A few more hours passed, and it was midnight.
Wang Liang opened his half-lidded eyes and exchanged a glance with Zhou Kun, who sat beside him with deep, dark circles under his eyes yet utterly unable to sleep. Together, they got up and quietly made their way outside.
The village was very dark at night. The dim moonlight was practically the only source of illumination. Fortunately, as ghost controllers, Wang Liang and Zhou Kun were more adapted than ordinary people to the shifting light and darkness of the night.
“Where do we go first?” Zhou Kun asked in a low voice.
“East. Old Li’s place,” Wang Liang said.
“Do you know where their house is in the east?”
Wang Liang did not answer again. He walked ahead and led the way, his target clear. He had already figured it out during the day.
Old Li’s house was a single-story brick-and-tile bungalow, the kind with several rooms lined up side by side, each room’s door visible directly from outside the courtyard. Around it was only a wooden fence.
Like thieves, Wang Liang and Zhou Kun arrived outside Old Li’s house, quietly climbed over the fence, and came to the doors of the rooms in the courtyard.
Outside one of the rooms, Wang Liang could hear faint breathing from within. That was the couple’s room.
So he and Zhou Kun silently moved to the room next door.
Zhou Kun stepped forward and tried gently pushing the wooden door. It did not open. The door was locked.
For a wooden door like this, even if it was locked, one kick would be enough to break it open. But that obviously would not do right now—the noise would be too loud.
Zhou Kun gestured to Wang Liang, pointing at the door and then crossing his hands to indicate that it could not be opened. Then he twirled his fingers a few times and poked back and forth several times, asking whether Wang Liang knew how to pick a lock.
Watching Zhou Kun “form hand seals” over there, Wang Liang’s expression darkened. The image of this square-faced fellow in his mind was on the verge of completely collapsing.
Wang Liang walked around Zhou Kun to the window of the room. The window was tightly shut, and the curtains inside were drawn, almost completely blocking the view within. Only a narrow gap in the curtains remained, through which one could barely make out the general layout of the room.
Looking like this was far too difficult, so Wang Liang took a one-inch photo from his pocket and slipped it into the room through the crack beneath the window.
Zhou Kun glanced at Wang Liang’s actions in confusion, then also came to the side and struggled to peer into the room through the exposed gap in the curtains.
But very soon, his eyes widened, and shock appeared on his face.
The photo Wang Liang had just tossed into the room through the crack beneath the window was now undergoing a bizarre change.
A hand with deathly pale skin, covered in unknown black lines, stretched out from that tiny one-inch photo in grotesquely disproportionate fashion and seized the floor. It was the hand of a ghost!
Immediately after, a female ghost in white, her black hair hanging loose and covering her face, crawled out of the photo with twisted joints. A sinister chill emanated from her as she rose to her feet, lowered her head, and stood silently in the room.
Looking at the scene inside, Zhou Kun swallowed. His gaze shifted to Wang Liang beside him. Releasing a malevolent ghost through a photograph—was this his supernatural ability?
But was it really appropriate to use the power of a malevolent ghost just to scout the inside of a room? They might as well have kicked the door down.
Zhou Kun suddenly thought of something and hurriedly took out the one-inch photo Wang Liang had given him that afternoon from his trouser pocket.
Looking at Wang Liang’s expressionless portrait inside the photo, Zhou Kun hesitated. All of a sudden, he really did not want to keep this thing on him anymore.
Beside him, Wang Liang had already sent part of his consciousness along the supernatural gray line in his field of vision to the medium, fully taking control of the derived Sadako he had summoned.
Inside the room, the derived Sadako’s body trembled. Then she lifted her head and looked around, observing the surroundings.
But she did not find anything special. Everything around her was ordinary furniture—so ordinary that one could not even tell this was a girl’s room.
Moreover, the place looked as if no one had lived there for a long time. A layer of dust had accumulated on the floor, the quilt, and the table.
Yet this family’s daughter was clearly about to reach her seventh-day memorial. She had still been alive six days ago, and she had still needed to eat and live somewhere. But this place was obviously one that had not been occupied for a long time. Then where had she lived before?
Or had they found the wrong person? Was this not Old Li’s house?
That should not be the case. The abnormalities on that couple were very obvious; the possibility of having found the wrong people was extremely small.
Wang Liang controlled Sadako to come before the only desk in the room. She pulled open the drawer below, intending to see whether anything special was hidden inside.
The drawer opened. Inside was only an old book with a brown cover, a layer of dust spread over it. It had clearly not been used in a long time.
The derived Sadako opened the book. Calling it a book was not accurate; it should be called a notebook.
However, there was almost nothing recorded inside. Most of it was blank. Only the first page had a single sentence written on it.
[I was chosen.]
Turning to the second page, one could see tearing marks in the gap between the first and second pages. There had been several pages in between, but they had already been torn out.
However, the person who wrote in this notebook seemed to have pressed very hard when writing on those pages. The derived Sadako could see in the darkness.
Through the derived Sadako’s perspective, Wang Liang could see that on the now-blank second page, there were some pen impressions left behind from the force of the writing. They were the contents from the pages that had been torn out.
They were not very clear, but he could roughly make out that the content consisted of many repeated lines of:
“Why? Why! Why?!”
Wang Liang controlled the derived Sadako to put the notebook back into the drawer and close it again.
After checking around once more and finding nothing else of value, the derived Sadako turned to ash and vanished from the room.
Wang Liang took out another photo and slipped it through the crack in the window.
Sadako had marked this suspicious location.
Wang Liang gave Zhou Kun a look and led him away from Old Li’s house.
After they had gotten some distance away, Zhou Kun asked in a low voice,
“How was it?”
“All I know is that the room hasn’t been lived in for a long time. That girl seems to have been chosen to become something.”
“This…”
Zhou Kun looked troubled. This was far too little information. He was very bad at puzzle-solving matters like this.
As Wang Liang walked, he pondered inwardly. Based on this information, as well as some experience he had gained from past movies, he made a bold conjecture. In truth, he already had an initial suspicion about what might have happened in this village. Next, he only needed to verify it.
In any case, he had arrived early. Since he had nothing to do, spending some time figuring these things out might help him deduce in advance the exact location where the film-and-television ghost would descend in this village, allowing him to imprison it at the first opportunity once the time came.
The cemetery to the north where the seventh-day rites were being held might not necessarily be the descent location at present. It was merely the place with the greatest possibility. There were still other possible locations where it might descend.
If the cemetery turned out to be empty when the time came, he would also be able to rush to the other places in time.
Wang Liang had not forgotten what the system had said before: the film-and-television ghost was easiest to imprison at the very beginning of its descent.
When the film-and-television ghost first descended, not only would its puzzle pieces be incomplete, it would also go through a period of gradual revival. The earlier he made contact and imprisoned it, the easier the supernatural confrontation would be.
If it was not imprisoned in time, the film-and-television ghost would definitely leave its descent location and go elsewhere to seek out its puzzle pieces, complete itself, and strengthen the scale of its supernatural power.
At that point, it would inevitably become a disaster—and Wang Liang would inevitably be swept into it as well.