Chapter 403: Chapter 345: Yin Chai
"People from the Du Family Village have been faithful Buddhists for generations. Although there were past grievances with the Mangjia Village, now that their entire village has suffered such a catastrophe and everyone has died, what is there left to hold onto?"
Patriarch Du sighed deeply, his expression one of sorrow, "Only after confirming that the beast soldiers wouldn’t return did we dare to open the city gates, and rallied the entire village to collect the bodies of the deceased from Mangjia Village. Bodies were piled on top of each other, numbering in the hundreds. The scene was a river of blood, with the blood mixing with the mud, soaking our shoes."
"We didn’t dare to openly erect a monument for the deceased of Mangjia Village outside the village, so we had to carry the bodies into the village and buried them near the ancestral hall, along with that monk."
Upon hearing this, Quan Doufeng’s spine tingled, and he pointed shakily towards the ancestral hall outside the door, "Just... just buried here?"
"Yes," Patriarch Du nodded, "We also hoped to use the incense from the ancestral hall to appease these wrongfully deceased souls, and... and that itinerant monk."
Yang Xiao couldn’t help but take a deep breath, recalling what he had seen in his dream the previous night. The ghost monk with his toes pointing backward, along with the hundreds of headless corpses, had silently appeared behind him, creating a chilling scene.
"It seems that Patriarch Du’s good deed didn’t manage to comfort the heart of that itinerant monk," Tong Han said with a subtle implication, looking at the "cows" and "chickens" in the stinking shack.
Despite this, Patriarch Du appeared as if he hadn’t caught on to anything, his expression still mournful, tears constantly rolling down from his murky eyes, "Our Du Family Village has always been benevolent, serving the Buddha generation after generation. Who knew that being good would bring such misfortune upon us!"
Yang Xiao remained expressionless, but he had already labeled this old man as dangerous in his mind. The events surely weren’t as Patriarch Du described them. It must have involved some horrifying acts by the Du Family Village to provoke such a curse from a monk.
Without a doubt, both these wrongfully deceased villagers and the monk were victims of something the Du Family Patriarch and his people did; as for why, Yang Xiao had a preliminary judgment in his mind.
Looking at the former villagers who had been turned into "cows and chickens," Patriarch Du was in tears, unable to stop crying, "Many years ago, a fangshi passed through our village and sympathized with our plight. He instructed us to use the bodies of cows and chickens to stop the villagers’ heads from rotting. Moreover, before this fangshi left, he cast a spell on the bodies of the cows and chickens. This spell granted the dead villagers who were harmed by the demon monk a special ability. In the evening, if they sensed the demon monk’s presence, the cows would start bellowing madly. And when the demon monk’s presence faded by daybreak, the chickens would crow."
"Thanks to these... these pitiful cows and chickens that warned us, many villagers managed to escape unscathed. Otherwise... otherwise how could we have the opportunity to meet such gracious benefactors like yourselves."
Patriarch Du, with a nose full of snot and tears, spoke sincerely and earnestly, embodying the image of a pitiful elderly man who had lost his kin in his later years. Unfortunately, he was facing people like Yang Xiao, who didn’t believe a single punctuation mark of what Patriarch Du said.
Cheng Cha, her eyes red, stepped forward, feigning empathy, and wiped Patriarch Du’s tears with her sleeve, "Patriarch, please restrain your grief. I won’t hide from you, someone in my own family lost a child too, and I totally understand how you feel!"
Once both parties felt they had acted enough and set the right atmosphere, Patriarch Du finally restrained his mournful expression, leading Yang Xiao and the others out of the shack and locking the door behind him.
Yang Xiao suggested visiting the Du Family Ancestral Hall, which made Patriarch Du hesitate. However, unable to resist the pressing arguments of Yang Xiao and Cheng Cha, which sounded very reasonable – merely to pay homage, Patriarch Du reluctantly agreed.
Pushing open the thick doors of the ancestral hall, Yang Xiao finally got to see the entirety of the Du Family Ancestral Hall. The interior was slightly larger than what he had seen the previous night. Despite it being daytime, the inside was still dim, with large blue stone slabs underfoot giving off a strange, icy aura. Only a few candles on the plaque stand were dimly lit, emitting a half-dead light.
But what surprised Yang Xiao was the large discrepancy from what he had seen the night before. The most noticeable difference was near the plaque. He distinctly remembered a stone platform with a pattern of circles with notches etched into it below the plaque from the previous night, but now, it had all been replaced with wooden racks covered with aged cloth. The grey cloth hung down, tightly sticking to the blue stone floor, completely covering the area beneath the plaque.
Besides that, the placements of the candelabras and some nearby decorations were off, and the number of meditation cushions on the floor was far fewer than the previous night.
Yang Xiao’s first thought was that this place had been refurbished, and what he had seen the previous night was how the ancestral hall originally appeared.
Undoubtedly, it had to be the people from Du Family Village who had done this, and as for why, Yang Xiao suspected they were intentionally hiding something.
And this, undoubtedly, had something to do with the hundreds of headless corpses and the death of that ghost monk.
The ancestral hall was utterly empty, not even a guard in sight, and before Yang Xiao and his group could take a closer look, Patriarch Du increasingly urged them on, his tone growing more impatient. Helplessly, Yang Xiao and the others had to follow Patriarch Du and leave. The ancestral hall was eerily quiet, a rarity, and the longer they stayed, the more they felt their hair stand on end. Yang Xiao couldn’t describe it; it was as if... as if they were being watched by many malicious eyes, yet every time he turned around, he couldn’t pinpoint exactly where this sensation of being watched was coming from, as if those eerie gazes came from all directions.
