122 A REWARD PART 10 (1/2)

Xue Lin showed outwardly that she was relaxed but in reality, she was beyond terrified. She thought five years ago, this nightmare was over. She couldn't understand why this nightmare came back unexpectedly.

Five years ago, Xue Lin was in the second year of high school. She went to the school tour with her classmates and teachers. They went to the mountain area. She was the naughtiest girl in the class. With her two best friends, she sneaked out after lunch to explore the areas they were prohibited to go.

When elders say – don't go here or there, children should listen to them. However, sometimes, it's better to disobey the elders.

Xue Lin didn't listen, neither did her friends. They went out and found out something shocking. The village they were in was a devil's village. The whole village was marked in a huge pentagon and the villagers were Satanists.

Satanists are a group of people who worships Satan. Satanism is a group of ideological and philosophical beliefs based on Satan. The contemporary religious practice of Satanism began with the founding of the Church of Satan in 1966.

During the Middle Ages, the Inquisition attached to the Catholic Church alleged that various heretical Christian sects and groups, such as the Knights Templars and the Cathars, performed secret Satanic rituals. The idea of a vast Satanic conspiracy reached new heights with the influential Taxil hoax of France in the 1890s, which claimed that Freemasonry worshiped Satan, Lucifer, and Baphomet in their rituals.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the Satanic ritual abuse hysteria spread through the United States and the United Kingdom, amid fears that groups of Satanists were regularly sexually abusing and murdering children in their rites. In most of these cases, there is no corroborating evidence that any of those accused of Satanism were actually practitioners of a Satanic religion or guilty of the allegations leveled at them.

Satanist groups that appeared after the 1960s are widely diverse, but two major trends are theistic Satanism and atheistic Satanism. Theistic Satanists venerate Satan as a supernatural deity, viewing him not as omnipotent but rather as a patriarch. In contrast, atheistic Satanists regard Satan as merely a symbol of certain human traits.

The villagers were Theistic Satanists and Xue Lin and her friends learned that they were planning to herd the students and the teachers. They were in a place where they couldn't get a cell phone network. So,

cell phones were completely useless. They wished they could take at least walkie-talkie but who knew they would face such a danger?

Xue Lin told her female friend to take a secret path to go to the nearest police station while she and the male friend quickly went back to their tents only to find that the villagers already knocked them off with some kind of homemade sleeping pills. From the villagers' conversation, they realized that the villagers were going to have a huge ritual and their classmates and teachers would become sacrifices for some kind of devil worshiping ritual.

Xue Lin realized that they were too late. Even if her other friend had called the police, before they arrived, all of their classmates and teachers would already become sacrificial objects. So they took the matter in their hands.