At the sound of that dreadful voice, the three of them felt as if their very souls had been frozen over!
They turned their heads slowly—and saw the old man who was unmistakably dead standing before them once more!
Only this time, what the old man held was no longer a broom, but... a pair of sharp scissors!
Step by step he closed in on the three of them, the smile on his face twisting more and more grotesquely.
His wrinkles seemed about to swallow his features whole, and the cold coming off him grew heavier and heavier.
All three knew: the old man before them was, in all likelihood, no longer human!
Sensing the danger, their first instinct was to flee—only to find that no matter what they did, their feet would not move!
Their legs might as well have been poured full of lead, impossibly heavy!
"So this is a ghost's power..."
Ning Qiushui's heart went ice-cold!
They were far too weak. Before a ghost, they had almost no capacity to resist at all!
As the old man advanced on him step by step, scissors in hand, Bai Xiaoxiao spoke up behind him, perfectly composed:
"Sir, we didn't mean to touch the shrine's things. But what's kept here... Guangchuan doesn't like it at all. It was Guangchuan who sent us."
At the mention of that name, the twisted savagery on the old man's face froze.
And then, in those lifeless, dead-fish eyes, an immense terror surfaced!
He turned his gaze and fixed it dead on Bai Xiaoxiao.
"What are you saying..."
Sweat slicked Bai Xiaoxiao's palms, but not a flicker crossed her face as she went on:
"If you don't believe us, we can show you something."
The moment she said it, Ning Qiushui—who had also sensed the shift in the old man's aura—pulled out Guangchuan's memorial tablet.
At the sight of the tablet, the old man reacted as if he'd seen something unspeakably terrifying. He gave a sudden howl of panic, dropped the scissors, turned, and fled into the depths of the forest...
The moment he was gone, their bodies finally came back under their control.
Cold sweat had soaked through the backs of all three. They stood panting, and Liu Chengfeng said to Bai Xiaoxiao with genuine admiration:
"Sis Bai, you've always got a move ready!"
"Sent that old ghost packing with a couple of sentences!"
Bai Xiaoxiao blew out a breath and said:
"I was only testing it. If it hadn't worked, I had other ways..."
"...Looking at it now, whatever the inscription describes is, I fear, not at all what actually happened back then. Otherwise that old thing wouldn't have been so terrified of the tablet in Qiushui's hand!"
"When even ghosts fear it—that tells you how vast the resentment of this tablet's owner must have been after death!"
Ning Qiushui glanced at the tablet, felt the chill crawl over his back, but tucked it away all the same and said:
"Let's get out of here first. No telling when that old ghost might come back—and there don't seem to be any other useful leads here anyway..."
With all the back-and-forth delays it was already noon. They returned to the tourists' rest area in the village and went to the canteen for food.
They had just gotten their meals when a shapely woman in jeans walked over and addressed them:
"You three—got a moment?"
Ning Qiushui and Liu Chengfeng didn't respond.
Bai Xiaoxiao smiled graciously:
"We do. What is it?"
The shapely woman in jeans extended a hand to her.
"I'm Tang Jiao. Would you come join us for a meeting?"
"Essentially all the other Blood Door participants are there."
Bai Xiaoxiao hesitated a moment, then nodded.
"No problem."
She followed Tang Jiao up to a fairly large room on the second floor, where four other Blood Door participants were seated.
Ning Qiushui swept the room with a glance and frowned:
"How are we down another three people?"
At his question, two of those present turned distinctly ashen.
Judging by their faces, those three were not coming back.
"What happened, exactly? Can you tell us?"
Perhaps it was Bai Xiaoxiao's beauty doing the work; when she asked in that soft, gentle voice, one of them slowly began:
"...It's nothing complicated. The three of them formed a team, crossed the jungle, and headed for the temple on the back hill to look for the path to survival."
"We tried to talk them out of it, but they insisted—and they promised that whether or not they found any clues in the temple, they'd come back down within an hour."
"The hill isn't high, and there's a proper, well-built stairway—quick up and down, ten minutes at most... But we waited at the bottom for nearly three hours and they never came. So we figured something must have happened to them up there, and just as we were debating whether to go up and save them..."
At this point the terror in the man's eyes was close to brimming over. As if reliving some horrific scene, he suddenly clapped a hand over his mouth and began to retch!
The companion beside him held together noticeably better, but his face was bloodless all the same.
Seeing the state of them, no one pressed; everyone waited in silence.
When the retching man had finally steadied the spasms of his stomach, he went on in a voice gone nearly hoarse:
"Just as we were deciding whether to go up after them or leave—something suddenly came tumbling down the hill and nearly hit us..."
"Only when it finally rolled to a stop on the flat did we see what had come down the hill..."
"It was... it was the three of their corpses!"
At those words, everyone in the room stopped breathing.
Dead silence.
The man who had retched stared with half-empty eyes, mumbling to himself:
"Exactly like the corpse outside the guesthouse this morning... exactly like it..."
"Their heads had been torn off their living bodies... it was a ghost... it had to be a ghost!"
"There's a ghost in that temple on the hill!"
Seeing him slipping toward hysteria, the companion beside him slapped his face hard a few times and pressed a bottle of cold water to his lips. A few swallows brought the man back down; he stared at the table in front of him and said nothing more.
After a long while, Tang Jiao sighed.
"You've all seen how things stand."
"I don't know what's wrong with this Blood Door. It's supposed to be a second door, but its difficulty is absurd..."
"I'll be honest with you: I'm actually a veteran of five Blood Doors. I took a commission to carry newcomers through this one. But the difficulty of this door is far too high—it doesn't fall short of the fifth door I cleared myself!"
"If we don't unite and work together, this door may very well wipe us all out!"
At the words "wipe us all out," every face in the room changed—except three: Ning, Bai, and Liu.