“What is your name?”
Xuan He asked.
Hearing this, the girl stood frozen in place, staring blankly at Xuan He without uttering a single word.
Xuan He looked back with puzzlement, patiently waiting for the girl’s reply.
Since the girl had made food for her so many times, Xuan He was more than willing to ask for her name.
Yet the girl seemed as though she had been hit by a pause button, standing stock-still in place.
Her entire body was rigid, but her mind was racing at high speed.
What was her name?
Old Man Guo and Guo Da called her stinking girl, money-losing commodity, and slatternly girl.
The people in the village called her the Guo family girl or Guo Da’s girl.
Was that truly her name?
The girl slowly lowered her gaze, thinking deeply.
She did not want this pretty, beautiful older sister in front of her to address her in that manner. She could not explain why, but she simply did not want it.
Memories began to spread out, expanding like wildly growing vines.
A very, very long time ago, she seemed to remember that someone had given her a name.
The woman was very gentle. Even though her body was covered in bruises and she was trapped in a dim, cramped room, she still held her patiently and whispered about the beauty of the outside world.
“Child, if you have the ability, you must leave this place. This is hell. You must escape completely.”
“You must leave, you must leave here. I also want to leave this ghost place, to leave here.”
“Leave, I want to leave, I want my mom and dad, I want to leave.”
The girl remembered. That mother from a very distant time had told her to take her mother’s surname and given her a name. Her name was…
Just as she was about to speak her name, she realized that Xuan He had already finished eating.
The girl had spent too much time thinking, so long that Xuan He assumed the girl didn’t have a name. Not paying it any mind, Xuan He finished her food on her own, wiped her mouth, greeted her, and left.
Watching Xuan He’s departing back, the girl’s mouth opened and closed, ultimately turning into a sigh.
“My name is Li. Jiang Li.”
At night, thick, curved black mist drifted into every household in the village.
Hideous monsters roared and burrowed into everyone’s dreams.
“Don’t come over, get away, don’t come over!”
A man screamed in terror. The dark shadow behind him suddenly elongated, and a gloomy, terrifying child’s voice echoed all around, “Daddy, I am your child, Daddy.”
An elderly woman was working in the fields when she suddenly dug up a hard object. Her heart leaped with joy, thinking she had struck gold, only to discover it was a small skull.
At that moment, the skull suddenly opened its mouth and spoke, “Grandma, I’m in so much pain, Grandma.”
“Aaaah!” Terrified out of her wits, the old woman dropped her hoe and tried to run, but the skull suddenly split into more than a dozen pieces, and their exposed teeth bit away her hands and feet bite by bite.
A daughter-in-law finally gave birth to a grandson. Ecstatic, the old man cradled the baby and chuckled merrily, completely ignoring the woman heavily bleeding on the bed.
Suddenly, the grandson in his arms transformed into a pitch-black monster and locked its jaws around the old man’s neck, while the heavily bleeding woman lay on the blood-soaked bed giggling away.
A man was beating a woman with a leather belt. The wails of the woman collapsed on the ground brought joy to his body and mind.
Right at that moment, the leather belt in his hand suddenly turned into a blade that severed his hand, the ground transformed into roaring flames burning his feet, the woman he had abused vanished, and countless sharp blades from the surrounding air lunged at him simultaneously.
Amidst his agonizing screams, the blades sliced him into countless pieces.
This night, the sounds of miserable shrieks echoed endlessly throughout the village.
Everyone woke up screaming.
The nightmares left them drenched in sweat, sitting by the bedsides unable to recover their senses for a long time.
The next day, when the villagers gathered and talked with one another, they discovered that everyone had experienced the exact same nightmares.
“Someone must have put a curse on us!”
“Dammit, which bastard cursed us?! This isn’t even about me!”
“Should we invite a shaman?”
“I heard there is a master priest in town. Let’s hold a Taoist ritual!”
The villagers chattered noisily, and even the village chief felt the matter was suspicious since most people in the village had suffered nightmares.
Consequently, the villagers pooled their money and sent someone to invite the town priest to come to the village and perform a purification ritual.
Qian San and Wang Laoer’s couple were somewhat indifferent.
These three individuals were human traffickers responsible for abducting people, transporting them, and selling them to this village.
Every time they brought a few women over, they would stay for two or three days specifically to eat the free wedding banquets.
This time, they had eaten the wedding banquets of the other families, leaving only the Guo family’s banquet, when suddenly this bizarre incident occurred.
They had also had nightmares last night.
Unlike the villagers, they had traveled far and wide for many years and did not believe in ghosts and deities; if they did, they would never have entered this profession.
They simply figured they hadn’t slept well in the village these past two days.
However, since a priest was coming, they could watch the excitement, so they didn’t object.
The next day, the priest arrived, lit a bonfire, and began the ritual.
Having suffered continuous nightmares over the past two days, the villagers all had dark circles under their eyes as heavy as a panda’s, with their eye bags hanging low.
The chief ordered everyone in the village to gather in the small plaza at the very center of the village to jointly ward off evil.
Those able to gather were the family representatives who actually held a say in household matters.
The vast majority were men. As for the women, most were purchased wives who weren’t allowed to leave freely and remained locked inside their homes.
The crowd gathered and made a tremendous racket. The chief demanded everyone to quiet down, and only then did the noise subside.
After counting the head count from each family, they discovered that nobody from the Guo household had arrived.
They waited for a long time, yet the Guo family members still hadn’t shown up.
“What is going on? Where are Old Man Guo and Guo Da? Why haven’t they come out yet?!” the chief asked anxiously.
Someone in the village hurriedly offered to go to the Guo house to check on them.
Only then did they realize that Old Man Guo and Guo Da seemingly hadn’t appeared for two whole days.
They assumed that with a new bride and a warm kang bed, the men simply didn’t want to come out, but attendance at such an important occasion was mandatory!
The priest put on a grand air and had limited time; with the time spent waiting, he could take on a few more gigs and earn a bit more money.
Therefore, he was extremely impatient, urging the chief to start the ritual immediately under the excuse that missing the auspicious hour would render it ineffective.
Daring not to offend the priest, the chief hesitated repeatedly before agreeing. After all, the life or death of the Guo family had nothing to do with him.
Thus, the priest began the ritual.
Nobody knew what he scattered into the campfire, but it immediately produced thick, blinding smoke that shrouded the entire surroundings.
The priest muttered incantations under his breath, looking very much like the real deal.
Hiding in the shadows, Xuan He found it interesting and decided to add a little drama for them.
Right at that moment, a low, drawn-out woman’s voice suddenly echoed through the surroundings.
“Pay with your life. Pay with your life.”
“My life is so miserable. My life is so miserable.”
“Why was it me? Return my life.”
The voice came from all directions, carrying echoes that reverberated through the air.
The priest stiffened all over, eyeing his surroundings with high alert as his legs began to shake.
“Who is it? Who’s there?!” Under the watchful eyes of the villagers, the chief braced himself and shouted twice.
Yet the low, lingering female voice grew even more distinct, carrying a shrill, resentful wail that made one’s hair stand on end.
The surrounding mist seemed to thicken, enveloping everyone within it.
Trembling at the knees and feeling his scalp tingle with terror, the priest dropped his wooden peach sword onto the ground.
He bolted straight into a run.
Damn it all! Having faked supernatural tricks for all these years, this was his first time actually running into the real thing!
Great Immortal Mother, Grand Patriarch Grandmother, he would never dare scam people with fake tricks again!
Just as the priest ran out of the village, he tripped and fell straight to the ground, knocking out his two front teeth and fracturing both wrists.
He would never be able to scam anyone again; after all, what kind of priest speaks with a lisping whistle?
As for the villagers, they also wanted to run, but the thick fog trapped them tightly, wrapping around them like a maze. Discovering they couldn’t escape at all, they could only huddle together in a shivering mass.
A few cowardly ones even knelt on the ground, begging for forgiveness and reciting prayers to the Jade Emperor, Queen Mother of the West, and Guanyin Bodhisattva all at once, adding Matchmaker and the God of Wealth at the end just to be safe.
From this day onward, not a single person in the village was ever able to leave the village again.
The villagers didn’t have much initial reaction about failing to leave; they were merely tortured every night by nightmares and descent into hell, being torn apart by ghosts, which left them in a trance-like state of utter exhaustion.
The three human traffickers, however, were frantic with anxiety. Finding themselves unable to leave the village, they grew terrified and panicked, running to the village entrance every day in an attempt to escape.
Yet every single time, they circled right back to the starting point.
This went on for a week. Completely unable to endure it any longer, all the villagers and the three traffickers had the chief call another meeting to discuss what to do.
The chief was pulling his hair out in worry. Over the past week, they had tried everything, praying to gods and worshipping Buddhas, using black dog blood, roosters, jade gourds, and cinnabar talisman papers, yet none of it had the slightest effect.
Hiding to the side, Xuan He asked in puzzlement, “Aren’t they supposed to be bad people? Why do bad people still pray to gods and Buddhas? Aren’t they afraid divine punishment will strike them down?”
After its upgrade, Little Light Ball was noticeably a bit smarter. “Main God, they don’t think of themselves as bad people, so they aren’t afraid.”
Xuan He was somewhat uncomprehending. In the petitioner’s memories, the people in this village were rotten to the core.
Who would have thought that the villagers didn’t consider themselves bad?
Human beings truly were complex creatures.
After pondering for just a few seconds, Xuan He dropped the thought.
Following a week of torment, the petitioner’s resentment had mostly dissipated, and she was almost ready to leave this village!
Only the final step remained.
Tormented by nightly nightmares, the villagers had sallow complexions and looked on the verge of sudden death.
Their mental states were near collapse, and a few with poor stress tolerance had already begun to lose their minds, tearing at their hair and screaming aloud.
Right at that moment, the mist enveloped them once more.
Unlike the previous mist, this one was mixed with a heavy scent of charcoal fire and was intensely choking.
Before anyone could react, intense heat suddenly spread, and a fiery red glow cut through the thick mist to illuminate the space.
“Fire, fire,” someone screamed in terror, their pupils reflecting nothing but the red of the blazing inferno.
The others reacted as well, scattering in all directions in an attempt to find water to put out the fire.
Yet to their dismay, they couldn’t escape the mist at all.
The vapor slowly swallowed the surrounding environment until their vision finally dissolved into a boundless expanse.
From within the impenetrable, thick smoke, sharp cries and agonizing roars echoed.
Flames leaped, full of vitality and burning endlessly, scorching away all that wickedness into nothingness.
When the smoke cleared two days later, the surroundings were reduced to charred ruins where nothing could be distinguished.
The Underworld officers of the netherworld rushed over once again looking miserable. Truly, they had no idea how this world had managed to summon such a bigshot, doubling their workload overnight!
Not daring to voice any grievances, they rounded up the ghosts and bowed low before scurrying away.
The petitioner’s final trace of resentment dissolved.
Feeling refreshed and clear-headed after finishing the final task, Xuan He prepared to leave the village.
Suddenly, a hand reached out and grabbed the hem of Xuan He’s clothes.
Xuan He turned around in puzzlement, meeting Jiang Li’s pair of dark, wide eyes.
Within those eyes flickered worry, fear, and anticipation.
“Where are you going?”
She stammered, her voice still low and raspy.
Xuan He tilted her head in bewilderment, a stray hair curl awkwardly sticking up and making her look extra innocent and cute.
Jiang Li pressed her lips tightly together, mustered her courage, and continued, “Can you take me with you?”