Chapter 4

Chapter 4

I didn’t dare let my guard down, because that bridal sedan was still blocking the doorway.

I suspected the female ghost might have climbed inside, so I walked toward the door one step at a time.

At first, I thought this bridal sedan was the same paper one I’d delivered. After all, even the four bearers looked exactly alike.

But once I got closer, I realized this sedan was different from the paper one I’d brought.

Its body was painted with all kinds of scenes, most of them wedding rituals from the old days.

There was a bride climbing into the sedan, a matchmaker holding the sedan curtain aside, a wedding procession playing music and singing…

But if you looked closely, in every single wedding scene, the men carrying the bridal sedan all had ghostly faces.

My head snapped up. The faces of the four bearers had all twisted into the likenesses of evil spirits.

I drew the Soul-Whip and lashed it through the air.

The whip caught the sedan curtain and flipped it up. Several pale ghost hands inside quickly withdrew into the sedan body, but the female ghost wasn’t in there.

The four bearers lifted the sedan and retreated in perfect unison. In the blink of an eye, the sedan was gone.

Could that have been a Ghost Sedan?

A legend from around South Camel Peak vaguely came back to me.

In the past, South Camel Peak had another name: The Daughter’s Sedan Chair.

That was because there was a strange rock in the mountains shaped exactly like a bridal sedan.

Later, no one knew how the story changed, but people began saying that rock was actually a Ghost Sedan.

Whenever a family married off a daughter, they had to avoid South Camel Peak, because the Ghost Sedan would snatch brides away. Once taken, they could never be found again.

Confused, I stepped out of the house. By then, the courtyard had long since turned desolate.

Weeds nearly waist-high grew everywhere. The lively banquet from before was nowhere to be seen.

I couldn’t find Yang Hong or Yang Yan either. This village had clearly been abandoned for a very long time, and everything around me was eerily quiet.

Suddenly, a nimble black shadow shot out from beside my foot.

It dropped something in front of me, then darted into the grass.

I looked down and saw it was a sneaker.

The upper was very new. Though it was covered in mud, it was obviously not an old shoe that had been abandoned for ages.

I picked it up. Judging by its size and design, the sneaker didn’t look like something a boy would wear.

But in this abandoned village deep in the wilderness, where had a girl’s shoe come from?

“Brother Long?”

Yang Hong’s voice suddenly rang out, startling me. By reflex, I hid the shoe behind my back.

It really was Yang Hong. He was outside the courtyard gate, waving at me in a panic. “Brother Long, hurry up and come out. Something’s wrong with this place. I think there are mountain cats causing trouble!”

Around here, what we called mountain cats were actually wild lynx. There were especially many lynx around South Camel Peak.

But to the older generation, these lynx were more or less like the Yellow Immortal of the Five Immortals of the Northeast.

They were spiritual, understood human ways, and some could even cultivate and ask for a title. Others could cloud a person’s five senses, lure them into a cave, and eat them alive.