In that instant, Ning Qiushui felt cold air seeping up his back in waves.
He had a dim sense that during that great drought, something truly terrible might have happened in this village...
While Ning and Bai studied the painting, Liu Chengfeng had drifted to one side to look over the inscription beside it.
"So it really was a great drought... Huh? Come look at this, quick!"
Liu Chengfeng seemed to have found something. His face changed, and he called to the two by the painting.
They came at once—and when they saw where his finger pointed, both froze.
There, in the text... was a new name.
Guang Xiu.
"Another Guang? Could he be connected to Guangchuan?"
Ning Qiushui's eyes brightened slightly, and he skimmed rapidly through the inscription.
Its gist was this—
Some hundred and twenty years ago, Rainprayer Village suffered three straight years of drought. The stream ran dry. Not only did the crops fail utterly—even the trees and grasses on the mountain withered dead.
In those days, the whole village survived on a single ancient well dug by their forebears.
But after drought came famine. As more and more villagers starved to death, some went to the home of Guang Xiu—the village's one and only squire—hoping to borrow surplus grain from him.
But those who went never came back.
The other villagers sensed something wrong, so together they crept to the walls of Guang Xiu's home—and peering over, discovered that Guang Xiu had killed the villagers who came to borrow grain, chopped them up, and fed them to his dogs!
When word of this got out, the entire village erupted in fury!
Led by a middle-aged man named Ruan Kaihuang, the villagers stormed Guang Xiu's home as one and hacked him to pieces on the spot; his wife and child were locked away in the Misty Rain Temple.
The Misty Rain Temple was a rain-prayer temple Guang Xiu had built by pooling the whole village's wealth. Each year the villagers offered up tribute there, praying to the land for favorable winds and rains.
In truth, the temple was nothing but Guang Xiu's instrument for raking in wealth.
Strangely enough, on the very night Guang Xiu was hacked apart, rain fell from the sky.
Lightning struck the Misty Rain Temple, and it caught fire.
Some saw that the fire, far from going out beneath the pouring rain, only blazed higher and higher—and so Guang Xiu's wife and child burned to death inside the Misty Rain Temple.
The villagers all said Heaven had opened its eyes: the wicked had met Heaven's punishment.
Afterward, under Ruan Kaihuang's leadership, the villagers gradually returned to peaceful lives.
To commemorate Ruan Kaihuang's service to Rainprayer Village, later generations cast a miniature figure of him in gold and built this shrine.
That was the whole of the inscription.
"So the man holding the sickle in the painting is Ruan Kaihuang, and the ones bound on the ground are Guang Xiu and his wife and child."
"In that case..."
Ning Qiushui immediately brought out the tablet, staring at the two characters of Guangchuan's name, a note of excitement in his voice:
"Guangchuan... could he be Guang Xiu's son—the boy who burned to death?"
Bai Xiaoxiao nodded along.
"Most likely."
As she spoke, she seemed to notice something and let out a small "hm." She stepped up to the inscription, looked it up and down, then produced a small flashlight and shone it over the surface. Her voice turned abruptly graver:
"There's something behind this inscription!"
Ning and Liu pressed in at once.
"What is it?"
Light flickered and died and flickered again in Bai Xiaoxiao's eyes.
"Not sure. But there's a large hollow space in the wall behind the inscription."
"You two... stand back."
They knew what she meant to do. Liu Chengfeng's eyes went wide and he moved to stop her:
"Sis Bai, don't go doing anything rash! Didn't that old sweeper say nothing in the shrine was to be touched?"
Bai Xiaoxiao said calmly:
"Relax. I know what I'm doing."
Seeing her set on it, the two men stepped back several paces. Bai Xiaoxiao wasted no ceremony: she fished several coins from her pocket, chose one, and worked it against the inscription's frame for a moment—and the screws came loose!
"Holy shit, you can drive screws like that?!"
Liu Chengfeng watched, dumbfounded.
With the screws off the frame, Bai Xiaoxiao carefully lifted the inscription down—and sure enough, set into the wall behind it was a large, inward-sunken cavity!
And the horror inside that cavity froze all three of them where they stood!
Crammed into the modest hollow were two corpses, their bodies twisted into utterly impossible shapes!
The cavity was a cube of perhaps fifty centimeters a side. It defied imagination—how had a space like that swallowed the bodies of two grown adults!
The two corpses wore expressions of boundless terror, as if they had seen something unspeakable before death. They were tangled into each other, two chalk-white faces, one above the other, staring out of the cavity...
"It's them?!"
Ning Qiushui exclaimed under his breath.
The other two looked at him.
"Bro, you know them?"
Ning Qiushui nodded and replied:
"Remember what the old sweeper said just now? Two tourists came here last night, between eight and nine..."
"When we entered the Blood Door yesterday and gathered on the open ground, I didn't get a clear look at every face, but I roughly memorized the clothes. These two are like us—people from outside the Blood Door!"
"This morning I was wondering: if there was only one corpse out on the open ground, why were three of us missing?"
"Now we know... the other two missing people are right here!"
As Ning Qiushui finished, Liu Chengfeng swallowed hard:
"So... what kind of thing turns people into this?"
The other two were silent.
In theory, no human being could accomplish this.
At the very least, no human could knead two corpses like dough—without spilling blood—and stuff them into a space this cramped!
So... what in the world had done it?
And in that silence, from behind the three of them came a voice that made their scalps crawl!
"Didn't I already tell you... not to touch the things in the shrine?"
"Why..."
"Why don't you people ever listen..."