As soon as he entered the house, Wang Liang lay down on a reclining chair and rocked gently, looking perfectly at ease.
He took out his phone and started scrolling through videos. Fortunately, even this remote place had internet.
Zhou Kun stood in the room, looking somewhat at a loss. He had no interest in electronic devices.
After wandering here and touching things there, Zhou Kun finally could not help frowning as he asked,
“What are we doing now?”
“What do you want to do?” Wang Liang did not even raise his head, continuing to play with his phone.
“For example, some deeper investigation. Look for the possible source of the supernatural phenomenon, especially at Old Li’s house, where the incident happened.
“And I feel like the people in this village are all a little strange. The way they look at us isn’t quite right. It’s not the curiosity you’d expect when seeing strangers, but some other kind of feeling I can’t really describe.”
“If you want to investigate, then wait.”
“Wait for what?”
“For nightfall.”
Zhou Kun understood again. A dark and windy night was the best time to act.
“So that’s how it is. Sigh, what a hassle. Why don’t I contact some people and have the villagers controlled first, then wait until the seventh day after the death, when the vengeful ghost appears, and we can just imprison it directly?”
“You should leave right now. I’ll handle this alone.” Wang Liang looked up at Zhou Kun speechlessly.
“Uh, no. I still want to stay.”
“Then sit down quietly and rest for a while. You already know there’s something wrong with this village, yet you still want to restrict and control the people here according to normal circumstances. In the end, that might rapidly push something that was originally controllable into an uncontrollable state. Are you sure the people in this village are still normal people?”
“What do you mean?”
Zhou Kun’s expression changed.
“Sometimes, the living people you think you’re seeing may not truly be alive. If the gap in supernatural levels is too great, or under certain special circumstances, even if you’re a ghost controller, you may not necessarily receive that special warning sense toward vengeful ghosts.”
“! You mean this village…” Zhou Kun found it hard to believe.
Wang Liang lowered his head again and looked at his phone, saying,
“No, don’t overthink it. I’m not sure. It’s just a guess. And it probably isn’t the case. What I mainly want to tell you is that after stepping into an unknown incident, unless you’re confident enough, don’t casually disrupt everything inside before figuring out the situation. Otherwise, you may immediately suffer an unbearable unknown attack.
“During a relatively calm period, try to figure out some of the rules inside and understand some things. Only then, after danger erupts, can you increase the probability of finding a slim chance of survival or resolving the incident. You can’t rely on being lucky enough to brute-force your way through every supernatural incident.”
Listening to Wang Liang’s words, Zhou Kun fell into deep thought, and the room became quiet once more.
The sun slanted westward. At dusk, the dark orange sun dyed half the sky orange-red.
At the village entrance, the shadow of the old locust tree was stretched long, cast obliquely across an earthen wall. The slightly bent shadow of the trunk looked like an elderly man hunched over with age.
The villagers who had been busy in the graveyard all day returned to the village one after another, each going back to their own homes.
Among them was the couple Wang Liang had judged to be suspected members of Old Li’s family.
After that couple walked out of the graveyard, they headed toward the eastern end of the village without saying a word.
On the way back, none of the villagers they passed greeted them. Invisibly, it seemed like isolation, and also like avoidance.
And in a place neither the couple nor the villagers on the road noticed, amid the muddy ground and the scattered withered grass, a small one-inch photo was stuck askew in the soil. Printed on the photo was Wang Liang’s portrait.
When the couple passed through this area, the portrait of Wang Liang on the photo inserted among the weeds suddenly underwent an incomprehensibly eerie change.
The pupils of the person in the photo actually shook strangely at that moment. Then the eyeballs turned, and the line of sight followed the gaps between the weeds, moving along with the couple walking on the road.
Only after the couple had passed through this area and could no longer be observed did the person in the photo turn his head back. Then it returned once again to the appearance of an ordinary photo, as if everything that had just happened on it had never occurred.
In another area some distance ahead, another photo discarded in an inconspicuous place also underwent the same change when that couple walked over.
The gaze of the person in the photo followed the people in reality as they moved. After they walked far away, it returned to normal.
Inside the hunchbacked old man’s house, Zhou Kun had originally been boredly studying the age of the furniture here.
But suddenly, he abruptly turned his head and looked toward the reclining chair where Wang Liang was.
There, a bone-piercingly cold aura was emanating from Wang Liang, who lay on the chair with his eyes closed.
This made Zhou Kun’s expression change.
‘He’s using the power of a vengeful ghost. Why? What’s going on?’
Zhou Kun first nervously looked around, thinking a vengeful ghost had appeared and used some special supernatural attack on Wang Liang.
But he quickly rejected that guess, because aside from the changes on Wang Liang’s body, he could not sense anything at all.
Then it could only be Wang Liang himself actively releasing supernatural power to act on some place.
‘Supernatural power released from a distance? What exactly is his ability? And what is he trying to do?’
Zhou Kun’s heart was full of confusion, but at this moment, in his mind, Wang Liang’s mysteriousness rose once again.
After Zhou Kun received the news that Wang Liang was going to Dahui City, he had once used his own authority to check Wang Liang’s file at headquarters.
Unfortunately, aside from the records of the two supernatural incidents he had recently resolved, there was nothing at all regarding the vengeful ghost he controlled.
Perhaps even headquarters did not know, or perhaps headquarters had encrypted the information about the vengeful ghost he controlled. In any case, Zhou Kun had learned nothing.
‘Da’an City, Wang Liang…’ Zhou Kun muttered inwardly.
After about twenty minutes, Wang Liang, who was lying on the reclining chair, finally opened his eyes. The cold chill around him gradually dissipated.
This result once again filled Zhou Kun with shock.
He had used supernatural power continuously for more than twenty minutes without stopping, yet his condition looked completely unchanged. Did this guy not have to worry about the vengeful ghost reviving?!
“What did you do?” Zhou Kun hurriedly asked.
“Figured out a few things. It’ll be easier to act tonight. All right, once most of the villagers are asleep, we can move. Come or not, it’s up to you.”
“Of course I’m going.”
“Fine.”
Night fell quickly in the village. There were not many of those bright city lights here.
Most of the people in this village also went to sleep very early. By seven or eight o’clock, they basically stayed indoors, and quite a few had already turned off their lights and gone to bed.
When the time reached a little past nine in the evening, the hunchbacked old man slowly walked out of the darkness with aged, sluggish steps and returned to his bedroom at home. After turning off the light, there was no more movement, as if he had fallen asleep the moment his head hit the pillow.
Through the photos scattered in every corner of the village, Wang Liang monitored the entire village and naturally knew what this old man had done during the day.
It was very strange. Most of the time, this old man had actually just wandered aimlessly around various parts of the village.
The only special thing was that, in the middle of the day, he had spent an hour on the low mountain outside the village. What he had done there was unclear. Wang Liang had no photos there and could not monitor his actions.
At eight o’clock in the evening, the old man went to the mountain once again, came down an hour later, and after returning, went straight inside to sleep.
Such actions indicated that there was probably something wrong with that mountain as well.
Wang Liang marked that low mountain as one of the locations for tonight’s activity too.