“Even supernatural creations can actually be burned. I had originally planned to rely on this robot to contain this ghost, but now that the quilt is damaged, we must evacuate as soon as possible. Otherwise, once the two puzzle pieces combine, there’s no telling what terrifying thing might be produced.”
The quilt inside this robot was originally a complementary puzzle piece to that ghost. Liu San had planned to use this characteristic to contain it, but the suddenly appearing black fire disrupted his plans, leaving him no choice but to prepare to evacuate.
“Paper dolls are utterly insufficient. This ghost still has half a puzzle piece whose whereabouts are unknown…”
Just as Liu San was pondering, a voice came from beside him:
“Where is this? It’s so cold.”
“Xie An? Is that you? How did you become like this?”
Liu San abruptly turned his head. Where his eyes landed, all the burned paper dolls were gone, replaced by dense crowds of people packed into the square, with constant clamorous noise rising and falling.
Among the crowd were also several blond delinquents looking at him.
As a captain internally appointed by headquarters long ago, Liu San had witnessed far too many bizarre occurrences. He didn’t panic, but rather narrowed his eyes slightly, observing the chaotic crowd.
These people were all truly existent individuals, not illusions created by a ghost domain, but rather ordinary living people who couldn’t be more ordinary.
“Living people?”
Within the crowd, Liu San saw several familiar figures.
One of the steps in Liu San’s paper doll creation required a complete corpse, without any decay or missing parts.
For this reason, he often traveled across the country collecting corpses. Some of them were even people he knew, who died in supernatural incidents and were then made into paper dolls by him.
But at this moment, those people seemed to have been affected by the black fire, unexpectedly all coming back to life.
Liu San looked toward a blond in the crowd wearing tight pants and pea shoes.
“A Jie?”
“It’s me. What’s wrong with you? You look malnourished and about to die. I told you to stop racing around, but you wouldn’t listen.”
A piece of yellow paper quietly drifted over, but there was no reaction. The blond still craned his neck curiously looking around, without displaying any unusual behavior.
A hint of abnormality showed in Liu San’s eyes.
‘Impossible. Someone who has been dead for several months—how could they suddenly appear here?’
But Liu San still asked, “A Jie, how did you end up here?”
The blond’s teeth chattered from the cold. His snot had frozen into icicles as it ran down. He shuddered and said, “Damn… it’s freezing me to death. I was just getting ready to drag race with Wei Shao. I don’t know what happened—my head suddenly caught fire, and then I was here.”
Liu San asked in confusion, “Wei Shao? Drag racing? Didn’t Wei Shao die with me?”
The blond glanced at Liu San.
“Did the cold freeze your brain? Just now you were telling Wei Shao you wanted to compete with him to see who’s the true number one car god of Willow Leaf Town. Forget that for now—do you have any clothes or something? Lend me something to wear. It’s way too cold today.”
Liu San fell silent at this. He and Wei Shao had gotten into an accident while drag racing in the small town and were saved by a passing Liu Xunzhi, which led to him becoming what he was now. But this blond’s account was completely different from what Liu San had experienced. In the blond’s memory, Liu San seemed to still be alive and had not become a ghost controller.
“Wait! Willow Leaf Town?!”
Liu San suddenly noticed the flaw in the blond’s words. He had never heard of any Willow Leaf Town. From childhood to adulthood, he had always lived in a rural-urban fringe area called Willowless Town.
Legend had it that during the Republican era, a willow tree in this small town became a spirit, killing common people everywhere. An eminent monk who traveled from afar passed through this place and performed rites to destroy the willow demon, hence the name.
He lunged over and grabbed the blond by the throat.
“Speak! What do you mean Willow Leaf Town?! Who the hell are you?!”
Liu San’s numb eyes showed no emotion. The little blond was clearly frightened by him, his crotch instantly soaking a large patch. He spoke in terror:
“Brother Xie An, I’m A Jie… Willow Leaf Town is our town. Don’t you remember? There’s an especially large willow tree in the town. The old folks even used to say that the willow tree became a spirit in the past.”
Liu San’s gaze flickered uncertainly. This blond was without a doubt a real person, but the information he provided completely didn’t match what Liu San had experienced.
Liu San was uncertain in his heart.
“Consciousness altered? Or simply living people created by supernatural forces?”
Suddenly.
Beep—.
An electronic notification sound came.
At the square’s stairway, a bit of light emitted from the head of that robot, which had remained silent all this while. A standard artificial intelligence voice rang out.
“Southwest direction. Headquarters support team detected.”
Liu San observed the changes before his eyes—the suddenly appearing living people and the restarted mechanical supernatural creation—rapidly planning his next move in his mind.
“It actually rebooted successfully. Are communications restored?”
Liu San immediately said to that grotesque machine of intertwined flesh and machinery, “Take me to them.”
As he spoke, pieces of yellow paper drifted out from his chest, wrapping and covering that blond named A Jie, then transforming into Liu San’s appearance, standing stiffly before Liu San.
“Go back.”
This paper doll immediately turned around and quickly walked away into the distance.
Liu San didn’t want to give up on this supernatural incident concerning the resurrection of the dead so easily, so he had no choice but to temporarily place A Jie inside the paper doll and distance him from this place.
People around him were already beginning to freeze to death, but Liu San couldn’t even take care of himself at this moment.
Watching the paper doll’s silhouette already walking far away, Liu San also prepared to evacuate. Being merely a somewhat special paper doll clone himself, he had no extra energy to rescue the living people here. Moreover, people resurrected through supernatural means simply couldn’t be counted as true living people.
However, these people were slightly different from what Liu San had imagined. Although they had indeed appeared here through supernatural means, they were all truly existent living people. It’s just that the world they originally came from was not this one.
But Liu San knew nothing of this at the moment. Just as he was preparing to leave, a faint blackness suddenly coated the frozen buildings in the distance, as if something was racing toward him.
That faint blackness moved very fast. By the time Liu San could see clearly, what met his eyes were overwhelming footprints frantically sweeping through everything around. From distant high-rises to nearby streets, every inch of wall, ground, and even mid-air was covered in dense bare footprints.
“Cao Yang? This state…”
Before Liu San could react, the entire footprint-covered world abruptly flipped in an instant, transforming into a blinding blue-purple.
All the footprints instantly vanished without a trace.
In their place was a withered corpse standing in the center of the square.
This ghastly withered corpse was currently holding a little boy tightly in a death grip, stiff as a statue…