Chapter 79

Chapter 79

The way down the mountain was even harder than the climb up.

After everything we’d been through, we were already exhausted, but the fear of Du Ruhai’s bodyguards coming after us meant we didn’t dare stop to rest.

Going downhill meant your legs would just keep going once you started running. Before long, we found ourselves unable to stop even if we wanted to.

Eventually, I lost my footing and went flying, tumbling all the way down the slope. Song Xiaotian and Meng Yifan couldn’t even keep up with me.

I rolled for a long distance before a tree finally brought me to a halt.

It was a heavy impact; I felt like my bones were about to snap.

“Damn!”

“That looked like it could’ve killed someone!”

“Chen Mo, are you okay?”

It took a long while before I heard Song Xiaotian and the other guy catching up.

The two of them rushed to help me up. I hissed in pain, realizing that the bone in my shoulder had been knocked out of place.

“Ow, ow, ow… Something poked me just now.”

Something had jammed right into my bone during the fall. I was lucky it wasn’t my head, or my skull might have been displaced too.

Meng Yifan picked up a stone carving and handed it to us. “What the hell is this? It’s creepy as hell.”

Song Xiaotian and I took a closer look, and it gave us a start.

This stone carving felt sinister. It looked like a ‘Buddha,’ but I couldn’t tell which one it was supposed to be in the Buddhist pantheon. Snakes were coiled around its body, it had a third eye on its forehead, and there were even strange patterns etched onto its face.

“Doesn’t the three-eyed thing make it Erlang Shen?” Meng Yifan asked.

I told him that Erlang Shen belonged to Taoism, not Buddhism.

“Hey, there’s more here!”

Meng Yifan picked up another one from the ground. “Holy crap, there’s more… there’s a ton of them…”

We looked down and saw a multitude of identical stone carvings.

They were covered in mud, looking as though they had been buried in the soil and washed out by heavy rain.

No wonder. No wonder they had installed so many Qilin statues along the winding mountain road to suppress the evil, yet people still kept meeting with accidents on this mountain. It turned out there were other sinister things buried here.

One look at these carvings told you they weren’t true Buddhas. I had no idea who had buried them here.

But that wasn’t our concern; the priority was getting away.

Because of my injury, our pace slowed down. Fortunately, the bodyguards didn’t seem to be following us.

We really suffered through the wringer that night. By the time we reached the foot of the mountain, the sun was already coming up.

We had no idea where we were, but it certainly wasn’t the direction we’d come from.

The three of us looked like refugees-exhausted and starving.

“Brother Tian, where’s your car? Where’d you park it?” Meng Yifan was at his limit.

“How should I know where I parked? I don’t even know where the hell we are.”

Song Xiaotian seemed to have lost his bearings as well. “Let’s just call a cab. We’re lost.”

We hailed a car and went straight to the hospital.

Luckily, my shoulder was just dislocated, not broken. It just needed to be popped back into place.

After leaving the hospital, we headed straight home.

Meng Yifan’s girlfriend was still staying at his place, so it wasn’t convenient for us to go there. Instead, I brought them both back to my rental apartment.

Now that we had the ashes, we naturally had to deliver them to Du Yuwei. However, we didn’t know where to take them, so we could only wait for her to come looking for us.

After the night’s ordeal, we were beyond exhausted. After a quick shower, Song Xiaotian and Meng Yifan crashed on my bed.

I fell asleep on the sofa.

I slept like the dead, as if I’d fallen into a coma.

I had been far too tired lately, especially after what happened to Fang Man; I hadn’t been able to sleep for nights on end.

It felt like I was making up for all that lost sleep today. I felt like I slept for an eternity.

I didn’t wake up until the urge to urinate became so overwhelming that I could barely hold it in anymore.
I stood up, intending to use the bathroom and then go back to sleep, but as I rose, I realized I hadn’t been lying on the sofa. I was lying on the floor.

Dazed and groggy from sleep, it took me a long moment to clear my head.

I found myself inside a building-the stairwell of an old-fashioned residential apartment block.

Lying next to me was a cracked urn. It was the very same one we had worked so hard to dig up from the cemetery, and the talisman that had been on it was now torn off.

I practically bolted upright in fright. A quick glance showed I was on the seventh floor; to my left and right were Unit 7-1 and Unit 7-2.

Cold sweat broke out instantly as I recognized exactly where I was.

This was Du Yuwei’s hiding place!

Song Xiaotian and I had come here once before to look for her, but we hadn’t found her then; we had ended up finding another location instead.

How did I get here?

I was clearly sleeping on my sofa at home. Who could have carried me all the way here?

I stood outside the door for a long time, stunned. Finally, I picked up the urn from the floor and knocked twice.

Regardless of how I got here, I was certainly in the right place this time.

Du Yuwei was inside, and she wanted her child.

Now that I was returning the child to her, she would tell me the identity of the prime suspect.

Once I knew who that person was, I could finally avenge Fang Man.

Soon enough, the door opened.

I pulled it wider and stepped inside.

Sure enough, I was back in that room. Dim candlelight flickered in the empty space, and Du Yuwei’s corpse sat upright in a chair, eyes tightly shut.

The wardrobe door was closed, the diary had been put back, and even the offerings on the table had been replaced.

It seemed someone had cleaned the place.

Holding the urn, I walked over to Du Yuwei and placed it on the offering table beside her.

I backed away a bit, keeping my distance before I dared to speak.

“I’ve brought your child. We went through a lot of trouble to reunite the two of you.”

“Can you tell me who that person is now? Please…”

After I finished speaking, no one in the room answered me.

I prepared to open the wardrobe to take out the diary. Perhaps Du Yuwei would communicate the identity of the prime suspect through its pages.

But just as I opened the wardrobe and before I could reach for the diary, a loud crash erupted behind me, making me jump.

I spun around and saw that the urn on the offering table had fallen. It had shattered into pieces.

The ashes inside were scattered all over the floor.

My eyes widened. I couldn’t understand how the jar could have fallen.

I had placed it so securely. How could it have just dropped?

Right then, a shadow emerged on the wall. It was a shadow with long hair draped over its shoulders, and it seemed to be trembling.

Almost simultaneously, the temperature in the room plummeted. It was the middle of summer, a time of sweltering heat, yet the room now felt like an ice cellar.

I hurriedly pulled the diary out of the wardrobe and flipped to the last page.

The page that had been blank was indeed updated!

But the words written there left me pale with shock.

“This is not my child!”

“Who is he! Who is he!”

My eyes went wide as I turned to look at the ashes on the floor in disbelief.

That wasn’t Du Yuwei’s child?

It wasn’t that infant?

How could that be!

It had been buried in the Phoenix Grave, and its presence had even alerted Du Ruhai’s bodyguards.

If it wasn’t Du Yuwei’s child, none of this made any sense!

I was momentarily at a loss, unsure of where things had gone wrong.

Just then, another shadow suddenly appeared on the floor, right next to the ashes.