Suddenly, someone shouted loudly outside the door.
Shen Yi flinched in surprise, and the paper in his hand flew out. He scrambled to catch it, fumbling several times before finally grasping it again.
Shen Yi let out a sigh of relief.
Pounding began at the door, and the raspy, frantic voice from before erupted into loud laughter, incessantly calling for a “son.” Shen Yi quickly stowed the items from the red envelope and the paper he had just torn off, then ran out to see what was happening.
The rusted iron gate was being slapped with a deafening clamor.
When Shen Yi stepped out, he saw an old woman with disheveled hair and ragged, mud-stained clothes laughing hysterically. She was leaning against the gate, frantically calling for her “son” while slapping the half-open gate of his house.
Upon seeing Shen Yi emerge, her dull eyes lit up. She straightened up, swayed unsteadily, and let out a ghostly shriek: “Son! Where is my son?!”
“My son what did you do to my son!”
Midway through her sentence, she suddenly burst into loud wailing.
“Give my son back to me… Give him back! My son!”
Shen Yi stared with wide, shocked eyes. Suddenly, he noticed something. The old woman clearly didn’t look normal, so Shen Yi didn’t dare approach. He leaned his body to the side, stretching his neck to curiously and carefully scan her face.
He noticed, Wen Mo thought.
Shen Yi asked, “Hello?”
The old woman did not respond to his greeting, crying even more bitterly with tears and snot streaming down her face.
“Hello?” Shen Yi tried again tentatively. “Have I seen you somewhere before?”
The old woman continued to howl and cry. Shen Yi felt a massive headache coming on. He scratched his hair, wearing a pained expression.
“Old Lady Lin!”
A flurry of footsteps approached from a distance, and a person shouted, “What are you doing here again? Do you think things aren’t big enough as it is!”
“Old Lady Lin” was this old woman.
Lin wailed: “My son…”
“What about your son? Stop causing trouble!”
The person was still far away; before they even reached the Jiang family gate, their footsteps thudded incessantly.
Shen Yi thought for a moment, turned around, and began walking back into the house.
The person shouted: “Brother Yi was killed by that little deaf boy of yours, and yet you still come here seeking a life! Are you afraid you haven’t lived long enough!”
Shen Yi’s footsteps into the house faltered.
Wen Mo stood inside the house. His blood-red eyes were slightly raised, his gaze a pool of silent, stagnant water.
The rain continued to fall, causing a thin white mist to rise from the ground. Wen Mo watched Shen Yi; the latter remained frozen in place, his eyes blank and filled with utter bewilderment.
“Hurry up and leave!”
The footsteps grew much closer.
Shen Yi snapped back to reality. He hurried back into the house and hid by the door, poking only half his head out to peek. He was very conscious of the fact that he was currently a “ghost.”
Old Lady Lin continued to wail outside while the newcomer reached the courtyard gate. It was a village woman, dressed cleanly and holding an umbrella. She grabbed Old Lady Lin, dragging and pulling her away.
Lin refused to go, her hands clawing and waving wildly as she gripped the Jiang family’s doorframe: “I’m not leaving! That poisonous woman hasn’t given my son back to me yet! I’m not leaving!!”
“Given back what!” The woman grew angry. “Your son is dead!”
“He’s not dead! He’s not dead, my son isn’t dead!” Lin cried. “Li Guilan murdered my son! Li Guilan!!”
The village woman was startled when she heard Lin use the full name.
“Li Guilan! Li Guilan! You heartless woman! Give me my son—”
“Stop shouting!”
The woman barked a command to silence her, then suddenly let out a sharp cry of pain. Shen Yi looked out and saw that the woman had tried to cover Lin’s mouth, only to be bitten hard. Lin bit down with such force that a ring of bloody teeth marks was left on the back of the woman’s hand, with blood oozing out.
The woman was instantly enraged, her face flushing deep red as she delivered a vicious slap to Lin’s face. Old Lady Lin also let out a cry of pain, then covered half her face, wailing even louder with a look of profound grievance.
The woman lost her temper entirely. She cursed Lin’s parents under her breath, grabbed her by the hair, and forcibly dragged her away.
Old Lady Lin’s screams continued. The sound gradually faded, dissolving into the noise of the rain. Shen Yi straightened up behind the door, stood in silence for a moment, and then walked out. With a complex expression, he stared at the empty courtyard gate for a while before looking up at the overcast sky.
He sighed: “What on earth is going on here…”
Wen Mo followed him out the door. He closed his eyes, the black mist around him dissipating. Just as he was about to manifest before Shen Yi, a voice came from the front of the yard: “Yo, I finally found you.”
Wen Mo immediately retracted the black mist and became invisible again.
Shen Yi looked down. The gate of the old Jiang house creaked again, and a pair of beautiful black high heels hopped inside.
It was Yan Pan. Holding her hand over her forehead to shield her eyes, she hopped into the yard and walked toward him.
“I’ve been looking for you for ages. I didn’t expect you to find someone else’s house.” Yan Pan reached the eaves and stopped beside Shen Yi, lowering her hand. She gave her long, wavy hair a vigorous shake, splattering water everywhere.
Shen Yi flinched from the sudden spray.
Yan Pan brushed her hair back and let out a long breath: “The rain is so heavy; I’m exhausted. How about you? Did you find anything in this godforsaken corner? By the way, how did you even find this place?”
“This is the Jiang house. I felt there must be something here, so I came,” Shen Yi said, wiping away the water she had splattered on him. “Besides, even if I went to ask the villagers what’s going on, no one would talk to me, right?”
“That’s true.” Yan Pan thought about the treatment he’d received since arriving in the village, and her tone turned sympathetic. “It’s a miracle they haven’t chased you down with brooms.”
“Hahaha…” Shen Yi laughed through gritted teeth.
“So, did you find anything?” Yan Pan asked.
“I did find some things,” Shen Yi said. “But why should I tell you?”
“Naturally, I won’t ask for nothing,” Yan Pan replied. “I have information too. Like you said, if you ask the villagers, you won’t get anything. But I’m different; I can get them to talk.”
“I’ve made a full circle around the village and talked to more than half the villagers. I’ve gathered a lot. So, I have clues you definitely can’t get, and you have clues that have already been taken and that I can’t find anymore. We share and exchange it’s a trade. How about it? Sounds like a good deal, doesn’t it?”
Admittedly, it sounded like a trade that needed to be made.
Shen Yi nodded: “You’ll have to show your sincerity first. A trade is all about sincerity. Since you say you’ve gathered clues, give me a little hint first. Don’t worry, I won’t let you lose out.”
“Then you have to show me what you found.”
“Of course.”
Yan Pan nodded: “Fine.”
“The news I gathered is very interesting,” she said. “Three years ago, two people died. One was you Shen Yi and the other was a deaf child named Lin Wu.”
“The villagers say those two kids were quite close; they’d known each other since the Shen Yi family moved here. But their personalities were as different as the sky and the sea.”
“Shen Yi was very generous. Because he had two younger siblings and his family situation wasn’t great, he was used to being the big brother who took care of kids. He had a great temper, loved worrying about others, and was a natural at socializing.”
“Unlike him, Lin Wu had a bad reputation in the village,” Yan Pan continued. “That child was born deaf and couldn’t hear people speak. His parents hated him and hit him, making him very gloomy. He would avoid people whenever he saw them. The village even gave him a nickname: ‘The Deaf Ghost’.”
A realization dawned on Shen Yi: “Because he always avoided people?”
“Yes, and he didn’t speak himself, nor did he respond when others spoke. Over time, the villagers said he was like a ghost,” Yan Pan said. “Three years ago, after you were burned to death, Lin Wu committed suicide by jumping into the river.”
“Also, I went back to the wedding banquet to investigate. The dead groom is still lying there; he hasn’t moved. The wedding clothes he’s wearing are different from the Ghost Groom we saw at the ruins.”
“Most importantly, I discovered that Zhang Er the dead groom has a scar on the back of his hand.”
“A scar?”
“Yes. He died a brutal death yesterday with cuts all over, and his hands were covered in blood. It was obscured by the blood, so none of us noticed he had a scar on the back of his hand.”
“When I went back to look this morning, the villagers had cleaned the blood off him for the burial, and that’s when I saw it. I heard that while he was doing carpentry in the county town, he accidentally scraped the skin off the back of his hand.”
Shen Yi winced: “That sounds painful!”
“It looked painful too; a huge scar right on the back of his hand,” Yan Pan said. “And the hand that was injured is the same hand the Ghost Groom used when he handed you the umbrella.”
“But the Ghost Groom didn’t have a scar on his hand, did he?”
Shen Yi fell silent. He looked upward, recalling the morning the hand the Ghost Groom had extended toward him was deathly pale and clean, with no scar.
“He didn’t,” he said.
“Then that’s it,” Yan Pan spread her hands. “It proves that the Ghost Groom isn’t the groom who died at the wedding banquet.”
Shen Yi was confused: “Why would anyone think it was the recently deceased groom?”
Yan Pan paused, giving him a bewildered look: “Well, obviously. The broadcast mentioned a Ghost Groom, and the only groom currently in this village is the one who just died, right?”
“…”
Only after she mentioned it did Shen Yi realize it a beat late. That was indeed the case. He scratched his cheek sheepishly: “Sorry, I never felt that the Ghost Groom was the one from the banquet. I thought it was… forget it, never mind.”
Shen Yi laughed it off. Yan Pan gave him a suspicious look but shrugged and didn’t press him.
“In any case, this proves that the Ghost Groom has absolutely no connection to the wedding groom, Brother Zhang Er,” Yan Pan said. “That’s all the information I have for now. Now, you should show me your sincerity.”
Yan Pan extended her hand toward him. Shen Yi generously pulled the items from the red envelope out of his bag and handed them to her. Yan Pan took the items one by one, her brow furrowing deeper as she studied them.
“What is this?” She studied the two straw dolls for a while. “Voodoo dolls?”
“I don’t know; they were like this when I found them,” Shen Yi said. “And this—this is the red envelope that contained the dolls and the two paper notes. When I found it, it was wrapped in several layers of red thread.”
Yan Pan took the red envelope and studied it for a moment.
“I’m not sure what it’s for, but my intuition tells me the contents of this red envelope are very important,” Shen Yi said. “If you don’t think this is enough, I also have a piece of paper.”
“Let me see.”
Shen Yi followed her request and pulled out the paper he had torn from Li Guilan’s “memo wall.” He unfolded it and handed it to Yan Pan. The paper was yellowed and the handwriting blurred, leaving only a few faint lines discernible. It wasn’t large, and there wasn’t much written on it.
【Pay ▆ to ▆▆, swallow ▆ with water. Stuff the dolls into the ▆▆ envelope, two paper ▆ together. The red ▆ use ▆ rope ▆▆, place in the ▆▆▆ corner.】
【Must first beat ▆▆ to ▆▆. To ensure ▆▆ won’t ▆▆▆.】
“Good grief,” Yan Pan couldn’t help but say. “The key parts are all blurred. Unbelievable.”
Shen Yi laughed out loud: “Standard horror game trope. If we figured it out this fast, what would be the point of playing?”
Yan Pan curled her lip and returned all the items he had handed her. “Keep them safe,” she said. “You found them, they’re yours. I just wanted to see what they were.”
Shen Yi nodded and took everything back.
“What did you find at the ruins this morning?” Yan Pan took the opportunity to ask. “The Ghost Groom appeared right after you found that item.”