Xinghe was busy clearing pebbles from the wounds on his fingers. He answered flatly, "Until they grow bored. Or until something else on this planet distracts them. We have no control whatsoever over these creatures."
On the other side, Xin Yan finished tying a torn piece of her clothing to Yun Hai's knee. The girl winced, enduring a sharp sting. "The wound is quite deep," Xin Yan said, inspecting the bandage. "Can you stand on your own?"
Yun Hai nodded slowly, though her face had turned deathly pale from blood loss and the chilling cold. Zhao Lin paced within the narrow area directly beneath the belly of the bronze cauldron. He kept rubbing his neck, which was bruised blue from being choked earlier. The youth's face was still filled with the remnants of terror.
"All of this is truly nonsensical. You shout four strange words and hundreds of monsters immediately submit to you. What do you actually know about this place, Xinghe?" Zhao Lin demanded, his voice rising.
"I only read the hidden carvings on the stones of this land," Xinghe replied without looking at Zhao Lin. "It was pure coincidence. If that writing happened to be an ancient food recipe, I would have shouted it just the yang to make those creatures release me. The eight of us know equally nothing here."
Han Dong stood at the edge of the pillar foundation, monitoring the surroundings with full alertness. He looked up. The darkness of the planet's sky was thick and oppressive. "Hey," Han Dong called out suddenly, his tone sounding hesitant and strained. "Try looking up there."
Everyone beneath the cauldron looked up simultaneously. The sky, which was previously a boundless, plain black canvas, now showed a change. There were small specks of dirty grey and blood red in the distance of space. These specks moved quickly through the darkness, descending straight toward the dark blue planet where they stood.
"Stars?" Fang Hua murmured hopefully. "Are we going back to our solar system?"
Yun Hai narrowed her eyes and immediately dismissed the hollow hope, despite her weakness. "That... cannot be a constellation. Stars do not move that fast, and they wouldn't keep getting larger. It's likely just light from other large stars on the edge of Eridanus."
The group fell deathly still. The specks continued to grow larger with an unnatural landing speed. Their true forms began to appear clearly from behind the thin atmosphere of this dead planet. The descending objects were not meteors or advanced spaceships. They were a swarm of giant living entities floating through cosmic space.
The size of their forms was staggering. One entity was at least three times larger than the dead black dragons lying stiffly around the cauldron's landing site. The forms of these cosmic monsters possessed no logical anatomical patterns. The creature in the lead had a body shaped like a mass of flesh with thick purple veins and dozens of dangling tentacles.
Those tentacles were covered in sharp thorns as large as skyscrapers. The creature beside it resembled a massive chunk of black crab carapace, equipped with dozens of blind yellow eyes blinking randomly without eyelids. There was also a creature whose body was surrounded by many torn, fleshy wings flapping slowly.
They moved in unison through the atmosphere toward the planet's surface. A very low-pitched roar began to descend from the sky, its frequency piercing directly into their eardrums and vibrating the insides of every human who heard it. The hundreds of pale, three-meter-tall creatures who had been prostrating on the ground immediately reacted to the roar from above.
Their ritualistic mumbling changed instantly into rapid, panicked whimpers. The pale creatures pressed their forms flat against the blue stone surface. They crawled backward in terror away from the open area and did not dare to look up at all. Their attitude of worship shifted into pure terror. The giant shadows of the horrific entities in the sky began to cover the area of the eight pillars.
The air on the ground became very oppressive to breathe, and a pungent stench of rot swept down rapidly. Total panic broke out again beneath the bronze cauldron. Zhao Lin screamed with the loudest voice. He turned and struck the thick metal base of the bronze cauldron with both fists blindly.
"Open! Quickly, open the cauldron!" Zhao Lin shouted. His hands struck the hard bronze metal repeatedly without mercy until his knuckles turned red and blistered. "Please open it! I don't want to be eaten by that crazy monster's flesh! Let me back in!"
Han Dong immediately ran to the other side of the cauldron's base. He jumped and struck the belly of the cauldron with the back of his large hand. The sound of skin hitting metal echoed dully. "There must be a way in! This furnace opened from below when it picked us up! Everyone, help find the switch!"
Li Wei wept uncontrollably. He picked up a chunk of crystal stone near his feet and smashed it roughly against the gaps of the cauldron's support pillars. The stone in his hand shattered into pieces, but the metal base of the cauldron was not even scratched, let alone moved. Xin Yan pulled Yun Hai back, pressing her against one of the pillars so she wouldn't be trampled by the wild panic of their male friends.
Fang Hua crouched weakly on the ground while covering her ears tightly, her body shaking violently as she refused to see the disgusting images from the sky. Chu Xinghe ran toward one of the cauldron's support pillars made of plain blue crystal. He felt the crystal surface with both hands, which were covered in stains of dried blood. He traced every inch of the stone from bottom to top, searching for a secret lever, a mechanical button, or a hidden carved gap.
"There's nothing on this pillar!" Xinghe reported desperately, his voice nearly swallowed by the thundering roars of the giant monsters in the sky, which were getting lower.
The tentacled entity above had now broken through the planet's dust clouds. One of its massive thorny tentacles swung down to the ground and struck a blue stone hilltop two kilometers away from their position. The hill was instantly leveled in one powerful strike. The explosion was so loud it made the entire ground beneath Xinghe's group vibrate violently.
Lin Mei recoiled in panic as she saw the land hill destroyed. She stepped back hurriedly away from the edge of the pillar foundation, trying to find a more enclosed point of protection behind the pile of support pillar stones. Because Lin Mei kept staring at the sky with full terror, she ignored her footing on the uneven ground. Lin Mei tripped over a broken crystal stone with a sharp angle near the base of one of the pillars.
Lin Mei's body lost its gravitational balance and she tumbled backward. The right side of Lin Mei's head struck the edge of the solid blue crystal pillar very hard. The girl shrieked in high-pitched pain and immediately sat down, clutching her throbbing head. Her hands reflexively gripped her right temple area, which was torn quite deep. Fresh blood dripped heavily, quickly flowing through the gaps of her fingers.
Lin Mei's blood, fluid and red, flowed down, splashing onto the cold blue crystal pillar surface behind her. A moment later, the plain crystal pillar that had just been splashed by Lin Mei's blood provided an extraordinary change! The dark blue color of the pillar shaft instantly transformed into an incredibly bright, dazzling blood-red glow.
The red light raced up the shaft of the pillar from the bottom base at full speed, spreading to the top of the pillar that touched the metal base of the bronze cauldron directly. The sound of a shrill mechanical whirring immediately emerged from the cauldron, the source of the sound coming exactly from the intersection point between the glowing pillar and the metal belly of the cauldron.
A sharp red line of light began to be drawn across the tightly closed bronze metal base. All group members immediately stopped their pounding and sobbing. They stood frozen, watching the phenomenon of the bright red light that had just been created.
Chu Xinghe focused his gaze on the fresh bloodstain on the pillar that was now glowing bright red. He immediately shifted his gaze to Lin Mei, who was still kneeling weakly, clutching her severely bleeding head. Xinghe turned his head, staring sharply at the row of the seven other crystal support pillars whose conditions were still a dead blue without reaction.
Xinghe's eyes quickly swept across, counting the remaining members of their group. One, two, three, four... eight whole people. This formation had exactly eight support pillars for the cauldron. The details of the anatomical paintings and the bizarre procedures on the second floor of the wooden pavilion flashed clearly in his mind, but at this second, he saw the ultimate necessity of why this execution site was built.
"Blood!" Xinghe shouted with all his might, forcing his voice to pierce the cacophony of the horrific monsters in the sky. "The pillar reacts when it receives human blood!"
Han Dong turned toward Xinghe's position with a look of maximum confusion. "What do you mean, react?!"
"This pillar needs our blood to trigger the cauldron to open!" Xinghe pointed with a straight finger toward the seven other pillars that were still dead and dim. "One support pillar is intended to hold only one person! Quickly smear your fresh blood on the empty pillars before those monsters above crush our bodies into pulp!"
Zhao Lin, who had been pounding on the cauldron, took a step back. He stared at his own palms with a look of horror. "Have you gone completely mad? You're telling us all to intentionally injure ourselves?"
"Do it immediately or we all die chewed by that rotten giant flesh!" Xinghe snapped without allowing for a single moment of panic.
Xinghe did not waste any time waiting for the approval of others around him. He immediately ran fast toward the crystal support pillar in front of him that still emitted a cold blue color. He clenched his right palm. His fingernails were still broken and torn open from being brutally dragged on the stone ground earlier.
Xinghe pressed and forcefully rubbed his open wound against the smooth surface of the pillar, letting his dirty bloodstains smear thickly onto the crystal stone. The crystal pillar in front of Xinghe immediately reacted with the same bright red glow. The humming from inside the cauldron grew even louder in their ears.
A second red light path line immediately formed across the metal bronze base, starting to curve to connect with the first line's route. Seeing the second pillar successfully activated, Han Dong did not delay any longer. The youth ran to the third pillar. He had no open wounds on the surface of his skin to flow blood.
He immediately knelt, picking up a sharp-angled stone fragment from the rocky ground, then slashed the palm of his left hand hard using the tip of the stone without a moment's hesitation. Han Dong winced softly as his palm was torn. He then immediately stood up and pressed his hand, drenched in fresh blood, against the shaft of the third pillar.
The third pillar instantly glowed with red light. The line on the bottom of the cauldron began to form a template of an octagonal pattern. "Quickly do it to your pillars!" Han Dong shouted to his terrified friends.
Li Wei trembled so much his legs could barely stand. He took the blood-stained sharp stone that Han Dong had just thrown to the ground. He closed both eyes tightly to gather courage and roughly slashed the skin of his own forearm while screaming to endure the pain. Li Wei smeared his blood onto the side of the fourth support pillar.
Xin Yan ran to pick up another sharp-tipped stone from the surrounding land; she tore the tip of her index finger hard, then ran to smear it on the fifth pillar. The girl then hurried to turn and give the bloody stone to Yun Hai. Yun Hai did not use the stone; she dragged her leg and smeared the deep blood from her still-open knee against the surface of the sixth pillar.
Fang Hua, who had no sharp objects at all, chose to forcefully bite the skin of her own wrist with her teeth until the skin layer bled, then smeared the fishy stain onto the shaft of the seventh pillar. Everyone now stood frozen. Only one last support pillar remained in the corner of the formation that had not yet glowed red. All eyes of the group members turned simultaneously toward Zhao Lin's position, who was still standing frozen in fear, clutching his own body.
"Zhao Lin! Quickly find a way to get your blood out!" Chu Xinghe shouted with a voice filled with urgent anger.
The entity with dozens of yellow eyelids in the air above them had now descended to a distance of only a few hundred meters from the ground, preparing to drop its large black carapace weight to crush everything on the planet. Zhao Lin finally cried hysterically. He couldn't find a suitable stone and was reluctant to injure his hands.
He bit his lower lip hard using his teeth until the skin tissue tore open, then he leaned his head and spat the collection of blood directly against the wall of the eighth pillar beside him. The remaining last pillar instantly glowed blood-red with an immense brilliance.