Chapter 57

Chapter 57

Xu Muchan's expression was too frightening. Zheng Shengli and Tao Shu had no idea what was going on, hesitating whether to ask him what was wrong, when the man who'd been crammed into the back seat with them pushed through the silent crowd and walked over.

He shot the two of them a glance, then reached out and covered Xu Muchan's eyes.

Xu Muchan did not resist, nor did he make a sound, standing there like a wooden dummy.

Wei Xilou leaned down and whispered in the young man's ear, "Achan, how about we go home?"

Xu Muchan gave a faint nod, and Wei Xilou, still covering his eyes, turned him around, then took his hand and led him off.

Zheng Shengli watched the two figures disappear into the crowd, then looked at the others, who all seemed weirdly shaken. A heavy weight settled on his chest. He scrubbed his face with his hand and said hoarsely to Tao Shu, "I think everyone here is sketchy. How about we head down the mountain and get back to the station?"

No phone signal was a classic horror movie trope. Back in the day, Zheng Shengli would've figured it was nothing for trained cops like them—the road down was right there, they were in shape and had guts, and worst case, they could just feel their way down in the dark.

The police car was parked at the foot of the mountain. Two grown men weren't gonna be scared off by something like this, right?

But now, looking at the villagers, each one weirder than the last, Zheng Shengli's heart was starting to race too.

A strong sense of danger kept telling him: get out now, get the hell out of here.

The two of them were on the same page. While everyone was focused on Cui Tong and the strange man struggling, they snuck out of the village.

Meanwhile, Wei Xilou led Xu Muchan in the opposite direction.

The village had just one main road—east went down the mountain, west led to the Mountain God Cave, and past that were endless mountains and thick forests.

It wasn't even dusk yet, but the dying sunlight couldn't cut through the dense woods. It was like night fell here earlier than anywhere else.

Wei Xilou didn't bother with the lights. In the dark, he led Xu Muchan to the bed, pressed him down to sit, then poured a glass of cold water and held it to his lips.

Xu Muchan looked like he'd lost his soul, quiet and obedient the whole time.

Wei Xilou let out a quiet sigh. Thick shadows poured out from behind him, wrapping around Xu Muchan completely. He murmured, "Achan, you're tired. Get some sleep."

Sleepiness slowly crept over Xu Muchan. His wide eyes began to close, but just as he was about to drift off, his lashes fluttered and he forced his heavy lids open, staring straight at Wei Xilou, his voice full of confusion: "He died a long time ago. So why is he back?"

Wei Xilou said, "Lots of weird stuff's been going on in the village lately. A dead guy coming back isn't that strange."

"Really?"

Xu Muchan's eyelids drooped tiredly, and he leaned into Wei Xilou without thinking, putting all his weight on him, chin on his shoulder, dark eyes staring blankly into nothing: "Seeing him again, I realized I don't even remember how they died."

Actually, if he hadn't run into Zhou Ping again, he wouldn't have noticed that his memories of his adoptive parents were like looking through frosted glass—all hazy and unreal.

But his memory had always been sharp—he could even remember stuff from when he was three. Yet the years from age three until he was sent to the Mountain God Cave had gone faint and blurry, leaving just a vague outline. At first, it felt like he remembered everything, but when he tried to dig into the details, there was nothing there.

He couldn't even picture his adoptive parents' faces anymore.

Wei Xilou said, "None of that matters. If you don't remember, then don't."

Xu Muchan gave a sleepy "Mm" and went quiet.

He stayed facing Wei Xilou, chin on his shoulder, zoning out. Wei Xilou stayed still too, running his fingers through the young man's shoulder-length hair, rubbing his scalp gently like he was calming a scared animal.

After a long pause, Xu Muchan suddenly said, "I want to go back and see."

He didn't say where, but Wei Xilou got it. He paused, then asked seriously, "Achan, you sure about this?"

That made Xu Muchan hesitate. He buried his face in Wei Xilou's shoulder and mumbled, "Let me think about it."

Wei Xilou patted his back, and Xu Muchan, still in that awkward position, curled up in his arms and dozed off.

Guess it's true that you dream about what's on your mind. Xu Muchan had been going back and forth about whether to return, and in his dream, someone called his name.

He sat up, groggy, and saw the window was open somehow. A young man stood outside the window, smiling with a face just like his, his voice dripping with temptation: "Xu Muchan, it's been so long since you left. Don't you want to come back and see?"

Xu Muchan frowned at him through the window. "Who are you? Was that you in the woods last time?"

The other guy just smiled, didn't answer, and turned to walk off into the distance.

Xu Muchan instinctively tried to go after him, but a pair of ice-cold hands covered his eyes.

The young man's voice seemed to still echo in his ears. Xu Muchan, stirred by a surge of questions, struggled to pry away the large hand covering his eyes—he felt that if he followed, perhaps the doubts that had plagued him for so long would finally be resolved.

But the arms restraining him were too strong. They covered not only his eyes but also his ears.

Xu Muchan vaguely seemed to know who was stopping him, and he protested, "Brother, let me go."

The one holding him did not respond. Instead, another pair of hands covered his mouth and nose.

With his mouth and nose covered, Xu Muchan could not help but roll his eyes from lack of oxygen. His struggles gradually slowed until he completely lost consciousness, his body going limp and falling into a cold embrace. Only then did the pale arms restraining him release.

Wei Xilou leaned down and touched his bloodless face, sighing, "Really disobedient."

Certain the young man would not wake midway, a portion of the dense shadows split off and followed the fading trace of that presence.

The black shadow moved silently through the darkness, eventually stopping at the front of Zhou Ping's courtyard, following the scent.

The eerie, ghostly old house was surprisingly lively. Zhou Ping and his wife were tugging at Cui Tong, their mouths opening and closing, making strange sounds.

But Cui Tong seemed to understand what they were saying, pushing back in terror, clearly unwilling to go inside with the couple.

Wei Xilou watched coldly as the husband and wife, one on each side, forcibly dragged Cui Tong inside.

The shadow was about to slip into the courtyard when a figure suddenly materialized, blocking its path.

The young man, identical to Xu Muchan, looked at him and asked softly, tilting his head, "Brother, are you going to save them?"

The shadow condensed into a human form. Wei Xilou said with displeasure, "You are not Achan. Don't imitate him. It only disgusts me."

The young man, wearing Xu Muchan's pretty face, burst into laughter—a sinister, malicious laugh. "I am him, and he is me. It's useless for Brother to deny it."

The shadows at Wei Xilou's feet surged, and more than once pale arms reached out uncontrollably, as if ready to drag the young man into the abyss at any moment. But he stopped them just in time.

He had clearly developed murderous intent, yet he held back for some reason.

"Whatever you plan to do, I won't interfere. But don't come bothering Achan again. He's living well now."

With that, his form dissolved, and the shadow retreated along the path it had come.

The young man stood in place, watching, and said with a grin, "This is between the two of us. I can stay away from him, but can you guarantee he won't come looking for me on his own? He's very curious."

The dense black shadow had long since vanished without a trace, but Wei Xilou's cold voice echoed in the young man's ear: "At least that would be his own choice."

The young man's smile vanished, and he fell silent, his expression cold.

After standing still for a moment, he turned and walked into the courtyard.

The commotion in the courtyard wasn't interrupted by their conversation—or more accurately, neither Zhou Ping and his wife nor Cui Tong had any idea that two extra spectators had appeared outside the old house.

Cui Tong had his arms pinned by Zhou Ping and Zhou Xia, and couldn't break loose.

The couple's faces were pale and terrified, their mouths begging and pleading, but their grip was freakishly strong. The arm they held ached faintly, like it might snap any second.

He forced himself to take a deep breath and calm down: "Alright, I won't leave. Let go of me first and tell me what's so damn important that you need me for."

Zhou Ping and Zhou Xia both froze at the same time.

Zhou Xia looked up at him and said in a hollow, distant voice, "Xiaozhu is dead. Master, please save him and bring him back."

Zhou Ping said nothing, but his face, normally flushed from drink, was drained of all color, pale and twisted, as if in the grip of sheer terror.

Cui Tong wasn't a patient man, but he was always good at keeping up appearances. Yet faced with the couple's absurd demands, even his patience was starting to wear thin. He tried to explain in as calm a tone as possible: "I'm just a Taoist priest, not some all-powerful god. I can't bring the dead back to life."

But then a thought nagged at him—as far as he knew, Xu Muchan was alive and well, so why were these ghosts claiming Xu Muchan was dead?

Zhou Xia's eyes widened at his words, and she looked utterly terrified. She turned to glare at Zhou Ping, like her eyes were about to bug out of her head: "Honey, he can't be saved, he can't be saved—what do we do?"

Zhou Ping was panting heavily, his face twisted in sheer terror, a sickly blue tint creeping over his complexion. He clutched Cui Tong desperately, his eyes bulging in desperation: "How can he not be saved? Aren't you supposed to know magic? And you're the one who brought him here, so take him back. We don't want him."

"Yes! We don't want him, get him out of here!" Zhou Xia also snapped back to attention, staring at Cui Tong desperately.

Even Cui Tong, patient as he was, had had enough by now. He didn't want to play this ridiculous game with the couple. Gritting his teeth, he tore off a paper effigy to take his place, yanking himself free from their grip. He said angrily, "Xu Muchan is alive and well. If he were truly dead, I'd thank you!"

After cursing them as "useless," Cui Tong stormed off in a huff, his sleeves flapping angrily.

Ever since he'd run into Xu Muchan, nothing had gone right.

The Zhou couple he'd left behind knelt there in a daze. After a moment, they stiffly got moving again. Zhou Ping said through gritted teeth, "We can't let him come back. We need to bury him."

Zhou Xia nodded in agreement: "Yeah, yeah, we need to bury him. I'll go get a shovel."

The couple suddenly seemed to have a plan again. Zhou Ping picked up the body wrapped in old rags, Zhou Xia grabbed a shovel, and the two scurried past Cui Tong, heading toward the village.

Cui Tong watched the ghost couple hurry off, thought it was fishy, and quietly followed.

But after trailing them for a while, just as they neared the Mountain God's Cave, the couple just vanished into thin air.

Cui Tong wasn't buying it and did a loop, but they were really gone. He could only frown and head back.

Halfway back, he ran into a group of villagers with flashlights, out looking for him.

The elderly village chief led the way, followed by a few burly guys. When they spotted Cui Tong, the group was thrilled to see him. The chief switched off his flashlight, grabbed Cui Tong's sleeve, and said, his voice shaking, "Master, thank god we found you. You saw it too, right?"

Everyone in the square had seen Zhou Ping earlier.

Zhou Ping and his wife had died one after the other, and they figured it'd been over a decade. Yet Zhou Ping had suddenly appeared in the village in broad daylight, and a bunch of the villagers present had scared the hell out of them.

They could only watch helplessly as Cui Tong was dragged away by Zhou Ping.

Afterward, the chief thought it best to pick a few brave, burly guys and head to Zhou Ping's house in the back to check things out.

Zhou Ping's house was remote, standing alone at the back of the village. After the couple passed away and Xu Muchan went to the Mountain God's Cave, the house had fallen completely into ruin.

Years ago, some mischievous kids had gone there to play and been so frightened they lost their wits. When their souls were called back, they said there was always someone in that house crying.

After that, the villagers forbade kids from going there, and adults rarely ventured that way either.

No one had expected that there really were ghosts in that house!

And they'd come out in broad daylight.

The village was in a panic, and the chief himself was terrified, clinging to Cui Tong as his lifeline: "Master, when can the ritual be done? Zhou Ping's ghost isn't still in the village, is it?"

Cui Tong had his own troubles and no time to deal with these villagers.

But they all stared at him expectantly. Cui Tong thought it over—this was their territory after all—so he forced himself to be patient and fobbed them off: "If you're really anxious, then do the Mountain God sacrifice the day after tomorrow. As for Zhou Ping's ghost, there's nothing to fear. Burn some incense and paper money for him tomorrow. If he rests easy down below, he won't come out again."

The villagers trusted him completely and breathed a sigh of relief at his words. They gradually dispersed, discussing how they'd pool together some offerings tomorrow to pay respects at the couple's grave.

Thinking about it, Xu Muchan had become the Mountain God's person, and after the couple died, the village had dwindled over the years. People could barely look after their own ancestors, and since the couple was buried far away, naturally no one went to pay respects.

Perhaps it was the lack of incense and offerings, making them suffer down below, that had driven them to return as spirits to cause trouble.

With this thought, much of the villagers' fear dissipated. They exchanged greetings and prepared to head home.

The chief was just about to open his door when he saw four more people rushing out of the darkness. He pressed his hand to his heart and stood at the door for a moment to catch his breath, then shone his flashlight over to see two police officers and the two missing outsiders collapsed on the ground, gasping for air.

The villagers who had been about to head home saw the four suddenly appear and had no choice but to gather again.

They all chimed in: "What's happened now?"

"I thought they'd already gone down the mountain—why are they back?"

"Look at those pale faces—they haven't run into something unclean again, have they?"

"Day after day, no peace—when will this ever end!"

After catching his breath, Zheng Shengli looked at the chief and said, "The road down the mountain is gone."

When he and Tao Shu had left the village, the sky hadn't fully darkened yet. They'd deliberately quickened their pace, almost jogging down the mountain. A path that normally took forty minutes on foot should have taken them at most twenty-odd minutes at their speed.

But they'd walked for a full two hours on that winding mountain road and still hadn't reached the bottom.

The twisting, turning path seemed endless, and the sky around them had gone completely dark. Seeing things take a turn for the worse, they'd discussed it and, using their phone flashlights for light, fumbled their way back.

But whether it was their imagination or not, as they headed back, they kept feeling vague figures flashing through the trees on either side, and from time to time, the sound of shoes stepping on fallen leaves.

It was as if someone in the woods was also hurrying toward the village, just like them.

The thought sent chills down both their spines. Ignoring their exhaustion, they turned their flashlights to full brightness and ran toward the village, singing the national anthem as they went.

"These two say they got lost in the woods and were drawn here by the sound of us singing the national anthem. Do you know them?" Zheng Shengli looked at the chief.

The chief said, "I recognize them. They're companions of the dead man. They said they came to the mountains as tourists and were staying at Jin Ping's place."

"You're companions of Wei Zixiang? Were you there when he died?"

Tao Shu suddenly looked at the two men, realizing they were the deceased's companions. They'd run into them halfway back, and with everyone's nerves frayed, they'd only briefly confirmed they were heading the same way before bringing them along back to the village.

Zheng Shengli's gaze also shifted over, and out of professional habit, he instinctively switched on the body camera clipped to his chest.

"There are many suspicious points in Wei Zixiang's death. As his companions, you'll need to come back to the station with us."

Huang Wei and Zhang Ming actually looked somewhat relieved at the mention of going to the police station: "Fine, the station's better than staying in this godforsaken place."

It was then that Zheng Shengli noticed one of Zhang Ming's eyes was swollen and festering. The man hadn't complained about it himself, and in the darkness, no one had seen it earlier. Now, suddenly catching sight of it, Zheng Shengli was startled by the gruesome injury: "What happened to your eye?"

Zhang Ming lowered his head and said, "What else could it be? Got bitten by a bug."

Huang Wei said, "So he lost an eye—still better than losing his life."

When Wei Zixiang met with his accident, they were right there at the scene.

After returning from the Mountain God Cave, Wei Zixiang, maybe bitter about it, or puzzled why his insect-attracting bell had failed, stood at the window, shaking that busted bell nonstop.

The bell made this weird, grating noise, and Huang Wei and Zhang Ming couldn't stand it. They told him to knock it off and take a break, but he wouldn't listen, so they had no choice but to retreat to the living room.

This run-down village was rough. The upstairs of the place they were crashing at wasn't even finished, and the empty living room had only an old, worn-out sofa that looked like it had been scavenged from somewhere. The two of them crammed onto that beat-up sofa, all cramped and uncomfortable, and before they knew it, they'd dozed off.

Wei Zixiang's screams jolted them awake. Zhang Ming woke up first, and as soon as he opened his eyes, he couldn't see a thing out of his right eye, and his body itched. He looked down and saw bugs crawling all over him.

Zhang Ming quickly got up, slapping the bugs off himself while calling out to Huang Wei.

But when Huang Wei saw him, his face went pale, and he finally stammered out that there was a bug in his eye.

Zhang Ming's right eye was indeed blind. He had been distracted by the bugs on his body, but now hearing Huang Wei's words, he pulled out his phone, not quite believing it, and saw some weird bug burrowing into his right eye, with only half of its tail still sticking out, but he didn't feel a thing.

Zhang Ming had known Wei Zixiang long enough to know these bugs were bad news. Seeing that the bug was about to fully burrow into his eye, and sensing a warning from Weng Gun, he gritted his teeth, grabbed the bug's tail, and ripped it out of his eye socket.

Before he could go find a village doctor to treat his eye, a piercing scream erupted from Wei Zixiang in the room, and then there was complete silence.

The two hurried to the bedroom to check, and as soon as they opened the door, they saw the room crawling with countless bugs, while Wei Zixiang lay on the ground clutching the insect-attracting bell, the bugs burrowing in and out of his body, his death a horrifying sight.

Wei Zixiang was a gu master, yet he died among bugs in the end, which was somewhat ironic.

Moreover, the three of them had offended someone during the day, and this death, almost like an act of revenge, immediately made them think of the two brothers in the Mountain God Cave.

The two of them couldn't care less about Wei Zixiang at that moment. They hastily packed their things and wanted to go down the mountain, to get as far away from this godforsaken place as possible.

But the downhill path, which had no forks, seemed to stretch on endlessly, and they couldn't reach the end no matter how far they walked. Realizing they had encountered a ghost wall, they tried to call on the immortal masters and ancestors for help, but neither the immortals nor the ancestral spirits dared to show themselves, only continuously sending warnings.

With no other choice, they gave up on the main road and tried to cut through the forest beside it.

But who would have thought that after nightfall, the forest was even more terrifying than the endless mountain path. There wasn't a single person in the woods, yet they constantly felt crowded, as if something nearby was secretly watching them.

In a panic, they fled, and coincidentally heard the sound of Zheng Shengli and Tao Shu singing the national anthem. Taking a gamble, they followed the sound and escaped from the forest.

"That's all we know." Zhang Ming and Huang Wei said dejectedly.

Zheng Shengli and Tao Shu exchanged a glance, both looking grim. This was clearly way beyond anything science could explain.

Zheng Shengli didn't know what to say for a moment, so he silently turned off his body-worn camera and waved his hand weakly, saying, "Everyone, let's disperse for now. We'll see if we can get down the mountain after dawn."