Seeing that Kong Xuyang was about to lose his mind from anger again, Yang Zhi quickly changed the subject. “Brother Kong, we still have the advantage. We have already figured out how to collect clues on the true end line the last ti we played this ga.”
Kong Xuyang, with red eyes, forced himself to gather his mind and exhaled, “The almanac of Yinshan Village, the incomplete parts of the murals are all in the almanac of the village. As long as we find the almanac from a hundred years ago, we can complete the background story of this Taoist zombie.”
“We can then find its weakness.” Yang Zhi patted Kong Xuyang’s shoulders to help him relax. “Last ti in the ga, a player found a page of the almanac. Brother Kong, do you rember where that player found it?”
Kong Xuyang’s sight slowly moved outwards. He looked at the hilltop and the weir pond hidden in the darkness, then said word by word, “The mass grave behind the weir pond.”
In the tomb passage.
The entrance to the tomb passage, which originally beca narrower and narrower, was forcibly torn into a large passage by brute force, and the walls were covered with the sharp claw marks of the zombie.
Bai Liu held up the candlestick and shone it over. “These should be what the zombie opened in order to escape.”
“… This strength is too terrifying.” Mu Sicheng stretched out his hand to compare the claw mark. It was twice as large as his hand and so deep that you could see the wall. Mu Sicheng’s scalp was numb when he saw it. “If this zombie goes crazy, it will kill us without any effort.”
“So we have to end this ga before then,” Bai Liu said.
Bai Liu walked to the entrance where they climbed into the tomb, stepped on Mu Sicheng’s shoulders to gain leverage and leaped up, jumping out. After Bai Liu got out, he turned around and pulled Mu Sicheng up with his hand.
The entrance to the tomb was under a bed. Just as Mu Sicheng was about to crawl out from under the bed, Bai Liu held his shoulders.
Bai Liu looked outside the bed and said calmly, “There’s light; there are people outside.”
Mu Sicheng then noticed a flickering silver-white, gray-black light on the ground under the bed, accompanied by a faint noise, like the sound of an electric current due to poor contact, and the intermittent voices of many people talking.
The voices were sotis rough and sotis delicate, but there seed to be a layer between them, and they didn’t sound like real people speaking.
“… These damn ghosts want to freeze us to death, kill us, and starve us to death, but as long as we are still alive, we must defend this place and prevent outsiders from taking it away…”
“But the n have all left, leaving behind a village of old, weak and sick people. How can we protect the village? We can’t defend it…”
“When the n co back, the wives will go to the bridge at the entrance of the village to have a look! Rember to bring an umbrella so you don’t get wet. It’s almost the Qingming Festival, and it’s been raining a lot recently…”
Bai Liu and Mu Sicheng looked at each other and understood where the voice ca from.
“The sound of the TV.” Mu Sicheng pointed outside and said softly, “Soone is watching TV.”
Bai Liu gestured to let him go out first, then nimbly moved away from the bed and knelt on one knee in the shadow at the foot of the bed that was not illuminated by the TV light. He looked quietly ahead, as if confirming sothing.
After Bai Liu was sure, he lowered his head and made a “hush” gesture to Mu Sicheng, who was still hiding under the bed, asking Mu Sicheng to co out quietly.
Mu Sicheng heaved a sigh of relief when he saw this. He thought it was safe outside, so he pushed himself out from under the bed with one hand and tried to stand up. However, he quickly turned around, gasped and quickly shrank next to Bai Liu. He mouthed with horror, “What’s going on?!”
There was a mahogany bench next to the bed at the entrance, which sat two gray-haired old n with their backs to Bai Liu and Mu Sicheng.
The old n were facing an old wooden cabinet with rotten edges. Inside the cabinet was an old FM TV that looked no more than twelve or thirteen inches square.
The picture on the TV was in black and white, shaking and blurry from ti to ti, but the two old n seed to be watching it very attentively with their necks stretched forward and their backs straight, as if they were stiff corpses, sitting there staring at the TV screen without moving.
The light from the screen shone dimly on the faces of the two old n. Brown spots appeared around the old n’s cloudy eyeballs, and sothing seed to be wriggling in their mouths and noses, trying to crawl out. Additionally, white spots like worms could be seen stretching and shrinking in their ears.
They had wooden smiles, and their mouths moved rapidly, as if they were saying sothing.
Mu Sicheng held his breath and paid attention, but did not hear any sound coming out of the throats of the two old n. However, he soon realized where the voices of the two old n ca from.
The mouth movents of these two old n were synchronized with the voices of the people on TV.
Bai Liu looked at the TV. “They are dubbing the people on TV.”
The wavering black and white images on TV were like an old videotape from so historical material. Several won dressed in simple and old-fashioned clothes were sitting at the gate of Yinshan Village, wearing small boots and funeral clothes. They were kneeling beside coffins, waving white handkerchiefs to cover their faces and crying with an unopened white umbrella beside them.
Mu Sicheng asked quietly, “That’s the attire of the sacrificial bridge ghosts. Are these won the living versions of the sacrificial bridge ghosts?”
Bai Liu looked at the TV screen and nodded slightly, “It should be.”
The two old n with strange faces opened and closed their mouths, and a voice ca from the TV,
“All the n are dead. There are too many of them to fit in the graves…”
“… Those who were torn to pieces by those ghosts cannot be buried in the ancestral tomb. How can they face their ancestors in the afterlife…”
“Put them in a coffin and bury them in the mountains on the other side of the bridge. Let them rest in peace.”
“My enemy1! You died so tragically! How can you expect to live on without you?!”
The won sobbed and leaned on the coffin, refusing to let go. They were about to faint from crying, but finally decided to follow the people carrying the coffin, walking across the pond and stepping onto the bridge.
They were crying numbly, with tear marks all over their faces. They held umbrellas in their hands to shade the coffins to prevent the mutilated bodies and souls in the coffins from being damaged by the sun.
But at the mont of crossing the bridge, these won who had lost their husbands looked at the long rows of coffins falling into the mountains. When they were holding umbrellas to send the coffins down the bridge, they suddenly put away their umbrellas, held them without hesitation, and jumped off the bridge.
There was a shallow stream under the bridge, and the won crashed into the bridge piers, their heads broken and bleeding.
They died with unresolved grievances, holding their umbrellas as they looked at the coffins going away on the bridge, with devastated and miserable expressions on their faces.
The mont the coffins left their sight, they slowly closed their eyes, fell into the water, and lay motionless. The blood oozing from their bodies dyed their shrouds, umbrellas and the clear stream water red.
Mu Sicheng felt sweat on his back when watching this scene, but Bai Liu was so absorbed in it that he seed like he was looking for soone.
This searching look made Mu Sicheng even more nervous. “Who are you looking for, Bai Liu? There can’t be anyone you know here, right?”
“Can’t say for sure.” Bai Liu replied without looking away.
Mu Sicheng was startled, then quickly ca to his senses, “That’s not right, Bai Liu, you have no mory. The only people you know are these few: , Kong Xuyang, and Yang Zhi, I know them all. They are not in this screen.”
Bai Liu looked at Mu Sicheng indifferently, “I’m looking for soone outside the screen.”
“Outside the screen…” Mu Sicheng was stunned. “What do you an?”
Bai Liu replied calmly, “It’s true that neither you nor I know the people in this screen, but there is another person outside the screen, and maybe you and I will find them familiar.”
Mu Sicheng beca more and more confused. “This happened a hundred years ago, who can I recognize?”
“You missed one person, the one who shot this scene.” Bai Liu stared at the picture. “If I’m not mistaken, you’ll know what’s going on when you take the first look at this person.”
Curiosity overwheld fear. Mu Sicheng crossed his arms and frowned, then began to stare at the edge of the screen seriously, trying to see the person who was holding the cara and filming.
Soon, Mu Sicheng saw that the person filming was adjusting the cara to allow his face to enter the scene.
As soon as the caraman’s face ca into the cara, Mu Sicheng was so astonished that he turned around and looked at Bai Liu. “Why does he look like this?!”
Bai Liu remained calm. “What else? What do you think he will look like?”
Mu Sicheng pointed at the caraman who flashed by in the picture, and almost jumped up in anxiety. “He looks like !”
The caraman on the black and white TV was wearing sothing both old and trendy, a three-piece vest suit and a pair of leather shoes, along with a mourning hat on his head, and there were tear marks on his face. He was adjusting the film with his head down while writing sothing on an almanac with a brush.
Bai Liu looked at the man and said, “He should be the village almanac master.”
The village almanac master is the person who records good and bad fortune, big and small matters in the village. He is also the person who records the missing piece of information on the mural.
“How did you know that he would look like ?!” Mu Sicheng was as curious, it felt like a cat scratching his heart2, approaching Bai Liu to ask.
Bai Liu glanced at Mu Sicheng and the cara hanging around his neck that had been recording, and began to explain,
“I’m just guessing. We know that we are in a ga and we are participating as four characters. These four characters are all descendants of Yinshan Village.”
“From the props and tasks obtained, the four characters are a tomb robber, a righteous sorcerer, an evil sorcerer, and a caraman.”
Bai Liu raised his eyes and looked at Mu Sicheng. “Don’t you think it would be more reasonable to push this setting forward a hundred years?”
Mu Sicheng suddenly realized, as if he was about to understand. “So you think that we are not playing the role of the present, but the role from a hundred years ago.”
“To be precise, we are playing the role of descendants of four characters.” Bai Liu stretched out his finger and tapped the ground eight tis, connecting every two dots. “If this is a role-playing ga with strict logic, you are the caraman, the recorder of supernatural events; now there is also a caraman in front of us, who uses the almanac to record destiny. The overlap of the roles and tasks is as high as 80%. I personally think that you are most likely his descendant.”
“If I were the one designing the ga, I would adjust your appearance to be consistent with the past to remind you of this.”
Mu Sicheng suddenly realized, “So you figured out he looks like !”
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[1] Doesn’t really an enemy; refers to one’s lover whom they often argue or quarrel with
[2] An idiom that ans very anxious
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