Fu Sang’s pupils dilated slightly.
He noticed that Qi Changying’s eyes were moving, as if he was examining every detail of his features from such close range, trying to figure out what was wrong.
And during this time, Fu Sang inappropriately thought…
‘This ghost is really cold.’
Even though his palm had been pressed against him for so long, it still hadn’t warmed up even a little.
“Qi Changying.”
Fu Sang’s voice was very soft, still carrying a hint of hoarseness.
“Yes.” Qi Changying looked back into his eyes.
“You’re very cold.”
As soon as he said this, Qi Changying’s fingertips seemed to tremble very lightly, and then the chill left Fu Sang’s cheek.
“Sorry.”
Qi Changying withdrew his hand, but his body didn’t move away.
He maintained that position and asked softly, “What happened?”
“Hm?”
“You seemed to have had a nightmare.”
“What?”
“You were very agitated, calling my name.”
Fu Sang’s expression didn’t change as he looked away: “You heard wrong.”
He raised his hand, pressing against Qi Changying’s shoulder to push the ghost farther away.
“Alright, I heard wrong.”
Qi Changying went along with his words.
Then, he told him again:
“There’s movement outside.”
As if to corroborate his words, the moment he finished speaking, a loud knocking came from outside:
“Big Brother! Big Brother!”
It was Wu Renmei.
Fu Sang rubbed his messy hair, got up from the bed, and went outside to open the door.
As soon as the courtyard gate opened, Wu Renmei almost threw herself in and grabbed his clothes:
“Big Brother! Save my didi, please save my didi!!”
Fu Sang couldn’t help but yawn, playing along with Wu Renmei’s act, “What’s wrong with your little brother?”
“He’s been possessed by an evil spirit!”
Wu Renmei’s small face was deathly pale, her big black round eyes filled with a pool of tears:
“Please save him!!”
“Fine.” Fu Sang answered lazily, “Lead the way.”
So Wu Renmei trotted ahead, leading him toward her own house.
Fu Sang walked behind her with his hands in his pockets, watching her stumbling little figure. At some moment, he suddenly felt the scene before him looked somewhat familiar.
He looked at Wu Renmei, then looked down at the path beneath her feet, a little lost in thought.
In his mind, he subjectively added firelight to the scene.
This was indeed very similar to the first half of his dream just now, but upon closer comparison, there were some subtle differences.
What exactly was different?
It seemed… to be the route.
The courtyard where Fu Sang had slept wasn’t far from Wu Renmei’s house. Soon, Wu Renmei had twisted and turned her way over the excessively high threshold into her yard.
The courtyard was in chaos, chickens flying and dogs jumping.
Fu Sang heard someone inside shouting “Buyi.”
He frowned slightly and finally quickened his pace to follow.
In the center of the courtyard, Zhuge Buyi was lying on the ground convulsing continuously, while Zhuge Buhuo knelt beside him, trying to hold him down, cold sweat already beading on his forehead.
Fu Sang’s gaze sharpened. He quickly walked over, grabbed Zhuge Buhuo by the back of the collar, yanked him aside and threw him away, then knelt on one knee to check Zhuge Buyi’s condition.
“Epilepsy.”
Fu Sang quickly pronounced the word, then ripped off the ridiculous bib around Zhuge Buyi’s neck, grabbed his arm, and positioned him on his side.
When Zhuge Buhuo was thrown aside, he cursed out loud, but after scrambling up and seeing that Fu Sang seemed to actually know what he was doing, he immediately shut his mouth.
He came back over, but Fu Sang raised a hand to block him.
“Don’t touch him. Just wait like this.”
Then he asked, “Does he have epilepsy?”
“No!”
“Are you sure?”
“What’s there to be unsure about? I’m his real brother! I’ve watched him grow up since he was little, he doesn’t have epilepsy, wouldn’t I know?” Zhuge Buhuo was equally bewildered.
“He doesn’t have this condition. He just suddenly became like this out of nowhere. I thought some dirty thing had possessed him!”
“…” Fu Sang’s eyes deepened, but he didn’t say anything more.
He positioned Zhuge Buyi properly, stood up, and when he raised his eyes, his gaze paused slightly.
He looked around the small yard and asked, “Where’s Wu Renmei?”
“Wasn’t she just…” Zhuge Buhuo stammered. “…Where is she? Wasn’t she right here just now?”
“Ahhh!!”
A scream suddenly came from somewhere.
It was the neighboring yard.
If he remembered correctly…
Fu Sang raised an eyebrow slightly, once again instructed Zhuge Buhuo “don’t move him,” and then immediately went in the direction from which the scream came, putting Ghost Blood Whip on his hand as he went.
The courtyard gate of the neighboring yard was wide open. Huo Wei was straddling the threshold, one hand tightly gripping the door frame, while the other was being forcefully pulled by Wu Renmei.
If before Fu Sang hadn’t understood why these people were so obedient to this little girl and what exactly they were afraid of, now he was starting to understand…
Under the moonlight, the stone-paved ground suddenly melted into a large pool of thick ink, like a deep black swamp.
Countless sticky, arm-like black shadows extended from the pool, grasping at Huo Wei’s ankles, trying to drag her down to the bottom. At the same time, the threshold she was leaning against also began to melt bit by bit from the bottom, slowly merging with the abyss.
“San You, save me!!!”
Huo Wei was about to cry. She flailed and struggled desperately like a bird whose claws had been caught.
Seeing this, Fu Sang came back to his senses, raised his hand to form a seal, and the blood-thread of the Ghost Blood Whip, carrying the copper coins bound to it, shot directly toward Wu Renmei, slicing cleanly through both her wrists like a blade.
The cut ends of the little girl’s hands showed no flesh or bone. If one had to describe it, it was like smoothly severed Play-Doh, the same color inside and out.
They were solid, with no filling.
And within seconds of her hands completely separating from her arms, accompanied by Wu Renmei’s scream, her entire body dissolved like smoke into the air and vanished.
Fu Sang rushed over, replacing Wu Renmei to grab Huo Wei’s hand. The five blood-threads coiled around Huo Wei’s arm in layers, helping him pull Huo Wei out of the deep black mud pit.
“Where was she trying to take you?” In the midst of all this, Fu Sang still had the presence of mind to ask.
“I-I-I don’t know either! She just told me to follow her to go see something. I forgot about the mute setting and subconsciously asked ‘what,’ and she suddenly screamed that I wasn’t Ah Tian, and I…”
“Got it.”
Fu Sang interrupted Huo Wei’s words, and with another hard pull, he completely tore off the several ghostly hands dragging her, almost flinging her behind him.
Huo Wei felt like she’d been swung in a perfect parabola and then slammed hard onto the bluestone slabs.
The floor was cold, hard, and painful, but incredibly comforting.
She let out a breath of relief, but before she could get up, just one glance upward drained the color from her face: “San You!!!”
After she left the center of the mud pit, the ghostly hands, having been damaged, sank to the bottom, and the black pool rapidly shrank, about to disappear completely.
This should have been a good thing.
If only Fu Sang hadn’t, after a running start, jumped in just before the black pool completely sealed shut.
Everything happened so fast that Huo Wei was dumbfounded.
By the time she came back to her senses, Fu Sang had already vanished along with the black pool.
All that remained in sight were the uneven, winding bluestone paths of the village.
Realizing this, Huo Wei’s heart skipped a beat.
Her legs were too weak to stand, so she had to crawl on all fours to the gate of the neighboring yard and look inside.
Zhuge Buyi’s epileptic episode had passed. He lay on his side, as still as a dead man, while Zhuge Buhuo, heeding Fu Sang’s words, didn’t dare do anything rash and just silently stayed by his younger brother’s side.
Catching a figure out of the corner of his eye at the gate, Zhuge Buhuo turned to look, saw Huo Wei, and asked, “What was all that commotion just now? Where’s that kid?”
“He jumped in…” Huo Wei’s voice was trembling.
“Jumped where???” Zhuge Buhuo was full of question marks.
Huo Wei pressed her lips together, looking like she was about to cry, and tried her best to organize her words.
But just as she finally opened her mouth, she saw Zhuge Buhuo staring intently behind her. When he came back to his senses, he frantically made shushing gestures at her.
Huo Wei suddenly had a bad feeling.
Her shoulders trembled, goosebumps instantly spreading from her lower back to the top of her head, her whole body feeling as chilled as if wind were blowing through it.
“Ah Tian…”
The voice came from above her head. Huo Wei swallowed dryly, her fingers resting on the stone slabs curling slightly as she slowly looked up.
She saw that Wu Renmei, who had been dispersed by Fu Sang just moments ago, was standing behind her at some unknown time, head lowered, staring at her with eyes whose pupils had dilated until they nearly swallowed the whites of her eyes., the dark pupils reflecting Huo Wei’s face.
“Come with me and see… come see…”
…
The feeling of jumping down from outside the black pool was strange, as if gravity had suddenly reversed. There was no sensation of falling; it was as if he had simply rolled on the ground, and he was already in another place.
Fu Sang was thinking about one thing.
If his theory of a “stage play” was correct, then what were those “black hands trying to drag him underground” that Zhuge Buhuo had mentioned?
To put it another way, if an actor on stage broke character and ruined the plot, what would the director behind the scenes do?
Kick them off the stage?
There were two possibilities for “going off the stage”: either you were kicked out of the theater, or the variable was killed, the bug eliminated, and the next actor capable of playing the role was welcomed.
So, which one would they encounter?
Fu Sang thought it was the former.
The reason was simple…he was a man of action. Rather than thinking and theorizing, he preferred to try things himself. But obviously, one couldn’t just march toward death, so he always had to give himself a hopeful, beautiful reason.
So he would first symbolically assume his theory was correct, and specifically the better of the two possibilities. He’d try first, and if he was wrong, then he would consider himself unlucky.
It seemed he had gambled correctly.
‘This damn luck!’
He stood up from a pile of ruins.
There was almost no light here; it was pitch black, with only a sliver of light filtering through the thick clouds.
Looking up, he couldn’t tell whether the sky was filled with dark clouds or nether miasma.
This place gave him an eerie sense of familiarity, exactly the same as the feeling he had after passing through the crevice in the rocks and before stepping into the village.
It seemed he had emerged from the small domain centered on Mitou Village.
A faint smell of burning hung in the air.
This smell came from the buildings beside him that had already been burnt to charcoal.
Fu Sang fumbled in his bag for the flashlight, turned it on, and shone it around.
After a quick sweep of the flashlight, Fu Sang realized he was still in the same place, yet not in the same place.
Judging by the threshold of the neighboring courtyard, which was much higher than normal, he was now outside Ah Tian’s house, exactly where the black pool had appeared.
He walked back to Wu Renmei’s front door.
Aside from the raised threshold, everything else here had been burned into a crooked, broken, dilapidated mess, completely losing its original form.
“Fu Sang.”
Qi Changying suddenly called out softly beside him.
Fu Sang raised an eyebrow and looked at him, only to find that his eyes were looking elsewhere. He followed his gaze, shifting the flashlight beam in that direction.
And so, the only and incongruous light source in the world illuminated the only other incongruous presence in this village destroyed by fire, besides the two of them, one human and one ghost, who had wandered in by mistake.
It was a little boy.
To describe him accurately: he was a little boy in tattered clothes, half his skull smashed in, the rotting flesh at the wound curling outward, with shards of skull deeply embedded in the decayed meat visible.
He looked about four or five years old. Because of the head trauma, he only had half a head and half a face, his remaining eye bulging outward, showing only white sclera with no pupil.
His mouth was open, revealing a set of sharp ghostly teeth, as if in threat.
“Ha!”
The little boy wasn’t afraid of light. He stared directly at Fu Sang’s light source with wide eyes, squatting on the ground like an animal, baring his teeth and hissing at him threateningly.
“?” Fu Sang hadn’t actually seen many ghosts, so he wasn’t sure if this animal-like behavior was normal.
Curious, he took a step closer.
“Ha!!”
The little boy reacted strongly. He arched his back like a feline, assuming a defensive posture, as if ready to pounce at any moment and bite through his throat.
But this didn’t intimidate Fu Sang in the slightest.
Just as he was considering whether to simply tie up this brat or beat him half to death and drag it over, a flash of red suddenly blocked the beam of light.
Fu Sang was slightly startled.
Following the flash of red, he saw Qi Changying standing half in front of him with one hand raised protectively. Then, mimicking the little boy, he bared his canine teeth in a silent threat.
