Chapter 342: Yinshan Village

When all the ten ghosts had returned to the wine altar, the mechanism in Bai Liu's side of the tomb finally twisted and the bottom of the tomb sank downwards with a loud rumble, and a lot of smoke and dust rose from the cracks of the tomb.

The light of the candlestick held in Bai Liu's hand was dimmed.

Everything around him was wrapped in smoke, and Bai Liu heard the sound of altars gurgling and rolling all over the floor, and a few hitting his feet and breaking with a crackling sound.

Now Bai Liu reckons that all the ghosts in the entire paracrypt have been released.

The ghosts of the corpses, or to be more precise, the corpses crawled through the smoke, occasionally peeking out of the smoke with a face without five senses shrugging and sniffing at the position of their noses.

Some of the ghosts have two bloodshot slits in their eyes, their bloodshot eyes darting around in their sockets, as if searching for Bai Liu in the darkness of the smoke and dust, and then crawling towards the bright light.

Bai Liu exhaled and blew out the candlestick in his hand, and everything was plunged into darkness and nothing could be seen.

He could feel the chamber sinking slowly, not knowing when it would stop, and every now and then wet hair and hands and feet trickled across Bai Liu's back and ankles, and he felt the constant sound of sniffing air and the wet, slimy sound of tongues licking at something in his ears.

The coldness of the coldness is getting closer and closer to Bai Liu, and the corpses seem to be on the verge of finding Bai Liu hidden in the darkness by sniffing.

Bai Liu took two steps back, leaned against the wall, calmly took off his coat and dipped it into the corpse water flowing on the ground, then wrapped his lower body in the corpse water-soaked coat, put an empty wine jar that the ghosts had crawled away from over his head, and cowered in the corner, holding his breath.

The darkness of the ghosts seemed to reduce the sound of their sniffing, and in response, the sound of their crawling became more frequent, and Bai Liu could occasionally hear the sound of pots and broken tiles being shaken.

The chamber seemed to be about to sink to a fixed position and began to make a cackling and jamming sound.

Bai Liu could feel a ghost approaching him, and after sniffing around the mouth of the altar, he left again.

And of course there are those who didn't leave.

Bai Liu looks down through the spout of the wine jar and from his narrow view he can faintly see a pair of wet, miserable white feet standing on the ground very close in front of him, still oozing down.

Bai Liu slowly turns the wine jar above his head towards the wall, trying to avoid this tiger corpse standing in front of him, but as he does so, the feet slowly tiptoe in the direction Bai Liu is turning.

Eventually it becomes, again, that this foot is toe to toe with Bai Liu, who is wearing a wine jar, and a little closer.

Bai Liu paused subtly as he remembered the explanation of toe-to-toe squareness in the Evil Art of Maoshan.

When a ghost holds his toes towards you, he is trying to get into your body, or to follow you home and live with you. That is why there is the saying that you should not sleep at night with your shoes with your toes facing the bed, because it will make the ghost step on your shoes, get into your bed and sleep with you.

There are so many ghosts here, but this one ghost is the only one who sticks to Bai Liu's place.

It wouldn t be that he wanted to live with him ...... Bai Liu took a look at this wine jar he was using.

The legs standing in front of Bai Liu slowly bent down and crouched in front of him.

Bai Liu can be seen below its shoulders, the thing clasps its knees with both hands, is still for a moment, then its bones begin to contort and its head twists a hundred and twenty degrees, its whole head tilted to look upwards from under the mouth of the altar towards Bai Liu inside the altar, its eyes all black.

He pointed to the altar on Bai Liu's head and made a very strange, gurgling sound in his throat, like a man talking in water.

"Here's my ...... altar, where's yours?"

The chamber finally sank to the bottom, and with a heavy jolt the chamber fell to a new place, where the main door opened to reveal a dark cloistered passage.

Bai Liu quickly removed the wine jar from his head and put it over the head of the ghost in front of him: "I just borrowed it for a while, now I'm returning it to you."

With that, Bai Liu turned and rushed back into the corridor without looking back.

The ghosts spotted Bai Liu, a running human, and hissed as they crawled along the walls in pursuit.

The corpses behind them were crawling so fast that, if there was light, Bai Liu could see the remnants of these corpses flipping their arms and legs when he looked back.

At the moment when the ghosts were about to catch up with Bai Liu, Bai Liu took off his clothes and threw them in front of him, then turned sideways and spun into a passage that opened up next to a corridor.

The ghosts behind him were in hot pursuit, but it seemed that in the darkness the ghosts relied on their sense of smell to chase the living, and Bai Liu, hiding in the side corridor, felt the ghosts running past him towards the top that smelled like him.

Bai Liu relaxed his breathing as he watched the tiger corpses rumble and pile up in a white mass where his clothes had been, teeth clacking.

The sound of clothes being shredded soon resounded in the corridor.

The corpses piled up around them scattered, and one of them lifted out a wine jar, which they seemed to have filled with bits of clothing as if they were the remains of Bai Liu's body, and sealed it with red paper with the word "Dien" written on it, then turned and crawled back with the jar.

Apparently, they thought they had made Bai Liu the next ghost to be brought back to feed [the tiger].

Bai Liu raises his eyebrows slightly as he watches.

The ghosts acted so well that they were able to tear up the "human flesh" that came to their mouths and put it in the altar, not as if they had been instructed by irrational ghosts, but as if they had been deliberately trained by the living.

But in this tomb strewn with ghosts and ghouls, in the village of Yinshan where the last descendants were drowned, what living people would there be but the four of them returning home?

Bai Liu was about to poke his head out to see where the ghosts were going to deliver the wine jars containing "himself" when a dark hand suddenly reached out and covered his mouth and nose.

"Don't turn around!" Someone warned in a hoarse voice, "Something's coming to clean up the grounds!"

Bai Liu is submissive and does not move.

Soon, several paper figures half Bai Liu's height appeared, smiling, with smiling faces made of ink, holding paper brooms in their hands and sweeping them back and forth around the spot where Bai Liu's clothes had just been torn, in stiff, deadly movements, before disappearing again.

When the paper man left, the man covering Bai Liu's mouth and nose breathed a long sigh of relief, but still held Bai Liu's throat still, his body very tense.

Bai Liu calmly took out a match and lit the candlestick, holding it up to illuminate the man: " Mu Sicheng, what are you doing here?"

Mu Sicheng's face was filthy with dirt, there was blood around his mouth and eyes, and his body was covered in colour, so it looked like he had been in a bad fight.

"It really is you Bai Liu ." Mu Sicheng's chest rose and fell violently, his eyes were lax, "...... I thought I had saved another ghost."

Bai Liu looked at Mu Sicheng from top to bottom: "What's happening to you?"

"Don't mention it." Mu Sicheng, depressed and scared again, squatted on the ground while smoothing his heart out and said, "You don't know where you've been, I followed that fake Bai Liu to carry the coffin and on the way I walked over a bridge that the fake Bai Liu told me to walk across."

"But that bridge is actually made of paper!"

"The bridge is full of ghosts carrying coffins, some strange paper people and so on, and some translucent ones, I can only vaguely see the shape of things, the water is dark, there are also floating duckweed, black hair and paper money, a look at the fall is not expected to come up."

Mu Sicheng's face was dark: "I did as you said, held my breath without throwing up, almost didn't kill me, but at least I got through, and then went round and round, and my head got dizzy, to some secondary chamber that said it was connected to the main chamber."

"This time the chamber was full of coffins, and standing coffins, three dozen of them, with red satin tied to them, arranged around the middle in some sort of formation like shape, I can't remember."

Mu Sicheng recalls with a frown, "That fake Bai Liu asked me to choose a coffin to carry out. So I chose one that I could carry."

"I had just carried the coffin out of the sub-crypt and it was a bit slippery and fell down a bit, so I turned it upwards, but I was afraid of offending the corpse in the coffin, so I said sorry I was also carrying a coffin for the first time, please excuse me, but just after I said that, a woman's laugh came from the coffin behind me, and then the coffin was knocked twice."

Bai Liu recalled, "That seems to mean giving orders to the ghosts, doesn't it?"

"Yes!" Mu Sicheng stood up angrily and showed Bai Liu the big red flower in satin hanging from his waist: "After that coffin rattled twice, a whole bunch of ghosts suddenly appeared with that fake Bai Liu holding my head down, putting a big red flower on me, and insisting that I marry the bride in the coffin!"

Bai Liu smiled, "So have you tied the knot?"

Mu Sicheng shook his head stubbornly, "No! While the ghosts were setting up the wedding hall, I took advantage of the chaos and beat them up, then ran out."

"So you ran away from the marriage?" Bai Liu nodded as if he understood and smiled a little, "The other party really likes you and chose you to be the one, and you ran away without even saying no properly, that's not very nice, is it?"

"No, okay!" Mu Sicheng roared, "She doesn't really like me so she'll marry me!"

Mu Sicheng clenched his fists, his hands shaking with anger: "You don't understand anything, I'm not just marrying the bride I'm carrying, I'm marrying the whole tomb, all of it, all three dozen brides!!!"