Chapter 340
Mu Sicheng's shaky voice called out in the darkness, " Bai Liu ?"
Then he heard four or five "Bai Liu" voices in different tones answering him.
"Hmm."
"Hmm."
"What for?"
"I'm here."
Mu Sicheng's sweat rose as he took a step back and raised the camera in front of him, turning on night vision mode.
In the green screen, Mu Sicheng sees a scene that makes his hair stand on end.
In the narrow passage, four or five ghosts of the tomb, twisting and turning, approach Bai Liu in the middle to observe him, their bloodshot eyes staring at him and their gaping noses sniffing at his body.
Their arms and legs and bodies look like white Play-Doh being shaped, their heads sticking out from under their crevices and their feet folding over the back of their heads in various contorted and soft positions, but judging by the bulging skin of the bones, they do have bones.
From the way they pose ...... Mu Sicheng can't imagine what it would take for a creature with bones to pose like that.
Then slowly, slowly, the ghosts became identical to Bai Liu.
They stand in a row on tiptoe with their heads hanging down next to Bai Liu, and if you don't look at them, Mu Sicheng can hardly tell who is the real Bai Liu.
The five ghosts suddenly looked up, staring at him with their heads cocked, a black eyeball slowly falling from the top of their pure white eyes, cracking a smile at Mu Sicheng, who was standing opposite, before turning his head violently and coming closer.
Mu Sicheng was so frightened that his camera almost flew off.
At the moment when the ghosts approached, Mu Sicheng subconsciously turned the camera around, pointing it at his own surroundings, but the next moment when he saw the contents of the camera screen, he was shocked and let out a cry.
Mu Sicheng is also surrounded by several shape-shifting ghosts.
These ghosts seemed to be preparing to take on the form of Mu Sicheng, so now they were wearing a "Mu Sicheng" face with distorted features, grinning at him with their teeth clacking together.
In the midst of the confusion, a long, slender hand reached out from the ghost's miserable, white-wrapped torso, fingers gently holding a match.
A calm voice came from afar: "On the road to the underworld, follow the ghosts, and when you cross the ghost bridge, hold your breath and do not exhale, and wait for me to come to you."
This is the voice of Bai Liu!
Fuck-!
The match is polished and the candlestick is lit in front of the shrunken Mu Sicheng's eyes.
The moment the fire lights up, all the demons and ghosts around Mu Sicheng fade away, leaving only Bai Liu, holding a match to light his candlestick, watching him silently.
Mu Sicheng raised the candlestick and was just about to breathe a sigh of relief, but then he suddenly remembered the words he had just heard in the darkness [Wait for me to come to you].
He subconsciously held up the candlestick to shine a light on the Bai Liu in front of him.
Bai Liu's bemused face reflects the greenish firelight, and nothing shadows the floor or walls.
Mu Sicheng's back slowly tightened as he held the candlestick flat in front of himself and tried his best to keep his voice steady, "Where are we going now?"
" Bai Liu" moves forward and he glances back at Mu Sicheng, his face looking as if it has been painted on with an eerie paper-like grin.
"Go to the tomb, find a coffin and carry it to earth."
The other end.
Bai Liu is holding a candlestick and there is no one around him.
When Bai Liu stepped on a flap door on the floor as he was entering the chamber, he stood on it to keep his balance until the ghost of the tiger appeared and chaos ensued, when Bai Liu moved his foot to the side of the flap door and slid through it to the next level.
Before the ghosts could react, Bai Liu disappeared.
Bai Liu stood up, patted the dust on his trouser leg and looked up at the spot where he had fallen.
It is a quadrangular, partial chamber, not very large, Bai Liu estimated the length, width and height to be about three metres by three metres by two metres, and the walls are thickly covered with ash.
But these were not Bai Liu's concerns, and he looked around the room, eventually turning his attention to the flap door he had fallen through - the only exit from this quadrangular chamber.
This is a sealed chamber.
And it's not just that.
Bai Liu lowers the candlestick, the light wavering as if it will go out at any moment, but the faint light is enough for Bai Liu to see what is on the floor of the chamber.
The floor of the chamber is neatly and densely piled with many wine jars, which are sealed with four-sided red paper with a red thread wrapped around the neck, on which is written the word [Dien] in black brush, with two old brass bells hanging from the end of the red thread.
Red thread, bells and red paper, which is clearly the same outer wrapping as the coffin used for Bai Liu's previous wake.
I don't think there is anything in the wine jar that Bai Liu would like to see right now.
In such a small chamber, Bai Liu roughly counted about a hundred of these wine jars, which filled most of the space in the chamber.
Bai Liu stood on the altar and estimated that he would be able to reach the flap door, but there was only a thin paper seal on the altar and it was estimated that the mouth of the altar would break if Bai Liu stood on it, and the mouth of the altar would open if it broke.
On top of that, the flap door was wobbly and Bai Liu couldn't get out even if he stepped on the altar and reached the door.
The situation seems to have come to a standstill for a while, but Bai Liu doesn't panic, he has a vague feeling that there is a solution to everything here.
Bai Liu holds up the candlestick and shines it around, this time looking a little closer.
Bai Liu holds the candlestick up close to see what appears to be painted on the mud and rock walls, keeping his balance so as not to touch the wine jars placed against the walls, and using his clothes to wipe the dusty mud crusts off the walls.
The dust on the wall fell away and a fresco emerged, a faded painted design that appeared extremely old, so blurred in many places that it was impossible to see what had been painted, but with the inscription next to the fresco, it was possible to understand the meaning of the fresco in general.
The paintings on the walls of the tomb are generally used to record some of the events of the owner's life. The tomb Bai Liu came into, judging from the murals, must have been a collective cemetery in the village of Yinshan, commonly known as an ancestral tomb, and was not built for a particular individual, but for a clan.
The mural shows a number of small red figures, dressed in full regalia, building a burial chamber, making offerings to the Three Purities and praying for good winds and rain and a good crop.
From the painting, it appears that the village of Yinshan at this time did not have those strange practices of joint burial, and that most of the village people died normally and then went to their ancestral graves in coffins.
Bai Liu notes the date of the inscription at this time - about two hundred years ago.
This means that two hundred years ago, Yinshan was just an ordinary village, with no village people drowning and no custom of burying women who were not yet married in a wedding palanquin with the drowned.
Bai Liu turns his body and holds the red candle up to look at the second wall.
On this wall these little men are divided into men, women and children standing at the entrance to the village with forlorn faces, strong men selected and seemingly pulled away by something dark, and the place where these men are about to go is painted with mountains of swords and fire, guillotines and steel spears, like the eighteen levels of hell.
The men were pulled through by dark, ghost-like things. They struggled not to leave, wanting to stay in the village of Yinshan, but in the end they were pulled into the inferno.
They fall into the fire and the sword, shredded by guillotine and steel, the men screaming in horror, and even if it is only a crude and faded mural, Bai Liu can see the pain and misery of these men.
The inscription next to the mural of the man falling into hell reads [A good death and an eternal death! .
The only people left in the village of Yinshan were women, old people and children, who stood at the entrance of the village draped in mourning, looking away from the men who had fallen into hell, hiding their faces and crying.
Bai Liu turns to look at the third wall, the candelabra's fire growing darker, glowing green and white, the wine jars around Bai Liu turning silently as he turns to look at the next painting.
But Bai Liu seems to be unaware of this and continues to read on unperturbed.
A long-browed Taoist appears on a mural on the third wall.
This Taoist man, with his long black eyebrows, snow-white beard and golden crown on his head, has an immortal aura and a certain sense of morality.
The villagers of Yinshan begged and prayed so hard that they seemed to have finally touched this Taoist man in heaven.
The Daoist held up a floating dust and descended from the earth step by step, landing at the entrance of the village of Yinshan, where a crowd of people knelt at the entrance of the village, holding up the three fattest animals and rice wine to offer to this Daoist who had descended from the earth.
This dawg picked it up.
Bai Liu turned towards the mural on the fourth wall, and the altar at his feet had moved closer and closer to him, from being some distance away to being right next to Bai Liu's legs, as if deliberately trapping him.
The Daoist on the fourth mural changed violently from an immortal aura to a green-faced, fanged, cross-eyed man with green and black sharp nails, his body covered with all kinds of yellow talismans, living as a suppressed demon.
This Taoist held up a floating dust and drove the people of Yinshan village like a whip.
The people of Yinshan village were forced by him to jump into the water and be drowned and turned into water spirits, and the unmarried girls were put into his wedding palanquin and buried alive in the cemetery to be muffled.
The Taoist seemed to be planning some major ceremony, and the girl who had been muffled was dug up from her grave, re-dressed in her grand wedding clothes into a coffin and buried in her ancestral tomb.
And the drowned man's body was fished out of the weir by him, and the swollen body was stuffed by the Taoist into a life jacket, covered with a straw mat, and buried by the roadside.
Innocent passers-by are constantly being dragged into the weir and drowned by the corpses of water spirits buried by the roadside, to become stand-ins and ghosts for this Taoist to drive.
By the time the bodies of the drowned had piled up in the weir, and no new passers-by had managed to drown in it, the man finally appeared again.
His face was becoming darker and drier, his eyes were like those of a swine, his ears were pointed, his eyes were sunken, his three palaces were purple, his fingers were like steel, and he sniffed as he walked, not resembling a living person at all.
This Taoist zombie dug out the corpses from the weir and threw them into the back of the hill. He also dug up the bodies of the people of Yinshan village who had been buried by the roadside before, by this time the corpses were almost decomposed, only some rotten flesh and bones remained.
The daoist appears to be using the chamber and these corpses to set up a formation.
Some of the frescoes in the middle are blurred and only the last painting of the closed tomb of the ancestor remains.
This man lay covered in talismans in the main chamber with a dozen bridal coffins standing around him, while the rest of the side chambers were filled with ghosts of various colours and also wine jars.
The normal burial goods in a tomb are gold, silver and jewellery. This Taoist hijacked someone's ancestral tomb and used something extremely overbearing like the Red and White Double Furies for the burial.
The use of the bodies of people's ancestors who died of torture as burial objects, and the construction of a house underneath their ancestral home, is heavy enough to affect the descendants who live on it.
This Taoist wants to refine all the people of Yinshan Village for generations to become Red and White Furies and continue to give him burial goods.
No wonder all the subsequent villagers of Yinshan Village were not allowed to die well. This Taoist made such a spell to trap the people in Yinshan Village a hundred years ago, how could the people here end up well?
The technique used by this Taoist was extremely sinister and destructive in Taoism. It lasted for more than a hundred years until the last few villagers in Yinshan Village were forced to drown by this technique, but it still did not stop there, and Liu Bai, the only remaining descendant of Yinshan Village, was summoned back to continue the torture to death.
Bai Liu's eyes rest on the face of the Taoist figure lying in the main chamber of the mural.
If they hadn't died, the daoist would have had to wake up without getting what he wanted.
What will happen when a zombie wakes up after more than a hundred years and an unknown number of people have died in vain, trained by the Qi of resentment and fury?
~
Chapter 341
Bai Liu looks up at the last fresco on the ceiling.
This last fresco is a long one, with a blood-red, faint background, which seems to tie together what appears in the previous paintings.
The bride in the coffin jumped out and rode on the shoulders of some dark-faced people, Xi Pa swayed and walked towards something, some ghosts with twisted faces were crawling on the ground next to the bride, and Bai Liu looked back, there were some bamboo shelves raised by the ghosts, on which many wine jars like the one under Bai Liu's feet were stacked.
The wine jars seem to have been opened, and several of them have white arms peeling around them.
Some of the pictures in the middle are blurred and it is hard to see what has been painted, but I can only see the inscription next to the painting which reads [...... Gengzi year nonchen month kuei ugly day, all things are inappropriate, the god of night wandering with all the night wandering patrol division, kill the people who enter the village ......]
A small line next to it reads [The details are contained in the village calendar].
Lastly, there is the zombie Taoist, holding a peach wood sword in his left hand and pointing towards the sky, while his right elbow is resting on floating dust, half of his face is that of a compassionate Taoist, showing compassion for all beings, while the other half is that of a zombie with a fierce, green face and fangs.
It sits atop the altar, beneath which a myriad of twisted ghosts twist and hiss in the black smoke beneath the altar, surfacing a puffy, drowned face as it arches towards the village entrance.
At the entrance of the village stood a myriad of people, holding swords and axes, holding frying pans, dragging chains of iron ropes, wearing some kind of strange domed hats and short black boots with cow and sheep's feet, grimacing and looking abominable, more like brats from the eighteenth circle of hell than human beings.
Judging from their appearance, these are the same brats who pulled the men from Yinshan Village away earlier.
The bride and the ghosts also rushed forward to hold down the ghosts.
There seems to have been a fierce fight between the two "men" at the entrance to the village.
The painting behind it is blurred again, and Bai Liu looks towards the very end of the mural.
At the entrance of the village, blood was flowing and there were broken bodies and white bones everywhere, except for the daoist who had all but turned into a zombie, propped up with his sword, his face sinister and hideous standing in the middle of the village entrance, black hair growing on his arms and legs, his fangs showing out of his mouth, blood all around his mouth.
Inscribed next to it [Descendants of the village of Yinshan abandoned their ancestral graves to erect this tomb for the (obscure) Taoist priest and his ancestors].
By the time Bai Liu had finished looking at the last fresco, there was no place to land around him, and the wine jar was pressed against Bai Liu's calf, ready to be kicked down if he moved.
The thin mouth and thick body of the wine jar, with its extremely thin sealing paper, and having been left for so long, it is expected that the sealing paper will crack as soon as it is poured on the ground, and the contents of the jar will be able to crawl out.
Again the chamber, again surrounded by these wine jars to death, looked as if there was no way out.
Bai Liu calmly held the candlestick up and looked around, then suddenly lifted his foot and stepped on top of one of the wine jars.
The jars of wine that surrounded him shifted a few times and gathered in the centre, where they collided with each other and then seemed to feel Bai Liu disappearing from their midst, so they stood still.
Bai Liu also stands motionless, but a moment later a human face is topped off the paper closure of the wine jar.
The noses on the faces of the people on the paper move as if sniffing Bai Liu, and then these slowly move back towards the wine altar on which Bai Liu is standing.
Bai Liu waited until these wine altars were once again close to the one he was standing on, then changed to another altar and continued to stand as he gazed at them with a calm gaze and said with a heartfelt sense of certainty.
These wine jars contain the bones of drowned people, the "bodies" of the ghosts. The ghosts that have escaped are just ghosts and spirits, but their real bodies are still here.
According to Taoist theory, after the soul has left the body the bones are just bones, they will not take form and become evil, which in short means they are safe.
Bai Liu encountered a number of ghosts near the flap door as soon as they entered the tomb, which means that there must have been a number of "empty" wine jars in the chamber, that is, after the ghosts had left their bodies.
In other words, these wine jars won't move.
Bai Liu sifted through the wine jars that moved and chose the ones that didn't to stand on. It didn't matter if he crushed the sealing paper on the jar, because it was just a dead body with no soul inside.
The moving wine jars are obviously trapped by the red threads of the sealing paper. According to Taoist theory, these things are all yin objects and need the yang energy of a living person to break open the jars and see the light of day again, so they try to use Bai Liu, a yang person, to break the jars or the sealing paper.
If a normal person entered this partial chamber, just by walking around, those wine jars would unknowingly get kicked in the way of the other person walking around, and as soon as the jars were emptied, the contents would come out as desired.
And as soon as one ghost comes out, the people who come in have a large range of movement to avoid this ghost, and more wine jars are kicked and broken.
After this man's yang energy is used up, he will be consumed alive by the ghosts and become a wine jar here as well.
This means that after entering this chamber, it is by no means possible to move.
Bai Liu, the odd one out, spent more than half an hour looking at the murals after entering the tomb, but his feet didn't move at all, no matter how the wine jars were moved around, until Bai Liu had seen all the jars that had been moved around in the tomb, then he picked one of them and stepped on it slowly.
Moving from side to side will touch the wine jar, but moving up and down will not.
And now Bai Liu is moving on a plane above these altars, and it is entirely these altars that are chasing him, and the more they run, the more the ones that don't move become visible.
Bai Liu remembers that when the candle flame went out as he entered the tomb, five ghosts of his ghosts appeared, five ghosts of Mu Sicheng's ghosts.
Assuming that the ten ghosts all exited from this partial chamber, it can be deduced that about ten altars in this chamber are safe.
Bai Liu scanned the chamber for altars that would not move, exactly ten of them.
Although he could not rule out the possibility that his deduction was wrong, and that one of the ten altars was a non-moving one, Bai Liu would be dead in an instant if he stepped on it, Bai Liu felt that he did not seem to care about this risk, and always went in the direction of the greatest possible and the greatest benefit, not caring much whether he would die halfway.
Bai Liu feels as if he is a consequentialist.
He glanced at the ten altars, linked them together with his eyes, and then paused for a moment.
The ten altars are joined together to form the character [out], but the character [out] is missing a little, without a head, and the point is to the south-east, where the moving altars are constantly 'walking' back and forth.
It feels like an organ that needs an altar in each place, but there are only ten immovable altars and one more to go.
Bai Liu raised an eyebrow slightly - was this forcing him to have to step on an altar with something on it?
Seemingly aware that Bai Liu has stepped on the altar, the movable altar becomes more and more agitated, and the face of a deformed human being emerges from the sealing paper, mouth wide open and hissing silently.
A nauseating smell of rotting corpses emerged from the altar as a gust of wind washed back and forth across the sealed chamber.
Bai Liu took another step and he turned on top of a new altar.
The wine jar that Bai Liu had previously stepped on was pushed by other moving jars the moment he lifted his foot, breaking the seal and revealing a body huddled twisted in the water inside.
The body was face up, its face so decomposed that only one eye was left intact, its eyes fogged over as if covered with a layer of gauze, its blue and white swollen lips open, staring out in death.
This would be the corpses of those ghosts of the ghosts.
The power of the ghosts is multiplied by the corpses. If these ghosts are allowed to take the corpses and burrow straight out of the altar ......
Imagining that scenario for a moment, Bai Liu gauged each other's fighting prowess and objectively felt that he would more than likely die here.
Bai Liu kept switching altars in pursuit of the wine altars, whose seals were damaged one by one, and Bai Liu finally approached the direction of the southeast corner of the last point missing from the [out].
The wine jars were like schools of fish that had caught a whiff of bait and were almost piled up in that direction at the last point of the [out].
Bai Liu calmly stands on the wine altar nearest to the point where [out] is missing and looks around for a way back.
Wait until he steps on the wine altar, in case no exit appears and something in that altar climbs out, Bai Liu needs to be oriented to not knock over the other altars while having a chase on these ten altars.
Bai Liu stared at the shaking wine altars in the southeast corner room of the [out], and after stepping quickly on one he turned and stood on a corner altar, his back pressed against two walls.
The altar, opened by Bai Liu, shakes twice, stands still, then begins to tilt slightly, irregularly, in one direction again, and five white fingers slowly extend from the broken red paper seal, slowly holding the edge of the mouth of the altar.
A head was exposed, its head bent ninety degrees across the mouth of the altar, as if completely disconnected from its body, a grim smile on its dead white face, long, dark and wet hair emerging from the mouth of the altar, and the rest of its body and limbs pulled out of the mouth of the altar at a twisted and bizarre angle.
Bai Liu, standing on the diagonal, could hear that creaking and distorting sound of bones as he glanced at the four walls and sighed inwardly with considerable regret.
He seemed to have guessed wrong, not in the way he thought.
At least for the moment this partial chamber does not appear to have a mechanism that would make way for a door for Bai Liu.
Bai Liu didn't think he had guessed the meaning of [out] wrongly, the hint was given rather obviously.
But now there is no appearance [of a way out], unless there is something missing from .......
Bai Liu looked up at the ceiling, the altar he was standing on was directly below the flap door, which made a clanging, jiggling sound directly above him.
A ghastly white face peeps out from behind the flap door, and a ghost crawls in on all fours from outside the flap door.
Bai Liu gave a tsk and said to himself, "Sure enough.
The eleven altars still had to be the ones containing the ghosts of the accomplices to be opened, so it was not long after he stepped on that one that these ghosts that had left would return.
The ghosts were ready to crawl towards Bai Liu, but not long after they came in, they seemed to smell something, cracked a blood red smile on their faces, and then darted in towards the altars that Bai Liu had trampled open.
Then, one after another, the ten Bai Liu-stomped open altars stretched out their ghastly white arms and feet to slap against the vermilion ones, their twisted heads making a cackling, bone-crunching interlocking sound inside them.
The drowned corpse's rotting face is decaying as its eyes stare straight at Bai Liu standing in the centre, a grin growing at the corners of its mouth.
~
Chapter 342
When all the ten ghosts had returned to the wine altar, the mechanism in Bai Liu's side of the tomb finally twisted and the bottom of the tomb sank downwards with a loud rumble, and a lot of smoke and dust rose from the cracks of the tomb.
The light of the candlestick held in Bai Liu's hand was dimmed.
Everything around him was wrapped in smoke, and Bai Liu heard the sound of altars gurgling and rolling all over the floor, and a few hitting his feet and breaking with a crackling sound.
Now Bai Liu reckons that all the ghosts in the entire paracrypt have been released.
The ghosts of the corpses, or to be more precise, the corpses crawled through the smoke, occasionally peeking out of the smoke with a face without five senses shrugging and sniffing at the position of their noses.
Some of the ghosts have two bloodshot slits in their eyes, their bloodshot eyes darting around in their sockets, as if searching for Bai Liu in the darkness of the smoke and dust, and then crawling towards the bright light.
Bai Liu exhaled and blew out the candlestick in his hand, and everything was plunged into darkness and nothing could be seen.
He could feel the chamber sinking slowly, not knowing when it would stop, and every now and then wet hair and hands and feet trickled across Bai Liu's back and ankles, and he felt the constant sound of sniffing air and the wet, slimy sound of tongues licking at something in his ears.
The coldness of the coldness is getting closer and closer to Bai Liu, and the corpses seem to be on the verge of finding Bai Liu hidden in the darkness by sniffing.
Bai Liu took two steps back, leaned against the wall, calmly took off his coat and dipped it into the corpse water flowing on the ground, then wrapped his lower body in the corpse water-soaked coat, put an empty wine jar that the ghosts had crawled away from over his head, and cowered in the corner, holding his breath.
The darkness of the ghosts seemed to reduce the sound of their sniffing, and in response, the sound of their crawling became more frequent, and Bai Liu could occasionally hear the sound of pots and broken tiles being shaken.
The chamber seemed to be about to sink to a fixed position and began to make a cackling and jamming sound.
Bai Liu could feel a ghost approaching him, and after sniffing around the mouth of the altar, he left again.
And of course there are those who didn't leave.
Bai Liu looks down through the spout of the wine jar and from his narrow view he can faintly see a pair of wet, miserable white feet standing on the ground very close in front of him, still oozing down.
Bai Liu slowly turns the wine jar above his head towards the wall, trying to avoid this tiger corpse standing in front of him, but as he does so, the feet slowly tiptoe in the direction Bai Liu is turning.
Eventually it becomes, again, that this foot is toe to toe with Bai Liu, who is wearing a wine jar, and a little closer.
Bai Liu paused subtly as he remembered the explanation of toe-to-toe squareness in the Evil Art of Maoshan.
When a ghost holds his toes towards you, he is trying to get into your body, or to follow you home and live with you. That is why there is the saying that you should not sleep at night with your shoes with your toes facing the bed, because it will make the ghost step on your shoes, get into your bed and sleep with you.
There are so many ghosts here, but this one ghost is the only one who sticks to Bai Liu's place.
It wouldn t be that he wanted to live with him ...... Bai Liu took a look at this wine jar he was using.
The legs standing in front of Bai Liu slowly bent down and crouched in front of him.
Bai Liu can be seen below its shoulders, the thing clasps its knees with both hands, is still for a moment, then its bones begin to contort and its head twists a hundred and twenty degrees, its whole head tilted to look upwards from under the mouth of the altar towards Bai Liu inside the altar, its eyes all black.
He pointed to the altar on Bai Liu's head and made a very strange, gurgling sound in his throat, like a man talking in water.
"Here's my ...... altar, where's yours?"
The chamber finally sank to the bottom, and with a heavy jolt the chamber fell to a new place, where the main door opened to reveal a dark cloistered passage.
Bai Liu quickly removed the wine jar from his head and put it over the head of the ghost in front of him: "I just borrowed it for a while, now I'm returning it to you."
With that, Bai Liu turned and rushed back into the corridor without looking back.
The ghosts spotted Bai Liu, a running human, and hissed as they crawled along the walls in pursuit.
The corpses behind them were crawling so fast that, if there was light, Bai Liu could see the remnants of these corpses flipping their arms and legs when he looked back.
At the moment when the ghosts were about to catch up with Bai Liu, Bai Liu took off his clothes and threw them in front of him, then turned sideways and spun into a passage that opened up next to a corridor.
The ghosts behind him were in hot pursuit, but it seemed that in the darkness the ghosts relied on their sense of smell to chase the living, and Bai Liu, hiding in the side corridor, felt the ghosts running past him towards the top that smelled like him.
Bai Liu relaxed his breathing as he watched the tiger corpses rumble and pile up in a white mass where his clothes had been, teeth clacking.
The sound of clothes being shredded soon resounded in the corridor.
The corpses piled up around them scattered, and one of them lifted out a wine jar, which they seemed to have filled with bits of clothing as if they were the remains of Bai Liu's body, and sealed it with red paper with the word "Dien" written on it, then turned and crawled back with the jar.
Apparently, they thought they had made Bai Liu the next ghost to be brought back to feed [the tiger].
Bai Liu raises his eyebrows slightly as he watches.
The ghosts acted so well that they were able to tear up the "human flesh" that came to their mouths and put it in the altar, not as if they had been instructed by irrational ghosts, but as if they had been deliberately trained by the living.
But in this tomb strewn with ghosts and ghouls, in the village of Yinshan where the last descendants were drowned, what living people would there be but the four of them returning home?
Bai Liu was about to poke his head out to see where the ghosts were going to deliver the wine jars containing "himself" when a dark hand suddenly reached out and covered his mouth and nose.
"Don't turn around!" Someone warned in a hoarse voice, "Something's coming to clean up the grounds!"
Bai Liu is submissive and does not move.
Soon, several paper figures half Bai Liu's height appeared, smiling, with smiling faces made of ink, holding paper brooms in their hands and sweeping them back and forth around the spot where Bai Liu's clothes had just been torn, in stiff, deadly movements, before disappearing again.
When the paper man left, the man covering Bai Liu's mouth and nose breathed a long sigh of relief, but still held Bai Liu's throat still, his body very tense.
Bai Liu calmly took out a match and lit the candlestick, holding it up to illuminate the man: " Mu Sicheng, what are you doing here?"
Mu Sicheng's face was filthy with dirt, there was blood around his mouth and eyes, and his body was covered in colour, so it looked like he had been in a bad fight.
"It really is you Bai Liu ." Mu Sicheng's chest rose and fell violently, his eyes were lax, "...... I thought I had saved another ghost."
Bai Liu looked at Mu Sicheng from top to bottom: "What's happening to you?"
"Don't mention it." Mu Sicheng, depressed and scared again, squatted on the ground while smoothing his heart out and said, "You don't know where you've been, I followed that fake Bai Liu to carry the coffin and on the way I walked over a bridge that the fake Bai Liu told me to walk across."
"But that bridge is actually made of paper!"
"The bridge is full of ghosts carrying coffins, some strange paper people and so on, and some translucent ones, I can only vaguely see the shape of things, the water is dark, there are also floating duckweed, black hair and paper money, a look at the fall is not expected to come up."
Mu Sicheng's face was dark: "I did as you said, held my breath without throwing up, almost didn't kill me, but at least I got through, and then went round and round, and my head got dizzy, to some secondary chamber that said it was connected to the main chamber."
"This time the chamber was full of coffins, and standing coffins, three dozen of them, with red satin tied to them, arranged around the middle in some sort of formation like shape, I can't remember."
Mu Sicheng recalls with a frown, "That fake Bai Liu asked me to choose a coffin to carry out. So I chose one that I could carry."
"I had just carried the coffin out of the sub-crypt and it was a bit slippery and fell down a bit, so I turned it upwards, but I was afraid of offending the corpse in the coffin, so I said sorry I was also carrying a coffin for the first time, please excuse me, but just after I said that, a woman's laugh came from the coffin behind me, and then the coffin was knocked twice."
Bai Liu recalled, "That seems to mean giving orders to the ghosts, doesn't it?"
"Yes!" Mu Sicheng stood up angrily and showed Bai Liu the big red flower in satin hanging from his waist: "After that coffin rattled twice, a whole bunch of ghosts suddenly appeared with that fake Bai Liu holding my head down, putting a big red flower on me, and insisting that I marry the bride in the coffin!"
Bai Liu smiled, "So have you tied the knot?"
Mu Sicheng shook his head stubbornly, "No! While the ghosts were setting up the wedding hall, I took advantage of the chaos and beat them up, then ran out."
"So you ran away from the marriage?" Bai Liu nodded as if he understood and smiled a little, "The other party really likes you and chose you to be the one, and you ran away without even saying no properly, that's not very nice, is it?"
"No, okay!" Mu Sicheng roared, "She doesn't really like me so she'll marry me!"
Mu Sicheng clenched his fists, his hands shaking with anger: "You don't understand anything, I'm not just marrying the bride I'm carrying, I'm marrying the whole tomb, all of it, all three dozen brides!!!"
~
Chapter 343
Bai Liu stroked his chin for a moment, "That's not good, it's bigamy."
Mu Sicheng is furious: "Is that all you can think of? Do you know how hard I had to work to get out! I was held down to pay my respects to them!"
Bai Liu's eyes gestured, "Did you get these bruises when you escaped?"
"Not only that." Mu Sicheng was furious when he said, "I had run out, but when I turned around and saw you being arrested and married to those thirty brides, I panicked and went back to save you."
The more he thought about it, the angrier Mu Sicheng became, he raised his hand and smashed the wall viciously: "The one I saved was a ghost, and when I was carrying it across the ghost bridge, it bit me twice, so I couldn't hold my breath and almost fell off the paper ghost bridge and drowned!
Bai Liu scans the area and sees that Mu Sicheng's shoulder is indeed covered with two bloody teeth marks.
"Didn't you take a candlestick and shine it on each other?" Bai Liu asked.
Mu Sicheng gave Bai Liu a resentful look, "Everything was seized from me during the ceremony, and the candlesticks were taken away."
"Although you didn't save me, and it wasn't me you saved." Bai Liu smiled politely, "It wouldn't have been wise to turn around and save someone in that situation, but thank you."
Mu Sicheng: "......"
How ...... does he feel Bai Liu is connoting his stupidity ......
Mu Sicheng muttered, "...... What if it's you, and I'm all alone after you die here, I don't know how I'm going to get out."
Bai Liu gave Mu Sicheng a second glance: "You think you have to rely on me to get out, which means you think I'm better at handling this kind of situation than you are, so why do you think I'm trapped when you can get out?"
Mu Sicheng: "......"
Shit, yeah!
Mu Sicheng scratches his face in annoyance: "It's the first time I've been in this situation, and I'm stunned ......"
"It's all right, once you've been there, you'll be able to hold on to it once more." Bai Liu walks inside with the candlestick in his hand.
Mu Sicheng was dumbfounded for a moment and followed: "...... Bai Liu, what do you mean?! You're not going to ......"
Bai Liu mumbled lightly, "I'm going again."
Mu Sicheng was devastated as he scrambled to stop Bai Liu, who was moving forward: "I told you there are a lot of ghosts over there, it's dangerous, why are you going?
Bai Liu holds the candlestick as he looks silently at Mu Sicheng: "Because I'm going to find Mu Sicheng."
Mu Sicheng was stunned: "What looking for Mu Sicheng, I am not here ......"
Mu Sicheng's unfinished words stop in Bai Liu's calm, unmoving gaze.
The features of his face flattened and disappeared, his complexion turned blue and white, and the sound he made became buzzing and dull, as if he were speaking from beneath the surface of the water.
The faint light of the fire washes back and forth between 'Mu Sicheng' and Bai Liu.
The firelight reflects the shadows of the two men on the wall, Bai Liu's shadow clearly visible, while Mu Sicheng's is layered and blurred, as if it were about to disappear at any moment, with many overlapping shadows.
"How did this happen ......" Mu Sicheng dumbly touched his face with only vague outlines of his features, "Am I a ghost? But I have a shadow ......"
Bai Liu approached Mu Sicheng with the candlestick in his hand, flipped his wrist upwards and placed it in front of Mu Sicheng's face, whose nose twitched twice subconsciously as he seemed to catch the scent of Bai Liu's body and could not help but inhale twice.
As the anger from Bai Liu's body entered Mu Sicheng's nostrils, the features on Mu Sicheng's face that had been blurred became clear again.
Mu Sicheng realised what he was doing only after he had sucked Bai Liu's anger, he froze for a moment and took two steps back in fear: "Don't you come any closer! I'm really a ghost, I was just sucking the anger out of you ......"
Bai Liu pulled his shirt down to cover his wrists, and he looked up calmly at Mu Sicheng, who was about to go mad: "You're not a ghost, but you're turning into one."
"You are a disembodied living soul."
Mu Sicheng was dumbfounded: "Disembodied ...... living souls?"
Bai Liu hmmed, "In short it means that your body has been greatly damaged by some circumstance, possibly being snatched away and used as a double, or you could be on the verge of death, causing your soul to leave your body and wander around."
"If there is no way to get your living soul back into your body before we return to the yang world at twelve midnight, then your soul will really stay on the road to the underworld and become a ghost of a helper in this underground tomb."
Bai Liu glanced down at the time on his phone, "If my phone hadn't malfunctioned, it would be five in the afternoon, seven hours to go."
Mu Sicheng's face began to fade again as he turned away from Bai Liu, and his voice became jarred again, "Seven hours should be enough."
Bai Liu moves closer to Mu Sicheng again and reaches out to let Mu Sicheng suck a little more of the anger from the back of his hand.
After another dose, Bai Liu's face turns pale: "Seven hours is the most optimistic scenario."
"There is only one possibility for you to be in a state where you are about to turn into a ghost and already need to feed on the anger of the living to maintain your soul form." Bai Liu looked at Mu Sicheng for a moment, "That is that your body is about to die."
Mu Sicheng took two steps back and raised his hand to shield his eyes, he actually began to feel the candlestick in Bai Liu's hand stinging, he looked to his blocking hand and a chill ran down his spine.
His hands had somehow become like those of the ghosts of the tiger, crooked and upside down, green and white and oozing, and dripping down.
Bai Liu raised the candlestick and shone it on Mu Sicheng, whose eyes had turned bloodshot: "It is imperative to help you find your body, or my anger will not keep your soul form for long."
Mu Sicheng was silent for a while and then asked, "What would happen to me if I didn't get back to my body before I died?"
Bai Liu looks at Mu Sicheng for a moment: "You will die."
"Then you will be like those ghosts, gradually forgetting that you are a human being, slowly losing your human form, becoming inhuman and ghostly, with your body limbs inverted and your yin and yang indistinguishable, walking in the human world only to serve the tiger and find a substitute."
"But I can hang on to your soul form with a breath of anger and just find your body before then."
Bai Liu holds out his wrist and hands it to Mu Sicheng for him to suck the anger.
Mu Sicheng stands in the darkness without a word, and does not come up to suck the anger out of Bai Liu, but neither does he go away.
Bai Liu did not withdraw his hand, still calmly holding it up as he waited for Mu Sicheng to open his mouth.
"What would happen to you if I had finished sucking the anger out of you and hadn't found my body yet?" Mu Sicheng finally spoke, his voice a little muffled this time.
Bai Liu replied calmly, "The living are lifeless, the walking dead, and I will become a zombie."
Mu Sicheng's lips were pursed as he took two more steps back, as if preparing to flee Bai Liu.
Bai Liu laughed as if it were a curiosity and asked Mu Sicheng in return, "Why do you think I would give up all my anger for you and become a zombie?"
"I will only keep you as long as I can ensure my own safety. I will keep you because you are useful, you are one of the few living people in Yinshan Village, and you obey me well, you are worth more alive than dead."
Mu Sicheng took another step back, and there was a clear wavering in his voice: "...... You're so good, you can handle these things better on your own instead, right?"
Bai Liu stepped forward with the candlestick in his hand, and again passed his hand in front of the face of the diminishing Mu Sicheng, his voice light: "Didn't that grave robber named Kong Xuyang say we were bound teammates?"
"If there are fixed teams divided up in this shady village, and various camps, is there some kind of competition going on here?"
"Suppose this is the match ......" Bai Liu looked up at Mu Sicheng who was hiding in the shadows, "then before the match started, at that time I chose you as my teammate and I trusted my choice, so you should be valuable and would help me win the game."
"I don't like to lose, so I need you to live."
"Now you have two choices before you, the first is to obey me directly and suck the anger I give you now to preserve your soul form, the second choice is to run away and then find a place to wait for death while I capture you and force feed you the anger to keep you alive."
Bai Liu took a step forward with his wrist, his face emotionless as he gazed at Mu Sicheng: "Which one do you choose?"
This time Mu Sicheng did not back down.
It was a long time before Mu Sicheng's face split into five features and he approached Bai Liu's wrist with a grim, stoic look, clenching his fist and taking a mouthful.
Bai Liu's face whitened a little more as he withdrew his grim wrist and rubbed it, looking to Mu Sicheng with a smile, "Thanks for the cooperation, mate."
Mu Sicheng was just about to take a deep breath when he stopped in frustration after realizing that he was only a wisp of a soul and couldn't inhale: "...... How long can your anger last before I turn into a zombie?"
Bai Liu thought for a moment, "I should be able to last more than an hour, I'm a young adult after all, I still have plenty of virility."
Mu Sicheng looked at Bai Liu's thin shoulders and back and repeated skeptically, "Young adults?"
Bai Liu smiled back, "Any questions?"
Mu Sicheng paused for a moment and shook his head quickly, "No!"
Bai Liu turned back towards the dark passage, "Well, you don't need to worry about my affairs here, I know them in my own heart, deal with your own affairs first, do you have any memory of when your soul left your body?"
Mu Sicheng hesitates for a moment: "...... No."
Bai Liu was not surprised, he just nodded his head to show his understanding: "The living soul leaving the body is usually very difficult to be noticed by the person himself, you just feel like you keep walking, you don't know when you run out of your body, you think you are still a living person, in fact at this time if you look back, you will find your body lying in the same place, not moving at all. "
"Let me ask it another way." Bai Liu pondered for a moment, "Do you remember when your shadow became blurred?"
Mu Sicheng answered quickly and surely this time, "My candlestick was taken away during the worship, and I'm sure my shadow was still normal during the worship!"
"That means that the separation of your body and soul was after the wedding ceremony." Bai Liu held the candlestick up to the path in front of the cloister, "Then go back the way you came to find it, remember the way to the wedding hall?"
Mu Sicheng did not reply.
Bai Liu paused as he lowered the candlestick in his hand to the ground, the firelight wavering.
A ghost with a deformed face, only vaguely resembling Mu Sicheng, is lying on the ground, coiled up in a ball of pain, spitting water from its mouth, its eyes all black.
Bai Liu crouches down on one knee and holds out his wrist for Mu Sicheng to take two puffs. Mu Sicheng chokes and vomits twice, and his twisted body returns to normal, his features appearing.
Mu Sicheng looked up, a thick layer of darkness rising to his face as he reluctantly replied to Bai Liu's earlier words, "Still, remember some of the way, but it's a bit hard to remember anymore ......"
"It's normal, you will gradually forget your memories of your life when you turn into a ghost." Bai Liu picked up Mu Sicheng, "The fact that the Yin energy of your living soul is gathering so quickly means that your body is in a very bad condition, we have to hurry."
~
Chapter 344
After taking two mouthfuls of Bai Liu's energy, Mu Sicheng regained his human form and led him deeper into the tomb.
But although Mu Sicheng was walking ahead of Bai Liu, the only sound in the darkened tomb was Bai Liu's footsteps.
Bai Liu holds a candlestick up to Mu Sicheng, who is walking in front of him, and casts a glance at Mu Sicheng's shadow on the wall with his afterglow.
Mu Sicheng's swaying shadow fades, like a wisp of smoke on the wall.
Now and then they would come across a wine jar or two placed in the middle of a grave path on their way.
Mu Sicheng carefully stepped in front of Bai Liu, allowing him to get behind him and out of the way of the wine jar.
The wine jar seems to be able to smell the scent of the living, slowly turning in a half circle as Bai Liu moves around, the red paper on the mouth of the jar arching slightly twice, and then slowly subsiding when it detects the scent of the ghosts on Mu Sicheng's body.
Mu Sicheng breathed a sigh of relief as he glanced back at the wine jar quietly guarding the middle of the road and patted his chest with palpitations, "This wine jar is also found in the Hall of Joy, it chases people, I don't know what it contains."
"That thing contains the bones of drowned people, and it runs after the breath of the living." Bai Liu looked at Mu Sicheng, "Do you remember when this wine jar didn't chase you?"
Mu Sicheng was stunned as he frowned and thought for a moment: "...... I don't remember much, I feel like these jars of wine haven't really been bothering me since I escaped."
Bai Liu mused, "Then your body must have been lost on the way out of the wedding hall, did anything strange happen in between, apart from you turning back to save me?"
Mu Sicheng struggles to remember: "...... can't quite remember, I think I came across some paper men, carrying something ......"
The sound of footsteps suddenly came from behind Bai Liu, a peculiar, confetti-stomping sound, a stop-and-go, as if something was leaping down the stairs, each sound a heavy, heavy landing of feet that sounded like they were moving slowly, but were almost instantly close to Bai Liu's back.
The candlestick in Bai Liu's hand swung violently, and the fire was suddenly blue and white. He quickly pulled Mu Sicheng into a nearby tomb passage and sidled up behind him, gathering his hands to cover the faint light of the candle.
In the very faint light of a candle, a pair of robust and greenish-white hands with dark, sharp nails jumped out from within the damp and gloomy low tomb passage.
The hands jumped again and finally lit up the body hidden behind the darkness. With these hands was a middle-aged man with a yellow charm on his forehead, dressed in a waistcoat and shorts.
The middle-aged man was tall and strong, his complexion an abnormal greenish-purple, his lips dark, his eyes sunken, staring straight ahead at the road, two long fangs stuck into the flesh at the sides of his mouth, his knees bouncing forward without any bending at all, and an Old Zhang old, yellow talisman plastered on his forehead that seemed ready to fall off at any moment because of the bouncing.
Bai Liu squinted at the yellow talisman for a moment and confirmed that the talisman drawn on it was the Yin Corpse Talisman from the Maoshan Evil Art, a talisman used to refine the dead into Yin corpses.
The corpses can be used to drive the person who draws the talisman, but at the same time, the person who draws the talisman will also be devastated, and once the person who draws the talisman is dying, these corpses will turn around and devour their master.
Through the dusty vest, one can faintly glimpse a large, bone-deep gash in the back of the middle-aged man's zombie, which has been simply and crudely sewn up, but at a glance it was sewn up post-mortem, and the spine inside can still be seen where the stitching was done.
This large slash should have been the middle-aged man's fatal wound.
The zombie jumped very fast, just once, high over Bai Liu's body, but then a second zombie jumped out of the darkness behind it.
This zombie looks about the same age as the one before it, both young and old, and also has a large wound on its body, on its neck.
The zombie's head had been chopped almost to the point of cleavage and had been sewn back on, but the stitchers were clearly not very good at their craft and as it throbbed the zombie's neck split open and its head fell to one side, its dark eyes looking straight at Bai Liu and the others hidden in the shadowed tomb.
The crooked-necked zombie's nostrils twitched twice as it seemed to smell the scent of a stranger, and a kind of angry cross-eyed look appeared on its stiff face as it leapt in towards the tomb passage with a twist of its flat hands.
Mu Sicheng looks tense as he stands in front of Bai Liu, who hides behind Mu Sicheng's shoulder, hiding the candlestick behind him with one hand and calmly covering his mouth and nose with the other.
The zombie's head was tilted and it opened its fanged mouth, and with a grim look on its face, it approached the left side of Mu Sicheng's neck and sniffed twice, as if it would bite as soon as it caught the scent of a stranger.
Bai Liu is now hiding behind Mu Sicheng's right shoulder, back to back with Mu Sicheng.
The zombies have poor eyesight, travel under the moon and like to eat human blood. They rely on their sense of smell and like to sniff around the seven orifices of the human body, where the anger flows.
The zombie sniffs Mu Sicheng's face, confusion creeping into its crooked head, and with a sinister flash of its fangs, it turns around and pokes at Mu Sicheng's left shoulder.
Bai Liu, who had his back to the zombie, moved as if he could see the zombie's movements and ducked behind Mu Sicheng's right shoulder again.
It poked Mu Sicheng's shoulder with its nails to make sure it was a ghost, and then turned its hands away.
Mu Sicheng, almost his entire body, oh no it was a ghost, was deflated as he leaned his back against Bai Liu and let out a long breath, wiping the non-existent cold sweat from his face, "Finally, we're gone ......"
"It's not over yet." Bai Liu's voice came very softly from behind Mu Sicheng, "There should be five more, seven zombies in total."
As soon as Bai Liu's words left his mouth, a new zombie jumped out in front of Mu Sicheng, who was just as curious about Mu Sicheng as the previous zombie.
Bai Liu, who is familiar with Mu Sicheng's scent, uses Mu Sicheng's flexibility to hide and succeeds in making the vampire think that Mu Sicheng is just a freshly dead ghost who is still alive.
The zombie grimaced and threatened Mu Sicheng, poking him in the shoulder with his fingernails and disliking him.
Mu Sicheng couldn't understand zombie talk, but he deduced from the expression on the old zombie's face that the other man should be scolding him to go away if he wasn't human.
Mu Sicheng: "......"
While that does seem to be the case, it really does sound like cursing.
This process was repeated six times in a row, except for the first zombie who didn't come and chatter about Mu Sicheng, but every zombie that followed came and sniffed Mu Sicheng, and some even took a bite out of Mu Sicheng, then left in disgust, and repeated the process with the next zombie.
Mu Sicheng, who has been bitten twice on both sides of his neck and face, is inconsolable: "......"
What are you sharks! Can't you tell each other if a bite doesn't taste good! You have to come back and bite me again!
But Mu Sicheng now realises that there are advantages to being a ghost, he is not so afraid of these things anymore.
Mu Sicheng was about to probe to make sure there was nothing behind them when Bai Liu caught him behind him.
Bai Liu looked into the dark tunnel, "Something else has not passed, there are noises, don't go out."
Mu Sicheng held his breath for a long time, not hearing anything, but his nose was always good and he caught the smell of a very greasy scented candle.
Slowly, Mu Sicheng also heard a clicking sound, like someone walking on top of paper, small and fragmentary, but echoing back and forth in the darkness of the tomb.
Bai Liu's eyes narrowed slightly as he looked deeper into the tomb, where a little wavering orange light swayed erratically, like a ghostly spectre, a floating light on the river, making it impossible to see the distance, but one could actually feel it coming closer.
In the distance, the bit of yellow fire drew closer and closer, finally giving a glimpse of the true contents hidden within it.
Mu Sicheng saw a huge triangular bronze incense burner with countless high incense and candles burning, sparks waving everywhere, illuminating the entire tomb path as if it were bright daylight, and carrying this incense burner forward were some paper figures that had been crushed to the point of deformation.
The paper figures' entire bodies were flattened and deformed under the enormous weight of the incense burner, and the faces that had been painted with joyful faces were crushed into creased and stacked eerie expressions, and the clothes on their bodies were squeezed so that it was impossible to see what had been painted.
Little by little, the paper people carry the incense burners, and every now and then, sparks float down to ignite the paper people carrying the incense burners.
The paper figures were set alight by sparks and their bodies burst into flames, and Mu Sicheng could hear the strange laughter of the paper figures in the glaring flames as they curled and distorted.
"Hee hee~"
"Hee hee~"
The swaying incense burners and burning paper figures seem to pass Mu Sicheng and Bai Liu lightly and heavily, followed by a papier-mache Taoist at the end of the procession carrying the incense burners.
This paper daoist is one of the most beautifully crafted paper figures, with a lifelike face and delicately traced features like those of a real person, black eyebrows and long beard, and a dignified appearance, except for one pair of eyes with no pearls, which are not painted in the middle of the eye socket.
In addition to this, the paper daoist was covered in talismans, and with one hand, two fingers raised above his head, he held a golden bell in his hand and a peach sword in the other, pointing towards the incense burner in front of him, his eyes open with a pair of white ink eyes without eyes, and he walked straight ahead with one step on his left foot and one step on his right, making the sound of walking on paper that Mu Sicheng had heard before.
With such a bizarre scene, Mu Sicheng's guts, which had just rapidly swelled because he was a ghost, flew back as he tugged on Bai Liu's sleeve and asked in a whisper, "What's ...... going on?"
Bai Liu looked at the paper daoist: "Paper man chasing a corpse."
~