Chapter 226 (I): An Unforeseen Turn

This old man's a crafty old fox. One look and you know, Zhang Yuanqing thought to himself as he put the blade away, satisfied.

"First question," he said. "How did Wang Xiao'er end up like that?"

Generally speaking, there were two ways a yin corpse came about. One was deliberate refining, the way he'd refined Corpse No. 1. The other was when a body was buried somewhere thick with yin energy. It would soak it up day after day, year after year, until it awakened a faint scrap of awareness and became a jiangshi, a yin corpse.

The way Wang Xiao'er was, he didn't fit the second method. And if it was the first, then it meant someone had taken an ordinary villager and refined him into a yin corpse that was stronger even than Corpse No. 1. That was chilling.

The old man's face twisted with grief and anger. "It's all because he went down into that tomb and brought back something unclean. A while back, Wang Xiao'er went missing for days, then all of a sudden he showed up in the village with a big bundle of gold and silver and jade, saying he'd struck it rich, that he was going to build the finest house in the whole village and find a girl from the provincial capital to marry. He went to Mr. Xu, the one who teaches at the village school, and asked him to take a look at a few antiques and put a price on them."

Antiques... Zhang Yuanqing didn't get bogged down in the question of how Wang Xiao'er had turned into a yin corpse.

"What sort of antiques did he bring back?" he asked instead.

The old man cast his mind back. "I was right there in the crowd at the time. He showed Mr. Xu three pieces. The first was a carved figure of a little girl with no tongue, sprouting a pair of jug ears. It was black and shiny, and cool to the touch... really cold, in fact. Mr. Xu said it was made of yin jade. He said it had to have sat in a tomb a good many years to get that oily sheen.

"The second piece was a silver rouge box, carved with flowers, a real work of art. And the rouge inside, oh, it was red as blood. You tell me, how does a thing sit in a tomb that long and not dry out?"

"And the third?" Zhang Yuanqing pressed, not taking the bait.

"A gray and dusty bronze mirror, set with a few pretty stones. Mr. Xu said they were gems. It's a shame the thing wouldn't show your reflection, or it could've been sold to some rich lady up in the provincial capital."

Right. Not a single one of those three was made for the living. Wang Xiao'er sure knew how to pick them, Zhang Yuanqing couldn't help but think.

He thought of how he'd torn the house apart just now and found nothing. "So, Wang Xiao'er sold those three things?"

"Mr. Xu bought the rouge box off him," the old man answered with a nod, then he shook his head. "As for the little girl figure and the mirror... there’s no telling where those went. All I know is the day after Wang Xiao'er brought this stuff back, all manner of strange occurrences began to happen in the village."

"What sort of strange occurrences?" Zhang Yuanqing asked, following the thread.

"The way Widow Li at the head of the village tells it, the night Wang Xiao'er came home, she got up in the middle of the night, and through her window, she saw a woman in red walk into the village. It was the prettiest girl she'd ever laid eyes on, only that her face was a little pale. The next day, Wang Xiao'er had turned into that ghoulish thing you saw."

Going by the Spirit Realm's description of the dungeon, the woman in red was probably the commandery princess. Which means she turned Wang Xiao'er into a yin corpse as an act of revenge. This princess truly was a nasty piece of work.

Ah well, since ancient times, it's always the pretty ones that turn into ghosts. It's a shame they're ghosts. Er, no. Actually, the princess is most likely a yin corpse, not a vengeful spirit. It would be nice if I could subdue her and use her every single day. Mm... Use her to fight... Zhang Yuanqing's thoughts wandered clean off the rails.

"Anything else?"

"Oh, there's more. Zhao Erdan's kid got his tongue cut out. Zhao Erdan's wife said that as she was making supper that evening, little Dan, that's Erdan's boy, was playing in the yard. She saw him follow a little girl out, but she didn't think much of it at the time, and figured it was some other family's kid who had come to play. The only thing that struck her as odd was that little girl's face looked overcast, almost like a shadow.

"When she finished cooking and went out to look for little Dan, she found him passed out by the front door, with his tongue gone."

Fear flickered through the old man's eyes as he continued to speak. "After that, come dusk, there'd always be a little girl walking around the village, dressed completely in black. She would press her face against people's windows and ask them if they wanted to play a game.

"Whichever window she pressed up against, the very next day, someone in that household would be found with their tongue cut out. That little girl would wander the village up till the end of the first watch[1] before she left."

So that was how the villagers lost their tongues. If she left at the end of the first watch, did that mean the game had to be played until then?

"What game?" Zhang Yuanqing asked.

The old man shook his head. "How would anyone know? She kept going on about playing a game, but she never said what game."

Zhang Yuanqing's brows drew together in a frown. That didn't tally with his information. The Cat King Speaker had said the game was "you clap one," but the old man said he didn't know what game.

"How did you lose your tongue?" Zhang Yuanqing asked, wanting to know the specifics.

The old man dredged up the terrible memory, and his face went stark white. "I was scared out of my wits, hiding under the bed and not daring to come out. She kept pressing her face against the window, kept asking me to play a game, and then after a while, she was gone. I remember dropping off to sleep, and when I woke up my tongue was gone."

Zhang Yuanqing ran the story against his own experience, trying to work it out.

Playing the game was actually the right way to dodge the danger. It was just that the villagers were too frightened, nobody dared play with the little girl. Demon Lord, being a Spirit Realm Walker, had gone along with the rules and had been bold enough to actually play the game, and cleared it that way. And the game he played was...

It clicked. Demon Lord had played the "you clap one" rhyming game, which explained why the audio from the Cat King Speaker had struck him as so odd.

"You clap one" was a modern children's rhyming game. It had no business showing up in a dungeon set in the Ming dynasty.

The rhyme hadn't originated from the dungeon's own horrors. It had come from Demon Lord. The Cat King Speaker had merely recorded Demon Lord's original solution and played that solution back to him.

Wang Xiao'er retrieved three antiques, and this was the first strange occurrence. There should be more strange things happening after it, Zhang Yuanqing reasoned.

"Any other strange occurrences?" he asked the old man.

At that the old man's face filled with dread and without meaning to, and he lowered his voice. "Mr. Xu died!"

There it is. Zhang Yuanqing didn't cut in and just let the old man carry on.

"The next morning, the village children prepared to go to the school to study. Mr. Xu, who was always early, did not appear. So the children told the grownups, and everyone went over to his place. That’s when they found Mr. Xu dead. He had died horribly too, all dried up like a husk.

"He was laid out on the bed, completely stiff, and there was a paper figure beside him. That paper figure was gorgeous, with rosy cheeks and red dots for eyes. However it was not red paint that adorned the figure, but the rouge from that box.

"The rouge box was right there at the head of the bed, still open. The village head noticed Mr. Xu had red rouge on his fingers, so he must've painted the paper figure's face and dotted its eyes himself."

At this point the old man grew furtive. "Li Tieniu who lived next door said in the dead of night, around the second watch, he heard Mr. Xu carrying on with a woman. But Mr. Xu had been a widower for years. Where would a woman in his house come from? It could only have been that paper figure. It came alive in the night and did Mr. Xu in."

In the dead of night, a paper figure with eyes painted on and cheeks rouged lying there beside you, and then it comes alive... Zhang Yuanqing tried to imagine the scenario and found it a touch horrifying.

That's exactly why he never bought figures. No silicone dolls or no blowup dolls either. None of it. If you water them every day with a few billion living souls, and the day one of them wakes up, the fun would really start...

"Where's that rouge box now?" Zhang Yuanqing asked.

"Still at Mr. Xu's place. Who dared to take it?" The old man heaved a sigh. "The night Mr. Xu died, somebody saw that paper figure walking around the village. It was frightening."

Hearing that, Zhang Yuanqing narrowed his eyes. The paper figure walks the village at the second watch. Which means the second watch is when the second wave of danger comes.

There was no telling how Demon Lord dealt with the paper figure. He'd ask the Cat King Speaker in a bit.

"Old man, there should be a third bit to this story, right? Say, during the third watch," Zhang Yuanqing said.

He'd seen a pattern in what the old man had told him. During the first watch, the tongueless ghost girl got to work. The paper figure took the second watch. There was bound to be some other mystery during the third watch.

1. In ancient times, people would take turns standing watch during the night. The night itself was broken into 5 periods of time. This would start approximately around 7pm, which was a few hours after dusk, and end around 5am. The first watch would be from dusk (about 7pm) to 9pm, the second watch would be 9pm to 11pm, and so on. ☜