The Nightmare-Binding Shrine.
It was a rather unusual ancestral shrine.
It stood in the jungle about two kilometers outside the village.
The great jungle was itself one of Rainprayer Village's scenic attractions. The villagers had spent years of time and effort building a network of trails through it, complete with detailed signposts, so that outsiders could taste jungle adventure without getting lost or running into danger.
They followed the trail eastward.
Two kilometers wasn't far—about twenty minutes' walk.
On the way, Liu Chengfeng kept glancing left and right, apparently worried the headless black figure might appear again—very much a bird startled at the twang of a bow.
Fortunately, their luck held.
The road was uneventful, and by the time they reached the Nightmare-Binding Shrine, the sun had grown brighter, dispersing a little of the gloom in their hearts.
The shrine was exquisitely built; even from a distance they could feel its weight and solemnity.
Not far to one side ran a drainage channel.
The rainy season hadn't arrived yet, so the water in it was shallow—jagged rocks jutting everywhere, and a scatter of wooden stakes, wrecked by past rainy seasons, embedded in the silt.
The three of them entered the shrine. In the outer courtyard there was only a stooped old man, sweeping the ground.
Beside the courtyard stood a small house.
By the look of it, that was where the old man ate and slept.
The shrine was deeply quiet; apart from the old man, they saw no one else.
"Sir! Hello!"
Liu Chengfeng called out loudly.
But the old man paid him no mind at all.
Feeling something odd, the three came closer, and only then understood: the old man was nearly deaf. Only one ear could barely catch sound from outside, and they had to stand very close for him to hear a word.
"No wonder they dumped him out in a place like this..."
Liu Chengfeng sighed.
They explained they'd come to visit the shrine. The old man was delighted—look all you like, he said, just don't go touching the things inside.
Then Bai Xiaoxiao asked him whether anyone had come to the shrine yesterday. The old man cast his mind back and said yes, two people, in the evening—around eight or nine—but they hadn't stayed long before leaving.
They chatted a while longer, and then Bai Xiaoxiao turned the topic on its head:
"Sir—do you know Guangchuan?"
The old man knitted his brow and tilted his one barely working ear toward her:
"What boat now?"
Bai Xiaoxiao said loudly into his ear:
"Guangchuan!"
"Guang as in 'broad,' chuan as in 'rivers'!"
At that, the old man's face changed utterly, and he shook his head in a rush:
"No... don't know him!"
"I don't know him... never heard of him... I don't know him!"
He babbled, repeating himself over and over, as if desperate to make them believe he truly did not know anyone called Guangchuan.
Then Ning Qiushui reached into his clothes, drew out Guangchuan's memorial tablet, and held it up before the old man.
"Sir, look carefully. You really don't know him...?"
The instant the broom-holding old man saw the tablet, an indescribable terror flooded his clouded eyes. He gave a great cry, as if something had snapped in him, flung down the broom, turned, and went hobbling away at a run!
As he ran, he screamed, over and over:
"It wasn't me... I didn't do it... I don't know anything... don't come looking for me!"
The old man fled in blind panic until he reached the drainage channel—where a snarl of weeds caught his foot, and he pitched headlong into the ditch. All sound from him stopped at once.
The three felt their hearts sink, seized by an extremely bad premonition.
They hurried to the channel's edge to look.
And the sight in the ditch froze them where they stood—
The old man had fallen face-up onto one of the stakes. The great wooden spikes had punched through his chest and the back of his skull, and dark red blood welled out in pulses, threading away downstream along the shallow water...
His empty eyes still held their terror, staring straight up at the three on the bank...
Liu Chengfeng flinched back half a step from those dead eyes:
"Holy hell... is he... is he dead?"
Neither of the other two looked good.
"He clearly knew something—but for some reason, he didn't dare speak."
As Bai Xiaoxiao said it, she turned her head toward Ning Qiushui.
"Little brother Qiushui—any thoughts?"
She had seen him staring at the old man's corpse, sunk deep in thought. But Ning Qiushui shook his head.
"I'm still thinking about the canteen..."
Bai Xiaoxiao frowned slightly.
"The canteen? What about it?"
Ning Qiushui said softly:
"Don't you think... the canteen's layout is strange?"
The two of them nodded.
Liu Chengfeng scratched his head:
"It is pretty strange. But maybe that's just how this village likes its canteens?"
Ning Qiushui looked them both in the eye and asked a question that made their scalps prickle:
"Tell me—isn't it possible... that the village's current canteen is actually the original guesthouse for receiving outside tourists?"
As his voice fell, Liu Chengfeng went blank for a beat, then sucked in a sharp breath:
"Holy hell... bro, now that you say it, it... it really does fit!"
Light flashed through Bai Xiaoxiao's eyes:
"Not just fits. That's exactly what it is."
"That canteen has three floors, and apart from the central serving area, it's all little partitioned rooms—each exactly the size of a guest room..."
"It struck me as strange too, but I never thought in that direction. Now, though... the threads are starting to connect."
She reached out, patted Ning Qiushui on the shoulder, and arched a brow in praise:
"Not bad at all, little Qiushui!"
"It's been a long time since I met a man as detail-fine as you!"
Ning Qiushui choked on Bai Xiaoxiao's half-teasing tone.
Incredible.
Was that a compliment or an insult?
"So the situation is... the building that should be hosting outside tourists got converted into a canteen, and the villagers converted some other big house that no one had lived in for ages into the guesthouse?"
Liu Chengfeng seemed to be catching on.
Ning Qiushui nodded.
"Right."
"But... why would they do that?"
"No idea. But that big house is unclean—so whatever they want for us, it isn't anything good."
Talking it over, they passed through several doors into the shrine's interior, where they found a painting in the main hall, with a statue beside it, and an inscription.
The statue was cast in pure gold. Though only palm-sized, it was worth a small fortune—for a remote village like Rainprayer, it could not have been a trivial expense.
Bai Xiaoxiao toyed with the little gold statue a moment, then set it back in its place.
Then the three of them turned their attention to the painting.
The scene in the painting appeared to be Rainprayer Village as well.
Only it had the feel of age about it—decades old, perhaps a century or more.
It showed a man with a grass-cutting sickle in his hand, one foot planted on another man's back.
Three people in all knelt bound upon the ground.
A middle-aged man, a woman, and a child.
And behind the sickle-wielding man massed a great dark crowd—villagers by the look of them, faces blazing with fury, arms thrust into the air, as if roaring their answer to some call...
"Wait, what is this? An uprising?"
The painting had Liu Chengfeng thoroughly confused.
But Bai Xiaoxiao leaned in close, brushed her slim fingertip lightly across it, and a flicker of doubt crossed her lovely eyes.
"Something's off. Look carefully at the background of this painting..."
At her words, the other two saw it too: the background of the scroll was... far too desolate.
"A blazing sun overhead. The vegetation withered dead. The stream dried up..."
"This is... a great drought?!"
Liu Chengfeng cried out.
Ning Qiushui seemed to think of something, and murmured:
"The kind bled themselves dry, and became the sweet rain..."