Chapter 58

Chapter 58

Zheng Shengli and Tao Shu spent the night at the village chief’s house.

After being led in circles by a ghost, neither could sleep well. They tossed and turned until the early hours before finally dozing off for a short while—only to be jolted awake at dawn by the roosters’ crowing.

“Tao Shu, it’s daylight.” Zheng Shengli sat up and nudged Tao Shu.

Tao Shu glanced outside—the sun had already risen above the horizon—then pulled out his phone to check. Still no signal. “Should we head straight down the mountain?”

The two had agreed the night before to descend at first light. With such bright, strong sunlight, surely they couldn’t encounter ghosts again.

Zheng Shengli nodded, grabbed his fully charged phone, and headed downstairs with Tao Shu.

It was still early; most villagers hadn’t risen yet. The village lay quiet, broken only by the chirping of insects and birds—and the occasional sharp crow of a rooster. Blue skies, green trees—everything looked peaceful and serene.

Yet the events of the previous night lingered heavily in their minds. After greeting the already-awake village chief, they made their way out of the village.

This time, the descent went smoothly. Indeed, darkness always magnifies fear. Last night, walking the same path in pitch blackness, they’d found the roadside trees’ shadows eerie and every rustle from the woods sounded like someone moving nearby. But in daylight, Guiyi Mountain’s scenery revealed itself as truly beautiful.

Their taut nerves gradually relaxed. Zheng Shengli smiled faintly and said, “So last night we were just scaring ourselves, right?”

Tao Shu frowned. “But that tourist’s death was genuinely bizarre.”

Remembering the road that had seemed to stretch endlessly last night, Zheng Shengli fell silent. After a moment, he said, “Forget it. No point dwelling on it. Let’s get back to the station first. Didn’t the higher-ups send someone to take over? It shouldn’t be our problem anymore.”

The two quickened their pace without another word.

Without the ghost interfering, they made good time. In the distance, they could even see the foot of the mountain. But as they walked, Tao Shu suddenly stopped.

Zheng Shengli turned back, puzzled. “Why did you stop?”

Tao Shu swallowed nervously. “Look at the road we’re on now. Something’s not right.”

“What’s off about it?” Zheng Shengli looked down—nothing seemed amiss. He raised his head and saw the foot of the mountain clearly ahead, their police car parked by the roadside at the entrance.

“Going down should be a downhill slope,” Tao Shu said. “But feel it—are we really going downhill?”

Zheng Shengli took a few steps forward—and his expression slowly changed.

They were definitely walking uphill.

But the road into the village wound upward in a spiral. Descending now, they should be spiraling downward—going downhill.

Zheng Shengli’s breathing grew labored. “But the foot of the mountain is right there ahead of us. Our car is parked there.”

Tao Shu’s face paled further. Hands trembling, he pulled out his phone, opened the camera, aimed it at the foot of the mountain—and snapped a photo.

The camera displayed something utterly different from what they saw with their own eyes.

*Click—*

He zoomed in on the photo. His hands shook so badly he could barely hold the phone. “Look.”

Zheng Shengli took the phone—and froze the instant he saw the zoomed-in image.

There was no foot of the mountain. No car.

The photo clearly showed Leigong Village’s entrance, with the words “Leigong Village” carved in blood-red letters on the large stone tablet. Beside it stood a young girl with pale, bluish skin, rigid as a board, her right arm raised in a wave—greeting them.

Zheng Shengli leaned in for a closer look—but the girl’s tightly pressed lips suddenly curled into a smile directed straight at him.

“Holy shit!” Zheng Shengli panicked, hurling the phone aside, eyes wide, gasping for air.

Tao Shu winced at the thought of his phone—but dared not retrieve it. Gritting his teeth, he said to Zheng Shengli, “That’s my new phone—cost me two months’ salary! Go pick it up for me!”

Zheng Shengli snapped out of his panic, silently reciting the socialist core values to steady himself, then mustered the courage to retrieve the phone from the dirt.

The photo remained—but the girl was gone.

Since last night, this place had shattered everything he believed in. Zheng Shengli was completely at a loss. He tossed the phone back to Tao Shu and asked, “What do we do now? Aren’t ghosts supposed to avoid broad daylight?”

Tao Shu was equally baffled. He clenched his teeth. “Let’s go back to the village first. At this rate, we’ll never get down the mountain. Didn’t the village bring in two Taoist priests? Maybe they can do something…”

At this point, science had failed them—so they had no choice but to turn to the supernatural.

They only hoped those two Taoists in the village actually knew what they were doing.

After wandering for over an hour, they returned to the village around eight in the morning.

Standing on the road, watching villagers bustling about, Zheng Shengli felt the fear clinging to him begin to ease slightly. “Horror movies always say going alone gets you killed fast. Let’s stay where there are people. Even if we can’t contact the station, once they realize we never came back, they’ll send someone to find us.”

Tao Shu began nodding—then slowly stopped.

He licked his dry lips and said, “Zheng Shengli, have you noticed… there seem to be far more people in the village today?”

Zheng Shengli replied, “Yeah, there are a lot. That’s good—more people means more yang energy. Ghosts and monsters won’t dare show up.”

Tao Shu felt both terrified and annoyed. “Look closer. There seem to be a bunch of new faces.”

Zheng Shengli frowned and observed the villagers passing by. Perhaps due to the Mountain God sacrifice, everyone had risen early—some hauling tables and chairs, others carrying offerings for tomorrow’s ceremony.

At a glance, the scene was bustling and lively—festive as New Year’s Eve.

But with Tao Shu pointing it out, Zheng Shengli realized there truly *were* more people—and many of them were young women he didn’t recognize.

He and Tao Shu had visited Leigong Village several times before. Its permanent population wasn’t large; most able-bodied young adults had migrated elsewhere for work, leaving behind mostly elders and children.

Young women like these were rarely seen in the village—only returning during holidays.

Yet now, these young women carried offerings in bamboo baskets, smiling as they moved through the crowd, as if they’d always belonged here—no sense of incongruity at all.

So much so that Zheng Shengli hadn’t noticed anything strange at first.

“Where did all these girls come from?”

His first thought wasn’t ghosts. “Did the Mountain God sacrifice bring all the young people back?”

But then he realized it didn’t add up. “But why only young women—and no young men?”

These girls appeared to be teenagers or in their early twenties—still school-aged, most likely. Would villagers really recall children still in school just for the sacrifice?

“Let’s go ask the village chief,” Tao Shu said.

The two headed toward the gathering crowd—only to find villagers holding what appeared to be a meeting. They surrounded the village chief, arguing loudly. Some elders spoke with heavy accents; when they spoke quickly, even Zheng Shengli—a local—struggled to understand. After straining to listen for a while, he gathered that the villagers were debating whose child should be chosen to marry the Mountain God.

There weren’t many young people in the village—just a few left-behind children—and among them, only one girl: Jin Ping’s granddaughter, Xiao Hui.

But the Jin family had recently suffered a tragedy—her husband and son had both met horrific ends, leaving only this one granddaughter. The old woman, upon hearing that her granddaughter was to be wed to the mountain god, naturally refused to go along with it.

Holding her innocent little granddaughter close to her chest, the gray-haired old woman stomped her feet and wailed, "You heartless bunch dare to set your sights on Xiaohui! She's the only one we've got left in our family. If anyone dares to make her marry the mountain god, I'll hang myself on their doorstep!"

The old woman was up there in years, but her spirit was still strong. She pointed at the villagers one by one and cursed them out: "Don't you have a grandson at home? Shan Gong could get married, so why can't your grandson? Our Xiaohui is supposed to go to the city for school—if anyone's getting married, let your grandson do it!"

The household she pointed at got worked up too. The man of the house didn't want to be the one to speak up, so the woman of the house came out wailing, "We only have this one grandson too, and last time, at the previous mountain god sacrifice, it was our family that provided the person! My sister-in-law was the one who went! It's not fair to make our family do it again, is it?"

The old woman set her jaw and dredged up old grudges: "Well, our family gave someone before too—my little girl was married off to the mountain god! I can't sacrifice both my daughter and my granddaughter!"

With that, every household there had old grievances to air.

Everyone there had been in Leigong Village for generations. If you really counted it up, every family had a daughter who'd been married to the mountain god.

In an instant, the village meeting turned into a shouting match. The elders who brought up old memories slapped their thighs and wept loudly, their grief was overwhelming.

Zheng Shengli and Tao Shu ended up at the edge of the crowd. At first, they were excited to hear some gossip, but as they listened, it suddenly hit them that the girls who'd been married to the mountain god were probably all dead.

They had died because of the villagers' ignorance.

Their relatives still wept when talking about them, but it was those same relatives who had personally offered them up to the so-called mountain god.

Zheng Shengli's expression turned grim, and he didn't dare count how many innocent girls Leigong Village had claimed over the years.

Tao Shu, meanwhile, noticed that ever since the villagers started arguing, the extra girls had been gathering around with blank faces. Each time an agitated villager named someone to prove their family had given a girl, another girl would walk up to the platform.

That platform was the ritual altar set up for the ceremony, with a table in the middle holding an incense burner and various fruits and offerings. The space behind the table was meant for the mountain god's shrine.

But since the altar wasn't ready yet, the villagers hadn't brought out the mountain god's shrine.

Now, those girls, one by one, walked blank-faced to the spot meant for the shrine, piling on top of each other in twisted, contorted poses, stacking higher and higher—like a tomb made of corpses, or a grotesque, horrifying idol.

The villagers, still arguing, didn't notice a thing.

Tao Shu didn't dare make a sound. He frantically tugged at Zheng Shengli next to him, signaling with his eyes for him to look. Zheng Shengli turned his head a beat late and saw the tower of countless bodies slowly writhing.

The girls' torsos and limbs melted together, pink muscle and yellow fat exposed, their healthy wheat-colored skin slowly turning gray, then settling into the pale blue-white of the dead.

Under Zheng Shengli and Tao Shu's watch, they slowly writhed and fused into another kind of monster.

A massive centipede-like body stitched together from female torsos, with twisted, deformed hands and feet jutting out at random, serving as the creature's many legs.

The head was a huge, swollen sphere with bulges all over, as if countless skulls had been squashed and glued together. On its sides were two enormous, round human eyes arranged like an insect's compound eye.

The front of the swollen head had no features—where a mouth should have been, there was only a pair of massive, serrated mandibles, and above them, a pale, blue-white girl's face.

Though the face was somewhat distorted, both Zheng Shengli and Tao Shu recognized it—it was the girl from the photo.

Now, that girl's face was attached to a grotesque, sickening monster. The creature's massive body coiled and towered like a snake, with limbs protruding from its torso spread out in a fan like a thousand-armed Guanyin. The faces bulging from its back emitted unintelligible, garbled murmurs, as if it were a deity standing on the altar awaiting worship.

Zheng Shengli and Tao Shu couldn't make a sound for a long time.

Such a monster was beyond anything they could comprehend. The only reason they were still standing and hadn't lost their minds was years of professional training.

After a very long time, Zheng Shengli finally turned his head, joints creaking, to look for the only Taoist priests who might save them.

The two priests weren't part of the villagers' argument—they were preparing offerings below the platform, completely unaware of the monster above.

Zheng Shengli inched toward Cui Tong, whispering through gritted teeth, "Taoist Master Cui, look up there."

But Cui Tong seemed to be spacing out, not reacting to his words at all.

Instead, Yang Zhao next to him suddenly turned his head and shot Zheng Shengli a look, his mouth stretching all the way to his ears. Zheng Shengli's vision went dark, feeling as if something above was watching him.

He dared not move any further, quietly backing away and shaking his head at Tao Shu.

The absent-minded Cui Tong suddenly snapped back to reality, looking at Yang Zhao in confusion: "Were you just talking to me?"

Yang Zhao kept his head down, folding gold ingots, ignoring him. The bamboo basket beside him was already full of gold ingots—each one round and plump, gleaming golden in the sunlight, clearly folded with great care.

Cui Tong frowned and instinctively scolded, "Why put in so much effort? This is just a ritual to placate the villagers—a half-hearted job will do."

Yang Zhao's hands paused, then he suddenly turned his head, staring at Cui Tong with a sinister look, his face faintly tinged with a grayish-blue pallor. He said, word by word, "The mountain god sacrifice is a great matter. It can't be sloppy, or heaven's wrath will follow."

Cui Tong felt uneasy under his gaze. Yang Zhao had been acting so normal these past two days that he'd nearly forgotten—not only was this village off, but Yang Zhao was too.

Cui Tong didn't argue, lowering his head to fold gold ingots alongside him.

The villagers' argument finally ceased. It had started for no reason and ended for no reason, and then, as if they'd forgotten about choosing the mountain god's bride, they returned to preparing the ritual with joy.

Someone hauled out a large drum, and the chosen villager began beating it while loudly humming a strange tune, completely oblivious to the monster lowering its face from the platform.

Xu Muchan was awakened by the thunderous drumming.

He hadn't slept well, it seemed—he'd had many dreams, but upon waking, he couldn't remember them, leaving only a murky, dizzy sensation.

Wei Xilou sat by the bed. Seeing him awake, he handed him a glass of water and said, "We're heading back to Jiangcheng today."

Xu Muchan took the cup, startled: "Why so sudden?"

Wei Xilou said, "Tomorrow, the village is holding the mountain god sacrifice."

Xu Muchan didn't understand what the village's ritual had to do with their return to Jiangcheng today, looking at him with puzzled eyes: "Are you hiding something from me?"

Wei Xilou didn't answer, instead asking abruptly, "Achan, do you hate them? Your adoptive parents, and the villagers."

Xu Muchan took a sip of water, thought for a moment, and shook his head: "I might have hated them before, but I don't really remember it now."

Hating was also something that took energy. He'd spent his days shuttling between school and the mountain god's cave, busy with studies and saving money, with little time or energy left for other irrelevant people or things.

Xu Muchan finished the water in his cup, stood up, and set it on the table before turning back to Wei Xilou, saying firmly, "You're off. You're definitely hiding something from me."

Wei Xilou stayed silent, and Xu Muchan didn't press further, instead bringing up another matter: "I've decided—I want to go back and take a look."

He felt like something important had been forgotten. That nagging, clawing feeling of being unable to recall was unbearable. Xu Muchan wasn't one to dwell on things, but since doubt lingered, he'd go back and see.

"If you want to go, then go," Wei Xilou said.

Xu Muchan looked at him strangely: "I thought you wouldn't want me to go."

Wei Xilou patted his head and said, "No matter what happens, don't be afraid. Remember, your brother will be with you."

Xu Muchan gave him an odd look, took his hand off his head, and turned toward the kitchen: "I'm going to brush my teeth."

After getting ready, the two walked together toward the village.

The village was bustling like New Year's, with exaggerated smiles plastered on everyone's faces. Xu Muchan watched for a while, feeling something was off: "What's with them? The mountain god sacrifice wasn't this grand before."

Wei Xilou remained silent.

Passing by the makeshift stage in the center of the village, Xu Muchan glanced up at it and saw only an offering table, with nothing placed behind it.

Xu Muchan suddenly stopped in his tracks, looking at Wei Xilou with some confusion: "Are they really worshipping you? I feel like something's off."

"Mountain God is just a very general term. In ancient times, some believed that tigers who lived past thirty were mountain gods, calling them 'Mountain Lord.' The people of Thunder Duke Village, however, believe that the shrine their ancestors have worshipped for generations is the mountain god."

Wei Xilou looked at the stage, his voice calm: "Achan, they've never worshipped me—they worship what they think is the mountain god."

The mountain god could be him, or it could be something else.

Xu Muchan frowned, zeroing in on the key point: this time, the mountain god worshipped by Thunder Duke Village was something else.

But what could it be?

Xu Muchan couldn't think of what it could be at the moment, and Wei Xilou had already taken his hand to lead him toward the back: "This has nothing to do with us. Let's go."

Wei Xilou led Xu Muchan away from the bustling noise.

The house of his adoptive parents hadn't collapsed despite all these years. Overgrown with wild grass, with thick climbing vines covering the outer walls, the whole place had an air of neglect and stillness, as if forgotten by time.

Xu Muchan stood at the door for a long while before pushing it open and stepping inside.

The house was empty inside, with only two rooms in total. It seemed someone might have been here before—the simple furniture was scattered and tilted, some pieces broken, lying in corners covered in thick dust.

"It looks like there's no room for me here," Xu Muchan muttered to himself.

Everything before him felt familiar, but alongside the familiarity was a strange sense of wrongness, as if something was out of place.

Xu Muchan walked into the courtyard and saw two rooms there.

"That must be the kitchen," Xu Muchan said.

He walked over first and sure enough, saw a blackened stove and a large iron pot rusted through and full of holes.

"What's this room next to it used for?" Xu Muchan came out of the kitchen and pushed open the door of the adjacent room.

In the small room, a wooden board leaned crookedly against the wall, propped up on bricks, but one corner had caved in, making it tilt. There was blackened cotton padding on top, and Xu Muchan recognized it as a bed.

Standing in front of this crude wooden bed, he looked a little dazed: "This looks like my room."

Wei Xilou stood behind him, his gaze swept over the simple bed and landed on a plastic bucket in the corner—probably a chamber pot, weathered and corroded, but still giving off a nasty smell.

Xu Muchan stood there in a daze, his memories, which should have been clear, seemed shrouded by something. He tried to recall details of his daily life but found he couldn't remember a thing.

"How is this possible?" Xu Muchan crouched by the bed, reaching out to touch the wooden board with mushrooms growing on it.

The moment his fingertips touched the wooden plank, he saw a frail child lying there with vacant eyes, damp, blackened cotton padding beneath him, emitting a foul stench.

Suddenly, a loud bang came from behind Xu Muchan as the fragile wooden door was forcefully pushed open, slamming against the wall with a clatter.

His adoptive father, Zhou Ping, and adoptive mother, Zhou Xia, hurried in. Zhou Ping turned the child on the bed over—the child's eyes were wide open, limbs hanging limply.

Standing by the bed with a displeased expression, he scolded Zhou Xia: "What's going on? He was fine yesterday, how did he die?"

Zhou Xia said, "How would I know? He even ate a big bowl of rice last night!"

Zhou Ping paced back and forth by the bed, slapping his left hand with his right: "No, we need to bury him quickly. Otherwise, if those cadres come again to persuade us to send him to school and find him gone, they might cause trouble for us. With all that talk about laws and regulations, we don't understand anyway—whatever she says goes. They might even arrest us and throw us in jail."

Zhou Xia also showed a frightened expression upon hearing this: "Where do we bury him?"

Zhou Ping thought for a moment, casually grabbed an old piece of clothing to wrap the child on the bed, and said, "Take him to the back mountain. If anyone asks, we'll say he was being naughty, went to play in the mountains, and drowned in the water. Got it?"