Chapter 80

Chapter 80

Something had happened to Crazy Wang.

The worst-case scenario had come to pass.

Ling Fang’s gaze sharpened at once, like a precious sword drawn from its sheath.

“Everyone, attention!” Ling Fang connected to the entire team’s channel and said coldly, “Stay alert at your respective positions. This village is not safe.”

“Understood!”

All five answered in unison.

“Ye Anran, Dai Xingyu, you two keep watch over the village chief.” Ling Fang issued orders rapidly. “Old Yu, examine the scene and see whether anything left traces behind. Shen Huaizhou, take Xie Qingling with you and keep an eye on her. Help stand watch as well. Don’t let anything approach Crazy Wang’s house!”

With the arrangements made, Ling Fang broke into a run toward Crazy Wang’s home.

After hearing his assignment, Shen Huaizhou looked back at Xie Qingling in her chair. He picked her up, chair and all, and ran swiftly toward Crazy Wang’s house.

Although the River God had put him through a terrible ordeal and his body had not fully recovered, he could still manage a simple task like standing watch.

Roughly five minutes later, Shen Huaizhou reached the slope outside Crazy Wang’s house. He planned to climb a tree and use its height as a lookout post.

But after glancing at Xie Qingling, he found himself in a difficult position.

Xie Qingling was now a bedridden invalid with almost no ability to protect herself. He did not feel safe leaving her alone, but taking her with him would make standing watch difficult.

As though she saw through his dilemma, Xie Qingling volunteered, “Put me inside Crazy Wang’s house. The team leader and Brother Yu are both there. I’ll be fine with them watching me.”

Shen Huaizhou listened, picked her up with the chair once more, and carried her into Crazy Wang’s house before returning outside to stand watch alone.

Seated inside, Xie Qingling saw Crazy Wang bound to a pillar and slumped on the floor. Blood covered the ground. A gash had been cut into each of his four limbs, and it looked as though nearly all the blood in his body had been drained.

The altar in Crazy Wang’s house had also been smashed. The clay idol lay in pieces, and the Back-Rider Ghost had vanished.

Ling Fang crouched and felt Crazy Wang’s neck. A trace of relief appeared on his stormy face.

He opened his silver case, took out the bottle of pink potion, and poured it down Crazy Wang’s throat.

This was the first time Xie Qingling had seen someone use the pink potion on a person at death’s door.

She still remembered Ye Anran’s introduction to the bottle: it was to be used only when someone was breathing their last and could no longer be saved.

She wondered what effect it would have.

A moment later, color and vitality returned to Crazy Wang’s deathly pale face. He looked as though he had merely fallen asleep.

His closed eyelids began to tremble, and the eyes beneath them rolled rapidly.

He was about to wake.

Crazy Wang coughed several times with great effort and raised his eyelids. The first thing he saw was the two men and one woman who had entered his home.

“I’m… Wasn’t I dead…?” Crazy Wang muttered to himself.

Ling Fang gave him no time to dwell on the sensation of dying. Grabbing his collar, he forced the old man’s long-bent waist upright and demanded coldly, “Who did this to you?”

“Why did you deceive the villagers into making sacrifices to the River God? What is your true purpose?”

“Speak!”

Crazy Wang let Ling Fang hold his head up and looked sidelong at him, still as arrogant and sharp as ever, utterly unrepentant even on the verge of death.

“Kill me! Go ahead and kill me! Even if I die, I won’t tell you anything!”

“Hahahaha! What a pity. Such a pity.” Crazy Wang turned his gaze toward Xie Qingling. “You are the one the River God wanted, a woman filled with Spirit. If you had been presented to the River God as an offering, she would certainly have been pleased. What a pity you returned alive… Now calamity will befall the village again.”

Crazy Wang laughed until tears streamed from his eyes, looking utterly deranged.

Ling Fang’s brow furrowed sharply. He drove a fist into Crazy Wang’s stomach, drawing a muffled groan from him. His newly flushed face turned white again. Even so, he tipped back his disheveled, nestlike head and kept laughing like a madman.

At the same time, he mumbled indistinctly, “Almost dead. Almost dead. I’m almost dead… Just… just hold on a little longer… I’ll be dead soon. I won’t tell you. I won’t condemn the village to endless disaster and curses. I won’t tell you. I won’t…”
Crazy Wang truly was at the end of his strength. Even if that bottle of pink potion had brought him back from the brink of death for a time, its effect was no more than a dying flare before the light went out.

Once it wore off, his condition would return to exactly what it had been.

Crazy Wang could feel that he was like a lamp about to run out of oil. He knew he only had to drag this into a war of attrition, and these people would be powerless against him.

The dead could not talk.

Ling Fang’s expression darkened terribly.

He had not expected Crazy Wang to be this difficult. The village chief had been easy to handle. All it had taken was a corpse to scare the truth out of him.

But this man was a tough nut to crack.

They had wasted such a precious bottle of medicine, only to pry open a mouth that refused to speak.

For a time, the situation reached an impasse.

Xie Qingling sat in a chair with the light behind her. She happened to have been placed where the sunlight fell through the doorway. From Crazy Wang’s angle, he could see only her blurred silhouette, not her expression.

Then he heard the woman who should have been sacrificed and left dead at the bottom of the river say coolly, “According to legend, every village has a Village Guardian.”

“The Village Guardian shields the village from disaster and is left disabled as a result. Neither truly mad nor truly foolish, neither wholly sane nor wholly deranged, he is both shunned and revered by the villagers.”

“The villagers see you as their Village Guardian. They believe your bent back and stooped posture came from taking disasters upon yourself. They fear you and obey your every word because they think you’ll protect the village.”

“But your back is bent only because you brought it upon yourself. You raised Child Ghosts as tools for profit, had them help you fabricate lies, then used those lies to control and deceive the villagers. And after all that, you turn around and claim disaster is about to strike the village. Don’t you think that’s a little hypocritical?”

Her voice brimmed with scorn. “You’ve spent all these years lining your own pockets under the pretext of the River God’s Wedding, haven’t you? You’ve taken plenty for yourself and squeezed the villagers dry. Otherwise, I truly can’t understand why you would urge them to keep offering sacrifices to the River God for decades on end. You’ve buried piles of gold and silver in your pickle jars and this miserable courtyard, haven’t you? Maybe you hid them somewhere else. But what does that matter? You’ll never get to use any of it now. So, how did all that earthly wealth and luxury taste? It’s a pity you’ll never enjoy it again.”

In truth, Xie Qingling had no evidence for any of those accusations, nor were they especially convincing. Calling them pure fabrication would not have been unfair.

She was only bluffing, making one last desperate attempt.

Threats and bribes had both failed against this stubborn old man. Her only remaining option was to find his psychological weakness and strike it.

Crazy Wang cared deeply about this village.

Xie Qingling did not know whether her accusations were right, but time was running out. She had no choice but to take a gamble and try an unorthodox approach.

Fortunately, Crazy Wang soon began to protest.

Vehemently.

His face flushed scarlet. His lips moved furiously, flecks of foam flying from his mouth. “I didn’t! Shut up! I didn’t!”

“I don’t need some little girl like you passing judgment on all I’ve suffered for this village! I’ve lived in poverty my whole life! I’ve never known wealth or splendor! Never lived in comfort! All I ever wanted was for everyone to be safe! For everyone to be safe!”

Crazy Wang shrieked hysterically. In his agitation, more blood surged from his wounds.

It gathered and spread across the floor like a lake of blood.

“Is that so? Sending the villagers to sacrifice themselves to an evil god and making them live in constant fear – that’s your contribution? Don’t make me sick. You’re nothing but a fraud. There is no River God in that river. It’s all a lie. You’re a false Village Guardian who used an evil god as a pretext to throw your weight around and savor the power of having everyone under your thumb.”

Closer. She was getting closer to the truth she wanted.

Xie Qingling kept her gaze fixed on Crazy Wang, her expression growing even more contemptuous.

That look cut Crazy Wang to the quick.

For more than twenty years, he had endured poverty and loneliness. No one had understood him. He had had no one to confide in, and eventually no one had dared come near him at all. Alone, without a single companion, he could not allow Xie Qingling to reduce every sacrifice he had made to a worthless, insignificant past.

And now she was smearing that past, calling him a false Village Guardian.

If he was not the Village Guardian, then what was he?

A joke?

He had no wife, no children, and no one close to him. Everyone treated him like a monster. Had he brought all of that upon himself?
No. That was not true at all!

Crazy Wang’s eyes reddened as he glared at Xie Qingling. In a hoarse voice, he said, “I’m not a fraud! I saw the miracle with my own eyes! I watched the river change course and the River God descend! You’re lying! You’re the fake!”

Xie Qingling raised her chin. Unmoved by his wretched, pitiful state, she continued coldly, “Is that so? If you personally witnessed the miracle and saw the River God descend, then you should know the River God is a female deity, shouldn’t you?”

“You – ” Crazy Wang began, then abruptly froze. His eyes widened in disbelief as he stared at her. “What did you say? The River God… she’s female?”

“Just as I thought. You don’t know a thing. That miracle you supposedly witnessed was nothing but someone deceiving you.” Xie Qingling let out a cold laugh. “Do you know why the River God was never satisfied despite all the sacrifices your village offered her over the years? Because from the very beginning, she wanted a groom, not a bride. If you truly wanted what was best for the village, why didn’t you sacrifice yourself?”

“The River God… wanted a groom?” Crazy Wang murmured. Something seemed to occur to him, and he burst into laughter again. “Yes, yes! Sacrifice me. Offer me to the River God…”

A madman. An utter madman.

Xie Qingling could no longer tell whether he had worn a mask for so long that he had come to believe it was real, or whether this was truly what he had thought all along.

“The River God is dead,” Xie Qingling said suddenly. “I killed her. This village will never need to make sacrifices to that evil god again.”

Crazy Wang’s laughter stopped dead. He stared hard at Xie Qingling, as if trying to judge whether she was telling the truth.

“You can keep your mouth shut, of course. I’ll drag the mastermind out sooner or later. It’s only a matter of time. But you? You’re just pitiful. Someone deceived you for decades, and you were still being deceived at the moment of your death. How tragic for you. How tragic for the villagers. How unjust for all those girls!”

Xie Qingling turned to Ling Fang. “Director, let’s go. There’s no point wasting time on this fucking idiot.”

Ling Fang nodded.

The group made a show of leaving and stepped out of the house.

Then Crazy Wang’s hoarse, feeble voice drifted out from within.

He muttered as if speaking to himself.

“I… I don’t know who that first man was. Thirty years ago, he taught me how to raise Child Ghosts and summoned the River God to the village. He told me that if we sacrificed to the River God and chose a bride who satisfied her, the village would be safe and prosperous for ten thousand generations. I believed him.”

“I believed him…”

Crazy Wang’s voice began to tremble. He broke into several violent coughs.

The coughing stopped briefly.

His breathing grew weaker still. “Three years ago, the person who contacted me changed. It was a young man. He’s the one who tried to kill me. He said he’d come to take the Child Ghosts away. He said… said I was no longer useful.”

“The young man was blind in one eye. He was one-eyed and had a full sleeve tattoo. He said his name was Tang Tian…” Crazy Wang’s voice suddenly swelled, like a ruined bellows wrenched open with a piercing screech. “And he was wrong!”

“I am useful!”

Even though the three Child Ghosts were gone from his back, his stooped body retained the same curve it had in life. Nearly all the blood had drained from his torso. Beneath him, rivulets of blood wound across the floor like rivers, seeping between the bricks.

“I… I… Wang Fuquan… Village Guar – ”

His bloodshot eyes stared at the sky outside, fixed desperately on his village.

Outside the house that so few people ever visited, children were playing. They ran, jumped, laughed, and chased one another, taking turns kicking the now-useless red lanterns at their feet.

A jackdaw landed atop the courtyard wall. One of the red lanterns pasted with the Double Happiness character sailed high into the air like a soccer ball and cleared the wall.

A scrap of paper veiled his sight.

The round lantern blocked the crimson sun’s radiance, as though it were another red sun hanging in the heavens.

That was the last sight Crazy Wang ever saw.

That red sun – merciful, warm, and drenched in blood – concealed too much madness and delusion behind it. It was no true sun.

It could never lead him to the final homeland where hope awaited.