Chapter 341: Yinshan Village

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.