“…”
Fu Sang lowered his head and looked at the little girl for a moment. After a long pause, he nodded, “Ah, yes. What about it?”
Hearing this answer, the girl seemed especially happy.
Her pitch-black pupils quickly returned to normal size. Smiling sweetly, she took Fu Sang’s wrist.
“Come with me!”
Fu Sang did not like being touched by others or other ghosts and had originally intended to dodge, but the girl seemed able to anticipate his movements. Her hand clamped around his wrist like an iron pincer, and she pulled him toward the village with strength completely mismatched to her outward age.
Fu Sang was slightly startled.
This was not because of the girl’s movements or the strength of her grip, but because of the body temperature he felt on his wrist.
Unlike the chill of ghosts, the girl actually possessed a body temperature close to that of a living person.
To confirm this, Fu Sang also firmly grasped the girl’s wrist.
Fu Sang was no stranger to the touch of ghosts. He even had a certain ghost clinging to him every day., so he was more than familiar with how ghosts felt.
Ghosts exist in a spiritual state and have no physical form, so the sensation when contacting a person is not real…it is even somewhat ethereal and illusory…yet it makes one extremely clearly aware that one is being touched.
That feeling was very peculiar.
It was also not warm, and even carried the chill unique to ghosts.
But the girl before him was different.
Fu Sang was very certain that what he touched was the texture of human skin and a neither high nor low body temperature.
“What’s wrong?”
Noticing that he was in a daze, the girl turned back to look at him with her big, bright black eyes.
After saying this, she stood on the steps and suddenly pulled hard. Fu Sang, caught off guard, stumbled forward onto the bluestone steps.
In that instant, it seemed like something passed through his body. The feeling was subtle, elusive and he couldn’t grasp it or hold onto it. By the time he came back to his senses, the world had been turned upside down.
Fu Sang was very certain that from the moment he got out of the car and stepped onto the mountain path leading to Mitou Village, the sky above had been overcast. The further he walked into the mountains, the darker the sky grew, all because of both the weather and the increasingly dense yin energy around him.
But the moment he stepped onto the stone steps, Fu Sang actually felt a hint of warmth that seemed like sunlight. Looking up, he was indeed stung by the sudden and intense sunlight, causing him to squint.
It would be a lie to say Fu Sang was completely unsurprised by the current situation.
Inside and outside the mountain were two different worlds. He had confirmed this early on, because the feeling inside and outside was completely different.
Zhuge Buyi’s analysis said the anomaly here was due to a particularly large binding, which was not wrong, but it was also not entirely correct.
As Fu Sang had said, the power of a binding is dispersed, but the yin energy around Mitou Village had a main body and a source.
Moreover, no matter how powerful a binding is, it cannot be separated from the main world, yet Mitou Village seems to have carved out a separate space within the world. In more accessible terms, it was something like a “small world,” “domain,” or “barrier.”
According to Zhuge Buyi, the spirit lying behind that huge mountain rock, the one torn apart by Qi Changying, was a fourth-rank Violet Erosion.
At the time, Fu Sang had indeed sensed that the presence behind the mountain rock was very bad, but that should not have been the fourth-rank Violet Erosion’s doing. It was just that he didn’t have time to think about it and analyze the many details of that instant’s perception.
Thinking about it now, the hint of unease in his premonition at that time might have been because the mountain rock they were about to cross was the entrance to the domain. Stepping past it meant fully entering Mitou Village’s territory. And the subtle feeling that made Fu Sang certain this mountain was not bound by a binding had indeed started from that moment.
Reasoning backward from this, the reason that fourth-rank Violet Erosion was stronger than the other spirits here also had an explanation; it was the “gatekeeper” of the entrance.
Fu Sang had never seen such a situation before, nor had he read about it in books, so he did not blame Zhuge Buyi for not recognizing or seeing through it.
He simply thought the person was stupid.
Fu Sang believed he had given him enough patience, but unfortunately, just from those few questions he asked, one could tell this person was inflexible, stubborn, and did not seem capable of independent thought. Fu Sang really did not want to share his speculations with him, mainly because he could not be bothered to spend time explaining and arguing, since he had not come here to be a tutor for a college student either.
So, up until just now, things had been within Fu Sang’s expectations. His plan for this mission, simply put, was to speedrun the dungeon with one fool to rescue two other fools.
But at this moment, looking up at the azure sky above, Fu Sang squinted slightly, somewhat dazed.
It was a different scene, different condition, and different feeling all at once.
Was this another new layer of domain within the domain?
The normal world’s highway, the deep mountains with black clouds pressing down, the sunlit village.
Layer upon layer, three layers stacked on top of one another…like a sandwich cracker? Russian nesting dolls?
However, no matter how many layers there were, the approach to solving the problem did not change…
Since both the yin energy and the domain here had a source supplying them, the solution was simple and crude. Even a fool would know that as long as you found the source and killed it, all problems would be solved.
But now Fu Sang faced two issues. First, was this source dead or alive, human or object? Second, why did the girl just now have human touch and temperature, and what kind of thing was she?
“Come quick!”
Speak of the devil. Someone gently bumped into Fu Sang’s arm, and the little girl with twin braids hopped past him, jumped ahead, turned back to smile at him, and waved:
“A Ma guai guai hao lai….”
The little girl spoke in dialect, and Fu Sang did not really understand it, but from her body language, she was probably telling him to follow her.
To break the deadlock in an unfamiliar place, exploration was unavoidable. Fu Sang confirmed that the Ghost Blood Whip was properly worn, then lazily stepped forward to follow the girl ahead.
After taking two steps, he suddenly seemed to remember something and looked back behind him.
Two brick-and-stone houses at the village entrance squeezed out a path paved with bluestone slabs. Further ahead were three steps, the very stone steps he had just stepped on when he entered.
Unfortunately, beyond the stone steps was no longer the narrow road and great mountain he had walked through, but a dense darkness so deep that looking at it for too long seemed like it would suck his soul away.
However, compared to pure blackness, it was more like an “emptiness.”
As if lightly jumping off the stone steps would send one falling into boundless, silent emptiness.
To verify this, Fu Sang found a rock by the roadside and kicked it hard toward the entrance.
The stone flew in an arc, landed on the stone pavement, bounced up, and hopped down the steps.
As Fu Sang expected, once the stone left the steps, it seemed to vanish completely, not even the sound of it hitting the ground could be heard.
Seeing this, Fu Sang withdrew his gaze and followed the little girl ahead.
Although Mitou Village was remote and small, it was quite lively inside.
A calico cat lay on the rooftop basking in the sun. An old man sat in a recliner in his courtyard, rocking back and forth. Occasionally, children in undershirts laughed and ran past him, and if they accidentally bumped into his arm, they would cheerfully say “sorry” to him.
“Fu Sang.”
The familiar chill pressed close, and Qi Changying whispered in his ear, “There is a familiar scent here.”
“What?”
Fu Sang turned his face slightly toward him, nearly brushing against his nose, and after a brief pause, said, “Don’t talk right against people. What’s wrong with you? I’m not deaf.”
“Sorry.” Qi Changying moved back a little and pointed at the bone coin hanging from his waist, “The scent is similar to it.”
Fu Sang followed his finger and glanced down.
He was not particularly surprised.
A scent similar to the bone coin meant that there were indeed other bone-made ritual tools suppressed in the auxiliary formations hidden here.
“Can you find exactly where the thing is?”
“Not for now.”
The little girl ahead hopped into a courtyard and still remembered to turn back and remind him, “Big Brother, watch your step!”
Fu Sang walked at an unhurried pace and, as he moved, asked one thing at a time, “Is she human or ghost?”
Hearing his question, Qi Changying was silent for a while, probably considering carefully before answering him, “She has no scent at all. She is not like a human, nor like a ghost.”
“Wow.”
How lucky.
Last time he encountered something that was both human and ghost, this time neither human nor ghost. It seemed all the difficult cases that had not appeared in the nether path for nearly a hundred years had all landed on him.
He was practically the nether path Conan, a gathering of elites, the light of the spirit masters.
“Big Brother, mind the threshold.”
Probably to make sure he would really follow her in, or perhaps to keep an eye on him, the little girl clung to the doorframe, her dark eyes fixed on him.
Fu Sang did not respond, did not acknowledge her, and did not even glance at her. He just looked straight ahead, hands in his pockets, and stepped into the courtyard.
After taking a step, his toes suddenly caught on something, and he stumbled before steadying himself. Frowning, he looked back.
The threshold of this courtyard was nearly half the height of his lower leg. Even with care, it was still easy to trip over.
The little girl had watched the whole thing. She raised her hand to cover her mouth, giggling “hee hee hee,” and bounced into the courtyard.
As she ran, she called out:
“A Ma, we have guests!”
Fu Sang looked up and surveyed the courtyard.
It was like an ordinary small courtyard in an ordinary small mountain village. Unlike the other buildings in the village, a special feature was that the houses in this courtyard were mostly built with wood. Another interesting point was that the furnishings in the courtyard all looked very old, even the little girl’s clothes were washed until faded, but the two door-god paintings on the left and right door panels were brand new, with vivid and beautiful colors, clearly just pasted up not long ago.
Besides that, many other things were hung around the house; peachwood swords, dog teeth, Bagua mirrors…everywhere. The items were all still new and exquisite. It was clear that the owner of this small courtyard strongly believed in gods and ghosts and was willing to spend money on such things.
“A Ma, I’m going to call Ah Tian over for dinner!”
The little girl’s voice was crisp. After going into the kitchen to see “A Ma,” she bounced back out, hopping with both feet together over the high threshold as she left. Her figure flickered and vanished on the bluestone path at the entrance.
A smell of burnt cooking oil wafted out from the kitchen, accompanied by the sound of a spatula scraping against the bottom of an iron wok.
For a moment, only Fu Sang remained in the small courtyard.
He had no taboos and touched and looked around everywhere, confirming that all those copper coins, wooden swords, and such hung in the house were purely handicrafts with no real significance or power, most likely from some charlatan.
After finishing the courtyard, he wandered into the house.
The main hall had a mix of incense and musty odors, which was not pleasant.
The sofa was covered with several layers of old-fashioned embroidered sofa covers. On the walls were posters of movie stars from the 1980s and 1990s, which, due to age, had faded and curled at the edges, with pencil and charcoal doodles on the faces.
The things in the room were numerous and cluttered, stacked untidily, looking messy.
Looking closely, there was a broken rattle drum here, an open comic book torn to shreds there, and even a stained handmade bib.
There were quite a few children’s items, but they seemed mismatched with the little girl’s age.
They were a bit childish for her.
Withdrawing his gaze, he looked further inside.
A small table directly facing the door was the cleanest and tidiest spot in the whole room. On it was a statue of some unknown god. Fu Sang stared for a long time but could not recognize it, only noting that the glaze was poorly done and the colors gaudy with no aesthetic sense.
Yet even this astonishingly ugly object was treated with care. It was wiped spotless, with fresh fruits and white cakes placed before it, along with a delicate little incense burner. The incense had just been changed and was only half burned.
“A Ma.”
The little girl’s voice appeared again, probably bringing her little friend back for dinner.
So Fu Sang withdrew his gaze, straightened up, and left the main hall, which, due to poor lighting, appeared very dim.
As he was about to step out, a spiderweb on the corner of the doorframe caught his attention. A large black spider was hanging on it, easily pulling his gaze.
He was observing the spider while stepping over the threshold when, at the same time, he heard someone gasp very dramatically.
The familiar sound made Fu Sang pause briefly. Shifting his gaze, he came face to face with Huo Wei, who was holding hands with the little girl as she walked in.
“?”
Fu Sang looked her up and down.
Miss Huo, who always went out with full makeup, had rarely neglected her personal image. Her hair was disheveled, her face bare, and she wore a ridiculous floral padded jacket that was a bit too tight for her. She stood there, looking at him with a somewhat dazed expression.
It was only after the little girl pulled her that she seemed to come back to her senses and, avoiding Fu Sang’s gaze, bowed her head and obediently sat down at the open-air dining table in the courtyard.
Fu Sang’s gaze followed Huo Wei as she sat, and he raised an eyebrow slightly.
“A Ma, Ah Tian, come eat!”
The little girl called toward the kitchen, then bounced in to get bowls and chopsticks and distributed them at the table.
Her “A Ma” followed behind her, limping out with a dish in each hand.
Fu Sang’s gaze grew even more meaningful.
If he remembered correctly, “a ma” in the local dialect should mean “grandma.”
What a strange sight…behind his back, his eldest nephew was playing the big bad wolf in grandma’s clothing.
Zhuge Buhuo looked even more disheveled than Huo Wei. He was carrying a plate of burnt food in each hand, bundled up in a padded jacket beneath an apron, his face smeared with soot from the stove.
Upon seeing Fu Sang, he jolted violently, nearly dropping the plates.
“Holy shit? Is this real or fake?”
After blurting out a curse, Zhuge Buhuo suddenly froze.
He looked down at the little girl beside him, then at Huo Wei at the table, then back at Fu Sang. As if possessed by some strange force, he forced out a smile that could only be described as “benevolent,” and his tone suddenly turned into a weirdly gentle one, even though every word sounded like it was squeezed through his teeth:
“…Heh, isn’t this the edgy, world class backstabbing bastard who goes around secretly changing people’s oaths? How the fuck did you get here~?”
