Stranger Danger
Chapter 340: The Dead Kowtows

“Have you actually seen any one of these taboos coming true with your own eyes?” Chu Nianjiu countered.

Qi Xuanyun turned a little red. “In fact, I have.”

“During my journey, I saw a family paying their respects to a dead relative. For some reason, one of the three incense sticks they burned was conspicuously long compared to the others. They either didn’t know about the taboo or didn’t take it to heart, but the next day, the whole family of five all died a sudden, inexplicable death.”

Lin Yuhuai smiled. “When it comes to these things, it’s better to believe that it’s real than otherwise. Plus, the gathas aren’t complete nonsense. Cats, dogs, crows and cocks are all naturally spiritual animals who are especially sensitive toward evils and filth.”

“Fine, forget what I said.” Chu Nianjiu shrugged.

They continued to navigate through the forest following Peng Hu’s group, but as they walked, the crows began cawing again.

“Caw! Caw!”

“Caw! Caw!”

“Strange. I keep hearing caws, but why can’t I see a single crow?” Qi Xuanyun muttered under his breath when he heard the caws again.

“What did you just say?” Ye Qing abruptly stiffened like a statue.

“B… Brother Ye? What’s wrong?” His reaction was so intense that it caught Qi Xuanyun off guard.

“I was wondering why I keep feeling like something isn’t right. Now I understand.”

Qi Xuanyun was just talking to himself, but his words lifted a strange worry that had been plaguing Ye Qing since he heard the caws. His eyes abruptly turned pitch black as he tapped the space in front of him.

Buzz!

His demonic thought rippled, and the scenery around them abruptly shattered like glass.

They weren’t walking in the middle of a forest, rain and vapor. No, they were standing just a few steps away from a cliff.

As for Peng Hu, the situation was far worse. Half of his foot was sticking out of the cliff’s edge. Just one more step, and he would fall straight to his death.

For some reason, Peng Hu couldn’t seem to perceive the danger he was in. He lifted his foot to take another step forward.

“PENG HU!” Chu Nianjiu yelled at the top of his lungs.

Someone moved faster than his voice could travel. Ye Qing abruptly appeared next to Peng Hu like a ghost and caught his shoulder in a firm grip, forcing him to stop.

Ye Qing looked down and saw a man hanging on the cliff with both hands. His body was completely broken, his head was shattered so badly that brain matter was leaking all over the place, and his body was covered in blood and brain matter. Right now, the man was glaring at Ye Qing while sticking out his long, long tongue.

“Is this… the Cliff Ghost?” exclaimed Lin Yuhuai as he appeared next to Ye Qing.

“Did it blind us with an illusion?!” Chu Nianjiu asked.

“Yeah.” Ye Qing nodded.

The Cliff Ghost was a person who fell off a cliff and died, but they refused to pass away into the afterlife due to overwhelming hatred or resentment. So, they turned into an evil ghost.

A Cliff Ghost normally clung to the cliffside waiting for preys to pass through the area. Then, it would blind its prey with illusions and cause them to fall off a cliff and die.

The more people it killed, the stronger it would become. The Cliff Ghost in front of them was a Hatred-class Stranger.

“Uwargh!”

Seeing that its ploy had failed, the Cliff Ghost let out a weird scream and tried to attack Ye Qing.

“Palm Thunder”

But before Ye Qing could even do anything, Qi Xuanyun fired a Palm Thunder at it and removed it from existence.

Objectively speaking, a Cliff Ghost was terrible in a straight fight. Its true strength lay in its ability to seamlessly trap its victims within its illusions.

Even Ye Qing didn’t realize that something was amiss until Qi Xuanyun had unwittingly given him a flash of inspiration.

Peng Hu and the other coffin hauliers snapped back to reality after the Cliff Ghost was killed.

“Where are we? What happened?” Peng Hu voiced his confusion.

“You were blinded by an illusion just now,” Chu Nianjiu explained.

“A Cliff Ghost?!” Peng Hu was an experienced coffin haulier. He immediately figured out the truth.

In fact, most coffin hauliers were just as experienced and knowledgeable as a member of the Pacification Bureau. After all, their job involved carrying dead bodies at night and traveling everywhere under the sun. Bodies were naturally attractive to Strangers and the like, so they couldn’t help but be experienced even if they didn’t want to.

Peng Hu looked grateful. “Thank you for saving our lives, Brother Chu. That would’ve killed us all.”

“Don’t thank me. Joyless is the one who saved you.” Chu Nianjiu pointed at Ye Qing.

“Thank you, Brother Ye!” All four coffin hauliers saluted Ye Qing deeply.

“Don’t thank me. Thank it!” Ye Qing pointed at a crow perched on top of a crooked tree next to the cliff. A white crow to be exact.

“The Crow of Light?!” Peng Hu recognized the white crow immediately.

“That’s right.” Ye Qing smiled.

If say, the Cliff Ghost was an evil Stranger created from the resentful soul of a victim who fell off a cliff, then the Crow of Light was a good Stranger created from that very same soul.

When the Cliff Ghost blinded someone with its illusions to lure them to their deaths, the Crow of Light would caw repeatedly to warn them of the danger.

For whatever reason, the Cliff Ghost couldn’t create an illusion of the Crow of Light probably because it was its antithesis. It couldn’t mask the Stranger’s caws either.

The humans were expected to recognize the discrepancy and subsequently the danger they were in.

“Caw! Caw!”

Seeing that everyone was looking at it, the Crow of Light cawed one last time before flying down the cliff and disappearing into the clouds below.

“Wait a second. Why couldn’t I hear its caws?” Peng Hu suddenly realized something.

Ye Qing thought for a second. “It’s probably because of the coffin you’re carrying!”

Peng Hu instinctively opened his mouth to refute it, but when he really thought about it, he couldn’t deny the possibility at all.

“That’s that. Let us resume our journey!” Chu Nianjiu said.

Peng Hu nodded, and the coffin hauliers lifted the coffin once more. However, they had just left the cliff when suddenly, they heard banging noises from the coffin again. In fact, the very first bang was enough to snap the ropes and cause the coffin to fall to the ground.

“Get the Corpse Suppression Nails!” Peng Hu roared when he saw this.

He had just finished when he saw Peng Chuan kneeling in front of the coffin and clutching his stomach with a pained expression on his face.

Peng Chuan’s stomach began swelling bit by bit. Water mixed with bits of sand and soil started leaking from his eyes, ears, nose and mouth.

“Grrrrrrr!”

Peng Chuan clutched his own throat with a death grip. As soon as he opened his mouth, a stream of murky water immediately splashed against the ground.

“Peng Chuan!” Peng Hu cried out in shock as produced a line marker[1]. He then threw an ink black thread at his brother’s forehead.

Unfortunately, the ink black thread ignited before it even touched Peng Chuan’s forehead. The line marker he was holding also exploded into smithereens all of a sudden and covered Peng Hu in ink.

“What the…”

Peng Hu’s wide-eyed expression made it clear that he wasn’t expecting this. The line marker he used was a signature Strange Artifact among the coffin hauliers. The line marker was made of Thunderstruck Wood, the ink was a black dog’s blood, and the thread was created by the hands of a virgin boy. The combination of evil suppressing qualities was so potent that it could flay half the life of a Hatred-class Stranger with a single touch. But now, it couldn’t even touch Peng Chuan.

Lin Yuhuai’s reaction was no slower than Peng Hu’s. At the same time the coffin haulier’s ink marker exploded, he appeared in front of Peng Chuan and attempted to slap a yellow talisman on his forehead.

Crackle!

Unfortunately, the outcome was the same. The yellow talisman was halfway to Peng Chuan’s forehead when it abruptly burned into ash.

“The coffin!”

Ye Qing chose to tackle the coffin and slapped his hand over the body. An unbelievably cold and evil stream of energy immediately poured into his body.

Using his astral qi as the fuel and his body as the furnace, Ye Qing refined the yin energy pouring into his body and surrounded the coffin in Burning Wind at the same time.

The Burning Wind was one of the hottest and most yang astral qi in the world. It was slowly but surely neutralizing the yin energy inside the coffin.

The problem was that Peng Chuan was still leaking muddy water from his orifices. His skin was starting to bloat and turn pale like that of a drowned body.

“What do we do?” Peng Hu was so anxious that his eyes were bloodshot.

“We open the coffin!” Ye Qing replied without hesitation. He was hoping that suppressing the entity within the coffin would be enough to eliminate Peng Chuan’s symptoms, but it hadn’t worked at all.

The only way to save Peng Chuan now was to open the coffin and check what the hell was going on inside.

“No! You can’t do that!” Peng Hu cried.

Ye Qing’s eyes glinted dangerously. “Who is more important, the living or the dead?”

“But… that’s…” Peng Hu looked conflicted.

“Are you serious right now? Is preserving tradition more important than saving your brother?” Chu Nianjiu’s face looked ugly as well. “Are you really going to watch him die!?”

“I…” Peng Hu was paralyzed with indecision.

Ye Qing didn’t care to wait for Peng Hu to arrive at a decision. Every wasted second was a second Peng Chuan came closer to death. He unleashed his force and threw the coffin lid into the air.

Professionalism was a positive trait, but blind professionalism was just stupid.

Sometimes, that stupidity could even claim a person’s life.

“You—!”

Shocked and angry, Peng Hu was about to rebuke Ye Qing when he saw what was inside the coffin. Whatever words he was going to say died in his throat.

He had imagined all kinds of scenarios about what might be inside the coffin. The corpse could’ve turned into a zombie, it could’ve been possessed by some sort of evil, or it could’ve transformed into a Stranger. However, he never imagined that the body would have shifted to a kneeling position.

When did it happen, and how was this even possible? The coffin was only as tall as a child. It would’ve been impossible for a living adult to kneel inside the coffin, much less a dead one.

In reality, the body had shifted to a kneeling position. Its joints were completely bent, and its chest and waist were compressed together by an unknown power, so much so that some of its rib bones were literally sticking out of its chest. That was how it managed to kneel inside the coffin.

Not only that, the body’s head would knock against the bottom every three breaths three times in a row. Such was its force that its head was shattered, and blood caked the wooden board.

It was… kowtowing. The body was kowtowing toward a paper doll placed at the end of the coffin. It was unusual to say the least.

“How… How can this be?” Peng Hu and the rest of the coffin hauliers stared at the strange sight, flabbergasted.

“The strange bangs we heard earlier is probably the sound of the body kowtowing toward the paper doll,” declared Ye Qing while narrowing his eyes. That, and the body shifting to a kneeling position.

He was one hundred percent certain that the coffin hauliers’ deaths had something to do with its kowtowing.

Ye Qing’s first thought was to control the body, but when his demonic thought wrapped around it, he couldn’t sense any anomalous energy from it.

“Is it that paper doll?”

Ye Qing immediately scanned the paper doll with his demonic thought, but the moment he made contact, his mind shook, and he suddenly felt unbelievably hot. He flushed as red as blood as an invisible fire had suddenly burst into life inside his body. His unusual reaction caught everyone by surprise.

“Hmph!” Ye Qing grunted and channeled his astral qi to suppress the unnatural heat. Then, he said, “It’s the paper doll that’s causing the problem.”

1. Carpenter's straight line marker (an inked cord stretched tight then lowered onto timber). ☜

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