Chapter 271
Chapter 271
The first and most horrifying feature was the enormous number of corpses densely embedded in the tree’s trunk!
Yes, embedded.
One desiccated, naked corpse after another, each body jet-black, was set into the trunk, their backs fused to the wood and their fronts facing outward, leaving a small portion of each body exposed.
There were men and women, old and young.
All had their eyes tightly closed. A dense layer of fuzzy fungal threads covered the exposed skin of their faces, chests, and hands.
Clearly, every resident of the village was here!
I also noticed two empty places on one section of the enormous tree. I guessed they had originally held Wang Xinren and the other corpse-fiend that Roundy and I had destroyed inside the house.
The second strange feature was where the tree met the ground. It looked nothing like roots.
Ordinarily, a tree rooted in the earth would have a clear transition where the trunk met the ground.
This tree had none!
It looked as though the ground had simply clamped around it, creating an extremely abrupt boundary.
There was only one possibility…
“There must be another level beneath this cement surface! Deeper underground, an even lower space exists.”
Old Cao tapped the ground lightly with his foot and continued,
“This strange tree actually grew upward from farther below, broke through the open cement yard at the center of Daling Village, and emerged here! In other words, what we can see may be only the very tip of the tree. It simply has no crown.”
Something even stranger lay deeper underground?
Everyone froze.
But after studying the bottom of the strange tree, we could see that Old Cao was most likely right!
We stared at the bizarre tree studded with corpses, observing it carefully. For a time, we fell silent, uncertain what to do.
After studying the corpses’ faces for a while, Yuan Fei said,
“Brother Cao, the gray fuzz on these corpses’ faces reminds me of something extremely terrifying…”
“Jiangshi, right?”
Old Cao replied calmly.
Exactly!
Yuan Fei nodded.
“I’ve never seen a real jiangshi, but they’re said to grow short, stiff hairs of various colors. A jiangshi with short, stiff black hair, for example, is called a Black Jiangshi. One with short, stiff white hair is called a White Jiangshi. So when I see these corpse-fiends covered in gray, fuzzy fungal threads, I can’t help wondering…”
Before Old Cao could answer, I picked up the thought.
“Uncle Yuan is worried these things might be jiangshi? There’s no need. Master once told me that the colors of hair on jiangshi aren’t random. Ordinary jiangshi actually come in only two kinds, Black Jiangshi and White Jiangshi. There are no gray ones.”
“More importantly… jiangshi are as difficult to deal with as corpse fiends. The corpse-fiends in Daling Village may be bizarre, but their fighting strength is far below that of even an ordinary vicious corpse. How could they possibly compare to something as ferocious as a jiangshi?”
Roundy cooed beside us. The birdcall alone sounded full of mockery, and then its obnoxious voice rang through everyone’s minds.
“Little Yuan, you really can talk nonsense. If these things were jiangshi, there’d be no point investigating a damned thing! We might as well lie down and prepare to travel to the Netherworld together. This magnificent bird has seen immensely powerful jiangshi before. These things aren’t even worthy of carrying a jiangshi’s shoes.”
Uh…
Although that stupid bird Roundy had mocked him, Yuan Fei was not offended. Everyone knew its temperament and refused to stoop to arguing with it.
Besides, he also felt he had overthought things. Scratching his head, he said,
“I only thought they seemed a little similar. I’ve never seen a real jiangshi either. I’d merely heard about Black Jiangshi and White Jiangshi, so I wondered whether the short, stiff hairs on jiangshi had anything in common with the fuzzy fungal threads on these corpse-fiends.”
Only Roundy and Old Cao among us had ever seen a real jiangshi.
Roundy constantly spouted nonsense and was completely unreliable, so everyone looked at Old Cao. He had also been the first to guess what Yuan Fei feared…
Old Cao said,
“I have indeed seen jiangshi twice, and on one occasion, I even took part in the battle against one. I wasn’t among the main fighters, only assisting from the side. The short hairs on a jiangshi resemble individual steel needles. They may be short, but they’re straight, exceptionally hard, and highly poisonous!”
“If one of those hairs pierces a person, the wound quickly swells and blackens, oozing black pus and blood. It isn’t as potent as the corpse poison in a jiangshi’s teeth and fingernails, but it still can’t be underestimated.”
“So they differ from the soft, curled fungal threads on the corpse-fiends before us. Jiangshi are terrifying, vicious creatures and extremely rare, though, so I don’t know much about them either.”
Once our discussion had more or less ended, Ni Yang asked Zhao Xu,
“Brother Zhao, do you think we have enough now to return and report to Boss Wang? We’ve essentially determined how Daling Village disappeared and what became of the villagers.”
He was clearly frightened and did not want to continue.
But the cash reward was unimaginably large. Having already come this far, he could not simply quit halfway!
That was why he sounded Zhao Xu out.
Hesitation flickered through Zhao Xu’s eyes, but he still shook his head and said helplessly,
“I’m afraid this information alone won’t satisfy our boss. If he learns that the villagers and elders he was so grateful to were absorbed by this strange tree, he’ll definitely want to uncover its origins. At the very least, he’ll want to know exactly what happened in Daling Village and the root cause of everything. Only then can he find people and connections to take revenge on whoever committed this evil…”
Zhao Xu’s reasoning made sense.
To tell the truth, people of the esoteric world possessed unusual arts and many miraculous abilities and methods, inspiring awe in most ordinary people.
If someone with real power and influence treated you as an equal, you were already fortunate. If they regarded you as an honored guest, they certainly expected some benefit in return.
Would they fear you like ordinary people or those with only modest wealth and status? Unless they were particularly terrified of death, probably not!
Consider someone like Wang Wenguang…
He had lost both parents as a child and been raised on meals shared by the entire village. Then he ventured alone into a major city, traded steel and cement, took on construction contracts, and entered real estate, eventually amassing a fortune of over a hundred million yuan by 2001!
Could someone like that possibly be easy to deal with?
What was more, he commanded a large group of enforcers and gang members who could even obtain guns. He must have been ruthless in his youth.
How could a man like that learn the villagers had been murdered and not seek revenge?
Even without Ni Yang asking Zhao Xu, I knew the little information we had uncovered could never satisfy Wang Wenguang.
We had to keep investigating!
In that case…
My gaze fell upon the base of the strange tree.
Clearly, we had to find a way to descend deeper underground!
We needed to see what lay beneath this strange tree. Where had it grown from? And how could it absorb an entire village’s population and transform them into those bizarre corpse-fiends?