The knocking on the door continued, though it was reduced to a faint, barely audible sound.
No one dared to open the door. Nobody knew what they would have to face once it was opened, nor what kind of danger lurked outside.
If they opened the door, they themselves might plunge into mortal danger.
Su Yan hopped lightly to the ground, leisurely put on his shoes, walked over to the door, and prepared to open it.
Just as his hand was about to brush against the wooden door latch, a hand belonging to someone who had suddenly materialized behind him firmly seized his wrist. Su Yan turned his head and discovered Xian Chengyue standing right behind him, completely silent and devoid of footsteps.
Since speaking was forbidden, communication could only rely on eye contact.
Su Yan gazed into Xian Chengyue’s eyes, catching his own reflection within those pitch-black depths.
Xian Chengyue’s gaze was cold and detached, as if even while looking right at Su Yan, there was no one in his eyes.
Su Yan snapped back to his senses in a fraction of a second and looked outward.
Chen Wei had climbed up as well. Aside from Su Yan, who was either naturally bold or blissfully ignorant both Chen Wei and Xian Chengyue were veterans.
As for Zhao Feng such people were invariably giants in speech and dwarves in action.
With a composed expression, Xian Chengyue made a hand gesture, and Chen Wei nodded in acknowledgment.
Then, Chen Wei shoved Su Yan aside, grabbed the door latch himself, and stood ready to yank it open at a moment’s notice.
Su Yan pressed his lips into a tight line, his gaze toward Chen Wei turning fiercely vicious for a split second before quickly reigning it in to return to normal.
Meanwhile, Xian Chengyue stood right in front of the door; if a monster truly lurked outside, the very first person to face it would be him.
Chen Wei tapped his fingers against the door three times. His movements were extremely light, making not a single sound until his fingers fell for the third time.
Chen Wei violently wrenched the door open!
In that exact fraction of a second, Xian Chengyue lunged forward, grabbing the collar of someone leaning against the doorframe. His movements were lightning-fast, swift as a gale, yet completely silent.
The people outside had long since exhausted all their strength. Catching a sudden glimpse of the hope of survival, they all scrambled frantically inward.
Xian Chengyue’s eyes were pitch-black as his gaze swept across the opposite room.
The door to that room stood wide open, and a bloated figure flashed past in a blur.
Before Chen Wei even had time to slam the door shut, a face suddenly materialized right before Xian Chengyue’s eyes!
Xian Chengyue wore no expression, remaining preternaturally calm.
It was a bloated face of indeterminate gender. Chilling water dripped down from its hair, sticky liquid coated its skin, and blue-purple veins lay hidden beneath skin that was pale to the point of transparency.
Its pupils and whites had almost melted together.
Fresh blood covered its entire body, and a reek of stench and rot emanated from it in waves.
Xian Chengyue didn’t move.
Its eyes twitched slightly, shifting to look behind Xian Chengyue.
Xian Chengyue slowly moved his fingers.
Gritting his teeth, Chen Wei mentally counted down in his heart, then threw his entire body’s weight into slamming the door shut in an instant.
The moment the door closed, Chen Wei shoved the latch into place, his racing heart practically skipping a beat from the tension.
Collapse-weakened, Chen Wei slumped backward onto the floor, reaching out to clutch the front of his shirt as he panted continuously.
The door was shut, and safety seemed restored.
Xian Chengyue turned his head to look at the people who had just been dragged inside. There were five of them in total four men and one woman. Huddled together in the corner of the room, completely soaked through, they trembled as they hugged their own knees. Every single one of them stared wide-eyed with a dazed, absent expression.
Everything fell back into absolute silence once more.
Xian Chengyue walked over and sat down on the edge of the bed.
Chen Wei tossed his own quilt over to the people huddled in the corner. The night was bitterly cold, and failing to warm up would inevitably lead to catching a cold; if anyone ran a fever, it was impossible to find cold medicine in this village, and a high fever would ultimately spell death.
However, the people hiding in the corner remained in a daze, completely unresponsive.
Some bit down on their own fists, desperately choking back their sobs, while others buried their faces into their knees with their shoulders heaving incessantly.
Right when everyone assumed they were finally safe.
A massive skull suddenly smashed through the window and poked straight into the room.
A bloated, pale face plastered with sticky fluid, its facial features compressed into a tangled mess by the swelling. As the head turned, long, wet hair dragged across the floor, leaving trails of wet residue behind.
Its eyeballs rolled incessantly, like a beast hunting for its prey.
Liang Shu and Xie Youmin shut their eyes tightly, desperately clamping their hands over each other’s mouths.
Zhao Feng clamped his hands over his own mouth.
The room grew so dead quiet that only the pounding of nervous heartbeats could be heard. No one dared to move. The five people cowering in the corner sat rigidly in place, completely soaked through, with tears, sweat, and the foul-smelling water dripping from their hair mixing together. Panting breaths echoed through the room alongside the sound of water dripping from hair-tips.
Finally, someone broke down.
The young man huddled in the corner was drenched in sweat and water. With bloodshot eyes and a pale face, even though his back was already pressed flat against the wall, he still kept trying to shove himself deeper into the corner, his legs kicking frantically forward until they struck someone else’s back.
“Don’t kill me… Don’t kill me…” the man widened his eyes, muttering in desperate entreaty, “I have children at home…”
The people beside him clamped their hands tightly over their mouths as despair began to spread contagiously. The two individuals pressing against him trembled all over, but before they too could open their mouths to join the man’s pleas—
The space around them seemed to compress instantly, everything happening in the blink of an eye.
The giant head that had just been hovering at the edge suddenly materialized directly in front of them!
Those eyes, seemingly veiled by a thin layer of white film shifted at the slightest movement.
The man broke down in agonizing sobs: “Why me?! Why did I have to come here?!”
“Why?! So many bad people, thieves, murderers why isn’t it them?!”
The man screamed in utter despair, flailing his hands wildly through the air.
In mere fractions of a second, the monster extended a claw-like hand and grabbed the man by the head.
Everyone watched helplessly as its fingers sank deep into the man’s skull.
The man shrieked frantically: “Help! Save me!! I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die!”
Screaming and weeping, like a mere shadow, he was dragged straight out through the window by the monster.
A bitter, chilling night breeze poured in through the shattered window. Su Yan glanced outside a bright full moon hung suspended in the sky, yet its radiance failed to dispel the darkness, making the night feel all the more freezing.
The sticky residue on the floor smelled utterly foul, and the occupants of the room stared wide-eyed, terrified that the monster might reappear.
Only Xian Chengyue lay flat on the bed,
with his eyes closed, appearing as though he were fast asleep, yet ready to wake up at any given moment.
Someone in the room was crying, but not daring to make a sound, leaving only their shoulders heaving continuously.
A single day had shattered their perceptions built over a dozen or several decades.
As dawn broke, when the very first ray of morning sunlight streamed through the window to drive the darkness from the room, the muffled whimpers and weeping finally erupted. The four people squatting in the corner broke down and sobbed loudly.
Xian Chengyue opened his eyes. Rolling off the bed, he found his clothes sporting a few wrinkles. Unflustered, he calmly straightened his collar, walked toward the door, and stepped outside. Chen Wei hurried to catch up, and the two of them walked out of the room together.
Liang Shu and Xie Youmin rushed over to tend to the four people huddled in the corner.
“It’s over, it’s over now.” Liang Shu repeated, breaking out in a cold sweat herself; while trying to comfort others, she couldn’t help bursting into tears along with them.
The young man among the four grabbed Liang Shu’s hand in terror and blurted out: “It came from the five-person room!”
“We didn’t lure it out!”
The man rambled neurotically: “We didn’t make a sound, none! We didn’t lure it out!”
“It wasn’t us…”
The courtyard was littered with corpses.
The door to the opposite room remained tightly shut, and no one had emerged yet.
Xian Chengyue walked over to the nearest corpse and crouched down to examine it closely. The bodies of these people were bloated, as if they had been soaked in water. Chen Wei quickly squatted down beside him and whispered, “Xian-ge, they drowned, right? Water ghosts?”
Xian Chengyue didn’t reply, continuing his inspection in silence. There were a total of six corpses in the courtyard; the body of the man dragged out from their room last night was missing. Xian Chengyue reached out to tilt a corpse’s head, focusing his gaze on its cheeks and arms both bore tiny blood-spotted rashes.
He pried open the corpse’s mouth, and Chen Wei leaned in to look: “Its gums are bleeding.”
Xian Chengyue said abruptly: “Check its abdomen.”
Chen Wei hastily thrust his hand beneath the corpse’s clothing, blinked, and said in sheer disbelief: “It still has body warmth.”
This confirmed Xian Chengyue’s suspicion. He nodded: “Let’s go.”
Rarely willing to speak to him, Xian Chengyue had obliged today, prompting Chen Wei to hurry after him with careful, utterly fawning attentiveness: “Xian-ge, where are we going?”
Xian Chengyue: “To wash our faces and brush our teeth.”
Until the two of them left the courtyard, Su Yan and Zhao Feng finally emerged.
Zhao Feng glared with vicious jealousy: “That brat has a pretty face, but who knew he was so calculating!”
Zhao Feng looked toward Su Yan, only to find Su Yan ignoring him entirely, curling his lip in disdain.
Su Yan stared at the corpses in the courtyard. Having zero interest in the dead, he stepped right past them. His gaze was locked tightly onto the direction Xian Chengyue had taken; without even bidding Zhao Feng farewell, he strode off in pursuit.
After taking two steps, Zhao Feng spotted the corpses on the ground, leaped backward in fright, slapped his own chest, and muttered to himself: “Freaks, all of them.”
The door to the opposite room finally creaked open, and a chorus of terrified shrieks erupted from a group of men and women.
Hearing the screams, Zhao Feng felt a surge of smug pride. Straightening his collar, he skirted around the corpses and left the courtyard without looking back.
Xian Chengyue arrived at the village well near the entrance, which he had spotted the previous day. The wellhead was covered by a thick stone slab.
Chen Wei was baffled: “The villagers sealed this well?”
“Do they carry water from the river?”
“No water?” Su Yan trotted over to catch up with Xian Chengyue. Having been ignored by him countless times already, Su Yan held up a wet wipe, waving it right in front of Xian Chengyue’s eyes. “Wipe your face?”
Xian Chengyue turned his head slightly to look at Su Yan. Su Yan smiled at him and said: “The commercial says it even sanitizes and sterilizes.”
Before Su Yan could ramble on, Xian Chengyue accepted the wet wipe handed to him, gave a slight nod, and replied in a flat, toneless voice: “Thank you.”
Su Yan looked somewhat nervous: “I thought you wouldn’t pay me any attention. You look so… um… high and mighty.”
Su Yan watched Xian Chengyue, only to find that Xian Chengyue wasn’t looking at him at all.
Su Yan pressed his lips together, a heavy flash of malice vanishing instantly from his brows.
Then he followed the direction of Xian Chengyue’s gaze.
A group of people was emerging onto the narrow path in the middle of the village. Clad in grayish-blue long-sleeved shirts and trousers with their cuffs rolled up, sporting patches on their clothes, they were scruffy and disheveled, carrying farming tools in their hands.
“Villagers,” Su Yan said softly.
There were only a little over twenty villagers walking toward them. All of them were men, and all were in the prime of life. Unlike the old village chief, who looked eerie and sinister, they appeared no different from normal living people. Some spat phlegm as they walked, letting out earth-shattering snorts, while others dug the sleep crust out of their eyes along the way.
“Old Pan said people arrived yesterday,” the villagers reached the well, appearing quite hospitable. “Looking to draw water to wash your faces? You can draw some in a moment.”
“Where are you folks from? Big cities, right? Is it true that women in big cities wear nylon stockings? A peddler passing through told us about it last time.”
“And pictorials! Word is American women don’t wear clothes!”
“They say the city has department stores full of foreigners.”
“City girls even have to study just like the boys.”
They didn’t require any response from Xian Chengyue and his group, chatting cheerfully among themselves. Walking over to the well, a dozen or so men exerted force together, chanting slogans as they shoved the stone slab away from the wellhead.
“Only one well in the village. Sealed in the afternoon, opened in the morning sigh, such a hassle.”
“I’ll go fetch a bucket home first, stop complaining, it’s just for a moment.”
The villagers took turns drawing water. Xian Chengyue walked up beside an eighteen or nineteen-year-old villager who was chewing on a dried sweet potato. Upon spotting Xian Chengyue, the villager grabbed a small handful of dried sweet potatoes from his pocket and flashed a row of white teeth with a grin: “Want some?”
Xian Chengyue could spot the black dirt nestled underneath his fingernails.
“Thanks.” Xian Chengyue accepted them and asked, “Why seal the well?”
The villager: “Uncle Pan didn’t tell you? There are monsters in our village; we can’t have water inside our houses at night.”
Xian Chengyue: “The well isn’t inside anyone’s house.”
The villager scratched his head: “Uncle Pan told us to seal the well. Uncle Pan’s words are never wrong, just listening to him is enough.”
Xian Chengyue looked toward the well. The villagers were drawing water, bucket after bucket of well water being hauled up, with droplets splashing around the edge of the well.
When the water hit the ground, Xian Chengyue heard the sound of metal striking metal.
In an instant, the surrounding scenery shifted.
They had returned to the courtyard.
“Time to prepare for the sacrifice.” The old village chief stood in the center of the courtyard, hands clasped behind his back, staring balefully at each and every person.
“You need to find a bowl of rootless rainwater, a live chicken, a plate of pastries, and a cup of wine.”
The crowd fell dead silent.
They had all been busy with different tasks in various locations just moments before. When the sound of metal striking metal rang in their ears, it was as if they had been pulled by a magnetic force, lining them up neatly in the courtyard just like a military drill arranged from left to right, tallest to shortest.
Four people per row, four rows in total.
Of the twenty-four people yesterday, only sixteen remained.
This time, the old village chief didn’t drag people out; instead, he stretched out a withered hand and pointed straight ahead: “The first row goes to find water, the second row goes to find a chicken, the third row finds pastries, and the fourth row finds wine.”
He gave a cough, spat out a glob of thick phlegm, and rasped in a hoarse voice: “The sacrifice takes place in five days. You only have five days.”
The old village chief departed the courtyard once more. Before leaving, his gaze swept across everyone’s face.
Every person swept by his gaze felt a chill strike straight down their spine.
“Where on earth are we supposed to find rootless water? Rootless water is rainwater, right? What if it doesn’t rain? Who goes around collecting rainwater?”
“There’s no pastry shop here, where are we supposed to get pastries?”
“Wine? People don’t even have enough food to eat here, who’s going to brew wine?!”
“What do we do… what are we going to do… won’t we die if we can’t find them? We’re definitely going to die, right?!”
Among the members of Xian Chengyue’s group, aside from Su Yan, the other two had turned deathly pale. What they had been assigned to find was a live chicken.
Yet in this village no one raised chickens.