The next morning, Xu Muchan was awakened by his biological clock.
He opened his eyes groggily and immediately felt as though the tip of his nose was rubbing against something warm and soft.
Xu Muchan: ?
He tilted his head backward and struggled to focus his vision so he could see more clearly, only to discover that all four of his limbs were restrained, leaving him unable to move.
Still, after squinting hard, he finally managed to see clearly.
The expanse of white before his eyes was Wei Xilou’s chest.
Xu Muchan: …
Why was Big Brother in his bed?
And he had clearly locked the door before going to sleep last night.
Xu Muchan struggled harder. The person holding him tightly finally woke up, opened his eyes, looked at him, and said good morning.
The scene was far too strange. Xu Muchan remained silent for a long while before finally asking hesitantly, “Why is Big Brother in my room?”
“Didn’t we always sleep together before?”
Wei Xilou said it as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
Xu Muchan opened his mouth, but unexpectedly couldn’t refute him.
The conditions in the Mountain God’s Cave had been primitive. There had only been one room in total, serving as both the main room and bedroom, and naturally, there had only been one bed.
The small bed, only 1.2 meters wide, had been placed against the wall. It was more than spacious enough for Xu Muchan to sleep alone, but adding another person made it somewhat cramped.
But back then, Big Brother had been difficult to communicate with, and Xu Muchan still had some instinctive fear of non-human beings. He also didn’t want to upset him over something so trivial, so whenever Big Brother crawled into the blankets in the middle of the night, he would do his best to pretend he didn’t know.
Over time, the two of them simply tacitly accepted sharing one bed.
But now there were three rooms, and Big Brother had a human body as well. Yet he was still squeezing into the same bed with him.
Xu Muchan couldn’t help feeling uncomfortable.
Especially now, his body was being forced to remain tightly pressed against the other man’s. His thin pajamas couldn’t block their body heat at all, and he could clearly feel that Big Brother truly possessed a human body now.
He was tall and powerfully built, his body temperature almost scorching, giving Xu Muchan the feeling that he was a full size larger than himself.
Xu Muchan became increasingly uncomfortable and arched his waist backward slightly.
“It’s not like we’re in the village anymore. There are so many rooms now. We don’t have to squeeze together.”
Wei Xilou felt him retreating. His arm hooked around Xu Muchan’s lower back and pulled him forward, drawing him back into his arms.
He lowered his eyes and looked at him.
“A-Chan doesn’t want to sleep with Big Brother?”
Xu Muchan: “…”
He obviously couldn’t tell him directly that he didn’t want to.
So he hastily came up with an excuse.
“It’s a little hot with two people squeezed together.”
Wei Xilou thought about it.
“I understand.”
Xu Muchan had no idea what he understood this time, but he knew that if they remained pressed together like this, something awkward would happen very soon.
He forcibly pried Wei Xilou’s arm away and jumped out of bed.
“I’m going to the bathroom!”
Wei Xilou watched his hurried retreat. He rubbed his fingers together, savoring the delicate sensation that remained on his fingertips.
A-Chan thought the human body was too hot.
Then next time, he simply wouldn’t use it.
In that respect, his spirit body was still more convenient. At least if he held someone while sleeping for an entire night, his arm wouldn’t become faintly numb.
After Xu Muchan finished washing up in the bathroom and came out, he received a call from Xu Zhifei.
She asked softly whether Xu Muchan was staying well at his friend’s house, when he was coming home, and so on. Naturally, she also said quite a few good things about Xu Qingming.
To sum it all up, it was simply that there was no grudge between father and son that could last overnight.
Thinking about the fact that the Joy God was still at the Xu family home, Xu Muchan hesitated briefly before deciding to take the opportunity to make peace.
“I’ll come back tonight.”
Wei Xilou heard this, walked over, pinched his cheek, and stroked the ends of his hair.
“You’re still planning to return to the Xu family?”
Xu Muchan hummed.
“The Joy God is still there. Once the Joy God is dealt with, and my eyes get a little better, I’ll move out.”
He hadn’t planned to live at the Xu family for very long in the first place. Now he was simply moving out a little earlier.
“Okay.”
Wei Xilou said, “I have to go to the Wei family. Do you want to come with me, A-Chan?”
After bringing A-Chan over, Wei Xilou only then discovered that raising a child was an extremely serious matter.
For example, there was no cook at home, so feeding A-Chan every day was already a problem. And then there was the poor feng shui of this place. Ghostly things gathered in the underground parking garage, and if A-Chan came home late from school, he would inevitably encounter them.
Wei Xilou felt that changing houses could not be delayed.
In the past, the entire Wei family had belonged to him, with properties scattered throughout Yundong. He could live in a different house every day if he wanted.
But times had changed. The Wei family was no longer under his control.
Although he could occasionally give these unfilial descendants an opportunity to show filial respect to their ancestor, if he did it too often, he would inevitably become dependent on them.
He carefully recalled things and remembered that he had already been constructing his tomb before his death.
Although he had ultimately never had the chance to use it, there should still be quite a few good things in the tomb in Yundong.
He decided to go take a look.
However, after so many years, the original site of the Wei family’s residence in Yundong was no longer clear. He would have to spend some time searching for it.
At a time like this, the descendants of the Wei family would have to contribute their efforts.
Xu Muchan didn’t want to go to the Wei family. He shook his head.
“I want to stay home and read and do my homework.”
Wei Xilou didn’t force him. He merely instructed him, “Someone will come to deliver food later.”
Xu Muchan nodded.
After seeing him off, he could finally concentrate on studying.
In the evening, Uncle Wu, the driver, came to Jiahe Garden to pick him up.
Big Brother had gone to the Wei family and still hadn’t returned. Xu Muchan packed his things, sent him a message, and returned to the Xu family first.
Xu Qingming wasn’t home.
Xu Zhifei had originally wanted to persuade him a little more, but when she saw Xu Muchan’s indifferent expression, unable to tell whether he was angry or not, she ultimately said nothing.
Everything returned to peace.
Xu Muchan was quite satisfied with this and continued going to school as usual every day.
Xu Qingming seemed very busy these past few days and rarely came home. On the occasional occasions when Xu Muchan happened to see him, he would still politely greet him, looking as though the previous argument had not affected him in the slightest.
The only thing that puzzled him a little was that He Jiaqi hadn’t come to school for a week already.
The last time he had seen her had been when he walked her home after school on Friday.
Although Xu Muchan felt that Jin Qi was already like a clay Buddha crossing a river, barely able to protect himself, and probably had no time to go looking for trouble with He Jiaqi, he still sent her a WeChat message to ask.
It took He Jiaqi a while to reply. She said that her younger brother was sick, so she had taken leave from school to stay home and take care of him.
The reason was perfectly reasonable. Xu Muchan figured he had simply been overthinking things, so he put the matter out of his mind.
As if thinking about something really did make it happen, Xu Muchan had only thought of Jin Qi during the day when that evening, he learned about the Jin family’s situation from their small WeChat group.
When he opened the group chat, Wei Yao and Wen Dajiang had already chatted their way to 99+ unread messages, all of them sixty-second voice messages.
Xu Muchan randomly picked one and played it. Wei Yao’s excited voice immediately came through:
“Fuck, Old Wen, have you heard the news? What Xu Fan said before seems to be true, and there’s even been a twist. That Chinese teacher didn’t jump off the building. She was accidentally pushed off by Jin Qi.”
Wen Dajiang clearly wasn’t well informed. He immediately started shouting in the group:
“How come I haven’t heard a single thing? Where did you get this news? If she was pushed down, shouldn’t the police have figured it out ages ago? Didn’t they determine that it was suicide? It’s been so long. How did the case suddenly get reopened?”
“Inside information. You know I have an uncle who’s in the system. I heard it from him. Apparently, when the person fell, she hit something else on the way down, so it was impossible to accurately determine where she would land. Then the teacher’s parents also accepted the suicide explanation. Plus, there was no one else at the school at the time apart from the teachers who had stayed behind on duty. Everyone who stayed had an alibi, and there was even less of a motive for murder. So the matter was settled like that.”
“But that’s not the most important part. Do you know why the case suddenly got reopened these past two days?”
Wei Yao’s usually loudspeaker-like voice had taken on a hint of tension.
“My uncle told me that Jin Qi himself went to the police station and surrendered. He confessed to the entire process of what he had done, step by step. Then the police followed up on what he said and investigated it—and unbelievably, every single detail matched perfectly!”
“Fuck, is Jin Qi really the kind of person who suddenly develops a conscience? He didn’t get possessed by a ghost, did he?”
Wei Yao said, “Maybe he really was possessed by a ghost. My uncle said Jin Qi looked absolutely terrifying when he went to the police station. He looked completely hollowed out, practically skin and bones. And didn’t he break both his legs? He was supposed to have casts on them and be unable to walk. Yet he actually walked barefoot all the way to the nearby police station to surrender. After he finished confessing, he collapsed on the floor, barely breathing in and out. He scared the hell out of everyone at the police station.”
“Everything about this whole thing is bizarre. There are way too many things that can’t be explained scientifically. My uncle said they’re suppressing the news for now and plan to deal with it quietly once the investigation is complete.”
Wen Dajiang said, “That’s what you call evil getting its due.”
The two of them sighed and lamented over it in the group for quite a while. In the end, they decided that they would obediently attend every class for the rest of the semester and stop skipping school, lest Heaven suddenly decide it didn’t like them either and send a ghost to collect them.
Xu Muchan didn’t bother listening to any more of their nonsense. He took off his earphones and washed up before going to bed.
Before sleeping, he habitually sent his brother a message saying, “Good night.”
A few days earlier, his brother had said that he had to leave Jiangcheng for a few days because of something that had come up, and told Xu Muchan to send him a message every night before going to bed.
Xu Muchan obediently sent the message, then fell asleep.
Tonight, however, his sleep was not very peaceful.
Although Xu Muchan had fallen asleep, his consciousness remained awake. He found himself standing in a vast wilderness shrouded in mist. The moon overhead was enormous and unnaturally low, with an obvious ring of shadow around its edge, as if a gigantic eye were staring down at him from the sky.
From far away came the faint sound of waves.
Following the sound, Xu Muchan walked toward it and saw black river water winding its way from the depths of the wilderness. There was clearly no wind, yet the water pushed against itself in wave after wave. The overly thick liquid collided with itself, producing a dull, muffled splashing sound.
That enormous moon was reflected in the black water, shimmering faintly.
That river was the Black Taisui…
If he just worked up the courage to take a little of it, perhaps it could completely cure his eyes.
Thinking this, Xu Muchan had already started walking. He moved toward the riverbank almost involuntarily.
The closer he got to the Black River, the louder the sound of the waves became.
But after listening to it for a long time, the irregular sound of the waves gradually seemed to turn into a chaotic murmur, as though the whispers of millions upon millions of people had gathered together, with every single voice desperately trying to squeeze into his ears.
The fragile structures of his ears could not withstand such an enormous and concentrated volume of sound. Xu Muchan felt a sharp pain in his ears and stopped walking.
He covered his ears and realized that, without even noticing, he had already been bewitched into walking all the way to the riverbank.
At that moment, he was less than a single step away from the surface of the black river.
The black river water seemed to possess a will of its own as it spread toward Xu Muchan. Dense, overlapping human voices seeped through the gaps between his fingers and into his ears.
Xu Muchan remembered his brother’s warning. He took a step backward, turned around, and ran.
The sound behind him suddenly grew louder, as if a radio playing nothing but white noise had been turned up to its maximum volume.
Static.
Static.
No matter how far Xu Muchan ran, the sound followed him like a shadow, ringing relentlessly beside his ears.
Xu Muchan stopped, gasping for breath. His fingers searched over his chest until they found the Mountain God Tablet, which he grabbed tightly.
Just as he was preparing to invite the god to possess his body, he noticed something strange.
When he moved the Mountain God Tablet farther away, the static seemed to become quieter.
Xu Muchan hesitated for a moment, then cautiously took the Mountain God Tablet off his neck and held it tightly in his hand instead.
The instant the Mountain God Tablet was removed, it was as though the entire noisy world had been muted.
There was no sound anywhere around him.
No sound of waves.
No sound of wind.
The silence was unnerving.
Xu Muchan couldn’t tell which situation was more dangerous. Just as he was preparing to put the Mountain God Tablet back on and see what happened, a voice suddenly called out to him from the river.
“Xu Muchan…”
Then it called again:
“Xu Muchan…”
“Save me.”
It was He Jiaqi’s voice.
Xu Muchan jolted awake and abruptly sat up in bed. He instinctively reached for the Mountain God Tablet against his chest. His fingers closed tightly around the smooth, polished wooden tablet, and only then did the terror from his dream finally begin to fade.
Could it really be that what one thought about during the day would appear in one’s dreams at night?
How could He Jiaqi’s voice have come from the Black River?
The voice had sounded muffled, as though the person speaking had been submerged underwater, with a layer of water between them that caused a slight distortion.
However, after losing his sight, Xu Muchan had become extremely sensitive to sounds. As long as he had heard a person’s voice before, he could basically remember it.
He was certain that it had been He Jiaqi’s voice.
He shook his head and had his phone announce the time automatically.
It was only six o’clock, earlier than the time he normally got up.
Xu Muchan first went to the bathroom and washed his face, clearing the grogginess from his mind.
When he came back, the phone on his bedside table was buzzing.
Xu Muchan picked it up and discovered that there were more messages from their four-person WeChat group.
He had originally thought Wei Yao and Wen Dajiang were chatting again, but when he opened the group, he found the entire screen filled with the same sentence:
【Save me】
The person sending the messages was He Jiaqi.
At the same time Xu Muchan opened the group chat, the sentence continued scrolling upward, refreshing again and again.
Xu Muchan immediately made a voice call to He Jiaqi.
After ringing for a moment, the call was answered.
He Jiaqi’s exhausted voice came through the speaker.
“Hello? Xu Muchan? Why are you calling me?”
Xu Muchan calmly said, “Look at the group chat.”
There was a moment of silence on He Jiaqi’s end.
Then came a faint gasp. She sounded frightened as well.
“I didn’t send those messages. Could my phone have gotten a virus?”
Xu Muchan lowered his eyes and asked her, “When are you coming back to school?”
He Jiaqi sighed.
“I probably won’t be able to come back anytime soon. My younger brother is seriously ill and keeps clinging to me. My parents can’t take care of him either, so I have to do it.”
Xu Muchan responded with an “Oh,” said nothing more, and ended the call.
He stared at the disconnected call record, his brows tightly knitted.
Of the person sending the messages asking for help in the group and the person he had just spoken to on the phone, one of them was definitely not right.
He couldn’t figure it out for the moment, so Xu Muchan temporarily put the matter aside. He changed his clothes, packed his schoolbag, ate breakfast, and headed to school.
He arrived very early that day. There were hardly any students in the classroom yet.
He had only been sitting there for a short while when Wei Yao and Wen Dajiang came rushing in one after the other.
The moment they saw Xu Muchan, they surrounded him and ushered him outside like a pair of close brothers.
After finding a secluded corner, Wei Yao finally said with a look of horror:
“What the hell is going on with He Jiaqi? I was sleeping so peacefully when the messages woke me up. I opened the group chat and saw the entire screen filled with ‘Save me.’ I almost got scared out of my soul.”
Wen Dajiang wasn’t much better off.
He had been so frightened that he jumped straight out of bed and slammed his knee into the bedside table. A huge bruise had already formed, and it was still throbbing painfully.
“I called He Jiaqi.”
Wen Dajiang sucked in a breath through his teeth.
“She answered.”
Wei Yao’s face immediately turned as ugly as if he were constipated.
“I called her too. What did she tell you?”
“She said her phone had gotten a virus and that she was at home taking care of her younger brother,” Wen Dajiang said.
“She told me the same thing. Did you call her?” Wei Yao looked at Xu Muchan.
Xu Muchan nodded.
“Same explanation.”
Wen Dajiang scratched his head, as though he could almost feel a brain growing inside his skull.
“So what the hell is going on? Was it really just a false alarm? What kind of virus scares people this early in the morning?”
Wei Yao said gravely, “When I left home, I went to my godmother and had her perform a divination. I asked whether He Jiaqi was currently safe or not.”
Wen Dajiang’s train of thought suddenly veered off in another direction.
“Your godmother can do that too? Would she mind taking on another godson? What did she say in the end?”
Wei Yao said, “She used cowrie horns. If both flat sides face upward, it’s a yang divination. If both curved sides face upward, it’s a yin divination. If one flat side and one curved side face upward, it’s a sacred divination.”
Wen Dajiang understood absolutely none of this. He scratched his head anxiously.
“So what exactly did you find out?”
“Nothing. The cowrie horns stood upright.”
Wei Yao said, “That means even my godmother couldn’t tell! Isn’t that even more fucking strange?!”
Wen Dajiang shrank his neck.
“That really is pretty damn strange.”
After a moment, he looked at Xu Muchan and Wei Yao and asked tentatively, “So… should we go take a look? We are classmates, after all…”
Wei Yao said, “If something really is wrong, wouldn’t going there just mean we’re handing ourselves over to be killed?”
Wen Dajiang made a “tsk” sound. “True. So we’re just going to leave her alone?”
It would have been fine if he hadn’t seen those messages in the group. But now that he had seen them, Wen Dajiang felt somewhat guilty about simply leaving them alone. After all, He Jiaqi had even lent him her review paper to copy before.
Wei Yao poked the silent Xu Muchan. “What do you think?”
Xu Muchan had been thinking about it just now. After considering it, he said, “I want to go take a look.”
But it wasn’t entirely because of He Jiaqi.
It was also because of the Black River.
In his dream, He Jiaqi’s voice had come from the river. At first, he had thought it was some kind of ability the Black River had to lure people in, but now he wondered whether it really had been He Jiaqi calling out to him for help.
Something might have happened to her, and it might be related to the Black River.
Xu Muchan had seen the Black River twice, yet both times he had failed to retrieve even a little Black Taisui from it. Naturally, he was somewhat unwilling to give up. Since there was no way to approach the Black River itself, he could only investigate things related to the Black River.
Hearing him say this, Wen Dajiang immediately became fired up again.
“You’re going? Then I’m going too!”
Wei Yao thought for a moment and said, “Then I’ll ask Daoist Yan He if he’s free to come take a look. If he comes with us, he should be able to keep us safe.”
After the three of them discussed it, they decided to wait for Daoist Yan He’s reply first.
When school let out that afternoon, Wei Yao said, “Daoist Yan says he’s still in Jiangcheng. He’s free tonight to accompany us. Should we skip evening study and leave directly?”
Xu Muchan remembered the painful lesson from last time and coldly refused.
“I’m going to ask our homeroom teacher for leave.”
A well-behaved student like Xu Muchan had always enjoyed certain privileges in front of his teachers. When Wan Zheng heard him say that his eyes were feeling a little uncomfortable, he immediately approved his leave and told him he didn’t need to attend evening study and should go home and rest properly.
When it was Wei Yao and Wen Dajiang’s turn, the two of them were given a good scolding before returning dejectedly.
“This isn’t me wanting to skip class. The circumstances simply won’t allow it.”
“No wonder no one wants to be a hero these days. You even have to skip class to do good deeds.”
The two of them sang back and forth, noisier than eight hundred ducks. Xu Muchan frowned and moved away from them in disgust.
“Let’s go.”
Wei Yao and Yan He arranged to meet directly at the entrance of Rose Garden, where He Jiaqi lived.
Yan He arrived first. When he saw the three of them getting out of the car, his gaze immediately settled on Xu Muchan, and surprise appeared in his eyes.
“You’re actually fine.”
Xu Muchan briefly explained, “I was lucky at the time. Someone rescued me.”
Yan He looked at him as though he were some rare curiosity.
He had entered quite a few haunted domains and had rescued quite a few people, but among ordinary people who had been trapped alone inside a haunted domain like Xu Muchan, he had never seen a single one who managed to come out completely unharmed.
After looking Xu Muchan over, he turned to Wei Yao.
There were actually two such extraordinarily lucky people.
“The death aura on you is gone. Which expert did you invite afterward? They actually managed to suppress Madam Jinhua?”
He had to know that Madam Jinhua had already awakened while they were inside the haunted domain.
Being targeted by a deity like Madam Jinhua, who had received offerings of incense and worship, was far more terrifying than being entangled by an evil ghost or malicious spirit.
After all, when dealing with evil ghosts and malevolent spirits, cultivators like them could still find a way to fight. But when facing a deity that had received offerings and worship, they could only either placate it or deceive it. Otherwise, they could only wait to die.
Ordinary people followed a simple concept of good and evil. They always assumed that gods were good and ghosts were evil.
In reality, this was simply an assumption based on wishful thinking.
Only those who had personally come into contact with them would understand that these deities were not benevolent. Sometimes, they were even more dangerous than evil ghosts and malicious spirits.
There was an old saying: “Respect ghosts and gods, and keep your distance from them.”
That saying was actually a subtle warning.
Ghosts and gods were, in a certain sense, equally dangerous.
“It was an expert my grandfather invited… I don’t really know the details either,” Wei Yao said vaguely.
It was obvious at a glance that Yan He was the stereotypical righteous cultivator who regarded slaying demons and exorcising evil as his duty. In his eyes, there was no room for even the slightest trace of demons or ghosts.
How could Wei Yao possibly tell him that his grandfather had actually summoned their own ancestor out of his coffin, that their ancestor had then beaten Madam Jinhua senseless, and that Wei Yao had taken advantage of the opportunity to acknowledge Madam Jinhua as his godmother, which was how he managed to escape with his life?
Feeling guilty, Wei Yao quickly changed the subject.
“I found out that He Jiaqi lives in Building 9, Room 101 on the first floor. Should we go straight over and knock on the door? Or should we scout around the area first and see what’s going on?”
Yan He said, “Let’s enter the residential complex first and see what we find. We’ll adapt as we go.”
He took out some talismans and handed one to each of them.
“These are Five-Thunder Talismans. Keep them with you just in case. If you encounter danger, these should at least buy you a little time to escape. But we still need to proceed cautiously. If the situation really is too difficult to deal with, you leave first. I’ll notify my sect and have them send someone to handle it.”
After the three of them put away their Five-Thunder Talismans, Yan He led them toward the residential complex.