Creak.
The back door was pushed open, and a figure stepped out from the darkness behind it.
Under the shocked gazes of the others, Wang Liang strode out from behind the door expressionlessly and quickly made his way to the rotting corpse in front of Zhou Kun.
“Something supernatural has appeared near the photograph I left in the village. The evil ghost is in the village right now. The sound of the ghost bell can’t reach that far, so it won’t be drawn over. We have to get there immediately.”
Ignoring the looks Zhou Kun and the others gave him, as if they were seeing a ghost, Wang Liang spoke while moving.
He took the backpack off the corpse and slung it over his own shoulders, then took the ghost bell and several other objects from the corpse’s clothing pockets and put them into the pockets of his current overcoat.
“This probe has gone far enough. I’m confident enough now. We have to confront it again before it kills everyone in the village. We must imprison it.”
Wang Liang walked over to Li Lengmei’s corpse, pulled the coffin nail out of her forehead, and held it in his hand.
“This evil ghost is very special, and this village seems very special to that evil ghost as well. That may also be why it spared you just now and went down the mountain to kill people in the village first. We have to move as quickly as possible, in case some new unknown change occurs after it slaughters the entire village.”
Wang Liang bent down and reached out, preparing to pick up the white ghost candle that had fallen to the ground.
But the moment his hand touched the white ghost candle, it shattered with a clatter into countless tiny fragments.
Wang Liang shook his head, scooped them all up, and threw them into his backpack.
After finishing all this swiftly, Wang Liang immediately ran in the direction down the mountain and said without looking back,
“What are you all standing there for? Don’t just freeze. Down the mountain. Bring that old man with you. He might be bait too—the final bait. We’ll imprison that ghost tonight!”
“.Ah, oh.”
Zhou Kun answered blankly, his body instinctively moving over to pull the hunchbacked old man up.
After coming back to his senses, he threw the unconscious hunchbacked old man to the three messengers, who were also dazedly following along, then took the lead and chased after Wang Liang.
Fang Rui caught the hunchbacked old man, glanced at the old man unconscious in his arms, then looked toward the two figures striding down the mountain ahead.
He couldn’t help slapping himself.
“Not a dream. I’ve really seen a ghost, haven’t I?”
“We did see a ghost. Just now…” Lü Huizhen hesitated, then spoke uncertainly.
Chang Feng’s face was stiff. His gaze moved back and forth between the rotting corpse on the ground and Wang Liang’s back up ahead, disbelief filling his eyes. At last, he couldn’t help cursing.
“Fuck, what the hell kind of ability is that?!”
His knowledge and experience were greater than Fang Rui’s and Lü Huizhen’s, so he understood even more clearly just how powerful and rare a ghost controller capable of doing this was.
How was this any different from coming back from the dead!
Which parts were real, and which were fake?!
A resentful female ghost, black corrosive ghost blood, resurrection from death.
Just how many evil ghosts had this man named Wang Liang controlled?!
“Let’s hurry up, or we’ll get into trouble. Fang Rui, remember to bring that old man,” Lü Huizhen urged.
Coming back from their shock, the three messengers, carrying an unconscious old man, hurriedly followed as well, heading down the mountain.
The temperature in Wangshan Village was very low tonight. The cold, sinister chill in the air was thick. As the cold wind blew past, it was icy and unsettling, making it impossible to feel that the current season was summer at all.
Many villagers sleeping in their dreams subconsciously frowned, tightening the thin quilts over themselves as they sensed the chill spreading through the air.
In the village’s dry well, several broken corpses lay at the icy bottom.
At that moment, one of the corpses trembled, but immediately returned to stillness, so much so that one might feel the tremor just now had been an illusion.
Yet in the next second, that rotting corpse abruptly opened its only murky eyeball. The eyeball in its other socket had long since disappeared, leaving only a hideous black hole stained with dried blood.
The corpse swayed as it stood. It was dressed in tattered hiking clothes, with large portions of its body rotted away. It was missing one arm, and half its face had even decayed to the point that bone could be seen.
But from the other half of its face, which was still relatively intact and covered in livor mortis, one could vaguely make out that this was a woman.
The female corpse’s body rapidly faded, merging into the air and vanishing from the icy bottom of the well.
After the female corpse disappeared, a one-inch photograph, also at the bottom of the well, trembled. The eyes of the person in the photograph shifted eerily, then returned to calm.
In the master bedroom of Old Li’s house in the village, a rotting female corpse squeezed out from the air and stood silently before the bed where the couple slept.
The stench of corpses in the air grew heavier. A sinister chill spread, and the temperature all around was so cold it seemed about to freeze into ice.
Li An, lying on the bed, frowned and groggily opened his sleepy eyes.
Because it was summer, he and his wife were both only covered with thin blankets. But with it this cold, he obviously could not sleep anymore and had been inexplicably frozen awake.
Moreover, he smelled a nauseating stench, making it even harder to sleep.
Li An sat up, breathed into his hands, rubbed his palms together, and looked around in a daze.
He discovered that tonight was darker than usual. The moonlight shining in from outside the window was bleak, leaving the room basically shrouded in darkness. Visibility was extremely poor; he could only see one vague black outline after another.
Li An wanted to get out of bed and take a thicker quilt from the cabinet, but suddenly, he stopped moving, sensing that something was wrong.
He noticed that a black shadow was standing silently just a few steps away from the bed.
But when had he placed anything so close beside the bed? That spot should have been empty, otherwise it would be easy to bump into it when getting out of bed.
And that black outline did not look like some object either. It looked like a…
Human figure!
Li An was instantly frightened so badly that he jolted, all sleepiness gone.
“Who’s there?!” Li An’s voice cracked from fear.
His panicked shout woke the woman sleeping beside him. She rubbed her eyes and looked at Li An, who had sat up next to her.
“Honey, what’s wrong? It’s so cold. Huh, what is that—ahhh! Urk…”
At this moment, the woman also noticed the strange black silhouette outside the bed and let out a piercing scream in terror, but her voice had only just sounded before it abruptly stopped. No one knew what had happened.
In the darkness, Li An had no time to see what had happened to the person beside his pillow. In a panic, he groped toward the top of the bedside table, trying to press the lamp switch and light up the room so he could see which bastard was scaring people in the middle of the night.
Click, click, click.
The button was pressed several times, but not the slightest bit of light came on, as if there had been a power outage. This made Li An even more panicked. The sense that something was wrong in his heart intensified, and fear rose within him.
“Damn it, why is there a power outage now?”
Li An stopped trying to turn on the lamp. He grabbed the phone by his pillow and edged toward the inside of the bed, wanting to get away from the black shadow outside the bed that had been standing silently all this time, but his body bumped into the woman’s body.
The woman’s body was very cold. And because neither of them wore much clothing, the direct contact between their bodies also gave Li An a feeling that was not exactly smooth.
But right now, he had little attention to spare for such things. He turned on the flashlight on his phone, wanting to use it to cast some light.
The phone’s light turned on as usual, but the white light that should have been piercing in the darkness now seemed somewhat dim, as if part of its brightness had been swallowed by the surrounding darkness.
However, the moment the phone light came on, Li An finally used that dim illumination to see who the black shadow outside the bed was. But the result made his entire body tremble.
That was absolutely not a living person!
It was a… female corpse, dressed in tattered hiking clothes, covered in livor mortis, missing an arm, with half its head rotted and hanging loose!