, even for me.”

Nameless stood on the side in a praying pose and started chanting a mantra of rebirth for these four bodies in a low voice, but Jianmen immediately stopped him.

“Master Nameless, I know you have a kind, compassionate heart and you are doing this just out of mercy.” Jianmen shook his head and said with a stern look on his face: “But if you do this and you are as good at it as I remember, then you will very likely end up disturbing the malice here.”

“... understood.” Nameless let out a long sigh and said: “It was this monk’s mistake - their minds and spirits are trapped here, and the Mantra of Peace would only be an attempt at ripping them away from the malice.”

“No problem, we shall deal with this when we have gathered enough information.” Jianmen said.

Josephine Wong and Jianmen only took around half a minute to fully examine the four bodies, which is a result of both their skills, experience and the fact that not much else remained on these four bodies - the medallions on their bodies were not enchanted and thus remained mostly as they were, and all the other artifacts carried by them were drained of their energy and power and were almost as fragile as blocks of salt and sand.

“So they usually work in groups of six?” Jianmen asked Josephine Wong: “I wonder where the other two are?”

“I don’t think they’ve escaped.” Josephine Wong said with a worried look: “If that is the case, we would’ve known about it. Plus we haven’t seen any signs of fights and struggles near the gate, so I think these four were the ones who made it out - almost.”

“Let’s go in.” Tze Cha opened his eye: “I think what happened to the other two would be more interesting.”

The rest of the group walked around the body out of respect, then proceeded down the hallway. The hallway gradually grew wider, and the rooms on both sides became bigger and their internal structures more complex. 

Tze Cha was walking in the front, but he was also quite cooperatively keeping it at a steady and cautious pace. But neither Jianmen nor Josephine Wong would be so naive as to assume that he was being a teamplayer, instead, they knew full well that he was taking his time to observe the status of Jianmen and Josephine Wong.

One room on the left caught the eyes of Jianmen, Josephine Wong and Nameless: it was a spacious room with a dozen pods attached to the walls. Each of the pods was made of high density fiber glass with arcane symbols engraved on the outside, and inside the pods were real life shaped and sized wooden dolls, with giant metal nails impaling their eyes, mouth, hands, shins and left chest. When they went into the room and examined the pods and wooden dolls, they found that there were also linings drawn on the wooden dolls signifying their meridians, and there were also metal tubes built into the wooden dolls running through the wooden dolls’ spines and extremities.

On the opposite side of the pods was a long desk close to the door with keyboards, screens and many buttons of different colors on it, which was also connected to the pods with cables on the ground.

“Atrocities have been committed here.” Nameless waved his hand in front of his nose as if there was some kind of stench in the air: “This monk can hear the echoes of the screams and cries.”

“Indeed, but not concentrated enough for a good snack.” Tze Cha sighed as if it was a pity, “But sort of an outlier nonetheless - you’d think a clustered malice this strong would’ve sucked everything dry.”

“Reverse curse dolls.” Josephine Wong sensed the energy signatures remained on the wooden dolls then said with a frown: “But they’re definitely not used as they’re supposed to. I think - they might have pumped something through these dolls.”

“Memory flashback incoming, keep your eyes open.” Jianmen looked around and said.

The overhead lights in the room flickered on, then the pods lit up from within as well. Then, some shadows of people in lab coats walked into the room, whose faces were all empty and cracked up like old mannequins. Some of them walked behind the long desk, and some of them came before the pods and started putting crystal balls inside the wooden dolls from holes on the top of the head.

One of the shadows in lab coats raised its hand and did something with this fingerless hand. Then all of the shadows put goggles on their hands, and with the push of a button on the desk, the wooden dolls started moving, shaking and even mumbling and moaning like confused real humans. Then the next moment, the linings signifying meridians on the bodies of the wooden dolls lit up, and the wooden dolls started struggling, shaking and crying louder like real humans being tortured and tormented. Some kind of light blue energy concentrated on the nails, liquified and dripped down to the bottoms of the pods.

The whole scene just lasted a few minutes, but it was enough for everyone present to grasp what went on inside this room - the people who ran this place used to collect the spirits and minds of real humans, contain them, put them inside these wooden dolls and run stimulated tortures on them in order to collect the energy from the torment and agony.

Tze Cha turned around and walked behind the long desk and smiled: “Reverse curse dolls and modern human technology, how creative. And your kind called me cruel.”