Wang Liang quietly slipped into the rear courtyard of the temple, the area where the monks rested.
Wang Liang only knew that the coffin nail was in a locked basement somewhere in Hongfa Temple, but as for where that basement was, he had no idea.
Without a ghost domain, things were inconvenient after all. Otherwise, one sweep of the ghost domain would have told him.
Still, Hongfa Temple was only so big. He could spend some time looking around; it wouldn’t take much effort.
Without alerting anyone else in the temple, Wang Liang circled around the monks’ sleeping quarters and arrived at the rear area, where several small rooms used for storing miscellaneous items stood.
He carefully searched those rooms, but found no special passage.
Wang Liang continued walking deeper in and came to a courtyard. In the courtyard stood an ancient tree, and beside it was a well.
“No way…”
Wang Liang’s expression changed. He went to the mouth of the well and peered down. It was pitch-black below.
Deep down, he really did not want to climb into the well to see whether there was some hidden passage or basement beneath it.
Fortunately, after getting closer, he noticed that behind the ancient tree there was a flagstone path almost completely covered by weeds.
Wang Liang immediately gave up on exploring the old well for the time being and chose to follow the flagstone path.
Pushing aside bushes along the way, he eventually arrived before a dilapidated wooden hut. The surroundings were overgrown with weeds, and there were no other buildings nearby.
The sight of such an environment made Wang Liang’s heart jolt. This setting felt right. He might have found it.
He walked into the wooden hut. There was nothing inside, only a wooden board about the size of a manhole cover set into the floor.
Wang Liang lifted the board, and sure enough, a passage leading underground was revealed beneath it.
He did not hesitate and entered the underground passage through the opening.
The light underground was too dim, so Wang Liang turned on his phone’s flashlight and observed the area.
This basement did not look like something built in modern times. It was made of blue bricks that carried traces of history.
At the end of the basement stood an old wooden door. The lock was gone, and the door was slightly ajar.
Wang Liang approached it. A cold wind blew out from within the door, making one’s hairs stand on end.
Pulling the wooden door fully open, Wang Liang held up his lit phone and slowly walked inside.
Drip, drip.
A faint dripping sound came from ahead, but what entered his sight was only darkness. Even the light cast by the phone’s flashlight seemed to be swallowed by the darkness before him, unable to illuminate very far in an eerie manner.
Looking back, he saw several savage scratch marks left on the blue-brick wall behind him, with traces of fresh blood still remaining on them. These marks had not been made long ago.
The light from his phone could not shine outward and was basically useless. At the same time, a bone-piercing chill came from the depths. The darkness ahead seemed like a giant maw that devoured people. Wang Liang could not see clearly and felt a wave of unease.
Thus, he activated the Sadako supernatural power within his body, attempting to make the Sadako supernatural force lingering in his abdomen spread throughout his entire body.
This was a method of using supernatural power discovered in the original plot after Yang Jian hanged himself in front of the ghost mirror and perfectly controlled the ghost shadow.
Wang Liang was trying it now. It could alter the state of his body, granting him the strange strength brought by the supernatural, better resistance to supernatural forces, and some special effects.
However, ordinary ghost controllers would not dare attempt this kind of state at all.
Just staying alive was already extremely difficult for them. Even the slightest activation of a fierce ghost’s power would stimulate the ghost’s revival and bring them one step closer to death, let alone allowing the supernatural power of a fierce ghost to fill their entire body like this. In their eyes, this was practically suicide.
However, the crashed Sadako naturally would not have any problems. Wang Liang could control it perfectly.
Wang Liang filled every part of his body with Sadako’s supernatural force. At once, a chill different from that of the surrounding environment rose from his body.
On the outside, the figure of a female ghost in white flashed across Wang Liang’s body, overlapping with his silhouette for an instant before vanishing.
After that, Wang Liang’s body visibly looked much thinner. His skin was deathly pale, and his entire body emitted a bone-piercing chill.
Wang Liang clenched his fist hard and could feel that his physical strength at this moment had already surpassed that of a human. He possessed a strange power, and his bodily state had changed. This was physical strength brought about by the supernatural.
However, this kind of strange strength was not of much use against fierce ghosts. It could only be used to bully ordinary people.
If he wanted to contend against fierce ghosts, he would need a true supernatural confrontation. A boost in physical strength was useless.
Aside from the strange strength, although he had not tested it, Wang Liang felt that in this bodily state, he might be able to jump down from the seventh or eighth floor and remain unharmed.
Because after recklessly filling his body with Sadako’s supernatural force like this, his current body could already be considered a pseudo-ghost body.
If he had thought of this move when facing the Knocking Ghost, he could have endured longer under the Knocking Ghost’s corpse-spot supernatural power.
But winning would still have been somewhat difficult.
In this state, when the chill within his body surged up to his eyes, Wang Liang’s vision suddenly became somewhat clearer.
Although the surroundings were still a little dim, it was no longer to the point where he could not see anything at all.
After letting the supernatural power possess him, the vision brought about by its influence on his eyes naturally was not as clear as Yang Jian looking directly through his scarlet ghost eyes, but for Wang Liang, it was enough. As long as it was not completely black, that was fine.
With his vision barely restored, Wang Liang immediately saw that up ahead, a tree made of tangled white bones was rooted in the ground.
Many bizarre things hung from the bone tree: dried human heads, ragged cloth stained with black clots of blood, and shattered bones.
Most shocking of all was that on the trunk of the white-bone tree, a huge black figure three meters tall was nailed in place. It seemed almost solid, and black blood was dripping down from the place where its chest had been nailed.
And the thing nailing this black figure in place was a rust-covered coffin nail!
[Anomaly Record Value: 26%… 28% (rapidly increasing)]
Wang Liang came before the black figure and looked at this enormous shadow that had been nailed down.
Every ghost could provide a certain amount of anomaly value. He was in no hurry to remove the coffin nail. An opportunity like this could not be missed. He would definitely wait until the anomaly value stopped increasing before taking the coffin nail and leaving.
During this time, Wang Liang looked at the black figure and thought of many things.
In his previous life, after reading the book Mysterious Revival, some people had speculated about this black figure that had appeared only briefly at the beginning and then disappeared without a trace after the coffin nail was pulled out.
Some guessed that this black figure was a mysterious and powerful ghost, calling it the Scarlet Lord.
But others guessed that this ghost was Yang Jian—or rather, “Yang Jian”—who, at some unknown point in the future, had grown numb in consciousness and thus returned to the past.
In the original plot, in order to solve the problem of fierce ghost revival, Yang Jian chose at a certain point to transfer his consciousness into his second ghost, a tall ghost shadow, becoming an anomaly—a ghost with the consciousness of a living person.
Although Yang Jian in the original plot once said that this huge black figure nailed down by the coffin nail was not his ghost shadow, it was also possible that Yang Jian’s experience at that time had simply been insufficient.
After all, after the future Yang Jian became a god, who knew how many ghosts he had devoured? It was entirely possible for the nature of his own ghost shadow to undergo some special changes.
This interpretation was equivalent to believing that everything was a closed loop of time and space, a timeline like an ouroboros.
The present Yang Jian picked up the ghost eye and grew into Yang Jian in the future. Then, at some unknown point in the future, Yang Jian returned once more to this point in the past, stayed here, dropped the ghost eye, and allowed the past Yang Jian to pick it up, continuing the cycle.
This could also barely explain why this huge black figure nailed down here never appeared again after the coffin nail was pulled out, all the way until the end of Mysterious Revival. Perhaps Yang Jian simply got tired of staying here and returned to the even more distant future.