Yang Zhao rolled to the side, dodging the pair of enormous jaws that snapped toward him.
The jaws missed and bit into the window frame. The sturdy frame was instantly bitten away in a large chunk, making the opening in the window even bigger. The monster swung its enormous jaws and forcibly squeezed its head through the window.
Only then did Yang Zhao see clearly that the monster attacking him had an extremely beautiful face.
That face was growing directly above the jaws. Its features were clear, its eyes lively, and it was even looking at him with a faint smile. Above that beautiful human face was a huge, insect-like head. On either side of the head was a gigantic, round eye, but unlike the compound eyes commonly found on insects, they were much closer to human eyes in structure—the exposed round eye sockets contained black pupils that occupied most of the space, while around the edges was a ring of white, covered in red blood vessels.
“What the hell is this thing…?”
Yang Zhao sucked in a breath of cold air. Facing the monster, he cautiously retreated while remaining on guard.
The monster’s head was stuck in the window frame. Yang Zhao could not see its entire body, only a pair of curved, enormous jaws continuously opening and closing, producing a muffled “click, click” sound.
Meanwhile, the human face above the jaws was looking at him with an increasingly delighted smile.
Her lips moved slightly, opening and closing at the same frequency as the jaws, as if she were speaking.
But the voice was extremely indistinct, and Yang Zhao could not hear clearly. As he backed away, he asked Cui Tong, “Brother Cui, did you hear that? This thing seems to be talking?”
“What is it saying?”
Yang Zhao could not help wanting to hear more clearly and actually took a step forward.
“What did you say?” Yang Zhao asked.
That human face emerged from the pale skin, and its lips moved a few more times.
Yang Zhao pricked up his ears and listened. This time, he finally heard clearly. In a crisp, sweet young girl’s voice, she said to him:
“Come a little closer…”
“Oh.”
Yang Zhao’s expression became dazed, and he actually walked toward the monster.
Cui Tong, who had already retreated behind the door, watched helplessly as Yang Zhao suddenly stopped and walked right up to the monster. No matter how much he called out to him, there was no response.
The monster’s jaws opened completely, while Yang Zhao stood unconsciously between them.
The monster’s serrated jaws, larger and sharper than those of an insect, were like two curved blades flashing with a cold gleam. With just a light snap, Yang Zhao would instantly be severed in half at the waist.
Just as this thought appeared in Cui Tong’s mind, the jaws suddenly snapped shut.
Yang Zhao’s body was severed in an instant, and blood sprayed in all directions.
Yang Zhao himself seemed not to have realized what had happened yet. His eyes widened in shock. Only after he saw the human face moving toward him did he finally seem to regain consciousness. Terrified, he supported himself with his arms and crawled backward.
“Brother Cui, Brother Cui, save me…”
Yang Zhao’s lower body could no longer move. He could only turn his body over and desperately crawl forward with both arms. He looked pleadingly at Cui Tong by the doorway and begged, “Brother Cui, I don’t want to die.”
Cui Tong glanced at him and said, “It’s not that Brother Cui won’t save you. Take a look at where your lower half is.”
Yang Zhao stared blankly, and his upper body began trembling violently.
By then, the monster’s head had completely crawled inside. Cui Tong did not delay any longer and turned around and left.
Abandoned behind him, Yang Zhao looked desperate. Summoning all the courage he had, he turned his head and looked back.
He saw a bright-red trail of blood extending out from beneath his body. Internal organs and intestines were dragged across the floor, scattered everywhere. His lower half, which had lost all sensation, was lying crookedly in front of the monster…
The face on top of the monster’s head seemed to smile at him.
Then it lowered its head and picked up his lower half in its mouth. After its jaws opened and closed several times, all that remained was a pile of mangled flesh and blood.
“Ah—!”
Yang Zhao let out a heart-wrenching scream.
The scream reached Cui Tong’s ears, and he looked back.
The house they were staying in was completely silent. Despite such a huge commotion, the family living upstairs showed no reaction at all.
Even the houses on both sides of the road were unusually quiet. There was not a single sound, nor the slightest bit of light.
It was deathly silent and pitch-black, like a graveyard.
Although the deformed monster’s head had already squeezed through the window, its long, centipede-like deformed body was still outside.
Cui Tong had seen many strange monsters and ghosts, but he had never encountered anything that made him feel such intense revulsion and nausea as the thing before him.
The monster’s body appeared to be pieced together from countless corpses. Some were upper bodies, some were lower bodies, all joined together section by section to form the trunk of a centipede, while the arms and legs formed its many limbs.
They slapped violently against the ground and walls, producing dull, deeply unsettling smacking sounds.
The “slap, slap” sounds grew louder and louder.
The monster suddenly yanked its head out of the window and looked toward Cui Tong. Then the hands and feet beneath its body began rapidly pounding against the ground, and it came charging after him at a speed completely at odds with its bulky, bloated body.
Cui Tong was horrified.
It was pitch-black all around him. Going into the woods would probably put him at an even greater disadvantage. There was only one road stretching ahead, and it seemed to be the path leading down the mountain.
Cui Tong tore off several paper doubles to hold back the pursuing monster while he desperately ran downhill.
But the monster was far more powerful than he had anticipated. The paper figures he sent out were torn to pieces in just a few moves, and the monster quickly caught up.
Rapid, high-frequency “slap, slap” sounds rang out behind him.
Cui Tong didn’t dare look back. He could only run desperately along the road beneath his feet. Several times, he even felt the monster’s open jaws brush against his back, yet it seemed to be deliberately playing with its prey and never actually bit down.
On the pitch-black mountain road, there was only Cui Tong’s heavy, ragged breathing and the rapid, incessant “slap, slap” sounds.
The monster’s countless hands and feet pounded against the ground as it ran, the repeated “slap, slap, slap” blending into one continuous sound, like some eerie and terrifying drumbeat heralding death.
Eventually, Cui Tong could barely spare any attention to listen to the sound anymore.
All he could feel was that the mountain road beneath his feet seemed endless, stretching straight ahead without any idea where it led.
He kept running forward.
Running desperately forward.
The trees on either side, their branches clawing wildly at the sky, flashed past him at incredible speed, yet there wasn’t even the sound of wind.
At some point, the deathly drumbeat suddenly stopped.
Cui Tong stumbled and fell, rolling several times along the ground before getting back up. Only then did he belatedly realize what had happened.
He panted heavily and turned around.
The monster had stopped in the distance for some unknown reason and was no longer pursuing him.
There was no light anywhere around them. The monster’s bluish-white skin was unusually conspicuous in the darkness.
Cui Tong could even see that every section of its hunched back had a human face protruding from it like a tumor.
The mouths of those faces were open, yet not a single sound came from them.
At that moment, the monster’s head was slightly tilted.
The enormous eyes growing on the sides of its head stared at him, filled with malice.
Cui Tong warily faced the monster, afraid to blink and afraid to make the slightest move.
After a brief standoff, the monster turned its bloated body around and left.
Cui Tong’s body went limp, and he collapsed onto the ground.
After resting for quite a while, the sensation of his heart and lungs about to burst finally subsided. Only then did he climb to his feet and examine his surroundings.
It was still the same straight road.
Only then did he remember that when the monster had been chasing him, he had simply followed this road and run straight ahead without turning once.
But he remembered clearly that the road down the mountain was supposed to be a winding mountain path full of curves.
The breath of relief he had just let out immediately caught in his chest again.
Cui Tong looked toward the end of the road.
A faint glimmer of light could be seen there, and it seemed as though there were signs of human habitation.
With danger ahead and behind, Cui Tong hesitated briefly before continuing forward.
The road had looked extremely long, but the moment Cui Tong took a step, it suddenly seemed to shrink.
After walking only a dozen or so meters, he could clearly see what was giving off the faint light at the end.
It was the yellow glow of an electric lamp.
An old, somewhat weathered single-story house stood before him.
The house was built of gray bricks, its walls whitewashed with lime. A low fence enclosed a small courtyard in front. The courtyard was divided into two sections: a row of rooms on the left, while the right side had been cultivated into a vegetable garden.
For some reason, Cui Tong found the house strangely familiar.
He hesitated at the doorway, uncertain whether he should go inside.
But just then, accompanied by a creak, the front door of the house opened, and two people walked out.
The moment they saw Cui Tong, they froze in surprise.
Then they enthusiastically opened the courtyard gate and came over to greet him.
“Daoist Priest, what brings you here?”
Cui Tong stared at the two people before him in horror.
He opened his mouth, but for a long while, he couldn’t make a sound.
Could it be…
Was that why the house had seemed familiar?
This was actually the house belonging to the Zhou family.
But Zhou Lin and his wife, Zhou Xia, should have been dead for more than ten years.
Yet the husband and wife standing before him showed not the slightest trace of yin energy. At least on the surface, they looked no different from living people.
The two of them seemed completely unaware that they had been dead for years.
They enthusiastically took hold of Cui Tong’s arms and ushered him into the house.
Cui Tong couldn’t figure out what was happening and didn’t dare act rashly. He stiffly allowed Zhou Ping to press him down into a seat beside the table in the main room.
Meanwhile, Zhou Xia went to the kitchen and brought out a pot of hot water. She then rummaged through the cabinet, took out some tea leaves, and brewed a cup of hot tea for Cui Tong.
Holding the hot tea, Cui Tong didn’t dare drink it. He quietly observed the two of them.
They were exactly as he remembered.
Zhou Ping had dark skin and a big, burly build. His cheeks and nose were bright red, giving him the unmistakable appearance of a heavy drinker.
Zhou Xia, on the other hand, was extremely thin and plain-looking. She habitually wore a humble, ingratiating smile, and her back always seemed unable to straighten properly. Whenever she spoke to someone, she instinctively bent forward.
She was a very talkative woman.
She wanted to exchange a few words with everyone, yet she wasn’t particularly good at talking.
At that moment, she rubbed her hands together and stood hunched over between her husband and Cui Tong, looking at Cui Tong cautiously with an ingratiating smile.
“Daoist Priest Cui, these tea leaves are fresh. We only bought them during the New Year, and we usually can’t bear to drink them. We only take them out when we’re entertaining an honored guest…”
Seeing that Cui Tong didn’t respond, she continued rambling.
“But Daoist Priest Cui, you’re from the city. You’ve definitely had much better tea. You probably don’t think much of what we have here…”
Zhou Ping suddenly slapped the table and cursed gruffly.
“Why the hell do you talk so much? I’m hungry. Go fry me some rice!”
Zhou Xia’s body trembled.
She smiled ingratiatingly at her husband.
“Why are you getting angry for no reason? I’ll go fry some rice for you right now.”
Then she turned to Cui Tong.
“Daoist Priest Cui, would you like some too? It’s just homemade fried rice, nothing special, but it’ll fill your stomach. He likes it…”
Before Cui Tong could answer, Zhou Ping had already stood up impatiently and slapped her across the face.
After being slapped, Zhou Xia didn’t dare say another word. She hurriedly retreated into the kitchen.
Only then did Zhou Ping sit back down.
He picked up his tea bowl and gulped down a mouthful before complaining to Cui Tong.
“Sorry you had to see that. That woman’s mouth never stops running. She’s noisier than a fly!”
Cui Tong smiled, but he became even more vigilant inside.
From the moment he entered the house until now, everything about the couple—their words, their actions, even the way they interacted with each other—was almost exactly the same as he remembered.
If he hadn’t already known that the two of them were dead, Cui Tong would never have suspected that they weren’t human.
His eyes swept across the small house as he casually asked, “What about the child? Has he settled in here? Why haven’t I seen him?”
Zhou Ping chuckled.
“He’s doing just fine. We’re just afraid he’ll disobey us and run away again, so we’ve locked him in that room over there. We give him food and drink every day. Once he’s a little older and we’ve kept him under control, we’ll let him out. His mother dotes on him. She doesn’t miss either of his meals.”
Cui Tong continued asking without changing his expression.
“When I brought him back to you, he was only three years old, right?”
Zhou Ping laughed.
“That’s right. And just like that, he’s already eight years old. All the other kids in the village go to school at that age. We wanted to send him too, but that kid is stubborn as hell. Later, he kept trying to run away, so there wasn’t anything his mother and I could do. We could only lock him up at home. Once he’s a little older and understands things, we’ll see if we can send him to school.”
As he said this, Zhou Ping suddenly looked at Cui Tong.
“After all, this kid was brought here by you, Daoist Priest. Maybe he’s closer to you than to us. Why don’t you go talk to him? Maybe he’ll listen to you and finally be willing to settle down and live properly.”
Cui Tong thought about it and didn’t refuse.
“Where is the child? I’ll go see him.”
Zhou Ping said, “He’s locked in that room in the courtyard. We’ll go after we’ve eaten.”
Just as the two finished speaking, Zhou Xia came over carrying a large bowl of fried rice. She also had two small bowls in her hands.
She said to Zhou Ping, “I made a little too much fried rice. If you can’t finish it, I’ll take the rest to Xiaozhu.”
Zhou Ping said, “I’ll take it over later. Let the Daoist Priest see him and talk some sense into him!”
Zhou Xia immediately brightened.
“Good. Maybe Xiaozhu will listen to the Daoist Priest. Last time the Daoist Priest brought him back, he listened for quite a while. He was such a good boy… He even called me Mom.”
Zhou Ping buried his head in his rice and ignored her rambling.
Zhou Xia looked at Cui Tong again and said enthusiastically, “Daoist Priest, why aren’t you eating? Have some! Otherwise, he’ll eat it all.”
The corner of Cui Tong’s cheek twitched.
He also felt that this woman really talked too much.
He took a deep breath and put on a pleasant expression.
“Those who cultivate the Dao don’t eat at night.”
But Zhou Xia seemed not to understand at all and continued trying to persuade him.
“Practicing the Dao is practicing the Dao, but why can’t you eat? Look at this rice, it’s so good! I even added some crispy pork lard bits and Chinese cabbage when I fried it. It smells wonderful.”
As she spoke, she stared at the large bowl of fried rice and swallowed audibly.
Cui Tong frowned and ignored her.
Zhou Ping didn’t even spare him a proper glance.
Seeing that Cui Tong wasn’t going to eat, he simply picked up the large bowl and, before long, finished the entire heaping bowl of fried rice.
He put the bowl heavily back on the table, gulped down another bowl of tea, then stood up and said to Cui Tong, “Daoist Priest, let’s go. I’ll take you to see Xiaozhu.”
Zhou Xia picked up the bowl and hurried after him.
“You haven’t finished what’s in your bowl.”
Zhou Ping didn’t even turn his head.
She stood there and muttered a few more words to herself before picking up her chopsticks and carefully gathering all the remaining rice together.
Then she ate it herself.
“Eating while talking,” she said. “Such good fried rice, and he doesn’t even know to finish it.”
Cui Tong followed Zhou Ping into the courtyard, only then realizing that the child had been locked inside one of the row of single-story rooms in the yard.
The row of rooms had been divided into two sections. One was the kitchen, while the other was the room where the child was kept.
Zhou Ping took out a key and unlocked the door. The moment it opened, Cui Tong was hit by the sour, rotten stench of something that had gone bad. Zhou Ping pulled a cord beside the door, and the light overhead flickered on. Only then could Cui Tong see what the room looked like.
It was practically no different from a pigsty.
There was no bed in the room. Instead, bricks had been stacked up to form a raised platform, with a wooden board laid across them.
A blackened cotton quilt lay on top of the board. The bedsheet had long since lost any recognizable color. The child was lying on it with his back to them, his body looking incredibly frail.
Zhou Ping had said he was already eight years old, but he looked no bigger than a five- or six-year-old. His exposed lower legs were as thin as dry branches, as though they would snap with the slightest bend. His long hair was a tangled mess, making him look even worse than a beggar on the roadside.
Zhou Ping called out, “Xiaozhu. Look who’s come to see you.”
The person on the bed didn’t move at all, showing no reaction whatsoever to Zhou Ping’s words.
Zhou Ping’s already-red face immediately darkened another shade. Furious, he strode forward and kicked the thin wooden bed board.
“You can’t hear me when I call you?”
The bed board tilted from the force of the kick, and the frail child rolled off with a dull tumble.
Suppressing his disgust, Cui Tong stepped forward and took a look.
“He seems to have passed out.”
Zhou Ping frowned and muttered, “So damn delicate.”
He turned the child over and shouted outside, “His mom! Bring some medicine!”
From inside the house, Zhou Xia answered, “Coming!”
She hurriedly found some medicine and water and brought them over. Zhou Ping pried open the child’s tightly clenched teeth and forcibly poured the medicine down his throat.
Afterward, Zhou Xia rubbed her hands together and said, “Should we take him to the hospital and have him checked?”
Zhou Ping snapped impatiently, “What hospital? Have you forgotten how he pretended to be sick last time and tricked you into taking him to the clinic, only to try to run away?”
“If I hadn’t happened to run into Zhou Kang and he mentioned it to me, that brat would’ve already run down the mountain!”
Zhou Xia shrank her neck when he yelled at her and didn’t dare say another word.
Zhou Ping looked at Cui Tong, sounding somewhat aggrieved.
“Xiaozhu’s a clever kid, but that’s the problem—he’s too damn clever. He’s been lying and tricking people since he was little. Daoist Priest, you don’t know what he was like when you were still here in the village. He was so obedient back then. He called us ‘Dad’ and ‘Mom’ every other sentence, sweet-talked us around his little finger, and whatever he wanted, we’d give him.”
“But what happened afterward? Once you left because you had something to take care of, he started acting up. One minute he’d claim he wasn’t feeling well and trick his mom into taking him to the clinic, then he’d use the chance to run down the mountain. The next he’d say he wanted to play with the village kids, then get those kids to cover for him while he escaped… His mom and I were busy working in the fields, and we still had to spend every day searching all over for him. What family could put up with that?”
“After that, his mom and I had no choice. Whenever we went out, we just locked him in the room.”
“And that little ingrate still held a grudge against us. He stopped recognizing us as his parents and just curled up gloomily in the room all day. His mom felt sorry for him and still brought him food every single day. And the little bastard never missed a meal…”
Zhou Xia quietly argued, “He’s still young. He’s at the age when he’s growing. How could we not feed him?”
Zhou Ping glared at her.
“You think my food comes blowing in on the wind? He doesn’t recognize his own parents, but he sure recognizes rice…”
As Cui Tong listened to the husband and wife bicker, his brows slowly furrowed.
The reason he had originally chosen this couple to raise the child was precisely because he knew there was an unrefined ignorance and cruelty in them.
By society’s ordinary standards, they wouldn’t dare break the law, and they were fairly warm and polite toward outsiders. You could even call them honest, decent people.
But when it came to their own family, they followed an entirely different set of unwritten rules.
For example, Zhou Ping was a heavy drinker with a violent temper, and he frequently beat and cursed at Zhou Xia. As for Zhou Xia, she appeared to be a weak and kindhearted woman, but in reality, she had long since been conditioned into accepting her husband’s way of thinking from the bottom of her heart.
With the child falling into the hands of these two people, his life was destined not to be a good one.
And Guiyi Mountain was a natural gathering place for yin energy. The yin energy there was extremely dense. After suffering his parents’ abuse from childhood, if the child were to later die a tragic death through some accident, the resentment he accumulated would be immense. There was a high chance he would turn into a Ghost King.
A Ghost King that had not yet fully grown wasn’t particularly difficult to deal with. Cui Tong could take advantage of the opportunity to refine it and make it his own.
But even though Cui Tong had anticipated this, he had never imagined that the couple would lock the child up and raise him like a dog.
Of course, what he had even less expected was that the child’s life would be so stubbornly tenacious.
Despite everything he had endured, he refused to die. Instead, he outlived Zhou Ping and his wife, grew up safely, and was eventually found and taken back by the Xu family.
Cui Tong glanced at the emaciated child on the bed. He didn’t want to listen to the two of them argue any longer, so he said to Zhou Ping and his wife, “Go outside for now. Let him rest.”
Only then did Zhou Ping stop talking for the moment and stride outside.
Zhou Xia lingered beside the bed, reluctant to leave.
She and Zhou Ping had never had children of their own, and she had always desperately wanted a child. This child was good-looking and clever. If it weren’t for the fact that he was disobedient and always tried to run away, she actually liked him quite a lot.
She sat down beside the bed, lifted the child’s head into her arms, stroked his pale face, and sighed.
“Didn’t your dad and I treat you well? Why did you have to be so disobedient and keep trying to run away?”
The child suddenly opened his eyes beneath her touch.
A pair of pitch-black eyes stared straight at her.
Zhou Xia suddenly felt inexplicably frightened. She abruptly let go of him, and his head hit the wooden bed hard with a loud thunk.
For some reason, Zhou Xia suddenly became angry.
“You child. I call you and you don’t even answer. Why are you acting like a ghost?”
Cui Tong, who had already reached the doorway, stopped in his tracks.
He suddenly turned around and saw the child’s head tilted toward the doorway. His face was blank and expressionless, and his unnaturally dark eyes stared fixedly toward the door without any focus.
Zhou Ping followed his gaze and walked over, poking at the child.
“Don’t tell me he’s gone stupid?”
Zhou Xia stood farther away and stretched up on tiptoe to take a look. Instead, she became happy.
“That’s good. If he’s stupid, he’ll listen. Then he won’t run away anymore.”
Zhou Ping glared at her.
“Are you out of your mind? If he becomes stupid, how’s he supposed to support us and take care of us when we’re old?”
Zhou Xia immediately fell silent, looking dejected.
Cui Tong, however, also walked over to the bed. He waved a hand in front of the child’s eyes, but the child showed no reaction.
After thinking for a moment, he tentatively called out,
“Xu Muchan?”
The child’s eyelashes suddenly trembled.
His pitch-black eyes turned toward Cui Tong.