Chapter 87

Chapter 87

Half an hour later.

The old woman performing the ritual had already collapsed to the floor. The three men lay on the ground clutching their lower bodies, great pools of blood merging together beneath them.

Ning Shuo panted, thinking that someone else’s body really was hard to move around in.

After taking a moment to catch his breath, he picked up the two-finger-thick iron nails and the hammer lying on the table beside the old woman. “Were these what you were planning to use on m… me?”

His voice was gentle. Coupled with the fact that he was still using Mingzhi’s body, it formed a stark contrast with the scene just now, when he had taken everyone down and even casually grabbed the old woman’s scissors and thrown them at that particular part of the three men.

The old woman, terrified, immediately shifted the blame to the Sun Family. “Yes… The Sun Family ordered all of this!”

“The Third Son of the Sun Family died. He was the favorite son of the head of the Sun Family, so they wanted to arrange a ghost marriage for him. I was only carrying out orders!”

Mingzhi had delicate features, and when her eyes curved with her smile, she looked utterly harmless. “Is that so? But you’re the highest-ranking woman in Aotianli. Are you telling me this is the first time you’ve done something like this?”

“Does being an accomplice mean you haven’t committed a crime? Does the harm done by an accomplice not count as harm?”

The iron nail slid slowly down the old woman’s face, its icy touch chilling her to the bone.

Though NPCs acted according to their settings, they still had an instinctive fear.

Not to mention, they were not merely NPCs. They were real, flesh-and-blood people who existed in Mingzhi’s memories.

In Spirit Tracing, there was no need to maintain anyone’s character setting.

Ning Shuo’s tone was very gentle, so gentle that if one only looked at his face, no one would ever realize those vicious curses had come from his mouth. “This is my first time doing this. I’m afraid it will hurt a lot.”

Because there were only four nails, he could not fully recreate Mingzhi’s pain.

So after Ning Shuo nailed one person into the coffin, he pulled the nails back out and moved on to the next.

It was a bit troublesome, but he was currently inside Spirit Tracing and could not use the System Shop. Even if he could, he would not have used it in front of Mingzhi.

Moreover, because Spirit Tracing involved possession, when Ning Shuo first began to act, he seemed to resonate with Mingzhi’s emotions in some way, feeling what she felt, hurting where she had hurt.

The curse activated, and scream after scream rang out in the dim room.

The old woman fainted from the pain, then woke from the pain again.

In the dim candlelight and the blur of tears, she heard this person say, “There are needles and thread too? Wonderful. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be enough thread for four people. It’s my first time, so I’ll have to be a little rough.”

…

After everything was done, the memory showed no signs of collapsing.

Ning Shuo braced himself against the table and looked around. Soon, his gaze landed on an almanac.

When he had been in the ancestral hall, he had seen the year in the Script at this moment.

But this almanac showed that this memory was from ten years ago.

Ten years.

That made sense. A memory that had tormented her for ten years could not be so easily broken apart by an outsider.

Later, in Aotianli, there was an unmarried man who had tortured quite a few women to death. On the seventh day after his twentieth birthday, the Ghost Bride knocked on his window.

That man also belonged to a wealthy household, and his family arranged a ghost marriage for the deceased as well.

A second victim just like Mingzhi appeared.

After that, the people of Aotianli finally discovered the origin of the Ghost Brides. They dug up all of the Ghost Brides’ corpses and, under that old woman’s direction, burned them to ash.

Originally, grinding their bones and scattering the ashes would have been the correct solution. But that half-baked old woman wanted to make more money, so she had each household clear out space beneath the ancestral hall, claiming they could use the power of their ancestors to suppress the souls of these wretched women and teach them the might of their forefathers.

Their ancestors had all gone off to reincarnate already. Schrödinger’s power, basically.

Still, although that old woman was only half-informed, she did have a little skill. The Suppression Talisman she drew was somewhat effective.

At least during the day.

Although Ning Shuo had changed the experience of being tormented, the environment of the memory did not collapse. So after tracing back to the memories that came afterward, Mingzhi was still in ghost form.
Through Mingzhi’s eyes, Ning Shuo watched as her ashes were placed inside a memorial tablet. That, too, had been at the old woman’s suggestion. She claimed it would make it easier for the ancestors to suppress her, even if the process was more troublesome.

Which also meant the old woman made more money.

The surrounding scene was wiped away, like ink spreading into the gloom of the ancestral hall.

Beside Mingzhi’s memorial tablet, many new tablets had appeared. On them were the names of other girls who had died unjust deaths.

Even after death, they had to be forced under the Sun family name. How damn unlucky.

A girl whose face was covered in scars stood before Mingzhi. “Eat me. As long as it helps you avenge me.”

When Ning Shuo did not deliberately control this body, it would act according to its original experiences. “Are you sure? If you do this, you may never be able to reincarnate.”

Mingzhi asked that of every girl who wanted to give her their strength.

After all, she herself was almost mad with the need for revenge: the humiliation at the wedding, the torture after marriage, being buried alive, then dug up again and burned into ashes.

None of the men in Aotianli had ever shown Mingzhi a kind face. Mingzhi wanted to kill every last one of them.

But there was always a force suppressing her. Even when she could go out at night, there were shockingly few people she was allowed to kill.

She could only kill men who had reached twenty and still had not married.

Mingzhi thought it was because she was not strong enough, but Ning Shuo knew this was a restriction the Script had placed on her.

She was one of the rare Script NPCs who possessed self-awareness. Yet the restrictions the Script placed on Mingzhi happened to create the Script’s horror effect, instead reinforcing the rule that “if you don’t marry by twenty, you die.”

So although she was an NPC who killed Player, she was not like the female ghost in the elevator from the Hospital Script, utterly devoid of reason.

She was a third type of NPC Ning Shuo had never seen before.

Self-aware NPCs were already rare enough. This kind-self-aware, yet not required to maintain a persona in front of him; a mindless slaughter-type NPC-was rarer still.

…

When she heard “never be able to reincarnate,” the girl gave a bitter smile. “Reincarnate? Reincarnate into another family that values sons over daughters, suffer more than ten years of torment, and in the end get sold to Aotianli again, repeating the life I have now?”

“…You were sold here by your family? Not by human traffickers?”

As if sinking into some memory, hatred burst from the girl’s eyes. “Yes. Sold by those two beasts I called my parents. My name is Zhaodi.”

“My younger brother is called Ning Banxian.”

Ning Shuo froze at the sudden mention of his own name.

“I don’t even need to describe how much they loved Ning Banxian. Just because he had reached the age to marry, those two sold me to Aotianli so they could use the money as a bride price for Ning Banxian’s wedding.”

“I treated my brother… so well. But when he found out I had been sold, he did nothing. We had a decent relationship before that, too.”

And yet, the information Ning Shuo had received was that his “sister, who had married into Aotianli, had died under strange circumstances.”

The information was different. No doubt that was the work of those parents who valued sons over daughters.

Their parents had told Ning Banxian that his sister had married into Aotianli, and Ning Banxian had simply believed it.

He could not even imagine how much effort this sister must have spent in a family like that just to keep Ning Banxian’s character setting from turning completely rotten, to the point that he still knew to disguise himself as a woman and go to Aotianli to look for her.

But this character setting was stupid and cowardly.

Cowardly enough that, as a grown man, he had failed to protect his own sister at home, and failed to protect the kind girl who wanted to take him away once he was outside. He had even let her be chased by the men of Aotianli until she finally fell off a cliff.

Ning Shuo heard Zhaodi sobbing, her voice filled with hatred. “If the next life is still like this, then I’d rather never come back.”