Bai Yu stopped walking. She took off her sunglasses and looked towards Zhao Mingyue. “A ghost doesn’t want us to continue. If we go forward, we’ll loop endlessly. If we go back, we can leave.”
Zhao Mingyue also stopped. She glanced left and right, finally noticing something was off. She had seen that grave mound there earlier. Why, after walking for a while, had the same mound returned to its previous position?
“Does a Ghost Wall Maze even work on ghosts?” Faced with this situation, Zhao Mingyue was actually quite curious about this.
“It doesn’t. In my eyes, you’ve just been walking in circles.” Bai Yu looked towards a Small Bridge about a hundred meters away. “I’m just wondering—is this ghost trying to help us or harm us?”
That question snapped Zhao Mingyue into a new line of thought. “You’re right. When I was little, I heard that a Ghost Wall Maze isn’t always meant to harm you. Sometimes it’s to save you. I heard a story once about a man walking at night who suddenly found himself trapped. He was so scared he ran backwards. The next day, he heard there’d been a fatal car crash up ahead.”
“So this ghost is trying to help us?”
“I think so. Otherwise, she wouldn’t guide us backwards. She would have lured us into the gutter where she drowned.” As Bai Yu spoke, Zhao Mingyue followed her gaze and saw someone on the Small Bridge not far away.
The figure wasn’t standing on the bridge. Half of its body was hanging over the railing, its lower half still below, as if it were sprawled across the bridge.
Zhao Mingyue was absolutely certain this was no living person. No living person had purely gray skin.
“It’s a female ghost. Why would she want to help us? Is there danger ahead?”
“She’s stopping you from going to the village.” Bai Yu spoke, then took a step forward. The Ghost Wall Maze instantly shattered. In Zhao Mingyue’s eyes, nothing visually changed, but the woman on the bridge jumped down from it.
“Stopping me from going back?” Zhao Mingyue’s expression shifted.
She knew the place was dangerous, but she hadn’t expected something like this to happen before she even arrived—when she was only halfway there.
“The balance of Yin and Yang is disrupted here. Something is affecting the magnetic field.”
Bai Yu walked towards the Small Bridge, explaining to Zhao Mingyue as she went. “In the world as I understand it, Yin and Yang are two completely different magnetic fields. Ghosts, especially weak ones, can’t appear during the day because Yang energy dominates, weakening or even harming ghostly monsters. Night is Yin.”
“Not all ghosts can appear in daylight. Forget that—most of them are restricted to specific locations.”
“But this ghost is abnormal.”
“To be precise, the moment I entered a certain radius, my body felt much lighter. The oppressive effect of daylight on me disappeared.”
She was a ghost, too. What other ghosts felt, she could also feel. That’s why she was saying this.
“There’s more than one thing in your village.”
The situation here was more complicated than Bai Yu had anticipated. To form such a wide-scale magnetic disturbance, there couldn’t be only a single entity inside. If there were just one, and that one was the entity currently inside Zhao Mingyue’s body, she would have definitely sensed it when she entered her body yesterday.
Bai Yu was thinking: with a place like this, would those people come looking for it?
The peace of this period was merely the calm before the storm. Those lunatics hadn’t just gone into hiding to conceal their identities—they were mainly searching for ways to grow stronger. Only when they had the power would they dare to make a direct move, like that Red-Haired Woman.
So during this time, those lunatics would definitely be frantically searching for methods to increase their strength. And Zhao Mingyue’s village was so close, it would easily be discovered.
She thought of that person she had killed, the one named Chen Yun. The power of her talismans came from a certain Evil God.
So, did that Evil God have a connection to Pingshan Village?
If so, then what they had to deal with in Pingshan Village wasn’t just ghostly monsters and an Evil God. It would also be those lunatics.
“More than one thing?” Zhao Mingyue felt a sense of disbelief.
“We’ll find out when we see it.”
With the Ghost Wall Maze broken, Bai Yu and Zhao Mingyue quickly reached the Small Bridge.
There was a ditch running along one side of the concrete road, three meters wide but dry. The Small Bridge connected the road to the opposite side. From the dirt on the bridge, it was clear no one had used this level little bridge for a long time. Beneath it lay a pool of black, stagnant water, faintly emitting a foul stench.
There was a drop of over three meters from the water to the bridge. Zhao Mingyue wondered if the female ghost’s corpse was in that stagnant pool.
“That ghost was standing right there watching us, wasn’t she?” Zhao Mingyue pointed to one side of the bridge.
The matter of the Small Bridge’s female ghost weighed even heavier on Zhao Mingyue’s already overcast heart. Even a ghost was trying to stop her from entering. Just what was waiting for her in the village?
Ten kilometers isn’t very far, nor very short.
After the concrete road ended, they followed a smaller path to the left. By this point, they were quite close to the village. Bai Yu looked at Pingshan in the distance, then her gaze returned to Pingshan Village.
Compared to the bustling prosperity of Tianchang City’s urban area, arriving here felt like stepping back in time over a decade.
There were few multistory buildings; most structures were tiled houses or single-story bungalows. The concrete road hadn’t even been paved all the way to the village entrance—it simply broke off.
The moment Bai Yu stepped off the concrete road, the sound of drums and gongs reached her ears. What was bizarre was that within this obviously festive drumbeat, the mournful, sorrowful tune of a suona horn was mixed in.
The former was typically played at weddings, the latter only at funerals.
“In the same village, on the same day, a wedding procession met a funeral.”
Zhao Mingyue quickened her pace, practically jogging with Bai Yu to the village entrance.
Just as expected, inside the village, a joyous procession carrying a sedan chair draped in red string, banging drums and gongs, was heading south. At that same moment, a funeral procession, draped in white banners and black cloth, carrying Funeral Wreaths and Soul Summoning Banners, playing suonas, emerged from the west, cutting across their path.
The two processions met. Neither yielded to the other. They wove directly through each other, the wedding party continuing south, while the funeral procession headed straight towards Bai Yu and Zhao Mingyue.
Zhao Mingyue quickly pulled Bai Yu to the side of the road, watching the approaching procession.
At the very front was a middle-aged woman wearing a white Mourning Clothes robe, her head bowed, cradling a black-and-white Memorial Portrait in her arms. She walked silently forward, her face deathly pale, her eyes somewhat vacant, as if she hadn’t seen Zhao Mingyue and Bai Yu at the roadside at all.
As the middle-aged woman passed by, Zhao Mingyue quickly glanced at the portrait. She realized she recognized the old woman in it. Her impression was very deep.
The funeral procession advanced in silence, Joss Paper scattering in the air the whole way. Behind them, the suonas continued to blow, the tune mournful and urgent. Perhaps because it was off-key, it sounded grating to the ears.
Just as the Massive Black Coffin was passing Zhao Mingyue, the several hemp ropes as thick as two fingers snapped simultaneously. With a heavy thud, the black coffin crashed to the ground. In that very instant, the suonas fell silent. The eyes of every person in the funeral procession simultaneously turned to Zhao Mingyue and Bai Yu, standing at the roadside.
