Chapter 63: The Madwoman

Showing remarkable wit at that moment, Xu Ling didn't make a sound upon finding me lying on the mortuary slab. Instead, he simply walked out of the room.

Before long, footsteps drew closer outside the door. Several shadows were cast across the threshold. Squinting through my eyelashes, I saw the very corpses that had walked ahead of the old woman earlier now filing into the room one by one.

The old woman spoke to Xu Ling in a hoarse, pale voice, issuing instructions. Xu Ling remained completely silent, nodding continuously beside her.

Every now and then, the old woman glanced in my direction. I quickly shut my eyes tightly, my heart leaping straight to my throat.

When I opened my eyes again, the sky outside had turned pitch black, and the old woman was gone. While I had been keeping my eyes closed and playing dead, I had heard her murmuring a string of incantations over and over:

"You failed to live as human beings, and in death you cannot become ghosts. I bestow upon you bodies of vajra and indestructible flesh."

I was far too familiar with this chant. Who else could it be if not the Child-Ghost Lady?

Opening my eyes now, I could faintly see a pile of unburned paper ash in the room. Hanging in the air, alongside the stench of corpses, was the distinct smell of smoke.

I truly never expected the Child-Ghost Lady to have followed me here, nor that she would make such a grand display of building a yin dwelling in this place and concealing so many corpses within it. What on earth was she planning to do?

Whatever her intentions, I could not allow her to succeed. Springing up from the mortuary slab, I quickly bolted out of the room. Looking around, I confirmed that the Child-Ghost Lady had indeed left. I immediately turned to Xu Ling and said, "Oil! Get me some oil right now!"

"Oil? What do you want oil for?" Xu Ling asked, staring at me in utter bewilderment, completely failing to grasp my intentions.

Nevertheless, he ran off and brought back a jug of oil. Taking it from him, I rushed back into the room and splashed the oil all over the corpses. Then, I struck a match and set them ablaze, intending to burn the entire house down along with the bodies.

As the fire roared to life, Xu Ling finally snapped out of his shock and flew into a furious rage. "What the hell do you think you're doing?! These are my corpses!"

Canning to dignify him with a response, I simply kicked him flat onto the ground, pointed at him, and cursed furiously, "Your corpses? Mark my words, one day you'll end up as one of these corpses yourself! Do you even have any idea who that person was just now?"

Xu Ling was left gaping in utter shock as I began to recount my very first encounter with the Child-Ghost Lady. Upon hearing the tale, he trembled with fear and immediately joined me in pouring more oil to ensure every last corpse was thoroughly burned to ashes.

We labored frantically until past ten o'clock that night before the corpses were mostly reduced to cinders. Then, fleeing as if for our very lives, we bolted from that house.

I never imagined that this affair would actually flush the Child-Ghost Lady out into the open. Had I delayed finding Xu Ling by even a few days, her sinister plot might already have succeeded.

On the drive back to the restaurant, Xu Ling was gripped by lingering terror. He swore up and down that he would kick his necrophilia habit once and for all; otherwise, hanging around corpses all day long would surely cost him his life sooner or later.

Upon returning to the restaurant, Xu Ling hurriedly packed his bags and sped away as if fleeing a death sentence—likely terrified that the Child-Ghost Lady might come looking for him. Once he was gone, I caught a ride back to the university. Even after lying down on my dorm bed, my heart was still pounding wildly in my chest.

To think that not only had that ghost master arrived, but the Child-Ghost Lady had tracked me down as well.

That night, drifting in a state of deep unease, I fell into a heavy slumber. The next morning, however, I was greeted by a most shocking piece of news.

Late last night, a deranged old woman had appeared in the city.

With disheveled hair and a hunched back, she roamed the streets in the dead of night. Whenever she crossed paths with someone, she would shriek wildly as if she meant to devour them alive, all the while muttering bizarre phrases over and over.

Things like, "You are not human, you cannot live as a human, nor can you become a ghost..."

Naturally, the people on the street were infuriated by this raving madwoman and began hurling insults right back at her. To everyone's horror, the madwoman produced a knife and brutally slaughtered those who had argued with her.

When the police arrived shortly after, they discovered that the people killed by the madwoman had somehow risen back to their feet and were actively fighting the police. The officers opened fire on both the corpses and the madwoman, but initially, even when riddled with bullets and torn to shreds, the corpses didn't slow down at all.

It wasn't until the police deployed grenades to blast the bodies into complete fragments that they finally stopped moving.

As for the madwoman herself, she was subdued and arrested by the police.

This juicy piece of gossip was, of course, delivered to me by Li Xiang, whose personality was usually as carefree as they came. As he recounted the tale with great zest, a look of smug triumph crept across his face, as if fishing for praise for his exceptional sources of information.

I, however, remained entirely expressionless. The madwoman was, without a doubt, none other than the Child-Ghost Lady. After Xu Ling and I had burned all the corpses she had painstakingly gathered to ashes the previous night, it was no wonder she had gone completely out of her mind. What I hadn't anticipated, though, was that the old woman would lose her grip to such an extent that she would run amok killing people on the open streets. It seemed her luck had finally run out.

Seeing my lack of reaction, Li Xiang gave me a shove. "What the hell is wrong with you, man? I'm talking to you, and you're acting like a corpse. Ah, I wish Hu Tou and Jin Yuan were still here."

At the mention of Jin Yuan and Hu Tou, Li Xiang's expression instantly fell, and he trailed off into silence. A familiar ache welled up in my chest, and I turned away. Just then, Li Xiang added from behind me, "I also heard that while the madwoman was being arrested, she kept screaming someone's name over and over. Guess whose name it was?"

I glanced back at him. "Whose?"

Li Xiang suddenly pointed right at me. "Yours."

Still wearing a blank expression, I lay straight back down on my bed. It wasn't particularly surprising that the Child-Ghost Lady would be screaming my name; after all, that old woman harbored a bone-deep hatred for me. What I hadn't expected, however, was that because of her frantic shouting, my name would spread rapidly through the surrounding neighborhoods, turning me into a local celebrity overnight.

Ignorant of this development at the time, I decided to shift my focus entirely to the third task the following day.

The third task description was somewhat vague, stating only that a major crisis had recently struck a certain tea plantation. The estate primarily produced tea leaves, which it then wholesaled to various distributors. In the past, their tea had always been in scorching demand.

Lately, however, they couldn't seem to sell a single batch.

The reason behind this sudden slump was that several customers had mysteriously fallen violently ill after drinking their tea. In the most severe cases, the illness had even proved fatal.

My assignment was to investigate the cause and track down the source of the trouble.

At that moment, I realized with a jolt that this matter was likely to be extremely serious.